Fire Water Burn

As I noted in a recent post, I'm currently hard at work on an essay discussing the recurrent use of heavy metal in films about the Iraq War. Since all my writing energy is currently being channeled into that essay, I thought I'd post a few paragraphs to offer a glimpse of the work in progress. So, here's the opening to the essay, in which I compare a scene from Michael Moore's polemical documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, with a longer version of the same scene from a lesser-know film called Soundtrack to War (I posted a link to this latter film in that earlier post; check the archives to see it).

Note: The title of this post is taken from a song by the band Bloodhound Gang, which is at the center of these two clips under discussion. I have to admit that I'm not all that familiar with the band, but they do seem to have had quite a fan base among Iraq war soldiers circa 2003-2004. Here's a link to the song (the video's actually pretty funny).

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“Immoral behavior breeds immoral behavior. When a president commits the immoral act of sending otherwise good kids to war based on a lie, this is what you get.”
- Michael Moore, Fahrenheit 9/11

Michael Moore’s documentary on the Bush administration’s response to the events of September 11, 2001, Fahrenheit 9/11, has been alternately celebrated and critiqued along multiple lines. Impassioned and driven by Moore’s characteristic sympathy for those he considers political underdogs, the film uses footage drawn from myriad sources to construct a dense montage in which political analysis rubs up against emotional pathos, on one hand, and humorous punch lines on the other. Moore’s comments about the “immorality” of Bush’s decision to send U.S. troops to war are meant to absolve soldiers of much of the responsibility for the big-picture consequences of their actions; for the moral and political crux of the film concerns the failure of leadership stemming from the highest echelons of U.S. government. Yet portions of the film show those same soldiers to be acting in full accordance with U.S. policy mandates and to be treating the Iraqi population as something less than fully human. Thus, “this is what you get:” soldiers laughing at a dead Iraqi laying on the ground with a rigor mortis-induced erection; soldiers treating a Christmas Eve raid on a civilian as a mock visit from Santa; and in one of the more stirring bits of footage, a white male soldier singing directly to the camera lines from the nu metal band Bloodhound Gang’s song, “Fire Water Burn.” “We don’t need no water let the motherfucker burn/Burn, motherfucker, burn,” chants the soldier, eyes open wide and mouth crooked in a half-smile in apparent glee at the imagined damage evoked by the lyrics he sings.

This last clip is one of several that Moore lifted from an earlier Iraq war documentary, Soundtrack to War, by the Australian artist and filmmaker George Gittoes. In Gittoes’ film, the main subject of which is the musical practices of Iraq War soldiers and Iraqi citizens, the scene in question occupies a particular pride of place at the film’s conclusion. It is also a more extended scene, taking some two-plus minutes to play out. Gittoes, whose voice is audible but whose physical presence is off screen, interviews one final U.S. soldier who introduces himself as John Frisbee from Lebanon, Tennessee. Gittoes instructs the young man as to what he wants: some indication of the music he most prefers and thinks is most suited to the circumstance of being stationed in Iraq, and some recitation of sample lyrics from that music. Such seemingly basic instructions lead to an unusually halting sequence, however, for the exchange between filmmaker and soldier is interrupted twice, first by a passing car that draws attention and then by Gittoes dropping his camera. Gittoes edits so that the pattern of stopping and starting the interview is on display in all its awkwardness, his mishandling of the camera stopping Frisbee mid-stream as the soldier is half-speaking, half-singing the words to the Bloodhound Gang song. By the final iteration of the scene, Gittoes is veritably feeding lines to his soldier subject, telling him to simply say, “My favorite number one is the Bloodhound Gang and this is how it goes.” Frisbee complies and then sings the notorious lines, after which he laughs at his own performance and asks to the camera, “Was that good?” An abrupt edit cuts to the end credit sequence, over which plays the commercial recording of the same Bloodhound Gang song.

