Rough and Rowdy Ways, Bob Dylan (2020)

 

“The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next for of the future.”
-Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

1. 

Adorno’s well known essay “Late Style in Beethoven” finds common ground with Giles Deleuze’s last essay “Immanence: A Life.” Both attempt to describe a state of being outside the subjective individual expression (both grounded in the artwork: for Adorno Beethoven, for Deleuze Dickens), while retaining something like the singularity of expression. Two passages from each will suffice:

 “Death is imposed only on created beings, not on works of art, and thus it has appeared in art only in a refracted mode, as allegory. The psychological interpretation misses this. By declaring mortal subjectivity to be the substance of the late work, it hopes to be able to perceive death in unbroken form in the work of art. This is the deceptive crown of its metaphysics. True it recognizes the explosive force of subjectivity in the late work. But it looks for it in the opposite direction from that in which the work itself is striving; in the expression of subjectivity itself. But this subjectivity, as mortal, and in the name of death, disappears from the work of art into truth.” (Adorno 566)

He continues, with specific reference to Goethe’s Faust II and Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre, “no longer, at this point, an expression of the solitary I, but of the mythical nature of the created being and its fall, whose steps the late works strike symbolically as if in the momentary pauses of their descent.” (566 emphasis mine)

In proximity, if not in agreement, Deleuze’s essay uses Dickens to express what he means by a life as an “index of the transcendental: 

 “The life of the individual has given way to an impersonal and yet singular life, which foregrounds a pure event that has been liberated from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what comes to pass […] a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil, since only the subject that incarnated it in the midst of things made it good or bad.” (Deleuze 387).

As if almost anticipating where they will disagree, namely the “descent” of the “created being and its fall” that leads unto death for Adorno, Deleuze writes as if he wishes the ethos of the “late work’s” emptying of subjectivity in the work of art could be experienced regularly in art and life:
 

“But a life should not have to be enclosed in the simple moment when individual life confronts universal death. A life is everywhere, in every moment which a living subject traverses and which is measured by the objects that have been experienced, an immanent life carrying along the events or singularities that are merely actualized in subjects and objects” (Deleuze 387)

If we take the two ideas together, beyond good and evil and Adorno and Deleuze’s teacher Nietzsche might say, then the work of art is the space wherein death can be allegorized without having to actually confront universal death, and the incarnation of life through events evaluated as either “good” or “evil.” It can refocus itself on a life while also acknowledging that the descent represented within that artwork by the figure of death is merely one virtually to reflect a life among many. The great reversal is, however, for the thinker Deleuze, it is his own confrontation of life’s “weakness and suffering” that engenders the reflection upon the transcendental field of “a life.” A life contains multitudes.

2.

Bob Dylan’s latest album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, begins with the song “I Contain Multitudes.” He released it a week after “Murder Most Foul” and deep into the pandemic.  The title is a reference to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” There are Blake and Poe references in there as well. Dylan just won the Nobel Prize for literature, so he either needs to prove his literary knowledge, or wants to play with his audience’s expectations for such things. But the song begins with the following couplet:

“Today, tomorrow, and yesterday, too/ The flowers are dyin' like all things do”

As Dylan has gotten older, his lyrics have become much less opaque. One of the ways one could demarcate “late” Dylan from “early” Dylan would be a continued reliance on plain language rather than surreal descriptions for his lyrics. Songs like “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” “Isis,” and “Changing of the Guards” gave way to the simple proselytizing of “Pressing On,” “Serve Somebody” and “Every Grain of Sand.” This has been mitigated by his post-Christian albums with secular versions of such homilies such as “Dignity,” “Most of the Time,” and  “To Bring You My Love,” the last of which is so homely that even Adele herself turned it into a hit. This isn’t to say that Dylan hasn’t always been able to bend his voice to universal truths about love, justice and time, its that he always reserved part of his talent for a lyrical modernism that made him the great inheritor of the American poetic tradition from Whitman to Ginsburg (his fellow rolling god of thunder).

Interlude (My baby/ he wrote me a letter): 

 
While writing this essay on Dylan’s new album, a letter was published in Harper’s Magazine titled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” Much has been written about the letter and, dear lord, I really don’t want to spend any time discussing its dumb argument. I’ll let the opening paragraph speak for itself:

 
"Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides."

There is so much that I could say about that paragraph but I will offer two reflections. One, the “But this need…” sentence and what comes after is one example of the violence of this letter. What comes before it, a laundry list of social institutions that are in need of reform, justice and equality, would be a task, were it actually implemented, so great that it would occupy us as humans for a long, long while. Yet this collection of “intellectuals” is so dismissive of these protests and calls for change, that they present these lists of demands as if they are so many tasks to be fulfilled by sub-contracted workers before the research reports owed deans are unconscionably late.

 Second, and perhaps the more serious one for pesky things like history, the “illiberalism” which these intellectuals see as somehow equivalent to the “resistance” hardening into “dogma and coercion” are in no way equivalent, and to make them so is the second example of this letter’s violence. As I write this, unmarked vehicles manned by hybrid soldier/police are “Pinochetting” people off the streets where I live in Portland, Oregon. Rather than letting the signatories define what illiberalism is, I’ll let Christopher Browning, historian of Holocaust, define illiberalism: 

"We are at a point now in the United States with Donald Trump where democracy is beleaguered. But it is in the form of a new kind of authoritarianism, what I call ‘illiberal democracy,’ where the whole system does not need to be changed entirely. You don't need a vast army of secret police. You don't need concentration camps. You don't need to lock up all your opponents. Now, in America or other liberal democracies, if an enemy of democracy or a would-be authoritarian manages to tweak the electoral system, infiltrate and stock the judiciary, control information and pollute the public discourse against truth -- using language such as "fake news" -- people basically lose faith. The fig leaf of democratic appearance is preserved. Elections are held but the opponents have no chance of winning. If the standard threshold for an assault on democracy and authoritarianism is set at Adolf Hitler then we are all failing to see how much damage can be done to democracy without getting anywhere near that level. Our guard is lowered because in so many ways Trump isn't anything like Hitler. Yet that does not mean there is not a clear and present danger of another sort to American democracy."

The morons parroting their own idiolect of grievance in this open letter somehow minimize both the uprisings around the country at the murder of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor and so many other victims of institutional racist violence, as well as the true resistance to Trump’s illiberalism among those of us who understand how history repeats itself. 

Prior to this week I would have numbered Greil Marcus, one of the signatories of the above letter, as an ally in understanding the seriousness of this moment with regard to both the uprisings as well as the historical echoes of fascism because he’s been writing about race and those historical echoes all my life. As I write this, I’m staring at my copy of In the Fascist’s Bathroom, a collections of essays with the overarching theme that in the 1980s the Regan and Thatcher regimes were the modern day incarnation of fascism. If the person who admired that book way back when had been shown the events of 2020 and asked whether Marcus or Bob Dylan, arguably the figure Marcus has written about the most, would have understood what is at stake, my response would have been: “well, what can you expect from Dylan? He will be 79 years old in 2020 after all.” Yet, Dylan seems to be having his most relevant year in decades. 

My friend Kate, who is in her mid-30s, had, prior to 2020, never intentionally heard a Bob Dylan song. I’m sure, like everyone in my general age group who has listened to a radio before, she has passively heard part of or all of a Bob Dylan song before. However, in terms of a Bob Dylan song she sat down and listened to all the way through, “Murder Most Foul” was the first one and I think that’s wild, of course. She really liked it. Her first response was “fuck our government.” It’s heartening to know that the dude who wrote “Masters of War” so many years ago can solicit that kind of response first time out. From the little evidence that has been released by the streaming services, my friend isn’t the only person for whom “Murder Most Foul” might be their first exposure to Dylan: it was the most streamed song the week it was released.     

But that wasn’t the only thing: Dylan gave a significant and rare interview to the New York Times ahead of his album’s release and, before the interview itself, the first comment from Dylan the reader encounters concerns George Floyd: “It sickened me no end to see George tortured to death like that,” he said. “It was beyond ugly. Let’s hope that justice comes swift for the Floyd family and for the nation.” For some reason that I can’t fully articulate, that simple statement from Dylan regarding Floyd’s torture and murder most foul, is worth all of the aggrieved letters that have been, are being and could ever be written.

