The Politics of Post-9/11 Music:

Sound, Trauma, and the Music

Industry in the Time of Terror

Edited by
Joseph P. Fisher and Brian Flota
 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music:
Sound, Trauma, and the Music Industry in
the Time of Terror
This page has been left blank intentionally
The Politics of Post-9/11 Music:
Sound, Trauma, and the Music
Industry in the Time of Terror

Joseph P. Fisher
The George Washington University, USA
and
Brian Flota
Oklahoma State University, USA
© Joseph P. Fisher and Brian Flota and the contributors 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Joseph P. Fisher and Brian Flota have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.

Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East Suite 420
Union Road 101 Cherry Street
Farnham Burlington
Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405
England USA

www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

The politics of post-9/11 music : sound, trauma, and the
music industry in the time of terror. – (Ashgate popular
and folk music series)
1. Popular music – 2001–2010 – History and criticism.
2. Music – Social aspects – United States – History – 21st
century. 3. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001 – Influence.
I. Series II. Fisher, Joseph P. III. Flota, Brian.
306.4’842’0973’09051–dc22

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The politics of post-9/11 music : sound, trauma, and the music industry in the time of terror
/ [edited by] Joseph P. Fisher and Brian Flota.
p. cm. — (Ashgate popular and folk music series)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-2784-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4094-2785-8
(ebook) 1. Popular music—United States—Political aspects. 2. September
11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001—Songs and music—History and criticism. 3. War on Terrorism,
2001–2009—Songs and music--History and criticism. I. Fisher, Joseph P. II. Flota, Brian.
ML3918.P67P655 2011
781.640973’09051—dc23

2011021370
ISBN 9781409427841 (hbk)
ISBN 9781409427858 (ebk)
V

Printed and bound in Great Britain by the

MPG Books Group, UK.
 Contents

General Editor’s Preface   vii

Notes on Contributors   ix
Forewordxi
Acknowledgments   xvii

Introduction—Greet Death: Post-9/11 Music and the Sound of Decay   1

Joseph P. Fisher and Brian Flota

Part I Electric Dreams: The Medium and the Message

1 Rock, Enroll: Music and Militarization since 9/11   13

Samuel Dwinell

2 Music, Terrorism, Response: The Conditioning Logic of Code and

Networks   31
Benjamin J. Robertson

3 Technostalgia and the Resurgence of Cassette Culture   43

Craig Eley

Part II Hail to the Thief: Post-9/11 Experimental Music

4 Why Protest Albums Can’t Teach Dissent: The Emergent

Complexity of Post-9/11 Protest   57
Conrad Amenta

5 On a Maddening Loop: Post-9/11 Rubble Music   69

Isaac Vayo

6 Terrorism and the Politics of Improvisation   79

Rob Wallace

7 Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero and the Biopolitics of Media Convergence 93
Katheryn Wright
vi The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

Part III What’s Going On, Again?: Protest and

Nostalgia

8 Casualties of War: Hip-Hop and the Old Racial Politics of the

Post-9/11 Era   107
Aisha Staggers

9 That Was Now, This Is Then: Recycling Sixties Style in

Post-9/11 Music   115
Jeffrey Roessner

10 A New Morning in Amerika: Conservative Politics and Punk Rock

in the 2000s   129
Matthew Siblo

11 “Agony & Irony”: Indie Culture’s Sardonic Response to

America’s Post-9/11 Devolution   145
S. Todd Atchison

Part IV Idle American, American Idol:

Mainstream Media and Ideology

12 Post-Dixie Chicks Country: Carrie Underwood and the

Negotiation of Feminist Country Identity 161
Molly Brost

13 Walking the Great Line: Underoath and Christian Fundamentalism

in Punk Rock after 9/11   173
Gerrit Roessler

14 War Is Heavy Metal: Soundtracking the US War in Iraq   185

Steve Waksman

Index   207
 General Editor’s Preface

The upheaval that occurred in musicology during the last two decades of the
twentieth century has created a new urgency for the study of popular music
alongside the development of new critical and theoretical models. A relativistic
outlook has replaced the universal perspective of modernism (the international
ambitions of the 12-note style); the grand narrative of the evolution and dissolution
of tonality has been challenged, and emphasis has shifted to cultural context,
reception and subject position. Together, these have conspired to eat away at the
status of canonical composers and categories of high and low in music. A need has
arisen, also, to recognize and address the emergence of crossovers, mixed and new
genres, to engage in debates concerning the vexed problem of what constitutes
authenticity in music and to offer a critique of musical practice as the product of
free, individual expression.
Popular musicology is now a vital and exciting area of scholarship, and the
Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series presents some of the best research in
the field. Authors are concerned with locating musical practices, values and
meanings in cultural context, and draw upon methodologies and theories developed
in cultural studies, semiotics, poststructuralism, psychology and sociology.
The series focuses on popular musics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
It is designed to embrace the world’s popular musics from Acid Jazz to Zydeco,
whether high tech or low tech, commercial or non-commercial, contemporary
or traditional.

Professor Derek B. Scott

Professor of Critical Musicology
University of Leeds
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Notes on Contributors

Conrad Amenta: Writer; Cokemachineglow.com

S. Todd Atchison: University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Molly Brost: University of Southern Indiana

Samuel Dwinell: Ph.D. candidate; Cornell University

Craig Eley: Ph.D. candidate, American Studies; University of Iowa

Ryan Randall: Ph.D. candidate, Visual and Cultural Studies; University of

Rochester

Benjamin J. Robertson: Instructor, Department of English; University of

Colorado, Boulder

Gerrit K. Roessler: University of Virginia

Jeffrey Roessner: Mercyhurst College

Matthew Siblo: Ed.M.; Ph.D. Candidate in Counseling; The George Washington

University

Aisha Staggers: Assistant Director, Center for Public Policy & Social Research;
Central Connecticut State University

Lloyd Isaac Vayo: Defiance College

Dr. Rob Wallace: Research Associate; Improvisation, Community, and Social

Practice; University of Guelph

Steve Waksman: Associate Professor, Music and American Studies; Smith

College

Katheryn Wright: Florida State University

This page has been left blank intentionally
 Foreword
The Earth Still Is Not a Cold Dead Place:
A Conversation with Chris Hrasky

In late August 2001, the instrumental rock band Explosions in the Sky released
their second record Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth
Shall Live Forever. The album’s cover art depicted an angel flying above a group
of soldiers in silhouette, a plane flying in the distance. Ominously, the declaration
“This plane will crash tomorrow” was inscribed on the inside of the sleeve.
Roughly two weeks after the album’s release, the events of September 11, 2001
unfolded to the world’s horror.
The uncanny, almost unthinkable, coincidence set off a barrage of speculation
about the group’s prescience. Did they know? How could they know? Are they
joking? Were they involved? Indeed, the band’s bassist, Michael James, was
deemed a threat to security and was detained in an Amsterdam airport when
authorities discovered that he had the words “this plane will crash tomorrow”
written on his guitar (Chamy).
Two years later, the band released what many critics have seen as their
masterwork: the gorgeous The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place. More restrained
than its exceedingly loud predecessor, Earth journeys through passages of
deep melancholy on its way toward a triumphant conclusion in its final track—
the soothing, reassuring “Your Hand in Mine.” Writing for Pitchfork, Hartley
Goldstein was correct to call the record “about as close as indie rock gets to an
intentionally ‘post-9/11’ album.”
A long four years after that – during which America’s Gulf Coast suffered the
tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, and, of course, during which the country became
increasingly mired in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – Explosions in the Sky
followed up with the equally poignant All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone. Startlingly,
the album’s cover art displayed a lone man in a rowboat holding a lantern, gazing
at a distant city almost entirely submerged in water.
Ask any music writer to name the most important band of the contemporary
era, always a shifting designation, and you better cancel your dinner reservations.
In the course of compiling this volume, we, the editors, have missed many
dinners. However, no matter what our disagreements were about what bands to
represent, what trends to survey, what albums to include, we continually returned
to Explosions in the Sky, believing them to hold an absolutely central position
in the culture of post-9/11 America. Whether or not their connections to the
current sociopolitical moment are accidental has no bearing on the fact that they
xii The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

have remained consistently relevant throughout a decade of pronounced cultural

turmoil.
Therefore, we contacted the band to see if they would be willing to lend a
voice to this volume—to frame it, as it were. Drummer Chris Hrasky (CH)
graciously accepted our invitation and kindly offered some of his time to talk
about the process—and politics—of writing music in the post-9/11 American
landscape. One of the most striking themes that emerged over the course of our
conversation concerned the ways in which, both from a creative and consumer
standpoint, the shifts during the decade since 2001 in the production and
dissemination of music have, possibly, sapped the act of listening of its potential to
foster communal connections—despite the omnipresent language of filesharing.
This issue is explored in the chapters that follow and, we contend, represents a
significant inquiry about the connections between music and politics in the Time
of Terror. If music is the universal language, what happens if it is primarily heard
in relative cultural isolation? This question becomes even more charged when we
consider that, despite the premium that many musicians, critics, and fans place
on the Internet as the utopian space for community, that particular community is
implicitly constructed as Western, if not primarily American. After all, not every
country in the world has unfettered access to music or to the Internet. We are
grateful to Chris for his assistance with this project.

Q: So here we are, nearly ten years out from 9/11 and the release of Those Who
Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever, and we are
back to talking about the band in the context of the September 11th attacks. Is this
surprising—or irritating—to you in any way?

CH: At this point, it doesn’t really bother us, because it really hasn’t come up in
several years. When [9/11] happened, and we had just put that record out the week
before, it was pretty much the main topic of our interviews—not that we were
doing a ton of interviews back then. The phrase “This plane will crash tomorrow”
is written in the liner notes, and, for some reason, some rumor started that the
record came out on September 10th, which was completely untrue; it came out
two weeks before that. So there would be interviewers who would ask us if there
was some connection between that phrase and 9/11. It’s as if they were looking
for us to say something like, “We knew it was going to happen” or that we had
premonitions or something. We would tell them that [the album’s] artwork [by
David Logan] and liner notes were completed six months prior to September 11,
and some journalists seemed disappointed with that answer. Also, at the time,
college radio wouldn’t play us because of the band name. We sort of understood
everyone was in this weird panic state, having this totally new experience we’d
never really been through as a country, so maybe people weren’t thinking very
clearly about things. It was just very, very strange. It went on for a full year like
that. [Interviewers] would say things like, “You guys are from Texas and George
Bush is from Texas. Can you comment on that?” They were trying to make up these
 The Earth Still Is Not a Cold Dead Place xiii

weird connections that didn’t even make any sense. One of the guys in the band
is Pakistani [guitarist Munaf Rayani], so they would talk about that sometimes.
Again, this was the first time we’d ever been interviewed for anything—so it was
kind of a strange trial by fire, I guess.

Q: Did that experience inform the way you envisioned your subsequent records
at any level?

CH: I don’t know if it really ever had the effect where it framed how we would
write the next record. Even in some of your questions, you mentioned The Earth
Is Not a Cold Dead Place and asked if some of the songs were a reaction to 9/11.
As far as I remember—we wrote that record eight years ago—that never came up
in the conversation about what these songs were about, or how these songs should
be, or even what they should be called.

Q: So-called “indie” music is all the rage in academic circles these days. Any
thoughts on how your role in this anthology might establish a connection between
Explosions in the Sky, the tragedy of September 11, and the realm of “academic”
writing?

CH: I wonder if the band’s intention is even important. I do feel like once you’ve
made something and put it out there, it develops a life of its own; the audience
seems to make of it what they will. If there are people who make the connection
[to 9/11], I think it’s valid. Just because we didn’t consciously make the connection
doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist in some way. We didn’t write any songs about 9/11.
That just didn’t happen. But if people look at it as though “this song is about 9/11,”
then that connection exists for them.

Q: Are you OK with our anthology spinning the music in a political way?

CH: If that’s how people relate to it or that’s how it’s interpreted, I certainly don’t
have a problem with it. Politics is not something that comes up when we’re writing
songs or titles or artwork—at least not on the surface. That title, The Earth Is Not
a Cold Dead Place, came from this idea of life being very confusing. It was a dark
time, and the record is sort of about trying to hang on to the beauty in the world.
So I guess in some sense that could be considered political. As far as making
these connections between our music and politics: just because it’s not present for
the four of us in the band doesn’t invalidate the argument. It comes back to how
people view the record[s] themselves.

Q: To force the issue a bit, we should discuss the genre of music the band performs.
Since your music is entirely instrumental, one can leap to the conclusion that it is
apolitical. However, the titles of the tracks on your two post-9/11 albums seem to
direct listeners to ways in which they are meant to be listened. Tracks like “First
xiv The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

Breath After Coma,” “Memorial,” “Your Hand in Mine,” “Welcome, Ghosts,” and
“Catastrophe and the Cure” all suggest both personal and collective reactions to
crises. As such, do you think of your music as political in any way? If so, how is
this politics directly related to the emotional quality of your music?

CH: When we write a song, it comes down to asking how we know when [it] is
finished. Do we find it moving in some way? Is it evocative of something? The
last thing we want [our songs] to be is background music, which is always a risk
with instrumental music. The fundamental goal is always for it to be evocative in
some way or, as cheesy as it sounds, to let the listener create the narrative of what
the song is about. What does it mean to them, if anything at all? It’s kind of an
intangible thing for us: “Well this works. This sounds cool. This feels good. This
makes me feel something. Why does this drum beat or this guitar note make us
kind of bored?” So it’s really more about emotional responses. We generally don’t
think of our music as political.
[However], we were wondering how the artwork for All of a Sudden I Miss
Everyone [by Esteban Rey] was going to be received. [That record] came out in
early 2007, and we thought for sure that this image of a flooded city and this guy
on his own in a rowboat … we just thought for sure people were going to connect
it to New Orleans and Katrina. Even if that wasn’t something we were necessarily
trying to convey, it was something we were OK with. [Ironically], no one—no
fan, no interviewer—has ever brought that up. To us it seems very obvious. We
were actually worried that people were going to say we were exploitative or too
heavy-handed: “Oh my God, this is so literal. It’s a flooded city and this lonely
guy on this boat.” We were working on one of the songs on that record in August
2005. That was the one time we were actually talking about an event while we
were writing a song and trying to connect the two. It ended up being [the song]
“It’s Natural to Be Afraid.” We never actually refer to the songs by their actual
titles when we talk about [them]. We always refer to them as what we were calling
them when we were writing them. That song, in our minds, is just called “New
Orleans.” It still is. If anyone brings that song up, we say, “Remember that part
in ‘New Orleans.’” That’s sort of the one instance where there was a very direct
connection to an event.

Q: Along those same lines, the title of All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone comes from
an awkward scene in John Cassavetes’ 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence in
which an eccentric mother, waiting for her children at a bus-stop, publicly displays
signs of her mental health in the process of disintegrating. Would you say that the
music on that album (or any of the band’s other albums) is about the loneliness of
being alienated when one most needs help?

CH: All of us have seen that movie five or six times over the past ten years. That’s
definitely one of my top five movies of all time. I was watching the movie again
after the record had come out, and that line came up, and I just thought, “Holy
 The Earth Still Is Not a Cold Dead Place xv

shit!” That’s not how we came up with that title—which is totally crazy because I
remember the scene. I totally know the line. The way she’s saying it is pretty much
exactly how we were thinking of what the title and the record meant. It’s sort of
about going about your daily life and your routine and feeling really isolated. Not
isolated where you’re stuck up in a research station in the North Pole, but literally
at your job, hanging out with your friends, your family, but still that feeling of just
utter, “Why do I feel so alone? And even though I’m surrounded by everyone, why
does it feel like I miss everyone all the time?”

Q: What do you think of the recent resurgence of vinyl collecting? Do you think
your records are more properly experienced when listened to on vinyl, on CD,
or in another digital format? Do you think the “return to vinyl,” especially for
younger listeners reared in the age of the CD, represents a nostalgic return to
“simpler times”?

CH: Obviously, things are so much faster now. You don’t have to dig very deep.
You can listen to ten-second snippets and say “I don’t like it. I don’t care.” It
makes me kind of sad because that’s not how I grew up listening to music. It was
a much more communal thing. It was like, “Someone got the new Dinosaur Jr.
record. Come over and we’ll all listen to it.” That was a big part of growing up for
me. That was a regular thing.
I’m very curious to see how it will be for us when we put our new record out.1
Our digital sales are increasing, but percentage-wise, our physical sales are still
really strong. We put a lot of work into the artwork, so maybe that’s [the reason].
It makes me hope that people have this connection to us and that they want to have
this artifact of what we do. The artwork for our next record is the most elaborate
we’ve done, which is interesting because it’s at a time when most record and CD
formats just come out pretty basic. If there are people who are spending the time
to go to the record store or waiting for it to be shipped to them from the label,
then we would like to give them something worthwhile. Sure, [anyone] can go to
iTunes and get it instantly. I do that a lot. But there’s nothing cool to look at, and
it’s an underwhelming experience. Our hope is that you’re rewarded with a cool
package and cool artwork. And because the artwork has always been so important
to us, almost as important as the music, we’ll always think about it that way. At the
same time, there is something positive about being able to find good music easily.
[If we think about the role of] technology—how are things like social networking
changing the way we experience our lives? What will the repercussions of that be
twenty years from now? This weird isolation and anonymity of online socializing;
the “wired” life—it’s certainly easier not to be a part of society in a physical sense.
I don’t even really buy anything in a store. I get stuff [online] if I want a CD,
book or a movie. It’s cheaper and I don’t have to drive. That whole experience of

1
  Their fifth album, Take Care, Take Care, Take Care, was released April 18, 2011.
xvi The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

purchasing goods and consuming has totally changed for me. Things are certainly
easier, but it also makes me sort of disappointed in myself.

Q: Explosions in the Sky hail from Texas; the band scored a film about football;
the band’s name, from what we’ve read, was inspired by a fireworks display; the
band is framing an anthology about 9/11. Does all of this make the band, at its
core, an American band? Does this distinction even matter? Is it one that you’ve
already embraced?

CH: We’re comfortable with that statement [that we’re an American band], but
we’re definitely not the love it or leave it type.

Works Cited

Chamy, Michael. “Born on the Fourth of July: To the Moon and Back with
Explosions in the Sky.” The Austin Chronicle. Oct. 24, 2003. Web (accessed
Jan. 5, 2011).
Goldstein, Hartley. Review of The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place, by Explosions
in the Sky. Pitchfork. Nov. 30, 2003. Web (accessed Jan. 5, 2011).
Logan, David. Cover art. Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the
Truth Shall Live Forever. Temporary Residence Limited, 2001. LP.
Rey, Esteban. Cover art. All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone. Temporary Residence
Limited, 2007. LP.
 Acknowledgments

The editors: Thanks to Gayle Wald, Robert McRuer, and Jeffrey Cohen for their
support and advice from the very beginning of this project. Also, thank you to Heidi
Bishop, who has been a fantastic managing editor all throughout the production
of this volume.

Joseph P. Fisher: Thanks to Explosions in the Sky, Chris Hrasky in particular, for
inspiring this project and for remaining willing to be involved in it the entire way.
I also owe a word of thanks to Alexander Tieberg-Bailie for introducing me to
The Disintegration Loops. Like so many of my students, Alex has taught me more
than he will ever know. As always, I am grateful for the love and support of my
parents, Patricia and Paul Fisher, and my brother, Kevin Fisher—all of whom have
patiently endured my incessant music listening and collecting habits for longer
than anyone else could. Finally, thank you to my wife Kelly for her unconditional
patience and love. This publication, like so many of my other projects, would not
have reached completion had Kelly not been touching it from a distance since day
one.

Brian Flota: I thank Joe Fisher for asking me to help him work on this project,
which has been very rewarding for me. I would also like to thank the English
Department at Oklahoma State University for allowing me the time and
concentration needed to work on this book. I would especially like to thank Carol
Mason for suggesting Steve Waksman as a scholar who would be suitable for
contributing to this collection. I am also grateful to my online communities at
RateYourMusic.com and PoMo Jukebox for keeping me aware of exciting new
music. Of course, I am thankful to our contributors, who have put up with our
criticisms and suggestions with grace. It has been an honor to work with all of
them. Last, but not least, these acknowledgments would be incomplete without
mentioning the love and support of my parents, Sandra L. Simmons and Bradley
T. Flota.

Conrad Amenta: I would like to thank the staff at Cokemachineglow, one of the
smartest communities of music writers working today.

S. Todd Atchison: I would like to thank Caitlin Saraphis and Alice Mitchell for
their insightful edits of earlier chapter drafts.

