This week’s last anti-war song is by one of my old favorites, John Prine—it’s about flags as “Makeshift Patriot” is about flags, but from about as different a source as you will find. And this one comes to us from the 1970s, with the implicit question attached of why humans never seem to learn about war.
This is also a funny song. I’ve been self-conscious lately about my earnestness, how obnoxious it can be. Granted, the week of 9/11 is not the time to throw caution to the wind and try to be funny. But humor does return, as reported by both Studio 360 and WYNC. There is a strong relationship between tragedy and comedy. Even Freud knew that jokes are serious business. Ha ha.
I generally have more sympathy for journalists than this Sage Francis song shows, and I mourn the current shrinkage of quality reporting in the world, but I do recall my own shock at the news coverage vitriol in the weeks and months after 9/11. Sometimes I would remark upon what I considered the inappropriate words used by journalists and the way that they failed to question the simplistic (and as it turns out false) rhetoric of George Bush and his minions. I was reminded of Toni Morrison’s words in her 1993 Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “[T]ongue-suicide … is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts, for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.”
“The systematic looting of language,” she goes on, “can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties, replacing them with menace and subjugation.” This kind of language, she notes, “does more than represent violence; it is violence.”
Let us watch out for that, always. It is something we can do in our daily lives: listen and stop ourselves when we are caught up in “the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind.”
P.S. My use of this version of the Sage Francis song video does not represent support for the 911debunkers blog.
It seems a particularly relevant morning to revisit Melissa Etheridge’s song honoring Mark Bingham, one of the four men who are given credit for bringing down Flight 93 in rural Pennsylvania so it wouldn’t make it to the Pentagon. Mark Bingham was a gay man.
This morning we try to recover from last night’s GOP Tea Party debate in Tampa. Richard Adams of the Guardian provides a merciful summary for those of us unable to stomach watching it. You can scroll down to 8:00 p.m. when the debate actually starts. Gay rights were not discussed at all, as those won’t really become an issue until a Republican faces a Democrat. But we should all know that the Republican position on the issue hasn’t changed much since the 1950s.
Perhaps the most revealing moment of the debate came when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked candidate Ron Paul who should pay for the hospital care of an uninsured man suddenly critically ill. When Paul hedged, Blitzer asked if he should just be allowed to die. Several members of the audience yelled, “Yes!” There’s a brief video of the exchange here.
This is the Black Eyed Peas’ peace anthem, and it’s simple in its chorus, but one of the things I like about it is how it acknowledges the tangle of complexities we live with.
Where is the love?
I don’t know.
Where is the truth?
I don’t know.
I have a friend whose birthday is 9/11. She and I have talked about how odd that is—to never be able to celebrate, as least not in public, the occasion of one’s birth. It becomes almost a secret. I want to tell her that we should never feel ashamed of being born, just as no one should feel ashamed of dying. So, happy birthday to my friend.
There is, however, both nothing and too much that one can say about the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I’ve already given the outlines of my experience of that day in this blog on the occasion of Bin Laden’s death. Saying anything today seems to me to take nerve, but it is probably nerve we need to have.
Philip Metres gives a good account of these conflicting impulses of silence and expression that face us over any such horrific event in his Huff Post article, “The Poetry of 9/11 and Its Aftermath.” His article also includes several poems related to 9/11, including Martín Espada’s beautiful “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100,” which ends with “Music is all we have.”
So for the next few days, I’ll post a song a day related to 9/11 and the dispiriting politics that have followed in the decade since. Just as George Bush squandered the world’s sympathy in his false claims of “weapons of mass destruction” and an ill-advised declaration of war on Iraq, our entire nation has squandered the feeling of brotherly love and egalitarian concern for each other that followed the attacks. Ten years after the 9/11 tragedy, that is a daily sorrow.
It’s Labor Day, and it’s hard not to think about the economic hard times we are living through now. Although I am a lucky person with a relatively secure and decently paid job, even I live with the evidence of decline—the house across the street that has been vacant for three years, the colleague whose husband lost his job, our continually eroding health and retirement benefits in the State of Florida, the old guy who bicycles by every now and then looking for yard work, the empty storefronts even in fancy Winter Park, the massive numbers of now-homeless pets that have been abandoned by families in distress.
