Cooler Than Thou

Some people wonder how I ever became a conservative at all.

Let's start with three bits of background.

First: I've been doing music much, much longer than I've been doing politics. I started on the cello when I was 10. Since then, I've picked up the guitar, bass, drums, mandolin, harmonica, pennywhistle/recorder (pretty badly, mostly Pogues songs), keyboards (even worse), curan, and bagpipes. I've done just about every kind of music that one could expect a typical middle-American to do for fun, profit, curiosity or on a dare; classical, jazz, sacred, patriotic, folk (American, British, Continental, some Turkish), bluegrass, show tunes at a summer stock theater and in the Twin Cities theatre scene, blues, country, and of course rock and roll in all of its infinite variations - garage rock, art rock, punk, speed metal, whatever. I've played concert halls, coffee shops, bars, open stage nights, and on the streets of Minneapolis, Basel and Köln. I'm a musician, and not just any musician, but one that moved to the Twin Cities with the express intention of being the next Paul Westerberg; I wrote a few nifty songs over the years, some of which may even come to this website before too long. And yet then as now I was a Republican.

Second: I also majored in English in college (with minors in History and German, and enough credits for minors in Music and Theatre, but they were mostly performance credits). I learned to not just read literature for fun, but to analyze it for a grade, and to love doing it. And yet I'm a conservative.

Third: I'm a Bruce Springsteen fan. It's no secret, if you've read this blog over the years. But it's gotten a lot lonelier in the past year or so. While Republican rock and rollers are scarce as hen's teeth (the late Johnny Ramone and the generally uninspiring Ted Nugent are about it), Springsteen was generally a "safe" choice; he generally abjured politics, although his nakedly populist music left few illusions as to where his sympathies lay. Until last year, anyway, when he started actively campaigning for John Kerry. That was the final straw for a lot of conservatives. But I can generally let it slide, since I doubt a musician has ever influenced my politics, one way or another. So I'm still a fan.

Why should you care? That's simple. You need not.

How does it tie in with the flap over the playlist on the President's iPod? And the larger question - what is it about conservatives and art?

I'm not sure. I'll figure it out in the extended section.

It started last week, when the Fraters' J.B. Doubtless penned a fisking of the Springsteen classic "Johnny 99" (covered by a plethora of other artists including Johnny Cash, about whom no wrong may be said these days).

J.B. wrote:

I have Sirius radio and I like it. But one channel (Outlaw Country) will not stop playing perhaps one of the worst songs ever to hit vinyl: Bruce Springsteen's Johnny 99 from his much-hyped and much-heralded-by-lefty-critics album "Nebraska."

Instead of just ranting about what a bunch of garbage this song is and how it so perfectly illustrates the modern liberal, I will resort to a song fisking.

Which he did. Fisk the song, I mean. It didn't have so much to do with "the modern liberal", or for that matter the song. But we'll get to that.

Now, I won't even go into the delicious irony of a guy who calls "Afternoon Delight" a wonderful song when, indeed, the Danoff/Nivert ditty (the same people that wrote John Denver's "Country Roads") showed how close the commies came to winning in the seventies; it, along with "Seasons In The Sun" by Terry Jacks, was the perfect anthem for those days of malaise, Brady Bunch, WIN buttons and the Ford Mustang II; pleasant, deeply mediocre, and utterly forgettable. Not that pleasant mediocrity doesn't have its place; J.B. cites "Chevy Van" by Sammy John, and I see him and raise him Henry Gross' "Shannon"...

But J.B.'s review was, like a lot of conservatives' reviews of various kinds of art, pretty much a point by point scold, telling the song's character (a guy who loses his job, gets hammered, kills a store clerk, gets sentenced to death, wishes he were dead anyway) how he should have acted.

I poked a bit of gentle fun at J.B. - but the whole thing brings up a question I run into a lot when I talk about art with conservatives; what are music, literature, visual art, drama, dance and all the other kinds of art supposed to be?