Molly Brost: I would like to thank Ben O’Dell, Oana Popescu-Sandu, Melinda York,
David O’Grady, and Mark Krahling for their feedback on an early draft of my essay.
xviii The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

Samuel Dwinell: My initial interest in this topic was developed in conversation

with members of the group Iraq Veterans Against the War. I wish to thank Judith
Peraino, Nick Salvato, and Amy Villarejo for their insightful comments at various
stages of this project. Particular thanks also goes to Shelley Feldman and Chuck
Geisler for organizing the “Accumulating Insecurity” workshops at Cornell
University in 2008. These events proved formative for my interest in aspects
of militarization. My greatest debt of thanks is to Rachel Lewis, without whose
bibliographic dexterity, theoretical acumen, and willingness to read drafts I would
never have undertaken this project.

Craig Eley: Thanks to Rob Latham’s seminar on subcultures at the University

of Iowa, where the idea for my chapter developed under encouragement and
valuable feedback. Also, a special word of thanks to David Z. Morris, with whom
I recorded my first cassette release. Thank you, David, for being a great bandmate,
friend, and intellectual sparring partner.

Benjamin J. Robertson: Thanks to Paul Youngquist and numerous students for

their conversations about media, music, and more; mash-up artists everywhere for
challenging conventions of music production, consumption, and distribution; and
Lori Emerson for being Lori Emerson.

Gerrit Konrad Roessler: I am indebted to my supervisor at the University of

Dortmund, Professor Walter Grünzweig, for his support at the earliest stages of
both my academic career in general, and the chapter in this volume in particular. I
owe thanks to my friends and colleagues Kelly Gross, Brett Martz, Gabriel Cooper,
and Matt Lockaby for reading rough drafts, listening to ideas, and debating them
on many occasions. Finally, I express my most heartfelt gratitude and love to
my partner, Allison Sommers, for supporting me in all my endeavors, be they
academic or otherwise.

Jeffrey Roessner: Thanks to Christy Rieger, always my first and best reader.
And special acknowledgment to Erich Hertz for the ongoing, always compelling
conversation about music. The essay would not have been possible without such
wonderful support.

Matthew Siblo: I would like to thank everyone who agreed to be interviewed for
my chapter, Lori for her inestimable patience and understanding throughout the
writing process, and Tom for his priceless guidance and long-winded explanations.
My chapter is dedicated to my brother who, despite his protests that punk rock
loses something on the page, continues to be the most important reader of my
work.
 Acknowledgments xix

Aisha Staggers: I would like to thank my family and friends for their love and
support, Teba Henderson for introducing me to hip-hop at the age of ten, and my
father, Ronald Staggers, for teaching me to appreciate good music. I dedicate this
to Amaya Elle, Ira Davis, Marvin and Tammi.

Isaac Vayo: Thank you to my dissertation committee (chair Ellen Berry and
members Cynthia Baron, Rob Sloane, and Don McQuarie) for their guidance in
helping me to refine the ideas in my chapter in this volume, and to my wife Lauren
for bearing with my unending discussions of its content.

Steve Waksman: Thanks to the editors, and especially Brian Flota, for inviting
me to be part of this project and for their patience as I toiled through the writing
process. Also, big thanks to Carol Mason, my friend and colleague from afar, for
connecting me with Brian and opening the way to my contribution to this book.

Rob Wallace: Thanks to Joe Sorbara, Jesse Stewart, Simon Rose, and members of
the ICASP reading group at the University of Guelph for their feedback. Thanks
also to Curtis Bahn and Tomie Hahn for alerting me to the different, but related
history of IEDs (improvised electronic devices).

Katheryn Wright: I would like to thank Amit Rai for his encouragement. Without
Clinton Bryant’s continual support and encyclopedic knowledge of all things
related to popular music, I could not have completed this chapter.
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 Introduction—Greet Death:
Post-9/11 Music and the Sound of Decay1
By Joseph P. Fisher and Brian Flota

The music was dying. I was recording the death of this sweeping melody. It was
very emotional for me, and mystical as well. Tied up in these melodies were
my youth, my paradise lost, the American pastoral landscape, all dying gently,
gracefully, beautifully.
William Basinski

In August 2001, avant-garde composer William Basinski began transferring a

series of analog tape loops, which he recorded in the early 1980s, to digital file
format. Early in the process, Basinski realized that the tapes themselves were
disintegrating. As the composer watched the old magnetic tape gliding through his
recording equipment, he noticed that particles of tape material were flaking off,
irreparably altering his initial recordings, and capturing, in literally gritty detail,
the sound of decay.
The added significance of this narrative is a matter of context: Basinski
completed this project in September 2001, and at the time, he was residing in
Brooklyn, New York. On the morning of September 11, 2001, Basinski watched
the destruction of the World Trade Center from his rooftop as he played his newly
archived tape loops over and over again in the background, providing an eerily
relevant soundtrack for what remains, perhaps, the most significant day in post-
millennial American history.
When Basinski released these loops commercially, he did so as an expansive
four-CD set entitled The Disintegration Loops. Though hardly as popular or as
well-known as other “9/11 albums”—like Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising or,
perhaps more esoterically, Godspeed You Black Emperor!’s Yanqui U.X.O.—The
Disintegration Loops have achieved a modest amount of critical praise. Most
notably, as the obligatory best-of-the-decade music lists began to be compiled at
the end of 2009, Basinski’s name gained a fair amount of public prominence, at
least among music bloggers. The music magazine Resident Advisor ranked The
Loops as the 86th best album of the ’00s. Similarly, the music site Pitchfork listed

1
  Joseph P. Fisher thanks Sarah Zupko for allowing him to adapt two of his
PopMatters blog posts for use in this chapter. Those posts are as follows: Fisher, Joseph
P. “Greet Death: William Basinski, Hospitality, and the Sound of Decay” (PopMatters, 16
July 2010. Web); Fisher, Joseph P. “Losing My Religion: Revealing the Hollow Reality of
Lo-Fi” (PopMatters, 23 July 2010. Web).
2 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

the set as the 196th best release (out of a possible 200) of the 2000s, while the
website Tiny Mix Tapes placed The Loops in the number 10 spot—two slots above,
it should be noted, Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009) by indie favorites Animal
Collective.
It is certainly possible that the dramatic backdrop which adorns The
Disintegration Loops is the reason for the set’s enduring relevance. After all,
Basinski’s subsequent releases have not garnered the same attention, critical or
popular, as The Loops. Regardless of the set’s contextual ties to the 9/11 attacks,
The Disintegration Loops arguably still stand as the most significant musical
artifacts of the so-called Time of Terror. As a group of recordings that chronicle
the process of auditory and material decay, The Loops metonymically embody
the sonic fixations of much post-9/11 music: concerns with fidelity, the tensions
between “outmoded” recording techniques and digital media, the connections
between “reality” and physicality, and a nostalgic gaze on the past. As Basinski
writes in the liner notes to The Disintegration Loops, he witnessed the death of his
past as his compositions physically and auditorily disintegrated. Along those lines,
the writers in this volume probe, from a variety of angles, and through discussions
of a variety of contemporary music genres, the ways in which the post-9/11
musical landscape, particularly in North America, has been shaped by artistic and
technological attempts to deconstruct the split between the past and the present—
the split between pre-9/11 temporality and post-9/11 temporality. Furthermore,
these writers question the political import of such attempts, particularly when they
are often dependent on an idealized, frequently pastoral, vision of the past—a
vision that, many of our writers argue, only fragments and disintegrates the more
that it is revisited, looped, reimagined.
In his slim meditation on the 9/11 attacks, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!,
Slavoj Žižek argues that “the ultimate and defining moment of the twentieth
century was the direct experience of the Real as opposed to everyday social
reality—the Real in its extreme violence as the price to be paid for peeling off
the deceptive layers of reality” (5–6). By drawing on examples as diverse as
Hollywood disaster movies, hardcore pornography, and the endless recycling and
rebroadcasting of the 9/11 news footage (the last of which has become a ritual,
at least in the United States, on each anniversary of the attacks), Žižek excavates
what he sees as a central irony in the drive to experience the Real: it “culminates in
its apparent opposite, in a theatrical spectacle” (9; emphasis in original). Indeed,
it is telling that the 9/11 attacks were notoriously described—by political pundits,
news broadcasters, and the public more generally—as being “like a movie.” While
the extreme, potentially pornographic video coverage of 9/11 attacks was meant
to reveal and transmit the reality of the attacks, it also worked to configure 9/11
as a spectacle, an event that was, in its utter realness, also unreal—too real to be
conceived beyond the trappings of theatrical performance.2

2
  Eerily, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks,
is quoted in The 9/11 Commission Report as having originally imagined a plot in which ten
 Post-9/11 Music and the Sound of Decay 3

Though Žižek, and many other critics who have written on 9/11, primarily
configures the spectacle of the attacks in visual terms, it is quite easy—and
necessary—to appropriate his remarks to examine 9/11 as a kind of auditory
spectacle.3 While a sizeable majority of 9/11’s (eye)witnesses encountered the
attacks visually, through various visual news media, the comments relayed by the
firefighters from FDNY Engine 7, Ladder 1 (the first firefighters to respond to
the World Trade Center attacks) suggest that 9/11, as an event, was initially an
auditory one. “And then we heard a plane come over; and in Manhattan, you don’t
hear planes too often, especially loud ones,” one of the firefighters stated upon
hearing American Airlines Flight 11 fly overhead before seeing it crash into the
North Tower (quoted in 9/11).
To be clear, resituating 9/11 as an auditory event is not meant as an attempt to
prioritize one set of sensory impressions over another, though it should be noted
that conceiving of the attacks solely in visual terms, which has been the dominant
paradigm to date, ignores the sensory impressions of, at least, blind and visually
impaired witnesses. Rather, moving 9/11 from a visual register to an auditory one
is meant to highlight the various ways that the attacks were preceded by—even in
the final seconds before them—noise. The 9/11 Commission writers describe, in a
chapter titled “The System Was Blinking Red,” the enormous amount of “chatter”
that was dominating defense channels all throughout 2001. (The first subsection
of this chapter is even titled “The Drumbeat Begins.”) Even more telling are
the comments from the firefighters of FDNY Engine 7, Ladder 1, because, as
the documentary that chronicles their rescue work bears out, American Airlines
Flight 11 roared above New York City, making an almost otherworldly racket
which predicted the destruction that followed. Jacques Attali’s famous analysis
of noise is, of course, relevant here: “Noise is violence: it disturbs. To make noise
is to interrupt a transmission, to disconnect, to kill” (26; emphasis in original).
Setting aside the chaos that ensued after the World Trade Center and Pentagon
were attacked—interruptions in telecommunication service, the seemingly endless
distribution of misinformation via the mass media, the horrifying sound of the
collapsing towers—it is arguably the primordial, disruptive howl of AA 11 that,
perhaps, signifies everything about 9/11: it bespeaks the massive global disorder
that followed it.
An intriguing musical parallel to the events of September 11, 2001 was the
resurgence, later that very month, of low-fidelity (or lo-fi) rock. Merely two weeks
after 9/11, New York City’s The Strokes released their debut album Is This It to
widespread critical acclaim. In his article “Maim that Tune: The Moldy Peaches

planes were to be hijacked, nine of which were to crash into various targets on the east and
west coasts of the United States. Mohammed would then have landed the tenth plane, killed
all of the male passengers, and delivered an anti-US speech through the mainstream media.
The Commission writers are perceptive in their description of this plan: “This is theater, a
spectacle of destruction with KSM as the self-cast star—the superterrorist” (154).
3
  See also Baudrillard, Borradori, Spivak.
4 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

and the Apotheosis of Lo-Fi,” Mark Desrosiers praised the album’s engineering for
being “perfect in its imperfection.” Likewise, Desrosiers gushed that lead singer
Julian Casablancas’ voice sounded “raw,” while “the band’s grooves crackle like
vinyl.” Though time has seen The Strokes’ star fall a bit, the importance of Is This
It remains as high as ever: Rolling Stone named it the second best album of the
decade in its “50 Best Albums of the Decade” list (Fricke et al.). It is no surprise,
then, that the remainder of the naughties, as clever music scribes have called the
first ten years of the new millennium, saw countless bands marketing themselves,
or being marketed as, lo-fi. And many of these bands also hailed from New York
City: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, LCD Soundsystem, The Dirty Projectors,
A Place to Bury Strangers, and Sleigh Bells, just to name a few, have arguably
brought more attention to New York City’s music scene than at any time since the
heyday of the city’s legendary punk movement in the mid- to late-1970s. Thus, in
many ways, the sound of post-9/11 New York has become just as prominent and
relevant as the sight of it.
Though written in 2002, a few years before many of these bands would hit
their commercial and critical peaks, Desrosiers does a wonderful job of detailing
the renewed appeal of rougher, unpolished sounds. “‘High fidelity’ … is now a
lie,” he quips. The truth? Reality, the Real. “Real life is analog,” Desrosiers argues.
This claim in many ways paraphrases Attali’s description of music: “Music is a
channelization of noise” (26; emphasis in original). For Attali, and for Desrosiers,
noise precedes music because it exists prior to the organizational controls that
channel it and ultimately render it musical, melodic even. As such, noise—as heard
in the crackle of vinyl, the imperfections of the human voice (before Autotune,
of course), the scuzzy distortion that is part and parcel of any electric music—
disrupts the fabricated fiction of high-fidelity recordings, the kinds of recordings
that are traditionally considered “music.” In other words, music is fiction, whereas
noise is real—the essence of real life, of reality as we know it.
It is fitting, then, that William Basinski would see the death of his youth, which
he links to the American landscape, in the disintegration of his analog tapes. As
those tapes flaked and fragmented, the physicality of his past, which, for him, had
bound itself magnetically to his recordings, gradually crumbled into ruin. The only
evidence that such a past ever existed emerges sonically on his digitized recordings
as disruptive lacunae that repeatedly violate the melodic flow of the original loops.
On The Disintegration Loops, we hear the jarring noise of death and decay. We
hear the sound of loss, the sound of destruction, the sound of an America that
has been unalterably changed by the spectacle of the Real—a spectacle of aural
catastrophe.
Given that noise embodies the potential for cultural disruption, and given that
so much post-9/11 American music has deliberately—and spectacularly, we might
say—appropriated the affectations of lo-fi, it is puzzling to note that the past decade
has seen very little, if any, overtly political music, particularly in light of the deep
turmoil that has characterized American politics, domestically and abroad, ever
since. While much has already been said about musical responses to 9/11 such as
 Post-9/11 Music and the Sound of Decay 5

Paul McCartney’s “Freedom,” Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You (When the World
Stopped Turning),” Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The
Angry American),” and Sleater-Kinney’s One Beat, as well as various musical
coincidences around the time of the attacks that seemed in poor taste, much less
has been written about the post-9/11 surge in patriotic music, which saw older
albums by country musicians Lee Greenwood (American Patriot and Super Hits)
and Charlie Daniels (A Decade of Hits and Super Hits) climb up Billboard’s Top
Pop Catalog charts (“Top Pop”).4 One of the goals of this collection is to reveal
the implicit as well as explicit connections between the tragic events of that day,
their geopolitical aftermath, and the myriad changes within the music industry that
followed in its wake.
For instance, in the hours before the terrorist attacks on Tuesday, September
11, 2001, new releases by Jay-Z (The Blueprint), Bob Dylan (“Love and Theft”),
Slayer (God Hates Us All), and Dream Theater (Live Scenes from New York) hit
record store shelves. This brief list is remarkable for a few reasons. The albums by
Jay-Z (as Aisha Staggers observes in her essay) and Bob Dylan have subsequently
been regarded as classics, each possessing a release date relegated to an eerie
but otherwise insignificant role in its critical reception. However, the releases by
Slayer and Dream Theater did not escape such a fate, as both were marked by
controversy based solely on the arbitrary (and coincidental) date of their release.
The title alone for Slayer’s album, God Hates Us All, either seemed outrageously
blasphemous or entirely appropriate depending on one’s religious beliefs in the
aftermath of the attacks. Its original cover art, depicting nails driven into a blood-
soaked Bible, did not help quell the controversy. Similarly, the cover art for Dream
Theater’s live album depicts a “Big Apple” on fire, with images of the World Trade
Center inside its flames; the cover image was quickly pulled with a new, less
offensive image put in its place. As these examples suggest, the simple affiliation
of the date September 11, 2001 with these releases has served to shape their legacy
in complex ways these artists could have never imagined.
More widely recognized than anything that Slayer or Dream Theater have
recorded since 2001 (or ever) has been the massive popularity of the televised
talent show American Idol, which debuted in the United States in 2002. Idol has
not only given Fox Television its highest Nielsen ratings ever for an episodic
show but also has made stars out of previously unknown singers such as Kelly
Clarkson, Carrie Underwood (who is the subject of Molly Brost’s contribution to
this volume), Clay Aiken, Jennifer Hudson, Chris Daughtry, and Adam Lambert,

4
  A sampling of these coincidences include the appearance of the track “NYC Cops”
on The Strokes’ Is This It with the lyric “New York City cops, they ain’t so smart,” the
cover art for Explosions in the Sky’s album Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who
Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever, announcing, “This plane shall crash tomorrow” (which
is discussed at length in the Foreword to this volume), and The Coup’s original artwork for
Party Music, designed before 9/11, which included an image of a giant fireball emanating
from the World Trade Center.
6 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

among others. More importantly, it returned the solo vocalist to a level of popular
cultural dominance not seen since the heyday of Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey,
and Michael Jackson in the early 1990s. Though it is fairly commonplace for solo
performers—singers and songwriters—to be configured as icons of pop music,
those figures also reflect the conventions of folk music, wherein the individual
vocalist has historically sung songs of social protest. This elongated, liberal
history is, of course, never recognized by the notoriously conservative Idol.
Nevertheless, this volume, in part, excavates those historical connections while
asking if something as hi-fi—as fabricated—as American Idol can actually be
more politically aware than it would seem at first glance.
Another seemingly apolitical post-9/11 musical trend has been the wide
popularity of mp3 downloads. The (illegal) downloading of music seriously began
to complicate the music industry’s enforcement of copyright violations; as such,
it was implicitly configured as a kind of consumer terrorism against entrenched
distribution models. One offshoot of this trend was the production of recordings
known as mash-ups, which fuse two or more previously recorded tracks into an
entirely new one. Combined with the increasing affordability of music editing
software programs like ProTools and Garageband, amateur acts as well as
popular DJs began reworking some of popular music’s sacred cows. As Benjamin
Robertson discusses in his chapter, the most highly publicized mash-up recording
was The Grey Album, produced by Danger Mouse in 2004. On it, he cleverly fused
Jay-Z’s The Black Album (2003) with The Beatles’ self-titled double LP (1968),
more commonly referred to as “The White Album.” Because of obvious copyright
violations, the album was never officially released. However, an internet campaign
known as “Grey Tuesday” (February 24, 2004) reportedly resulted in 100,000
downloads of the album, and there was nothing the record industry could do about
it (Rimmer 133). The popularity of The Grey Album opened the doors for mash-up
artists such as Girl Talk while also prompting a collaboration between Jay-Z and
the nu-metal act Linkin Park. Eventually, as Conrad Amenta and Katheryn Wright
note later in this collection, major acts like Radiohead (with their 2007 album
In Rainbows) and Nine Inch Nails (2008’s The Slip) would eventually forsake
tactile forms of their music almost completely, offering their albums as online
accessible mp3 files.5 In Radiohead’s case, they offered their fans a “pay what you
want” model, while Nine Inch Nails released their album for free under a Creative
Commons agreement. These gestures, whether occurring top-down, from artist
to consumer, or bottom-up, from consumer to artist, all imply a collective rage
against the machinery of old media—the noisy disruption of so many worldly
shoplifters uniting to take over.
Ironically, however, just as tactile music media seemed ready to be pitched
into the proverbial dustbin of history, the album was institutionalized as an artistic
medium. Prior to the terrorist attacks, Congress passed the National Recording

5
  Both albums would eventually get “proper,” tactile releases several months after
their initial release online.
 Post-9/11 Music and the Sound of Decay 7

Preservation Act of 2000, sponsored by California Representative William M.

