Acephalous

Against Springsteen

According to Rolling Stone, Bruce Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball is the best album released this year. Why? Because of lyrics like:

Gambling man rolls the dice, working man pays the bill.
It’s still fat and easy up on banker’s hill.

They “rage at corporate oligarchy and economic injustice,” things at which I’m raging too, so I completely understand why Rolling Stone would think they’re good: it agrees with them. There’s only one problem: they’re not. The state of political rhetoric is such that feeble statements of solidarity pass for insight. We’ve traded genius for blandished agreement, resulting in a situation in which we praise people for writing:

There ain’t no help.
The cavalry stayed home.

I wouldn’t be complaining were it not for the fact that, of all people, it’s Springsteen they’re praising for rehashing tired polemic. Because part of the reason I’m lefter than I’ve any right to be is that this same Springsteen fellow once made me feel the anger and hopelessness to which he only here alludes. If you’ve never seen the debut performance of “The River,” do yourself a favor and do so right now. I can wait.

Granted, “The River” isn’t an explicitly political song–it’s decidedly lacking in policy statements–but it’s a far more compelling vision of what lives are like “on account of the economy” than the broadsides found on Wrecking Ball. Let’s start with the titular and abiding image: a river. What are rivers like? To trade one bard for another, here’s John McPhee on the Mississippi in his “Atchafalaya“:

Southern Louisiana exists in its present form because the Mississippi River has jumped here and there within an arc about two hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand—frequently and radically changing course, surging over the left or the right bank to go off in utterly new directions. Always it is the river’s purpose to get to the Gulf by the shortest and steepest gradient. As the mouth advances southward and the river lengthens, the gradient declines, the current slows, and sediment builds up the bed. Eventually, it builds up so much that the river spills to one side. Major shifts of that nature have tended to occur roughly once a millennium. The Mississippi’s main channel of three thousand years ago is now the quiet water of Bayou Teche, which mimics the shape of the Mississippi. Along Bayou Teche, on the high ground of ancient natural levees, are Jeanerette, Breaux Bridge, Broussard, Olivier—arcuate strings of Cajun towns. Eight hundred years before the birth of Christ, the channel was captured from the east. It shifted abruptly and flowed in that direction for about a thousand years. In the second century a.d., it was captured again, and taken south, by the now unprepossessing Bayou Lafourche, which, by the year 1000, was losing its hegemony to the river’s present course, through the region that would be known as Plaquemines. By the nineteen-fifties, the Mississippi River had advanced so far past New Orleans and out into the Gulf that it was about to shift again, and its offspring Atchafalaya was ready to receive it.

The point being that rivers are forces of nature that even the Army Corps of Engineers can only control until the occasional Katrina. Going “down to the river,” as Springsteen’s narrator and compatriots do, is the contemporary equivalent of worshiping a mountain on account of its orogeny. It’s there and demands homage and besides where else are you going to go when that thing is there? The song begins with an idyllic, if limited, vision of life in America:

I come from down in the valley
where, Mister, when you’re young.
They bring you up to do, like your daddy done.
Me and Mary we met in high school,
When she was just seventeen.
We’d ride out of that valley, down to where the fields were green

That valley could be any valley, and the adjacent fields could be that green almost anywhere. There’s a little disillusioned defiance with the interjected “Mister,” letting you know that the tone of what follows is going to be a little belligerent. (You don’t “Mister” someone unless dudgeon’s on the rise.) Meaning that we have an annoyed narrator from a pastoral place, but at this point we have no idea why he’s annoyed. What did they do “[w]hen she was just seventeen”?

We’d go down to the river
And into the river we’d dive.
Oh, down to the river we’d ride

That’s the stuff of memories: he has his “Mary,” his “valley,” his “fields,” and he spent his time going “down to the river” and “div[ing]” in. Are we sure Mary’s name isn’t actually “Huck”?

Then I got Mary pregnant

We’re sure. But what happens to this little slice of an ideologically appealing America when Mary gets pregnant? I bet her nuclear family swarmed her with loving support and arranged a dream wedding and

Man, that was all she wrote.
And for my nineteenth birthday, I got a union card and a wedding coat.
We went down to the courthouse,
And the judge put it all to rest.
No wedding day smiles, no walk down the aisle,
No flowers, no wedding dress.