Because if it's supposed to be a recitation of people doing the right thing at the right time for the right reasons and getting the right results, most of Western art - literature, visual art, film, opera, drama, and of course music from the classical to today - would be very different.

Let's review some of the classics of Western art through the lens of the "Do The Right Thing" school of criticism:

• Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" - "Criminy. Enough with the hubris! Brutus and Antony - hire a friggin' lawyer and settle your grievances like normal people! You're acting like MoveOn.org here!"
  
• On The Waterfront - "Jeez, Brando - have you ever heard of the F B Freaking I?"
  
• Anna Karenina - "You slut! You freakin' skeeze! You see how much trouble you'd have saved yourself if you'd have just followed your bleepity-blank wedding vows? And we're supposed to feel sorry for you?"
  
• Iron Chef - "What's with the frou-frou presentation? Just plop the stuff on a plate while it's still hot!"
  
• Huckleberry Finn - "Look, just get Jim the Slave to the north! Stay on the river, do what you have to do, and move on!"
  
• Don Giovanni - "Well, duh! Giovanni and Leporello, if they were rational people, would repent for murdering the Commandant before he drags them to hell. Duh!"
  
• Picasso's Guernica - "OK, the Spanish Civil War is over, and if the commies had won Picasso would have never painted it. Why do we care about this painting anymore?"
  
• Moby Dick - "So Ahab would risk everyone's life because he's pissed at a whale? Where are his priorities?..."
  
• Casablanca - "Jeez, Rick. You know that giving Lazlo the letters of transit is the right thing to do. Cut the dramatics and just do it!
  
• Crime And Punishment - "Why spend a whole novel on a snooty pretentious little artiste who thought he was so superior to the people arround him that he could justify hacking his landlady to death? String him up and be done with it! Fifty pages at the most!"
  
• War And Peace - "WHY ARE YOU SLEEPING WITH DOLOKHOV, you stupid IDIOT?"
  
• Rocky - "Jeez, he's working as a knee-buster for a loan shark! If he'd just gotten his crap together and taken a computer programming course and gotten a job and some stock options, he'd be rich right now, and his nose would still be straight!"

Art, in whatever form, among many other things is about places and times and situations that you aren't in, getting inside minds other than your own. Sometimes the place is somewhere you've never been; sometimes its a different view of where you are now. Sometimes the mind is that of someone intrigueingly, frustratingly, even horrifyingly different than your own. Somtimes the situation is mundane, or glorious, or wrenchingly horrific.

Sometimes the place is the gym, and you just want something to listen to while you shoot for your target heart rate.

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The controversy - which has ripped the Northern Alliance asunder, let me tell you - took another turn early this week, when the Fraters' Atomizer quoted a Rolling Stone writer's review of...the contents of the President's iPod:

This is basically boomer rock 'n' roll and more recent music out of Nashville made for boomers. It's safe, it's reliable, it's loving. What I mean to say is, it's feel-good music. The Sex Pistols it's not.

Oy. Pretty snooty, huh?

J.B., on a roll, has the President's back:

There seems to be an unstated assumption amongst this crowd that people are looking to music for wisdom, insight, guidance or political suggestion. Anything that doesn't provide that is not Important. Most normal people (who have never uttered the phrase "_________ saved me life" whatever that means) want music to sound pleasant with an occasional turn of phrase that is interesting, or to set a particular mood.

J.B. comes perilously close to the truth here, without quite hitting it.

Art, if it's any good, is about manipulation. It can be a conscious thing - George Orwell's veiled anti-Stalinism - or totally unconscious, like filling an iPod with upbeat aerobic music to take one's mind off your exertion at the gym. It can even be carefully calculated, like J.B. putting the Al Greene or Starland Vocal Band on the turntable to impress the Doubtlessette.

