Archive for September, 2008

U2, Zooropa

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

From Art Into Pop (1987) by Simon Frith and Howard Horne –

Epstein and Oldham, then, made exactly the same ‘compromises’ with the pop process (even if John Lennon was to resent the fact that the Stones, not the Beatles, got to act out rebellion). Where they differed was in how they presented what they were doing (and their own roles in doing it). For the self-effacing Epstein the point of the sales pitch was that no one should notice it being made – the Beatles just were the zany foursome they were sold to be. For the youthful Oldham, by contrast, just as determined to be a star as the Stones themselves, the packaging of the Stones was an art – his art – to be celebrated for its cunning and cleverness. The Stones, unlike the Beatles, remained ‘authentic’ artists not because their music was more rootsy nor because their image was more rebellious but because they were clearly in charge of their own selling-out process. (Page 102)

Quite possibly, rock’s last great gasp was the creative explosion of the 1990s (though I would be more than happy to have this bold assertion proved wrong). Of course, *the* face of ‘90s rock is Kurt Cobain whose own experience of the push/pull of the underground vs. the mainstream remains a key part of his myth as a recent viewing of the interview-doc About a Son reminded me. As the story – and the cheeky documentary title – goes Nirvana’s breakout success was proof that 1991 was the “year that punk broke.” (Interesting when you consider that “broke” could very well cut both ways.) Still, I think this tale is fundamentally true when you consider that “punk” is essentially an upending of typical rock “values” in favor of some kind of snarky, smartipanced antagonism – often with a side-order of celebratory, art school amateurism. 1991 is the year when mainstream American rock audiences saw what had previously been “alternative” become the dominant popular form of rock music.

What the Frith and Horne book is all about is the how the British art and design school tradition influenced rock music from the ‘60s through the 1980s. Essentially, it examines the impact of art theory and art school methods on popular music. It goes into some detail on the extent to which Sex Pistol’s mastermind Malcolm McLaren was influenced by the French situationists in his conception of punk as a means of discombobulating the standard hit-making process while promoting his Bizarro-world pop group. In many ways, the ‘90s saw the triumph of these perverse un-rock/punk values of widespread mock and purposeful artifice. Nevermind the Bullocks reasserted as the plain-old American Nevermind.

Of course the American arty- and sloppy-rock underground as established by REM, Sonic Youth, the Replacements, and the Pixies had a great deal to do with the sound and sensibility of ‘90s rock. However, no discussion of popular music in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s can ignore the Irish media colossus that is U2. As Bono seems intent on reminding everyone, U2 pretty much put a chokehold on the “best and biggest thing since the Beatles” title sometime during the Reagan era. In their first superstar-flavored incarnation, U2 was a VERY SINCERE AND IMPORTANT GROUP. At their ardent peak, they stole “Helter Skelter” back from Charles Manson, recorded a sequel to John Lennon’s “God,” and re-recorded their hymn-like “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” with a GOSPEL CHOIR just in case you missed the point.

Yeah. They freaking MEANT IT.

A funny thing happened to U2 in the ‘90s – they sprouted a sense of humor. The much ballyhooed Achtung Baby found the band embracing Bowie and Factory Records and all sorts of “cool” influences. (Bono described it as “the sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree.”) The accompanying ZOO TV tour was even more of a revelation. Bono and company started toying with personas and satire. The big rock and roll spectacle was used to skewer not only the outside, non-rock world but the very business of rock stardom. The ZOO TV version of U2 was all media flux and pre-millennial angst. It was about the bloated, pointless business of rockstarness. As a hugely-popular mainstream band, U2 was inviting the masses to creep to the edge and peer into the vast cavern of nothingness that was modern rock celebrity. Here was the “World’s Biggest Band” echoing the anti-rockstar gripes of the Nirvanas and Pearl Jams of the world. The Fly, MacPhisto, the Mirror Ball Man – all of them proof that it was better to die before one became Pete Townshend.

Us? Cartoony? The Fly and MacPhisto.

The album that came out of U2’s newfound smarts and style was, of course, Zooropa.