Of the whole sequence recounted above, Moore includes only the penultimate moment in which the soldier – unidentified in Fahrenheit 9/11 – sings the lyric in a direct, unencumbered fashion. Whether or not Moore’s use of the clip is misleading is less of interest, though, than the way in which these two different uses of the same footage present two distinct versions of the connection between music, and specifically heavy metal music, and the sensibilities of Iraq War soldiers. The first, foreshortened clip creates what appears to be a direct association between heavy metal and white male military aggression. Although Moore’s overall portrait of American soldiers in Iraq is far from one-dimensional, this particular audio-visual soundbite clearly tips toward the less savory side of U.S. military attitudes, showing a young man for whom the charge of destruction is akin to a satisfying burst of visceral sonic pleasure. In the second, longer sequence, by contrast, the soldier’s aggression appears far more complicated. Indeed, Frisbee does not even choose the song he sings himself, but presents it only after another soldier whose voice is heard off screen begins to sing it. Frisbee declares his own preference for classic rock, but explains that the Bloodhound Gang song suited the mind frame of him and his fellow soldiers at a time when they were trying to get “Saddam and his regime out.” As such, “Fire Water Burn” comes across here as much an expression of military male camaraderie as untrammeled lust to crush the enemy. Moreover, Frisbee’s rendition is more overtly performative in Gittoes’ original sequence, rather than merely expressive: he is clearly playing to the camera, and his version of the lyrics only achieves resolution after much coaxing from the filmmaker. Heavy metal music and military mayhem, then, are not so neatly sutured together, but the music is shown to be an integral part of the soundscape of U.S. military engagement.

Remembering the Rockman

Today was my last day of teaching for the semester. I wrapped up my course on music technology on something of an odd note, but one that I thought raised some provocative questions. We'd been spending the last weeks of the semester talking about the effects of digitization on the music industry, with journalist Steve Knopper's polemic Appetite for Self-Destruction as our guide. We've talked about the development of MP3 technology, and about Apple's successful plan of using music to market new hardware with its simultaneous promotion of iTunes and its various mobile listening devices. And we've stressed the ways in which portability has superseded fidelity as the optimal feature for music consumers.

All of this raised important questions about the connection between music technology, listening and consumption. But it left questions about music production and creativity largely to the side. So, to bring things back around, I spent a good chunk of today's class discussing the brief history of the Rockman.


Anyone out there remember the Rockman? None of my students did, which is no great shock since this thing's heyday was nearly thirty years ago when most of my students weren't born. But, the Rockman marked a pretty fascinating early instance of trying to take portable music technology and make it something useful for musicians, not only for music listeners. The name, of course, was a play on the famous Sony Walkman, but the function was singular: a portable guitar preamp designed to be played through headphones, and with built-in distortion, chorus and echo effects that were considered state of the art as guitar effects were concerned.


That the device was designed by Boston guitarist (and MIT-schooled) Tom Scholz only added to the peculiar mystique of the thing.

Personally, I never liked the Rockman all that much. I never owned one but a good friend of mine did, and it didn't quite have the quality of distortion that I liked to have. But others disagreed, and the Rockman made an impact in its day, less for its portability than for giving guitarists a range of valued sounds in a compact, affordable package.

With all the current interest in music's portability, I'm surprised more people haven't been drawn to recall the Rockman. Any time spent with the iTunes app store will show an awful lot of apps made for the new generation of portable devices that seem to try to do something akin to the Rockman, to appeal to musicians' desire for a range of ways to manipulate sound in an accessible and compact package. Luckily for me, Tom Scholz himself seems to put a lot of stock in preserving the history of his own efforts, and he's designed a website devoted to the Rockman that has a remarkable amount of information about its history. Worthy checking out for those who want to explore this unusual bit of music technology:

http://www.rockman.fr/

War Is Heavy Metal

That's the working title of an essay I'm writing for what looks to be a really interesting anthology devoted to popular music in the post-9/11 era. Not my usual topic, insofar as I tend not to write about things so current as the past decade, but it's given me the occasion to read up on some of the really interesting literature that's appeared concerning the cultural politics of the "War on Terror."