Art is also about conflict; about challenging yourself and others to see things around you differently. Casablanca was a ripping yarn - but it also challenged isolationism. Lord Of The Rings - the book and the movie - were pseudo-mythic fables; they also allegories about good and evil, World War I, and religious faith. Art doesn't have to make you turn on your brain - but it's a whole lot more interesting if it does.

Do "most people" want music to serve as pleasant background noise? Maybe, in the same sense that there are people who want their art to be velvet Elvi and their literature to be from Harlequin and their sculpture to be hummels and their food to be on a plate with a side of mashed potatoes. Art can be ambient audio candy, bathroom and beach reading, a nice accent to set off the color of your new couch; it can make your beloved hornier, your nights out funnier, or your mood funkier. All of it makes the here and now just a tad more pleasant. There is nothing wrong with that.

But as J.B. says; yes. Sometimes, some of us are looking to art for something else. Forget about the ones that say ""_________ saved me life" - that's a bit of post-adolescent dramatics that most people outgrow and eventually laugh as they look back on it.

Every once in a while a piece of art comes along and challenges you to...do something. Think? Explore the world? Explore your preconceptions? Ponder whether you've really considered all the possibilities? Change your political orientation?

Yes, J.B., art changed my political orientation. In my case, it was a combination of Dostoevskii's Crime and Punishment and The Possessed, Solzhenitzyn's books including the fictional Animal Farm, along with a lot of non-fiction (and a lot of P.J. O'Rourke's articles) kicked off the thinking that started my slide to the right. It does cut both ways (and yes, it does make me a better conservative than someone who's always been one. Sorry).

And yeah, there are times when I'm buying exactly what J.B.'s selling; I want ear candy to make me feel...something. I play Stevie Ray to get raunchy, the Sex Pistols to psych myself up for housework, Tchaikowskii or Mahler on rainy days...

...and Springsteen?

Well, here we go.

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Springsteen wandered through a bunch of different styles early in his career; Greetings from Asbury Park's faux-Dylan, E Street Shuffle's anarchic pseudo-Manhattan R&B. On Born to Run, Darkness On The Edge Of Town and The River, the people who didn't "get it" figured the music was all about cars, girls and driving all night. For the rest, it was about all that, plus what happens to all that when you...gasp...gotta grow up. For those of us who were there and doing that, it was pretty affecting stuff.

Then came Nebraska, which smacked of Steinbeck and O'Connor and lots of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. And for the first time, Springsteen took you on the road with people who weren't like you, who you couldn't, God willing, identify with; the down-on-his-luck schmuck in Atlantic City, the blase murderers in Nebraska, the assortment of people struggling with faith in "Reason To Believe", the cop and his disturbed wastrel brother in Highway Patrolman, and the deeply unsympathetic thug in Johnny 99.

J.B. slams Johnny 99 for focusing on the character of the killer, and tossing his victim aside like an empty beer can:

And all of the deep thinkers are supposed to think deeply about capital punishment and criminals and society and there but for the grace of God go I and Alan Alda and caring for the less fortunate--but not the innocent person that was killed by this worthless animal.

The point is, you can think whatever you want. The "Macalester crowd" can ponder what made this ostensibly normal guy do something so monstrous. Or you can react like J.B., which is as good as any. Or you can listen - and by listen, I mean not just to the song and the singer, but to the character in the story - and think "OK, the character is a deeply narcissistic person; he's destroyed his life, the clerk's (who he - not Springsteen, mind you - doesn't bother to name), his mother's, and yet all he can think about is his problems. I hope they do fry his solopsistic ass!", or whatever else you can find in there.

And you can take away from it any thing you want. Which is why "Johnny 99" is one of the greatest songs from one of the five best American records of the last 25 years, not in spite of its moral ambiguity, but because it leaves those big, ugly questions out there, for you to wrestle with.

And if you want, you can wrestle with them. Or you can put some Toto on your iPod and go biking. It's a free country.

Posted by Mitch at April 15, 2005 08:02 AM | TrackBack