But What Do You Really Think? Thursday, August 28, 2003

I never finished my story about Rosanne Cash.

I mentioned earlier seeing her at St. Ann's in Brooklyn Heights, and how disappointing it was to realize she was just another schleppy privileged New Yorker--somebody who goes to Starbuck's to read the Sunday Times, and doesn't bother changing out of the sweatpants she slept in. Her song "Western Wall" came on the iPod the other day, sung by Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt.

It's a sweet tune, slow and soulful. The words, as usual are the problem:

I stand here by the Western Wall
maybe a little of that wall
stands inside of us all
I shove my prayers in the cracks
I got nothing to lose
No one to answer back

All these years I've brought up for review
I wasn't taught this, but I learned something new
I had to answer a distant call

At the Western Wall
I've got a heart full of fear
and I offer it up
on this altar of tears

Red dust settles deep in my skin
I don't know where it stops
and where I begin

It's a crumbling pile of broken stones
it ain't much but it might be home
if I ever loved a place at all
it's the Western Wall

I don't know if God was ever a man
But if She was, I think I understand
Why He found a place to break his fall
near the Western Wall

The thing that always stopped me was the joke in the first two lines of last verse. The first few hearings, it seemed like it was beneath the dignity of the song; it's a line you'd put on a bumper sticker, or in "Free to Be You and Me." (God is coming, and boy is she pissed, et al) Iconoclasm is all well and good (hear "Jesus: The Missing Years" by John Prine, or "Jesus Was a Capricorn," by, I think, Kris Kristofferson) but not when it throws a monkey wrench into a perfectly good song.

Or is it perfectly good? Let's step into the Wayback Machine for the answer.

When Rosanne sang it in concert, she prefaced it with a story about going to Jerusalem and visiting the Wailing Wall; threw in some joke about feeling humbled since she was "just a shiksa." Laughs all around. To unpack the moment, I think she was conveying something along the following lines: You in the audience--educated, well-off New Yorkers--are, like me, not particularly religious. When faced with people who genuinely, overpoweringly believe in God, we don't know what to do. That's what happened to me at the Wailing Wall; I saw all these people with strong faith, at this ancient spot, and I didn't know how to respond. I was "just a shiksa."

At the time, it irritated me for a number of reasons. But now I agree with her assessment. For Chrissakes, she's standing at the foundation of the Jerusalem Temple, where Solomon stood, where Jesus cleaned house, where the veil was ripped, where the revolt ended, where the world began. And all she can do is spin wistful little lyrics about her disappointing love life, her pallid upbringing, her neuroses. She could've written that in a Starbucks on Amsterdam Avenue. That's not humility. Being humbled changes you, it forces you out of your narrow perspective. Instead, she narrows the Wall until it fits into her blinkered, privileged New York frame. Not only is she "just a shiksa," she turns God into one, too.

So in the end, the bumper-sticker joke in the last verse isn't an artistic lapse. It's the theme of the song, spelled out.

I know, I know; it's all just the limitless bitterness of the grudging aesthete. But I have to fill the bandwidth somehow.

@ 4:27:00 PM,

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