Of course, it has become commonplace
to argue that through a conflux of the arch knowingness
of the sensibility which has come to be labelled postmodern,
and the commodification brought about by increased concentration
of media control, that such an overflowing outpouring
was a never-to-be-repeated one-off cultural moment,
the conditions necessary for a reprise of which simply
do not obtain these days. Things were always purer in
a prelapsarian past, and we are condemned (out of our
own mouths) to inhabit today’s paler, fallen world.
But such a resignedly pessimist view
is not only counterproductive in the practical sphere,
but may well be erroneous in the theoretical one, since
it wrongheadedly fails to take all the circumstances
into consideration. True, as with book publishers, so
also with recording companies: through a complex chain
of mergers, acquisitions, takeovers and subsidiaries,
there are really only three or four of them in the world
right now, with enough resources to have access to all
the developed global markets. Signings are ultimately
made by the bean-counters rather than the editors or
producers, with an eye to sales rather than aesthetics.
The philistines are in charge. This is why so much contemporary
literary and musical production, the stuff that winds
up on the airwaves and in the high street shops, is
– not to put a tooth in it – crap.
But this analysis does not take into
account how independent record companies have thrived
over the past twenty years, providing a leg-up and an
outlet for solo artists and bands that are doing something
out of the ordinary. Indeed, being signed to one has
become almost a rite of passage for musicians operating
at an angle to the mainstream. In many ways, they have
no choice but to go indy. Back in the ’60s, not
much was expected, either artistically or commercially,
from a band’s debut album. They might be getting
good by around their third offering, but weren’t
really going to deliver until about their fifth. Nowadays,
it is often the case that a band’s first album
is brilliant, its second alright, and its third dire.
Only indy labels give artists the time they need to
develop, since they are prepared to nurture talent in
a way the majors never do. Sure, you may have to hunt
around and keep your ear to the ground a bit more to
unearth the offbeat indy stuff that might interest you,
but that is all part and parcel of being an informed
fan, keeping up with your hobby. Frequently, bands graduate
from an indy to a major, when they have secured a sufficient
fanbase to be able to call the shots, and not be pushed
around by a faceless conglomerate. The role call of
American alt.rock or alt.country artists, who either
started their careers on indy labels, or are still on
them – not to mention those who self-finance their
own recordings and sell them at gigs – is long,
worthy and impressive: Uncle Tupelo, Yo La Tengo, Elliott
Smith, Low, Will Oldham, Sparklehorse, Wilco, to name
a very few.
The indy ethic would appear to be
catching on in publishing too, with more small presses
springing up in the last couple of years than has occurred
in a generation. Nor can the democratising role of the
internet be ignored in this phenomenon. It is now easier
than ever to distribute books and music all over the
world, without having to go through the usual channels
and deal with the standard outlets, simply by selling
online. Indeed, major record companies are now apoplectic
at the thought of thus having control wrenched from
their grasp. The Arctic Monkeys were a word-of-mouth,
MySpace MP3 download success before they ever had a
CD in the shops. Finally, on a more abstract level,
is not every lurch to the right followed, pendulum-like,
by an equal and opposite swing to the left? If contemporary
Ireland is roughly analogous to ’50s America,
in terms of rapid industrial expansion and massively
increased prosperity, aren’t all those kids now
stuck in the crèches just ripe for rebelling
against their parents’ materialistic values, a
la ’60s American flower children, in about ten
or fifteen years time, safe in the knowledge that they
can always fall back on their trust funds and inheritances,
should they tire of the rock’n’roll (or
whatever it’ll be called then) lifestyle.
But where, exactly, is this groundswell
of dissent located in American popular music, past and
present? And how has one generation inspired its successor,
forming an unbroken chain of influence continuing from
the ’30s to the ’60s to the present? And
has rock’n’roll ever actually helped to
change anything politically – like ending the
Vietnam War – much less changed the world?
From here on in (in a survey inevitably
constrained by available space), I’d like to concentrate
on two established figures in the rock pantheon, who
have been around since the ’60s: Bob Dylan and
Neil Young; then discuss more truncatedly two more who
rose to prominence in the ’70s: Bruce Springsteen
and Patti Smith; and finish by looking at an outfit
who, although they have been on the go in various incarnations
for over twenty years, have only attained big time critical
adulation and commercial success in the last six: The
Flaming Lips.