3.

 Rough and Rowdy Ways follows a formal pattern in Dylan albums regarded as “statements” insofar as it is a double record (like Blonde on Blonde, Time Out of Mind and, yes, Self-Portrait), containing a side-long track (like the first two double records mentioned). Rough and Rowdy Ways is a good to great Dylan record, not as good as his other double albums (yes, including Self-Portrait). If Blonde On Blonde presented Dylan as the newest of the new in 1966 and Time Out of Mind presented him as a swamp ghost from a 1950s C&W AM station picked up late at night, then Rough and Rowdy Ways sounds like a ghost having made peace with incorporeality, settling in to whatever the (after) life has planned. The popularity of Dylan at the moment on Spotify among people who were not even born when Dylan first became old suggests that this stance, inscrutable but certainly not unapproachable, demonstrates Dylan’s continuing canny ability to understand how to shape his image at every moment.

He also has a canny ability—or at least the younger people who are employed to run his release schedules and social media presence on platforms like Spotify—to release a new album in 2020: trickle out three tracks before releasing the whole thing at a later date. “Murder Most Foul” and “I Contain Multitudes” were the important early releases but it’s the third, “False Prophet” that’s the best of the three. What better opening couplet for life in 2020:

 
Another day that don't end
Another ship goin' out
Another day of anger, bitterness, and doubt

But it’s the music that I love: the kind of throw away sloppy blues rock stomp that he’s always seemingly populated his albums, and has always been the highlight of his live performances. They’ve always been the songs that slip between the cracks of his statement songs, but you can’t help but feel that they’re the songs he loves writing and performing, often hiding his most profound truths. “False Prophet” is about that very beyond death state that snakes through late work and the singularity of life that art like Dylan’s is always trying to express, the very heimish unheimlich that only the wandering ghost somewhat at home finally can sing to you with raspy voice:

You don't know me, darlin'
You never would guess
I'm nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest

And then later on:

Can't remember, when I was born
And I forgot when I died

Neither born nor dead, Dylan inhabits the space of Delueze’s a life in his art: empathetic, but singular, living beyond the ascent and descent of life as it is lived in the world of murders (JFK and George Floyd) most foul.

As great as “False Prophet” is, it’s not the best song on the record. For me, that’s “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You.” His late in life love songs have been remarkable. If as a young man Dylan the artist sings “I Want You” then Dylan the old man understands that such desire cannot be fulfilled and just becomes unproductively stupid the older the artist gets (just ask “those bad boys from England the Rolling Stones”). The young artist might understand this as well, which is why Blonde On Blonde’s answer song to “I Want You” is “Just Like a Woman”—if she doesn’t want you, fuck her, break her like a little girl, if she doesn’t break first.

“I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” depending on Dylan’s continued productivity, might be the final chapter in the great theme of Dylan’s work: desire. It, more than political injustice or, relatedly, the law of this world and justice in the next, seems to be the career-long lyrical concern of his: he entitled a goddamn album after it. Desire for the younger Dylan suggests a sacrifice to an other: whether the submission of one lover to another (the early love songs), submission to desire itself (divorce and after), and submission to the dark God of faith (Dylan: 1979-1981).  It would seem that giving oneself up to another would be both the larger theme and ultimate final statement for Dylan on desire. Yet, he’s made up his mind to do it. No longer imposing his desire and longing on the world, and taking his revenge when it does not follow, Dylan, ghostly apparition that he is, is content to finally, at the end, give himself to you. 

This doesn’t mean he isn’t a false prophet, or so multitudinous that he couldn’t be anybody giving himself to you. It means that love—the gospel the narrator of the song would preach were he a “snow white dove”—means giving up the desire to possess another but also giving up one’s ego to something or someone else. This emptying out of the subjective agency to shape the world after one’s desire is the final form Dylan’s music and lyrics are taking. It is the mark of late work but not because the subject has been finally done in by the descent of mortal sin and death, but because he understands that his work has been moving to a place wherein the subject becomes universal in its rejection of individualism, only reflected in the multitude voices of death and desire in the songs themselves.  

"Don't Worry About the Government," Talking Heads (1977)

 
1.

The group Talking Heads have a song on their first album entitled “Don’t Worry About the Government.” It’s sung from the perspective of a governmental employee who describes enjoying his rather mundane life, while imploring both the listener and the various people in his life not to worry about him. At the end of the song, as my friend Tom pointed out a long time ago, the lyric changes from “don’t you worry about me” to “it wouldn’t worry about me.” The “it” here is the government itself—don’t worry about the government because “it” doesn’t worry about you.

During the first lockdown of the pandemic, I listened to an episode of the podcast Political Beats about Talking Heads’ catalogue. When they discussed the first record one of the hosts, all conservative btw (this is a podcast produced by The New Republic), pointed out that the lyrics to “Don’t Worry About the Government” anticipated the Regan era pretty well (he meant this as a compliment to Byrne and the band).

It’s pretty morbid positively citing the lyrics “it wouldn’t worry about me” in the middle of a public health emergency in which, precisely, the federal government didn’t worry about us and we have hundreds of thousands of deaths to show for it. But this is the logical conclusion of viewing the lyrics to “Don’t Worry About the Government” in a positive way: neutralizing the government so that neither you nor “it” has to worry about the government or you respectively, means that the government cannot worry about you precisely when it ought to. And, since the relationship is reciprocal, it’s easier for a population to stop worrying about the government when it has ceased worrying about the needs of the population for a long time. Perhaps less a lack of worrying than a pessimistic resignation anticipating that, even in the midst of a global pandemic, we know better than to expect the government to care about us.

While I don’t think this is simply a matter of which political party is in power, the mantra of not worrying about the government is what got us Trump in many respects. And, having an irrelevant government that won’t care for you or, at least, offer you sustained cash payments, is probably what cost Trump the election.  As Peter Beinart effectively argues in this piece https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/11/07/how-trump-lost/ fiscal austerity probably did Trump in. The refrain of starving the necessary funding of the government that has been the part and parcel of conservative movements around the globe, does go against the authoritarian populism that Trump seems to see as his path to the lifetime presidency. Again, not having the government worry about you means that it’s really hard for you to give up your power for you have not sufficiently worried about it (which, I guess if you are giving any credibility to Regan’s cold war policies, is precisely how deregulation is seen by conservatives as ending a powerful centralized government—the boogeyman of communism/socialism/fascism). So the party whose politics of racism and resentment gave birth to Trump probably doomed him with its case against government spending.

David Byrne had inscrutable politics while fronting Talking Heads. It seemed impossible to know how to feel about “Don’t Worry About the Government.” Was he serious? Did he identify with the narrator? And how did it relate to the track, a few songs later, sung from the perspective of a “psycho killer?” For the most part, Talking Heads rarely sang overtly political lyrics compared to most of their 1977 cohorts, but there are some exceptions in which the lyrics, and music to a certain extent, seem to articulate a kind of vaguely conservative detachment that jibes with someone who might not worry about the government or have to.

There’s the narrator of “the Big Country” who, though perhaps less patriotic than the government employee of the former song, is no more interested in the lives of “all the people down there” as he flies across the country in a plane, while twangy country music plays in the background. Later on, within Washington discourse, the term “fly over country” will be used to describe the vast swaths of land that mean little to either coast. From the perspective of 2016-2020, it’s easy to see the narrator of “the Big Country” less as an alien and more of an entitled asshole who writes for Politico or a Netflix series.

There’s the flip side in “People Like Us” which seems to luxuriate in the very folks the narrator of “the Big Country” could not be paid to live amongst. Yet the narrator of “People Like Us” also seems like the culmination of the narrator’s perspective in “Don’t Worry About the Government:”

We don’t want freedom
We don’t want justice
We just want someone to love

In the bridge, the narrator makes it explicit:

What good is freedom?
God laughs at people like us.