Before I self-consciously thought about the “meaning” of rock, I was simply a teenager buying records, looking for sounds and songs I liked. Like most teenagers, my willingness to try new things came in fits and starts – simultaneously prompted by and hemmed in by peer approval and the need to fit in. Like a lot of dumbass teenage suburban boys, my ideas of what was musically appropriate was guided by how much something “rocked.” For instance, Led Zeppelin and AC/DC “rocked.” REM did not. In junior high, I mostly played at “rocking.” I mean, I dug Aerosmith and Ozzy and Van Halen, but I really couldn’t get into Slayer and Metallica. And I was sneaking REM and the Beatles on the side pretty early on. I knew that I liked the force and the volume of “heavy” music, but I also liked songs and smarts and melodies. In many ways, ‘90s “alternarock” – with it’s marriage of classic and punk rock approaches – was made for me.

So in 1993 I was still sorting out what “type” of listener I was. More than any other record, Zooropa hooked then fifteen-year-old me on what I would later learn were the big ideas of “irony” and “post-modernism” and the “unreliable narrator.” I remember what a shock the album’s newness and modernness was – especially compare to the guitar-heavy ‘70s and ‘80s rock that had comprised the bulk of my listening just a few years ago. I learned about rock and roll from my dad who was very much of the “disco sucks” persuasion. I knew next to nothing about dance music and post-punk and sissy synthesizer music. U2’s reconfigured and mainstreamed Euro-dance sounds was a big change from what your average Midwestern suburban rock-listener kid knew about. Add in all the Eno-inflected glam artifice and you’ve got something completely foreign and weird – something as otherworldly and interesting as the White Album (which was my FAVORITE album for years and years; I spent the better part of 1992 listening to nothing but the White Album).

I suppose what appealed to me about Zooropa even then was the album’s layers of sincerity. “Numb” had the same unreliable calm as the double-speak in my sophomore-year reading assignment 1984. “Daddy’s Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car” and “The First Time” reminded my Catholic-prep-school self of parables – though with very different lessons. Advertising slogans and grim apocalyptic doom, inescapable mortality and throbbing disco breaks – Zooropa isn’t really an emotionally-tidy record.

In many ways, Zooropa is the record that taught me to stop worrying and love the bomb. I think it helped reinforce those Lennon lessons about how an “artist” can toy with an audience’s expectations. I started to see how booksmart ideas about symbolism and allusion weren’t restricted to the classroom. You could apply them to the songs and movies and books that happened outside of school.

Mixing Pop and Politics…

Of course I now know that Zooropa-era U2 was borrowing from Eno and Bowie to craft some kind of half-kidding knowingly-sold-out disco-punk attempt at critiquing rampant consumerism and neverending omnimedia glut. But I didn’t know that when I was fifteen because I was dumb and sheltered and didn’t know shit about rock and roll shinola. Zooropa helped me get here from there. And it introduced me to Johnny Cash. And it’s still the smartest, neatest sounding record that U2 ever made.

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Wussy, Left for Dead

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

When’s the last time you saw a video like the Breeder’s “Cannonball,” with girls playing instruments, goofing around, wearing their favorite tshirt, their inky black hair falling into their faces, singing their own words? NOT dancing in choreographed line, with the camera on their flat abdomens and the words of a team of three middle aged industry men oozing out of their mouths? – Julie in Library Bonnet #4 (2001)

The Breeders — “Cannonball”

This morning I had a brief job-search-related outing that found me killing ten minutes in the determinedly fancy-looking foyer of some little office park building that was trying very hard to look like a rustic chateau or quaint public house. This being America, an unattended lobby television tuned to Fox News blathered unassumingly at no one in particular. John McCain was doing the town hall meeting thing to what I’m assuming was an Irish-American league of some type (based on his frequent dropping of the I-bomb and general “Springfield is the rockin’est town in the whole damn world” pandering). And then it kind of dawned on me. I don’t know if I want Obama to win.

