Chris Dahlen's 9/11 piece in pitchfork today

I'm still waiting for one.

http://pitchforkmedia.com/features/weekly/05-03-28-pop-culture-of-911.shtml

At this risk of attacting scorn, I'd cite a track or two on the last Killing Joke album from 2003, which addressed current US foreign policy in the wake of 9/11.....notably "Blood On Your Hands," "Seeing Red" and "Total Invasion", but even those fail to address the whole picture. For me, anyway.

Loren MazzaCane Connors' The Departing of a Dream, although instrumental, is a hymn for 9/11 and very very worthy.

Yeah, I was wondering about the Basinski angle- as I see it, melancholy and memorialization are also critical and reflective modes, albeit oblique ones. It seems like he just regarded it as symptomatic of a certain shock rather than explanatory in a wider sense, and criticized the pieces for only working along those lines. Or something. I'd like to advocate for the A.G.F./Delay song "Explode Baby" which, though it's about a Palestinian suicide bombing and not directly about 9/11, seems to ripple outwards into a meditation on violence and attempts to understand terrorist violence, and of the many traps and romantic projections and obstacles that might prevent that understanding.

and then there's the Neil Young "goin' after Satan on the wings of a dove" fiasco

a sense of respect for the dead that is stifling
a worry that art might be inadequate or inappropriate as a response
leftist culture makers not wanting to lose market share to red state consumers (see cautionary tale of Dixie Chicks or Madonna's abrupt about face circa the "American Life" video)
a sense that we are so far "inside" the American POV that any attempt at the kind of "seeing both sides" flexibility that mature thoughtful responses require isn't quite possible
people stalling out and retrenching into ready to hand positions rather than genuinely taking up the situation itself
people copping out with the "they hate us because we are free" position, ie. wallowing in "victim" status, or nurturing an illusory sense of America as geopolitical "victim"
and so on

i think it's especially hard to write a song about 9/11 cuz it was experienced immediately or pseudo-immediately (via tv) by everyone. the best protest songs, like, say, "ohio," take a specific angle and run with it, portraying an event in a very particular light. but with 9/11 being replayed endlessly on television and analyzed continuously, achieving any sort of singular objective or even subjective angle was nearly impossible.

Dylan's film, set in a fascist dystopia, is the best music-related response so far.

I would humbly suggest the reason younger artists have been so tongue-tied is that our generation, insofar as we teased ourselves into submission on playgrounds during the Reagan/Clinto years, can't get over its all-purpose, sexy irony, the shackles of youth.

(x-post)

See, it's questions like these that actually guide the "post-9/11 responses in music," precisely because there can be no explicit "post-9/11 responses in music" or you get Fox News for three months after the attack -- gross mass catharsis, a channeling of energy from what you thought was legitimate mourning into a framework of thinking that only leads to further violence + ignorance. I'd argue that the most significant responses to 9/11 in music and pop culture haven't been responses to 9/11 at all, but to the massive political sinkhole opened up after the attacks -- and even then, they haven't been direct responses to that sinkhole, but weird sublimations, like, "holy shit, too heavy to deal with, listen to so and so and all his internal rhymes, listen to how that hook builds into this huge chorus that you can't escape from." Someone in another thread (can't remember who) was talking about how he/she couldn't read the news any more or follow up on current events because it was too traumatic. I think there are profoundly deep wounds in people's sense of the ethical and the politically moral after 9/11, and this is being dealt with through strange, slightly off parties instead of "The Rising," which can only make things worse...

xxx-post, lots of responses in the interim, some of them reflecting this..

He essentially stated that repetition in "The Disintegration Loops" represents a precise re-enacting of the events as they happened, as opposed to a replaying and correcting of the events as he (Dahlen) would have hoped for.

To me, this runs contrary to what "The Disintegration Loops" is about. It takes brief, bewildering moments of fear, melancholy, and shock and stretches those moments into hours. The reflection and explanation isn't there because those "source" moments don't leave any time for that sort of reaction.

So yeah, why Dahlen criticised the piece for being so submissive is a bit confusing.