In 1986 two years before the end of the Regan era, it might have seemed heretical to reject such fundamentally conservative catchwords like “freedom” and “justice” and would most likely mark the song as satirical or critical. Yet, the authority that trumps lofty concepts like “freedom” and “justice” is love (not love for your neighbor, but a romantic partner with whom you can grow “big as a house”) and God. But the very freedom and justice man believes he has made for himself, is as hollow as the government described in “Don’t Worry About the Government:” all the government can promise us, now, is ease and convenience. By “People Like Us,” we don’t just not worry about the government, we actively reject it: we’re going to “make it” precisely because “we don’t want freedom/ we don’t want justice.” If the country music backing was echoed through the taut guitars of punk and new wave, the musical backing of “People Like Us” is more traditionally country with added pedal steel and fiddle.


2.

The song “People Like Us” comes from the movie David Byrne wrote and directed True Stories. Inspired by actual news articles from supermarket tabloids, it is also a fictional documentary of a small town in Texas named Virgil, celebrating its 150th anniversary, and growing into larger town with the investment of technological capital. One of the characters we repeatedly encounter is the mayor, played by Spalding Grey. In one of the more striking sequences in the film, the mayor, over dinner, explains how his role is as an elected official is to keep the corporations and the workers in Virgil happy so they won’t leave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjHwl5SRdCo

Byrne shows the admixture of various cultures and religions in the area and the spaces, like malls and work, where the people of Virgil commingle. It seems quite pleasant, at one point everyone gathers at a karaoke bar to lip synch “Wild, Wild Life,” and the social antagonism that might arise from having different cultures, races and religions come together is absent from the film. Creating the seamless work/life operation the mayor imagines at the food laden table.

The sequence after the aforementioned dinner scene takes place at church. We see an establishing shot along the highway in Virgil, resting on the sign “Victorious Life.” The church is in a big, nondescript, prefab building that you might see on any highway across the United States. It’s large size anticipates the mega churches that have become political centers as much as houses of worship in recent years, something the preacher in this scene explicitly demonstrates before launching into the song “Puzzlin’ Evidence:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TriaOVgwc1Y

"I’m not a member of the John Birch society or the communist party, but let’s look at what’s happened to the national morals since World War II. We lost the Vietnam War. The TV and the movies are filled with characters I don’t want to know, not in this life. The farmer is in trouble. The small businessman is in trouble. Unemployment is skyrocketing. Texas is still paying for JFK’s death [….]"

As the gospel music plays quietly in the background, a series of film clips plays on the screen behind the preacher. It shows men in meetings, bombers, a dollar bill, etc all the while the preacher continues his sermon:
 

"They have some involvement in all of these. What is the link? What do cars have to do with books, you might ask? The trilateral commission on foreign relations you ever hear of them? Well, I hadn’t either. They have members on the boards of all the large corporations. Not one detail has been left out. Am I right? Do you feel it? Do you know what Bobby Ray Inman was doing before he was running the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation? A CIA director! It’s public knowledge."
        
From here he continues his litany of conspiracy theories: Governor White bringing Inman’s MCTC corporation into the state, turning all the people into mindless robots. Concluding with the warning: “Sleep, sleep, one and one does not equal two, no sir! Silicon gulch! Silicon hills! Silicon Valley! You better wake up! It’s late! It’s late!”

This scene is juxtaposed against the techno-futurism of the dinner scene. The tech companies and their workers that Spalding Grey’s character is trying to keep in Virgil Texas are the very forces the local church goers see as the engine of the conspiracy. And any politicians (like Inman and White) who try to bring these corporations into towns like Virgil, Texas are just trying to get you to fall asleep and not notice the computer world developing all around you: the silicon gulch and valley.  Remember: one plus one does not equal two.

There are a couple of things to notice in this scene: one, there isn’t a single mention of religion, besides a vague bemoaning the loss of morals post-World War II. Instead, the preacher maps out a conspiracy theory involving capital, local elected officials, the military-industrial complex and Hollywood as a singular explanation for America’s downfall. Two, this scene, along with the karaoke scene, demonstrates the diversity of Virgil: the choir is filled with black and white faces, Ramon Radiohead is playing organ, Pops Staples—who practices Voodoo (the Vodun religion) at home—is there too. The entire town seems in agreement with the “puzzling evidence” placed before them, mobilized into their hatred of the silicon valley companies and bland white politicians who work for them.

3.

America’s proclivity for conspiracy theories was hardly new even when Byrne presented it in True Stories. The mention of  the John Birch Society and JFK’s assassination in the preacher’s rant demonstrates already the long-standing history of people believing conspiracy theories as explications for their daily misery. What’s worth noting is the disavowal of any political extremity—“neither John Birch, nor Communist”—in this gathering. The constant calls of “am I right” as well as “do you feel it” call upon an a shared truth that goes beyond facts, beyond ideology into the realm of feeling. They may tell you that one plus one equals two, but in your heart you can feel that it just can’t be right…can’t you? This portrayal of the church as space of truth where all untruths will be revealed reminds me of Heinrich von Kleist’s short story “the Earthquake in Chili”—a perfect society can only be imagined if there is a common enemy and a transcendent anchor for truth.  The preacher in True Stories does not offer faith in Christ nor, even, hatred of other religions but the transcendent anchor of mysterious forces in power out to get you. You know it, not because you’ve been offered evidence, but you’ve been offered “puzzling evidence” that feels like something to you.

We’re all living in the reality of this scene and Byrne was clever enough to figure it out in the 80s. The gulf between the corporations, the local government and the people that government ought to represent grew just as the puzzling evidence continued to be discovered. Older, recessive genes re-emerged as the gulf continued to grow. Why wouldn’t the institution of the church figure out a way to lure the wayward sheep into the fold of the awakening? And here we are. The president’s lawyers are arguing in court all types of conspiracies and grievances against his supporters, the true patriots. It wouldn’t be long before someone was going to capitalize on the conspiracy theories against the government for their own political and financial gain. And it doesn’t surprise me that the Republicans, the party that has actively tried to make the government so irrelevant that we don’t have to worry about it, would switch strategies and make it the malignant zombie that refuses to die, willing to exact any revenge upon the good people of the USA in its bid to hold onto power.

But now as Trump leaves office, there’s a new version of “Don’t Worry About the Government” that’s going around. At the end of November, Matthew Walther wrote the following piece in the Week https://bypass.theweek.com/articles-amp/951933/how-camp-explains-trump?__twitter_impression=true essentially his argument is that the media’s failure to understand that Trump has used camp to his advantage has also allowed people to inflate his malevolence. Using the well-known Cinco de Mayo Tweet of Trump grinning over a taco salad in Trump Tower, Walther explains:

"This, played with a thousand variations over the half decade or so in which he has been at the center of American public life, is the essential Trumpian conceit: playing a poor person's idea of what being rich is (having real linen!), a woke person's idea of racism (liking déclassé foods), a worker's idea of what a boss is (someone who fires people), and doing so without ever acknowledging the performance to any of the not-always overlapping segments of his audience, who in turn refuse to acknowledge it to one another."

This reminds me of a question posed early on in Trump’s campaign: is Trump really a white supremacist or is he using white supremacy to win votes? Such questions should have become moot once he took office and actively started advancing a white supremacist agenda (even if he wasn’t always successful). Yet, it remained a question throughout his presidency as otherwise intelligent people refused to buy into the clear rage that Trump was trying to induce with his policies. A certain group became Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski: Nazism should scare you because it has an ethos, nihilism should never scare you because it believes in nothing.

You can see this thinking in Walther's concluding argument:

"For obvious reasons Trump's camp appeal is unlikely to be discussed openly either by his enemies or his ardent supporters, both of whom have, doubtless to his chagrin, committed themselves to the bit. To readers of The New York Times, Trump really is a fascist dictator of the 1930s, albeit one reconstructed from the same half-understood pop culture artifacts by which they and he alike conceive of anything but the most recent past; his followers take him seriously in his winking role as uxorious husband, beloved patriarch, defender of the Constitution and our ancient liberties, champion of the victims of post-industrial capitalism, and so on. As far as I am aware only a small subset of coolly detached reactionaries have even attempted to appreciate him on his own terms."

