#124: "American Skin (41 Shots)" (2000) - Bruce Springsteen & the E. Street Band
While mother and the DSS contemplate their decision, we take our leave and head over to the the Bronx, where on February 4, 1999, we and the NYPD find Amadou Diallo, who looks an awful lot like a rapist, so we accost him, and he takes off running, and we shout for him to put his hands up, and he reaches into his jacket, and he pulls out his wallet.
Not before we shoot him, though.
Nineteen times.
Missed on twenty-two.
Bruce Springsteen--and the rest of New York City--hears about this, and the Boss writes a song about it, and he debuts the song live sixteen months later (to the day), and this record is the result of that performance, where Springsteen brings it all back home--the prejudice, the fear, the ghosts of the past and present, the sins of our fathers, the shame of our mothers, the rage against society's ill--when, 3/4 through the record, he repeats, acapella, "You can get killed just for living in," and no one responds. The band remains quiet. The audience remains quiet. The sound of one man and his cry, his gospel shout, his call to witness: and silence is his answer. We all sleep alone. We have to wake ourselves.
Springsteen wakes himself soon, on the record, but his passion, his rage against the dying of the light...it's all gone. He's resigned. "Your American skin." His wife comes in as Springsteen tails off: "forty-one shots" she reminds him. She reminds us. Clarence Clemons then offers a mournful liturgy as the chorus sings the refrain, and they grieve, and we grieve, and we despair and wonder if we're really any better off today, or if there's any hope, and we listen to what these artists have to play for us, and we know the answer, and they sing the song.
#125: "The State of Massachusetts" (2007) - The Dropkick Murphys
From the hicks to the Micks: we depart the rednecks and the coloreds of the South, and we ship our poverty-class social problems up to the Irish descendents in Boston Mass where we find the Celtic-punk band the Dropkick Murphys, in their bar, somewhere between the one owned by Green Day and the one the Pogues used to own (but left solely to the care of Shane McGowan). Amidst all their revelry and fist-pumping anthems celebrating their heritage, their beer, and their knack for violence, we find perhaps the most sexually and culturally insensitive hit songs by a left-of-center music act in the past thirty years.
In "The State of Massachusetts," Boston's favorite sons excoriate a mother for not being able to straighten out her life and take care of her two sons. It doesn't matter to them that she's been victimized by her abusive husband; it only matters that she isn't taking, uh, matters into her own hands for the sake of the children. Whoah, man, that's some heavy baggage and guilt heaped atop this pitiful woman. What about the husband? Why don't they attack him? The reason they don't is perhaps the most tragic part of the song: they've given up on him already. The husband has no hope. Since, of course, these characters are mere representatives of an entire culture of disaffected, inner-city, paycheck-to-paycheck 9-5 blue-collar Southies and Quincies, what does this tell us of the state of the typical sub-Boston man? Ouch.
Ouch again, if you consider that most of the Dropkick Murphys' other songs regale the typical sub-Boston man for his penchant for alcohol and his pride and his ability to fight. All this, from all those drunken Dropkick songs, and then they release a song condemning a woman for not being a good mother? Arrogant much? You betcha. Sexist? Maybe. Maybe.
Maybe the Murphys just see the situation for what it is, that these men simply cannot be relied upon, and if future generations are ever going to succeed by leaving this level of poverty--if, only by a rung on the social ladder--then it's the mothers who are going to have to do it. The men won't. They can't.
I don't know. I could be wrong. Maybe this is sexist. It's troubling. I've been back and forth on this one for months and months now, whether or not I should list it or not. I read interview after interview, and I find no insight. I read review after review, and I find no insight. I'm just not sure. I play it one more time, and I realize that there's one thing I am sure of: the music's smoking hot.
Tim Brennan picks the dickens out of that banjo, Matt Kelly plays almost the entire song rolling and tumbling sixteenths and thirty-seconds on the snare, Marc Orrell and James Lynch find their inner Mick Mars power chording in some metal to the mix, and vocalist Al Barr uses his gargling voice to its most-belligerent effect, and all push the tune past the typical oi! and hurrah! of past Murphys music into righteous anger at the hopelessness of society's ills and the loss of childhood and the sins of their fathers and lay it all at their mother's feet, kicking and screaming that she'll wake up and take charge, for if not, then there won't be anything left worth singing for.
NOTES
*Well, it was a hit on Billboard's Modern Rock charts, and it still gets play on alternative stations, and it's their second-most popular song, so it's as big a hit as any Celtic-punk band is ever likely to get.
