The Cultural Value of Music and Art in Times of Change: Connecting Humanity Through Creativity

We were strolling through Detroit several years ago, and what caught our eye was that the city was healing itself. Not with pompous master plans or glossy new complexes, but with murals over abandoned buildings and jazz drifting from neighborhood community centers. The thought is, when all seems up in the air, when neighborhoods are shifting, when residents are struggling, music and art transcend ornamentation. They become the glue that binds communities together.

We’ve all seen it, haven’t we? That moment when a piece of street art captures exactly what everyone’s feeling but couldn’t put into words. Or when a song playing from someone’s stoop becomes the soundtrack for an entire block. These aren’t just nice additions to urban life, they’re essential infrastructure, as vital as roads or water systems for keeping communities alive and connected. In many ways, they function like everyday necessities, quietly supporting the stability of our lives, much like the overlooked documents we rely on, from a driver’s license to a pay stub for apartment applications, the unseen proof that allows us to participate fully in the systems around us.

Why Creative Expression Matters More When Everything’s Shifting

What strikes us about music and art during periods of change is how they create immediate emotional shelter. We’ve noticed that in neighborhoods going through transition, whether it’s gentrification, economic hardship, or social upheaval, the creative spaces often become the first places people gather to make sense of what’s happening.

Think about it. When we’re getting knotted up in strong feelings or sorting through muddied social issues, we need something more. We have to feel our way through it. Music allows us to do that, at least. A decent song can rally an entire community to a specific moment, and a well-designed mural can make people talk in a way that actually leads to change.

And in the Civil Rights Movement, we saw it happen with songs like We Shall Overcome that became not merely music but structural elements of the movement itself, giving people a place to meet up with one another, even if there had been differences. The song literally built community where community had been ripped apart. 

Learning from the Past, Building for Now

We have spent a good amount of time learning about how artsy expression has developed cities throughout history, and the trends are incredible. In the Great Depression, folk music didn’t only chronicle the era’s hardships, it created communities where people could pool resources and optimism. Those songs were temporary public spaces, spaces where community could occur even when physical spaces weren’t there.

Likewise, the protest songs of the 1960s conducted in a similar manner. They built intangible architecture that brought together people from far-off locations on the basis of goals and ideals. Hip-hop of today continues this line of behavior with musicians like Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper tracing the emotional mapping of their communities effectively using music.

Visual art has long served this function, too, but the way that it’s evolved to address issues of the day is what we’re concerned with. Goya’s The Third of May 1808 was groundbreaking for its blunt denunciation of war’s atrocities, but now it’s street artists like Banksy or local muralists like Philadelphia’s doing it too, they’re making public space available to citizens in order to discuss issues that might not otherwise receive airtime.

We remember strolling through the Mission District in San Francisco and marveling at how the murals were not just pretty pictures, they were political pronouncements, historical accounts, and social spaces for people to engage with one another all at once. They’d pause before them and talk to each other about something, with the paintings as an entrée to more personal discussions about housing, immigration, and identity.

The Architecture of Social Change

It’s what most excites us about art and music in the city: they create so-called “soft infrastructure” for social movements. What we typically consider activism to be is policy change or protest in formal ways, but the cultural work that occurs both before and alongside those efforts is equally important.

Street art transforms public spaces into platforms for dialogue. We’ve seen how a single mural can shift the entire energy of a block, making people more likely to engage with each other and with difficult topics. These works don’t just reflect existing conversations, they actively create space for new ones.

Music works in a similar fashion, but with the added element of time. A theme song can be for a movement, both a call to emotion and an effective tool for organization. Think about the manner in which Public Enemy’s Fight the Power came to serve as soundtrack and battle cry against police brutality, or the manner in which artists are utilizing social media to organize virtual concert halls for racial justice and climate change today.

Of greatest interest to us is how these pieces of culture come to forecast and shape policy change rather than respond to it. Artists and musicians are usually the first to identify and explain new social tensions, establishing the intellectual and affective context that then comes to be read as political activism.

Personal Spaces, Shared Experiences

Personal impact of art and music during periods of disturbance is something to which we can all subscribe, but as people who ponder much about the functioning of space, we are most concerned with how the personal impacts relate to scale of community.

Music therapy studies indicate that the act of listening to music profoundly impacts reducing anxiety and depression, essentially, it allows one to have personal emotional agency. However, when the same music is played in public arenas, it generates what sociologists term “collective efficacy,” the belief that a community can cooperate to solve issues.

This has been evident in neighborhood recoveries from trauma. Following Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans rebuilt its physical spaces, but also tied its recovery intimately to its musical heritage. Jazz funerals, second line parades, and community concerts were not simply cultural events; they became critical to the healing process, providing spaces in which individuals could work through loss and dream about possibilities together.

Art operates on the same principles on different scales. Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a deeply individual experience of loss and remembrance, but also an open space for reconciliation and grief. Community arts projects push this even further, involving citizens in the creation so that the completed work includes people’s common values and experiences.

We conducted a neighborhood planning exercise a few years ago where we started off each community meeting with local musicians performing songs that represented people’s lives. It sounds daft, but completely changed the nature of our conversation. Folks were more willing to take risks, more creative in their thinking, more interdependent with one another despite borders of difference.

How Digital Changes Everything (And Nothing)

We are living in this fantastic era where technology is completely redefining the manner in which we listen to and share music and art, but the fundamental human needs that these works are trying to solve are never changing. Social networking sites and streaming platforms have made cultural production accessible in revolutionary ways, other artists can now get to listeners all over the world without the support of a major label system behind them, and communities are able to record and share their stories more easily than before.

What excites us about this shift is how it’s creating opportunities for more diverse voices to shape cultural conversations. We’re seeing genres like K-pop and Afrobeat gain international followings, bringing different approaches to community-building and social commentary into mainstream consciousness. The global reach of these forms is creating new possibilities for cross-cultural organizing and empathy-building.

But there is something irretrievable about location-based physical art. Online museums and virtual concert halls can reach farther and forge new types of community, but they can’t quite match the experience of being confronted with art in shared public space. How a mural changes with the light, the weather, the other spectators, that’s part of its allure.

We believe the most compelling innovations are occurring where the digital and physical worlds intersect. Artists are organizing individuals around social media to build community art initiatives, musicians are streaming live concerts from local venues, and apps are guiding people to local cultural events they would otherwise overlook.