First off, I have no great reason for supporting Obama. If pressed, I think I am simply enamored of a politician who is at least willing to throw around big, fearsome ideas and whipcrack rhetoric in sort of a throwback candidacy. I’m a “words guy.” But still, I think Obama could be a very lousy president. Beyond that, Geo. W. Bush has been a convenient monster. Any doubts or despair or unsettledness can be hung on him for later burning in effigy. To get all high-falutin’, Bush is the mentally crippled king whose lack of vigor has reduced the United States to a wasteland. This allows us to imagine numerous scenarios and heroes by which America can be redeemed. Hell, I’d wager that about half of Obama’s early appeal was that he seemed the right kind of hero to banish the curse and rejuvenate the land. If Obama does banish Bush but the land is still pockmarked and the lakes remain brackish and dead, we’ll all have to admit that funtime is over and we’re looking at some kind of big trouble that transcends the small-time uglies of the Bush-Cheney cabal.

Consider for a moment the now mythical Clinton ‘90s. Like many folks, I am inclined to strap on the rosy goggles when looking back to the recent past. I assume that my fondness for those years is inextricably bound up my own teenhood. The 1990s are when I bought a bunch of records and behaved like an alternately manic or petulant moron. I wore stupid clothes and drove around recklessly and wastefully, arm extended from the window cutting the cool autumn air. The days of elaborate crushes and marching band and late-night milkshakes at Denny’s and other such nicey-nice suburban-white-boy bullshit. Beyond my own personal ‘90s hang-ups, it seems that other, older folks remember the ‘90s fondly as the days of economic growth and optimism and free internet money for everyone. This assessment also seems like bullshit.

If I think hard, the 1990s seemed kind of precarious – if you had money, you didn’t necessarily have fulfillment. This afterall was the decade of angst and slacking and ironic detachment. If you were ambitious, you had to worry that one little slip up would mar your permanent record or give you AIDS. Loyalty and diligence were still necessary, but now you had to be creative and dynamic too. The world became increasingly and absurdly complex in a very short amount of time. And from what I can recall, Americans reacted to this absurdity by letting their pain eat away at them, by gobbling Prozac by the handfuls, by cynically dismissing everything as a joke, by tuning out and letting it all whir by. The now-celebrated Clinton Era collapsed in a heap, leaving little more than partisan finger-pointing and public sex talk and Y2K panic in their wake.

Wherein The Big Lebowski sums up the 1990s in an artfully done musical number –

Granted, the metaphysics of the looming presidential election and a heaping dose of 1990s nostalgia are always distinct possibilities here at the record desk. However, this melancholy mood as it relates to John McCain and the overstuffed and darkly comic 1990s is quite likely a result of David Foster Wallace’s passing a little over a weak ago. Quite honestly, he was the only working writer whom I really followed and whose work I really cared about. He was a smart writer and a funny writer and an incredibly gifted writer. More than that, he wrote in a way that felt human. He wrote in a way that was both tremendously sad and extraordinarily joyous to the point of shimmering. He could cut right through something and make its little heart apparent.

So when I saw John McCain on teevee this morning, pretending to care about another crowd of “town hall meeting” goobers while I sat patiently in a little building that pretended to somewhere grand and nice and not an office, I remembered that Wallace was Rolling Stone’s McCain correspondent for the 2000 election. I remembered how Wallace found something honest and real in the McCain who spoke his mind and who “acts somewhat in the ballpark of the way a real human being would act.” And I wondered if that same John McCain is lurking unscripted behind those beady little eyes that tiredly scan the crowd as the current Candidate McCain rattles off the same old talking points about being a “maverick” and a “reformer.”