I'll be writing on the recurrence of heavy metal music in the soundtracks to a variety of Iraq War-related films. Earlier today I watched the first half-hour of Soundtrack to War, a fairly obscure documentary (far as I know, at least) dedicated to the place of music in the experiences of the soldiers stationed in Iraq. Michael Moore used footage from this film in his own documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11. It's pretty fascinating, and has a great sequence about 20 minutes in revolving around a soldier who's into "gore metal," and is playing guitar while explaining how the music he likes is so suited to being at war. I'm taking the title of my essay from this scene, where after playing through a riff on his guitar, the guy says "War is heavy metal" and flashes the devil horns. \m/ (Is that how it goes? I'm not much for emoticons...)

Below is the link to the whole film, which is available through Google video. Definitely worth a look:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7548006816297243731#

(I tried to embed the video but somehow it didn't work; the link will do for the curious though.)

Keith Richards' Race Thing

Over the years I've had people question the degree to which I focus on race, or the ways in which I focus on race, in my approach to the study of rock music. Some students who take my rock history class - not all, or a majority, but definitely some - have complained in their evaluations about how much time we spend in class talking about race. I start my rock history course with lectures on blues, bluegrass, and blackface minstrelsy, and make it clear that from my perspective, rock 'n' roll is born not just from the intermingling of white and black musical styles, but from white fascination with blackness as that thing which is culturally marked as alluring and forbidden in roughly equal measure.

My book on the history of the electric guitar, Instruments of Desire, is steeped in similar arguments, and when it came out, some reviewers took me to task in the way that some of my students have done, wondering why the story of race and rock should be made to sound ridden with conflict rather than conciliation, as though music could only erase difference rather than reinforce it. I've always found such perspectives frustrating, as have many other scholars who study race. They arise out of the belief that color blindness is the best way forward, a belief that chooses to circumvent the continuing power of race rather than recognize it more directly and address it head on.



I'm now in the midst of reading Keith Richards' new autobiography, Life, and these issues have arisen anew for me. It's a great read - Richards is a good storyteller, his voice captured well by co-writer James Fox; and there are loads of revealing anecdotes that say as much about the larger context in which rock music took root in the UK in the late '50s/early '60s as they say about the specific history of Richards and the Stones.

The book opens with a rousing tale of a near drug bust in the mid '70s when the Stones were touring through the Southern U.S. In the middle of the account, though, Richards falls into flashback mode, recalling the dangers of traveling through the South in the mid 1960s as a group of long-haired Englishmen, disdained by the locals and only finding comfort on the other side of the tracks. By Richards' account, while white Southerners were bent on calling him and his band mates "girls" for their unseemly long hair, black Southerners were far more open minded. "You got welcomed, you got fed and you got laid. The white side of town was dead, but it was rockin' across the tracks. Long as you knew cats, you was cool." (p. 8)

All of which is mere prelude to a more extended riff by Richards concerning the wonders of a Mississippi juke joint for a group of white, blues-worshiping Brits. Richards' words here are worth quoting at length:

"And there'd be a band, a trio playing, big black fuckers and some bitches dancing around with dollar bills in their thongs. And then you'd walk in and for a moment there's almost a chill, because you're the first white people they've seen in there, and they know that the energy's too great for a few white blokes to really make much difference ... But then we got to get back on the road. Oh shit, I could've stayed here for days. You've got to pull out again, lovely black ladies squeezing you between their huge tits ... I think some of us had died and gone to heaven, because a year before we were plugging London clubs, and we're doing all right, but actually in the next year, we're somewhere we thought we'd never be. We were in Mississippi." (p. 9)

I've edited this passage a bit but the long version is every bit as suggestive. It's remarkable, first of all, that here in 2010 such unabashed racial exoticism is still every bit as potent as it was back in 1965 when Richards is writing about, or 40 years before that, and so on. It's also so telling that this comes within the opening pages of Richards' autobiography. These reflections are clearly meant to lay the foundation for all that is to come, for the deep immersion in the blues that Richards and his cohort experienced, for the intensive effort to reproduce the sounds they heard on records by Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Chuck Berry and a host of others. Richards' impressions of black Mississippi don't invalidate anything that he's accomplished - indeed I'm sure in the eyes of many readers they precisely authenticate his dedication to the real, the true, the Southern blues life blood that birthed rock and roll.

In my reading, what these passages reveal is how much racial reality and racial fantasy are inextricable in the realm of rock, or popular culture more generally. I wouldn't necessarily call Richards' impressions racist, but I would observe - and more strongly, I'd assert - that his perceptions are steeped not in the "real" stuff of Southern blackness but in Richards' own search for something outside of himself with which he could identify so as to reinforce his own standing as outlaw, rebel, outsider. White men have been turning to their imagined notions of blackness for two centuries or more to fulfill similar desires, with results that have been mixed in more ways than one.

Right wing folk-rock

I'm teaching a course on suburbia this semester called "In the Burbs: Culture, Politics, Identity," and we're currently covering the role of the suburbs in the rise of the New Right during the 1960s and 1970s. Scanning the internet for source material that might liven up the classroom, I came upon the following music clip on YouTube. The singer is Janet Greene, and the song is called "Fascist Threat." It is a trip, to say the least, and not in a good way, but so fucked up I had to share:



Greene was apparently hired by an anti-Communist crusader named Fred Schwarz to provide a soundtrack to the growing far-right movement of the time. As I told my students, this stuff wasn't especially popular and with good reason, but it shows how the political right was attentive to the power of popular culture and sought to appropriate it for its own ends. The roots of the Tea Party movement, on some level, lie here.

Stepping on Stage

I haven't written about it much on this blog, but I'm a guitarist. I've been playing since I was 9 years old, more or less, which means I've been playing more than 30 years now. And, I'm pretty good. A bit rough around the edges. After all, despite my music department affiliation, I'm almost entirely self-taught. I read music, but like many if not most rock guitarists I mainly play by ear. More to the point, my technique is a bit of a hodge-podge. I more or less flail about with my right (picking) hand, I can play fast staccato only up to a point before I lose my grounding, especially when I have to switch from one string to another. My left hand is more reliable and I can work up a good head of steam when I'm playing in a more legato (hammer-on and pull-off) manner. But there's a lot of imperfection in my approach, which is mostly fine but sometimes I wish it were otherwise.

Here's the thing - because there's gotta be a thing right? In all my years of playing, I've almost never been in a band, and haven't even spent all that much time playing with other people. As a musician I'm something of a lone wolf. Which is how I am in most other areas of my life, I guess, so no harm done. But, it means my playing is done almost entirely in private - my public appearances over the years have been few and far between. And thus, when I do play in public it's sort of a big deal, for me if no one else.

I made one of my rare appearances this past Saturday night. The occasion was typically Smith: the annual "Montage" concert, held during Family Weekend, when all the parents come to visit their collegiate offspring and are shown the College's idea of a good time. The concert is designed to showcase most of the main performing groups at Smith: orchestra, glee club, chorus, handbell choir (!), wind ensemble, and the many a capella singing groups. So where did I fit in? I was a guest soloist of sorts, playing lead guitar for a version of Boston's "Foreplay/Long Time," with a small rock band comprising myself, the orchestra/glee club conductor Jonathan on bass, the department accompanist Jerry on rhythm guitar, and a student named Jamie on drums. Oh yes, and the college organist, Grant, playing the giant pipe organ in the College's biggest public auditorium. Did I mention that we were accompanying the combined glee club and chorus, who provided the vocals? Does this sound as weird as I think it does?

Thing is, it was kind of a hoot, in its way. There's something so incongruous about playing lead guitar at a College event meant to boost the family spirit, and at the same time such incongruities are pretty much what I've based most of my life around. I played through my little 10 watt Line 21 amp and was easily audible above 100 unmiked voices. The audience was pretty big - I'd guess 1500 or so - and genuinely appreciative. And truth be told, I tore it up. Sure I hit a few bum notes here and there but I don't think anyone cared enough to notice. And today when I walked into class one of my students said my solo on Saturday "melted" her face, which I guess is a good thing. So, in tribute to coming momentarily out of my shell, here's some Boston for ya.


Boston · Long Time
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The State of the Record Industry

Last week, out of the blue, I started getting free issues of Rolling Stone delivered to my mailbox. I have no idea why, but I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so as long as they keep coming, I'll keep reading them. I'm not especially keen on the magazine's music coverage these days - they have some good writers on staff but the choices they make about who to feature betray their Boomer orientation far too much (the lead reviews in the two issues I've received thus far were of albums by Neil Young and Eric Clapton, respectively; not exactly finger-on-the-pulse-of-popular-culture choices). But, they do some of the better left-oriented political reporting to be found in such a mainstream publication, and that's reason enough to pay attention.

What has me writing though, is a piece by U2 manager Paul McGuinness that appeared in the September 30 issue, titled "How to Save the Music Business." [Addendum: After doing a bit of online research, I see that this article is an abridged version of one that appeared in the British version of GQ, which you can access here.]

I should note up front that I'm not much of a U2 fan. Sure, I have some of their albums and there is some very good music on them. But the band's - and specifically Bono's - self-righteous sense of purpose has never sat well with me. I like it when I agree with a band's politics, but I don't like people with messiah complexes and Bono has one in spades, something that came through loud and clear back when I saw the band play in 1987 on the Joshua Tree tour.

So, apparently, does the group's manager, McGuinness, who sets himself up as the man with the plan to "save" the music industry in this article. What the industry needs to be saved from, as I'm sure you can guess, is the free circulation of music that has been growing by leaps and bounds for the past decade due to the expanding reach of the internet. This is hardly news, but McGuiness tries to insist that the time is approaching when people are more willing to see that the free circulation of music has a down side that might outweigh the benefits.

McGuinness makes one salient point in this article: that "free" music isn't simply free, but relies on the availability of high-speed internet service, the provision of which is a major source of revenue for various large telecomm corporations. True enough. And he's also justified in claiming that access to free music and other similar content has been one of the major engines that has led to such a growth in the demand for such services.

Where he loses me and, I'm sure, many others who care about these matters, is in his effort to paint the music industry as a victim within this process. If McGuinness was willing to acknowledge the industry's own power as a cultural gatekeeper and a profit engine that generates a lot more income for record industry workers than for artists, his efforts would be on more solid ground. But he writes from the perspective of someone whose clients are the members of one of the most lucrative performing entities in the history of rock, who have a vested interest in the existing state of the music industry that isn't shared by those on the bottom rungs of the ladder to success.

There is an arrogance in McGuinness's perspective that's hard to miss. It's the same arrogance that I so often detect in Bono, such that even when he's speaking on behalf of something I fully support, I feel skeptical. When McGuinness asserts that "it is facile to blame record companies" for the economic dilemma they face, he just seems to be declaiming any responsibility on the part of those within the industry. He tries to make it sound like "free" music is taking money away from those who rightly deserve it, meaning the creative artists and those who serve them. But, realistically, following the logic of his own argument, it's more about one set of large corporations (telecomm companies) siphoning money away from another (record companies). Of course, even this paints too black and white a picture since in the current media environment, no major record company exists that is not part of some larger entertainment conglomerate. And where artists are concerned, the evidence I've seen suggests that they are just as likely to benefit from the free flow of musical information as they are to lose from it. For every group that loses some royalties they may otherwise have earned, there are probably five who gain access to listeners they may never have reached otherwise, which could mean more attendance at shows, more merch sales, or even sales of music that might otherwise never see the light of day.

I'm no utopian thinker when it comes to the potential of digital media. Like anything, the new technology (which isn't all that new anymore) has its ups and downs. Truth be told, I don't even download much "free" music. As I've written elsewhere on this blog, I'm old school in my listening habits. I like vinyl, I still buy lots of CD's, and I don't own an iPod or particularly enjoy listening to music through my computer. But I think the free circulation of music has benefits that outweigh the costs. The biggest such benefit is that it has brought loads of music back into circulation that had long been unavailable, and the commercial record labels would have no reason to reissue because of the lack of potential for profit. Having such an archive available, unruly and disorganized as it is, is all the justification I need not to let record industry interests dictate the flow of music.