Never mind that Walther had used Sontag’s essay on camp to compare Trump to Mussolini a couple of paragraphs earlier, by the end we’ve all been lured by “the bit,” whether enemy or supporter. This is exactly what Trump wants. I find it remarkably telling that Walther thinks only the “cooly detached reactionaries” appreciate him on his own terms, i.e. neither adore him nor worry about him.

And so we’re back at the beginning, but this time asking a different question: what makes someone write a song like “Don’t Worry About the Government?” Moreover, did songs like “Don’t Worry About the Government” give rise to the very attitude exhibited in this post-mortem on the Trump presidency (assuming that the presidency est mort)?

There are two stances of “not worrying” in the Talking Heads’ song: we’ve covered the imaged government employ who just wishes you would stop worrying about him and the government because “it wouldn’t worry about you.” If this song weren’t inscrutable in the first place, we would assume that it was simply a parody of the type of person who would work for the government (a kind of updated, mid-60s Kinks' song for the U.S.) But because we are left wondering where the singer stands in all this, it doesn’t come off as a parody. Yet, based on the songs around it and the band performing it, it doesn’t seem to be a conservative call for smaller government.

Instead, it seems to exist in the very “cooly detached” space that Walther reserves for the reactionaries who “get” Trump. As Byrne has shown throughout most of his public life, he’s definitely committed to progressive causes. And he was as critical as anyone during the Trump presidency. But as someone who often has expressed a kind of cool detachment from things, the perspective Byrne communicates through “Don’t Worry About the Government” is an acknowledgment that fear of the government met with the passion of, say, anarchism or a “White Riot,” will only insure that those singing anarchy now will be future Trump supporters later (RIP Johnny Rotten).

And given the list of #Resistance grifters who have emerged to con the masses with fears of Führer Trump, I sympathize with a desire to underplay Trump’s damage to everyday life in the United States. But, the truth is, Trump is now in a growing group of illiberal leaders who have used the organs of liberal democratic societies to both enrich themselves and terrorize segments of the population. Regardless of how campy or conspiracy fueled it seems, or regardless of how little it worries about you, you should worry about the government. Always.  

“Mommy, What’s A Funkadelic?” Funkadelic (1970)

If popular music seems silent in the face of a global pandemic, it is always ready to offer its services to uprisings. Moreover, uprisings specifically tied to the civil rights movement in this country have been particularly soundtracked by popular music. It’s worth remembering that our first African-American president greeted the world stage as president-elect to Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.” As that example demonstrates, popular music’s willingness to be contextualized in different political and cultural movements is not without a certain mitigation of popular music’s revolutionary potential as it serenades and gives over its meaning to those in power.

This results in a simultaneous romanticism towards music that resists this social/political utilitarianism. I’m thinking of albums like Sly & the Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Going On, the Last Poet’s first two records, and Gil Scott-Heron’s albums. But if those artists chose to fight under no banner or remain ambivalent in their politics, they nevertheless form a kind of loose conglomerate of revolutionary musical politics that suggests, by the silence of Sly’s title track, there is no riot going on and that’s the problem.

The least important thing in the world right now is what one 46 year old white, heterosexual man decides to listen to within the context of current U.S. politics.  There’s been an acknowledgement among my white friends that we should be listening to the long and varied history of African-American music right now. This is correct. But precisely because of this long and varied history the question of how or what comes up. For one of my friends, only spiritual jazz speaks to him and is the only music that explains the moment. For another, its disco, house and other music of queer black liberation.

For me, the music I keep coming back to and want to hear more of right now is early Funkadelic. The first Funkadelic record was released fifty years ago. What I find fascinating about the record is how much of it is taken up (lyrically at least) in defining its sound and how it sets up that sound in opposition to whatever was around at the time. The opening track, the erstwhile band manifesto “Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?”, ends with Eddie Hazel telling the listener a story:

"I recall, when I left a little town in North Carolina, I tried to escape this music. I said it was for the old country folks. I went to New York, got slick, got my hair made (heh-heh- heh-heh), I was cool. I was cool. But I had no groove, no groove. I had no groove"

It’s a reverse northern migration, or the alienation produced by that initial migration: you leave the south, go north and lose your groove. Yet, what he/they fall into isn’t a return to some authentic southern blues, social or folk music. Instead what Funkadelic creates is an imaginary musical world wherein heavily treated production and Bernie Worrell’s already forward thinking electronics merge with an “ancestral” groove located in a more authentically black south.

It’s funny how the first album is filled with questions that hide manifestos. Besides the first track, there’s also “Music for My Mother,” lyrically similar to “Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?”, it tells a story about another man who leaves or arrives at a town in the south infused with the rejuvenating effects of “authentic” funk and groove. Lest the previous “little town” in North Carolina be too ambiguous with regard to racial politics, the new setting is more explicit:

“Man, I was in a place called Keeprunnin’, Mississippi one time and I heard someone on my way back sounded a little something like raw funk to me so I slowed down and took a listen and this is all I could hear, baby.”

Interlude:

By way of context or contrast I listened to Gil Scott-Heron’s Small Talk at 125th and Lenox this morning, released the same year as the first Funkadelic record. As mentioned before, Scott-Heron is a deeply pessimistic thinker at this point, shooting both from the left and the right. It’s probably most famous for the original version of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” a phrase so familiar that it has entered the language as shorthand for a number of contradictory messages: either censorship of the truth by the state and its corporate actors (arguably its original meaning), or its opposite, the spectacle of revolution right before our eyes broadcast on social media platforms (the Arab Spring version perhaps). I can’t help but think of this right now as people march and protest in hopes of ending the state sanctioned killing of black men, all sharing their hopes, politics and violent videos on social media, unaware or ignoring the fact that the state doesn’t give up power and property that easily.

But it’s impossible to listen to the record without experiencing the deep disappointment that comes with a piece like “The Subject Was F———-s.” I won’t bother to go into the lyrics, except to say the only positive qualities to the song is the very early brief glimpse of NYC “ball life” that would come to international consciousness in the 1980s. What is doubly disappointing about this song is that it comes before “Evolution (And Flashback)” a piece that contains the following lyrics:

“Yeah In 1600 I was a darkie until 1865 a slave in 1900 I was a N——- or at least that was my name in 1960 I was a negro and then brother Malcom came along…”

I quote this part of the song because Scott-Heron catalogues the violence done to the African American community through language and naming. Black people have been all of the things listed, but never a human beings. Why can’t the same respect and dignity be extended to “F——-s”? What is the blind spot preventing Scott-Heron to see, especially within the context of ball culture, that some of those “F———s” are his brothers and sisters to whom he extends respect when talking about their skin color and heritage.

Return to Funkadelic:

“Keeprunnin’, MI” is a fake town, the inversion of the NC haven imagined in the first song. Here the name of the town suggests the history of segregated towns in the south and the north where black residents had to “keep running,” lest they be caught in town after sundown. The narrator knows that he should keep running, but the music lulls him to stay. Again, the ancestral music of the south holds strong, but, as with the first song, “Music for My Mother” is just as concerned with the future as much as the past. They create a true utopia—an a topos—wherein the singer can’t say if he is in a romanticized past or a heterodox future.

The original album ends with its final manifesto posed as a question “What is Soul?” In the freaky, funky, non-geometric, geometric method of the album’s cosmology, this song is the corollary to the question posed by the first song “Mommy, What’s A Funkadelic?” Both songs are ostensibly sung/narrated by “Funkadelic” himself, someone who does not come from our world, but seems to have much to say about its music and its traditions. The answers to the titular question of “What is Soul?”—perhaps the most unanswerable question in the history of music and metaphysics—are necessarily nonsense, surrealist answers: “rusty ankles and ashy kneecaps” is my personal favorite. But, despite the promise of answers, there’s really only one ethos that informs all of these questions: “For nothing is good, unless you play with it.”

Florian Schneider (7 April 1947 – 7 April 2020)

I got into Kraftwerk around the same time I got into (or back into if you count passive exposure during childhood) ABBA. It’s odd to think now of those two bands together, but in the early 90s they were just European (Eurotrash in the parlance of the times) bands from the 70s who had some notoriety with their very European sounding—i.e. slightly off—takes on pop music. Heard on cheap tapes purchased from the $4.99 music end caps at the Jamesway in Kingston, NY (I've been told that this particular Jamesway may have been in Rhinebeck, NY, which would add another layer of Teutonic patina to this tale).

