Who writes the songs? The crisis of imagination – and the opportunity for culture to change our tune.
Bob Marley - 1979 N.Z. Concert
Source: Unsplash
By Gabriel Smales
The defining crisis of our age is not merely economic or environmental. It is, at its root, a crisis of imagination. And not the lofty, utopian kind. It’s the day-to-day capacity to picture a world that holds together – a world in which global collaboration and solidarity feels plausible, not naive. That capacity is thinning.
We see it everywhere. Climate denial, only recently a fringe belief, now operates as a mainstream convenience, cloaked in economic pragmatism. Nationalist narratives promise a return to a greatness that never was. Power accumulates behind performances of grievance while public trust quietly dissolves. Everywhere you look, there’s a dominant logic that says: protect what’s yours, trust no one, and brace for collapse.
But that isn’t the whole story. Even in this age of tribal politics and algorithmic attention, there are flickers of a different collective instinct – seen not in our leaders’ speeches, but in music, television, arts, football stadiums, and memes. Popular culture has always trafficked in meaning, not just entertainment. From Bob Marley to Bad Bunny, from the terraces of Anfield to the nightclubs of Nairobi, it has offered a place for memory, identity, resistance – and sometimes, a fragile kind of hope.
There is nothing soft or ornamental about it. If you want to know what people believe, you listen to and watch what they dance to. What they quote back to each other. What they wear, repeat, imitate. Popular culture works not through argument, but through presence. It’s in the background music of our choices, the reference points of our humour, the unspoken sense of what’s familiar or desirable. Popular culture shapes the weather of our attention – quietly guiding what we notice, who we empathise with, and what futures we can plausibly imagine.
The machinery that delivers this culture is vast – broadcast networks, digital platforms, streaming services, and the architecture of advertising that funds much of what we see and hear. It is this same machinery that Shell used to partner with Fortnite so that players start a level by filling up at a gas station, and that BP used to quietly invent the concept of the “carbon footprint” – a strategic masterstroke that individualised responsibility while shielding systemic accountability. Big business trusts this model. The advertising industry alone moves hundreds of billions of dollars each year on the assumption that shaping what people feel, buy, and do works – even when precise metrics are elusive.
And yet in the world of philanthropy, multilateral institutions, and impact, this approach is still often viewed with suspicion. Too fluffy. Too hard to measure. Too far from “real” change. But if culture is where public meaning is shaped, then we ignore it at our peril. The climate and biodiversity crises are not just crises of science or policy – they are crises of communication and belief. When people don’t feel part of the solution, when the future feels distant or abstract, they retreat. And when it’s unclear what the public wants, leaders have cover to do nothing, or worse.
History tells us what’s possible. The role of music in the American civil rights movement, the influence of protest theatre and poetry under apartheid in South Africa, the mobilisation power of television during the fall of the Berlin Wall – these were not background flourishes. They were instruments of transformation.
So what now? What would it mean to take the machinery of culture seriously? To direct some of the world's best creative minds – not just in policy, but in design, storytelling, performance, and production – towards building the conditions for belonging, care, and courage? What if the next Patagonia ‘Don’t Buy This Jacket’ Black Friday campaign, or the growing global music initiative ‘Sounds Right’ to credit NATURE as the artist it truly is, was not the exception, but the rule? What if these weren’t side projects, but central strategies?
The 18th-century Scottish thinker Andrew Fletcher once said: “Let me write the songs of a nation, and I care not who writes its laws.” If we want different outcomes, we need different instincts. And if we want different instincts, we need to change what surrounds us – what we hear, what we see, what we come to feel as inevitable. Culture, and the machinery that delivers it, holds extraordinary potential to help shape who we might become. It can make solidarity and collaboration feel not only necessary, but possible.
Written by Gabriel Smales
Global Programme Director, Sounds Right, Museum for the United Nations - UN Live
The full article was originally on Business Green, find it here: https://www.businessgreen.com/opinion/4413125/writes-songs-crisis-imagination-opportunity-culture-change-tune