Thomas. As a result, the National Recording Registry was begun in 2002. Three
albums were included in the first registry: Frank Sinatra’s Songs for Young Lovers
(1954), Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (1959), and Bob Dylan’s The Freewheelin’ Bob
Dylan (1963). Twelve albums were eventually included as part of the registry for
2003. Coinciding with this official sanctioning of the album was the trend of long-
popular musical acts performing their most famous albums in their entirety in a
concert format. One of the first groups to do this was, interestingly enough, Slayer,
who performed their 1986 classic Reign in Blood at a handful of shows in 2004
from start to finish. Many artists, such as Patti Smith, Sonic Youth, Van Morrison,
and the Flaming Lips, followed suit and began organizing concerts and tours based
around performances of their older albums: Horses, Daydream Nation, Astral
Weeks, and The Soft Bulletin respectively. Not coincidentally, the decade since
2001 has also seen a resurgence in vinyl record production and sales. In 2008, for
example, the purchase of vinyl records nearly doubled, inching up 89 percent, and
in 2010 vinyl sales reached their highest volume since Soundscan began tracking
these numbers (in 1991), totalling 2.8 million copies (Roberts; Harding). Though
this resurgence is often seen as a backlash against the ever-widening reach of the
Internet and digital media, which is a point that Craig Eley makes in his chapter
about cassette culture, it is also possible to hear William Basinski’s words echoing
in the background of that backlash: vinyl, for many, embodies the paradise of the
past.
One of this volume’s core claims is that this backward glance to the days when
music was distributed, and generally consumed, on physical media in long-playing
format—it is worth noting here that a popular live album concert series carries the
ironic name Don’t Look Back—implies a nostalgic longing for the prelapsarian
time before the 9/11 attacks. A major focal point of this nostalgic gaze has been
on the sounds of pre-9/11 popular music. For instance, in the latter half of “the
naughties,” heavy metal, a topic that Steve Waksman discusses in his contribution,
largely transcended the “nu-metal” trappings of the early 2000s and returned
to the genre’s more “traditional” sounds, as deployed by bands as diverse as
Dragonforce, Mastodon, Wolfmother, Boris, and Sunn O))). Similarly, the popular
new wave sounds of the 1980s returned to the forefront, as groups like The Killers,
Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, and LCD Soundsystem produced highly acclaimed
and well-selling albums. Likewise, many disbanded groups from the 1980s and
1990s reunited, toured, and, in many cases, recorded new music throughout the
same period. Many of these groups—The Pixies, Pavement, Dinosaur Jr., Mission
of Burma, and, in particular, Guided By Voices—were early purveyors of lo-
fi music, which suggests that, despite the obvious monetary motivation behind
these reunions, their music carries a social currency that extends beyond entirely
commercial contexts.
Finally, despite the fact that you, dear reader, are currently holding this bound
book in your hands, the way that audiences of all kinds receive music criticism
has changed substantially in recent years. As all print media have continued to
8 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

decline in sales, longtime pop-music print stalwarts like Rolling Stone, Spin, and
Alternative Press have had to bolster their online presence to keep up with Internet
upstarts such as Pitchfork, PopMatters, and Stereogum, as well as user-generated
content sites like RateYourMusic and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Many of
these sites allow user comments, which have served to democratize music criticism.
Just as news crawlers became staples of televised newscasts after September 11th,
2001, ostensibly in an attempt to provide viewers constantly with new information,
music aficionados used the World Wide Web to their advantage, creating their own
media outlets to disseminate news about their favorite musical acts. Oftentimes,
these outlets have made use of blogging platforms such as tumblr, CafePress,
and, of course, Blogger to enact a grassroots, potentially countercultural campaign
against the towering old media monoliths.
The Politics of Post-9/11 Music is divided into four sections. The first, “Electric
Dreams: The Medium and the Message,” consists of essays that explore the impact
of the increasing digitization of music over the decade after 2001. Samuel Dwinell
focuses on the various ways in which the militarized rhetoric of the post-9/11 era
has penetrated the domestic sphere in the form of video games, websites, mp3 files,
movie trailers, and YouTube clips. In his piece, Benjamin J. Robertson observes
how mp3s and iPods have rendered the very activity of listening to music a far
more individual experience than it was in twentieth-century periods of warfare.
Lastly, Craig Eley looks at the “technostalgia” craze and the recent revival of
cassette culture, especially among lo-fi and noise rock acts.
The second section, “Hail to the Thief: Post-9/11 Experimental Music,” features
work that examines subversive responses to the tragedy of September 11, 2001
from the underground (like Lloyd Isaac Vayo’s piece on the controversial “rubble
music” of Cassetteboy, especially their song “Fly Me to New York,” which fuses a
narrative of the 9/11 terrorist attacks from the perspective of the terrorists with iconic
and unauthorized samples from the long-cherished back-catalog of the American
icon Frank Sinatra) and the ways in which (African-)American improvised
music—particularly jazz—has entered itself into the lexicon of military jargon (as
Rob Wallace explores in his contribution, which deconstructs the frequent use of
the term “improvised explosive device,” or IED, in media accounts of the US war
in Iraq). Lastly Conrad Amenta and Katheryn Wright look at two popular groups
who experimented with the way their albums were disseminated, rendering the
act of music consumption an act of protest. Amenta convincingly observes, for
instance, that Radiohead’s obvious anti-Bush leanings on their 2003 album Hail to
the Thief are less provocative as contemporary protest than their more ambiguous
2007 follow-up, In Rainbows, which was distributed through the Internet as mp3
files with a pay model that circumvented the traditional financial structure of the
major labels. Similarly, Wright discusses Nine Inch Nails’ multimedia experiment
Year Zero (2007), and how frontman Trent Reznor’s dystopic vision rejected major
label interference and expanded the physical boundaries of the album.
“What’s Going On, Again?: Protest and Nostalgia,” our collection’s penultimate
section, confronts head-on the perception that 60s-style protest has been largely
 Post-9/11 Music and the Sound of Decay 9

absent in the Time of Terror. In her essay, Aisha Staggers argues that mainstream
hip-hop since 9/11 has shirked the political engagement it proudly displayed during
the Golden Age of Hip-Hop. Jeffrey Roessner challenges the assertion that protest
music was vital during the 1960s, and subsequently looks at how contemporary
“freak folk” acts like Grizzly Bear and Fleet Foxes have sonically evoked an
apolitical 60s sound in their post-9/11 music. Matthew Siblo looks at the rise of
conservative punk around the time of the 2004 US Presidential Campaign. Siblo
also looks back at punk’s past, interviewing figures such as Ian MacKaye and
Mark Anderson. Similarly, S. Todd Atchison observes how punk theorizes protest
through irony and sarcasm, focusing on late-punk groups Alkaline Trio and Green
Day’s responses to the Time of Terror.
The final section of the book, “Idle American, American Idol: Mainstream Media
and Ideology,” broadly examines how the rhetoric of American patriotism has been
fused – or, rather, confused – with constructions of femininity, masculinity, and
religion. Molly Brost and Steve Waksman’s pieces make compelling cases about
how American gender constructs are meant to reinforce an unflappable American
idealism, yet also reveal how they are problematized by the very constructs which
maintain these cultural-national projections. Gerrit Roessler similarly observes
how two seemingly contradictory cultures, punk and Christianity, exert outsider
identities, yielding unexpected relationships. Molly Brost focuses on country
singer Carrie Underwood and how her tougher brand of country femininity might
not have been possible without the example of the Dixie Chicks, who, to the
detriment of their career, infamously criticized George W. Bush onstage at a show
in England in 2003. Roessler looks at the unexpected mainstream success of the
Christian, screamo punk band Underoath. Lastly, our volume concludes with Steve
Waksman’s contribution, which examines how heavy metal music is deployed in
five films about the Iraq War experience, all of which contest and substantiate the
claim in the title of his essay that “War is Heavy Metal.”
10 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

Works Cited

The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on

Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.,
2004. Print.
9/11: The Filmmakers’ Commemorative Edition. Dir. Jules and Gideon Naudet.
Paramount, 2002. DVD.
Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Trans. Brian Massumi.
Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 16. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1985.
Print.
Basinski, William. Liner Notes. The Disintegration Loops. 2062, 2001. CD.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays. London: Verso, 2003.
Print.
Billboard, “Top Pop Catalog.” Billboard. Sept. 29, 2001: 60. Print.
Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen
Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 2003.
Print.
Desrosiers, Mark. “Maim That Tune: The Moldy Peaches and the Apotheosis of
Lo-Fi.” PopMatters. Mar. 6, 2002. Web. Jan. 2, 2011.
Fricke, David, et al. “50 Best Albums of the Decade.” Rolling Stone. Dec. 24,
2009: 47–56. Academic Search Premier. Web. Jan. 2, 2011.
Harding, Cortney. “Vinyl Posts 14% Sales Gain in 2010.” Billboard. Jan. 5, 2011.
Web. Jan. 15, 2011.
Pitchfork. “The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s: 200–151.” Pitchfork. Sept. 28,
2009. Web. Dec. 31, 2010.
Resident Advisor. “RA Poll: Top 100 Albums of the ’00s.” Resident Advisor. Jan.
25, 2010. Web. Dec. 31, 2010.
Rimmer, Matthew. Digital Copyright and the Consumer Revolution: Hands Off
my iPod. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2007. Print.
Roberts, Randall. “Nielsen Soundscan 2008 Sales Figures Released: LP Sales Up
89 Percent – And Neutral Milk Hotel Breaks the Top Ten.” LA Weekly. Jan. 5,
2009. Web. Feb. 22, 2011.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Terror: A Speech After 9-11.” boundary 2 31.2
(2004): 81–111. Print.
Tiny Mix Tapes Staff. “Favorite 100 Albums of 2000–2009: 20–01.” Tiny Mix
Tapes. Feb. 2010. Web. Dec. 31, 2010.
Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on September 11
and Related Dates. New York: Verso, 2002. Print.
 Part I
Electric Dreams:
The Medium and the Message
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Chapter 1
Rock, Enroll:
Music and Militarization since 9/111
Samuel Dwinell

What role will we assume in the historical relay of violence, who will we become
in the response, and will we be furthering or impeding violence by virtue of the
response we make?
Judith Butler

Introduction

There has been a curious lack of attention to forms of popular music that
advance politicized interventions in US contexts since September 11, 2001. It has
become commonplace to decry the apparent lack of American “protest music”
in comparison with the enthusiasm with which an earlier generation of artists
took up issues such as the Vietnam War or “Third World” poverty.2 Carefully
sutured into the newly turbo-charged machine of “post-9/11” US nationalism, it
would seem, popular music artists now all sing from the same jingoistic hymn
sheet that political scriptwriters quickly provided to the Bush administration in
the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy. Voices from below either failed to
penetrate the hegemonic grasp of censored, corporate media networks, or never
sound in the first place. Such was the extent of popular support for the newly
named “war on terror.” This chapter does not seek to deny the power of the new
politics of security to disallow or, as David Palumbo-Liu writes, make appear
“treasonous,” positions of “skepticism, doubt, and critical thinking” with respect
to the “war on terror” (124). Rather, I attempt to demonstrate how the new state
of (being at) “war on terror” includes spaces for, and even encourages, certain
forms of protest music. How has the “post-9/11 world,” theorized so powerfully
by Slavoj Žižek as an example of what Giorgio Agamben refers to as a bio-
political “state of exception,” been achieved over the last ten years? (140–1). I
discuss related examples of post-9/11 popular music that advocate on behalf of

1
  An early version of this study was presented at the “Popular Culture and (World)
Politics” conference, held at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom, on September 11–
12, 2008, and organized by Christina Rowley.
2
  See, for example, Reebee Garofalo’s article “Pop Goes to War.” Scholars of theater
and performance, however, have noted what Chris Megson refers to as “upsurge in political
theatre” in Western contexts since 9/11 (369).
14 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

both “pro-” and “anti-war” causes, arguing that North American protest music
of different political stripes in fact contributes to the maintenance of what Bülent
Diken calls the new, everyday “normality” of the post-9/11 “war on terror” (82).
In other words, popular culture in the “digital age” becomes inseparable from
everyday life, and, in turn, inscribes the militarized into the commonplace. We
must understand these connections between global violence and daily life in order
to imagine alternatives to militarized cultural production.
This chapter is thus concerned with ascertaining how, since September 11, 2001,
the media technologies that we use every day become complicit with the discourse
of the “war on terror,” not least by stripping meaningful dissent of validity. With
respect to popular music since 9/11, I ask how militarized networks of different
media work both to represent and to constitute the conditions of everyday life.
In the first section, I summarize how others have theorized significant changes
to culture and society brought about by the tragedy of 9/11. Next, I discuss two
important case studies of militarized cultural production in the years immediately
following 9/11: the video game America’s Army, released by the US Army as a
recruitment tool in 2002, and the song “(America’s Army) Die Jugend Marschiert”
(2005), an “anti-war” response to the game from the Canadian punk-rock band
Propagandhi. I argue that both these texts function as important precursors to the
type of “militarization of everyday life” enacted through the text that I discuss in
the final, largest section of this chapter: “Citizen/Soldier,” a recent music video
and song that was produced through an ostensible act of collaboration between the
US Army National Guard and the popular American rock act 3 Doors Down. Here,
rock music and military recruitment converge in perhaps surprisingly direct ways.
As the first example of the hybridization of music video and military recruitment
commercial, “Citizen/Soldier” (2007) not only represents the confluence of these
two distinct and historically important genres of audio-visual cultural production,
but also must be understood, I argue, within its contemporary, multimedia
environment.3 This seemingly ubiquitous distribution relies on established patterns
of media interactivity, thereby allowing connections to be forged between what
Judith Butler refers to as the post-9/11 “relay of violence” and the practices of
everyday life (187).

Militarization since 9/11

The common theoretical distinction between military and police force, whereby
the latter exert power within the nation-state and the former outside it, has of course
often been breached in recent US and world history by various iterations of military

  For an important and rare discussion of “music as new media,” see Lister et al.,
3

191–7. They write that, in today’s digital environment, “[i]t is almost impossible to talk
about music without almost immediately considering the means by which it is consumed”
(191). See also Coates.
 Rock, Enroll: Music and Militarization since 9/11 15

power in civilian life. Since the birth of the studio system, Hollywood films, for
example, have not only routinely defined visual pleasure through the use of military
themes, but also regularly entered into financial and artistic collaborations with
sections of the US military.4 By 2000, moreover, media studies scholar Tim Lenoir
could speak productively of what he called the “military-entertainment complex”
in the US (238). Yet, as many commentators have argued, 9/11 precipitated a period
of redoubled discourses of US nationalism—one during which militarized cultural
production in the US became less the exception than the rule. Many commentators
have pointed perspicuously to the ways in which, partly as a result of the Bush
administration’s prompt delivery of mediatized, rhetorical effusions, the razing to
the ground of the World Trade Center (and the concomitant, indefensible loss of
life) became emblematic of a US “national” tragedy. That is, discursive operations
in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 successfully produced the “Twin Towers” as a
synecdoche for, specifically, the US nation-state. Such post-9/11 US nationalism
thus worked performatively to (re)produce what Benedict Anderson famously
referred to as a national “imagined community.”5 This renewed US nationalism,
one that cohered around feelings of fear and retribution, soon provided a nodal
point through which support could quickly be garnered for the US-led invasion
of Afghanistan in October 2001 and the ensuing military offensive, “Operation
Enduring Freedom.” Furthermore, alongside the Afghan theater of war, the
new “war on terror” later came to include the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as well as
sweeping changes to US policy, such that, in addition to the military operations
in the Middle East, a new part of both the discourses and force of US defense
became “homeland security”—a “state of exception,” perhaps, characterized by a
redoubled, militarized focus on both the borders of the US nation-state and many
of those within them.6 As James Thompson, Jenny Hughes, and Michael Balfour
explain, “[A] war declared on an abstract noun [‘terror’] has permitted global
powers to construct a shifting series of objects as targets of offensive operations”
(276). This “relay of violence” expanded and increased to fever pitch.

4
  Most helpful among the extensive literature has been Springer, Doherty, and
Slocum.
5
  For a highly useful account of the ways in which, immediately following 9/11, “the
US populace … are routinely interpellated into varying degrees of subjection by [the Bush
administration’s] discourse,” see De Genova 149. I am grateful to Nicholas De Genova,
Bülent Diken, Deborah Cowen, and Amy Siciliano for sharing drafts of their work, and with
further insight through discussion, with me and other participants, at the “Accumulating
Insecurity” workshops at Cornell University in Fall 2008, organized by Shelley Feldman
and Chuck Geisler.
6
  See the Special Issue of Social Text edited by Brent Edwards et al. entitled “911—A
Public Emergency” (20/3, Fall, 2002), and, in particular, contributions by Zillah Eisenstein
(“Feminisms in the Aftermath of September 11”), Muneer Ahmad, (“Homeland Insecurities:
Racial Violence the Day after September 11”), and Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai, as well as
Parris N. Glendening’s “Governing after September 11th: A New Normalcy.”
16 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

The redoubling of US nationalism after 9/11, it seems, has provided

commentators with urgent occasions to theorize new complicities between our
daily consumption of mass media in the US and the violence enacted globally
under the aegis of the “war on terror.” One of Butler’s key insights regarding this
global aftermath of 9/11, which also refers to a “cycle of revenge,” is the way in
which she connects large-scale “retributive” projects, such as the US-led military
operations in the Arab Middle East, and the seemingly more mundane aspects of
the “war on terror,” such as the kinds of discursive violence relayed, broadcast,
and transmitted via mass media, particularly newspapers and cable television
news (188). Since 2001, other prominent scholars, such as Slavoj Žižek, Douglas
Kellner, and Patricia Mellencamp, have provided more extensive accounts of the
processes by which the mass media in the US has worked to forge connections
between military offensives in the Middle East and everyday life at “home,” such
that not only do scenes and sounds of global violence now seem commonplace,
but also, and more importantly, a broad consensus of public opinion is formed
in support of the “war on terror” (Žižek 54). As we have come to realize, the
“‘war on terror’ is a war that has indeterminate and shifting borders as well as
an unprecedented global reach and is being fought in the spaces of language,
mainstream media and alternative digital mediascapes as much as on the frontiers
of Afghanistan and Iraq” (Thompson, Hughes, and Balfour 276–7). Thus, today,
the politics of security, Diken writes, has become the “most important factor of
sociality”: not something that can be extracted from contemporary social relations,
but that which forms them (81).
As we will see with the music video and US National Guard recruitment
film “Citizen/Soldier,” cultural production in the years since 9/11 has played an
important role in constituting and maintaining the imbrication of the “war on
terror” in the everyday. Aggregating an array of public and private mediatized
sites to the extent that it becomes ubiquitous in popular culture at a particular
historical moment, “Citizen/Soldier,” and other examples of militarized multi-
media cultural production, partake in that which commentators such as Henry
Giroux, Marita Sturken, and Zillah Eisenstein have persuasively referred to as the
post-9/11 “militarization of everyday life.” In this chapter, I employ this term to
name the processes by which the post-9/11 politics of security become naturalized
through our variously everyday activities, such as the types of practices associated
with consuming popular music in the “digital age.”
A significant body of scholarship now attests to the significance of American
popular music within post-9/11 discourses of US nationalism. The overall
picture presented by scholars such as Martin Cloonan, Suzanne Cusick, J. Martin
Daughtry, Reebee Garofalo, Jonathan R. Pieslak, Kip Pegley, Susan Fast, and
Martin Scherzinger is one, perhaps, in which the cultural context of the post-9/11
world powerfully, and almost without exception, demands that contemporary,
American popular music be expressive of, and largely complicit with, militaristic
US nationalism. For example, Cusick’s recent work on music and torture reveals
both that forms of “no touch torture,” such as the types of sensory deprivation
 Rock, Enroll: Music and Militarization since 9/11 17

that results from the use of music as torture, has formed part of the US military’s
“oral tradition” since at least the Cold War, and, more significantly, that the
post-9/11 “war on terror” has witnessed a profound change in how such torture
is received in contemporary US culture (“Music as Torture”). Today, a range of
mediatized sites—from online public chat forums, to the portable media players
of US soldiers, to the high-decibel speakers of the Guantánamo Bay interrogation
rooms—delineates a global network of music as torture that is specific to the post-
9/11 “war on terror,” one which spans military and civilian cites globally (“Music
as Torture”). “Provok[ing] no public outcry” (“You are in a place” 4), Cusick
describes how this bespeaks a new habituation on the part of the US public for
aspects of post-9/11 militarization (“You are in a place” 17–18). These studies of
music since 9/11 represent an invaluable intervention in the field of musicology.
Popular music studies of the last few decades of the twentieth century were perhaps
too preoccupied with refuting the Frankfurt School’s claims regarding the capacity
of the “culture industry” to create, maintain, and deceive a passive consuming
public. A return in the years following 9/11 to scholarly engagement with what
Gage Averill uncompromisingly refers to as the “nefarious uses to which the power
of music is put [in the context of the ‘war on terror’]” works powerfully to revise
this institutional privileging of popular music’s anti-establishment potential. This
scholarship provides a vital context for understanding new, post-9/11 developments
in popular culture, such as the militarization of everyday entertainment enacted by
the US Army National Guard’s “Citizen/Soldier” recruitment campaign.

