During September and October, KUBE 93.3 FM held a contest called United We Sing, challenging high-school students to express their feelings about September 11 through song lyrics. The station received over 100 entries, narrowed them down to the nine that KUBE deemed the most eloquent and evocative, and then consulted J Records to pick a final winner. J Records then put the lyrics into song form, and now 14-year-old Jessica Pease’s “I’ll Feel Your Fears Tonight” is in regular rotation on the KUBE playlist.

The chorus goes, “I’ll be feeling your fears tonight/In my dreams I’ll make it alright/As the stars shine bright/And as the flag flies free/Reach out and touch me in your dreams.” I wondered why this particular song won. KUBE Assistant Program Director/Music Director Julie Pilat explained it to me in an e-mail: “We were 3,000 miles away from ground zero. We were watching it on TV. We weren’t directly feeling the pain, but we sympathized and our hearts went out to everyone involved. We were feeling their fears.”

Still, I went to high school in the Seattle area, and I remember my classmates being a lot more ambitious than this–sharper, more critical, and just more realistic than imagining that in one’s dreams one could “make someone else’s fears alright.” Now God strike me down if I criticize a 14-year-old’s songwriting for a radio contest. Pease has an impressive talent for imitating what she hears on KUBE, and as every artist knows, this is how the artistic mind develops: first, one imitates.

But KUBE is issuing this song as an emblem of the post-September 11 adolescent mind–optimistic, sweet, impressionistic. By choosing this song as United We Sing’s winner, KUBE is asserting that “I’ll Feel Your Fears Tonight” is the entry that best articulates how the teenage mind is processing recent events. I wasn’t buying it, so I contacted Julie Pilat about the other entries. She was kind enough to send me the final nine, though she was unable to find the names of their authors. My hunch was right.

One song, potently titled “Help Us,” begins this way: “People be askin’/’What has the world become today?’/Man, what the hell?/What you talkin’ ’bout?/It’s always been this way.” “Help Us” shifts from anger toward the attackers, to criticism of the United States, into a kind of spiritual reconciliation: “This country has been hidin’ for I dunno how long/We thought we could take anything–yeah, bring it on!/Now that our lives have been impacted, what did we do?/We turned to complete strangers, smiled, and said, ‘I love you’/This truly is a tragedy, but maybe, just maybe it was a message from above.”

“Help Us” also addresses the idea that “we’re now living in history,” a profound statement on American consciousness. That same awareness of a complete cultural alteration can be found in a different entry, called “Your Sons.” First, “Your Sons” articulates an overwhelming confusion about where to position oneself in the events: “What was I before?/A confused young man/Am I now a full man capable to understand?/Ready for bloody hands, stand as I should for my home land?/Wipe the tears I weep, don’t be weak/Where is Afghanistan?”

The author wisely owns up to having been a “confused young man” before the events–as are all teenagers–but he also faces the idea that he now must leap into action with this confusion. Swiftly, curiously, the subject moves from “I” to “Your son”: “Your son now is not allowed to cry for self/Your son now sees his vain dreams as meaningless and nothing/Your son loves his country and questions what is dutiful….” Unlike the desperately hopeful (“Maybe, just maybe”) spiritual conclusion of “Help Us,” “Your Sons” is awfully, marvelously existential: “Shaken, hoping not to be mistaken, in a void of hesitation, your son’s only choice is waiting.”

Pilat explained that these songs didn’t win the contest because they were loosely structured. “I’ll Feel Your Fears Tonight,” apparently, required minimal tooling to be shaped into a pop song. (The formula wins again.) Nonetheless, cheers to KUBE for compelling teens to write the above lyrics, and I hope these powerfully expressive rappers find producers to hook up some beats for them.