In the Footsteps of Those Gone Before

It was fascinating to attend the Warped Tour in Kansas City with Springsteen’s Des Moines Seeger Sessions concert still ringing through my head. I had a fine time at Warped, particularly thrilled to see Joan Jett going strong with a set that included her hits and four or five new songs. She managed to bring her unrepentant vision to stand up for sexual difference and a vision of social justice. I also enjoyed my first exposure to Danny Diablo and Underoath in particular (for various reasons, I didn’t see a lot of the bigger headliners)—scrappy bands with an unabashed love for the misfits in the audience and the liberating power of rock and roll. Over a quarter of a century after I fell in love with rock’s promise, the dream is still alive where it needs to be, in the breasts of committed musicians and thousands of fans young and as old as any rock and roller ever gets.

But as a one-time kid from the ‘77/’78 punk era, I couldn’t help having contradictory reactions. I enjoyed the fact that the rebel impulse unites kids in such large numbers today, while I wondered about the implications of it looking and sounding so much like the music we were listening to all those years ago. It gave me fresh insight into why my friends from the 60s rock era often found themselves scratching their heads over garage rock as something “new” in the 70s.

First, let me make this clear—in general, I love today’s music. I even find myself spending a considerable amount of time listening to Top 40 radio. The fact that I have a 14 year old daughter who attended both of these concerts with me (well, I sort of chauffeured her friends to Warped and stayed out of their hair) has more than a little to do with everything I’ve said so far. And I will add that my daughter’s friends make mix CDs that are far more eclectic than most of the tapes we made when I was young (one such girlfriend’s mix CD, for instance, featured everything from Lil’ Jon and T.I. to Staind and local rock band V Card for Vengeance as well as Rihanna, Keith Urban and Roy Orbison).

Sadly, though, concerts and radio formats continue to fight such integration of genres. And what’s worse, within rock, there remains an enormous amount of clique-ishness around narrowly (sometimes mysteriously) codified subgenres such as emo, thrash and death metal as well as all those things I don’t know names for but might call bratty punk, punkish metal, postgrunge and so forth. When we consider that most of these approaches can be traced back to sounds from the 60s, the fundamental goal of rock to excite and surprise the audience seems endangered.

That’s a big part of the reason why I’ve found myself obsessing over the significance of the Seeger Sessions concert. I hear it in dialogue with the rest of what’s going on in popular music. It’s hard to imagine how an artist could more alarmingly challenge everyone in popular music to rethink their prejudices and expectations. Lately it has become more apparent to me that one reason Springsteen has always been such a galvanizing character in pop music—inspiring cultish devotion at one end of the spectrum and knee jerk rejection at the other—is that ever since Bruce started pouring over old girl group records in the early 70s, he’s been a subversive of the most dangerous kind.

What is he not subverting with this tour? Virtually every song the band plays subverts the nostalgic vision of America that fuels today’s jingoism. He subverts the rock audience’s expectations by doing what I would call a great rock show with no lead electric guitar and lots of horns (heavy on trombone and tuba), accordion, banjo and 2 lead violins. He subverts the folk audience’s expectations by daring to deliver folk as a rock show with no reverence for traditionalist purism.

Perhaps most importantly in terms of direct impact, he subverts the Springsteen audience’s expectations. He delivers a show consistent with the themes, dynamics and impact of his classic E Street Band shows but by taking the “Springsteen character” out of the mix. He ditches all but a few of the more obscure songs from his catalogue (offering those few with nearly unrecognizeable arrangements), and actually changing his role from that of the star of the movie to something more like a director, or conductor, or ….camp leader.

Key to all of this is that the lyricist Springsteen is all but gone, this show making its boldest statements musically. The Seeger Sessions band tosses about a dazzling array of sounds overlooked, forgotten, neglected or outright rejected by the mainstream currents of popular music. To name a bare minimum--ragtime and traces of western swing; norteno’s polkas with more than a dash of mariachi; jump blues, old time gospel and traces of free jazz. The net effect, the Bruce Springsteen concert experience recast as an adventurous and improbable hootenanny.

