Hey look, I am back. I could bemoan the insidious forces that have kept me from blogging, but I seem to know so many people who have been sick, injured, or lost loved ones in recent months, it really does not seem to become me to complain. And that was even without reading the paper this morning. Anyway, it’s a new year, a new semester, a new decade, so let’s get started.

Having been to more than my share of very sparsely-attended indie rock shows and history conference panels, the thought has occurred more than once that “mid-career” academic historians have much in common with a lot of the veteran indie musicians I go to see: well-known within a certain dispersed circle of cognoscenti, perhaps even established in certain way, but doing something too particular in its appeal to ever achieve more than the most modest sort of popularity.  Most historians like most bands still have to set up and load their own equipment, and while  it saddens me that we historians don’t usually get to perform in dive bars, the bathrooms in conference hotels are usually cleaner.

Then there is the economics of our respective types of publication. My reminder of the similarities here , admittedly not too recent at this writing, was this very informative post byTim Quirk of Too Much Joy, critiquing his band’s royalty statement.

From Tim Quirk, I learned a new term (new to me) major record labels used to denote those never-hit-it-big back catalog bands that they authorize themselves to ignore and abuse: “unrecouped.” This means bands whose sales, according to major label accounting, never paid back their advance and promotional costs. (According to the statement, Too Much Joy’s account with with Warner Brothers stood at $62.47 in royalties with an unrecouped balance of $395,277.18.)  Historians lucky enough to find teaching jobs and get tenure do enjoy some job security that bands who had a couple of songs on alt-rock radio in the early 90s might not, but we also live in danger of remaining “unrecouped” and thus powerless when it comes to dealing with the publishers  and their self-serving accounting practices.
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Now playing: The Low Anthem – To the Ghosts Who Write History Books

There was an interesting but overheated discussion at “Edge of the West” of a beloved piece of classic rock, The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” There was contextualizin’ and politicizin’ a-plenty, and I made the following remarks way, way down in the comments:

Sorry I saw this late. I love “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” dearly, and hearing the Band’s searing, lumpy original version after growing up with the dopey, slick Joan Baez sing-along on AM radio was a formative musical experience for me: it just illustrated the difference between original popular art and dumbed-down music industry pablum. (Also, the correct lyrics actually told a story that made sense.)

That said, Robbie Robertson’s lyrics for that song and several of the others on “The Band” and “Stage Fright” partook of a fairly naive infatuation with Confederate/white southern Americana that was common in the counter culture and its offshoots circa 1969 (and after). Whilst heading back to nature and making laid-back country-rock, they loved them their doomed outlaws and rebels back in those days, and with less historical insight than we might like, the hippie songwriters and screenwriters tended to think they identified with the poor Confederate soldier, especially if he turned “social bandit” after the war. Even in the dark, revisionist westerns they turned out, the good guys were almost always ex-Confederates, just like John Wayne and Randolph Scott had always been. Blue uniforms were only seen sacking Indian villages and southern farms.

I would say it is to Robbie Robertson’s credit that, unlike a number of left-wing historians of that day, he wrote his elegiac ballad about Confederate cannon fodder rather than, say, a revanchist thug like Jesse James.

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Now playing: The Band – Rockin’ Chair
via FoxyTunes

It’s either a good thing that John William Ward and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. are dead, or it’s even sadder than I thought.  Jacksonian Democracy has finally been made into the sexy rock musical it was always yearning to become.  (So is that Amos Kendall in the leather jacket to the right of Jackson, and Martin Van Buren in the skinny tie and tennies on far left?) I have to say, much as I appreciate the academically appropriate low cost of living and general ease of life where I am, there are days when I wish were a little closer to New York. This “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” is the kind of thing, among other more healthy things, I daydreamed about while reading my teenage history books. A courtroom drama about Bleeding Kansas! “The Iliad” set to Neil Young songs! (Those were different ideas.)  Anyway, someone please go review this for me.

Now, having enthused at the very notion of such a thing as Jacksonian Democracy Rock, the song you can play on Times web site, “‘Populism, Yea, Yea,’” does remind me of the final exam answers I used to get when I taught the all-of-American-history-from-Beringia-to-Bill-Clinton-in-one-semester course at Florida State, with many distant decades and movements mashed and mixed together by hapless freshman.  It is easy to confuse your angry loose-money farmers of the 1890s with your angry hard-money farmers of the 1830s; in the class, only that small amount of confusion would have probably netted you a “B.” Of course, these New York theater wags may have read Ron Formisano for their research; he retrofits the p-word back to the Revolution, so who could blame them for putting it in the title of their big number?  That same song has a chorus that goes “It’s the Age of. . .,  It’s the Age of . . . Jack-son” followed by “Take a stand against the elites” and what I think is something along the lines of “we will eat sweet democracy.” Sweet! Making one of my pet lecture points, the lyrics also make clear that, rockin’ as it might have been, democracy fueled and blithely rationalized Indian removal and violent expansionism.