If, as Billy Bragg has written, Woody
Guthrie was the first alternative musician, out there
telling the ’30s Dustbowl and Depression era like
it was while the masses were in thrall to the escapism
of Hollywood musicals and the Tin Pan Alley cats, then
Bob Dylan learned a lot from him, just as he learned
from Hank Williams (particularly in the latter’s
Luke the Drifter persona), and from bluesmen
like Sleepy John Estes, Jesse Fuller and Blind Willie
McTell. But he did absorb these formative influences
from folk, country and blues music, and take them to
places no one else had ever gone before, not merely
tearing up the rule book, but changing the whole game.
This process is chronicled in Dylan’s thoroughly
absorbing 2004 volume of imagistic autobiography, Chronicles;
and, to a lesser extent, in last year’s excellent
Martin Scorsese documentary, No Direction Home.
But, while Dylan is perhaps most acclaimed
today for the genre-busting mid-’60s trilogy of
Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited
and Blonde on Blonde, and the naked intensity
of 1974’s finest hour, Blood on the Tracks,
it can easily be overlooked that he started his public
professional life as a protest singer, idolised by the
folksy set, and given the imprimatur of that genre’s
elder statesman, Pete Seeger. This period reached its
apogee with his third album, The Times They Are
A Changin’, although its predecessor Freewheeling’
and its successor Another Side also contained
songs of direct political comment, although leavened
with the interiority of more personally emotional material.
But even The Times showcases the break-up song,
‘One Too Many Mornings’, and anyone who
thinks that the near-hillbilly folk-punk roughness of
The Times socially concerned songs have a short
shelf-life beyond the political ferment which inspired
them should check out The Neville Brothers’ sublime
cover versions of ‘With God On Our Side’
and ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’ on their
1989 offering, Yellow Moon. With Dylan, the
political has always been personal (even if the opposite
only sometimes holds true). If Dylan’s radical
roots as an angry young man are sometimes neglected
these days, this is not only because it was eclipsed
by the aesthetically revolutionary impact of what followed,
but also because he has distanced himself from it, claiming
that, while he is proud of the songs, he never went
looking for the ‘Spokesman for a Generation’
tag, and that it had nothing to do with him. Still,
the consternation and sense of betrayal felt by his
early audience when he moved on to pastures new speaks
for how much it meant to people back then, even if he
never deliberately provoked it. We’ve all heard
the stories about Pete Seeger cutting the electricity
cable when Dylan went electric at the 1965 Newport Folk
Festival, and the cries of ‘Judas’ that
were heard during the following year’s British
tour with The Hawks (latterly renamed The Band). Today,
Dylan again pleads bafflement at the brouhaha, opining,
‘Country music’s electric.’ Besides
which, electric rock’n’roll music can certainly
be protest music too, and Dylan has had several subsequent
forays into social comment, with songs such as ‘George
Jackson’ (1971) and ‘Hurricane’ (1975).
It will be interesting to hear how his new album, Modern
Times, due for release at the end of July, balances
this age old, though often dubious, aesthetics/politics
dichotomy.
Neil Young’s moral universe
has always been more elementally black and white than
Dylan’s, sometimes to the point of unsubtlety,
yet that doesn’t stop him citing both Dylan and
Phil Ochs (the ’60s protest singer par excellence,
who preferred the term ‘topical singer’,
styling himself a ‘singing journalist’)
as inspirations in the liner notes to his recently released
anti-Bush tirade, Living With War. Indeed one
song from the album, ‘Flags of Freedom’,
contains lyrical references to ‘…blowin’
in the wind’ and ‘Listenin’ to Bob
Dylan in 1963’, while the melody line of its chorus
directly echoes that of ‘Chimes of Freedom’.
But perhaps the most interesting aspect
of Young’s decision to wade into the contemporary
political arena is that he is not a dial-a-quote radical.
This is the man, after all, who alienated some long-time
fans by his support of Reagan in the ’80s, judging
that the Acting President had given Americans back pride
in themselves. Young has also taken his time to come
out publicly against the invasion of Iraq in his work,
claiming that he was waiting for a younger singer to
do it. Admirable though this reasoning may be, it does
display his ignorance of recent anti-government albums
and statements by Greenday, The Dixie Chicks and Pearl
Jam, among others. Then there was the bellicose nationalism
of ‘Let’s Roll’ from 2001’s
underwhelming Are You Passionate?, written
in praise of the gung-ho spirit of a passenger on one
of the 9/11 planes. But Bush and his administration
have since succeeded in squandering much of the goodwill
the rest of the world felt towards America then; and
maybe Young, though lacerating in his criticism of the
current regime in individual songs, has learned from
Dylan’s more ambiguous approach. He is not here
advocating anarchy or revolution, but the kind of down-home
domestic values espoused on a song like ‘Families’.