The “War on Terror” and the Bedroom

“Citizen/Soldier” was in fact not the first example of the US military’s production
of innovative, hybridized forms of popular entertainment and recruitment in the
years following 9/11. Although there has been a long history of the collaboration
between software technology industries and military agencies, the video game
America’s Army represents the first instance of US state-sponsored production and
distribution of a video game for the purposes of military recruitment (Nichols
39–40). Free to play online, America’s Army was released by the US Army as
a recruitment tool on July 4, 2002—not by coincidence, one assumes, the date
of the first US Independence Day after 9/11—and remained popular for several
years, before being superceded by later versions of the game. The game includes
hyperlinks that guide players to the US Army’s primary recruitment tool, the Go
Army website. In turn, the site makes it easy for its visitors to chat online with
recruitment officials and to leave personal contact information. In other words,
while playing America’s Army—a game not unlike many other popular “First-
Person Shooter” video games—players are encouraged to connect with state power
in perhaps surprisingly direct ways. America’s Army channels the diversionary
energy of video gaming toward US military recruitment.
18 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

America’s Army represents an important, innovative, post-9/11 example of

the US military’s committed appropriation of established forms of entertainment,
but its spaces of distribution, and the audiences it reached, nevertheless remained
limited. To be sure, players of the game range from active duty servicemen
and women across the world to civilian teenagers and young adults. Yet, as we
will see with the 2007 “Citizen/Soldier” recruitment campaign for the National
Guard, examples of the militarization of entertainment in the US in subsequent
years attained a far greater purchase on the terrain of everyday life than America’s
Army. The 2002 video game was only playable on personal computers, and thus
remained largely confined to private, domestic locations, such as the bedroom or
living room; players of the game consisted mainly of the particular demographics
mentioned in Palumbo-Li’s account: those already playing video games. Although
the game occasionally encourages players to return to the US Army’s recruitment
website, it functioned relatively straightforwardly as a vehicle with which the US
Army could connect with young people—and do so in predominantly domestic,
private spaces.
Significantly, the seeming simplicity of the US Army’s approach to recruitment
with America’s Army also provided an opportunity for opposition to the game
within the realm of popular culture. The song “(America’s Army) Die Jugend
Marschiert” by the Canadian, activist punk-rock band Propagandhi, responds
directly to the video game. It begins with twenty seconds of a grainy, Third Reich-
era recording of the Hitler Youth song “Die Jugend Marschiert” (The Youth Are
Marching) before abruptly launching into a thrashing, punk-rock invective about
the supposed indoctrination of children brought about by America’s Army. The
game is referred to in the song—albeit in exuberantly riotous screams that render
most of the lyrics unintelligible—as a “Trojan Horse that you living idiots paid
for and actually rolled into your own kids’ rooms.” This edited collage of sound,
by which the seemingly distant strains of an unaccompanied children’s chorus
are juxtaposed uncompromisingly with punk-rock “noise,” remains the most
significant sonic aspect of the song. Since it depends upon previously recorded
material, it renders the song impossible to perform live. In other ways, too, the
form of the song, as well as its subject matter of the video game-cum-recruitment
campaign America’s Army, seems to play with its own mediatization. As well as its
inclusion on Propagandhi’s album Potemkin City Limits (2005), the song appears
on www.americasarmy.ca, one of the band’s websites. This URL is of course a
reference to www.americasarmy.com, the official website of the US Army’s
video game, and represents an aggressive form of “digital activism” on the part
of Propagandhi. This URL helps to expand the circulation of the song to users
who mistype the much more widely known official website of the America’s Army
video game. Whereas the US Army used America’s Army to appropriate video
gaming as a tool in military recruitment, Propagandhi responded by reversing this
tactic. Through the innovative use of the URL, the band attempts, on behalf of an
“anti-militarization” politics, to take over the same area of cyberspace in order
 Rock, Enroll: Music and Militarization since 9/11 19

to advance the outlandish analogy between contemporary American society and

Hitler’s Third Reich.
Given the band’s wholehearted involvement since the mid-1990s with a
number of progressive political issues, we should take seriously the extent to
which the satirical elements of “(America’s Army) Die Jugend Marschiert” make
a politicized appeal to parents in the form of advocating on behalf of removing
militarized culture and entertainment from the private space of “kids’ [bed]rooms.”
The relatively limited distribution of America’s Army to precisely these spaces
perhaps justifies, and inspires, such an approach. Indeed, the song represents a
response to the video game, one that, in Judith Butler’s terminology, attempts
to “impede,” rather than “further,” the post-9/11 relay of violence. Like much
North American protest music since the 1960s, such as that associated with the
Vietnam War, “(America’s Army) Die Jugend Marschiert” adopts an oppositional
stance toward the perceived wrongs of a specific, current development. The song’s
political message, despite its willfully childish invocation of the Third Reich,
seeks to restore the sanctity of young people’s domestic spaces and to return the
military or the militarized to its “proper” place—outside the borders of the nation-
state, or at least the boundaries of the private home.
However, such an attempt to “undo” the incursion into the everyday of the
militarized fails to recognize the extent to which, in the years since 9/11, practices
of everyday life have in fact become constitutive of the “war on terror.” From
2005, for example, the US Army released many different versions of America’s
Army, including those for arcade machines, mobile phones and other portable
devices and game consoles. Many different types of interactive entertainment, and,
more importantly, many different types of both private and public spaces, thereby
became infiltrated by the video game. In other words, although Propagandhi
responded aptly to the first version of America’s Army, the type of protest they
developed, one that makes a demand for the restoration of usual conditions, does
not provide the grounds on which to challenge the new “normality” of the politics
of security. The band’s brand of “anti-war” protest music cannot conceive of
ways by which we can learn to live within the “state of exception.” In this sense,
“(America’s Army) Die Jugend Marschier,” despite its highly innovative use of
sound collage and digital activism, remains complicit with the “war on terror,”
since, by failing to challenge head-on the connections between everyday life and
post-9/11 militarization, it fails to acknowledge the naturalization of the “war on
terror.”
We must recognize two important and related aspects of Propagandhi’s
intervention into cultural politics with this song: first, that the years since 9/11
have by no means been bereft of concerted attempts to create and distribute “anti-
war” protest music, and, second, that by employing a model of protest more
suited to eras in which militarization was the exception rather than the rule, such
music permits what Diken refers to as the “business as usual” of the “war on
terror” to continue unabated (81). The following section closely examines the
various elements of the US National Guard’s 2007–2008 recruitment campaign,
20 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

“Citizen/Soldier.” I delineate the ways in which both the text and the context of
the campaign contribute to the militarization of everyday life in ways that surpass
the relatively limited context of the original America’s Army video game. Since
the purportedly anti-war rhetoric of Propagandhi does not adequately challenge
the militarization of the everyday, we need more than ever to understand how the
post-9/11 world requires that we respond to the “relay of violence” in such a way
that we remain cognizant of how the “war on terror” implicates the everyday and
determines the limits of our response.

Music Video and the Everyday

The US Army National Guard’s recruitment campaign, “Citizen/Soldier,”

represents a highly significant example of the ways in which popular culture
in the age of digital media becomes inseparable from the practices of everyday
life, and, in turn, allows discourses of securitization in the post-9/11 period to
become naturalized within the commonplace. In the first instance, at the time of
its release in late 2007, “Citizen/Soldier,” in a similar way to the unprecedented
conflation of video game and military recruitment tool undertaken by America’s
Army, became the first convincing hybridization of music video and US military
recruitment advertisement. Second, the project has proven influential in the years
since its release; in 2008, the National Guard and the southern rock luminary Kid
Rock released the video “Warrior,” a similar hybridization of music video and
recruitment advertisement that draws in discourses and practices of everyday life.
To be sure, however, rock and heavy metal music have been used before as the
soundtrack to US military recruitment commercials, even though, as Jonathan R.
Pieslak suggests, such recruitment ads before 2002 usually featured the types of
rich orchestral scoring more typical of Hollywood movie soundtracks (27). Pieslak
argues that “The Creed,” a recruitment commercial for the New Jersey National
Guard released in 2006 with a song-length, heavy-metal soundtrack, remains “one
of the first complete songs in a popular music style specifically commissioned for
the purposes of military recruiting” (30). An ad hoc band assembled only once
in the US military-run Section 8 Studios performed the song. Upon its release
in movie theaters, the video confused some audience members. They wanted to
know why, unlike with practically every other music video, they could find no
information regarding the band performing in “The Creed.”7
In contrast to “The Creed,” “Citizen/Soldier” works repeatedly to reassure
its audiences that a well-known band performs the featured song. We should
not discount this as a musical or mediatized form of advocacy, one by which the
members of 3 Doors Down seek to encourage support for nationalist discourses

7
  See responses to the video using the “comment” function on various postings of
the video on YouTube. For example, “artoftheninja” asks, “hey,what [sic] song is this and
what band?”
 Rock, Enroll: Music and Militarization since 9/11 21

of security. Within the general scheme of popular music in the US, 3 Doors Down
have provided a reliably conventional output of rock. Since 2001, they have
eschewed the trend to incorporate timbral elements of electronica, while riding
the wave of the garage rock revival. As Philip Auslander has shown, much rock
music performance, whether live, recorded, or filmed, has been preoccupied with
maintaining a governing aesthetic of “authenticity.” Although the majority of
shots in “Citizen/Soldier” show scenes featuring US military operations (including
extravagant historical “reenactments” of the Revolutionary Wars, “D-Day,” and
the Vietnam War, all worthy of any Hollywood major studio), frequent cuts to
shots of the band performing “Citizen/Solider” work to identify the popular band
3 Doors Down as the song’s performers. In addition, the sonic elements of the
song—especially the distinctive timbre of lead singer Brad Arnold’s voice—
are consistent enough for any rock fan to identify the performers of the song
as 3 Doors Down (and this is despite an unusual tom-tom beat that underscores
most of the track, perhaps rather topically suggesting war-drums, gunfire, or an
adrenaline-fueled heartbeat). Indeed, by the time the “Citizen/Soldier” video was
released in 2007, 3 Doors Down, hailing from Escatawpa, Mississippi, had been
popular for nearly a decade. The band’s brand of “post-grunge” southern rock
speaks broadly to a rural, American, blue-collar “authenticity,” an impression that
has been bolstered by their live appearances alongside such other southern rock
luminaries as Lynyrd Skynyrd and Tantric. In sum, both the moving image and
musical elements of “Citizen/Soldier” reinforce the impression that the video is at
least in concert with the work of a well-known rock band, a band noted, moreover,
for its cultivation of an “authentic,” individual voice. The video strives, it seems,
not by any means to disguise the militaristic elements of the project, but rather to
express a spirit of collaboration between the National Guard and 3 Doors Down.
One important effect of emphasizing the influence of a well-known rock band
on the “Citizen/Soldier” project is that it becomes recognizable to audiences as a
largely unproblematic example of a music video. With this form, as Pieslak explains,
the “preexisting song governs the duration of the video and the images are set
within the structure of the music” (30–31). This description aptly characterizes the
“Citizen/Soldier” video, the song of which, while not exactly predating the video’s
exhibition in movie theaters, was released in audio formats simultaneously. The
video’s production style also played an important role in its generic identification.
Instead of the military-run Section 8 Studios, Antoine Fuqua, director of famous
music videos for artists such as Prince and Queen Latifah, was enlisted to help
produce “Citizen/Soldier,” according to a National Guard press release in Business
Wire. Indeed, “Citizen/Soldier” features the type of fast-paced editing that has
typified music video since the launch of MTV in the early 1980s (Vernallis 27).
In this case, exhilarating crane and tracking shots cover fully armored servicemen
making jumps from helicopters; hand-held camera-work seemingly captures
the urgency of coming almost face-to-face with opposing forces in what appear
to be the darkened alleyways of a ruined urban landscape; and mortar and rifle
explosions are timed carefully with the music. As Michel Chion has argued, this
22 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

kind of “play” with sound and image has become typical of music video and
represents some of the ways in which examples of the genre often reject the more
naturalistic demands of narrative Hollywood cinema (167). Through its liberal
use of the audio-visual “evidence” of a well-known rock band performing the
song, as well as more formal features such as artistic editing, “Citizen/Soldier”
reads unequivocally as an example of the genre of music video to the extent that is
unprecedented for a US military recruitment advertisement. The importance of this
for understanding how “Citizen/Soldier” partakes in the post-9/11 militarization of
everyday life rests on patterns of distribution and reception of music video today.
Rarely any longer broadcast in full on their original home on cable television
channels such as MTV, music videos today, like music in audio formats, circulate
predominantly in digital form online, and, increasingly, in ways that do not violate
copyright restrictions (Austerlitz 221–3). Recording companies and other media
corporations are keen to encourage the wide distribution of music videos and
have been particularly successful in shifting people toward digital or new media
(Dickey and Sullivan 10). They can be readily accessed and exhibited in a plethora
of settings, including personal computers in the home, office or school, and mobile
phone devices in an even wider range of locations (Beebe and Middleton 1–3).
Video streaming websites such as YouTube (launched in 2005), according to
Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, have become among the most visited sites on
the Internet. In this way, technology and patterns of distribution have changed
the ways in which audiences receive music video. At least according to many
theorizations of new media, such as those advanced by Lev Manovich, these
changes represent the ways in which forms of “interactivity” have largely replaced
the “passivity” of what Andrew Goodwin referred to in 1992 as the “distraction
factory” of music television. Today, such online “interaction” with music video
includes searching for videos online, commenting on them, embedding them in
blogs and social media profiles, and creating amateur “response” videos.8 In one
particularly established pattern of interactivity with music videos, audiences often
search for an appealing video online after seeing a short clip of it on TV or in other
spaces of exhibition (Cha et al.). This user-directed journey through various media
platforms—from TV to YouTube, for example—exemplifies what Henry Jenkins
has influentially referred as the “convergence culture” of new or digital media: a
blurring of the boundaries, or a “flow of content,” between forms and technologies
of mediatization (2). “Citizen/Soldier” weaves itself seamlessly into established
patterns of media interaction on the part of its audiences, positively embraces a
novel culture of online video streaming, and aggressively competes with any of
the highest budget music videos for other popular artists.
The point to recognize here is that, in the first decade of the twenty-first century,
music video has perhaps become all but ubiquitous in everyday interaction with
multiple forms of online media. Yet, the networks of distribution of music videos
such as “Citizen/Soldier” extend beyond the types of Internet browsing described

  On the latter, see Salvato.

8
 Rock, Enroll: Music and Militarization since 9/11 23

above. As I will discuss below, the music video “Citizen/Soldier” functioned

as the central point for an even wider network technological platforms and
entertainment formats. Like many examples of contemporary popular music, the
song itself circulated digitally in purely audio formats, for example; moreover,
the most important way in which the National Guard increased circulation of the
“Citizen/Soldier” video well above that expected of a high-budget music video
from a well-known artist was to exhibit it in movie theaters. In sum, music video
proved a highly suitable genre for a high-budget military recruitment film such as
“Citizen/Soldier,” the primary aim of which, one presumes, was not dollar profit
but maximum distribution. Thus where music video intersects with advocacy
in support of the “war on terror,” it is a wide range of everyday practices and
spaces that become inundated by post-9/11 discourses of security. The following
section attempts to delineate the everyday life of post-9/11 militarization, at least
as it emerges in relation to the “Citizen/Soldier” campaign. Although seemingly
ubiquitous, distribution of the video is in fact selective and functions as an
instrument of exclusion; certain members of society are expressly not interpolated
by the video’s address, while conservative definitions of the family are further
reified. New or digital media, routinely praised for their supposedly democratizing
capacities, can just as readily serve as technologies of propaganda that work to
imbricate nationalist discourses of post-9/11 security into exclusionary concepts
of the citizen and the family.

Militarization and Everyday Life

Both the audio and visual aspects of the “Citizen/Soldier” video itself, and its
patterns of distribution, demonstrate that the recruitment campaign functions
through particular, ideological constructions of a post-9/11 US citizenry. For
example, the campaign targeted the pre-feature film slot of a wide range of
movies, including the post-apocalyptic science-fiction movie I Am Legend, the
holiday-themed family comedy Fred Claus, and the Disney musical Enchanted.
A longer version of the video was also included on the DVD-extras for a range of
Hollywood movies. A “blanket release” to Hollywood movies such as this resulted
in “Citizen/Soldier” achieving a very wide audience, including young children and
parents who do not form part of the target demographic for recruitment (“National
Guard”). This apparent “militarization of the family,” an aspect, perhaps, of
what Deborah Cowen and Amy Siciliano have referred to as the contemporary
“securitization of childhood,” needs to be placed in the context of the ways in
which such so-called “blanket distribution” passes over sites of non-Hollywood
film, including the niche markets of non-Anglophone and queer cinemas. This
works to naturalize and further reify conservative definitions of the family against
non-US and queer alternatives.9 Furthermore, the broad connotations of the music

9
  On the latter, see, for example, Halberstam.
24 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

also continue in this vein. Steve Waksman persuasively traces a genealogy of such
contemporary rock music to the hypermasculine performance of early electric
guitar “hero[es]” such as Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin (238). Waksman explores
how a particular performance style of rock music, one that seems to combine self-
absorption with a brash robustness, has become coded as both white and masculine.
Rock music, such as that by 3 Doors Down, becomes an “occasio[n] for doing
‘identity work,’” in this case of accomplishing, perhaps, a white, heterosexual,
male identity (Walser 116).
However, the cinematic imagery of the video, edited to accompany the
song, perhaps provides the clearest indication of the ways in which the post-
9/11 militarization of everyday life enacted by the “Citizen/Soldier” recruitment
campaign entails a subtle redefinition of the US citizenry. Much of the video
contains historical scenes, including lavish “reenactments,” but a scene toward the
end of the video revisits more recent history. Shot among dusty, urban wreckage,
the setting reminds us of the scenes in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001.
There then appears the didactic text, “I stepped forward when the towers fell.” Next,
in the midst of what we must take to be a depiction of a “domestic” humanitarian
disaster such as 9/11, we see a black National Guardsman return a blond-haired
boy to his distressed mother. Finally, the video closes with a freeze frame of the
URL of the National Guard’s recruitment website. Here, we should note the ways
in which this sequence assigns particular duties to different members of a seeming
multicultural, national utopia (one in which Arab ethnicities are tellingly absent),
but, with its redolence of Christian wisdom (like in the “Story of Solomon”),
the scene works to reawaken strong American nationalist myths concerning the
cohesion of the citizenry, the feminization and vulnerability of the US nation, and
the primacy of social reproduction. Jasbir Puar, for example, writes how, since
9/11, the “body [of the terrorist] must appear improperly racialized (outside the
norms of multiculturalism) and perversely sexualized in order to materialize as the
terrorist in the first place” (38). Much in this video suggests how it likewise works
to renew and redefine both codifications of multiculturalism and the nuclear,
“national family”, in order to produce a seemingly coherent citizenry against such
an absent figure of the terrorist (Puar and Rai, 136).
However, the “goal” of the video, signaled not least through the largely
chronological order of the scenes of historical reenactment, seems to emerge as
the final freeze frame: the URL of the National Guard recruitment website. In
some versions, the shot of the rescued boy proceeds directly via a match cut to
the text of the URL. By galvanizing its audiences into action by the urgency and
apparent heroism of its message, and by thrilling them with stunning, fast-paced
sequences on the big screen “and in surround-sound” that demand to be revisited,
the “Citizen/Soldier” video steers its audience online towards the National Guard’s
official website. Of all the video’s many locations, formats, and technological
platforms, moreover, the only one at which contact with a military recruitment
bureau can take place remains the National Guard’s official recruitment website.
Similar to the promotion of the US Army’s website through the video game
 Rock, Enroll: Music and Militarization since 9/11 25

America’s Army, GoGuard.com allows instant, online chatting between a recruiter

and a visitor to the site, as well as many ways in which visitors can leave their
contact details for National Guard recruiters. For the duration of the video’s run
in movie theaters, “Citizen/Soldier” enjoyed a pride of place on GoGuard.com. It
was played in full-screen, high-quality graphics. In addition, the National Guard
website allowed free mp3 downloads of the song, thus taking advantage of, rather
than seeking to diminish, the widespread culture of music file-sharing. In such a
network of mediatized sites, online video streaming sites and digital audio-file
sharing become not the official National Guard website’s competitors, but rather
its means of widespread promotion. These features of the site, alongside the ways
in which the video itself places emphasis on the freeze-frame shot of the site’s
URL, establish GoGuard.com as the center of the wide, digital expanse created by
various versions of the song and video. The goal of the video’s apparent ubiquity,
and the ways in which it operates as an aspect of the post-9/11 “militarization of
everyday life,” clearly centers on the official recruitment website.
It is important to draw attention to the ways in which the digital environment’s
apparently free “flow of content,” its multiple sites, technologies, and capacity for
“user-generated content,” can nevertheless serve the purposes of state propaganda,
and thus assist in the post-9/11, global “relay of violence.” The purportedly
democratizing technologies of new media—such as YouTube, whose motto,
after all, is “Broadcast Yourself”—in fact play a key part in this militarization
of everyday life. Music video spans multiple sites of audio-visual media across
the erstwhile divisions between public and private exhibition, as well as what are
ostensibly “corporate” and “user-generated” media. As it does so, it can become
the conduit for the post-9/11 militarization of everyday life. Yet, as we have seen,
the ultimate destination of the “Citizen/Soldier” video, including its patterns of
distribution, remains the official National Guard website; the “media journey”
from the movie theater to the Internet, for example, emerges as the basis for the
entire recruitment project. Rather than precisely a “free flow of content across
multiple platforms,” as Jenkins describes a typical new media environment, the
direction of “flow” in this case is highly managed. When the user lands on the
National Guard’s official recruitment website, he or she has completed this over-
determined journey that began with the music video, delivered through multiple
platforms, technologies, and modes of spectatorship.