In conclusion, between the two possible outcomes of a project like this, awesome or awesomely stupid, I am going with the former.
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Now playing: Les Sans Culottes – Coeur Vagabond

Sorry to be away for a while. I had a feeling it was a bad idea to make any reference to “my next,” as I did in the last tea party post. The end of the semester just kind of bears down on us out here in the teaching trenches, especially when there are lectures to write and graduate students handing in chapters.  Out of my apparent masochistic tendencies, and the chance to get back together with one of my first historical loves, I agreed to take over our semi-required Missouri History course this semester. I have really enjoyed it, though by this point I am little worn out from having to download a new topic into my head every week and then process it into something intelligible (or not) for the students. The challenge and fun of doing the history of a particular place is that it has forced me to come much closer to “histoire totale” than I have ever had to in most of my other work. So I have had to learn or remind myself about riverboat technology, hemp production (not that kind), meatpacking, railroad land-jobbing, urban planning, organized crime, and myriad other social and economic details of Missouri’s past.

Music is one such topic I have spent a lot of time on, because certain branches of popular music — the kind they played in the many dive bars, brothels, and gambling dens found in seedy Missouri river and railroad towns — turn out to be the state’s principal contributions to world culture, Mark Twain notwithstanding. I am thinking of ragtime, which before some reading and listening in the last couple of weeks I knew nothing about if it did not come from The Sting soundtrack; Kansas City jazz (more like swing, really, and about which I knew even less); and early rock and roll.

Admittedly, the preceding reflections were little more than an excuse to share a couple of striking YouTube videos I ran across while looking for examples to play for students in the class.

First we have “blues shouter,” proto-rocker, and KC jazz fellow traveller Big Joe Turner, doing a song I did not even recognize as “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” so terribly neutered is the familiar Bill Haley version. If anyone knows who the bopping host is in this clip, or what year it was made, do tell:

Then we have St. Louis’s own Chuck Berry doing his first hit “Maybellene,” on what seems to be some kind of British (or German?) TV show that involves a manically cheerful audience sitting on the stage in tuxes and evening gowns. This is the kind of thing the Internet is really good for:

In honor of Oxford University Press publishing the paperback edition of Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution, I thought we might strike up a playlist.  The annotations make it a long entry, so if you’re in the mood for some Friday fun, please follow me below the fold.  In the meantime, pick up a copy and add it to your syllabus today.

I should start by saying that there isn’t much musical, historical, or thematic rhyme or reason to this list (which I first created in 2007 when the hardcover edition was published): I just wanted a CD-length playlist inspired by the book, drawn from songs I already owned (although I did hunt down a couple more).  Under my self-imposed rule, the songs had to have “rebels,” “rising”, “city,” “cities,” or the name of one of the book’s five cities (Boston, New York City, Newport, Charleston, and Philadelphia) in the title.  I also included songs that corresponded with the introduction and epilogue.  Where songs are named for a specific city, they are in chapter order; the three “rebels” songs precede the three “rising” songs.  Here’s the book’s table of contents if you’d like to follow along.

(more…)

Carrie Brownstein (member of the erstwhile Sleater-Kinney) and Carl Wilson (of the Globe and Mail) have been discussing music during the Bush Years.  Both discuss the protest music (and other musical responses) of the years 2001–2008.

Brownstein discusses a lot of the songs you’d expect (by Springsteen, Kanye West, the Dixie Chicks, Green Day, etc.), and includes streamed versions of the songs.  Yet she also writes:

Certainly, music in the time of George W. Bush was not limited to protest songs. Many artists acted as more of a soothing salve, or rejected a musical relationship with current events altogether….

In the last few years, the songs and struggles have tended toward the internal: A lot of music has become as personalized and intimate as the means of recording it. There’s a widespread sense of weariness and reflection in place of fury, alongside a hard-earned desire to dance, celebrate and escape. But, like the end of the Bush era itself, those recent musical trends are the denouement. The lasting musical embodiment of the Bush administration will be the songs with teeth — the ones that weren’t afraid to snarl back at bared fangs.

