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Old wounds and the new right

Last night Peter forwarded a particularly pointed commentary on Bruce Springsteen's forthcoming album of Pete Seeger covers, written by Paul Mulshine of the Star-Ledger, the largest paper in New Jersey. It is headlined (and do I wish I'd written this head), "If I had a hammer, I'd take it to Springsteen's new record."

Now, I don't know Mr. Mulshine at all, but sure as I type that he'll be across the table from me at dinner next week during SXSW. Nor am I all that much a fan of Springsteen's work. I think I've finally worked my way up to neutral. Perhaps that's a consequence of the seven years I spent working in the same office which produced Backstreets magazine, typesetting that book, and doing one or two other chores for that part of Charles Cross's former business. When I started work Charlie sorta chuckled when I told him I didn't own any Bruce (I'd typeset the headliines for the first issue, even) and handed me a Dutch pressing of Nebraska, which is still as close as I come to really understanding Bruce's attraction. I count Backstreets alum Erik Flannigan as a good friend, and think highly of the current Backstreets publisher, Chris Phillips (and, by extension, of his brother, who publishes a fine magazine about books,called Bookmarks).

Once Charlie had extra tickets, and so I was 20-odd rows back at the Tacoma Dome during the Tunnel of Love tour. That's my Bruce credential. I felt the same way that night I did some years later at Al Green's church.

I am not, shall we say, a true believer.

And, like Mr. Mulshine, I have some difficulty with the populist pose of one of rock's biggest stars. I've always thought it a shallow, comfortable role that his audience now demands he play, and maybe he's not capable of more, and maybe I'm just not capable of hearing it. It always felt, to me, as if he (or his people) let "Born in the USA" be co-opted by the right because it helped sell records during the Reagan jugernaut, confident that his core audience understood he was being misunderstood. And so I was gratified when Springsteen stepped out and spoke out during the last election cycle. That, at least, involved some risk, particularly these days, and when artists fear to risk they are no longer capable of making art.

"Sing," John Cale sang, "fear is a man's best friend."

In any event, I'm pleased to see such blunt commentary in print, for most of the younger generation of rock critics (and, again, I've no idea of Mr. Mulshine's age) seem uncomfortable clearly voicing strong opinions.

"Springsteen may be a hell of a rocker but he is an awful folk singer," Mulshine writes. I'd mumble that maybe Nebraska, and perhaps Tom Joad, argue otherwise, but...OK.

A few lines down as Mulshine talks about the downloadable version of "We Shall Overcome" that I've not heard: "The first thing you will notice about it is that Springsteen is singing in a sort of generic middle-American drawl. The second thing you will notice is that he is singing out of tune. The effect is to create a false air of authenticity."

Now, one of the things I've been meaning to write about here is the whole dragon chase for authenticity. My current hunch is that it's one of those things one becomes concerned with at certain phases of investigating roots music, but that, ultimately (to borrow, again, from Castaneda), it is a path without heart. Either the music draws you in, or it doesn't, and there is artifice involved as soon as a second person steps into the room where the sound is being made.

It does, however, seem a little curious to charge a veteran rock star with inauthenticity. He puts on a show. He pours water on his head to look like he's sweating more. He paces his presentation so it looks and feels like he's playing for hours without limit, but, in fact, he is husbanding his strength for the next night and creating the illusion, as best he can, that we're still in the unfettered days of his youthful explosion on the scene. Or that's my theory, anyhow. And the fact that he has mastered stagecraft neither adds to nor subtracts from my respect from his work; that's PART of his work, after all.

None of which, alas, is what emboldened me to start typing about Mr. Mulshine's critique. It was, instead, the next paragraph:

"[Pete] Seeger was just as bad in this regard. While posing as a humble hick, Seeger was in fact a Harvard dropout who adopted a folksy air as a means of inflicting his Marxist views on audiences."

And there we have it: The old, old wounds, recalibrated for this generation.

I grew up believing Communism to be one of many 19th century utopian philosophies, and aware that Karl Marx had felt Russia to be the state least suited to its application. I read Trotsky in the 8th or 9th grade. I don't think I had any illusions about Stalin, nor any real understanding of Mao (who stares, in poster form, at my back as I type; just because I like the artwork of the cultural revolution, not because I endorse its precepts; and because I like the fact that Mao and Johnny Cash are across the room from each other).

