As we approach the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, many pop
stars have independently decided that the most fitting tribute they can offer
is to shut up. As reported in the July 27 Billboard, acts from the Goo
Goo Dolls to George Strait and from Cher to Creed are taking breaks from their
tours around that sensitive date, even if some -- like Goo Goo Dolls bassist
Robby Takac -- think that not performing is "counterproductive." Explained
Takac: "I don't think you should interrupt life to acknowledge an act like
that."
The tension between the desire to keep silent, thus showing respect for the
victims, and to soldier on, thus foiling the terrorists' goal of intimidation,
also racked the entertainment industry in the days and weeks following the
attacks. Now, as then, fear of seeming insensitive has won out, at least in the
pop big leagues. As Larry Vallon, senior VP of House of Blues Concerts, told
Billboard, "Partying down with rock stars doesn't seem to be the most
appropriate thing."
Of course, not all rock stars have spent the last 12 months just partying.
Bruce Springsteen, for one, addresses the tragedy with solemn purpose
throughout his new The Rising (Columbia), but this major exception
remains just that -- an exception. At the MTV video awards (which aired August
29 rather than on its traditional mid-September date), Springsteen had the
September 11 issue to himself in his bracketed performance, allowing the
star-studded audience to save its tears for a Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes tribute
that came mid show.
This shortfall, however, is nothing compared with the official commemorations
that will honor the occasion with readings from famous political speeches of
the past. On National Public Radio, political-scientist Gary Wills rightly
blasted that Washington plan as a failure of imagination and leadership. By
contrast, the New York Times' recent survey of September 11 songs by
everyone from Springsteen to the Wu-Tang Clan offered this mild conclusion: "Is
it good stuff? Perhaps not. But it's a start." Any more dour assessment would
have been, as Robby Takac might put it, counterproductive.
To rock fans, especially fans nurtured in the shadow of the 1960s, all this
probably seems a huge copout. For them, rock is practically a spiritual guide,
and it should rise to the occasion like a good clergyman. Springsteen is one of
those quintessential flower children. On his anthem-drenched 1978 Darkness
on the Edge of Town, he defined his faith that rock could lead its
followers to a "Promised Land" -- which may be why his recent concert in
Cleveland focused almost exclusively on selections from The Rising and
Darkness, including "Promised Land." The only exception I noted before
the encore was "Bobby Jean," the most Darkness-like song from 1984's
Born in the U.S.A. This made sense: not since the depths of the '60s has
America yearned to be lifted up from prostration as it has in the year
following September 11.
As befits Springsteen's mature artistry, The Rising offers no easy
closure; it's too suffused with loss for that. Yet despite the allegedly "hard"
production by alterna-rock guru Brendan O'Brien, it answers the call for
salvation with a response as soothing and ritualized as any sermon. Like all
rituals, it stands outside the tide of history, even though it professes to
address history. That's why the critics who have pointed out its shortcomings
have focused on its lack of concrete details and its generic song forms. These
are not just minor flaws, they're part of a larger contradiction. Keith Harris
took that observation farther than most in the Village Voice and was
subsequently called to task by Eric Alterman in the Nation for his
"willful forfeiture of the common cultural ground upon which Springsteen plies
his trade" and his "cynical" criticism of Springsteen's very "willingness to
offer solace in troubled times." But if anything, Harris's critique could be
taken half a step deeper and a whole lot broader. The problem with The
Rising is the same one that's afflicted many of the musical responses over
the past year, and for that matter many of the political responses, too: they
return us to what we already know.
Greil Marcus, a renowned rock critic who makes a living uncovering tiny
fissures and epiphanies in the "common culture," closed his July "Real Life
Rock Top Ten" column for Salon.com. by comparing two July 4 editorials,
one in the New York Times, the other in the San Francisco
Chronicle. The latter was entitled "Dissent -- The American Way," a notion
that, as Marcus observes, "one can hardly imagine running in any other major
daily." The Times editorial, on the other hand, seems like a tasteful
and tame rumination about the rare direct experience of "feeling one's freedom"
that this July 4 offers. Yet Marcus zooms in on the author's definition of
freedom as "the ability to choose whom and what you will become according to
your own lights" and then opens fire. "How very New Age or, rather, Republican.
It's up to you, you're on your own, and there is no such thing as society, let
alone politics."