Wilson riffs on this as follows:

I’m not sure the songs that got traction or will have lasting impact actually are the angry ones, at least not the explicitly politically angry ones. This may be a Canadian point of view – one at a bit more distance from the action – but I think the songs that will end up embodying the era will be the ones that reflect what it feels like to have your government relentlessly snarling at you, and living in a society whose leaders openly sneer at “reality-based” perspectives.

Songs of escape such as Hey Ya . . . as well as the shelter-offering Umbrella aren’t going to be forgotten soon, and the hip-hop fixation on “the club” seems to fall into the same area – recalling the way that escapist songs of the 1930s have endured. Even in the parenthetical, indie category from which Brownstein primarily draws, there was the ascendance of soothing folk/classical/nursery-song-influenced sounds, a lot of punk-disco party music, the Flaming Lips’ dance-this-dada-around moves and so on.

The non-escapist music of 2000-08 that endures may include more generalized expressions of anxiety than explosions of anger. There was that initial post-9/11 backlash against critical thinking – which coincided with pop’s most ferocious trickster, Eminem, withdrawing almost completely from the limelight during 2001-2008 (save for his brief intervention in the 2004 elections). That seemed to me to be followed by a wave of cynicism about the worth of calling down power in art (except in satire), and much of the music of the age reflected a sense of panic – some acted it out, like the “yelpy” school of indie (Modest Mouse et al) or songs like Crazy, while some staged it through withdrawal, such as Animal Collective and the other more insular sixties-revival-slash-experimentalist groups, or the mournful goth/emo bands such as My Chemical Romance.

Wilson is wise enough not to make too bold a prediction: “But as for which music posterity will eventually elect to represent that messy era, well, as Bush himself once put it, ‘history takes a long time for us to reach.’”  In any case, according to both these writers, many musicians seem to have responded to the Bush Era by turning inward rather than lashing outward. This got me thinking about the protest songs of earlier musical eras, and how they might stack up, comparatively.

(Side note: The songbook Rise Up Singing actually made an appearance at my extended family’s most recent holiday gathering.  I know many of those folk songs from my childhood.  And it’s not as if I was raised in a commune: lots of grownups back then genuinely liked listening to this stuff, and my dad and his cousins have a good ear for the guitar.)

The rock music and hip-hop of previous generations appear to be more explicitly political than a lot of what we get nowadays–but then again, it would be easy to lapse into Golden Ageism here and shake our heads at the apathy of today’s youth.  That strikes me as a cop-out (and the title of this post, by the way, is tongue-in-cheek): is Brownstein correct that the fluff will fade away and we’ll remember the anger best?  Or is Wilson correct that the years 2001-2008 will yield a broader legacy?  Which songs, for you, best illustrate popular music’s response to the Bush Years?  And while we’re at it, what are your favorite protest songs from previous eras?

(Hat tip, Christopher Shea at Braniac.)

Times are hard so it’s time for some music, early American history rock, that is.

[Continued from a previous post.] Here we move into the Spanish Conquest section, which theme has allowed rock musicians to smuggle in some Spanish guitar and brass along with their power chords and hippie pieties. First, however, we have two more Columbus-themed tunes, an old one that is really about the historical Columbus, by Todd Rundgren’s imitation British Invasion band Nazz, and a much more recent number by Vermont roots-rocker Grace Potter that uses CC metaphorically to denote having “found the edge of the world.” Unless she’s talking about living near Canada, I am not sure I could vouch for the straight-ahead Ms. Potter’s claim of edginess on an artistic level, but the song is not uncatchy.

6. Nazz – Christopher Columbus (3:23)

7. Grace Potter and The Nocturnals – Mr. Columbus (3:38)

Now we move on to the conquistadors proper. Interestingly, a common theme is the Spaniards’ confusion and defeat, which sadly did not happen often enough in real life, at least not to the ones who became famous. I have a feeling lot of the musicians were trying for that Aguirre, the Wrath of God feeling without actually remembering the name.

8. The Boo Radleys – Spaniard (4:01) — rather excellent also-rans from the early 1990s alternative rock scene as it was becoming “commercial alternative. This is followed by two chestnuts of 1970s AOR radio.

9. Procol Harum – Conquistador (5:11) — the orchestral version featured on Procol’s Greatest Hits and in regular rotation on Kansas City radio back in the day, in this delightful clip someone has set it to scenes from Herzog’a Aguirre.