The dirty south: from the sins visited upon our fathers to the sins of our fathers themselves, we'll stay below the Mason-Dixon line, where the ghosts of the past are so intertwined into the culture that one wonders if they ever went to the grave in the first place. They oh so often haunt the region--legally, socially, economically, politically, and (depending on who you ask and who you believe and what you believe) literally--that it's no wonder so many Southern artists (musical, literary, etc...)--conjur up these insular, defeatist, patriotic, rebellious, rustic Gothic works of schizophrenia. Down here, we're not all hicks, we're not all poor, and we're not all backwoods...but none of us are more than two generations removed from it. We're all part of the Collective Southern Social Unconscious.
No band today mines these Jungian waters as well (or as much) as the Drive-By Truckers. Most other Southern musical acts--no matter the genre--write about the culture because it's second nature (or, in some cases, affectation influenced by commerce), and they write about it as a given; they don't question--they just observe. The Truckers, however, have spent album-upon-album analyzing and criticizing and honoring the quick and the dead of those who are and were American by choice, but Southern by the grace of God. This band does so by copping the most obvious (and much parodied) aspect of the most popular Southern rock act of the past ever: Lynyrd Skynyrd's triple-guitar attack.
The Truckers, though--unlike so many other Southern Rock acts of the past thirty years--use the triple-guitar attack as a means to an end, not the end itself. They use that sound--the Skynyrd sound--to deliberately evoke images of Skynyrd, its legacy down here--to at least 10% of the population--as not only the greatest rock band ever, but as one of the two symbols of the grandness and rise and fall of the region. Most every region and culture around the world has (and forever has had) a coming-of-age moment or rite or ritual for its young men, but has any other culture in the history of mankind ever had that rite centered on one* singular sole that wasn't a deity? I don't think so. In fact, I know so. In the Deep South, though, it's different. Every Southern born-and-bred white boy must drink a beer and sing all the words to at least one Skynyrd song before he graduates. Those who don't are socially outcast from the majority. I don't exaggerate, either. Lynyrd Skynyrd is that important.
Patterson Hood--leader of the Truckers--knows this, and he and the Truckers emulate the Skynyrd sound in order to call attention to the complex conflicts and contradictions of the South, and the people the Truckers are calling are--primarily--Southerners. Hood and company use a familiar form--one in which they excel--to entice and invite, and then they hope that their music is strong enough to keep the audience's attention while their messages slowly seep in and through. In this aspect, the Truckers--at their best--easily rival Skynyrd--the world's greatest rock and roll band for the entire span of their existance--in reach and grasp. In fact, with the Truckers' third album Southern Rock Opera, they surpassed Skynyrd, at least in terms of artistry.
Southern Rock Opera--released in 2001--is a sprawling double album, a concept record, a song cycle that opens and examines what they call "the Southern thing." In doing so, in so bracing and honest and painful and intelligent and passionate a fashion, the Alabama natives deconstruct and construct and deconstruct again the great mythology of a region in as expert a fashion as any artist has ever done before. It's as great a rock record--for what it does--as any ever recorded. In its own way, it's the thematic and lyric** equal of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On or Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions....
That album, though, didn't yield a single,*** and there's not one single cut on that album that would even seem like a radio single****. Southern Rock Opera is as singular an LP as has been recorded this past decade. The Truckers' follow-up album Decoration Day, though, offered not one but two impressive single-cut songs. The title track is (obviously, huh) one of them.
Decoration Day (the album) was made after fellow native Alabamian Jason Isbell joined the band. Going from strength to strength, Isbell's addition gave the Truckers another first-rate songwriter (Hood and co-guitarist Mike Cooley). In fact, Isbell might even be the best writer of the group.***** One wouldn't doubt it after hearing the title track. "Decoration Day" takes the essence of Southern Rock Opera and boils it down to 5:48. In the song, Isbell tells the tale of two warring families who've forgotten why they fought in the first place...yet still continue their battle. Sure, on the surface it sounds like the Hatfields and the McCoys, and it is, but that's just the hook.
The song's poison's in its details, in Isbell's examination of a culture of ignorance and violence, of the corruptive and destructive effects of pride. It's a metaphor for "the Southern thing", of course, but it also works as a story itself, as a tale of evil male hubris, of fathers hurting their children and their children's future out of their own hurt and their own lack of understanding and compassion and kindness, learned at the harsh hands of their own fathers, and the effects of all this on the son, and the complex, tortured feelings of the child who must honor his father because that's how he must prove he's worthy and prove he's a good son and a good brother and how important and painful familial love can be, and of the sin of obligation.