Anything I say about how this compares to the hard focus of the classic Springsteen shows cannot be accurate; it’s too qualitatively different and similar at the same time. I surprised myself by almost (I think “almost,” I certainly didn’t want to embarrass my kid right off the bat) weeping by the end of the opening number “John Henry.” Of all the Seeger Session songs, this is the one that has its deepest roots in my childhood, and the doomed but triumphant central character has been with me forever. But as the opening of the show, it became startlingly vivid how this song broadens the context of Springsteen’s career. All of its bravado, the simplicity and sophistication of its statement of the plight of every worker (particularly those—are there any other kind?--losing value to a new piece of technology), that great last verse about Polly that finds political solidarity in two individuals facing overwhelming circumstances—it’s “Born to Run,” “Youngstown” and “The River” (to pick somewhat arbitrarily from his canon) all rolled into one, and in its exuberance and promise, it’s the show to come writ large.

I think of the show I saw in five distinct movements, each one capped by a call to community—

“Eyes on the Prize” capped the opening challenge of a changing, oppressive, alienating world, a world where “more than all this put that gun” in Johnny 99’s hands.

“Eerie Canal,” perhaps the loneliest song in the show, served as an improbable call to community (don’t worry I’ll explain) in the midst of a series of tales of outlaws, gamblers, refugees, souls in peril and broken, discarded veterans.

“We Shall Overcome,” the climax, capped three songs serving as anthems for the state of America—“How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live,” which uses New Orleans as the universal illustration it is and “Jacob’s Ladder” serving as a celebration of the resistance, this show’s “Badlands.”

“My City in Ruins” drove home the political and spiritual urgency of the desperate dancing of “Open All Night” and the call for economic justice (or simple fairness) in “Pay Me My Money Down.”

“When the Saints Go Marching In” closed the show with a dream of a new world after an exuberant set of songs celebrating the fact that it “ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive” (even if it is illegal).

I say these songs brought the show back to community because of the way they punctuated the show with most of the musicians together at the front of the stage--the many singers, not insignificantly of different races, arm in arm, holding each other, rubbing and patting each other on the back. These were the songs where I imagined I most clearly saw my daughter’s skepticism slipping away. She wasn’t familiar with most of the material, but she didn’t miss the poignancy of something as simple as that group of singers calling, “low bridge, everybody down” or “keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.”

The final song, “When the Saints Come Marching In,” seemed to recast, or maybe revive, the song’s central desire. What’s redemptive in the song’s dream of being “in that number” is not the fact of the singers escaping eternal damnation. It’s about something more fundamental to how we live our lives while we are here. The singers—and I hope a fair part of the audience singing along--were asking to be a part of the community to set things right, to be a part of something bigger than themselves that can tackle all of these problems haunting these old stories and plaguing the world around us.

All told, this show’s goals were, at once, to redefine the rock show, to redefine folk music, to redefine popular music, to redefine what it means to be a Springsteen fan and, most importantly, to redefine what it means to be both an American and a member of the global community. Can those seeds take root in this hard land we live in today? I have to hold onto that much faith. As I’ve said, I have a 14-year-old daughter, and she means everything to me.

Who Protects Us From You?

5 teenagers are gunned down on the streets of New Orleans Saturday night. Today, 100 National Guard troops in SWAT-style teams called SRTs are being deployed to enforce the city's youth curfew. The Times-Picayune also reports the need for troops stems from FEMA rental support for evacuees drying up this summer. More youth will be trying to come back home in time to start the new school year.

Though all we know about this crime is that the victims are teenagers, the New Orleans city government and media is quick to justify the need for soldiers in the streets to control the youth. In a country where the vast majority of violent crime affecting youth is perpetrated by adults, why are we so quick to blame youth? And why aren't more people outraged when youth are blamed?

With Hurricane Katrina, approximately 2000 people died as a result of a system of neglect designed by adults, and we've all seen graphic footage of the New Orleans police shooting and beating Katrina victims on TV.

But the youth are the problem?

2,500 young Americans (countless Iraqi youth) have been slaughtered in Iraq because of the political posturing of their seniors in government.

But Congress is currently debating the causes of youth violence, and troops are being deployed in the streets of New Orleans to control the youth.

