Inarguably, it’s the most horrific thing to ever happen in the long history of rock ’n’ roll. But proving there’s still good in a world that often seems overrun by evil, some positives are starting to emerge from the November 13 attack on Paris’s Bataclan concert hall.

If we’ve learned anything since 89 people were gunned down by four terrorists in the middle of a show by the Eagles of Death Metal, it’s that nothing galvanizes people like a tragedy. U2’s Bono was among the first to say what many were thinking when he described the Bataclan massacre as “the first direct hit on music”. That came out sounding somewhat clunky, leading many on Twitter to suggest one of the most famous rock stars on the planet was trying to make everything about him. Again.

Except that this time Bono actually made some sense.

As anyone who has travelled will tell you, few things are cooler than hitting a club in a foreign city. The second you step onto the dance floor, you’re at one with everyone around you, even when you have no idea how to speak the language.

It’s your band that’s on-stage, and that instantly gives you something in common with everyone in the room. That’s what made Bataclan so traumatic for EODM singer Jesse Hughes.

The frontman—who’s normally one of rock’s most here-for-a-good-time characters—gave his first post-tragedy interview this week with Vice. He started crying while recounting the following: “The reason that so many were killed was because so many people wouldn’t leave their friends.”

The terrorists—or flaming assholes, as comedian John Oliver more accurately described them—picked a target that caught the attention of everyone who loves music. Instead of a random attack on a subway platform or public square, they took aim at a crowd that Slate described as being a “young, multi-ethnic, bohemian vision of Paris that they cannot comprehend”.

The scariest thing about what happened at the Bataclan? That’s easy: it could’ve been any one of us who loves live rock ’n’ roll. And that might explain why the Bataclan tragedy has galvanized musicians around the world. Terrorists hit the music world, and the music world has hit back as one.

Britpop icon Jarvis Cocker has responded with “Friday 13th 2015”. A powerful and calmly measured spoken-word piece set to an ambient soundscape, the track has Cocker recounting what it was like to be in Paris, where he lives, the most touching line coming when he intones, “The strongest statement of resistance is to just keep going.”

Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters recorded a five-song EP, Saint Cecilia. The digital release is free, but has a link where you can donate to Bataclan victims.

Some reactions to the tragedy have been every bit as out-there as the rockers who’ve made them. Take, for example, Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister, who this week said he would gladly have played the Bataclan the day after the shooting. His reasoning, while largely tone-deaf to the situation, at least showed his alcohol-scarred heart was in the right place. To unplug the amps, he argues, is to let the “assholes and cowards” responsible know that they’ve won.

If there’s any silver lining to be found in what’s been one of rock ’n’ roll’s blackest of black clouds, it’s that the terrorists haven’t won. From tragic violence at Altamont to trampling deaths in Cincinnati to club fires in Rhode Island to on-stage shooting in Columbus, there have always been horrific moments in rock ’n’ roll. Bataclan, however, was nothing less than a large-scale assault that’s mobilized an army.

In response to the shooting, you’ve got Céline Dion standing shoulder to shoulder with such unlikely allies as Cocker, Grohl, Kilmister, and Bono. You’ve got Madonna taking to the stage in Stockholm to tell her fans, through tears, “They want to shut us up, and we won’t let them. We will never let them.” Coldplay has rolled out John Lennon’s “Imagine” in concert, and U2 fans are mobilizing to wear all-white for the band’s first post-Paris-attack show, in Belfast on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the band closest to the horror is also soldiering on, despite obvious PTSD. Cofounding member Joshua Homme—who wasn’t on-stage with EODM the night of the shooting—is encouraging fans to donate to victims of Bataclan through his charity Sweet Stuff Foundation.

This past Sunday night at the American Music Awards, 30 Seconds to Mars frontman Jared Leto read a letter penned on Facebook by Antoine Leiris, whose wife died at the Bataclan. It read, in part: “Friday night you took an exceptional life, the love of my life, the mother of my son, but you will not have my hatred.”

November 13 at the Bataclan was the biggest tragedy the rock world has ever seen. Thank God, Elvis, Janis Joplin, and Kurt Cobain that the response has been as defiant as it is uplifting: to rock on.