This was the first Kraftwerk cassette I owned. Looking at it now, it’s hard not to see why I failed to see Kraftwerk as anything other than pre-new wave curios. If I had been into hip-hop older than a few years, I might have recognized the first track from “Planet Rock.” I hadn’t gotten into techno yet, my initial interest being sparked by this tape, so I had no knowledge of their deep influence there. For 1992 me,  Kraftwerk was a band without much of a context, other than lumping them in with other vaguely teutonic bands that sang in a stilted English.

One of the more provocative and productive quotations from Joshua Clover’s excellent 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About is the following:

“Every genre enters the popular imagination as a novelty song that is later seen to be a manifesto, a discourse on a new form. Consider how strange ‘Rapper’s Delight’ once seemed—or ‘Rock Around the Clock.’ To turn matters on their head, one might say that there are no novelty songs, only failed genres; this is perhaps to say that there are no insurrections, only failed revolutions.”

In the early 90s, it wouldn’t have been hard to see Kraftwerk as a one-hit-wonder with a novelty song: “Autobahn” had been a minor hit in the U.S. charts (bigger one in the UK) in 1974. Eventually  “Trans-Europe Express” have some play in the discos in the late 70s. In 2013, when Kraftwerk were set to play their series of album performances at the Tate Modern, the Telegraph led their story with the headline: “Kraftwerk: the most influential band in pop history?” It would have seemed absurd to me (and probably to most people) if someone told me that the showroom dummies and robots that made this tape would eventually be considered potentially more influential than the Beatles. From the perspective of 2020, this hardly seems a controversial position. It’s obvious that their few scattered hits (including “Computer Love” and “the Model” both charting #1 in the UK) were indeed manifestos, discourses on a new form.

And, like the Beatles, it’s hard to say anything about Kraftwerk without falling into cliche or reiterating already known facts. I will say, as much as people talk about their influence on all that came after, not much is made about their own geniuses at crafting albums. Even leaving aside the first three albums, which they pretty much disowned sadly, the run they had from 1974-1981 is astounding. Each album explored a thematic element and, if you purchase the beautiful vinyl reissues from 2009, contained meticulously designed accompanying artwork. What runs through all of these albums conceptually is the tension between the use of electronic instruments in the service of conservative or old-fashioned technology/culture. The artwork for Radio-Activity plays on the word (in German as well) transforming the substance of cold war nightmares into a nostalgia for an imaginary Telefunken world of matching suits, oversized microphones and graphics that recall 1940s and 50s visions of a telegraphic future. By contrast, the artwork for Trans-Europe Express is all late 19th and early 20th century Deutsche Kultur: Franz Schubert and countryside by train; the great irony of the music sheet on the front defaced with doodles and doppelgänger notes crashing into one another; the tinted photography from studios around the world, each one embossing its signature on their respective photograph’s corner.

There’s no doubt something unsettling about the romanticizing of German culture and technology, especially in the post-war era. Turning such things into the fodder of novelty songs, eventual manifesto or no,  is not without its disquieting reification of the past. Even the seemingly forward looking Man-Machine is really just an echo of Soviet and constructivist art—the original historical context for the word Robotnik—and fraught with its own historical catastrophes. And this period of the band’s career concludes with Computer World, a prescient cataloging of the ways “business, money, numbers and people” are aggregated into a computer world of capital and technology. In the context of the earlier albums’ pastoral and nostalgic commingling of the technological and the natural, it’s hard not to understand Computer World as the loss of that, right at the moment when Kraftwerk would become musically synonymous with the new computer world we were entering.

By design, Kraftwerk were not supposed to have individualities, but, nonetheless, individualities did come out. It seemed that, as much as Kraftwerk wanted to be the robots that made robot music, it was pointed out in every interview how much they liked bike riding and the countryside. What comes across listening to The Robots tape today isn’t so much a brave new world of technology, nor a reactionary warning about what will happen in our computer world. Rather, Kraftwerk’s best work sounds like what every other vision of the future sounds like in hindsight: a nostalgia for a future that was always a hope, just not for us.

It’s hard not to hear what is so likable in their catchier songs like “the Model” and “the Robots,” with the later being, of course, the preferred song of choice for any funky robot dances (would we even know what a funky robot would sound like if Kraftwerk hadn’t introduced us to them?). There is also a deep melancholia to their music as well: a longing for something that either has receded into the past or in a future yet to come. It is this constant state of longing, echoed both in the human and computer-treated voices, that makes even objects in the present out of reach: has there ever been a more sad, beautiful song composed to something as banal as “Neon Lights?” In our popular imagination neon connotes the city and its lascivious temptations. In Kraftwerk’s ode, as with so much of their music, there’s a magic and loss to the shimmer just over the horizon.

"Third World Man," Steely Dan, 1980

“Good evening my friends,” the voice is overwhelmed by spurious frequencies flaying the channel on either side of the AM dial. It was hard to understand, but loud.
“—ad to have you back I […] week, although I will be with you the rest of the summer!”

Everything seemed to come into focus now.

“Tonight, we’re going to be talking about those forgotten men, those who are missing either in body or in spirit. Those who never left the jungle in their minds. Those brave men for who I proudly fly the MIA/POW flag for every day. Those men who sacrificed everything for this country, BUT…” and here he held the silence a beat longer so that the third order mixing products of nearby and far away transmitters could be softly heard in the background “BUT, WHOSE COUNTRY HAS DONE NOTHING FOR THEM!” Again, he paused before continuing. “They were spat on when they came back from Vietnam. Called Baby killers. Good Christian men who fought for their country accused of killing babies. Accused of killing women and children. Spit on by hippies and druggies and politicians trying to get re-elected. It was disgusting. And those” here you could hear the anger rising in his voice “Hollywood liberals with their films like the Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now showing our boys as war criminals. Killing babies!” Was he crying or was it the static?

“Back then, on college campuses, they’d talk about the third world. ‘Oh, we have to help the third world!’ They’d say in their shrieking, feminist voices. The bleeding hearts and tree huggers worrying about the third world. Well, let me tell you folks, what I’ve seen in this country over the last decade is another third world. This is a third world within the United States. No, I’m not talking about the blacks and Mexicans who are always looking for a hand out. No, I’m talking about the white working class. The white farmer in the middle of the country whose farm went under. I’m talking about the little guy—”

He drove around aimlessly at night. His wife had left him recently, but he did it before she left as well. It wasn’t like her leaving started it. His insomnia had only intensified after the war. He started crossing the bridge back into town when he noticed two figures stumbling along the side of the road. They were two college students, drunk, falling into one another with each step. There was a possibility that, even with planning, he would accidentally clip one of them. He decided to slow down and open his door.

“You guys need a lift?”

Both looked up startled, and in that moment the man in the truck realized that they weren’t college students, or at least they weren’t young. Late twenties, maybe even early thirties. A tinge of disappointment ran through him. He wouldn’t try it now that there was a chance of both fighting back.

Looking at one another both said yes and got in.

The man continued on the radio:
“Vietnam used to be a third world country! Not anymore! Sold to the highest bidder and now those people will have the jobs and factories of white Americans. I voted for Regan but he’s got to do something, or else—“ the driver turned down the radio.

“So, what are you guys doing out at this time of night?”
The two passengers both burst into laughter. “Um, we’ve just been drinking. You know. Having a good time.”
“Nice,” the man behind the wheel chuckled, “I remember those days…”
The woman started talking, she seemed, to the driver, to be the more powerful of the two. Real boss lady. He liked that.

“So,” she said, “what are you doing out here this late?”
Her voice was scratchy, like she and her boyfriend had been chain smoking and drinking all night. But she was sexy, no doubt, the way he had liked them back in his twenties.
“Well,” he took a left turn as he spoke, “I can’t really sleep. Never have been able to, but it’s getting worse. My wife has to get up in the morning, so rather than keep her up walking around the house I drive around.” Other than the fact his wife had recently left him, it was mostly true.