When I got home today, I decided to take another look at Wallace’s 2000 McCain coverage. Here’s a bit from his Rolling Stone writing as reprinted in Consider the Lobster (2005, Little, Brown, & Co.) pgs. 186 & 187 –

Who Even Cares Who Cares

It’s hard to get good answers to why Young Voters are so uninterested in politics. This is probably because it’s next to impossible to get someone to think hard about why he’s not interested in something. The boredom itself preempts inquiry; the fact of the feeling’s enough. Sure one reason, though, is that politics is not cool. Or say rather that cool, interesting, alive people do not seem to be the ones who are drawn to the political process. Think back to the sort of kids in high school who were into running for student office: dweeby, overgroomed, obsequious to authority, ambitious in a sad way. Eager to play the Game. The kind of kids other kids would want to beat up if it didn’t seem so pointless and dull. And now consider some of 2000’s adult versions of these very same kids: Al Gore, best described by CNN sound tech Mark A. as “amazingly lifelike”; Steve Forbes, with his wet forehead and loony giggle; G. W. bush’s patrician smirk and mangled cant; even Clinton himself, with his big red fake-friendly face and “I feel your pain.” Men who aren’t enough like human beings even to hate – what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is often a defense against pain. Against sadness. In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about. It’s way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit.

One reason a lot of the media on the Trail like John McCain is simply that he’s a cool guy. Nondweeby. In school, Clinton was in student government and band, whereas McCain was a varsity jock and a hell-raiser whose talents for partying and getting laid are still spoken of with awe by former classmates, a guy who graduated near the bottom of his class at Annapolis and got in trouble for flying jets too low and cutting power lines and crashing all the time and generally being cool.

All that – very true, mind you – stuff about sadness and phoniness and coolness and just not caring is really the very essence of high school, and therefore the very essence of what the 1990s were for me. In retrospect, the 1990s were ten years of happy people pretending to be sad while sad people tried to be happy. They were manic times and reflective times. Uneasy – like that hot swampy air and nasty green light before the tornado sirens.

For me, the ‘90s are a tangle of looks and sounds. If I were to describe it, the stuff that really made me feel more alive during the ‘90s – the stuff that I still go back to when I need to recharge – had a sort of sleepy yet punchy look and sound. It’s that contrast of placidness and abandon. And lots of warm colors offset by very retro blueish greens. It’s easier to SHOW than it is to TELL.

Sonic Youth – “Bull in the Heather”

Pavement – “Cut Your Hair”

So what does all of this have to do with Wussy’s Left for Dead? Well, not much on the face of things. Wussy is a Cincinnati, OH band featuring Chuck Cleaver from the ‘90s one-hit outfit the Ass Ponys. On first look, they’re a pretty straightforward rock combo with some boy/girl vocals and lots of pretty guitar sounds. But something in the *feel* of what they do just has that “happy + sad” ‘90s appeal. Listening to them makes me feel lonely. I can listen to Left for Dead and get that same feeling that I got when I’d discover a band back when I was in highschool. And all of the in-depth analysis and album-review pretense aside, most listeners of a certain age who still bother to seek out new or unknown music are probably trying to reconnect with those first teenage highs. It’s about the feeling you get when a band crafts a little world that you can crawl into and live in. Musicians and cool music weenies like to pretend that rock fandom is more intellectual than simply liking what you hear or more often what you see and hear at the same time.

I’m not afraid to admit that I checked Wussy out because I dug their album art. Some online retailer popped it up as one of my recommendations and I thought is looked interesting enough to preview a couple tracks. I bought the album about five minutes later.

Wussy -- Left for Dead

Because Wussy aren’t really mainstream chart-toppers, there isn’t a lot of information out their on the band. I dug up some videos of the group in action and found that they’ve got that ramshackle everyband look that I tend to associate with the music of my teenage years. That just sort of seals the deal for me.

“Jonah”

“Rigor Mortis”

Anyway, I whole-heartedly endorse Wussy’s Left for Dead. It makes me feel somehow happy and sad at the same time. It’s a lovely, real record that makes a sucky world suck a bit less. It’s not perfect, it’s better than that.

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Rolling Stones, Voodoo Lounge

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

What’s with all the handsome grandsons in these rockband magazines?
And what have they done with the fat ones, the bald, and the goateed!?

– Silver Jews, “Strange Victory, Strange Defeat”

While unpacking my wife came across some back issues of Venus Zine that we’d not gotten around to reading. Flipping through Issue No. 33 from Fall 2007, I zeroed in on Amy Schroeder’s feature “What Happened to Revolution Girl Style Now?” – a kind of state of the union on women in rock circa these foul years of withering and diminished potential. I was particularly struck by the frankness of Kill Rock Star founder Slim Moon’s assessment of rock in the late aughts; “I think boring bands and artists are dominating the industry, and most of these boring bands and artists are male.”