I grew up believing that some form of socialism would prove the natural evolution of our democratic experiment, that it was our obligation as thinking, caring individuals in the richest nation on earth to provide a floor beneath which we did not permit our fellow citizens to fall. I still believe that, incidentally. I don't believe in utopian philosophies anymore; they are always engineered as if the human race were as bright and well-meaning as the philosophers who seek to perfect them. Er... us. But I believe in getting as close as we can. In the striving.

The role of the post-Depression American socialists/communists/liberals seems increasingly complex, the better I come to understand it. It is difficult, even today, for me to reconcile the evidence that the Rosenbergs really were spies. It makes perfect sense, in the aftermath of the Depression, that working people would look toward some system that more evenly divided wealth. It makes perfect sense that Civil Rights acativists would take help from wherever it was offered, that the American Communist Party would seek both to support (because it was the right thing) and to co-opt (because it was an opportunity) that movement.

The folksinging left put itself on the line for union workers and civil rights. So did a lot of other people. Some of them were in the thrall of various political ideologies, and many worked through several such groups trying to find something that worked, that made sense. Plus or minus their guiding ideologies, I continue to believe that the difficult work they did was worth doing, and that we are a much better country for their efforts.

Lots of people were or thought they were Marxists in the 1930s and 1940s. Many of them paid dearly for that freedom of thought in the 1950s, including Pete Seeger. One of my favorite obscure musicians, the late composer Conlon Nancarrow (from Arkansas; for most of his working life he lived in Mexico City and wrote music for player piano rolls), fought in the Lincoln Brigade in Spain, as I recall, and was banned from returning to the United States as a Premature Anti-Fascist.

Are we, then, to deny the music, the work, the effort of Pete Seeger (or Nancarrow) because he once believed in something which proved inconvenient later on?

Are we not allowed to learn, to change our mind?

Rather more to the point: We on the left have sought to create a better world for everybody. Maybe the ideas haven't worked, but the impulse seems, in general, honorable. (It is something of a shock to hear how reviled Vista volunteers were here in Eastern Kentucky.) The evidence at hand argues, convincingly to me, that those in power -- and it's hard these days to credit them with an ideological position, so venal has the impact of their rule proven -- have sought simply to enrich their backers and, as a byproduct, those who have supported them.

The debate we are meant, I hope, still to have in this democratic republic remains centered on how best to do the job of governing. For that debate to work, strong and eloquent voices on ALL sides must be heard. They must respect each other. The process can not be simply about winning the game of electoral politics; the obligation which comes with seeking to rule, at any level, is an obligation to attend to the wants and needs of one's fellow citizens. Not just those who might reasonably be expected to vote for you next time out. The tension between us should be about doing what's best for the country, not about who will benefit financially from the insertion of specific language in an appropriations bill.

We cannot have that debate if one side seeks never to listen to the opinions of the other -- if either side ceases to listen. We cannot have that debate if the debate itself is only about winning, not about testing ideas. We cannot have a democracy if we do not debate in a meaningful way. We cannot give up on that hope, on the hope of democracy.

I don't yet know if Bruce's new record is any good. I'm not sure I could tell, to be honest, but I'd like it to be good. Pete Seeger wrote and popularized some pretty good songs, and, yes, I know the publishing history of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" is troubling. But the idea that Pete Seeger's entire career is to be ignored because of political beliefs he held (or holds) is absurd.

"A complete retrospective of Seeger's work would remind Americans of just how thoroughly misguided the so-called Old Left was in the 20th century," Mulshine writes.

Not perfect, no, far from it. But somebody had to champion the rights of minorities and women, somebody had to argue that the poor deserved food and health care, somebody had to erect protections for workers against the immutable and, when unchecked, exploitative power of big business. There has to be some balance in this thing. And anybody pretending that Joe McCarthy's heirs would have embraced any of those causes is disingenuous at best.

I guess I'm still fighting the old battles, too. Ah, well.

Posted by grant on March 8, 2006 10:17 AM | Permalink