What happened to America, Man? Who exactly are you, Mister? In the space of two verses, Springsteen transformed America from an advertisement for the Shenandoah Valley into the urban pit in which affect scuttles to die. This verse begins with angry conjunctions: birthdays, which are supposed to be happy occasions, are conjoined by comma to a conjunctive clause whose necessity seems as unnecessary as the alliteration in this sentence, “a union card and a wedding coat.” That “and” there is deceptively correlative, as Springsteen’s delivery of the lyric hammers home: the narrator “got a union card and a wedding coat.” The vehemence that begins with the “and” encompasses the “wedding coat” in a way that makes it clear that the narrator resents the enforced necessity of this particular conjunction. Not that anything can be done about it. The flat affect Springsteen brings to the rest of the verse communicates that clearly: from “wedding coat” on his delivery is as listless as a trial transcript, and rightly so, since the narrator and Mary went “down to the courthouse,” where a “judge put it all to rest.” But what does that even mean?

The OED informs me that, by “put[ting] it all to rest,” the judge either “dispelled [their] fears” or “settled something (so as to be free of it).” Only he didn’t do either. The “something” that’s been “settled” here is amorphous mess of adolescent emotion that settles about as well as a biscuit cut from wet batter. It keeps its shape so long as it’s in the mold, but place it on a sheet and its edges bleed until its original form can’t be fathomed from the slop. That’s what marriage as a social convention is for: preventing the slop. But the narrator and Mary don’t experience marriage as a social convention so much as a bureaucratic one. Moreover, their ceremony is literally defined by the attributes it lacked: the “wedding day smiles,” “walk[s] down the aisle,” “flowers,” and “wedding dress[es]” to which the cruel world has said “No,” “no,” “No” and “no.” How does the couple celebrate this sterile occasion?

That night we went down to the river,
And into the river we dived.
Oh, down to the river, we did ride.

Of course they did. Except notice the difference between the first iteration of the chorus and this one. In the first, they “[would] go down to the river,” and “into the river [they would] dive,” and even though the contracted “would” marks the past tense, it’s expansive, in that it refers to multiple occasions in which they rode down and dove into the river. The openness of the phrasing is nostalgic. But the second time it comes around, the chorus refers to a specific time and ride and dive: their wedding night, which they marked by doing what they’d always done, only differently, deliberately. That night they “did ride.” Who “[does] ride” somewhere? People with a purpose “[do] ride” somewhere. Except the narrator and Mary “did ride” to a place that isn’t a place. (Don’t make me quote Heraclitus.) On the night in which they bound themselves together, permanently, they ventured out to the very image of impermanence itself: a flowing river in whose bed nothing settles, no matter what a judge says. I’m sure this’ll be a happy union.

Now all them things that seemed so important,
Well Mister they vanished right into the air.
Now I just act like I don’t remember,
Mary acts like she don’t care.

But at least they have their memories, right? The narrator only “act[s] like [he] don’t remember,” and Mary only “acts like she don’t care,” which suggests that they both actually do, which makes everything more horrible. At least it can’t get any worse.

But I remember us riding in my brother’s car,
Her body tan and wet down at the reservoir.
At night on them banks I’d lie awake,
And pull her close just to feel each breath she’d take.

So he remembers, but the slight uptick in the tempo suggests a kind of resurgence, as if this memory is something he draws strength from despite the fact that “pull[ing] her close” is how his troubles started in the first place. The tense has expanded again: the contracted “would” no longer refers to a particular moment, but to composite memory of a life’s worth of them. This is good, right?

Now those memories come back to haunt me,
They haunt me like a curse.
Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true,
Or is it something worse?

There is no good here. He’s not haunted by a single memory, but by a monstrous agglomeration of them. And it’s cursed. It’s not enough to double-down on the verb “haunt” in a repetitious construction that’s structured like a confession, these memories must “haunt [him] like a curse.” Which makes no sense, because curses don’t “haunt” people, they “follow” them. Unless, of course, these memories are just a dream, and that dream is just a lie that didn’t come true, in which case the curse is something worse. Therein lies the power of this lyric. It begins understandably enough, with memories haunting the narrator, but then the memories turn into a curse; then the narrator asks someone, presumably the “Mister” to whom the song’s addressed, a simple-sounding question that leads into a conceptual quagmire of horribleness. I could diagram that question for you, but it wouldn’t help because, fundamentally, it doesn’t make any sense. It evokes a state of confused desperation instead of detailing the circumstances of it, much like the monster in a horror film that’s far scarier when its figure is implied than when it appears on screen.