If you care for discog info/comments:

Notes: Limited 1 sided 12 inch released after September 11 attacks, containing samples of people talking about the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon.
Also samples Marvin Gaye's "Inner City Blues (make me wanna holler)"

Tracklisting:
A Major Moments Of Instant Insanity

User Comments & Reviews:

dexterfeng - 23-Aug-02 09:23 AM
You'd have to be brave to play this one, very brave. It's just that slow. It's content based around the ushering in of that new era deal we got shortshifted on last year with the world trade centers going boom.
intense to say the least, with the changing chants. chants that sound like, famous letdowns, god knows where we live, memories, so fast, etc. along with the fire engine sirens, the random bits from the news and from the guy down the street from you, it's conscious & it'll hit you someplace, maybe even in the ass. you'll probably even get some tingles up the neck and a wispy eye as the record plays.
one of the better sound signature releases intended for the private stash of set phasers to kill records.

rossa - 03-Dec-03 05:01 AM
Limited Edition Sound Signature release. This is a really deep and serious track. The aftermath of the September 11th attacks. This is a musical landscape - a journey into panic and fear. Sampled voices show the varied reactions of people - in so many of the voices we hear fear , anger and ignorance : President Bush "The US will hunt down and punish those responsible" - is this the kind leader we want influencing the world? By contrast Theo includes a sampled voice of a man saying that none of the major world religions would call for an act of retaliation , that we are one in seeking peace and love. A major Theo moment for me but one that will sadly be heard by few. Marvin Gaye beautifully sampled "Panic is spreading" , "God knows where we're heading" . Just as then we ask "What's going on".

XXXXpost

Probably going too far, but . . . I think the widespread use of "child-like" strategies in recent indie art-making (music that evokes or sounds child-like, "childish" signifiers in graphic design, the resurgence of child-like, shaky, abject-looking line drawings in recent galleries and group shows, certain very popular singing voices, certain markedly lo fi production techniques that are back big time, predominance of tape hiss, the huge nostalgic return to certain key-pre 9/11 eras that are marked as "optimistic")- all of this is symptomatic of a certain critical desire to return/reverse historical trauma. If you hate it, you could call it a head-in-the-sand denial and a cowardly, impotent strategy. If you like it, you could call it a genuinely critical attempt to disavow the state of post-9/11 culture, its cultivation of "seriousness" and sobriety as it takes up the task of fighting its endless war on terror. Whether it's a cop out or a fuck you or a bit of both, all this goo goo ga ga bunny foo foo stuff is a refusal to be ideologically mobilized on behalf of ANY cause.

http://www.popmatters.com/music/interviews/trail-of-dead-050328.shtml

See, it's questions like these that actually guide the "post-9/11 responses in music," precisely because there can be no explicit "post-9/11 responses in music" or you get Fox News for three months after the attack -- gross mass catharsis, a channeling of energy from what you thought was legitimate mourning into a framework of thinking that only leads to further violence + ignorance.

Not sure if i follow you here, mate. I'm not trying to compartmentalize the issue, and i don't think honest questions like mine (and Dahlen's) do. This isn't a call for the creation of a new section at Sam Goody ("Post-9/11 Responses"), the question is how artists (specifically musicians) have dealt with the event. Music, art, literature is not created in a vacuum....let's not pretend that it is. Experiences, especially ones as cataclysmic as 9/11, naturally lead to expression, whether explicit or not.

I should say too I'm still hung up on how the Dylan album came out on 9/11. Love & Theft. Bizarre.

There was a point on the week after September 11th that I thought music in general would be entering a new seriousness or a breakthrough of sorts. I recall reading that when the atomic bomb was dropped in Japan many neoclassical/serial musicians were so shocked at the devastation and the strength of nuclear power, that they turned away from all musical schemes of the past, and turned towards electronic music, tape music, and musique concrete for inspiration in the new "atomic" era.