Lately, I’ve been a bit down on rock and roll as a form that can remain vital and meaningful into the near future. There’s such a business as usual vibe to so much radio programming and rock journalism and band forming. And it’s not just a corporate initiative. Even at the individual amateur musician level, there’s an acceptance of “rules” about the right and wrong way to be in a band. Heck, I’m a fairly obnoxious member of a popular musicians message board, and almost daily I read posts by folks who see rock as this normalized world where one must have a certain look and certain gear and a certain worldview to succeed. Of course some folks are more in favor of the current state of things than others, but no one doubts the “reality” that rock and roll success is for the pretty people who follow the appropriate trends.

One article of faith in the “established view” of rock and roll is that the Rolling Stones are supremely ugly mothers – grizzled zombies hideously deformed by years of drug abuse and R&B jive. You know what I mean – the sorts of Jay Leno monologue crapola about performing in wheelchairs and their tour bus being a gigantic hearse. Basically, the Rolling Stones are treated as a creepy punchline because they haven’t done as expected and grown old gracefully. They helped establish the template for all the “boring bands” that Slim Moon was decrying in the Venus piece, but their very longevity makes them unboring and unsettling.

I think one aspect of the Stones’ growing creepiness (the creepiness that makes rock critics and the audience at large refer to them as undead, leering corpses) is that they are a band whose appeal is rooted in sex. This is, after all, a band who as dirty old men in their twenties gave us the nasty ode to statutory rape that is “Stray Cat Blues.” The Stones catch a lot of flak because they, as unrepentantly gnarled rock and rollers, force us to confront the uncomfortable realities like impending mortality and randy granddads.

Years ago as an undergraduate, my British Romantics professor Dr. Loudon mentioned the Rolling Stones as an example how young artists make their names by celebrating their virility and then spend their middle ages watching that virility slip away. He specifically mentioned the Stones’ best later work being that where they try to once more jumpstart their primal urges for a final go around. (I think he was referring to “Start Me Up.”) I won’t go into the whole romantic sex = death equation here because I caught some blowback regarding my cursory treatment of Blake in the last blog about Dylan and Obama and prophetic speechifying and murder ballads. Still, I think that it’s fair to say that a good deal of the Stones’ later work has been about getting the juices flowing.

The opening shot on Voodoo Lounge is titled “Love is Strong” and kicks things off with the unsubtle

Love is strong
And you’re so sweet
You make me hard
You make me weak

It’s no “Viva Viagra!” but you get the picture. The very next track “You Got Me Rocking” weighs in the power of a particularly vital love object to revive dwindling potential –

I was a hooker
Losing her looks
I was a writer
Can’t write another book
I was all dried up
Dying to get wet
I was a tycoon
Drowning in debt

Hey hey
You got me rockin’ now

The album’s title Voodoo Lounge prompts me to think of totems of potency like the gris-gris bag or the mojo hand or the John the Conqueror root. And given how often the Stones like to reference Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon, I’d wager those allusions were lurking somewhere behind their conceptions of “voodoo.” This is a record about reclaiming one’s mojo by any means necessary. Heck, “Suck on the Jugular” even seems to muddy the waters between vampirism and sexual hedonism.

This is a record about old men wanting to fuck and be fucked. This is not appropriate or “normal” content in a climate where rock and roll has been reduced to young pretty folks following the rules and building a safe little rock and roll career. This stuff is actually dirty in comparison to the intellectualized toy Satanism Mick et al. were tinkering with in the run up to Altamont. The Stones in their dotage break the fundamental rule that rock and roll is for the young and pretty things. When Jagger snarls “Going to fuck your sweet ass” in “Sparks Will Fly” – or when Dylan lusts after Alicia Keys on Modern Times’ “Thunder on the Mountain” or when Springsteen leers at the “girls in their summer clothes” on his latest Magic – audiences and album reviewers get a little squirmy. It’s one thing to look the other way when confronted with the goatishness of ever-youthful Pan. But when hoary ol’ Zeus and Pluto start changing shape and absconding with the maidens, then rock and roll’s promise of unbridled sexiness seems merely “gross.”