After the initial horror of September 11 subsided -- and with it, the
overwhelming sense that no pop music could speak to the complexity of grief,
rage, and fear that the nation felt -- the dominant pop response has been
suffused with the smug ideology that Marcus uncovers. Given its history of
complicity with conservatism (call it a "yearning for tradition"), country
music has proved it isn't quite pop after all by leading the Republican charge.
The most notorious example is Toby Keith's career-defining hit, "Courtesy of
the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)." The title pretty much says it
all, and the standard-issue, good-ol'-boy album it leads off, Unleashed
(DreamWorks), confirms Keith's willingness to "let the president" do the
political thinking for him.
This pride of ignorance is about the only thing that links Keith's hit to Alan
Jackson's tender rumination "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning),"
which confesses that the singer's "not a political man" and isn't sure whether
he "can tell you the difference in Iraq and Iran." Both songs are at the very
least heartfelt -- Unleashed's overall blandness speaks to how inspired
Keith must have been when he wrote "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue." That
same pride of ignorance, however, is what sets these country hits apart from
their closest rock cousin, Neil Young's "Let's Roll," whose title is taken from
the phrase that Todd Beamer was heard to say on a cell phone just before he
joined the attempt to overcome the hijackers on United Airlines Flight 93, the
plane that crashed outside Pittsburgh.
"I'm only familiar with one musician's reaction to 9/11," writes an old friend,
a longstanding foreign correspondent who has gained some recent national
attention for his first-hand coverage of the war in Afghanistan. "That being
Neil Young's song where he was supposed to have crooned something like, `Let's
roll.' I didn't think there was anything wrong with that; this country was
attacked, after all, and however outrageous our policies might have been in the
Mideast, I don't think Mohammad Atta had the answer. I'm glad he's dead, it's
too bad we didn't kill him ourselves, and I hope we kill a lot of guys like him
before they get to you and your family." Setting aside my problem with Young's
recycling a riff from David Bowie's "Fame," however, I do believe there's
something wrong with the notion that not only do we have to "turn on evil" but
we've got to roll for Freedom, for Truth, for Love, for Justice. My friend, I
think, would probably agree.
"I think the real issue is this," he continues. "9/11 was a statement that the
rest of the world doesn't want us imposing our values on them. That might sound
obvious, but I mean that in a more radical sense than you suspect. I'm saying
that the very dearest of our values -- democracy, secularism, feminism, even
intellectual honesty -- are not interesting to the people whom we are now
fighting. Every empire had its myth that sustained the nation, and gave them
courage to make the sacrifices you take to build an empire; if you read Italian
newspapers from the 1930s about the invasion of Northern Africa, the articles
read like ours did about Somalia -- soldiers landing here and there, freeing
thousands of slaves, rescuing them from starvation. The Egyptians don't think
we're any different from the Italians, the British, the Russians. If we could
say that we had a foreign policy that was selfless or at least global, we might
claim to be better. But we don't."
Whether or not my friend is right, pop music after September 11 has proved
incapable of raising disturbing notions like this one. Like the good capitalist
products they are, pop and rock try to give us what we want. But like the great
capitalist products they can be, at their best they don't fulfill existing
needs, they create new ones, or perhaps uncover ones we didn't know we had.
Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen have done that in the past with "Ohio" and
"Born in the U.S.A." -- songs tied to the here and now with music as well as
words, all of it novel, unexpected, uncovering something that many people may
not have wanted to hear.
Outside the Billboard charts there are numbers that have done this for
September 11. Already, a month before its release, Steve Earle's Jerusalem
(Artemis) has drawn the ire of right-wing commentators for daring to
imagine American Taliban convert John Walker Lindh's world in a song titled
"John Walker's Blues." The indie-rock trio Sleater-Kinney try to ignite the
spirit of patriotic dissent on One Beat (Kill Rock Stars; see page 23
for Carly Carioli's review). And the Village Voice compilation Love
Songs for New York (Village Voice Records) jostles expectations in small
ways by allowing contradictions in the international mix of contributors. Some
day, a pop hit might come along that does all this and more on the radio. But
no matter how much we need its cathartic balm, no matter how much we ache
without it, when it comes, it will be an utter shock.
Issue Date: September 6 - 12, 2002