While I probably love fun as much as I love seriousness, I was thinking that 9/11 might affect musicians' mortality, in the fact that the guys from (insert corporate rock/pop/punk band here) might say "Wow, my safety has been threatened. I really should be doing something meaningful in my life, perhaps I should take the music I create more seriously."

[also the simpsons have made a number of references to 9.11 and the response to it.]

soooo many x-posts

xpost: That Green Day album isn't about 9/11, is it? I mean, it just sounds like a grown-up Dookie, themewise (i.e. not as good).

I could be wrong. I didn't even know how to spell Green Day right. Anyways my point was if it is 9/11-related, it's interesting Dahlen (and we) dive straight for the obscure and esoteric while ignoring the popular and obvious.

oh, i completely agree with you here, sorry if i was coming off as combative. i just think that the most telling 'responses' i've encountered haven't been responses at all -- and that the non-responsiveness of those non-responses show just how deep the cultural wound has been. artists that haven't addressed the issue have really addressed it; artists that have explicitly addressed the issue haven't really addressed it at all.

marx to thread!

1 Ashes to Ashes
2 Amerika V. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)
3 Conspiracy Theory Earle
4 John Walker's Blues Earle
5 The Kind Earle
6 What's a Simple Man to Do?
7 The Truth
8 Go Amanda
9 I Remember You
10 Shadowland
11 Jerusalem

1 Ashes to Ashes
2 Amerika V. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)
3 Conspiracy Theory
4 John Walker's Blues
5 The Kind
6 What's a Simple Man to Do?
7 The Truth
8 Go Amanda
9 I Remember You
10 Shadowland
11 Jerusalem

For To End Yet Again

Full of frequency
an unintelligible roar
of everything ever lived
or altogether avoided life

A storm of voices
and backward thoughts
through deserts of sand
through gutters of shite

Drums and flames
our bodies in ruins
and I say my name
without my voice

Speed increases
fucking all up
in a whirling wind
tearing all order apart
in order to rebuild order

Police, police, police
please stop the Euro
from binar bin Laden
Io paramount Pan
Io Paradox Pan

Don't fight it, you'll only
whirl up all mass hysteria
in your thousandfold self

We lost eachother
we slide unnoticeably
in hallucinatory orbit
around the sun
the black sun
oh black sun

PARTY TIME!!!!!!!1 WHERES MY SPARXXX????11!!

doooooooooooood, don't forget, on I Am The World Trade Center's debut that came out before the attack, the 11th track was called "September". heaaaaaaaaaaaaaavy.

Personally, I prefer thoughtful politics or subtle emotions over sloganeering. I also like morally or ethically complex questions as opposed to the tearjerking, fist thumping, bile spewing variety. I feel as someone on the left (self identifying again!), that the angry generalizing tract makes us more like what we despise on the right. Sloganeering has a time and place, like on my crust 7 inches.

Your mighty layers of sarcasm and irony have overwhelmed me! I don't even know what you mean!

Kid A is boring, but that's not even my objection. Somehow that record's listless onanism -- diddling softly while Rome burns -- along with related qualities in the equally blissless Yankee Hotel Foxtrot -- and, more to the point, the way both were received and revered in certain quarters -- will forever be bound up in my personal history of the early oughts with the dumbstruck uselessness of the Democratic Party in the face of the Bushco onslaught and the general inertness of mainstream Western liberalism at a time when it should have been doing pretty much anything but sitting still. Which is not to say that Kid A or YHF are either explicitly political or anything but symptoms of a deeper malaise, or even that they're historically uninteresting -- I think they are interesting, the way a low-grade fever is interesting.

I think that American pop music did take a turn, but it's going to be a few years before we're really able to analyze it -- more of a gradual shift where the focus was between September 2001 and April 2002. I don't think that too many of the songs that make specific references to events as their theme are going to have a long shelf life.

Sickboy "Worst Trade Central" was one of them.

http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=4869

Elephant Man "The Bombing"

All that I want is a shady lane..

Shady Records was 80 seconds away from the towers
Them cowards fucked with the wrong building
They meant to hit ours

Super Furry Animals - "Juxtaposed With U" (even if it was written before the fact and it's actually about housing prices. Doesn't matter.)