Isbell's singing sells the song--which could easily arch into camp under many another singer--as he sounds haunted and determined himself, and then the triple-guitar attack of Isbell, Hood, and Cooly reach into the song not to exorcise the demons, but to inflame them, as the guitars here are as incendiary as any we've heard these past ten years, and music this searing can only call forth the demons and the ghosts and demand that we Southerners confront them, whether to pay them heed on Decoration Day (for every day is Decoration Day down here) or to spit on their grave...or maybe a bit of both. It's the Southern thing to do, ya'll.
NOTES
*Okay, it's not just one musical act; it's two: Skynyrd and Hank Williams, Jr.
**Muscially, though, Southern Rock Opera isn't on a par with those two records. Don't get me wrong, the music's great: it's tough and honest and skilled and full of sound and fury; however, the Drive-By Truckers, musically, didn't break any new ground, not the way Marvin Gaye or Public Enemy did. The Truckers make great use of the Skynyrd sound, and they even add a few new wrinkles here and there, but essentially, it's still the Skynyrd sound.
***Not that an album yielding a single has stopped me from pulling in album cuts before (I mean, just yesterday--with Otis Taylor--I did that), but still....
****Heck, even Radiohead's phenomenal and radio-unfriendly Kid A had one song that would've worked by itself.
*****Apparently Isbell thought so, for he split from the group a couple/three years ago, and he released his first solo album last year. It's a good one, too.
Last week, several of my former students dropped by unannonced to shoot the breeze. After about an hour of chit-chat, the topic turned to ghost hunting. We talked about various alleged haunted places around the area and about different amateur expeditions we've all taken. One student--let's call her Belle--told us about a time recently when she and another friend (who wasn't at my house) went out in the woods to investigate an old house in which someone had recently--within the past three years--been murdered. Once Belle told us exactly which house she and her friend tried to investigate* some small bit of tension arose in the room.
See, to various degrees, we all knew the victim and the culprits of that murder. The unease we all felt was based upon the turn of the tone. No longer was Belle's ghost-hunting an exciting and fun and titillating adventure; now, it encroached upon matters earnest and grave. These people weren't legendary: these people were real. These ghosts were real. Belle's tale was no longer thrilling; it was harrowing. It was as if we had switched from the fourth chapter of The Haunting of Hill House to the fifth chapter of In Cold Blood without the benefit of Capote's prosidy to ease the way.
Contemporary bluesman Otis Taylor's "Saint Martha's Blues" (from his stunning and bracing album White African, one of the best albums of this decade) tells a similar supernatural tale, one in which the switch from haunting atmosphere to stark tragedy and terror is troubling. The record begins with a creepy synth drone. On top of it, Taylor lays a riff that rings and shudders with the use of the echoey chorus effect. Whooh, buddy! Now we're in Spookville. "My great-grandfather," Taylor speaks and pauses, and let's the guitar line fill the space. Yup. This is an ol' fashioned haint story. Taylor continues: "back in Lake Providence, Louisiana,"--okay, then, we know now the sound Taylor's replicating with his guitar: the bayous. Heck, we may even have another "Legend of Wooly Swamp" on our hands. Taylor pauses in his speech again, plays the second half of the guitar riff, and we've eased up in our seats, eager to hear and ready to be frightened. Taylor comes back with, "...he was lynched."
The air leaves our chest, and our breath our throats. The carnival has shut down for the night, folks, and the spook show is over. Go home to your family, 'cause this ain't the type of fun you're here for. This is serious business. You wanna stay? You sure? I'm a turn out the lights, now, and you ain't gon' hear nothing but my voice and my guitar. That drone? You don't want to know what that is. I'm here to tell you the truth, and it sure ain't pretty. It's gon' rock you to your soul. It's gonna still you, and it's gonna hurt, but it ain't nothin' compared to the hurt they had, my great-grandfather and his wife, Martha Jones. You gon' remember this one for the rest of your days, 'cause I ain't gon' let you forget it. I'm only have to tell it once, and it won't never leave yo' mind. You ready? Remember, now, this ain't no creepshow. This is the real deal. Cryin' won't help you; prayin' won't do you no good. It sure didn't Martha. It still doesn't. This type of hurt, it don't never go 'way. Never.
*NOTES
*Tried being the key word in that phrase, as Belle and her friend never quite made it to the porch before chick...uh...deciding to postpone their investigation and return to their automobile.