Conclusion

The “Citizen/Solider” recruitment campaign, in its encompassing of cable TV,

broad swaths of cyberspace, FM radio, multiplex movie theaters, cell phones,
and portable media players, emerges as an important example of the relentless,
contemporary “militarization of everyday life.” In both video and audio format,
“Citizen/Soldier” appears and reappears at multiple sites of distribution/reception
that span public and private spheres; and, as it does so, it engages audiences in
26 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

different forms of spectatorship and interactivity. The campaign employs the genre
of music video, and the ways in which popular culture in the “digital age” becomes
inseparable from practices of everyday life, in order to inscribe militarization into
the commonplace and thereby to strip arguments condemning the “war on terror”
of validity. One thing that these examples of militarization in the popular cultural
sphere since September 11, 2001 can perhaps remind musicians and of scholars
is the extent to which protest music remains an important feature of the “post-
9/11 world.” We must recognize, in other words, the sincerity with which the
members of 3 Doors Down no doubt engaged in the collaborative project with the
US Army National Guard, “Citizen/Soldier.” For this reason, the band’s efforts
are importantly thought alongside those of Propagandhi, whose politics attempt
to oppose precisely the cause of US nationalism for which 3 Doors Down have
long been campaigning. In Propagandhi’s work, the vehement plea to remove
America’s Army from the private spaces of young people’s homes neglects to take
account of the ways in which post-9/11 politics of security already interpolate
the child, the family, and the nation as important constituents of the discourse of
the “war on terror.” Unlike Propagandhi, we must ask, “What can I do with the
[militarized] conditions that form me?” (Butler 187). As Jacqui Alexander writes,
we must “move away from theorizing resistance as reactive strategy to theorizing
power as interwoven with, and living alongside, marginalization” (229). Cultural
production that truly undermines the militarization of everyday life must begin by
acknowledging that the “war on terror” is here to stay.
 Rock, Enroll: Music and Militarization since 9/11 27

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 Chapter 2
Music, Terrorism, Response: The
Conditioning Logic of Code and Networks
Benjamin J. Robertson

Writing for the music website Pitchfork in 2009, Eric Harvey suggested that
“it’s possible the past 10 years could become the first decade of pop music to be
remembered by history for its musical technology rather than the actual music
itself.” While artists continue to make notable music, Harvey may be correct: these
days, music is secondary to the technology that subtends it. In the context of the
present volume, this claim can be modified as follows: in the twenty-first century,
music no longer effectively speaks in its capacity as music—on the level of its
content, that is. There are, of course, still artists whose music acts as a form of
explicit political and social commentary. However, those statements are beholden
to codes beyond the musical, to the logic of the technologies through which they
are distributed, on which they are heard, and with which they are produced. Music
in the twenty-first century does not exist for popular culture if it is not online,
nor amenable to the iPod. As a result, the political battles music once fought with
lyrics, notes, and chords are now fought according to another code entirely.
I refer here to two very different conceptions of code, a difference that
manifests according to two different understandings of networks. On one hand,
code structures the political, gives order to the disordered, and allows culture
to become Culture. According to Jacques Attali, “Codification of this sort gives
music a meaning, an operationality beyond its own syntax, because it inscribes
music within the very power that produces society” (25). This “code” corresponds
to a homogenous, total network—society as such.
On the other hand, code refers to the logic that conditions the functionality of
objects and actors within manifold networks. In this context, the code that affords
functionality in one network does not afford the same functionality in another.
Moreover, code does not always and forever allow for the same functionality
within a single network, as the codes that govern one network are themselves
open to revision by codes from other networks with which the first overlaps. For
example, law may govern the architecture of the Internet, but the law and the
Internet are not the same network (even if they connect with one another). Internet
architecture allows for certain transactions, but not for others. Law may either
allow or forbid these transactions as well, regardless of architectural affordance.
Finally, the Internet itself is not homogeneous. Its code varies in numerous ways:
servers in one country may allow certain content, while servers in another do not;
32 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

TCP, UCP, HTTP, and FTP are part of the Internet Protocol Suite, but operate
within different layers of that suite, according to different architectures. Friedrich
Kittler questions whether code, thus conceptualized, adequately addresses the
numerous contexts in which it is deployed. Claiming that the “notion of code
is as overused as it is questionable,” he nonetheless argues, “If every historical
epoch is governed by a leading philosophy, then the philosophy of code is what
governs our own, and so code—harking back to its root, ‘codex’—lays down the
law for one and all” (45). As the governing concept of the twenty-first century,
code determines our actions within society’s multiple, heterogeneous networks.
To make sense of this development and its importance, I must return to
Attali, who defines a series of three consecutive networks that order society and
music’s place within it: sacrifice, representation, and repetition. Each corresponds
to a different moment in the development of capitalism. A fourth network,
composition, will exist at some point in the future according to Attali’s somewhat
romantic argument. He writes, “In each network, as in each message, music is
capable of creating order. Speaking generally and theoretically, in the framework
of information theory, the information received while listening to a note of music
reduces the listener’s uncertainty about the state of the world” (33). In the first three
networks, music produces order, but only according to the requirements of older
codes, codes involved with systems of exchange, symbolic or otherwise. Music
partakes of ceremony in sacrifice, exists as a flow of information in representation,
and appears as an instantiation of a pre-existing recording in repetition. In each
case, “A network can be destroyed by noises that attack and transform it, if the
codes in place are unable to normalize and repress them” (Attali 33).
For Attali, both a society’s political apparatus and its music belong to a self-
similar network. That is, the network is homogeneous throughout and provides a
foundation upon which politics and music interact. Change to the network comes
about as a result of noise, which enters the network from outside and which the
network and its codes cannot parse. Noise can destroy the network and thereby
destroy extant power relations; it may thus create the necessary conditions for
a new society: “The presence of noise makes sense, makes meaning. It makes
possible the creation of a new order on another level of organization, of a new
code in another network” (Attali 33). To be clear, however, noise must find some
purchase within the network. Even if it is new, it must dovetail with some extant
part of society if it is to operate as a force of change. Attali’s notion of the musician
provides a concrete example of this model: “Poet laureate of power, herald of
freedom—the musician is at the same time within society, which protects,
purchases, and finances him, and outside it, when he threatens it with his visions”
(11). The musician must be inside the network to affect it, but the noise with which
he or she affects must come from outside the network if it is to change society.
Attali’s network/outside may allow for the alien, but the alien comes from an
ill-defined “beyond”—subject to no rule but capable of instigating rule as it enters
the network itself. Following Attali’s logic, al Qaeda comes from the outside
to disrupt the United States and to, perhaps, reorder that society through the
 Music, Terrorism, Response 33

deployment of its alien codes. Similarly, music by artists such as Eminem, Green
Day, and Nine Inch Nails makes noise from beyond society that, at best, ultimately
heralds the destruction of that society’s codes and the replacement of such with
the codes that arise from noise. Obviously, both al Qaeda and these artists already
exist within society to some extent, else they would not be able to penetrate it.
The issue is that, no matter what, in Attali’s theory, there is only ever one
network—the one that exists that can only ever be replaced, but never supplemented
or bifurcated. Writes Attali: “All music, any organization of sounds is then a tool
for the creation or consolidation of a community, of a totality” (6). Because of
this singularity, music can interact with societal structures and redefine them.
However, this singularity requires Attali to explain noise in terms of an outside
and thus produce a binary that buttresses a dialogical model of musical activism in
which music responds to politics to debate the future form of society.
Even if we accept the doctrine of the outside in this context, we cannot accept
the idea of the single total network. Society is not a network/inside facing a non-
network/outside. There is no Network; there are only networks. We can see at least
three of these numerous networks at work in the context of this anthology: the
sociopolitical network of the United States, the al Qaeda terrorist network, and a
network of music and musicians. These networks surely connect with one another,
but they are neither reducible to each other nor to a single meta-network to whose
rules they all conform.
Thus, networks are everywhere. Further, these networks themselves are neither
self-similar nor coherent. In 2007’s The Exploit, Alexander Galloway and Eugene
Thacker argue that “networks never claim to be integral whole objects in the
first place. To name a network is to acknowledge a process of individuation (‘the
Internet,’ ‘al Qaeda’), but it is also to acknowledge the multiplicity that inheres
within every network (‘the Internet’ as a meta-network of dissimilar subnets, ‘al
Qaeda’ as a rallying cry for many different splinter groups)” (12). Whatever the
agents within these networks express, in the years since Napster and 9/11 (at least),
that expression has become less significant than the technologies through which
these expressions circulate.
With that in mind, we must acknowledge that music in the twenty-first century
cannot be understood as political speech simply in its capacity as music—as an
ordering of lyrics, notes, chords, etc.—that comes from outside politics in order to
face them and, ideally, change them. Rather, we must account for music: 1) within
a series of networks that sometimes overlap with one another; and 2) according to
the codes that allow (or do not allow) it to move between these networks.
The remainder of this essay is divided into two parts. The first implicitly
extends my discussion of Attali by addressing the notion of a culture/counter-
culture divide within which contemporary music continues to situate itself. The
second discusses two of the various technologies that condition music in the
twenty-first century, the mp3 and the iPod, in the context of what Gilles Deleuze
calls “control,” a progression beyond the discipline described by Michel Foucault.
In the course of this argument, I largely eschew a specific discussion of the two
34 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

topics of this volume: 9/11 and music. Rather, I make a few specific references to
the actual events of 9/11 or to the music that follows in its wake. This lacuna is
intentional. I argue here that such specifics are less important than the environment
that surrounds them. 9/11 provoked numerous musical reactions: loss, anger,
confusion, and so on. Whatever the reaction, however, close reading—answering
questions like “What are they saying?” or “How does this song express itself?” —
itself does not provide tools adequate to address the questions “How does music
function in the context of twenty-first-century politics?” or “How does activism
manifest and operate in the wake of events such as the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01?”
The various musical responses to post-9/11 US domestic and foreign policy offer
an opportunity, rather, to come to terms with the fact that “traditional,” often
60s-styled activism and dialogue no longer make sense as tactics or strategies in a
world governed by control.

Music and Activism In and After the 60s: Discipline

In the wake of the political fallout of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001—
the USA PATRIOT Act, the Department of Homeland Security, the National
Threat Level, the fearmongering of the Bush Administration, and so on—
numerous musicians expressed their discontent. Eminem released “Mosh” via the
Guerrilla News Network on the eve of the 2004 election. The song called into
question Bush’s motivation for the Iraq War, and speculated that the terrorists
had succeeded in what they set out to do to the US. Less specific was Green
Day’s American Idiot, a rock opera/concept album that described the cultural and
political landscape of the post-9/11 United States through the character Jesus of
Suburbia, a discontented youth who travels to the big city where he witnesses
firsthand an American population that has allowed its own mindlessness to come
to pass. Similarly, as Katheryn Wright’s addition to this volume discusses, Nine
Inch Nails’ Year Zero offers a sci-fi critique of the year 2022, a time when a fully
theocratic state controls all forms of communication and, thereby, thought.
In each of these examples, we can see artists challenge power by making
statements that counter power. Such statements become a soundtrack to a historical
moment by creating countercultural consciousness. Music in this context is the
protest. The notes, chords, and lyrics of popular songs face power with alternative
statements. When power states, “War!” “Capitalism!” “Empire!” “Neoliberalism!”
or something similar, music offers a response, an expression of something else.
This model, of course, reached its mythical apotheosis during the 1960s, a
period in which political activism—the resistance to conformity and technocracy—
became indistinguishable from the music of the era. Sit-ins and chants, Woodstock
and The Beatles: in our cultural memories, the events of the decade play out
juxtaposed with a music that has come to stand in for them. This confluence of
music and politics allows for an understanding of music as speech, as a statement
that responds to politics. This understanding has been with us ever since. The 1990s
 Music, Terrorism, Response 35

even tried to outdo the 60s with not one but two Woodstocks and a presidential
inauguration headlined by REM. After 9/11, albums such as American Idiot and
Year Zero likewise offered further proof that we consider music political only
according to what it says and to whom it says it.
However, even if we accept this 1960s understanding of communication
between power and resistance as tenable in that decade, the post-9/11 world
reveals its problematic nature (even if people still believe in its viability). By the
mid-1990s, if not earlier, forward-thinking activist groups had begun to realize
that the nature of communication had changed, that the very environment in which
power operates had become something else altogether. If there was a time when
protests and other direct confrontations with power worked, then it had passed by
the middle of Clinton’s administration and existed as nothing but romance by the
middle of Bush’s. Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), for example, laments activists’
inability to recognize the changing landscape on which political battles are fought,
criticizing those who still believe in older forms of protest and therefore “see no
need to invent new approaches” (10). They write, “Nostalgia for 60s activism
endlessly replays the past as the present, and unfortunately this nostalgia has also
infected a new generation of activists who have no living memory of the 60s” (10).
CAE does not refer to music, but we can easily locate music within this narrative as
a soundtrack to events and as speech itself. And while more recent activist events,
such as the Seattle World Trade Organization protests in 1999, become interesting
in light of the ways in which they use new methods and technologies such that
CAE demands, the “hell no, we won’t go”-style chants that characterize them and
their endorsement by musicians render them as but slightly revised versions of
the activism CAE describes. They remain (attempts at) direct confrontations with
power, primarily concerned with content, with comprehensible statements that
express displeasure, anger, and disgust with the current organization of society.
Thus music has what Attali calls an ordering effect: it comes from outside the
network of society (even while existing within that network) in an attempt to
alter the codes according to which that network operates. It positions two groups
against one another, in dialogue: power and resistance, claim and counterclaim.
And while this model does not ignore the question of technology out of hand, it
assumes that power can be located, can be addressed, and, most importantly, will
be able to (or is willing to) hear counter-statements as they are uttered. In other
words, it assumes a single network, a totality, within which all codes are the same
code, or at least parse according to the same logic.
Eminem’s “Mosh” provides a perfect example of this understanding. The song
was released shortly before the Bush/Kerry election in late October 2004 as a
music video available at the Guerrilla News Network website. Although it would
appear on Eminem’s album Encore (released 16 November 2004), “Mosh” was
not a conventional single; its online form was its only official release. Despite the
nature of its distribution, “Mosh” buys into the conventions of 60s-style protest.
The song is a call to arms, a demand that people come to political awareness and
vote Bush out of office. The video is more explicit still in its belief in a dialogical
36 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

form of protest. Eminem reads headlines about Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy,
the war in Iraq, bin Laden’s continuing freedom, and so on. In response to these
headlines, he states his opinion and then marches through the streets and raps in
front of crowds, gathering unto himself an army of the dispossessed and disaffected
who proceed to a voting precinct to register their discontent through the franchise.
A subsequent version of the video, released after the election and entitled “The
Mosh Continues,” features the same crowd storming what appears to be Bush’s
State of the Union address. The protesters confront Bush, Cheney, the Supreme
Court (whose ruling gave Bush the election in 2000), and a crying John Kerry with
signs that demand that troops be brought home and other such sentiments. Save for
the style of the music, an activist from the 60s would recognize the scene without
any trouble whatsoever.
While much of the video for “Mosh” implies a coming violence, in the end it
reads very much like a civics textbook: read the newspaper, craft a response, enter
the debate. Both versions conclude with Eminem inviting dialogue and suggesting
the possibility of reconciliation between longstanding political opponents
galvanized by 9/11. If words are not enough, the individual must appear in front of
those with whom he or she should speak.
However, the failure of such dialogue does not result from a problem with
dialogue per se, but rather from the medium through which speech travels and
the protocols that medium imposes upon it. In a passage specifically about civil
disobedience, but which can stand in for any mode of political activism that relies
on direct confrontation with an opponent on what is perceived to be common
ground, CAE writes that traditional civil disobedience “has no effect on the core
of organization” because it assumes that the power center of an organization
can be located (13). Civil disobedience assumes a “head” of power and thus the
possibility of dialogue. Within the networked environment of the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries, however, there exists no single position of power:

For an oppositional force to conquer key points in physical space in no way

threatens an institution. Let us assume that a group of dissidents managed to
occupy the White House. It might prove embarrassing for the administration in
power and for the Secret Service, but in no way would this occupation actually
disrupt the effective functioning of executive power. The presidential office
would simply move to another location. The physical space of the White House
is only a hollow representation of presidential authority; it is not essential to it.
(CAE 13–14)

Facing one’s opponent does not suffice to produce political change.

Communication—whether in words or lyrics, text or music, images or sounds—
is, in and of itself (to borrow CAE’s term) dead capital. The network in which the
activist speaks may not be the network in which the opposite power lives. To move
between networks and to shift society from one form to another does not require
convincing arguments; it requires amenability to the network form. Music in this
 Music, Terrorism, Response 37

context is no longer noise coming from beyond promising a new code, but itself
must always already be encoded in such a way to afford its movement within the
network and across the networks.
And here is the crux of the issue: technological environments were very much
what activists in the 1960s understood themselves to be fighting. To give in to the
logic of the network was to lose one’s individuality and accept conformity to a
hostile logic. The title of Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture:
Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition explicitly
describes a dialogical relationship between power and resistance, between a
conformity-inducing culture and a counterculture that championed individuality.
Likewise, it reveals what power is to Roszak and his generation—what we might
call that society’s network form. Roszak writes:

By the technocracy, I mean that social form in which an industrial society

reaches the peak of its organizational integration. It is the ideal men usually
have when they speak of modernizing, up-dating, rationalizing, planning.
Drawing upon such unquestionable imperatives as the demand for efficiency,
for social security, for large-scale co-ordination of men and resources, for ever
higher levels of affluence and ever more impressive manifestations of collective
human power, the technocracy works to knit together the anachronistic gaps and
fissures of the industrial society. (5)

Technocracy conditions society as a totality, draws together and orders individuals

into a logical, bureaucratic whole. It does not do so through force or literal violence:
“In the case of technocracy, totalitarianism is perfected because its techniques
become progressively more subliminal” (Roszak 9). Roszak continues: “While
possessing ample power to coerce, [technocracy] prefers to charm conformity
from us by exploiting our deep-seated commitment to the scientific world-view
and by manipulating the securities and creature comforts of the industrial affluence
which science has given us” (9). Technocracy thus induces totality by positing and
maintaining an ideal—efficiency, rationality—and then by rewarding individuals
who live up to that ideal.
Although the techniques Roszak describes (economic reward, security) are very
different than those Michel Foucault enumerates in his discussion of discipline
(drills, exercise), we can nonetheless see in Roszak’s claims a disciplinary
society. For Foucault, discipline involved the creation of “docile” bodies—bodies
conditioned to behave, to conform to a standard. While discipline has its roots in
the prison, it exists in any number of social institutions—the family, the school,
the church, the military—and manifests according to spaces specific to those
institutions. While the child does not learn the same discipline in the schoolhouse
as in the home, he or she nonetheless learns discipline broadly across these spaces
and thus becomes amenable to the act of disciplining. This amenability is the
signature of a useful member of society:
38 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and
diminishes these same forces (in terms of political obedience). In short, it
dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an “aptitude,”
a “capacity,” which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course
of the energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of
strict subjection. (Foucault 138)

Whatever power disciplinary exercise might provide to the individual in terms

of resistance (in terms, that is, of individuality) immediately turns around to
become means of subjection. Similarly, whatever rewards the technocracy offers,
they always serve to advance the technocracy rather than individual interests.
Capital always requires a market. Such markets require a rational logic. Such logic
serves the technocracy.
I do not mean to suggest that Foucault and Roszak make the same argument.
They part ways, for example, over the issue of subjectivity. Contra to Foucault’s
claim that one is always subject to one power or another, Roszak implicitly
endorses a state of freedom that technocracy precludes. However, these differences
are of minor concern to my discussion, which describes societies that seek to turn
all people into a part of a total system, to make individuals cogs in the machine.
Even if each individual becomes a different cog, they all serve a functionalism and
become part of a technology. In such a network, music as response makes sense
and offers a vehicle for change (perhaps); but once society no longer demands
conformity, music finds that there is nothing to which it might respond.