The democratic process can still work in Young’s
world, as the lines, Yeah we’ve got our election/But
corruption has a chance/We got to have a clean win/To
regain confidence from ‘Lookin’ For
A Leader’ demonstrate. ‘Let’s Impeach
The President’ does not advocate getting rid of
revealed religion, but rather, Let’s impeach
the President for hijacking/Our religion and using it
to get elected. In general, the message is America
is beautiful/But she has an ugly side, again from
‘Lookin’ For A Leader’. He even closes
the album with a hundred-voice choir rendition of ‘America
The Beautiful’, putting one in mind of the last
scene of Michael Cimino’s Vietnam movie, The Deerhunter,
where the war’s survivors in the small industrial
heartland town of Clairton, Pennsylvania start singing
a chastened, if not quite defeated, version of ‘God
Bless America’ at the funeral of one of their
own. So ends what has instantly come to be regarded
as Young’s best rock (if not folk) album since
1990’s Ragged Glory, and even if it does
not feature one cut as individually strong as Young’s
response to the shooting dead by soldiers of four student
anti-war protesters at Kent State University, 1970’s
‘Ohio’, it is still, collectively, a powerful
batch of songs in the best tradition of American protest
music.
Bruce Springsteen is an artist who
made his name through giving voice to the many indignities
and few moments of transcendence which are the staple
experience of blue collar life in America. His many
paeans to the possibility of escape offer by the road,
and his dissections of how America’s involvement
in the Vietnam conflict impacted on working class families
and communities in the States, have even sometimes verged
into self-parody. He has seen his rabble-rousing, clarion
call to the futility of that war for the American conscripts
who fought in it, the anthemic ‘Born in the USA’,
appropriated by Republican Presidential candidates,
who clearly hadn’t bothered to listen to all the
lyrics.
In 1997 Springsteen recorded ‘We
Shall Overcome’ for Where Have All The Flowers
Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger. In the liner notes
to this year’s acclaimed The Seeger Sessions,
he writes: ‘Growing up a rock’n’roll
kid I didn’t know a lot about Pete’s music
or the depth of his influence. So I headed to the record
store and came back with an armful of Pete Seeger records.
Over the next few days of listening, the wealth of songs,
their richness and power changed what I thought I knew
about “folk music”.’ Despite being
a Johnny-Come-Lately to the folk tradition, on The
Seeger Sessions he manages to dig back into this
rich vein of influence in homage to one of its embodied
custodians, in a more oblique, but no less resonant,
reaction to the prevailing American scene as Young’s.
In a recent public interview in Sligo,
Springsteen’s fellow New Jerseyite, Patti Smith,
spoke of how one of the things she valued about being
an American artist was the freedom to be a political
activist in her work, no matter what difficulties she
might encounter through being outspoken. Never a Year
Zero new waver, wanting to disavow everything that went
before her time, Smith has written of the liberating
effect of hearing Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling
Stone’ on a jukebox, as a sixteen-year-old on
her way home from school in her hometown, and spoken
of the lasting impression left by meeting Jimi Hendrix
shortly before he died. Smith also has a direct link
with the furthest reaches of ’60s rock’n’roll
radicalism, through her now deceased, much-loved husband
and father of her children, Fred Smith, guitarist with
Detroit’s legendary MC5, the house band of the
White Panther Party, an insurrectionist political faction
espousing ‘…total assault on the culture
by any means necessary, including rock & roll, dope,
and fucking in the streets.’
So it is only to be expected that
the woman with such a strong countercultural pedigree,
who once sang ‘People Have the Power’ (1988),
should be among the most vocal in her intelligent and
trenchant criticism of the present American regime.
Even before the current conflagration, she was exploring
themes of American use and misuse of power, on albums
like Gung Ho (2000), with the song ‘New
Party’ exhorting a shift towards a new politics,
and the title track a sympathetic portrayal of a young
Vietnamese boy growing up during the American occupation.