And as for that beacon of hope, the river? The narrator still goes down to it, “though [he] know[s] the river is dry.” His life has become an empty gesture of defiance. Why? On account of the economy. It’s a single phrase in a song whose power emanates from elsewhere, and yet it resonates far more soundly than “[i]t’s still fat and easy up on banker’s hill.” Those who already agree with Springsteen will applaud him for that line. But people—ideology be damned—who listen to “The River”?

They might could be converted.

Yes, Governor Christie, I'm sure this will impress him.

You have to feel for Chris Christie. The biggest political speech of his life and he backdrops himself thus:

If that looks familiar, that's because if you have anything resembling taste it damn well should:

Christie loves him some Springsteen. Grew up listening to and idolizing the Bard of the Badlands. The feeling's mutual:

Despite heroic efforts by Christie, Springsteen, who is still a New Jersey resident, will not talk to him. They’ve met twice—once on an airplane in 1999, and then at the 2010 ceremony inducting Danny DeVito into the New Jersey Hall of Fame, where they exchanged only formal pleasantries. (Christie does say that Springsteen was very kind to his children.) At concerts, even concerts in club-size venues—the Stone Pony, in Asbury Park, most recently—Springsteen won’t acknowledge the governor. When Christie leaves a Springsteen concert in a large arena, his state troopers move him to his motorcade through loading docks. He walks within feet of the stage, and of the dressing rooms. He’s never been invited to say hello. On occasion, he’ll make a public plea to Springsteen, as he did earlier this spring, when Christie asked him to play at a new casino in Atlantic City. “He says he’s for the revitalization of the Jersey Shore, so this seems obvious,” Christie told me. I asked him if he’s received a response to his request. “No, we got nothing back from them,” he said unhappily, “not even a ‘Fuck you.’”

Did I write "mutual"? I meant the opposite of mutual. You have to wonder about someone who embraces a musician this deeply without listening to a damn thing he sings. The disconnect between lyric and listener is borderline sociopathic: if you spend your nights ears-deep in working-class tales of toil and despair and your days enacting policies that guarantee a future full of working-class tales of toil and despair, people may begin to suspect that you've embraced some strange form of patronage-by-poverty. They may begin to think that you're trying to manufacture the social conditions necessary to create a newer, "better" Springsteen whose "convictions" won't interfere with yours because you'll have whispered the Gospel of the Free Market in his ear from the moment you turned him into a foundling. Not that you murdered his parents, mind you, they're just not in his life anymore. And then years later, when you successfully run for President, you and your pet Springsteen will tour the country and your rallies will begin with your pet's new hit, "Burn Down the U.S.A.," a rousing tune about the virtues of small government.

People may begin to consider that you indulge in this pathetic fantasy because you're as small of mind as you are large of body, and the man whose approval you so desperately seek won't even begrudge you a "Fuck you."

JUST IN CASE SOMETHING OR OTHER (WITH PRETTY DAMNING LYRICS):

A list of people whose deaths I have permission to mourn.

An annoying anonymous person writes:

Why is it any time anyone hipsters or academics are supposed to like dies, they just so happen to be very important never-before-mentioned influences on your life? Are you really so needy that there's no death you won't use as an excuse to call attention to yourself?

Although this comment belongs to the tedious category of "complaints about bloggers having blogs and writing about stuff on them," it nevertheless struck a chord: first, because the size of the community grieving for Alex Chilton surprised me; and second, it seems to be a dangerous time to be a living artist or academic who changed my life.  That said, this annoying anonymous person is reading in bad faith: not everyone who influenced me did so greatly or uniquely, which is why I noted Kurt Vonnegut's passing in passing, as a "Vonnegut phase" is required to join the community of readers.  The same cannot be said of those academics and artists with whom I shared an intimate relationship over many years, which is why I wrote individual remembrances of Octavia Butler, David Foster Wallace, Howard Zinn, or Alex Chilton. 

If I seem to be too familiar a type, blame central casting: academics play the part because that's the part they've been asked to play.  That there seems to be a wider community of similarly interested intellectuals is, to my mind, a sign that while academic disciplines may be irrevocably balkanized, something resembling a larger intellectual culture still exists.  Whether this cultural homogeneity is a good thing depends on what it actually contains, and given how surprising Chilton's inclusion image was to me, I probably should refrain from saying much more about it. 

