In a comparison that would probably upset fans of both of these artists, the Venn diagram intersect consisting perhaps of only me, it came to me the other night that there are a few things that Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift have in common, besides their obvious success.

Firstly, I think they both tapped in, early in their careers in particular, to perspectives that hadn't previously been represented in music: teenage girls and teenage boys. 

Sure, lots of songs appeal to young girls, but they aren't usually written from their point of view like Taylor Swift has, albeit from a heteronormative idealized view, with Love Story and You Belong with Me being the most obvious examples (and happen to be great songs and videos, BTW.) 

And well, I don't think I need to list all the Bruce songs that are written from the young male POV and most noteworthy, not in terms of girls but about their hardscrabble, working class lives. There have been so few songwriters over the years that have even tried to write from that perspective, but Bruce did it often and he did it brilliantly.

Secondly, I also think they, more than any other artists I'm aware of, have had a great connection with their fans, Taylor even more than Bruce. He shows it in the length and quality of his legendary live performances. But no one has the connection Tay-tay does and it's been a big reason for her overall success.

Oh, and it doesn't hurt that they both are unparalleled musical storytellers.

I've had various inspirations over the years for websites. One of them was to track people who had never gotten the credit they deserved for some important contribution to history, especially if more credit was given to someone else. 

So instead of a whole website, I'll just list them here as I find out about them:

Claudette Colvin died last week. Her refusal in 1955 to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala., came months before it was overshadowed by a similar act of resistance in the same city by Rosa Parks. But local civil rights leaders decided not to make Ms. Colvin their symbol of discrimination. She was, she later said, too dark-skinned and too poor to win the crucial support of Montgomery’s Black middle class. 

And...

We all know the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. While the poetry and prose were all his, the “I have a dream” motif actually came from Black activist and minister Prathia Hall.

Hall delivered a prayer during a service commemorating the Mount Olive Baptist Church, destroyed by the KKK. She spoke directly to God about justice and equality, saying over and over, “I have a dream.” King, in attendance, didn’t hide his inspiration. He told Hall outright he wanted to iterate on her metaphor.

As Sen. Raphael Warnock says in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s excellent history, “The Black Church”: “People need to know that before it was Martin’s dream, it was Prathia’s prayer.”

Rather than diminish King’s accomplishment, to me, this underscores how the Civil Rights Movement wasn’t made by giants alone. It was built instead with countless people’s gifts, intelligence, ideas, labor, acts of resistance, works of art, words, deeds, sacrifices and, yes, prayers.

And bonus addition:

The woman who didn't get full credit for the discovery of the DNA double helix with Crick and Watson was Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose crucial "Photo 51" provided the key evidence for their model, but her contributions were minimized during her lifetime, and she wasn't eligible for the Nobel Prize awarded in 1962 because she had passed away in 1958. Her work, shared without her explicit consent, was foundational, leading to her being called the "dark lady of DNA" and a symbol of sexism in science. 

 

So heck, just out of curiosity, I just googled "people who didn't get the credit they deserved" and there was a whole list. So maybe this will be my last post on the topic, but...probably not.

 

 

I thought this was a really wise list of strategies from David Plouffe, who I think is as close a political genius as we Dems have.

Here's my summary of his ideas, though he explains many of them well in more detail:

A plan to bring down costs.

Democrats should

- promise to investigate and stop price gouging.

- Get rid of Mr. Trump’s inflation-inducing tariffs.

- Build millions more apartments and homes.

- Establish universal child care.

- Expand Medicare to cover home health costs for family caregivers.

If it can’t be communicated in an Instagram post or 10-second TikTok, go back to the drawing board. Make it about tangibly cutting the cost of living for people, not an ideological wish list.

A plan to create the jobs America needs.

- Candidates could be honest about their districts’ shortages of nurses, police officers, teachers, auto mechanics and plumbers.

- Through tax incentives, training, tuition assistance and a relentless focus on what’s needed, candidates should call for specific numbers of people to be hired over the next four years.

A plan for A.I.

- Force tech giants to be more transparent about their data and algorithms, about how they identify deepfakes and about their plans to mitigate the downstream negative effects of their products.

- Start with A.I.’s toxic stew of higher energy costs, job losses, chatbot mental health misuse and misinformation. Then consider how the revenue from these activities will go to the wealthiest people on the planet.

A plan for reform.

- Term limits and lifetime lobbying bans for members of Congress.

- A ban on stock trading.

- Rules for elected officials and their crypto holdings.

- Guardrails for prediction markets.

- Maybe even consider a constitutional amendment banning presidential pardons.

You can’t go far enough in this lane if you are an outsider candidate challenging the broken status quo.

- Democrats have come to be seen as the defenders of institutions that voters, especially young ones, feel are badly broken. It’s a deadly political place to be. The party can win a debate about how to reform and modernize government when it’s up against a MAGA worldview where there are no rules at all, especially for the powerful. But not if they continue to be seen as the standard bearers of a broken status quo.

Hold your own leaders to account.

- Democrats should call for new leadership and say that, if elected, they won’t support the current crop.

- Candidates should blow the whistle on a poorly performing program or a law or regulation that’s outlived its usefulness.

- If Democrats get better about focusing on results, cutting red tape and getting things done for people, on time and under budget — what’s become known as the abundance agenda — it makes the populist call for higher taxes on the wealthiest even more powerful.

It's become a "thing" to declare that we are allowed to have our own opinions but not our own facts.

I disagree. Numbers are easily manipulated to prove our own point. 

Good news! Last year, Trea Turner led the National League in hitting! 

    And made outs 70% of the time!

Good news! Tariff income raised about a quarter of a trillion dollars last year!

    Which accounts for just a fraction of the federal government's total revenue.

This was a fun article to read about a fellow who set out to walk around the world. 

One thing on particular stood out to me as a shared experience from my 1982 cross-country bike trip:

Bushby said he has learned a lot over the past nearly three decades, but one thing stands out: “99.99 percent of the people I’ve met have been the very best in humanity,” he said. “The world is a much kinder, nicer place than it often seems.”

Bushby said that anytime he was ill or down on his luck, a stranger would swoop in and help — either with shelter, a meal, financial support or guidance.