Music, protest, 9/11, etc.

But is it a good article or not? Is it reporting, lecturing or hectoring or all three? And is the description at the end of the piece of Ms. Nuchow's well-meaning work the type of thing that would just make you *more* mad if you were there? (Crabby bastard that I am, I would be...I think I would have preferred to hear silence first and foremost.)

Actually, I realized one point in particular bugs:

But perhaps, in this connected world, we also possess accelerated expectations. History shows that radical ideas don't take hold overnight. World War II's hit parade featured sentimental escapism like Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" and sugary patriotism like the Andrews' Sisters "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy."

There's a strange implication here I don't like, though it's hard for me to put it into words. Suffice to say that if BushCo overdetermines with its 'axis of evil' comments and the like, this seems like a perverse overdetermination in another direction.

Put this on NYLPM, Ned, when your thoughts are in order.

But my BRAIN hurts. DOCTOR! DOCTOR!!

Can't you see I'm burning? BURNING!!!

The pop culture train continues...in the name of love, yeah.

It's a good article. I guess what seems strange in that paragraph is labeling "White Christmas" as escapism, though considering it was such a wildly popular record I can see how the force of its collective impact might have been a momentary distraction.

it is odd that "White Christmas" and "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" are singled out for abuse, since (A) they're great records and (B) they were both v. v. important as wartime distractions that acknowledged the existence of the war. rhetorical question: what did she want, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy"?

'the indie-punk scene began as a highly charged opposition to Reaganism'...!

Hm, you're right, how did I miss that one! If you were in DC, maybe.

Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" turned defiance into a raging, soaring, brave and melancholic gestures of community.
I got the community aspect but what the antiwar part? A line or two?
Nice to see it doesnt mention Keep On rockin In The Freeworld at all. Now where is the obligatory mention of Teenage Riot?

Now that I finsihed the article does it say anything? Am I missing the point? Or is it just bad journalism?

Protest culture requires a culture of protest. The worst of the anti-glob kids listened to despicable nu-folk with flat message and terrible skilz. Hip-hop may yet provide something, but is caught in that intersection between the church and the crackhouse. If you want protest songs, you need people (better yet RALLIES) to sing them to. Even the anti-war liberals are all touchy about stepping on toes right now.

Ned: Maybe part of what rankles in that WWll Hit Parade is historical inaccuracy.

It pulls the rug out from under the article's own argument to point to the "sugary patriotism of the Andrews Sisters", given that even the radical folkies of the day had come on-side at that point: Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger's Almanac Singers dabbled in isolationist anti-conscription songs (Songs For John Doe) early in the war, but by 1942 were releasing such "protest" records as Seeger's Dear Mr. President:

"Now, Mr. President/ We haven't always agreed in the past, I know/ But that ain't at all important now/ What is important is what we got to do/ We got to lick Mr. Hitler, and until we do/ Other things can wait /In other words, first we've got a skunk to skin."

Guthrie put it less subtley:

"Now I wished I had a bushel Wished I had a peck Wished I had old Hitler With a rope around his neck."

These songs still took on domestic issues such as Jim Crow, but the over-riding sentiment was anti-fascist. It would take Hiroshima to get the anti-government sentiment boiling over again in American song ("Einstein says he's scared/And when Einstein's scared I'm scared"-- Vern Partlow, Atomic Talking Blues). And even that didn't provoke the immediate outrage of the Guthrie/Seeger camp the way our "accelerated expectations" would have us believe. (There might be an interesting parallel to be drawn here vis-a-vis Momus' recent comments on the curious reticence of B. Bragg lately...)

Anyway. Being a "sugary patriot" had much different implications in that era, and this article makes a mistake by trying to encapsulate protest music as a genre which doesn't a-change with the times. To suggest that the America of 1942 and that of 2002 are similar places politically is frankly bizarre.

The kind of protest music this article is dealing with actually WAS being written during WWll, incidentally. By Shostakovich and Prokoviev, among others.

"WWll Hit Parade COMMENT", I meant to begin that with...

Thank ya, Mr. Jones, you both put it better than I could and had the detailed info which I didn't possess. I hope you don't mind; I just copied that post in a brief note to Alternet.

Crediting you, I should note, don't worry! :-)

Sure thing, Ned. The credit really goes to Google though, I'm afraid... if I actually committed Woody Guthrie lyrics to memory, I might awake one morning transformed into a Braggesque troubadour myself. That's how it happens, I hear.

This is particularly tru since the left wing of the cultural establishment had been communist party until the rupture when the stalin-hitler pact was signed and the CP went abruptly isolationist for the brief span until Germany invaded Russia. During that span, the cultural crowd either abandoned the CP and moved strongly right (more strongly pro intervention, anti-communist, etc.) or stuck with the cp and the isolationist line until the CP returned to the Roosevelt fold and became pro-intervention itself. Hence, radical opposition in U.S. to WWII = trotskyists, shactman-led ex-trotskyists, John L. Lewis. All of whom got v.v.v. little sympathy from the American public.

Note that there WUZ exactly this civil-rights type stuff akin to Outkast's "The Whole World" in gist.

Also, I expect there will be "protest cultcha" from other nations in much greater quantities, but largely along the line of "fuck the usa"