12. Neil Young – Cortez The Killer (7:30) — Of course, this had to be here, if only as a reminder of having my young music geek’s mind blown by Decade back in the day. A 3-record set in a package was like an inch thick, or so it seemed! The Collected Masterworks over a count ‘em 10-year career! Who but Neil could be so ambitious, so long-winded, and yet so shamblingly casual? (I realize writing this that Neil Young must be one of the secret influences on my whole aesthetic, and I do have one.)

Like many of old Neil’s forays into history, this epic is perhaps best approached without focusing too much on the lyrics. I am sorry to report that Neil has misled some of the rock-listening public into thinking that “The Aztecs were peaceful, representing sort of a utopian nonviolent society.” With human sacrifice! Oddly Neil does mention the Aztec penchant for human sacrifice while also claiming that “Hate was just a legend/And war was never known.” That would have been news to the many peoples chafing under Aztec rule, the ones who joined up with the Spaniards to overthrow the Aztecs. And yet Cortez was indeed a killer, so the facts on Mr. Young’s side there, anyhow.

13. Splitsville - Ponce de Leon (2:15) — Hard to believe, I know, but this is indeed a boppy little ditty about the conqueror of Puerto Rico and “discoverer” of Florida, who was not looking for the Fountain of Youth but did enjoy siccing his dog on the local Indians.

14. The High Dials – The Lost Explorer (5:25) — This is a nice bit of neo-psychedelia that I have here representing the French colonies, because the band is from Quebec and Neil Young has not recorded a tune called “Champlain the Negotiator.” I am going to dedicate it to Réné Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the French explorer of the Mississippi who got so lost with his broken compass and his jumping to geographic conclusions that his men had to kill him when they missed the mouth of the Mississippi and wandered into Texas instead. It could happen to the best of us.

TO BE CONTINUED

One of the Early Republic-themed (or -named) bands mentioned in an earlier post are on tour.  That’s right, The Henry Clay People are coming to a city near you. (They seem to have chosen the Des Moines rather than Columbia/St. Louis route across, often an either/or matter, so I may have to give them a miss.) I am not entirely sold on these guys musically, but maybe someone’s Dad is a historian, so we should support them. Listen here, and below. The album the HCP is touring behind is here. Unfortunately they are not touring with the not previously-mentioned The Whigs, who are also on the road. (Listen to the Whiggery here.) This band does have amusing link that allows you to “Join the Whig Party,” which seems to involve period-inaccurate costumes. Both these band seem to espouse fairly traditional rock values, which is somewhat Whig-like.

The Henry Clay People, “Working Part Time”

The Whigs, “Technology”

. . . more of the my thematic playlists. In this case, my now long-running series of home-made holiday CDs. They have nothing much to do with history or politics, so these will be appearing on my other blog.

As revealed formerly in this space, one of my many hobbies is making thematic playlists (and CDs) to listen to while I work, drive, or do pretty much anything else. Partly it is just a way to organize all the digital music that accumulates on one’s hard drive, without resorting to rating everything so that some software can mathematically reproduce my tastes. (Frankly, rating every song is too much like grading or serving on the salary committee.) The themes range from simple to really geeky, and naturally one of them is the American. Blogs are for sharing, and so are the holidays, so here we go.

I am make no representations about the historical value of these songs. Not that many musicians are very accurate historians — oh my no. Yet sometimes they do evoke the right feeling, and even the mistakes are often interesting in terms of what they reveal about popular understanding of history.

The order is roughly chronological, but with some concern for how well the songs flow or contrast sonically. In other words, the numbers are not ratings, but the order they appear on the playlist that I actually listen to. I have had to separate the playlists into periods, so today we have just the start of the Colonial Period. There will be some repeats from the American Indian History playlist posted a while back.

• 1. Graham Parker – I Discovered America (right-click to save an mp3 of the whole song) — from the album Don’t Tell Columbus (2007)
• 2. The Toasters – History Book Version
• 3. Randy Newman – The Great Nations Of Europe — hilarious song, but also the first of many examples on this list of musicians who doubtless consider themselves very critical of European and Usonian imperialism while buying into the “vanishing American” trope concerning this and other continents’ native populations:
  

• 4. The Old Haunts – The Old World — somewhat gothic punk Americana, not sure what it means to be about, but I like it, the link goes to their MySpace page, where the song in question is available to play.
• 5. The Knitters (also X) – The New World