As an independent man-about-town, I have a fair amount of discretionary time during what I used to call “the workday.” I find myself grocery shopping at noontime and running to the post office fairly often. And because Kansas City might simply be the worst city on the planet for commercial rock-format radio, I’ve been half-kiddingly dipping into the AM crazy-pool with some regularity. Yes, children, we’re talking Fox News, the EIB Network, and all that good stuff. I’m kind of a political animal and therefore find some kind of sick enjoyment in *ironically* listening to these fascist chatterboxes. However, something I heard on Bill O’Reilly’s Radio Factor kind of surprised me. First of all, his overall tone was fairly populist — he was giving the business to corporate robber barons and such. Beyond that, while debating a caller regarding the brewing ugliness in Pakistan and Georgia, he actually said that we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq because doing so was expensive and has taken our eyes off the global prize — even though we’re no longer getting pantsed by the insurgency. (My paraphrase, but true story.)
I was kind of stunned to hear a cog in the right-wing national applause apparatus admit that the Iraq adventure (in hindsight) wasn’t quite the best thing to do. Still if the true believers no longer believe, the whole situation seems even more absurd. Five years of holding my breath as this war lingered like a fart in the national elevator – and now “Oopsy. That was dumb, wasn’t it? Wish someone had mentioned that before we started.” Such seems the way of things in these times of creeping, peripheral dread.
I remember when the days of “shock and awe” started. My coworkers and I would duck out at lunchtime and roll over to one guy’s nearby apartment so that we could wolf our sammiches and watch things explode. I assume this vapid and callous response was a way to process my anger regarding the whole dumb, hopeless situation. I’m guessing the other guys were feeling the same way – though they might have just been vapid and callous. Even weirder than the spectator sport of invasion-by-embedded-news-anchor, was the Bush administration’s almost nightly parade of ultimatums running in tandem with the Iraqi “information” minister’s sans-reality rebuttals as the war loomed.
“Baghdad Bob” aka “Comical Ali” doing his thing.
In short, the buildup to the Iraq War and the subsequent “shocking and awing” of Iraqi civilians is incontrovertible proof that America lost its proverbial shit after 9/11. My first band The Spring even got into the act. On Thursday March 27th, 2003 – about a week after the war started – the Spring played what was *supposed* to be our last show. The drummer (one of my war-watching coworkers) and I were feeling particularly nihilistic. We dressed the stage with dark balloons and wrote ill-tempered messages on our gear and persons using masking tape. My amp bore the legend “Hooray for war!” while the rallying cry “Fuck the Spring” was displayed proudly on the back of my suit jacket. I like to think that we were feeding off the stupidity of our times. But really, I think we might have just been a stupid, pretentious band.
Sheesh. Hear what I mean…
The Spring, “Glorious Knife” – Live @ Lyons Den 3/27/2003
What does all of this have to do with an album released over six months before we went to war with a country that was guilty of nothing more than the political equivalent of looking at us funny? Well, I believe the “march to crazy” that will eventually define the aughts was kicked off by 9/11 and our (justifiable) collective inability to make sense of it. And One Beat is perhaps the best album-length response to the first stirrings of what would become our decade of new horrors.
One Beat’s “9/11 song” is the harrowing “Faraway.” Rather than the everyman abstractions that watered down Bruce Springsteen’s similarly-9/11-minded songs on The Rising, “Faraway” sticks to how most folks experienced the event. “Then the phone rings/‘Turn on the TV’.” The lyrics touch upon images of sky and falling and fire – all key features of the apocalypse-on-repeat footage – as the overdriven guitars churn out repeating, roiling figures over driving, rolling drums. The entire song oozes turmoil and unease. It’s defiant yet fearful music. It certainly sounds like 9/11.
More than simply recording an accurate depiction of 9/11 shock in song form, Sleater-Kinney manages to nail the absurdity of the mass militarist response that soon followed all that death from above. The faux-martial feel of “Combat Rock” – as well as the title’s allusion to the Clash’s 1982 call to arms – sends up the pugilistic national mood. The irony is apparent in the lyrics and Carrie Brownstein clipped delivery –
They tell us there are only two sides to be on
If you are on our side you’re right if not you’re wrong
But are we innocent, paragons of good?
Is our guilt erased by the pain that we’ve endured?
Brownstein’s deadpan questioning in the verses is set off by Corin Tucker’s whooping, accusatory lines in the choruses –
Hey, look it’s time to pledge allegiance
I love my dirty Uncle Sam
Oh, gentlemen start your engines
And we know where we get the oil from
Still the song’s strongest blow is delivered in Browstein’s final hiccupy verse.
Show you love your country go out and spend some cash
Red white blue hot pants doing it for Uncle Sam
The exhortations here would be completely silly, if they didn’t so closely echo the actual “calls to action” that followed in the wake of 9/11. You know, the calls to spend money the way we normally would so that the terrorists wouldn’t win and the calls to “liberate” Muslim women from the burqa so that they’d be free to flaunt it should they have it.
Basically, One Beat captures the way in which terrorism gave everyone a dose of the panic while skewering the ridiculous and sadly predictable response to the attacks. Like the very best song about the fear and loathing of our times – Radiohead’s “There, There” – Sleater-Kinney reach back to feel the Rolling Stones’ dread-saturated late-1960s rock. While “There, There” bites “Gimme Shelter,” Sleater-Kinney’s “Sympathy” is a nod to Beggar’s Banquet’s “Sympathy for the Devil.” Rather than a litany dirty deeds done by a “man of wealth and taste,” “Sympathy” is a very personal plea to God. This song is all about a parent’s fear for her child. But even out of this personal turmoil comes some insight into how fear breaks even good people –
When the moment strikes
It takes you by surprise and
Leaves you naked in the face of death and life
There is no righteousness in your darkest moment
We’re all equal in the face of what we’re most afraid of
In that way the “whoo-whoos” of “Sympathy” and of the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” seem to punctuate the same point – when something terrible happens we’re all a bit to blame because after all we’re all capable of the evil and the fear that we’d rather see as something “other people” inflict upon us.
Still if One Beat were only a lament decrying the inability of people to do right by each other, it might be honest but it wouldn’t be any fun. The reason why this record is the best album-length response to 9/11 is that its defiance holds up in the face of both evil and stupidity. It’s about transcending the obvious, fear-driven desire for flight or isolation or revenge. It’s a record about dealing with shit and making it work. Beyond the big ugliness and super dumbness this album holds up for mock, it is the fuzzed-out, rocked-up girl group swagger of “Step Aside” that really provides some hope –
These times are troubled these times are tough
There’s more to come but you can’t give up
Why don’t you shake a tail for peace and love
Move it up one time for LOVE
…
When violence rules the world outside
And the headlines make me want to cry
It’s not the time to just keep quiet
Speak up one time TO THE BEAT