It's something worse than stupidity or insanity at work. It's a war on youth, particularly poor youth. In light of my speechlessness and anger over this after spending most of my adult life trying to stop it, I've decided to repost an interview from the blog Holler If Ya Hear Me as well as important, related links from yesterday's The Daily Show and youth advocate Mike Males.

Myths About Teen Violence--

http://home.earthlink.net/~mmales/

"Player Haters" on the Daily Show--

http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/index.jhtml?ml_video=70892

Why Congressional Studies Into Videogame Violence Are Worse Than Meaningless--

It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hear a Child

By Danny Alexander

In this era of inflamed cultural anxiety and renewed culture wars, it’s hard to imagine a more necessary book than Gerard Jones’s Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Superheroes, and Make-Believe Violence. One of his key strengths is that Jones listens to what kids have to say, unlike the political pundits who give lip service to protecting them. Aside from skewering the lazy thinking (and bad science) that has shaped most liberal and conservative perspectives on culture, he also offers indispensable insights into the distinct ways boys and girls make use of the culture, often reaching conclusions that fly in the face of conventional wisdom.

After Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’s hidden sex scene made national news, Hillary Clinton held a press conference comparing video games to cigarettes and tobacco, spouting the same tired assumptions Jones’s book should have lain to rest.

In response, he agreed to answer a few questions:

In Killing Monsters, you go to great pains to show why studies on the effects of media violence are, to say the least, misleading, and you make a strong case that video games are the least likely cultural culprit when it comes to real violence in society. Last March, likely 2008 Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton joined culture warriors Joe Lieberman, Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback, asking for $90 million in federal funds for research on the effect of the Internet, iPods, and other electronic media on children. What hopes do you have that this research will yield more objective or thoughtful results than past studies?

Basically none. Whenever there’s a call for new studies, it’s always from the same people: politicians or advocates who want evidence that certain types of entertainment cause certain types of problems. And they always turn to the same researchers, who are even more invested in demonstrating the presence of the same “negative effects.” After all, their livelihoods, sometimes the existence of their schools’ entire social science departments, depend on reliably delivering the same anxiety-provoking data for the same politicians and foundations. It’s a combination political maneuver and boondoggle, just like Bush demanding “more intelligence” on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and connection to al Qaeda. More studies, more quotable people assembled to say exactly what they’ve been asked to say.

I’d love to see some real research done on this subject, but that requires asking questions that no one’s asked in 80 years of social-science “research” on entertainment.

1) What might be the positive effects of this media? (Not just, “Does this increase hostility?” but also, “Does it increase boldness, self-confidence, social connection, the desire to take right action?”)

2) How do the effects of “violent entertainment” compare to sports fandom, academic pressure, social competition, patriotism, religious zeal, and the many other factors in life?(e.g., anecdotally it certainly seems that more large-scale violence is inspired by holy texts and national causes than anything make-believe; but no one ever puts entertainment in a larger context.)

3) How do we explain the fact that instances of crime, violence, and other antisocial and self-destructive behavior keep dropping even as media use increases and media violence becomes more frequent? All the research I see is “bubble research.” The numbers make sense within the bounds of the study, but they’re never reflected in real life. (As contrasted with, say, the cigarette/cancer connection, which clearly showed up in real-life statistics and then was backed up by lab studies.) Can it be that the increase of aggression recorded by so many studies somehow results in a decrease of genuine acts of violence?

There are hypotheses to explain such a phenomenon, but the usual gang of researchers and politicians never wants to look at it. Heart doctors study the “French Paradox.” Will social scientists ever study the “Media Paradox”? I’d love to see it happening, but it won’t come at Clinton and Brownback’s urging.

Why don’t arguments like the ones you make in Killing Monsters get more media play?

The commercial news business is owned by the same companies who produce the entertainment, and they know that consumer confidence in their news product is tenuous. Producers and journalists are afraid that if they seem to be coming out in favor of the company’s entertainment products, they’ll lay themselves open to accusations of shilling for entertainment at the expense of accuracy.

I’ve talked to enough reporters about this personally, usually right after they’ve interviewed me, to say this with some confidence. It’s the same reason educated, left-leaning journalists are so susceptible to being bullied by conservatives.