About a year or so before I got married, a close friend talked me into seeing a fortune teller. This oracle lived in a trailer* right on the side of a four-lane highway, right underneath a gigantic billboard proclaiming her Sister status. My friend and I were just riding around one night, and she spotted the sign. It sported a nifty, hieroglyphic-like eyeball. The sign was yellow, the test was red, and the writing was on the wall. We had to go.
I knocked, and Sister Mary opened the door for us. I walked in and nearly tripped on a child's pop-up/bubble mower. I then nearly tripped on a child. Sister Mary shooed her half-naked young'uns** back to their bedroom, and she ushered us through some love beads*** into her sanctum sanctorum.**** She sat down behind a small wooden table, and I sat opposite her. I think my friend was behind me, but I didn't know, for there wasn't room enough to turn my head. Sister Mary then asked us what we wanted. I don't remember anymore what fortune we ordered (Ooh! I'll have the #13, the Voodoo Hoodoo Chooka Chooky Choo Choo special), but I remember Sister Mary pulling out her deck o' Tarot cards with the fancy pictures and layin' 'em straight. She then stared at the cards, looked up at my friend, and asked her to leave the room.
After my friend left,***** Sister Mary asked me if I liked this woman,****** and I told her that I did. She returned to the cards, and she grimaced, and then she grabbed my hand and looked into my eyes and said, "the cards do not lie." She unclamped the vise grip and then explained what each card represented, and I have no recollection of what stood for what, and I didn't much listen to her closely. Not because I thought it was mumbo jumbo, but because her intense glare and hand clamp had mystified me. "Why so serious," I wondered.
After she finished her analysis of the signs of the Tarot, I asked her, "Tell me, what does it all mean?" She glared at me again--not angrily, but...I don't know...seriously. She held her gaze and grip--without speaking or moving--for a good five seconds. I know, now, that five seconds doesn't seem to be a long time, but...okay, I got it. Imagine sitting in small wooden chair in a small cramped closet of a room with someone squeezing your hand and looking you in the eyes. Got it? Okay, now let's count: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five Mississippi. See? That's a long time, my friend. I mean, imagine if someone you knew well held your hand while staring in your eyes that long without speaking...it'd creep you out, wouldn't it? Well, imagine a total stranger doing it. Uh-huh. I thought so.
It didn't matter the future and fortune she foretold; what mattered was her delivery...and the atmosphere. The whole time she was reading the cards and staring into my eyes, I could still hear her children in the living room, but that dose of realistic background noise greatly reduced the level of hokum: it didn't seem like a show. Sister Mary was dressed in ordinary, lounge-around-the-home clothing, and she never lit any candles or incense, nor did she ever darken the lights, or play any mood music. All she had were her instruments and her words and her versimilitude and her presence. These qualities, against a realistic backdrop--all unaffected--made for a compelling and believable performance.
Hence, Bright Eyes' "Four Winds," Conner Oberst's & co.'s cerebral re-imagining of Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" for a new era. Oberst--in full symbolist form*******--pens a satiric-apocalyptic poem full of heavy doses of Yeats and Twain and Lovecraft and Rushdie and Dylan. Lyrically, it comes across more-than-a-mite pretentious and arrogant. Musically, it's brilliant. Oberst's best vocals lie in this song, as he suppresses his worst tendencies--his too-sincere breathing, his too-precious pauses, his adenoidal delivery--in favor of singing the melody straight but passionately, all archness away. The country-folk instrumentation (Bright Eyes is a band) sounds sincerely country, and then there's the fiddle. Oh, my! Anton Patzner's licks are not only melodically memorable, but full of country soul also, as he seems to slightly rush and squeek at the end of a line, or dip and sway, pulling us in and letting us go and pulling us back again. In fact, Patzner's performance here is one of the best individual instrumental performances on a pop record in the past, oh, eighty years.
The music on this record is so good, that I believe it undercuts Oberst's message: what he's condemning in the lyric his band's in fact invoking. The spiritualism that Oberst (perhaps too********) smartly********* deconstructs he first has to construct, and his band gets a hold of that construction and never lets go. No matter the message, the messengers are so convincing and adept that we have no choice but to ride along and go with the flow, as we fall under sway, the words themselves mere constructs, conduits for what we perceive to be the spiritual truth because the tellers tell us so as they gaze and grip with such intensity that we dare not look away. We cave.
NOTES
*I want to note that I am not putting down trailers, as I once lived in one.
