Tuesday, November 4, 2008

"A Change Is Gonna Come" - The change is finally here

In the last weeks I listened to a lot of songs: Campaign songs, songs that are dedicated to a Presidential candidate or even songs that caused a lot of troubles (copyright infringement issues, and such).
But I noticed that there's no real soundtrack - what's the soundtrack of Barack Obama's campaign? There's no song on the radio that is associated with him. Of course, a lot of musicians support him by dedicating songs to him or playing concerts to arouse the crowd to go out and vote. But there's no catchy tune - and, in my opinion, all the dedicated songs didn't really fire my rocket.

After writing about Neil Young's "Lookin' For A Leader" I have to mention a song, which is much more appropriate to this issue.
"A Change Is Gonna Come" written by Sam Cooke, can represent the election campaigns in 2008, especially the Obama campaign.

The song was recorded in 1963 and was released a year later, after Cooke had been shot in El Segundo. The song is a representative of the Civil Rights Movement - a movement very strong and compareable to the "Yes We Can" movement caused by Barack Obama.

An verse in "A Change Is Gonna Come" says: "I go to the movie and I go downtown, somebody keep telling me don't hang around."
It refers to Cooke's experience, when he and a couple of friends want to rent a motel room in Lousiana the service to them was refused - because they were black.

"A Change Is Gonna Come" can be seen as an answer to Bob Dylan's song "Blowin' In The Wind", another protest song for the Civil Right Movement. To Sam Cooke's opinion a protest song for the support of the Black's rights could only be written by a black musician.

Besides Stevie Wonder's famous song "Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours", which was played after every rally of Barack Obama's campaign this year, Sam Cooke's song can be, in my eyes, some kind of 'soundtrack' for this election.

And as we all know now, since CNN declared Barack Obama the new President of the United States of America, the change finally came and Sam Cooke's and the Civil Right Movement's spirit have reached the peak: The first Afro-American is the President of the USA.
See the comments below the video and see how a song which is more than 40 years old still touches the people in a historical situation like this!


A Change Is Gonna Come - Sam Cooke

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