The focus on content and taste is also a great distraction from potentially larger arguments about the effects of new media per se or the political implications of the media and their messages. People who make decisions in the mass-media business know that no assaults on violent, sexy, or bad-taste entertainment will actually make any significant differences to their profitability. Everyone in the mass-media business knows that these flurries will happen and all you have to do is toss a couple of products to the wolves, slap on some new warning labels, and maybe pull back on the shock value a little bit.

If you can redirect the argument from “I don’t want my kids disappearing into an iPod” to “I don’t want my kids listening to all that violence and obscenity on an iPod” and then tell them, “Now it’s easier for you to keep them from listening to all that violence and obscenity,” the larger questions about whether they should be listening to iPods in the first place get shelved.

The furor over Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is good for video games as a whole, because if you can make it the demon and then show that it’s been dispatched, the rest of the games in the living room look more innocuous.

Clinton’s Senate re-election campaign received more entertainment industry donations than that of any other senator. My guess is, based on what we’ve seen in the past, the industry will continue to support her despite her taking such stances. Why do you think the industry is unwilling to stand up for itself on these issues or help educate itself and the public on the positive side of controversial ideas and violence in particular in cultural play?

People in the entertainment industry are always willing to sell out their own. HUAC found far more friendly than hostile witnesses. When the comic-book business was in danger of being destroyed in the early 1950s, people in newspaper comic strips and “wholesome” comic books rushed to the Senate hearings to say, “We’re not like those sleaze mongers. Attack them but leave us alone.” Supporting a senator who attacks Grand Theft Auto is a perfect way to cast oneself as a “responsible” member of the entertainment industry.The people who support Clinton also know that she’s not going to go after their products.

Attacks on “violence” and “obscenity” shift easily according to what the attackers needs to happen. In 1996 Bob Dole railed against “violent movies.” Then Schwarzenegger threw a few million dollars into the pot and offered to show up at rallies Suddenly Dole was praising Arnold’s movies as “depictions of heroism,” the kind of action movie we should have. Ignoring the fact that Raw Deal and Total Recall were among the nastiest movies ever made—not only in the intensity of their violence but in the sadism of their protagonist and the twistedness of their messages.The same with mainstream sitcom producers or record companies who support Clinton. They know her attention will always be on more marginal, easily isolated entertainers that won’t turn out to be very important as contributors or fundraising hosts.

Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas argues that cultural anxiety is a tool used to push right wing agendas. You make the point that much of this cultural anxiety comes from a fear of the future and projection of our fears onto our children. Do we have as much to fear from our fantasy culture as we have to fear from the effects of this cultural anxiety Why do you suppose political progressives are so resistant to the kind of critical thinking you try to model in Killing Monsters? (Maybe that’s two questions)

First, yeah: the culture of anxiety is far, far more pernicious to children and adults than anything we’re likely to see in our make-believe. I think entertainment has very little power if we say “someone made that up to shock us” and “it doesn’t matter.”As for progressives...I think it’s mostly just that they feel they have to steal as many issues as they can from the right without compromising the core progressive issues that they need to stick to. They figure they’re not going to lose any votes (or at least any likely votes) by yelling about violent video games and rap songs, but they might by seeming to be “soft on family values.”

Underlying that is the elitism of educated progressives. They still see themselves as having to take care of less well-educated people, which means that their reliance on upper-middle-class standards of taste and the research of people with PhDs will always be seen as more “correct” than the direct experience of kids, teenagers, immigrants, and lower-middle-class or working-class people who comprise most of the audience for the entertainment attacked. This is one reason that attacks on shows like The Sopranos or Six Feet Under never get much media traction, and why the heat always goes toward rap music and pop of the Britney Spears ilk but rarely toward alternative rock. Poor people don’t partake in it, so they’re not as worked up about it; and educated elites “get it,” so they ignore or deflect criticism, imagining that their children won’t be affected by it. The basic progressive model is that “those people” are being led astray by crass (probably right-wing) profiteers, and we liberals need to protect them from themselves.

What’s more dangerous, violent video games or politicians who have problems distinguishing between video game violence and reality? Clinton has consistently supported the Iraq war and is now pushing for an increase in the size of the Army by 80,000 troops. How do you suppose such hawkishness compares with fantasy media in terms of aggravating real world violence?