**I want to note that I am not putting down half-naked young'uns running around a toy-strewn living room. I might have back then, but I would never do so now. You should see my house. Then again, maybe you shouldn't.
***I want to note that I am not putting down love beads. If it were completely up to me, I'd put ours back up.
****This private and sacred shrine occupied what was once a closet.
*****She told me that she then went and played with the kids, but I distinctly remember hearing the trailer door shutting.
******I assumed she meant my friend, but she could have meant her--her meaning Sister Mary, speaking of herself in the third person. I mean, who knows sometimes, right?
******* All you college grads and religious researchers will have some serious party-time fun noting and detailing this song's every analogy.
********I've known several people who've believed this record was a religious song.
*********Smart, at least, in the sense that the lyric's symbolism (pretentious or not), though cryptic at first listen, actually works well as poetic symbolism, meaning it not only seems literary but it is. Second-rate poetry, maybe, but dead-on target.
Up this week: bands E-L. The battles are over on the right sidebar, so go vote!
This past week, the following metal acts left us:
Accept
Anthrax
Armored Saint
Autograph
Bad English
Bang Tango
Black n' Blue
Britny Fox
Alice Cooper
Danger Danger
Dangerous Toys
Dokken
while the following headbangers soldier on, and we'll see them again in three more weeks:
AC/DC
Aerosmith
Bon Jovi
Bulletboys
Cinderella
The Cult
Damn Yankees
Danzig
Def Leppard
Dio
as well as...Jon Bon Jovi. Solo. See, I made a boo-boo. So, in three weeks, we'll see Mr. Jovi's solo hits take on some of these survivors. We may even pit him against his own band. Hmm....
Anyway, exact results of this past week's intra-band battles:
10 ACDC’s “Hells Bells” v. Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got a Gun” 2 12 ACDC’s “Back in Black” v. Anthrax’s “Caught in a Mosh” 1 7 ACDC’s “Thunderstruck” v. Accept’s “Balls to the Wall” 4 12 ACDC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” v. Britny Fox’s “Girlschool” 0 7 ACDC’s “Who Made Who” v. Autograph’s “Turn Up the Radio” 5 7 ACDC’s “For Those About to Rock” v. Def Leppard’s “Bringin’ on the Heartbreak” 5 4 Aerosmith’s “Rag Doll” v. Def Leppard’s “Photograph” 8 3 Aerosmith’s “Love in an Elevator” v. Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” 9 9 Aerosmith’s “Angel” v. Bad English’s “When I See You Smile” 3 1 Anthrax’s “Madhouse” v. Def Leppard’s “Rock of Ages” 9 1 Armored Saint’s “Reign of Fire” v. Cinderella’s “Night Songs” 10 3 Bang Tango’s “Someone Like You” v. Damn Yankee’s “High Enough” 8 1 Black ‘n Blue’s “Hold on to 18” v. Cinderella’s “Heartbreak Station” 7 8 Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name” v. The Cult’s “Love Removal Machine” 2 7 Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” v. Def Leppard’s “Foolin’” 4 9 Bon Jovi’s “Runaway” v. Dio’s “Rainbow in the Dark” 2 3 Bon Jovi’s “I’ll Be There for You” v. Def Leppard’s “Hysteria” 8 9 Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer” v. Cinderella’s “Don’t Know What You’ve Got” 2 7 Bulletboys’ “Smooth Up in Ya” v. Dangerous Toys’ “Teas’n, Pleas’n” 2 9 Cinderella’s “Shake Me” v. Dokken’s “In My Dreams” 1 3 Cinderella’s “Somebody Save Me” v. The Cult’s “Firewoman” 7 4 Alice Cooper’s “Poison” v. Danzig’s “Mother” 6 7 The Cult’s “Wild Flower” v. Danger Danger’s “Naughty Naughty” 3 5 Dio’s “Holy Diver” v. Dokken’s “Dream Warriors” 3
It didn't matter the future and fortune she foretold; what mattered was her delivery...and the atmosphere. The whole time she was reading the cards and staring into my eyes, I could still hear her children in the living room, but that dose of realistic background noise greatly reduced the level of hokum: it didn't seem like a show. Sister Mary was dressed in ordinary, lounge-around-the-home clothing, and she never lit any candles or incense, nor did she ever darken the lights, or play any mood music. All she had were her instruments and her words and her versimilitude and her presence. These qualities, against a realistic backdrop--all unaffected--made for a compelling and believable performance.
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