However, believing in a rock and roll where normalcy prevails and prettiness reigns and where children learn of the proper types of rocking via videogame simulations thereof, is ultimately harmful – especially for folks who see creation as a way to harness and cope with “non normal” views and ideas. The pressure to be always young and always vital eats away at folks. Cobain admitted as much in his suicide note. I think rock is a form (and maybe this is just my punk rock sympathies showing) needs to allow for the not normal, the unexpected, the frankly flawed. Without that release, without the ability of rock music’s voodoo powers of regeneration (even in half-measures), we’ve got nothing but death – either by attrition or through the black magic intentionality of suicide.

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Bob Dylan, World Gone Wrong

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking there’s some kind of change.
– Bob Dylan

I’ve been a bit concerned with the end of the world lately. I suppose it’s the ramp up in anticipation of Electionmania ’08. I’ve been thinking a bit about what America “means” at the moment – partly because Obama is running on a campaign that (policy aside) is largely based on the oomph that American language can still have despite years of euphemism and empty doublespeak. Obama made his mark with his postmodern mash-up of Lincoln and King Jr. at the 2004 convention. And his riffing on hope and inspiration is in the tradition of soaring American wordslinging. Still, Obama does seem a bit lightweight. Critics have a point when they claim he’s all bunny rabbits and rainbows.

Consider this bit of powerful speechifying from the 2004 keynote address –
Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope: In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead.

I believe that we can give our middle class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity.

I believe we can provide jobs for the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair.

I believe that we have a righteous wind at our backs, and that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices and meet the challenges that face us.

This is good stuff, but it lacks that certain something. As much as I enjoy Obama as a political orator, he seems fluffy – like he’s hiding something. I think I’ve figured it out. He’s got a grasp of the America of dreams and prosperous futurism. But he doesn’t really speak the bloody and horrifying language that is also part of the national discourse.

When Obama does address life during wartime in our bellicose republic circa 2004, the best he can muster is some vagaries about services and security –

Now, let me be clear. Let me be clear. We have real enemies in the world. These enemies must be found. They must be pursued. And they must be defeated.

John Kerry knows this. And just as Lieutenant Kerry did not hesitate to risk his life to protect the men who served with him in Vietnam, President Kerry will not hesitate one moment to use our military might to keep America safe and secure.

Lip service in comparison to another great American orator – President Lincoln – when addressing a war that threatened the meaning of America.

From Lincoln’s Second Inaugural –
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

That’s not just “better angels” – that’s the wrath of God smiting the wicked and leaving no man out of that sorry number.

I think there’s a distaste for this kind of strong medicine amongst today’s progressive types. Amongst non-office-holding liberal types whom I know in reality and on the internet, there seems a willingness (and I’ve done this myself) to paint socially conservative voters as “in-bred, backward, hillbilly mouth-breathers” who are thwarting progress by voting for candidates who typically oppose government-controlled health care and stringent environmental regulations while making the world safe for gun owners and religious fundamentalists.

The internet is rife with this sort of thing. Consider the following satirical electoral map that emerged after W’s 2004 win.

I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours.

For many reasons, progressively-minded Americans align themselves with Europe and Canada (at least in casual political conversations). It seems that “Americanness” is this *other* thing – this unseemly primordial thing. Unsophisticated. Superstitious. Rural.

I think what really gives folks the willies is that Americanness is still tied in with violence on some level. And in American mythology, “the South” is home to violence. The victorious North fought the South bloodily in a self-devouring war. And the gospel of American patriotism cites the South and its violent slave keeping as the reason for this bloodletting. It’s little wonder that the South (along with the other non-urbane American backwaters) is blamed for what progressives see as electoral failures that result in violence at home and abroad. I think that some liberal types like to imagine that violence as consigned to the past – if only the “wrong kind of Americans” would step aside and give the reins over to today’s modern, rational citizenry.