But it is with 2004’s trampin’ that
she specifically confronts the consequences of contemporary
American foreign policy. For while it has tracks that
deal generally with issues of military might and passive
resistance, like ‘Gandhi’ and ‘Peaceable
Kingdom’, it is the magnificent long collage jam
‘Radio Baghdad’ that offers the lyrics,
Suffer not your neighbours’ affliction/Suffer
not your neighbours’ paralysis/But extend your
hand, praising Baghdad as, a perfect circle,
centre of the world, and, city of scholars,
culminating in the enraged chant of, They’re
robbing the cradle of civilisation. This is politically-charged
rock’n’roll done as well as it can be by
anybody, and it is difficult to see what more it could
do.
The Flaming Lips are perhaps the first
band in the history of rock to combine successfully
elements from punk with those from progressive rock,
as though the new wavers of the late ’70s have
foresworn amphetamine sulphate and started taking LSD
instead. They also manage to fuse ideas drawn from psychedelia
with tonalities from funk and soul. It’s as though
there’s room for The Sex Pistols and Pink Floyd,
The 13th Floor Elevators and The Isley Brothers, all
on the same record. The greater wonder is that it does
not come across as some ghastly Frankenstein’s
monster, but is melded into a cohesively innovative
whole. They are capacious in their appreciation of the
popular music of previous eras, and eclectic in their
borrowings, in the same way that Captain Beefheart,
himself clearly an influence on The Lips’ best
early album, In a Priest Driven Ambulance (1990),
was. Their last three albums, The Soft Bulletin
(1999), Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (2002),
and the recently-released At War With The Mystics,
represent a sustained period of creative excellence
over three records certainly not heard in American music
since Neil Young’s mid-’70s visceral dissection
of how the hippie dream went wrong, the so-called ‘Doom
trilogy’ of Time Fades Away (1973), On
The Beach (1974), and Tonight’s The Night
(1975), and perhaps not even since Dylan’s above-mentioned
mid-’60s trilogy.
With their cosmic sci-fi leanings,
and the urgency of their concern with the duality of
love and death, The Flaming Lips, together with kissin’
cousins Mercury Rev, are latter-day hippies, older,
wiser and more sussed than their naïve predecessors.
They succinctly exemplify my argument for the existence
of a distinct lineage in American music from the ’60s
to the present. For if Mercury Rev, with whom The Lips
formerly shared guitarist Jonathan Donahue, and who
now work with the same producer in Rev’s bassist
Dave Friedman (perhaps the premier knob-twiddler de
nos jours, providing his services to a veritable
role call of the more successful alternative bands),
are a contemporary incarnation of Dylan’s old
backing band The Band, getting their heads together
and communing with nature in upstate New York (the circumstances
surrounding the making of The Band’s debut Music
From Big Pink (1968) in Woodstock and Rev’s
most recent The Secret Migration (2005) certainly
invite comparison, not to mention the fact that both
Garth Hudson and Levon Helm of The Band guested on The
Rev’s breakthrough 1998 album, Deserters’
Songs), then surely it is not fanciful to suggest
that The Lips, although born, bred and still based in
Oklahoma City, represent a current rebirthing of the
more tripped-out, West Coast, Haight-Ashbury wing of
the hippie movement, as personified by bands like Jefferson
Airplane and The Grateful Dead.
But how might they be said to be in
any way political? Sceptics could certainly argue, with
some justification, that anyone who is obsessed with
the cartoon world of aliens, superheroes, and space
and time travel, like Lips’ chief lyricist Wayne
Coyne, and who has the audacity to put out an album
with a title featuring a manga heroine fighting evil
pink robots, clearly can’t have a very firm grip
on everyday reality, and that his feet must surely be
a long way from the ground. Yet nothing could be further
from the truth, since The Lips are the most hands-on
and user-friendly of contemporary bands, still largely
setting up their own stage props and equipment when
touring, for example. It is with their last release,
At War With The Mystics, that they confront
the prevailing situation in America. Songs like ‘Haven’t
Got a Clue’ and ‘The W.A.N.D. (The Will
Always Negates Defeat)’, while they would be applicable
to any tyrannical dictatorship, in the present climate
invite a direct identification with Bush and his cohorts,
the former featuring lines like, You haven’t
got a clue/and you don’t know what to do/You used
your money and your friends/To try and trick me…,
the latter, Time after time those fanatical minds/Try
to rule all the world/Telling us all it’s them
who’s in charge of it all. Yet despite the
directness of these sentiments, and the seeming simplicity
of Coyne’s world view in general, this is a record
which – like the most potent artistic responses
to the political world – does not hit the listener
over the head and bludgeon the audience to a pulp with
ideology. ‘The Yeah, Yeah, Yeah Song’ questions
whether anyone’s behaviour would be above reproach
if they were given absolute power, while ‘Free
Radicals’ neatly satirises extremists of whatever
hue.
