The year was 1979, and 250,000 people had convened in the shadow of the twin towers for a giant No Nukes rally, the culmination of five days of the Muse Concerts for a Non-Nuclear Future at a packed Madison Square Garden. Bruce Springsteen was one of the draws, one of the supporters of Musicians United for Safe Energy that went by the acronym, MUSE.

Jackson Browne was the headliner that Sunday afternoon alongside the majestic Hudson River. His big hit then was a prophetically titled “Before the Deluge” with a line about buildings keeping our children dry. He had come to sing truth to power – especially against the dangers of an energy policy built around unsafe nuclear plants. The rest of us had come to hear the stars sing, and to stand with them against a corporate threat that seemed to promise only destruction.

Back then – long before intensified debates on globalization – the World Trade Center was our symbol of greed. Jackson Browne asked: “Do you lay down and let those corporations roll over you? Can you leave your life in the hands of those people?”

Our only ‘weapon’ that day was non-violent and uplifting, as we took a peaceful stand against a temple of financial power and the system it symbolized. Nor was this weapon an impotent one. In fact, this and similar events helped to stop the momentum of nuclear power, forcing a society seemingly bent on its own destruction to understand the dangers.

These days it is fighting back, slickly selling itself anew by appropriating our old slogan of ‘safe energy’. And now this reinvention is paralleled by a second, one equally cynical and beyond our imaginings. For we could never have conceived that another fall day two decades on would become the day of deluge that Jackson Browne warned against. We could never have imagined that our life-affirming protest in this corner of Manhattan would one day be accompanied by another kind of protest – a twisted, death-affirming one of murderous force and distorted logic.

A new kind of family values?

I co-hosted a national radio hook up for that 1979 rally, looking up that day at the power and seeming permanence of the twin towers. Ten years later, on the eve of the Gulf War, I produced a documentary on another ‘message’ song, a remake of Give Peace A Chance. John Lennon’s son Sean, Lenny Kravitz, and 37 other artists from every musical genre produced a record and video. It was powerfully done, but suppressed by the media when war started. No outlets would play a peace song; it was considered an anachronism.

Today, Jackson Browne is still at it, this time joining as many as 200 other prominent artists and athletes in the remaking of another musical anthem, We Are Family. The song also came out in the year of the No Nukes rally at the World Trade Center. It was once thought of as an anthem of the self-indulgent disco crowd, a party song for mindless distraction. Yet it has been remade – and by one of its original producers, Nile Rodgers, known for dance tracks and his work with Madonna and David Bowie – as an anthem of our common humanity.

Here is a third, much smaller, but this time benign, reinvention: a song which now helps to promote the sense that we are all part of a global family that has to stand up against the intolerance and hate crimes that have also crawled out of the rubble of September 11.

This song was produced in just ten days, a process I recorded for another documentary film. It is now going into the wider media system – where, I hope, it will resonate with a population in need of inspiration and healing. Its circulation and new meaning poses the question: can music do what journalism at present seems incapable of – reinforcing the sense of empathy and caring that has also been so apparent here in New York in the aftermath of this tragedy?

The prospects are mixed. At present, what CNN calls ‘America’s New War’ is cranking up, and the flags are flying on the sets of newscasters as well as on the streets. And already, the biggest radio company in America, Texas-based Clear Channel Communications, has circulated an ‘advisory’ warning to its radio programmers of songs to avoid in this climate. John Lennon’s Imagine is on the list. We couldn’t have imagined that in 1979 either.

And the United States has an Attorney General, John Ashcroft, who is a reminder that it is not only the Taliban who hate popular music.

So will the explicitly apolitical and humanistic We Are Family be another casualty of the war on terrorism? And will this be a signal that we are heading towards a new period of media censorship and the muzzling of dissent?

We must work to prevent this. Free media matters even more at a time of war when, as we all know, truth quickly becomes the first casualty. It is a time that calls for a new soundtrack.