“Where are you guys headed?,” he had forgotten to ask them where he was driving.
“Those new apartment buildings up on the outskirts of downtown. The nice ones. Do you know which ones I’m talking about?” He was getting more turned on by her but didn’t need to get into trouble.
“Oh, yeah. Fancy. You look kind of young to have money.”
“No,” he answered, “she’s housesitting.”
“Ah.” And then everyone in the car went silent again, giving the driver time to turn the radio back up.

“Welcome back! So, we were talking about Regan and Vietnam and all of the third world really, and, look, I voted for Regan…like the guy…but he’s got to realize something. If he looses all of his white voters because the rich guys who fund his campaign want him to give nice trade deals to all these countries without helping real Americans, well… You know who gets shafted in that scenario? The little guy. The white guy living in the midwest, the bread basket, the heartland, all the places where Regan did well and won. Well, let me just tell you he’s going to have a wake up call…and if he doesn’t start listening to us, real Americans, he’ll regret it. Because we’re peaceful now, but more of this and people will throw down their disguises, let me tell you—“ The voice was soon overwhelmed by static and interfering chatter again.

Five years ago, one Sunday morning, he had woken up on his front lawn, naked, clutching his rifle. He had no idea how he had gotten there, why he was naked, or why he was cradling his gun. He only woke up because the neighbors had called the police, who came and politely covered him in a blanket, putting him in the back of their squad car.  Once they ran his license, the younger of the two officers quietly said, “thank you for your service.” He was single then. His parents, his only next of kin, then living in a nursing home in Oklahoma, signed the necessary paperwork to place him in a VA psychiatric hospital. He had met his wife, a nurse, inside the hospital and they were married once he was released a year later. Even she realized he was too fucked up to be with. That was over now.

As the three of them pulled up to the tall, new developments on the outskirts of the downtown, he had a brief thought about doing something before they left the truck, but, again,  thought about the struggle that would result and the attention. He would never be able to get what he really wanted, everybody made sure of that.

“Well, thanks again!,” the guy, closest to the passenger door, didn’t even bother to wait for the car to stop before he got out. He thought about how the girl was less worried about getting out of the car and took her time sliding over, her bare thighs slowly sliding sweat all over his seat, and it turned him on again. Before he could think twice, they were outside the truck and he was giving them a wave and driving off. He thought about what they would get up to once inside, but thought better of it and started the drive back to his empty apartment.

He started paying attention to the radio again: fuzzy, flayed, fried and fading, the last words he heard before he lost the station entirely was “the white man is a third world man in his own country...he’s a third world man…a third world man...it's the age of the third world man.”

“Someday When We’re Dreaming:” The Utopian Music of 1964

[This is the prologue/preface to a book about the music of 1964 I thought about writing. I might still write it.]

Prologue:
A Transvaluation of Boomer Values

When I was growing up, there were three musical eras on the radio: oldies, classic rock and contemporary music (both in its mainstream, hard rock, occasionally R&B, as well as “alternative” iterations). Steven Hayden has done a good job of describing the “classic rock” format in his book Twilight of the Gods (2018), but I’m curious about our category “oldies,” and what it might mean today. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the time during which radio would have been most dominant in my life, in Boston, WROR played “oldies” (essentially music from 1954-1964, or so); WZLX played “classic rock” (one of the first successful forays into the format in the country: music from 1965-1975); WBCN and WFNX played contemporary music.

 I would say my parents switched pretty regularly between the “oldies” and “classic rock” formats. I remember listening to classic rock more often, but that oldies stations hold dearer memories for me, because they obviously held dearer memories for my parents. You were more likely to see my parents drunk on a Saturday night singing along to Joe Martell’s selection of 50s hits than you would see them singing along to Dylan or Springsteen on classic rock. It makes sense to me now as a 45 year old adult: My parents were in their adolescent and teenage years when that music was released, in their young and not so young adult years when the music on WZLX was released. Just like my parents, I overly estimate the music from my youth: goes a long way in explaining my generation’s obsession with Yacht Rock.

 Now such distinctions seem meaningless. “Oldies” radio just means music made before 2000, and who listens to the radio any longer? SXM, which I now have in my car, seems to have a station for every musical taste (albeit stratified by decade, rather than format, and, although it once held the prominent position at Station #4, the forties music station has been relegated back into the 70s or somewhere). Besides, most people stream music in their cars, where any curatorial decision, either by man or by algorithm, can replicate myriad listening experiences: including the radio of my youth.

So now that the era seems to have passed, and my parents passed even before that, it seems important to figure out what shaped my understanding of popular music. Constructing a history of popular music isn’t something that is only done by historians or musicologists, it’s also determined by commercial forces, music availability, format and lived experience. One of the most powerful voices in music criticism that recognizes this is Hanif Abdurraqib, who recently in an interview remarked: “I think the stakes are raised when music criticism understands the world that music is being released into.” This is true not only of music being produced today, but of past music as well: understanding the world music was released into back then, as well as understanding how that music is heard in the world we inhabit now. What was the world in which that music was released into (albeit understood on a necessarily reduced level)?

What I am talking about is a set of values that constructs “the world” (or possible worlds) for a music listener. That, as much as anything, is constructed by a set of values alongside of historical contingency and individual genius. Values are constructed and what appears “natural” is a process that develops over time through the shaping of things well beyond our control.  For example, growing up, I was taught music periodization by the radio and what that periodization meant to constructing a cohesive narrative about popular music. Broadly defined: “oldies” radio meant a lot of different kind of music: you might hear a primitive jump blues number next to an orchestrated pop vocal from Roy Orbison. An early Beatles single, next to an early Doo-Wop single, next to the instrumental version of the theme from “A Summer Place.” It was meant to convey to its boomer audience the shock of moving from something your parents might have thought pleasant, to something you might have had to listen to under covers at night.

But mostly the music seemed to come from everywhere: Belafonte singing songs from coastal cities in countries people hadn’t heard of, girl groups from poor communities where humiliated men often took out the violence of the world on their girlfriends, Joao and Astrud Gilberto, along with Stan Getz, bringing Brazilian music to the masses, James Brown bringing sex to everyone. But the thing I remember most about the music of oldies stations is that many of the artists played there were people of color: Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, the Drifters, Ben E. King, all the Phil Spector groups, the Motown groups and solo artists, all the Stax artists, the aforementioned Brown, the occasional weird jazz outlier like Louis Armstrong, Cannonball Adderley or Hugh Masekela sneaking in. As much as it is a format constrained by time, it was incredibly ecumenical in what it could play.

I can count on one hand all of the artists of color I heard on classic rock: Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, Carlos Santana, War, Thin Lizzy…and that’s pretty much it. If one the DJs got adventurous, they might throw in a Bob Marley song. But that paltry offering is all I remember from hearing artists of color on classic rock radio, and, going through the list, all of those artists either played in bands with white musicians or were highly touted by other white musicians (specifically thinking of the racist Eric Clapton covering both Hendrix and Marley). In all my years of listening to classic rock radio growing up, I never once heard Funkadelic. I was more likely to hear “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” “That Lady,” “Reflections” or “Psychedelic Shack” (all songs as influenced by “classic rock” as any in the format) on “oldies stations” then I was on “classic rock” stations.

Of all the insidious forms value can take, upholding institutions of power is the most insidious. This one time division of radio formats might seem benign or insignificant, but in terms of creating a social history of listening and consuming music, it highlights a natural seeming truth about music that obscures as much as it produces new ways of knowing through periodization and exclusion. Yet understanding this isn’t as simple as retrofitting a legible form of racism to the whole enterprise. Or, to put it another way, racism doesn’t always make itself legible on the surface. Experiences of the dominant group within an ideological structure can produce the naturalness of exclusion from experience alone.

The “classic rock” era, as defined by the radio formats of my youth, roughly 1967-1987 (someone once remarked that Dire Strait’s Brothers in Arms (1985) was the official end of the “classic rock era”), was about relaying a set of understandable and collective experience to white baby boomers at the expense and exclusion of others. This wasn’t necessarily willful on their parts, but once they found themselves in positions of power (radio programers, label executives, etc.), it became impossible not to reinforce the narrative they had been told about themselves their whole lives.