What The Lips do is to encourage resistance
through rapture, opposition via wonderment. They are
fully aware of the dark side of life and its lure, but
rather than embracing it like a Beckett or a Morrissey,
a Joy Division or a Radiohead, they want to posit the
idea that while there is no end to human greed, suffering,
misery and evil, there is equally no end to human love
with which to counter it. Beside the black void there
is an eternal Yes. And while such an attitude may seem
at best foolishly naïve and at worst self-servingly
hedonistic, the worst excesses of hippiedom all over
again dressed up in fashionable new clothes, it isn’t:
because these guys have learned from their predecessors
and, in the words of one of their acknowledged influences,
The Who, ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’.
If the recordings don’t convince you, go and see
one of their uplifting and cathartic live shows.
What all of the above artists (with
the possible but debatable exception of The Lips) have
in common, ironically, is that although they are fiercely
opposed to the current regime and its works, they are
all, in their own ways, patriotic, still holding out
hope that America can be put right, through the actions
of ordinary, decent American citizens.
As for the large question of how practically
productive any artistic engagement through social comment
can be, while poetry may, as W.H Auden had it, make
nothing happen, perhaps the arts can contribute to that
hoary old ’60s concept of consciousness raising.
Rather than art being contaminated by political concerns,
resulting in bad art and worse politics, maybe it functions
best in a trickle-down fashion, from year to year and
generation to generation. Lou Reed has rationalised
his love of rock’n’roll in terms of knowing
that, on a personal level, it can change the direct
of your life, as it did his; but it was Bruce Springsteen
who, when instigating the Chords for Change tour in
support of the Democratic Party before the last American
Presidential election, spoke of how he knew music could
change people’s minds, because he’d seen
it happen before, in relation to the Vietnam War. Steve
Earle has echoed similar sentiments, in concert, declaring,
“I was around the first time, and I’ve seen
music help to end one war. I know it can make a difference.”
So perhaps it was not for nothing that Country Joe and
The Fish sang, Be the first kid on your block/To
get sent home in a box at Woodstock, or that Hendrix
mangled ‘The Star Spangle Banner’ into submission
through layers of distortion, thus purging it of its
associations with a drum-beating, flag-waving, cocky
imperialism, and reinventing it as an expression of
betrayal felt by already disenfranchised inner city
ghetto black kids, who unwittingly found themselves
‘in country’.
There are omissions in this article.
It would have been interesting to include some discussion
as to why it is that Canadians have had such a central
influence on the development of American music: Neil
Young and Joni Mitchell are both native Canadians who
have made their homes in the States, while four of the
five members of The Band, who extensively mined the
mythology of the old Civil War Deep South to arrive
at their sound and ethos, were Canada-born. Also, any
article about anti-establishment music in America that
makes no reference to black music in the shape of rap
and hip hop is in sore need of extension. This lacuna
is further accentuated by focusing solely on the international
repercussions of the Bush administration’s policies,
at the expense of highlighting the internal problems
it has caused, for example the lack of foresight in
environmental planning, the scant preparation for and
tardy response to Hurricane Katrina which hit New Orleans,
a clear demonstration that within the US the white underclass
and the black population are just as expendable as Iraqi
civilians (presumably because they don’t vote),
and a total insult to the city’s rich musical
melting pot heritage, which encompasses blues, jazz,
Cajun, zydeco and rock.
But these are other articles, for
other times, or maybe even for a book. As it is, I hope
I have pointed up the congruence through the decades
between popular resistance and popular music in America,
and helped to put to rest the internal oppositions that
have existed and sometimes marred fruitful cooperation,
like those between folk and rock in the ’60s,
or between hippies and punks in the ’70s, thus
overcoming both genre and generational prejudices. As
that man who has managed to combine an almost schizophrenic
musical output in his long career between pastoral folk
and hard rock, and who now in his 60s is dubbed The
Godfather of Grunge, Neil Young, has shouted on stage
from a maelstrom of Crazy Horse feedback: ‘It’s
all one song.’
First published in The Journal of Music in Ireland,
September/October 2006