My new mantra is that some people lived through the Fall of the Roman Empire, too. For some reason, that thought calms me, though I’m not sure it should.
So, today I bring you a selection of songs about hard times and hard work. (For some of us, it’s a holiday, so maybe there’s time to listen to more than one.) I’ve tried to select only first-person songs that are about the personal experience of economic difficulty and hard labor, as opposed to the many more that are about the poor who are “them.” As the span of dates on these songs indicates, of course, there are hard times all the time, depending on who you are. It’s just that now we are returning to a pre-Civil Rights pervasive poverty for more people, and the rich are getting richer.
My favorites, I will admit, are the protest songs, the ones like Marley’s and DiFranco’s that call for revolution—“A hungry mob is an angry mob” and “whoever’s in charge up there had better take the elevator down and put more than change in our cup, or else we are coming up.” Even though Marley’s song encourages listeners to take comfort in dancing, there’s the implication that poverty should not be tolerated. On the other hand, two of the more popular recent hard-times songs, “For the First Time” by Script and “Keep Your Head Up” by Andy Grammer, seem more sanguine, more insistent that poverty isn’t all bad.
Some of these newer pop songs feel a bit to me like pacifiers—little anthems for hard-hit folks to sing along to and feel better, feel encouraged, feel hopeful. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, studies show that domestic violence has increased significantly since the onset of the recession, and so it might be a good thing for men who listen to this kind of music—who may be struggling with issues of anger and resentment, who may be tempted to raise a hand to a family member in frustration—to hear a song that encourages them to pull together with their loved ones. On the other hand, these songs also assert that poverty is not important, that it can be overcome, that struggling people should address it with personal gratitude and forbearance.
They’re also just a little hard to believe, what with those beautifully veneered teeth, stripper types showing up in videos, and happy tunes. There are tougher recent songs out there, like Cam’ron’s “I Hate My Job.” He’s just not played as much on pop radio. Go figure.
Anyway, happy day off, to those who have the day off.
* * *
The selection process was hard. There are some good articles and lists about this subject, past and present:
I promised to get to arias sooner or later, so today, in honor of floods and hurricanes and tornadoes and tsunamis and blizzards and avalanches, here is one rendition of “Ebben? Ne andro lontano” from Alfredo Catalani’s opera La Wally. This one is sung by Rene Fleming with Christian Benda conducting the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. In the story, La Wally has made a real mess of her love life and heads out into the snowy Alps. This song comes from that moment. A little while later, it seems that she will reconcile with her would-be lover, who has followed her, but his voice calling to her sets off an avalanche that buries him. She flings herself off the mountain into the avalanche to join him in death.
Whether you know the story or can understand the words doesn’t really matter, of course, because the sorrow is very clear in the music itself–the grieving pace, the climbing and falling of the notes, the tremulous trill at the top. “Ebben? Ne andro lontano” may seem familiar even if you aren’t an opera fan. It has been used over the years in a number of films, including Diva (1981) and A Single Man (2009). There are other good versions on the web, including the one by Maria Chiara that I first heard several years ago and that made me fall in love with the song and another one by Rene Fleming that’s a little fuller than this one (but includes an ad). I really enjoyed listening to several different interpretations from many stunning singers. At a time when the forces of nature seem overwhelming, it’s good to marvel that such voices can come out of human beings.
Yesterday on my way to spin class I had the radio on in the car again, and, lo and behold, the sentimental song that came on was “Close to You” sung by the Carpenters. I had to laugh because this song makes “Operator” sound completely unsentimental. The gritty scenario of the guy being dumped seems so very real next to the silly lyrics of “Close to You,” with its fantasy of a “dream come true” boy that is followed everywhere by singing birds and “all the girls in town.” Karen Carpenter had a beautiful voice, but “Close to You” must be one of the worst songs ever recorded. Nonetheless, it made it to Number One on the Top Forty list in 1970, where it remained for four weeks, and it also won a Grammy.