I experienced this first hand in 1987. That year Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band celebrated its twentieth anniversary. For anyone who has heard the record, the first line gives away why this anniversary was particularly important: “it was twenty years ago today…” The record was released on CD. Countless books were published. Covers were recorded. Perhaps the capstone, for 14 year old me, was Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 100 greatest records from 1967-1987: “The 100 Best Albums of The Last 20 Years.” I’ve always wanted to write something about this list, but it’s always been too close to my own development as a music listener to give it its due. Now I know that what I want to write about it what the list was telling me about myself as a music listener. What it was teaching me.

The list, given the years it covers as well as its clear appeal to baby boomers (who would have just started to enter their 40s), is predominantly populated with white artists. Marvin Gaye and Jimi Hendrix cracked the top ten. Steve Wonder, Otis Redding, Sly & the Family Stone, Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin and Al Green all have albums in the list. Miles Davis Bitches’ Brew also shows up there. All in all, artists of color make up 14% of the total list. There’s one “international” record, The Harder They Fall, placed to represent all of reggae (and, one assumes, all of “world music”).  If I remember correctly, I don’t have my original copy and it seems to be all but scrubbed from the internet, there was a preface to the list that explained this skew with the assertion that, since this list started with 1967, it left a lot of great early music behind (Chuck Berry, Little Richard, etc.) and R&B artists tended to make better singles than albums, with the exceptions noted above. They also made sure to include how many copies each album sold, just to assure the reader that they weren’t biasing big selling albums by bands like Loggins & Messina or the Eagles.

It’s correct to call the list racist, but I’m interested in the why. And I think the why, like a lot of whys in our current state, can be traced back to a narrative the post-war generation both were taught to believe, as well as taught to perpetuate. Most people center the baby boom generation from 1946-1964. My father was born in 46 and my mother was born in 49. In 1967, the “summer of love” and ground zero for the list, my father was 21 and my mother was 18. Again, judging from my own experience, that span of years is the first time a person begins to feel like an adult. Thus begins the narrative of popular music that it doesn’t become “serious” or “mature” until 1967, and that Sgt. Pepper becomes the paradigmatic example. But this narrative comes at a moment when the government started increasing the number of young men being sent to Vietnam, while allowing college students to defer. This would be still maintained through the 1969 draft. In 1967, 4% of the total African-American population enrolled in college, while 10% of the overall white population did so. Meanwhile, African-Americans, as a general population, were being asked to serve in Vietnam in disproportionate numbers. As historian Gerald F. Goodwin writes:
 
"African-Americans also complained that they were disproportionately drafted, assigned to combat units and killed in Vietnam. Statistics from the first three years of the war support these complaints. African-Americans represented approximately 11 percent of the civilian population. Yet in 1967, they represented 16.3 percent of all draftees and 23 percent of all combat troops in Vietnam. In 1965, African-Americans accounted for nearly 25 percent of all combat deaths in Vietnam. By 1967 this percentage had dropped considerably, to 12.7, but the perception that blacks were more likely to be drafted and killed remained widespread."

This occurs during an extended period of time wherein the incarcerated African-American population grows exponentially. As a Department of Justice report from 1986, a year before the Rolling Stone list, explains:

"A major trend documented In the admission series is long-term growth in the size of the black prison population. From 1926 to 1986 the recorded black percentage among admissions to State and Federal prisons more than doubled from 21 % In 1926 to 44% In 1986. This growth is not explained by general  population trends. The number of blacks relative to the general population was about the same In both years, 10% In 1926 and 12%. [….] The recorded number of black prisoners in 1986 was nearly 9 times larger than the number recorded in 1926 (80,814 In 1986 versus 9,292 in 1926) (table 3). The recorded number of white prisoners was 3 times larger (100,874 in 1986 versus 33,626 In 1926), and the number of other races was 5 times larger (2,081 versus 410)."

The narrative around popular music develops as more and more African-Americans are being drafted and incarcerated. Meanwhile, the rate of African-Americans attending college, a refuge against the draft,  at the same time remains flat.

If we are going to reassess our understanding of the music that has so dominated my life, at least, it seems to me we need to take these statistics into account. The boomer account popular music’s “serious” development over the years 1967-1987 is determined by the luxuries afforded them by dint of their race, class and education. Moreover, the benefits of this experience then feeds into the narrative of what is “natural” and “worthy.” The “poptimism” of recent popular music criticism is a recent development, and is more likely to favor white artists (Taylor Swift, Robyn, Carley Rae Japson) than it is to favor artists of color. For most of my life popular music has been rock music’s ugly step-child in the face of serious art. And pop music that is most closely tied to genres where African-Americans are integral to their development, have always been originally sold as faddish or, at best, admirably held at a distance: disco, hip-hop, blaxploitation…I grew up thinking at one point or another that each one was bad, or certainly not as good as the stuff on the Rolling Stone list.

However, I argue that this doesn’t just affect minority artists, the obscure or the forgotten. If you Google “Radiohead Beatles comparison” you will most likely find some comparison like this: Radiohead are like the Beatles in that they made some insignificant music and then recorded a series of classic albums that changed rock. Generally, Pablo Honey gets compared to pre-Rubber Soul, with RS being compared to the Bends, Revolver to OK Computer, Kid A to Sgt. Pepper, Amnesiac to Magical Mystery Tour, Hail to the Thief to the Beatles and In Rainbows to Abbey Road. You can kind of see it, except for one flaw that supports my argument: you have to compare the first Radiohead record with the first four Beatles records. Records that completely changed popular music, whereas “Creep”  once soundtracked Steven Dorff slowly walking down the street in 1994’s S.F.W. (aside from Prince’s cover of the song, this is how I will always remember it).

It’s amazing to think of the early music of the Beatles, with songs like “If I Fell” and “Things We Said Today,” and so many more, being lumped with a mediocre debut album that now just seems like a grunge cash-in from a band that would go on to better things. The comparison itself demonstrates the still-held import of the Beatles, so this isn’t something that’s new upstaging something passe, but also demonstrates the very problem described above. We can only think of albums like A Hard Day’s Night or Beatles for Sale as necessary commercial compromises that led to the artistic breakthroughs. This is because my parent’s generation went off to college, instead of going off to war, and learned from people much smarter than them that childish things must be put away in favor of grown up concerns. In the shadow of war, nuclear annihilation, assassinations, etc. singing something as simple as “If I Fell” seems absolutely naive and immature. What is joy compared to the alienation and serious classical music of “A Day in the Life?” I can recall this narrative echoed in the Beatles/Dylan comparison of the rock histories of my teenage years: by 1965 Dylan had eclipsed the Beatles in terms of seriousness and sophistication. Or the Beatles/Beach Boys comparisons: as wonderful as Pet Sounds is, it’s no “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Motown and Stax were seen as “factories,” where geniuses had to fight the system if they were going to produce artistic statements. And on and on in Jan Wenner’s “transvaluation of all values.”

But that wasn’t quite true before 1967. And now that I’m getting older, and my parents are no longer around to talk about what happened before that, drunk, dancing to some old novelty R&B song, I have to recreate it for myself. As history moves forward, and pop music history even more so, it seems even more important to try to peer through the opacity of a time before I was born to try and rescue the past from a monochromatic blur. In that sense, I’m starting to become sympathetic to my least favorite Beatles’ songs, the songs where they sing (especially Paul) about the music to which their parents listened. Except, whereas Paul understood his parent’s music as evidence of a simpler time, I want to reawaken the radical nature of music in 1964: from pop, to R&B and soul, to jazz, to avant garde and, even, international music, everything seemed to be possible in the musical landscape of 1964, with a resonance that feels more present than ever.

“Murder Most Foul,” Bob Dylan, 2020

What good are pop artist in a pandemic?

1.