Runners up: "Bombs Over Baghdad" by Dr. Ring Ding and "Taliban Slam."

A few lines from Paris' "What Would You Do?":

"I see a message from the government, like every day
I watch it, and listen, and call them all suckers
They're warning me about Osama or whatever
Picture me buying the scam, I say 'never'"

"Now ask yourself, who's the one with the most to gain? -- BUSH!!! --
Before 9/11 motherfuckers couldn't stand his name"

"Ain't no terror threat unless approval rating's slumping"

"And while the Reichstag burns, see the public buy it / I see them profiling, see the media's compliance"

Bruce Russell from the Dead C made a music piece circa 2003 containing bits of interviews with Americans skeptical or critical of the war in Iraq.

The most fucked-up, graphic musical response to 9/11 is the Church of Euthanasia's "I Like to Watch" music video. It deals with the phallic horror aspect of it and the media's constant replaying of the collapse.

"The city is covered in inches of muck.
I see some more pictures of victims are up
Grieving mothers are thinking their children are stuck,
leaping lovers are making descisions to jump while holding hands,
to escape the brutal heat;
sometimes in groups of three.
The fallout was far beyond the toxic clouds where people look like debris
but all they say when all was said,
beyond the talking heads,
was the bloody dust with legs,
looking like the walking dead calling for meds.
All the hospitals overwhelmed,
volunteers need to go the hell home.
Moments of silence for firefighters were interrupted by cell phones.
Who's going to make that call, to increase an unknown death toll?
Its the one we rally behind.
He's got a megaphone, promising to make heads roll.
We'd cheer him on, but asbestos is affecting our breath control.
The less we know, the more they fabricate,
the easier it is to sell souls.

(Man talking)
There is a new price on freedom, so buy into it while supplies last.
Changes need to be made;
no more curbside baggage,
seven pm curfew,
racial profiling will continue with less bitching.
We've unified over who to kill, so until I find more relevant scripture to quote,
remember, our kind is bigger, stronger, smarter, and much wealthier.
So wave those flags with pride, especially the white part.

We're selling addictive, twenty-four hour candlelight vigils on TV.
Freedom will be defended at the cost of civil liberties.
The viewers are glued to television screens, stuck,
'cause lots of things seem too sick.
I use opportunities to pluck heartstrings for theme music.
I'll show you which culture to pump your fist at,
which foot is right to kiss.
We don't really know who the culprit is yet,
but he looks like this.
We know who the heroes are,
they're not the xenophobes who act hard.
We taught that dog to squat,
how dare he do that shit in our own back yard.
They happen to scar our financial state,
and char our landscape.
Can you count how many times so far I ran back the same damn tape?
While the cameraman creates news and shoves it down our throats,
on the west bank, with the ten second clip put on constant loop to provoke US angst.
So get your tanks and load your guns and hold your sons in a family huddle,
'cause even if we win this tug of war and even the score,
humanity struggles.
There's a need of blood for what's been uncovered under the rubble;
some of them dug for answers in the mess,
but the rest were looking for trouble."

From a performance perspective, it was definitely seeing El-P in Minneapolis on September 14 or 15, 2001. None of us knew what the fuck was going on, and he explained what he'd seen (from Brooklyn) and how it affected him. Then he played Patriotism.

Best pre-emptive responses: PJ Harvey, "Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea" or "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot"

Best response: maybe Ted Leo's "Ballad of the Sin Eaters" or Springsteen's "My City of Ruins" (written about New Jersey but retrofitted to 9/11)

well put, i see your point (especially w/ regards to YHT + the reception of both albums). i'm not with you on the 'diddling away' part, but that's personal + already done to death...

Elsewhere though, the more vague sentiments ("I would like to salute the ashes of American flags" being the only one that jumps to mind) strike me as more relevant or in-tune with the "sea change" you mentioned.

But still, as far as a discussion of artists creating a response to a given event, it doesn't make much sense to me to include works created before the event.