For me this song also brought up the sinister side of over-happiness. It brings back the 1970s of The Stepford Wives, a book and movie in which men’s desire was to control and render idiotically pleasant the women in their lives through nefarious means. Even though the movie was re-made in 2004, the 1975 version was the one that emerged out of a time when women were struggling to create choices for themselves. If you think that all is well in 2011, then I refer you to the Stepford Wives organization, but at least it’s now easy to see those women as the fakey freaks they are.
On the other hand, Karen Carpenter came of age at a time when gender limitations were the norm, and these sexist norms were just being broken down. I would say that she suffered for them, died for them, even. Karen Carpenter started off as a terrific drummer, but was forced into becoming merely a vocalist. Her brother controlled their careers and chose the music they would perform, and she was forced into an unwise marriage by her mother, who forbade her to call it off at the last minute. Of course, the anorexia that killed Karen Carpenter was a complex disease including many factors. But if you have any doubt about the destructive nature of cotton-candy fake happiness instead of deeper fulfillment based on a more complex vision, take a look at these two videos: one a medley of KC playing the drums early in her career and the other of KC after the drums had been stripped from her, propped up in clothing designed to disguise her thinness and singing “Close to You” like an automaton. The songs may not make you cry, but if the comparison between the sassy early Karen and the re-packaged one doesn’t at least make you cringe, then you’re ice.
There’s a hint here, of course, about what sentimental means: there may be an element of fakery. It’s a partial definition–that’s not the only quality involved, and it may not always be involved–but the sentimental sometimes evokes our skepticism.
P.S. Please see the comments for more accurate information about the dates of the linked videos.
I’ve been keeping this blog for a little more than three months now, and I’m doing a bit of quarterly reflection. I have a small confession to make.
This old Jim Croce song is one of the first ones that I used to make myself cry after I decided I should think about crying. I haven’t posted about it before because it’s really not a song I like. This is a song that reaches over into bathos and sentimentality. So it’s not a song I sought out. It came on the radio (yes, the radio) one harried day when I was driving home after a long day, and I made myself listen to it in a way I perhaps never had before.
I thought about what a sad, sad song it is, and how Jim Croce died a tragic, early death in a plane crash. The song’s narrator is pathetic, not just tragic, and he’s the kind of narrator that I’d usually roll my eyes at. But in fact all of us fear somewhere deep down being that kind of person–most of us have been dumped at one point or another and most of us have had things we’ve had a hard time getting over. So, even though I’ve never behaved as this narrator does, I let myself connect to those deep insecurities for a moment. It was cathartic.
But “Operator” also raises issues for me about snobbery and elitism. I’m dedicated to both, I guess, and the sentimental in art is probably going to remain something I have quite a bit of disdain for. But it’s also something that I want to think more about, so this fall I think I’ll set out to do some reading along those lines. Let me know if you have any recommendations.
I feel as though there’s such a fine line between the moving and the mawkish, maybe even overlap. In some ways, “Operator” represents a “return of the repressed” for me, as I’m sure I was a very sentimental child. Where did she go? Why do we deny these childish vulnerabilities so very much? Why do we let fear of being losers overwhelm our compassion? Is it a good or bad thing that I can cry over something I don’t respect?
Jerry Ragovoy died this week. I had never heard of him, but he was the co-author of my anthem for this blog, “Cry Baby.” Using the name Norman Meade, he wrote it with Bert Berns for soul and R&B singer Garnet Mimms in 1963. Janis Joplin recorded the song shortly before her death in 1970. “Get It While You Can” is also a Ragovoy song, as is “Time Is on My Side,” made famous by the Rolling Stones. He also produced one of my all-time favorite albums, Bonnie Raitt’s Streetlights. He was the kind of guy who had a stellar career behind the headlines. In 2008, the British label Ace recognized his importance with a retrospective CD, The Jerry Ragovoy Story: Time Is on My Side, 1953-2003, which inspired NPR to review his career. I’m going to order it.
Here’s the Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters version of “Cry Baby.” There’s another one on YouTube without the cheesy pictures, but the sound quality is better on this one. What a great voice Ragovoy recognized, and what a great tune he wrote.
Lisa Roney
Joyous Crybaby 