Music and Technology in the Twenty-First Century: Control

Here we return to the claim by Eric Harvey with which I began this essay—that
the first decade of the twenty-first century will be better remembered for the
technologies that surround music than for the music itself. While Harvey focuses
on the mp3, his argument applies to other technologies with which music has
become involved since the 1990s. These other technologies, especially the iPod, I
argue, operate and form an environment of control that stands in distinction to the
disciplinary network of the past.
The mp3 has, along with the iPod, achieved the status of Kleenex or Thermos,
a genericized name that serves as metonym for an entire class of objects: FLAC,
Ogg Vorbis, AAC, WMA, and so on. The objects within this class are not so
much things as they are codes, or codecs (coder-decoders), which render content
amenable to the technologies that play, distribute, or manipulate it. They came
into existence as standards by which media content could be made amenable to
network distribution. In 1988 by the International Organization for Standardization
charged The Moving Picture Coding Experts Group with the task of digitizing
films for purposes of efficient portability. A hacker would eventually make the
 Music, Terrorism, Response 39

audio layer of their product available to the general public. As a result, the mp3
began its ascendancy in 1992.
By the late 90s, the mp3 became the de facto standard format for musical
content. However, the mp3 was not simply or even primarily a medium for the
transmission of content. Rather, it was a logic; it conditioned what music was,
could be, and did. Jonathan Sterne writes, “The mp3 is a crystallized set of social
and material relations. It is an item that ‘works for’ and is ‘worked on’ by a host
of people, ideologies, technologies and other social and material elements” (826).
Sterne also notes that, despite the mp3’s specific characteristics, its specific
encoding and position within a series of other codes causes most “writers still
[to] represent the mp3 itself as a mute, inert object that ‘impacts’ an industry, a
social environment or a legal system” (827). Sterne does not analyze what we
mean when we say, “I got this mp3 from iTunes.” That is, when he writes “mp3”
he does not mean “song.” Rather, he means the technology itself and its particular
networked relationships, which touch, but are distinct from its musical content
(itself only one aspect of the sum of those relationships).
A history of the mp3 as technology would include discussion of: the foundation
of Napster; the debuts of iTunes, the iPod, and the iTunes music store; the release
of significant mash-up albums such as Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album and The
Kleptones’ A Night at the Hip-Hopera; the release of popular singles (such as
Nine Inch Nails’ “The Hand that Feeds”) as Garageband (AIFF) files for remixing
by fans; and the fact that artists now account for the technical aspects of the mp3
when they master their recordings. Such a history might continue for some time,
as whatever there was of music outside the multiple networks these events imply
are made amenable to those networks and are enfolded within them.
Such a history is the history of power in the twenty-first century, whose logic
does not conform to the dialogical structure implied by such binaries as network/
outside, culture/counterculture, and homogeneity/individual. Reading Foucault,
Gilles Deleuze argues that these oppositions may still exist in some contexts, but
that the homogenizing technologies of discipline have largely been replaced by
personal technologies of control. On the concept of discipline, Deleuze writes,
“Disciplinary societies have two poles: signatures standing for individuals, and
numbers or places in a register standing for their position within a mass” (179).
By contrast, control societies replace the signature with “codes indicating whether
access to some information should be allowed or denied. We’re no longer dealing
with a duality of mass and individual. Individuals become ‘dividuals,’ and masses
becomes samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’” (180). Thus, whereas discipline
molds individuals such that they fit into the dominant side of the binary, control
modulates the person such that the means of subjection become immanent to
him- or herself. The person becomes a “dividual,” a term Deleuze does not define
specifically, but one that implies the manner in which someone can be internally
divided (or, again, modulated) through the application of technologies that limit
action or thought on a personal basis. The dividual is the person who must exist
simultaneously in multiple networks and according to multiple codes.
40 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

The transformation of the individual into the dividual results from a

technology that has become autonomous and specific. Passwords allow access
without behavioral conditioning and track movement without panopticism. These
networks are no longer total or totalizing. Within their multiplicity, the activist can
no longer achieve an outsider’s position. One can no longer escape the Network;
one can merely move to another.
In other words, under control, songs can no longer be expressions of an
individualistic, anti-technocratic opposition. Music can no longer scream “No!”
as it faces that which it refuses. It has become fully imbricated in the very logic of
power, and it becomes secondary to the technology that was at one time merely its
support. Thus Steve Jobs can speak, without irony, of cultural change in terms of
a technology that debuted shortly after 9/11: the iPod. He cites his own experience
with musical counterculture in the 60s and 70s and then notes that “music is really
being reinvented in this digital age, and that is bringing it back into people’s lives.
It’s a wonderful thing. And in our own small way, that’s how we’re working to
make the world a better place” (quoted in Goodell). These comments illustrate
both the difference between older forms of cultural resistance and a blindness to
that difference. Jobs buys into the narrative of music-as-soundtrack-to-cultural/
political-events and offers the iPod as a means by which to return to that previous
moment, when music mattered, when music was the driving force behind making
the world a better place. If the music of Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, et
al. healed the psyche of a nation (or at least the youth of that nation) torn apart by
Vietnam, assassination, and other scandal, the iPod itself can do the same in the
twenty-first century for whatever ailments currently face the US.
In The Perfect Thing, Steven Levy defines these ailments as the loss he felt
after 9/11. He asks, “How could you devote your energies to documenting the
Internet, cool gadgets, and the future of music when all this darkness was afoot?”
(19). Unwittingly perhaps, Levy lists here, along with “music,” aspects of the
technocracy against which the 60s counterculture would have rebelled. The result
of this convergence of culture and counterculture? For Levy, and presumably for
millions of others, nothing but the return of music as a soundtrack for life:

One day sitting in the subway, I plugged in the iPod and the world filled up with
the Byrds singing “My Back Pages.” The faces around me suddenly became
characters in a movie centered around my own memories and emotions. A black-
and-white moment of existence had sprung into Technicolor. I held my iPod a bit
tighter. Something odd began to happen. As the days passed and I bonded with
my iPod, my spirits lifted somewhat. (18)

Levy goes further to imply that he feels a connection with George W. Bush, whose
own iPod became news in 2005. Levy writes, “I wasn’t exactly forgetting about
9/11, but I was getting excited—once more—about technology and its power
to transform the world” (18). Similarly to Jobs, Levy demonstrates a romantic
understanding of technology as that which can overcome some sort of personal or
 Music, Terrorism, Response 41

interpersonal rift. For Jobs this fragmentation might take the form of ideological
opposition. For Levy, it is within the self: the wound opened by unexpected
violence.
However, if Jobs and Levy’s terms are romantic, we must recognize in them
something fundamentally opposed to the romanticism of the 1960s: music is no
longer centered in itself, but rather in the device on which it plays. In an interview
for the book The Cult of iPod, Michael Bull states: “One of the interesting things
is that with vinyl, the aesthetic was in the cover of the record. You had the sleeve,
the artwork, the liner notes. With the rise of the digital, the aesthetic has left the
object—the record sleeve—and now the aesthetic is in the artifact: the iPod, not
the music. The aesthetic has moved from the disc to what you play it on” (quoted in
Kahney 26). In so doing, the concept of music-as-expression becomes secondary
to the networks in which it travels. Cyberpunk writer Bruce Sterling describes
this pivotal technological transition: “Not for us the giant steam-snorting wonders
of the past … eighties tech sticks to the skin, responds to the touch: the personal
computer, the Sony Walkman, the portable telephone, the soft contact lens” (346).
Technology no longer dwarfs the individual subject with the threat of assimilation
into an inhuman system. Technology now exists for the individual. The iPod and
all of its attendant applications, devices, and accessories is such a technology, the
management of which in turn manages its user. Tellingly, in Levy’s account “My
Back Pages” is an entirely personal soundtrack, heard by him alone. It can never
serve as a metonym for that moment within a community.
By way of conclusion, I offer two points. The first comes from theorist
Paul Virilio, who argues in Ground Zero that “the tragic events in New York
in September 2001 showed us the alarming situation of an overpowerful state
suddenly brought up short against its own consciousness—or, rather, against its
techno-scientific unconsciousness: in other words, against the Gnosticist faith on
which it is founded” (65). For Virilio, 9/11 resulted from a scientific rationality
that prohibits prohibition, that does not say “no” to progress, ever. While this
claim comes in a context somewhat different than that of the present argument,
it nonetheless underscores my central point that there is a conditioning logic of
technology, that the rational systems through which we move daily found our
existence and allow or disallow our actions. Such is the case whether we refer
to music or to terrorism: the network and its codes engender the object or event.
My second point comes from Deleuze, who, like the present argument, does not
claim that this system is all powerful. He writes: “It’s not a question of worrying
or of hoping for the best, but of finding new weapons” (178). Whatever these
weapons are, they will not be the weapons of the past.
42 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

Works Cited

Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Trans. Brian Massumi.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1985. Print.
Critical Art Ensemble. Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas.
Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1996. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP,
1995. Print.
Eminem. “Mosh.” Google Videos. n.d. Web. March 25, 2010.
——. “The Mosh Continues.” YouTube. n.d. Web. March 25, 2010.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan
Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979. Print.
Galloway, Alexander and Eugene Thacker. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2007. Print.
Goodell, Jeff. “Steve Jobs: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone. Dec. 25,
2003. Web. March 25, 2010.
Harvey, Eric. “The Social History of the MP3.” Pitchfork. August 24, 2009. Web.
Mar. 25, 2010.
Kahney, Leander. The Cult of iPod. San Francisco: No Starch P, 2005. Print.
Kittler, Friedrich. “Code.” Software Studies. Ed. Matthew Fuller. Cambridge, MA:
MIT, 2008. 40–47. Print.
Levy, Steven. The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and
Coolness. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. Print.
Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections of the Technocratic
Society and its Youthful Opposition. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969. Print.
Sterling, Bruce. “Preface from Mirroshades.” Storming the Reality Studio: A
Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction. Ed. Larry McCaffery.
Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991. 343–8. Print.
Sterne, Jonathan. “The mp3 as Cultural Artifact.” New Media & Society 8.5
(2006): 825–42. Print.
Virilio, Paul. Ground Zero. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2002. Print.
 Chapter 3
Technostalgia and the Resurgence of
Cassette Culture
Craig Eley

Figure 3.1 The Picador, Iowa City, Iowa, 2008. Photo courtesy of Mark
Palmberg

Before I heard that cassette tapes were coming back into style, I saw it—painted
larger than life on a building in downtown Iowa City. It was the fall of 2007, and the
rock club in town had recently changed owners. The new staff had designed a mural
around a pre-existing narrow window on the building’s façade, including a custom
curtain that gave the appearance of a tape spool (Figure 3.1). A striking addition to
the building’s otherwise fortress-like exterior, this painted display of tape affection
seemed, at first glance, a logical expression of the romanticization of cassette tapes
that had become, in Simon Reynolds’ words, a defining characteristic of music
fandom in the first decade of the 2000s. This trend has been displayed variously
in literary works like Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel High Fidelity (and its 2000
44 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

film adaptation), Thurston Moore’s 2004 art book Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette
Culture, and Rob Sheffield’s 2007 memoir Love is a Mix Tape. Hardly confined to
popular literary remembrances, however, this trend also crossed over into methods
of music distribution, as a growing number of independent musicians and labels in
the second part of the 2000s returned to cassettes as a way to record and circulate
their music. This return to form, so to speak, was especially true within the “noise”
music scene, which, as Marc Masters points out, had evolved over the decade to
encompass a range of styles including “abstract improvisation, ecstatic free jazz,
lo-fi pop, outsider avant-rock, minimalist drone, power electronics, and more.”
In 2009, critic Cici Moss identified 101 distinct cassette record labels, and by
2010 the tape resurgence was being covered in mainstream outlets such as The
Guardian and The Los Angeles Times.
Like tapes themselves, the popular discourse surrounding this “new cassette
culture” has two sides, even though both attempt to locate the significance of
today’s tape culture in the 1980s. On one hand, proponents of today’s noise music
scene trace its lineage to the underground cassette scene of the 1980s, when a
loosely connected network of experimental musicians circulated home-recorded
cassettes through the mail as an alternative to the mainstream music industry’s
distribution methods. Developing out of the do-it-yourself (DIY) attitude that
originated in 1970s punk culture, 80s cassette culture has been widely celebrated
as a similarly oppositional subculture that introduced a new generation to DIY
aesthetics (Spencer 226, 343–8). While there is some truth here, which I will
discuss in more detail later, this origin story allows contemporary participants to
feel as if they are part of “an organic underground movement” independent of the
mainstream music industry’s hype machines (Hogan). Additionally, because of the
continued low cost of making cassettes, advocates insist that tapes create a more
participatory experience between musician and listener. According to Britt Brown,
founder of Not Not Fun records, “Tape fits in with a belief system of how intimate
music is made” (quoted in Brown).
On the flip side, critics have implicitly or, in some cases, explicitly noted that
participants in today’s cassette culture would likely be more familiar with the
near-ubiquitous mass-produced cassettes in the late 1980s than with the small-
batch tapes of the early 80s underground—a fact reinforced by musicians within
the scene. For instance, Nathan Williams, whose contemporary low fidelity noise
band performs under the name Wavves, finds comfort in tape culture: “It’s what I
was around growing up ya know, so it sticks with you … it’s almost comforting in
a way” (quoted in Richard). Rather than a coherent belief system about intimacy
or anti-corporate opposition, today’s cassette culture can be read as obsessed with
lost youth and sentimentality. Los Angeles Times writer August Brown has noted
that tapes often “evoke high school mixes from nascent crushes and trips to the
beach soundtracked by sun-bleached tunes recorded off the radio.” However,
not all critics have responded enthusiastically to this resurgence. Writing for the
web magazine PopMatters, Calum Marsh characterizes the cassette revival as “a
 Technostalgia and the Resurgence of Cassette Culture 45

confused, regressive cultural misstep” that ignores the “democratic dissemination”

of digital music solely to promote a sensibility of “cool.”
Though writers on both sides of this debate are quick to write off cassette
culture as flimsily nostalgic, doing so not only ignores the history of the period
that they are seemingly nostalgic for but also eliminates the possibility for new
meanings of cassettes to exist today. As Marsh correctly notes, as influential as the
underground cassette movement in the 1980s might be to tape lovers today, that
original scene had little to do with tapes per se—they were simply the cheapest
distribution method available at the time. Recalling that period, Robin James says
that “the spirit” of the scene had “nothing to do with the cassette medium” (quoted
in Campau). Additionally, a recent examination by Bas Jansen of writings about
mix tapes led him to conclude that the nostalgia that people feel for their old
tapes is not triggered directly by the objects themselves, but rather by the stories
associated with those objects, including the acts of making and giving them to
others (44). Yet, overwhelmingly, it is the cassette itself—its materiality—that
people in today’s noise music scene mark as its most important characteristic.
As Chris Jahnle, founder of the LA-based Kill/Hurt tape label, claims, “Cassettes
sound terrible anyway, so why not have something that sounds terrible that you
can hold?” (quoted in Brown).
Because of its position in-between the valorization of the vinyl record and the
mainstream acceptance of the music download, the cassette’s sudden reemergence
within this particular subculture suggests a dissatisfaction that extends beyond
critiques of the music industry and issues of fidelity into the realm of politics.
But to excavate the significance of the cassette resurgence, we must address and
ultimately move beyond a discourse that fixes its meaning solely in relation to
the 1980s—be that meaning nostalgic or retro. Not to do so would be to ignore
the ways in which technologies are socially constructed, a process that is always
“both ongoing and multiple” (Altman 21). Instead, we might understand the
resurgence of the cassette tape among noise musicians under the more specific
term “technostalgia,” a fascination with vintage technologies. As it applies to
music and musicians, technostalgia suggests a “movement toward both new
sounds and new interactions, whether aural, social, or physical, made concrete
through combinations of the past and present” (Pinch and Reinecke 166).
This was the real meaning of Iowa City’s cassette mural, as I eventually
discovered. The tape on the front of The Picador was more than mere decoration or
throwback icon; rather, it was a symbol of the impact that physical cassettes were
having on the local music scene. At shows around town, it seemed that everyone
had started a noise band and was swapping tapes, including people on the very
periphery of the scene, like myself. The local cassette-only record label, Night
People, was being celebrated for its catalog of experimental, psychedelic, and
noise rock in national blogs and magazines such as Rose Quartz, Foxy Digitalis,
Impose, and Signal to Noise. Thanks to this growing network of bands, promoters,
friends, and fans, Iowa City was developing into a Midwest hub for touring
46 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

experimental musicians of all varieties, many stacking their merchandise tables

with their latest cassette releases.
It is in the physicality of the cassette—both in its form and in the relationships
it fosters—that allows it to simultaneously serve as a site for creating new
connections between people as well as a place for resisting mainstream music
industry practices and dominant political ideologies. Cassettes also, it should
be noted, create their own set of problems. Even as cassettes have increased in
visibility, showing up as icons on T-shirts and belt buckles and even iPod cases,
today’s functioning musical tapes remain almost wholly out of reach beyond a
relatively small group of musicians and collectors. Always produced in limited
runs, often sold hand-to-hand and rarely digitized, the tape avoids widespread
distribution through either legal or illegal channels. Therefore, as a part of DIY
culture, cassette tapes ultimately “form relationships not intended by capitalism”
(Holtzman, Hughes, and Van Meter 45).
To attend to the physicality of cassettes is also to attend to the energy that has
reconfigured their magnetism. The sounds on today’s noise tapes reflect a very
particular kind of discontent, drawing their influences from the music popular
during two distinct Cold War moments: 50s and 60s garage and girl group, and
mid-80s electronics. By looking at and listening to a selection of tapes from
popular cassette artists like Wavves, Vivian Girls, and Dirty Beaches, we might
hear that, for some musicians, resistance has less to do with music and lyrics and
more to do with form and function.
Cultural theorist Alexi Monroe calls the redeployment of technologies outside
of their original contexts a “sleeper agent,” something that can cause technologies
“to activate at some point in the future when they themselves are rediscovered
and/or re-invented, destabilizing their own time and potentially releasing a further
set of unintended consequences in another 2 to 3 decades” (quoted in Bailey).
Strikingly, the redeployment of cassette technology, as a means of cultural and
political destabilization, was one of the main tactics of Osama bin Laden following
the events of September 11. Of course, in the Middle East, and in many developing
nations, the cassette has remained the dominant form of audio circulation (including
music as well as political and religious speeches), and its political implications for
the cultures there have been well documented (Abu-Lughod).
But for participants in today’s noise music cassette culture—a mainly young,
white, middle-class, and Western demographic—the release of bin Laden’s tapes
and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 can be understood as the sleeper agents for today’s
tape revival; those events signaled changes in the meaning of those technologies
at those moments. As Mark Greif has noted in his essay on changes to so-called
hipster style, the larger cultural mood swing in the United States from “mourning to
patriotic aggression and violence” made previous subcultural markers like trucker
hats and “wife beater” shirts seem less subversive. What he defines as the “White
Hipster” was replaced by the “Hipster Primitive,” a “subculture” that is more
amenable to women and whose points of reference include “animals, wilderness
… a fascination with early-eighties computer electronics” and, of course, cassette
 Technostalgia and the Resurgence of Cassette Culture 47

tapes. Scathingly critical of hipsters as lacking any politics beyond what he calls
“rebel consumerism,” Greif sees the Hipster Primitive as one who steals from
more subversive groups like “anarchist, free, vegan, punk, and even anti-capitalist
communities.”
Greif’s gripes aside, the noise music cassette scene is one that is legitimately
subversive. By lauding the cassette tape above other media, the scene’s participants
challenge the narrative of Western superiority—technologic and cultural—over
the “backwards” cultures of the Middle East. An outspoken example can be found
in Alan Bishop, who runs Sublime Frequencies, a label that releases collages of
music collected from other countries, much of it via cassette tapes. Writing for The
New York Times, Douglas Wolk argues that Bishop “sees in his projects a victory
over cultural hegemony.” Thus, even though Greif, among others, laments the lack
of politics he sees among “hipsters,” we should acknowledge that their return to
“primitive” technologies like the cassette tape forges—perhaps briefly, perhaps
only symbolically—connections between the West and its so-called “enemies,”
rather than bolstering a separation between the two.
Of course, the idea that magnetic tape embodies a form of radicalism is not a
particularly novel one. From the tape collage experiments of Pierre Schaeffer and
John Cage to the more recent work of William Basinski and Philip Jeck, tape has
been widely celebrated for its importance in avant-garde composition (Hegarty).
But with its widespread adoption in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the cassette
tape also allowed everyday people to reshape cultural production and to challenge
traditional corporate models of music recording and distribution. Experimental
and amateur musicians used cassettes to record and release their own material,
and music fans likewise used them to create compilations and share songs with
their friends via mixtapes. Eventually, however, the latter practice resulted in
the now-infamous “Home Taping is Killing Music” campaign, launched by the
British Phonographic Industry against consumers who were, allegedly, practicing
copyright infringement. While the campaign was highly criticized by both fans
and artists at the time (the classic example being Bow Wow Wow’s pro-home-
taping anthem “C:30 C:60 C:90 Go!”), the labels have used similar strategies in
today’s copyright wars over digital file distribution (McLeod 278–96). Where the
cassette once served as the most inexpensive way to circulate music, that function
has gone digital: first to the CD-R, and now to the mp3, which any label executive
will tell you is literally killing music via peer-to-peer file distribution. Today’s
cassette culture, by eschewing contemporary media forms for more esoteric ones,
is building on the older cassette culture tradition of rejecting dominant industry
formats.1 However, contemporary cassette distributors aim not so much to make

