For almost a year, NPR has invited musicians to contribute an original song to their "Morning Edition Song Project." The composition is meant to capture the zeitgeist through the artist's eyes. Today, you can hear the song composed by my friend Money Mark, longtime key(board) collaborator with the Beastie Boys.
For months after the pandemic began, Mark had been posting daily "Isolation Jams" on Instagram. For each piece, he interconnected unusual electronic gear, vintage Casio keyboards, toys, and everyday objects into experimental musical instruments and then harnessed their strange sounds to play lovely "song poems." Meanwhile, he had become relentlessly focused on Black Lives Matter, social justice, and the fight against racism.
"Being a person of color, I've always had this idea that I needed a strategy to get through life. It just became more refined," Mark told NPR in a radio interview this morning during the song's premiere. "The strategy is to have the ultimate empathy for all things that are in the world, and to understand what love is and that what you emit into the world is so important."
Here is Mark's song, "Fight With Love":
