As my music journalism class heads into its final weeks, I want my students to read some unconventional, unprofessional, and esoteric examples of music writing. Last week they graciously indulged my sadistic decision to assign Hipster Runoff’s infamous Animal Collective post. This week I asked them to read a piece from the War Against Silence by Glenn MacDonald, a software engineer by trade and a music geek by default.

I forget how much I miss The War Against Silence until I revisit it. From 1999—when I discovered it while searching for fellow Loud Family fans—until 2004, when MacDonald discontinued it, TWAS was the source of some of the best music writing on the web, and was the first instance of cogent, articulate online writing I ever encountered. That MacDonald wrote TWAS as a labor of love, with purportedly zero interest in becoming a professional music writer, only makes his project seem more rarefied and noble.

Eight years after he posted it, his ostensible critique of Amnesiac, Vespertine, and Life on a String also frames MacDonald’s immediate response to the events of 9/11/01. Eight years later, the piece holds up not only as a review of three new releases but also as a bracingly prescient time capsule containing one very smart person’s comprehension of the incomprehensible.

One of MacDonald’s best lines in the piece comes near the front. “Here is a very simple rule,” he states. “Music is what humans are best at, so anything that seems to supersede it, we should not do. Or phrased as semi-solipsism, in a sort of inversion of Wittgenstein’s point about what language can’t express, anything I cannot comprehend, should not exist. We, as a species, must be past this, or we will not survive.”

I have read this piece repeatedly over the intervening decade, and that bit still makes me catch my breath. MacDonald doesn’t dither about the role music plays in our lives or how best we humans might employ our ability to listen to and perform music. I have had the privelege of making music with and reading the words of people who agree with this statement and think very hard about it, and MacDonald’s words—this whole treatise, because it really is a kind of manifesto, still makes my spine straighten a bit, serving as a mild admonishment to care more—about music, about other people, about life.

“This isn’t a record, it’s the inherent sound of streets and data and buildings, of all the wreckage we surround ourselves with even if it hasn’t fallen yet.”

Is that even music journalism? Who cares? I certainly don’t.