I think killing real people is a bigger problem than killing badly animated pseudopeople on a computer screen. And I think arguing from the Senate floor that America should be sending its young men and women to their deaths for a disastrous colonial venture is more likely to distort our thinking about violence than watching superheroes fight in a cartoon.My one hope is that the costs of real war will help Americans remember (maybe for longer this time) that real violence isn’t fun and exciting, and you don’t get a happy ending after two hours. Hawks like Clinton may help us that way.

Jones’s 2004 book Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book recently came out in a soft cover edition. Dave Marsh called it, “by far the best book about comic book history I’ve ever come across. Best written, best told, most informed, best at seeing the big picture and grasping the little details essential to frame that picture.”

http://hollerif.blogspot.com/2005_09_18_hollerif_archive.html

The Ultimate Reckoning Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” may be the greatest reckoning song of all. Hell, it may be the greatest rock record period.

Producers Jerry Wexler and Arif Mardin, engineer Tom Dowd, the Franklin sisters and that terrific team of Muscle Shoals musicians, particularly bass player Tommy Cogbill, manage to pack those 2:26 seconds with so much energy that it’s hard to imagine it could possibly go on a second longer. On the other hand, I played the record about 20 times today, and I could have gone for 20 more listens without beginning to tire of it. In fact, somewhere around the 7th listen, the record seized me by the throat, and I was overcome with emotion.

I’m not sure what moment it was, but I suspect it was one of those two moments when Franklin’s voice breaks a little. (I would say she almost whimpers, but when a voice sounds as strong as this one—words like sigh or whimper or swoon don’t really come into play.) It’s probably the first time, right after she sings, “I’m about to give you all of my money,” and the wordless cry that follows suggests every bit of risk she is taking in the process. Past ghosts, a sense of helplessness, the possibility of madness and the uncertainty of the future all haunt that line. What she wants, what she needs—just like the lover she’s confronting—demands that she risks losing herself completely in order to find the one thing she needs, respect.

The other place where her voice breaks is after recalling those kisses “sweeter than honey,” making it clear that sexual passion calls for that risk as well. After all, calling for respect, Franklin’s demanding a quality of love, and that comes with all the good stuff, which is why those cries to “whip it to me” and “sock it to me” sound so deliciously erotic.

But, ultimately, the reason I think all of these elements make “Respect” perhaps the most important record of the rock era has everything to do with what’s political in the personal. Respect means, ultimately, to take another look, to more closely consider the wants and needs of another and her point of view. That’s what I think rock and soul, at their greatest, always aim for, a reckoning with other points of view. And when we truly lose ourselves in a song, which “Respect” all but demands that we do, we find ourselves strengthened by the process. Maybe that’s why Aretha Franklin’s voice sounds as strong as any other voice I’ve ever heard here, in the face of all those fears. She’s hit on the kind of love that’s really all we need—the kind that hears the voice that typically goes unheard and joins in.

(photo by Dave Ransom, from the June edition of People's Tribune--see links)

My Favorite Gangstas: Natalie Maines and P!nk

Why are Natalie Maines and Pink my favorite gangstas? That’s the question, but not the way it sounds. The interesting thing is why them? Why now?

But I suppose we need to get past the qualifying round before going on. I’ve thought Natalie, Emily and Martie belonged in the company with Ice Cube and Scarface at least since their unrepentant murder fantasy, “Goodbye Earl,” which came out about 6 months before Pink began spittin’ tough guy lyrics like “Hell Wit You” and “There You Go.” And 6 years later, it’s not just Natalie who’s “Not Ready to Make Nice,” Pink starts her new album laying into virtually all of her peers with “Stupid Girls” before turning on “Dear Mr. President.”

Now, considering their penchant for blond Mohawks, you might think I’d wanna call these two singers punks. But punks just don’t cut it. Punks think too small. (I may make an exception for Joe Strummer here who, at his crucial taking-on-the-American-pop-charts moment, also sported a Mohawk.) Punks, with their nihilism at one end of the spectrum and anarchist utopianism at the other, never really grapple with reality on a grand scale.