However, in light of the recent proliferation of lists like this, I think I'll take a moment to silence future scolds by listing all living authors, musicians, and filmmakers with whose work I feel a deeply irrational kinship.  They may not still move me as they once did, but they once did and when they die a little bit of me will too.  

I do believe it all makes sense now (and if you don't agree with that you're a pretentious Martian from Venus).

Via The Guardian, a testament to my taste making sense:

The long walk back to the real world.

How do conservatives reconcile their cultural tastes with their partisan politics? I don’t mean generally, because generally the answer is they don’t think about their media consumption any more than your average liberal. I mean specifically, that is, when they do consider how the media they consume intersects with the beliefs they profess, what happens? Thanks to Andrew Breitbart, we now have a daily glut of valuable insight into what it is to be a conservative for whom music, literature and film don’t nadir after Beethoven, Shakespeare and Bogart. Admittedly, some of the revelations are old hat, as with Breitbart’s confession of how certain conservatives really feel about the working poor:

Whoever cast the Boston grotesques that littered the film, my hat’s off to you. These profoundly ugly people really created a backdrop that made you want to root for the kid not to be found and brought back to her natural origins.

But most of Big Hollywood is so awesomely counter-intuitive Walter Benn Michaels wouldn’t touch it with your ten-foot pole. Exhibit A: Evan Sayet’s post on Bruce Springsteen’s secret conservatism, in which he claims

that, while Springsteen the multimillionaire, rock star with the mansion in Beverly Hills may be a Liberal, Bruce Springsteen the poet is one-hundred percent Republican.

Those of you currently reading Dante in your sophomore English classes take note: Sayet someone out. Not that I need to tell you this, but the Commedia is written by Dante the Man about Dante the Pilgrim as narrated by Dante the Poet. The Poet is the fiction’s conceit—the character who remembers and recalls what happened after he found himself per una selva oscura—and is not to be treated coextensive with Dante the Man. I invoke Dante here because Springsteen, like Dante, is frequently confused for his narrators by people who should know better. No one reads “Caliban upon Setebos” and mistakes the theological musings of Prospero’s deformed manservant for a definitive statement of Browning’s philosophy; whereas with Springsteen, every word his narrators utter is an expression of his personal beliefs even when he opens with a lyric like “[m]y name is Joe Roberts.”

Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?

(x-posted.)

Obama’s “palling around with terrorists,” yes he is:

Because a real American would’ve planted his platform right smack in front of the Liberty Bell, yes he would.

This isn’t to say I’m still waiting for the folks who attack Obama for his connection to Ayers to acknowledge that the man who financed the Annenberg Challenge—a.k.a. Annenberg—was a close, personal friend of Ronald Reagan.  Because they won’t, you know.

Wouldn’t suit “the narrative.”

The fact that it’s Annenberg who gave Ayers the $50M these folks claim is proof of Obama’s ideological kinship with the Weather Underground is irrelevant, because, well, because.  Reagan was a patriot. Played “Born in the U.S.A.” at every—I mean, it’s not like that guitar-totin’ fellow in the picture knows jack about Philadelphia—

—Obama is a terrorist, alright?  Just vote for McCain already and I’ll shut up.  Ain’t that motivation enough?

Iraq, Katrina and Illegal Immigration

A talking head on CNN tonight argued the issues most important to minority voters would be 1) Iraq, 2) the Bush administration's response to Katrina and 3) illegal immigration.  My mind, being mine, immediately constellated the three and returned a memory of the perfect lyric:

"Hey kid, you think that's oil?
That ain't oil that's blood."
I wonder what he's thinking when he hit that storm—
Or was he just lost in the flood?

Then:

And some kid comes blastin' round the corner,
But a cop puts him right away.
He lays on the street holding his leg screaming something in Spanish,
Still breathing when I walked away.

And somebody said, "Hey man did you see that?
His body hit the street with such a beautiful thud."
I wonder what the dude was saying—
Or was he just lost in the flood?

It sounds better than it looks.  But doesn't it look topical?  A song about a veteran returned back from the front; the mistaking of blood for oil; a tale about overzealous police employing excessive force.  It could be topical. 

It isn't.  Not in the least.  But damn is it ever evocative: