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Room for the Occasion:
Working Professionals Defeat Doom on Two Benefit Comps
Musically, benefit compilations are doomed at conception. Up against
the same triple threat as every other collection of new material by
multiple contributors--the organizers have to sweet-talk the
artists, pray they'll do their best, and make the inevitable mishmash
cohere--do-good comps then have to break through the pall of
sanctimony, although most activists are too caught up in their own
cause to realize it. Sanctimony is what Chuck Berry was put on earth
to save us from. Sanctimony and rock and roll don't mix. I'm not so
sure sanctimony and gospel music mix either.
So when I learned that September 11 had moved the Voice to
revive an old management dream, a CD of "love songs to New York" to
launch the Village Voice Media oligopoly into music production, I was
real glad I'm not music editor. Sure I helped and kibitzed, but to
small effect. Baaba Maal's track on Wish You Were Here: Love Songs
for New York (Village Voice), all profits earmarked for the
September 11 Fund, began with a call I made, and that was about
it. Along with 15 or 20 colleagues, I spent a few hours helping music
editor and co-producer Chuck Eddy sort out marginal
submissions. Although most of these weren't even submarginal, two
ended up on the CD, and neither knocked me out at the time; I was
wrong. Later I lobbied for a Maggie and Suzzie Roche song that didn't
fly; I was right but it doesn't matter. Wish You Were Here
flows so powerfully it's even impressed Greil Marcus, whose low
sanctimony tolerance has put him off almost every such compilation
ever issued, including yet another new benefit record that beats the
odds--his friend Jon Langford's Illinois Death Penalty Moratorium
Project CD, The Executioner's Last Songs (Bloodshot).
Although these records don't provide a template, much less establish a
trend, each works in the same unexpected way. I would have assumed the
relevant model to be the tribute album, a closely related subgenre
also threatened by piety and inconsistency pitfalls only overcome, if
at all, by piling on the talent and going from there. The Songs of
Jimmie Rodgers and the greatest tribute or benefit comp record
ever, Red Hot + Blue: A Tribute to Cole Porter, succeed by
loosing first-rate artists on first-rate songwriters and adding
motivation and concept--Dylan reconfiguring the folk idea with the
Rodgers, AIDS consciousness tweaked by a happy confluence of gay camp
and postpunk irony with the Porter. Motivation, or is it luck, is
essential--see the star-spangled yet soggy Hank Williams:
Timeless. But neither Wish You Were Here nor The
Executioner's Last Songs has many big names at its disposal. With
all respect to Cornershop and Andrew W.K., the major draw on the
Voice record is Moby, while the ubiquitous Steve Earle
headlines on the death penalty disc, the latest credit for Langford's
all-purpose backing band, the Pine Valley Cosmonauts. Yet in each case
anonymity is a virtue. Populated by working professionals outdoing
themselves rather than luminaries exercising their droit de seigneur,
both records leave extra room for their occasions.
In crucial respects, the occasions are dissimilar. The campaign
against capital punishment is made to order for rock's feel-good
p.c.--not as squooshy as world hunger or saving the whales, but,
like gun control, all too compatible with a sentimental distaste for
violence. Like gun control, it makes more sense as policy than as path
to enlightenment; even those of us who can readily imagine a polity
with the moral right to dispense with sociopaths or a revolutionary
situation in which the good guys would need firearms will agree that
we're woefully far from either, hence better off just shielding the
poor from switch-pullers and triggermen. But while September 11 also
scares up a distaste for violence--I expect that many contributors
to Wish You Were Here, specifically Senegal's Baaba Maal and
Egypt's Hakim, were moved by something of the sort--it evokes much
else as well: patriotism and, for New Yorkers, chauvinism, plus such
primal stuff as hatred, dread, revenge, and grief. Except for the
grief, none of this meshes with feel-good p.c. But it meshes fine with
rock and roll, which has gone for the primal since 1955. And the way
The Executioner's Last Songs plays capital punishment renders
its rock-inflected take on country music just as good a match.
So the first last song is Brett Sparks intoning the coldest murder
ballad in the old-timey canon, "Knoxville Girl," which ends with the
vile killer "wast[ing] his life away" in jail--but not
executed. Sentimentalists exit to the rear unless you're down with
sparing such creeps. Then Rosie Flores pulls out the everyday
existential despair of Hank Williams's "I'll Never Get Out of This
World Alive," and Waco Brother Dean Schlabowske transforms the
Adverts' "Gary Gilmore's Eyes" from what Marcus once declared a "pure
punk notion" into a formally realistic horror story. Some of the
covers are more obvious--"Oh Death," "Tom Dooley," "Sing Me Back
Home"--and not one is definitive, but laid in a row by these
irascible postneotraditionalists they say far more about rage, guilt,
remorse, retribution, and human orneriness than the inevitable sermon
at the end (which has its uses even so). In its own class is "25
Minutes to Go," the gallows-humor farewell Shel Silverstein wrote for
Johnny Cash, swung till it levitates by two guys from the Aluminum
Group. Tragically absent is Tom T. Hall's "Turn It On, Turn It On,
Turn It On," in which a World War II noncombatant shoots up the town
that called him a coward and greatly enjoys the fried chicken and baby
squash at his last supper.
Yet the standouts aren't covers--they're two original topical songs
by people I'd never heard of. Chris Ligon's disingenuous ditty about a
nice guy on death row feels like a one-off. Christa Meyer and Tim
Kelley's grisly, understated, apocalyptic, klezmerish "Hangman's
Song," however, has the mark of committed songwriting--when Meyer
lilts "Oh, oh, woe is me/The state has put a date on me," it's hard to
believe other singers won't follow. If "Hangman's Song" isn't "Turn It
On, Turn It On, Turn It On," here it tops "Sing Me Back Home" and "25
Minutes to Go," and the occasion, first as inspiration and then as
context, is why. Stuck between the wicked murder of "Tom Dooley" and
the hopeless murder of "Pardon Me (I've Got Someone to Kill)," its
categorical rejection of ultimate punishment signifies like
Brecht-Weill.
None of the occasional songs on Wish You Were Here have that
much aesthetic reach. In fact, having figured half the 18 tracks for
direct responses to the disaster, I was surprised to learn that only
two completely new songs made the cut: Joseph Arthur's "Build Back Up"
and Loudon Wainwright III's "No Sure Way." Instead, people scrambled
and recontextualized. On two of the strongest entries, Moe Tucker and
Peter Stampfel set new lyrics to old tunes. Ari Upp changed the
Cookies' "Don't Say Nothing Bad About My Baby" into "Don't Say Nothing
Bad About NY," Afrikaa Bambaataa funked up Melanie's "Candles in the
Rain," Uri Caine low-bridged Kander-Ebb's "New York, New York." And
often artists just rummaged through their catalogs for something
suitable: actual love songs to New York from outlanders the Mekons and
Andrew W.K., a Romanes title from Ukrainian Americans Gogol Bordello
that translates "Strong City," a Cornershop outtake fortuitously
entitled "Returning From the Wreckage," Hakim mournful and Sheila
Chandra mystical and Baaba Maal pleading for peace, and Matthew
Shipp's 1998 recording of "Amazing Grace," along with Moby's "Memory
Gospel" the only previous U.S. release. I'd replace the Chandra with
the Roches' "song for the heroes," and although I love Slug I can't
hear how the Atmosphere track fits even with Chuck Eddy whispering in
my ear. But though you may suspect such a miscellany can only add up
to a mess, the occasion, augmented by Chuck's knack for the segue,
holds it together.
Chuck was an early fan of rock en espaņol, which I've accused of
"kitchen-sink stop-and-go," and that attraction to the disjunct helps
him comprehend the incomprehensible event at hand. Mourning and rage,
chauvinism and internationalism, sleepless fear and fierce
determination--in this leftish workplace, as in much of the city,
all coexisted in the wake of the attack, and Wish You Were Here
proves that they're contradictions only on the surface. "Memory
Gospel," which passed me by on Play: The B Sides,
strikes the perfect note of pomo reverence before sliding into
Cornershop's unbowed synth-rock, which sets up the faster rockers that
follow--defiant, celebratory, and both. Bambaataa provides the link
to an emotionally polyglot global grouping, and Caine leads off a
quietly disquieted final section. My favorite touch is pure
Chuck--one-upping "Amazing Grace," an obvious capper, with an
industrial assault by local DJ Lenny Dee that had me holding my ears
at our listening session. Called "Extreme Terror," it sticks
sanctimony where the sun don't shine.
Sanctimony is in the ear of the behearer, and no doubt there are fools
who will try to reduce the unmeasurable man-hours and critical acumen
that went into this red-white-and-blue cake to the corporate
self-service it may or may not accomplish. I say that in all its noise
and beauty, its conflicting emotions and culture clash, it represents
the New York I've loved since the coming of Willie Mays. To quote
English heiress, white Rasta, Johnny Rotten in-law, and NY immigrant
Ari Upp: "Don't say nothing bad about my city." And right now, you'd
better watch it when you talk about my paper, too.
Village Voice, Mar. 26, 2002
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