Anyway, given my renewed interest in a very American eschatology, I recently rewatched Southland Tales and gave a first viewing to Masked and Anonymous. Both films are somewhat inscrutable, making sense emotionally and visually rather than according to rules of plot and structure. They’re alternate universe renderings of American passions with the training wheels off. Interestingly, both are meta-dramas – Southland Tales being a story that is foretold by a prophetic, in-movie screenplay, Masked and Anonymous being a “let’s but on a show” yarn steeped in vaudeville motifs and stage metaphors. This self-awareness might hint at how as Americans we’re often vary aware of what Americanness “means” and how we often feel a disconnect between where the country is headed and our dreams for what a just and right America would be.

In addition to these critically-maligned films, an internet compatriot of mine brought to my attention a couple snippets of Lloyd deMause’s psychohistory works. Particularly interesting (to me anyway) was deMause’s treatment of the first Iraq War.

From the Emotional Life of Nations, Chapter 2 – The Gulf War as Mental Disorder

Many reporters recognized the depressive origins of the national mood and even the guilt that engendered it. The Washington Post said that after eight years of optimism, “America is in…an ugly spasm of guilt, dread and nostalgia. Once more, America is depressed.” A columnist accurately diagnosed the mood of America in 1990:

America is like a barroom drunk. One minute it brags about its money and muscle, and then for the next hour it bleats into its beer about failure and hopelessness…America’s depression is not brought on by plague, flood, famine or war…We are guilty, guilty, guilty…depression, decline, depravity, dysphoria, deconstruction, desuetude, dog days, distrust, drugs, despair…”

What deMause gets at (among other things) is the violence lurking in America’s conception of strength and power. He proposes that many presidents cannot resist the call to war making because of developmental issues. War making becomes a way to reconcile childhood weakness and the current vogue for indulging children. It’s not the stuff of “rational” political science, but more a jab at the meaning driving our culture.

This sublimation of personal violence into political violence and political theatre reminds me of the function of fairy stories and bogeymen – to make childlike sense of frightening adults. I’m also reminded (probably because I’m currently reading Olive Woolley Burt’s American Murder Ballads and Their Stories) of the great American folksong tradition with its swindlers, killers, lovers, and thieves – which brings me back to Dylan.

In the liner notes to his collection of traditional songs World Gone Wrong Dylan himself writes –

technology to wipe out truth is now available. not everybody can afford it but it’s available. when the cost comes down lookout! there wont be songs like these anymore. factually there arent any now.

Essentially, Dylan places “progress” in opposition to murder ballads like “Love Henry” and “Stack A Lee.” This weird, unmodern music with it’s sailors, engines, talking birds and hat-related shoot ‘em ups is part of a fast fading America – an America that one could say nurtured Dylan’s gifts and fed his songwriting. I find it no coincidence that following two albums spent with mere “covers” of traditional material, Dylan reemerged once again a powerful songwriter capable of album-length feats of strength like Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, and Modern Times. It seems Dylan’s connection with these timeless songs puts him outside of and beyond the current America. He knows the violence and weirdness and weariness that goes along with all that promise and hope. He knows the gunsmoke and geargrease and gravestones. These seemingly simple songs presented in spare arrangements convey a wisdom and lonesomeness befitting an experienced America.

“World Gone Wrong”

Pack up my suitcase, give me my hat,
No use to ask me, baby, ’cause I’ll never be back.
I can’t be good no more, once like I did before.
I can’t be good, baby,
Honey, because the world’s gone wrong.

In many ways, America is doing battle with a Blakeian innocence v. experience problem. Progressive America, Obama’s America wants the hope and sweetness of unspoiled youth and potential. But somewhere lurking is coal dust and wasted promise and fearsome tigers. You will be bound. Promise is fleeting. The end is quite possibly nigh.

Note: The following books are probably lurking behind this post. I read No Go, the Bogeyman a few years ago. I haven’t read this particular Marcus book, but I saw him speak of it at the Chicago Humanities Festival.

No Go, the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock by Marina Warner
The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice by Greil Marcus

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