Bono offered a piano ballad, which eventually became something called “Sing for Life” with a bunch of other pop artists, and the accompanying video can only be described as akin to Flight of the Concords. Meanwhile, over in Madonna’s bathtub, we find out that the virus is “the great equalizer”—as much like her opinions on music, the virus will unmake the bourgeoise and the rebel. And let’s not forgot, through not strictly a gaggle of pop artists, the montage of famous people singing John Lennon’s “Imagine,” telling a world full of soon-to-be unemployed and evicted people to “imagine no possessions.” So, yeah, it would be easy to see the utter failure of pop music to say anything about this moment as symptom of its decades of aspirational economics: pop stars want to be taken as seriously as tech gurus and health ministers during this difficult time. Not merely to gratify their own egos, but, especially in the case of Bono, as an additional revenue stream from the New York Times opinion page if the streams of the latest U2 album don’t meet expectations.

I would be remiss if I left this catalogue of pop star failure and didn’t mention the counterexample of the leftist transformation of Brittney Spears, who started the week offering to go shopping for fans who couldn’t leave their homes, and ended the week by sharing a poem by Mimi Zhu arguing that we seize the means of production and redistribute. It surprises me not in the least that the pop stars who came closest to seeing how the sausage was made by starting out as pure product would be the first to call for redistribution.

In the midst of all this, Bob Dylan released his first song of new material in 8 years! Imagine being a songwriter stuck inside knowing that you’re going to write your very meaningful song about this difficult time and Bob fucking Dylan dusts off a song from seven or eight years ago about something that happened in 1963 and bests you before you even begin.

Writing about Bob Dylan now is like what writing about the Bible must have been like for people during the Black Plague: Everyone knows it. Everyone has an opinion about it. And whatever angle you think you can get at it that no one has ever gotten at it before, you’re wrong. I keep going back to Leonard Cohen (may his memory be a blessing) who, upon hearing Dylan had won the Nobel Prize, said that such honor was like pinning a biggest mountain metal on Everest—not merely a redundant gesture, but a gesture that says more about humans than mountains.  I had forgotten that Cohen had more to say about Dylan during that particular interview:

“I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us: you don’t write the songs anyhow,” he said. “So if you’re lucky, you can keep the vehicle healthy and responsive over the years. If you’re lucky, your own intentions have very little to do with this. You can keep the body as well-oiled and receptive as possible, but whether you’re actually going to be able to go for the long haul is really not your own choice.”

Bob Dylan writing a song about a nearly sixty year old presidential assassination in the middle of a pandemic sounds like something that would have been on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. On that collection, Smith collected recordings of musicians from the late 1920s and early 1930s describing historical calamities of all types. The influence of Smith’s Anthology on Dylan is well documented. Greil Marcus, who has, in many ways, spent a sizable part of his career chasing this particular nexus, sums it up:

“In 1960, John Pankake and others who were part of the folk milieu at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis initiated a nineteen-year-old Bob Dylan into what Pankake would later call 'the brotherhood of the Anthology’; the presence of Smith’s music in Dylan’s has been a template for the presence of that music in the country, and the world, at large. From then to now verses, melodies, images and choruses from the Anthology, and most deeply the Anthology’s insistence on an occult, Gothic America of terror and deliverance inside the official America of anxiety and success-as Smith placed murder ballads, explosions of religious ecstasy, moral warnings and hedonistic revels on the same plane of value and meaning-have been one step behind Dylan’s own music, and one step ahead.”

And Dylan himself said during an interview in 1965:

"Folk music," he said, "is the only music where it isn't simple. It's weird, full of legend, myth, Bible and ghosts... chaos, watermelons, clocks, everything…"

At this point, the years between the “legends” in the songs of Smith’s Anthology are as distant to those singers as Kennedy’s assassination is to Dylan. It feels like the last survivor of a shipwreck or the last man to see John Henry or Casey Jones alive giving you his best recollection of an eyewitness report. It’s a ghost story for sure.

But Dylan isn’t a folk singer, and his songs aren’t reportage, rather Dylan is the one who brought modernism into pop songwriting. Ginsberg and his poetic tradition inheres in Dylan as well. Again Dylan:

“I came out of the wilderness and just naturally fell in with the Beat scene, the bohemian, Be Bop crowd, it was all pretty much connected,” Dylan said in 1985. “It was Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti … I got in at the tail end of that and it was magic … it had just as big an impact on me as Elvis Presley.”

As I write this, “Murder Most Foul” is the highest viewed page at the song lyric site genuis.com. The analysis of the lyrics, this time, have little to do with Dylan’s hermeticism and far more to do with fact checking Dylan’s account of the assassination. I can’t help but think of “American Pie,” with its allegory by numbers history of the 1960s, a song that I have always imagined as the antithesis to what Dylan has been doing for so long.

But as with so much that Dylan writes and performs, it’s not what can be easily glossed that holds the meaning. The historical events that often become the central focus of Dylan’s lyrics become, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, the inaccurate transmission of an inessential content. So in reading over the genius page for “Murder Most Foul,” its the lines that lack a current gloss that draw my attention:

He said, "Wait a minute, boys, you know who I am?"
"Of course we do, we know who you are!"
Then they blew off his head while he was still in the car
Shot down like a dog in broad daylight
Was a matter of timing and the timing was right
You got unpaid debts, we've come to collect

The “wait a minute, boys” should immediately direct the listener to another long topical Dylan song, “Hurricane” (“Cops said, “Wait a minute, boys, this one’s not dead!”). Though separated by race, power and time, in the face of some nameless “boys,” “cops,” etc the protagonist of both songs become nothing but disposable bodies (one rotting in a cell, the other dying like a dog) to men in power with guns. Again, this has little to do with the historical “truth” of JFK’s assassination, or the truth of the power differential between a black boxer and the president of the United States, rather it has something to do with a cosmic truth, to which Dylan is receptive.  “Shot down like a dog” recalls the final sentence of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel the Trial: “‘Like a dog!’he said; it seemed as though the shame was to outlive him.” Kafka’s novel points out the lack of humanity in Joseph K.’s death. Dylan’s lyrics point out the lack of humanity in JKF’s assassination. Such nameless, faceless killing is the essence of death. As Reverend Gary Davis sang, and Dylan’s friend Jerry Garcia would sing many decades later, “death don’t have no mercy in this land.”


2.

I hate to tell you, mister, but only dead men are free […]

The man who fell down dead like a rootless tree […]

Play darkness and death will come when it comes [….]

All of these lines are currently without annotation. All of these lines, including the previous lines about JFK dying like a dog, strip the title and elevation from the office of the president. The first line is a response to the spiritual “Oh Freedom,” which Dylan would have learned from Odetta’s albums, and would have sung himself as an ally (or opportunist depending on whom you believe) in the civil rights movement. It’s answered by the old Dylan seemingly foreclosing the possibility of freedom as something that can be achieved in this world. One has no greater control over real or imagined freedom in this life than any other, even the president of the United States (who Dylan told us already in 1965 sometimes has to stand naked). Again, this is antithetical to everyone’s understanding of freedom, to the actual power inhering in the presidency,  but in the middle of this crisis in which we find ourselves, wherein even the President of the United States stands “perfectly” naked, maybe more naked than any leader in modern history, the fleshiness of this world and all the people in it lays low our received understanding. Elsewhere, well glossed by the geniuses, Dylan brings up “Merchant of Venice.” At the end of the day, we’re all just somebody’s pound of flesh that either does, or does not, get repaid ("You got unpaid debts, we've come to collect"). Even Shylock’s famous speech of tolerance and liberation reminds us that we’re all just meat puppets trying not to die:

“Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?”

Dylan brings up Shakespeare’s play (elsewhere it’s the more obvious Macbeth) to remind us that we’re all subject to the same diseases. It’s worth remembering that Shakespeare lived through an outbreak of the black plague in Venice that saw 50,000 people dead.

The final line here finds us now. Dylan is playing darkness with “Murder Most Foul,” just like the poet Paul Celan played “death more sweetly” to bring the darkness in his poem “Deathfuge.” Max von Sydow lost his chess game with death, recently. Dylan knows it comes for all of us, ultimately, president, Shylock and Bob Dylan alike. A song about a sixty year old presidential assassination in the middle of a global pandemic seems to make very little sense, much like death itself. Dylan knows that in order to truly reflect on the time you live in, you must understand that you are not the subject, just the recipient of the catastrophe.