1
  It is because of these older traditions and historical context that I have chosen to
focus on the cassette, though it is certainly not the oldest or most outmoded technology
out there. I have anecdotally heard of a band who released an mp3 of their single on a 3.5″
floppy disc, and bands have experimented with the 8-track format since the 1980s.
48 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

music cheap and widely available as much as they do to make it physical, and,
ultimately, collectible.
Traditionally, aspiring rock bands saw the cassette tape as a low-quality
jumping-off point on the way to bigger money and higher fidelity. Its most
common usage was for demo tapes—cheaply produced recordings that bands
assembled with the hopes of scoring record contracts, professional studio time,
and, eventually, a vinyl LP with their name on the cover. Then, as now, such a
scenario was unlikely, and many bands hoping for major label success invested
vast quantities of their own time and money into releasing their own records. John
Foster, founder of the Lost Music Network and editor of their OP magazine, tried
his best to discourage this practice: “A word of advice to bands contemplating
pressing a 45 [rpm record] … don’t do it unless you have a large local following,
are planning on touring a lot, or are prepared to lose all your money with little to
show for it” (“Optional Reading”).
With Foster at the helm, OP became one of the most important players in
1980s cassette culture. Founded in Olympia, Washington in 1978, the magazine
was imagined as a way “to educate others about musics not widely known” by
“sharing contacts, information, and ideas”—roles it took quite seriously (Foster,
“Message”). With a design aesthetic and general attitude that owed much to the punk
collage, the magazine featured an extensive listing of zines, radio stations, labels
and distributors of all types of music, in addition to more traditional music news,
interviews, and reviews. Foster recalled that in the early days of the magazine “an
independent cassette-only release was an anomaly” (“OP”). However, due to artist
dissatisfaction with industry practices and the emergence of relatively inexpensive
home recording equipment, that anomaly soon became the norm. By the summer
of 1981, the magazine had an entire column devoted to cassette releases, called
“Castanets.” Each column included brief, mostly descriptive reviews of tapes, as
well as the prices and mailing addresses where fans could order them.
OP magazine and the “Castanets” column not only established the term
“cassette culture” but also cemented two deeply related principles that were
critical to its development, success, and continued deployment today: the
facilitation of subcultural interactions not restricted to specific local geographies,
and the establishment of an alternative economy for the circulation of music.2
While OP was based in Olympia and prominently featured labels and musicians
from the Pacific Northwest, its function as a clearinghouse allowed it to connect
a wide variety of people from around the world. Today, of course, that function
is performed not by postal mail but by the Internet. Shawn Reed, who runs Night
People, has noted, it is through digital technologies that cassettes can “flourish”
and reach a wider audience (quoted in Hogan).

2
  Though the term “cassette culture” is a generally accepted one that, at least
contemporarily, conjures a primarily white male demographic in noise music circles, tapes
have played a major role in hip-hop culture and in many “jam band” communities as well.
 Technostalgia and the Resurgence of Cassette Culture 49

Reaching that audience involves the process of creation, and, as tends to

be the case in DIY circles, that process emphasizes handmade production,
which has always been the most affordable means by which amateur artists can
work. Though contemporary cassette culture operates in a different economic
paradigm than that of the 1980s, there is still an emphasis on handmade goods
and uniqueness. Nevertheless, the value for such goods in the marketplace has
increased exponentially. While cassettes are still certainly cheap to record and
make, the motivation behind their use for contemporary bands and labels cannot
be understood as purely financial, especially for distribution, which, as mentioned
earlier, is only limited by access to the Internet. Timothy D. Taylor notes that
that the revival of old technologies in the digital era “in part registers a new
ambivalence and anxiety over today’s digital technology” (96). He continues, “At
the same time, these resurrections mark a disillusionment with technology, for
they are often manifest as a kind of nostalgia for past versions of the future, a
future that never arrived” (96).
The technological “ambivalence and anxiety” of the current cassette culture
is centered around the Internet, which, ironically enough, is viewed as a failure
as both a music delivery model and as a mode for personal expression. While
in the 1990s, a kind of post-everything utopianism dominated discourses about
“cyberspace,” the realities surrounding issues like governance and technology
soon painted a more realistic picture (Lessig 3). In the twentieth century, this
utopianism, at least in the context of musical distribution, has transformed into
a kind of fatigue resulting from the seemingly limitless supply of music via
legal channels like iTunes and Amazon.com, as well illegal ones like BitTorrent
networks. Tape label owner Alex Davis laments the isolationism that this kind of
distribution fosters: “The further and further I got away from the experience of
listening to full albums, going to the record store, and sharing what I found with
friends, the more I realized I was becoming a pretentious fuck with a full iPod, not
someone cherishing a collection of albums I was in love with” (quoted in Hogan).
Here, Davis’ critique of his own “pretension” (which certainly extends well
beyond himself) is not linked to esoteric knowledge or even the act of collecting—
things we might normally associate with musical pretention—but rather to what
he imagines as the insular, solitary practice of reading about music, downloading
it, and loading it onto a device.
In essence, Davis is critiquing the online music blog culture that places a
premium on “new” music, demanding a near-daily devotion to—or contention
with—the latest buzz band. This critique is consistent with cassette culture’s
more broad criticism of the Internet’s core failure: an inability to generate more
intimate interactions between musicians as fans. Mark Sniper, who runs tape label
Captured Tracks and performs under the name Blank Dogs, has taken issue with
fractured web communities: “I’m not opposed to tracks on the Internet. [My]
entire discography is on iTunes, for example. [But with my] blog, it just became a
situation where people were not getting the point of it. You really can’t do anything
these days without getting attacked for it” (quoted in Mules).
50 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

The response to these twin failures—turning people on to new music, interacting

more closely with fans—was to begin trafficking in cassettes, a technology that
Shawn Reed has called “old and outdated, intentionally obscure and marginal,
almost pointless in some way” (quoted in Hogan). Steve Rosborough of the label
Moon Glyph uses almost identical language, when he notes that many people
“chose the format for its lack of modernity and as an attempt to be willfully
obscure” (quoted in Hogan). For Rosborough, this turn away from modernity is
ultimately a rejection of “mass digitization and the loss of the physical format”
(quoted in Hogan). As straightforward as this rejection might seem, it is not until
contemporary consumers actually begin looking for cassettes that the extent of
their subversiveness becomes clear: they are nearly impossible to obtain.
Certainly, cassettes’ limited availability has a great deal to do with their status
as handmade DIY artifacts. In simple terms, tapes sell out quickly, rendering
them instant collector’s items. Some tape labels even celebrate this scarcity. For
instance, the UK label The Tapeworm proudly displays on their website that for
each cassette release, no more than 250 copies will be made (for example, see
“TTW#02”). Other tape labels have done the same: Fuck It Tapes have released a
total of sixty-six cassettes, only two of which remain in print. (“Fuck it Tapes”).
The label Night People has distributed 100 tape releases, of which twenty-one
remain available (“Night-People”). And these labels certainly are not unaware of
the black market this lopsided supply-and-demand creates. As of this writing, one
(out of a total of forty) blue cassette release of the album Blissed Out by the Dum
Dum Girls was selling on eBay for upwards of $50—not only a ridiculous mark-
up on an item that probably cost less than a dollar to produce but also a steep cost
of entry for any outsider to the scene. Like a toy that never leaves its box, the
ostensible function of this cassette—to create a sense of intimacy and to distribute
music to a community of fans—is evacuated in the name of collectability.
This distribution model, while significantly ironic, ultimately reinforces the
rejection of contemporary music industry practices that lie at the heart of cassette
culture. According to cultural critic Will Straw, “To collect the obscure and
formerly unhip is to ‘refuse the mainstream,’ or to exhibit a ‘a transgressive anti-
conventionalism’” (quoted in Taylor 101). While cassettes might reject Internet
distribution and the digitizing of music, they do so at the expense of availability.
Whatever cassette culture might be, it is certainly not democratizing. The dominant
narratives of both American foreign policy and music technologies are about
“access” to “freedoms,” whether that means democracy or digital downloads. In
positioning themselves and their music away from these tropes, noise musicians
mobilize the physicality of cassettes in a way that is often opposite of earlier
cassette culture. Rather than facilitate access, they facilitate a kind of fetishism.
The politics of technology aside, it would be easy to claim that cassette culture
itself is not political. For one, many participants in the scene either refuse to
acknowledge any political implications in their decision to put out their music on
tape, or they claim ignorance as to why they put out a tape in the first place. Nathan
Williams of Wavves epitomizes that self-conscious ignorance about recording to
 Technostalgia and the Resurgence of Cassette Culture 51

tape. When asked why he chose that particular medium for releasing his debut (on
Fuck It Tapes), he responded, “Maybe the same thing that attracts me to music
and culture from the 80s and 90s … It’s such a different medium, it’s so muddy
sounding, but it’s almost comforting in a way. And then I let some drunk dude
tattoo a cassette on my arm at my friend’s house when I was 16 so that was that”
(quoted in Richard).
Regardless of motivation, Williams’ music exemplifies the technostalgic
impulse: the use the past to make sense of the present. The debut album’s opener
“Intro Goth” is a 100-second synthesizer solo containing layers of vintage-80s
Casio sounds looping around each other. Then, with little warning, a wall of
electric guitars interrupts the flow to initiate the track “Losers Yeah,” a garage-
rock-meets-surf-rock-meets-punk-rock anthem (complete with “Woo-oohs” and a
guitar solo). The chorus, barely audible through all the distortion, asserts, “I know
I am a loser.” The album is peppered with these kind of era-bending musical styles,
including big, 60s-sounding drums and girl-group backing vocals. Nevertheless,
for all of the melody and energy, there is a sadness that permeates the record, a
stoner loneliness that makes lines about being a “loser” resonate much deeper than
Beck’s mid-90s ironic claims.
While it is generally acknowledged that the musical styles and production
aesthetics of much of today’s noise and lo-fi pop scene often have as much to do
with the 1950s and 60s as they do with the 80s, it’s almost never mentioned that
the music echoes many of the same Cold War anxieties present in those times.
Exemplary in this regard is East Vancouver’s Dirty Beaches, who draw on rockabilly
to create haunting, cinematic scenes that seem both to reinforce and undermine the
aggression and self-assurance of so many traditional rockabilly songs. Similarly,
Super Furry Animals’ frontman Gruff Rhys situates the physicality of the cassette
as a kind of indestructible shelter against the looming—and ultimately flattening—
presence of the Internet: “Cassettes and vinyl are the analogue cockroaches to the
nuclear Armageddon that is digital formats” (quoted in Hogan).
Brooklyn, NY’s Vivian Girls, who share a label with Wavves, also suggest that
past technologies construct an aesthetic that brings the past and the present into
communion with each other:

We definitely have a recording aesthetic, we don’t want our records to sound like
the 90’s. I think the best records were made in the 50’s and 60’s and all those
recordings were made live or on one mic usually. So I feel that we’re trying to
get closer to that type of recording sensibility than we have been. For instance
our first record was recorded digitally, our second record was recorded on a 16
track tape machine, but I think for the third record we’re going to try to stay
exclusively with 8 tracks and 4 tracks of either cassette tapes or reel-to-reel, and
try to get away from multi-tracking as much as possible. (quoted in Ramone)

This decision to eschew digital recording and to strive for the fewest number of
tracks—in combination with their band’s already fuzzy, distorted guitar tones—
52 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

inevitably results in a “unpolished,” “lo-fi,” and occasionally harsh, sound. But

while some bands use noise in a deliberately aggressive way, the “noise” music
of the cassette culture scene is not meant not to isolate, but rather to bring people
together. When the band Woods (who run the label Vivian Girls is on) were asked
about the “lo-fi” aesthetic of many of their recordings, they defined it not via
aesthetics but via personal relationships: “I think the problem with ‘lo-fi’ is that
people take it as a genre term, or to come up with a name for a ‘scene.’ It’s not so
much a ‘scene’ as it is a lot of people making music near one another” (quoted in
Craine).
When The Tapeworm Collective launched their cassette label in 2008, they
deliberately positioned their work outside of commercial music culture, their
website proudly proclaiming, “No barcodes. The cassette will never die! Long
live the cassette!” (“The Tapeworm”). In an interview with Wire magazine, an
anonymous spokesman for the collective said that their fascination with the
cassette stemmed from its “non-digital awkwardness; the clunk; the effort
required of the listener, an enforcement of A versus B” (quoted in Young). As they
articulate, and as I have argued, the physicality of the cassette is its most important
characteristic as a subversive response to mainstream music culture. However, just
as an overdub does not always fully erase what came before it, the connections that
cassettes have to their past still resonate, and they fuel the contemporary cassette’s
power as both a scarce—and collectible!—material object as well as a powerful
point of connection for those inside the culture.
Ultimately, the physicality of cassettes makes any “enforcement of A versus B,”
impossible, since those things are united by the tape itself—they are, literally, two
sides of the same tape. The physicality of cassettes and the music on them represent
a new kind of protest music in a post-9/11 world. That tape labels are predicated on
masculinist practices of collection and the desire for limited editions is undeniable.
Moreover, the ability to acquire a physical copy of a cassette that has gone on to be
critically celebrated—physically or economically— is often limited to people with
inside access or deep pockets. But by sonically bathing their music in an aesthetic
of uncertainty, distance, longing, and mechanization that characterized moments
of the Cold War, tape artists use technology and technostalgia to express their
ambivalence toward dominant music culture practices as well as global politics. In
an increasingly digitized culture, the physical becomes political.
 Technostalgia and the Resurgence of Cassette Culture 53

Works Cited

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1, 2010.
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Sept. 30, 2010.
Craine, Paul. “Woods Wants No Part of Your Lo-Fi ‘Scene.’” The Onion AV Club.
Aug. 20, 2009. Web. Oct. 15, 2010.
Foster, John. “A Message from Lost Music Network Coordinator John Foster.”
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——. “Optional Reading.” OP. F Issue (1983): 1. Print.
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Hegarty, Paul. “The Hallucinatory Life of Tape.” Culture Machine 9 (2007). Web.
Feb. 26, 2011.
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2010.
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Moss, Cici. “101 Cassette Labels.” Rhizome. New Museum of Contemporary Art,
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 Part II
Hail to the Thief:
Post-9/11 Experimental Music
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Chapter 4
Why Protest Albums Can’t Teach Dissent:
The Emergent Complexity of Post-9/11
Protest
Conrad Amenta

By the middle of the twentieth century, nearly all control of the production,
distribution, marketing, and sales of recorded music in America belonged to a small
number of corporate entities. It was in their interests that music was organized
into genres: sustainable commodities subject to economic forecasting, traceable as
they penetrated demographics of age, class, and ethnicity, and with their own body
of legitimized (and legitimizing) historical articles. Until recently, the touchstones
of the protest genre remained Depression-era folk, such as Aunt Molly Jackson,
labor-rights-era Woody Guthrie, Vietnam War-era Bob Dylan and his “The Times
They Are A-Changin’” (1964), Civil Rights-era soul such as Marvin Gaye’s
What’s Going On (1971), and funk such as Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a
Riot Goin’ On (1971). Similarly, the wellspring of rock and roll and punk music,
to which we so often refer when speaking about subversion and rebellion, carried
on protest’s narrative tradition of blue-collar catharsis and accentuated otherness.
As those owning the rights to protest sought to maximize its traction with the
American counterculture, historical articles and the cultural atmosphere from
which their authors drew came to be used interchangeably as not only evocative
but also mutually representative of one another. Protest music was not simply
a message from a subculture, but yet its albums were treated as units of it, as
if to purchase The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) was to possess some portion
of Dylan’s principles—political urgency conflated with the act of consumption.
To this stratification of culture into markets one could then attribute hierarchy
and determine which unit of culture was “most seminal,” which is to say most
representative of a cultural atmosphere. Those who consider themselves among
what historian Thomas Frank calls the “Culture Trust” expend much time and
energy examining the permutations of this hierarchy, and the impact its occasional
reordering has on society. The twentieth-century music listener was consigned to
this limited array of cultural products, and the assurance of their lasting relevance.
Whether or not we should question the assumption that an iconic article can
signify culture should be at the forefront of our minds when acknowledging that
America in the 2000s—increasingly embroiled in wars abroad and divided at
home by contentious domestic politics—saw no resurgence in the sales of protest
58 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

music, much less the emergence of a revised but allusive variation. Surveying
Billboard’s Top 200 list of bestselling albums during the 2000s revealed no surfeit
of popular (or populist) music easily cross-referenced to a “big tent,” impetus
to rebellion (though, according to Tim Lemke of The Washington Times, in the
days following the terrorist attacks there was a clear uptrend in the sales of music
with strategically patriotic themes). Protest music remains commercially stagnant.
Is this so because musicians and their audiences are unaffected or unengaged?
Are we to assume that no such big tent exists, or did the size, number, location,
and clustering of tents change while we were watching the charts? I posit that
it is our reliance on a compromised referent, an entrenched, corporate account
of the popular protest movement that prevents us from seeing mass expressions
of politicized dissatisfaction and the sites of strategic non-participation. Today’s
popular movement is the vast migration of consumers from traditional systems
of material accumulation to socially networked emergent systems of organized
complexity: the blogs, subcultural websites, peer-to-peer networks, and the
necessary impermanence of their multiform variations.
Systems based on emergent organized complexity emphasize the tracking
and grouping individual preferences, which allows for true ratification by public
alignment with and reciprocal interpretation of subject matter. These systems
are evident in the lattice of online networks across which source material and
its iterations are disseminated. Inside these systems, commercial products are
complicated beyond the baseline affiliations of their market demographics,
potentially capturing fleeting and iterative resonance via social mechanisms.
The interactions and interpretations these systems enable and perpetuate are
both more appropriate representations of a culture’s complex contemporary
mood than a static article and a public, living record of a social history. Where
narrative historical accounts, such as those we attribute to expository genres of
music like protest, seek to embody a period of time, social history, as embodied
by emergent complexity, favors the interplay of small events over the long term.
These interactions build on what Fernand Braudel terms the longue durée, or the
evolution of historical structures rather than the enclosed examination of events.
It is to Braudel’s concept that we should turn to help us understand what emergent
systems mean in a historical context, and where these systems are located, and to
properly measure post-9/11 American protest where it naturally occurs.
The kind of protest that is occurring now is both an explicit and unconscious
eco-systemic event: the mass abandonment of structures that allow for limited
interactions. The line between the politics of content consumption and use
of medium has blurred; to use a medium is now to participate indelibly in the
formation of content. These are the increasingly evident social ramifications of
a powerful new media, a return to the fundamental play of media on the creation
of information itself. Marshall McLuhan’s work, now decades old, still offers
insight into the dynamism with which political thought is imbued when the
speed and complexity of communication is increased. He points out that “as the
speed of information increases, the tendency is for politics to move away from
 Why Protest Albums Can’t Teach Dissent 59

representation and delegation of constituents toward immediate involvement of

the entire community in the central acts of decision” (204). He goes on to state
that “this mosaic form has become a dominant aspect of human association; for
the mosaic form means … participation in process” (210, ellipses added). Socially
networked systems accelerate the dynamic described by McLuhan, and the natural
interplay between small events that form the meshwork of history. Braudel’s
organization of time is systematized, and the mosaic, social form of history is
made traceable and concrete. Just as in the last century the organization of music
into track-listings was based on the capacities of the dominant media of the time—
the radio, the 45, the long-playing record, the compact disc, all transmitting their
content in unalterable forms—so too are socially networked systems placing new
emphasis on access to content and participation in content creation at the expense
of centralized ownership. An array of sincere and ironic renditions of pop hits
appear on YouTube and Facebook, and the effect of their appearance is twofold:
they communicate that the authorship of song material is no longer the exclusive
purview of the artist or their label, and that the medium of music consumption is
no longer the static and unsatisfying form of material accumulation. With each
new interpretation of material, the underlying notion of the content’s sanctity,
and thus its tendency to ossify, is diminished. The standard that recorded music
takes is under constant determination, but one can be assured that the periods of
dominance enjoyed by each form—and thus the locus of control over content in
the context of that form—will become shorter so long as there exist platforms that
are founded on the principle of unimpeded access to content and content creation
tools.
Distinguishing trends in these systems is not unlike an analysis of coded
behavior in subcultures; the detection of patterns that are immersed in apparent
chaos and are often imperceptible to those outside of the collective behavior that
produces them. Steven Johnson also points out that “the technologies behind the
Internet … have been brilliantly engineered to handle dramatic increases in scale,
but they are indifferent, if not downright hostile, to the task of creating higher-
level order” (118–19, ellipses added). Thus the purpose of this essay is not to
capture or explain new or uncategorized forms of fluid protest, but to suggest
that the methods with which we measure information trends such as protest and
its dialects should include an interdisciplinary perspective, due primarily to the
rapidity and complexity with which information is communicated via the force
of new reciprocal media. It is as important now to turn to shifts in statistical
research, such as the kinds of bottom-up quantitative analyses and web metrics
that comprise the study of emergent systems of organized complexity, as it is to
examine the cultural studies and strategic readings on which the humanities and
social sciences have relied in the past, and which have the potential to entrench
our reliance on cultural artifacts. Events develop after as many as millions of
local interactions; their antecedents are the multiform body of reactions, of the
resonance and dissonance, of reciprocal communication itself.
60 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

