Wild in the Streets Thursday, November 04, 2004

Driving to work this morning, at the usual unspeakable hour, it finally happened. I had been waiting for it, going on three years now, and it happened just before dawn on a back road outside of Princeton. Good thing I was at a red light, or I might've driven off into the cornfields.

It was the absolute worst song I have ever heard in my life. I can't give you the precise lyrics--I was too stunned to get the artist's name--but the narrative included a boy who went to school but couldn't find no job; and a girl "from the good part of town" who ended up on a street corner because her "daddy did things to her [you can't talk about]."

This easily trumped the second-most astonishing music-industry extrusion I had seen in recent weeks: a video for a John Cougar Mellencamp song that involved--I swear on the seeping wounds of Christ--a woman in a wheelchair whose trailer is firebombed by a gang of rednecks. For loving a sensitive dwarf! I'm sure the songwriter above is kicking himself for not thinking of that one first, provided he's not confined to a wheelchair.

I hesitate to draw political points from all this. But I can't help seeing connections between the Little Nell-ism and the Vote Kerry tour conducted by Bruce Springsteen, REM and the Dixie Chicks--a kind of Blind Faith of clapped-out bien-pensants. Likewise the sneering of B-list Bolshies like Steve Earle, whose voice seems to be squeezed from a sphincter where his nose meets his brain.

It's not that rock has become politicized; politics has become rock-and-roll. Emotion, attitude and posing trump common sense. How different is the girl on the corner and the sensitive dwarf from Edwards's "Two Americas"? Both are based on the same idiot assumptions and absolute lack of context. And both think magically about the solutions--see also Kerry's plan for making the world safe for Nongovernmental Organizations.

In this light, Kerry's campaign was nothing more than a failed comeback tour for a Woodstock-era dinosaur. He might have taken a lesson from John Fogerty, who recently dusted off his old playbook for a new record, but crossed out Vietnam and Nixon and pencilled in you-know-where and you-know-who. Kerry managed to do the latter, but forgot to fix the former.

@ 9:17:00 AM,

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