When John Lennon was asked in 1975 why so many adults disliked rock and roll, calling it the ‘devil’s music’, he replied: ‘I always thought that it’s because it came from Black music.’ Reflecting on the past 400 years of white supremacy in the United States, including the recent attempted insurrection at the US Capitol in January 2021, I often wonder what Lennon would say of us today. Would he tell us to ‘Imagine there’s no heaven’ or would he sing ‘Stand by me’? Would he cry ‘Mother’ or remind us that love really ‘is the answer’?
I am a professor of philosophy, and I have always thought in sound. Allow me to fine-tune, in my own way. One of the distinctive features of my cognition is that not only do I think with sound and music; I also don’t think in images during my waking hours (although I dream vividly and visually at night). This lack of visual imagery is known as aphantasia, partial in my case. Along with another condition known as mild auditor