That’s the job for gangstas. For me, an unrepentant gangsta fan since NWA changed the way I saw everything almost two decades ago, the best gangstas (why bother with the crappy in any genre?) are the ones asking the big questions in pop music. Sure, they may not have the politically correct answers, but they keep their eyes and ears on the material reality. Not ready to make nice, the gangsta asks, how do we take over? The whole genre is a critique of capitalism in some sense, and it’s often a call for class unity and peace by focusing on the everyday violence of the status quo.

That’s what’s in Maine’s voice when she declares, “I could never follow” or I “wouldn’t kiss all the asses that they told me to” or “I’m not ready to back down ‘cause I’m mad as hell.” And that’s what’s on Pink’s mind when she declares “we’re not dumb and we’re not blind.” A big part of both artists’ strength lies where some would see a weakness—in a sort of vulgar directness (Pink takes home the trophy here). That’s precisely what makes gangsta such an appropriate comparison. When those who don’t "get it" get over being polite about human slaughter, then we will have made some progress.

There are a number of intriguing connections between the Dixie Chicks’ and Pink’s new albums. They tackle similar themes with songs like the DC’s “The Long Way Around” and Pink’s “Long Way to Happy” and “Everybody Knows” and “Nobody Knows” (which both focus on the singers’ refusal to let the world see them cry) and, among other things, they both sing lullabies (of a sort) here and end their albums with something like prayers—not worshipful prayers but pleas to the universe.

But what started this whole line of thinking was the way they each confront this political moment with an unusual variation on a staple of women’s music in the rock and soul era. It’s a form I like to think of as the Sunday morning reckoning song. On one level, that image comes from the idea of, say, Aretha Franklin singing “Think” or “Respect” to her man while she’s trying to decide whether to finish frying breakfast eggs in that iron skillet or use the whole damn thing, sputtering eggs and all, to lay him out if he won’t do right. On another level, I imagine it like Aaliyah’s “4 Page Letter,” written to simply sort a relationship out, whether or not the addresse ever gets the chance to read it (a practice about half of my women writing students have testified to ever since I first started teaching).

What's unusual is not the political dimension of these songs. All Sunday morning reckoning songs have a political tenor that rises above the vehicle. The politics of the bedroom generally serve as a metaphor for the larger society, particularly in women's music. But what's unusual about these two songs is the futility of the plea, on one level, and its hopefulness on another.

With Maines the open letter is aimed at an industry (a society really) that propagandizes real world hatred and war without offering a critical thinker enough rationale to justify murder. The result? Well, one is people threatening to assassinate her for saying she’s ashamed of the President. With Pink, the letter is aimed directly at the President, reckoning with grieving mothers, imprisoned fathers and children as collateral damage both here and abroad. In neither case is there any hope that the villains will listen, but the swelling music declares a great hope for unity among a much larger group who could.

It is a piece of Pink’s reckoning song, the bridge, that I see most clearly as a duet with Maines. Together, they could declare--cast iron skillet or gun drawn and ready—

“Let me tell you ‘bout hard work
Minimum wage with a baby on the way

“Let me tell you ‘bout hard work
Rebuilding your house after the bombs took them away

“Let me tell you ‘bout hard work
Building a bed out of a cardboard box

“Let me tell you ‘bout hard work—
You don’t know nothing ‘bout hard work!!!!!!!”

Fear of this sort of rallying cry is one reason Democrat and Republican politicians who have been hawkish on this war (almost all of them, but for the sake of clarity let’s single out Hillary Clinton, Rick Santorum, Joe Lieberman, for instance) have joined hands against youth culture. The only way you blame music and videos for kids thinking of violence (when your job as Senator is to propagandize violence) as a solution to problems is to ignore such ideas and their implications altogether.

Whether politicians aim at gangsta rap or gangsta video games is really immaterial. The gangstas raise their voices in crude, unrepentant ways because the stakes are too high to fret over manners or political correctness, and perhaps manners are being revealed for what they really are, a systematic tool for ignoring the “outcasts” Pink says she wants to hear.

She literally cries out for these outcasts every day (just about every hour) on Top 40 radio right now because, like all of the great gangstas, she thinks big. That’s what polite society—be it conservative or progressive—hates most of all, those who listen to and engage with the unwashed masses. Fortunately, the best gangstas like the Dixie Chicks and Pink dream of a world, as Maines sings in “I Hope,” where we “can all live more fearlessly.”