For example, the emergence of the file-sharing network Napster may not have
been a higher-level catalyst for a larger dissatisfaction with the music industry,
but the result of a localized set of interactions that grew to a sea change, as
consumers, already alienated by industry practices and pricing but relegated to
traditional means of material accumulation, were prepared to abandon a system
in which they no longer had faith. As agents in an emergent system of organized
complexity naturally develop behaviors that engender the continued survival of
the whole, so too did post-9/11 consumers’ series of migrations from a system
that systematically closed down spaces for expression (which need not have
been explicitly political so much as discussions of the monetary value of music)
contribute to the formulation of a new majority outside what had been perceived
as the mainstream—a macro-political response given form and exponential mass
by socially networked media. For Johnson, our focus should be on the shift in how
systems come to meet the requirements of its users: “It’s about altering a system’s
behavior in response to [changing] patterns in ways that make the system more
successful at whatever goal it’s pursuing. The system need not be conscious to be
capable of that kind of learning, just as your immune system need not be conscious
to learn how to protect you from the chicken pox” (104).
The cure for the pox is the mass exodus from systems of music consumerism,
where trends are artificially inseminated, to systems in which memes are socially
conceived: ratification through numerous local interactions rather than the
simulacra of a unilateral myth. Contemporary protest is marked by absence and
abandonment. The movement has already reached what is called, in the parlance
of emergent complex systems, its statistically robust “climax stage,” the point at
which it must be acknowledged as a macro-social trend. For example, Facebook
reports having 500 million users, each creating 90 pieces of content a month and
connected to 80 community pages, groups, and events (“Press Page”). Though
the music industry may not have produced an allusive variant of the protest genre
to correspond to post-9/11 agitation, the degree of this much broader form of
information consumption is also evident in the crumbling edifice of the troubled
music industry itself, its key messages drowned out by cacophonous discussion.
But before taking a perspective of systems and structures, one that explains
our social networks and emerging dialects, one should first understand why
transgressive products—rock albums released in the 1960s, for example—continue
to be relied upon as iconic representations of protest while no longer sufficient to
help us understand “how” to protest. Vital to the flawed correlation between albums
and cultural resonance is an ongoing scripting of protest music—specifically
music stored on tactile media, distributed via retail sales, and stylistically and
lyrically rooted in their periods of production—as the sole authentic medium
for marginalized voices. These articles are legitimized by a tactically deployed
nostalgia, and are encoded with a highly narrativized, retroactive continuity.
The key logical fault of relying upon this dynamic between article and culture
is that, in locating contemporary protest in a historical spectrum of work lauded
for the sensibility it supposedly imposed on American political reality, the
 Why Protest Albums Can’t Teach Dissent 61

genre now provides a sense of instant resolution, invoking a nostalgia-infused

historical change, real or imagined, in place of a fresh interrogation, leading one
to conclude that the lack of a similar contemporary movement indicates a lack of
engagement. Protest has become what Jean Baudrillard might call a “simulacrum,”
a commercial simulation that has come to replace its referent. As a simulacrum,
protest music comes to constitute parameters for politicized dissatisfaction,
narrowing normalized spaces for dissent rather than allowing them to feed an
output of locally specific expressions. Protest’s legitimized historical articles
contain both the problem and the solution to the agitated impulse, a package for the
restless demographics, and are frozen in a compromised state rather than fluid in
the emergence of new structures wherein individuals construct meaning. Thomas
Frank invokes social critic Camille Paglia to demonstrate this all too simplistic
narrative of protest, which suggests that “rebellion is one-half of an all-too
convenient and fictive formula, against a supposedly static oppressor, whose great
opponents are, of course, liberated figures like ‘the beatniks,’ Bob Dylan, and the
Beatles. Culture is, quite simply, a binary battle between the repressive Apollonian
order of capitalism and the Dionysian impulses of the counterculture” (quoted in
Frank 35). Baudrillard goes further, rendering the problem as macro-social. He
posits simulacra as cyclically self-legitimizing, entrenched collaborations between
audience, author, and media, and he suggests that simulacra “are the ones that
interrogate us, and we are summoned to answer them, and the answer is included
in the question. Thus all the messages in the media function in a similar fashion:
neither information nor communication, but referendum, perpetual test, circular
response, verification of the code” (75). Protest music today, be it contemporary
or canonical, acts as a panacea, a balm of stylistic and lyrical catharsis that has
difficulty calling into question the materialism upon which it depends for its
dissemination. Thus, our legacy of rebellion can be seen as having no referent at
all, compromised and never having been accommodating enough for complex and
fluid cultural movements.
Depictions of the counterculture have become as conflicted and disposable
as the concept of “cool” itself—that exclusivity and novelty upon which the
marketing of revolution has so often relied—because commercialism long
ago learned to make novelty an ineffable part of its appeal. John Leland, in his
history of “hip,” suggests, “There is no difference between commercialized hip
and the real thing … Even at its most pure, hip is just a cog in an expansionist
economy, conjured to create the radical consumers that the market needs to sell
ever-newer stuff. Its fetish for novelty trains us to embrace obsolescence and
constant turnover” (284, ellipses added). A protest album cannot represent and
teach agitation that is continuously changing, just as an album with subcultural
capital cannot represent the culture it seeks to distill, because lifestyle brands long
ago suggested these notions as a reason to buy up the excess that the industry
was creating, and imposed stability, sluggishness, and myth on the dialogue. The
terms “rebellion” or “revolutionary” were hollowed-out and lightened, conflated
seamlessly with the principles of an omnipresent lifestyle commercialism that
62 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

consists “of a sort of Nietzschean antinomianism, an automatic questioning of the

rules, a rejection of whatever social prescriptions we’ve happened to inherit”; or,
put simply, “Just Do It is the whole of the law” (Frank 32). Those belonging to
the Baby Boomer generation of the 1960s, commonly portrayed as a catalyst of
cultural upheaval—less Moloch than media personality making appeals to anti-
establishment ideologies—yielded the great corporate entities of capitalism in the
latter half of the twentieth century. “As existential rebellion has become a more or
less official style of Information Age capitalism,” Frank explains: “It has become
difficult to understand the countercultural idea as anything more than the self-
justifying ideology of the new bourgeoisie that has arisen since the 1960s, the
cultural means by which this group has proven itself ever so much better skilled
than its slow-moving, security-minded forebears at adapting to the accelerated,
always-changing consumerism of today” (34–5). It is not that protest’s historical
articles, and the establishment against which they pushed, were once and now-
complicated truths; they are in fact the essence of our simulacra, whose very
historical validity can be called into question because of the corporate lens through
which they are viewed.
Thus, agitation has withered on the margins of our traditional systems
of material accumulation. Even if protest were still encoded in the works of a
Guthrie or Dylan, whose personalities, biographical narratives, and attendant
myths are now embedded in the sale of the article, in seeking legitimization by
comparison to a historical article, one pre-empts the ability of a work to respond
to or capture the contemporary essence of mimetic information. The occurrence
of a social response is subsumed into the systematization of belief; are simulacra
affixed with myth: narrativized, encoded, concrete, and cumulatively (and often
unconsciously) reified. Protest music leverages the weight of mythology in its
push for commercial traction, and in so doing snuffs out non-synergistic accounts.
“[We] can discern … two mechanisms through which a body of dogma has always
made itself believed,” Michel de Certeau explains. He goes on to say:

On the one hand, the claim to be speaking in the name of a reality which, assumed
to be inaccessible, is the principle of both what is believed (a totalization) and
the act of believing (something that is always unavailable, unverifiable, lacking);
and on the other, the ability of a discourse authorized by a ‘reality’ to distribute
itself in the form of elements that organize practices, that is, of “articles of faith”
These two traditional resources are found today in the system that combines the
narrativity of the media—an establishment of the real—with the discourse of
products to be consumed—a distribution of this reality in the form of “articles”
that are to be believed and bought. (185, emphasis added)

The protest genre is essentially constituted by the articles of faith to which

de Certeau alludes, the discourse of “legitimized” products which organizes
the practice of protest by providing the language, and more importantly the
rigidly controlled medium, via which we understand how to express politicized
 Why Protest Albums Can’t Teach Dissent 63

dissatisfaction. Protest is an entrenched and unresponsive dialect which speaks for,

or rather in place of, reality, not so much unreal as anti-real, frozen in the past, a
coda of dilemmas packaged with their resolutions, and rendered by a strategically
employed nostalgia as distant, disconnected narratives. But where protest music
has become inadequate and unsatisfying, it may be useful to imagine where a
critical dissatisfaction forms. While de Certeau describes the degree to which the
article of faith has come to constitute the justification and of belief, he also points
out that “this instrument that ‘creates opinion’ is manipulable by those that have
it at their disposition,” and that “it is legitimate to inquire into the opportunities
it offers for changing ‘belief’ into ‘mistrust’ into ‘suspicion,’ and indeed into
denunciation, as well as into the opportunity for citizens to manipulate politically
what serves as a circular and objectless credibility for political life itself” (189).
This is the subtext of a narrative about an unmotivated counterculture: the
perpetual asphyxiation of the cultural by omnipresent sponsorial entities has driven
contemporary expressions to accommodatingly pliable mediums, a migration to
systems currently attaining the statistical robustness at which they make themselves
known paradigmatically and without the legitimization of a historical referent.
Corporately owned information-management and communications platforms
in the twenty-first century, such as Google, Facebook, MySpace, and Napster,
along with the community of independent music blogs and websites offering
original content, such as Daytrotter, Pitchfork, and Blogoteque, are iterations
of a largely free information exchange whose perpetuity and ease-of-access
accelerate the change demanded of underlying systems, such as copyright law,
material accumulation, or personal privacy. They are the venue, and sometimes the
substance, of America’s subcultural meshwork.
In Steven Johnson’s exploration of socially networked online platforms as both
manifestations and perpetuations of emergent systems of organized complexity,
he describes the behavior evident in these systems as “higher-level patterns
arising out of parallel complex interactions between local agents,” replete with
socially defined parameters that only emerge when the statistical sample becomes
large enough (19). Socially networked systems are Braudel’s longue durée given
contemporary form, capturing social trends as they emerge over time. These two
notions privilege social history over narrative simulacra, and suggest we should
look for the historical action (in this case, instances of resistance) in the migration
between systems within, away from, and returning to traditions. For the goal,
Braudel asserts, should be “to define a hierarchy of forces, of currents, of particular
movements, and then tackle them as an entire constellation. At each moment of
[historical] research, one has to distinguish between long-lasting movements and
short bursts, the latter detected from the moment they originate, the former over the
course of a distant time” (125). In this context, what we might view as a scarcity of
protest in the music industry is in fact an over-reliance on a short-term manner of
measuring social resonance (retail sales by genre, and in a relatively short period
of time (such as the decade following 9/11), while all around us the way music is
created, listened to, owned, and valued is changing. What drives that change has
64 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

formed over a much longer period of time than that rendered by the Billboard Top
200 or attenuation to market cycles.
As Leland informs us, subcultural histories are rife with accounts of
paradigmatic and technological shifts:

Uptown, a Jamaican man named Clive Campbell called himself Kool DJ

Herc and pulled apart records nobody wanted, isolating the “break beats,” or
strong percussive sections, and repeating them on two turntables. Downtown,
pseudonymous musicians like Dee Dee Ramone or Stiv Bators pulled apart old
pop forms that had lost their savor, hammering them to their own equivalent of
the break beat … Hip in the age of DIY came with a strain of guerilla capitalism.
(298, ellipses added)

Social networks, though corporately owned, extend the do-it-yourself aesthetic

from entertainment to the discourse and medium surrounding entertainment,
rendering the iterative social construct the subject of an information transaction
predicated on cultural, rather than monetary, capital. What we see in the emerging
patterns of information across these platforms is the brusque dismissal of the
establishment/rebellion dichotomy, a de-sanctification of historical articles in our
strata of allegiances.
Predicated on dynamic reciprocation, appropriation, and a creative
interpretation of information, emergent systems ripple with dissatisfaction and
strategic non-participation. Post-9/11 dialectics may be informed by awareness
and acknowledgment, an understanding that to be a consumer is to inhabit an
active and politicized state, or it may occur unconsciously—almost defensively—
arising out of a general inability to effectively communicate, or to communicate
in an appealing or fashionable way, in pre-empted, compromised systems of
production and distribution. These scenarios may too exist simultaneously, but are
both defined by a self-organizing principle of destratification and restratification,
the deconstruction and constitution of both information and the systems through
which it passes. The brands of emergent systems are themselves impermanent
events in Braudel’s longue durée, but they, by their very nature, allow for the
statistical tracking of social histories as they emerge, and are driven by adaptation
and transparency. It is true that organized complexity is simply another way
of organizing units of time, a non-objective way of conceiving of the social
unconscious, but this speaks to a suspicion that one’s actions take place in an
overarching stratum of history. The individual commits to public record their
affinities and choices, and then engages in dialogue, thereby assuming an active
role where once variations on passive consumption were all that were offered.
The metrics are built into the very foundation of the system itself, allowing
for a statistical description of language usage, content generation and sharing,
and demographics. In this way, emergent systems of organized complexity
make explicit unconsciously developed memes. They are the contemporary
manifestation of Braudel’s ideal, allowing those concerned with measuring history
 Why Protest Albums Can’t Teach Dissent 65

to “get past superficial observation in order to reach the zone of unconscious or

barely conscious elements, and then to reduce that reality to tiny elements, minute
identical sections, whose relations can be precisely analyzed” (135). The article,
such as the album, in isolation is self-legitimizing and disconnected. Emergent
complexity, by contrast, places emphasis on the perpetual reconstitution of
elements of the social, and then the linking and tracking of reconstituted elements.
The temporary ascendancy of an icon like Bob Dylan is rendered less important
than the social trends and themes connoting a preference for someone like Bob
Dylan at that time, and the conditions which may give rise to another like him.
The fluidity that these systems enable—their composition of absorbing and
absorbed information—means that variations on protest have difficulty coalescing
into something that might be recognized and/or legitimized by established or
more stable commercial norms. However, what the protest taking place in these
systems lacks in traceability, it makes up for in pure mass. Linkages between units
of information—made on minuscule, peer-to-peer levels but across a staggering
array of transactions—develop into meta-coverage. Their exposure, which itself
begins to mutate and become a part of the information, expands exponentially,
and each variation on the original message incorporates local concerns into the
communal whole. Social networking sites—which rely not only upon statistics-
based learning software that links pieces of information, but also on the feedback
loop that is generated when others perpetuate and interpret that link—respond to
the original message and modify its information, creating a space for commentary.
Effectively, what these systems allow for is the socialization, and thus cumulative
legitimization, of information in lieu of a corporate entity’s explicit authorship
or endorsement. One aligns oneself with a piece of information on Facebook not
because Facebook is sponsoring it, but because one’s friends are. The platform is
designed in such a way as to capitalize on the impulse to comment on, approve of,
modify, or link pieces of information, and to make visible each of these actions
in what amounts to a declaration of affinity. Similarly, ease of access to and use
of blogging tools such as Blogger, WordPress, and tumblr, and their integration
with social networks, allow content to be shared seamlessly across platforms,
and enable blogs to emerge and link with one another in what may constitute a
contemporary variation on the community. Music blogging has become vast and
complexly interwoven, where the taste-making capital of sites such as Pitchfork
and Said the Gramophone combine with the collating power of aggregators such
as The Hype Machine to form seemingly ubiquitous access to dynamic, culturally
resonant music. Codification is established and destroyed in the arc of listening
patterns developing via millions of communications transactions involving content
sharing and modification. Johnson elaborates on how the system works when he
says: “Generically, you can describe those rules as a mix of positive and negative
feedback pushing the system toward a particular state based on the activities of the
participants” (159). The key difference between today’s agitation and that of the
1950s and 1960s is that socially networked systems have exponentially accelerated
the constitution, adoption, and destruction of the subcultural to the point where
66 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

capitalization by corporate entities—production and marketing for the purposes

of mass dissemination—cannot keep up with the meshwork of interpretations and
alignments implied by this mix of feedback.
I posit that social networks, powered by a socially significant emergent
complexity, allow for a kind of unification that is not possible in the retail
sale of Protest music, and which facilitates one’s ability to express politicized
dissatisfaction. A social network enables and encourages users, via the conduit
of their preferences for and modulations and interpretations of content, to form
groups and clusters of groups. They are so encouraged because these clusters feed
and refine the networks’ fundamental algorithms, driving the system toward an
economy of accommodation. They observe fractious, unpredictable embellishment
as not only an aspect but also a pillar of the system itself. What was once a
demographic—understood in inflexible terms, subject to slow reconstitution and
consisting of individuals that may not have been involved in the definition of its
parameters—has become an enmeshed series of peripatetic local interactions
whose mosaic whole comprises staggering substance. Individuals in the network,
grouped by their preferences, are more actively invested in the definition, and
direction, of messages emitted by that group. To make decisions in a social
network can be politically motivated and contextually, locally defined, or it may
be an unconscious, but active identification of preferences, becoming a form of
socialization that in turn contributes to the statistical robustness of the messages
produced by each shifting cluster of groups: big tent resonance from a landscape
of small tents. Nonetheless, the accommodation is natural; as Johnson points out,
“The needs of most progressive movements are uniquely suited to adaptive, self-
organizing systems: both have a keen ear for collective wisdom; both are naturally
hostile to excessive concentrations of power; and both are friendly to change”
(224). Or, to quote McLuhan again: “All media are active metaphors in their power
to translate experience into new forms” (57). Social networks are no exception.
One convenient contrast, which illustrates the dynamic of user feedback,
occurred between Radiohead’s 2003 album Hail to the Thief and their 2007 release,
In Rainbows. The lyrics of the former album are fatalistic and cynical—invoking,
for example, Orwellian paranoia in the opening song, “2+2=5”—which can be
interpreted as dissatisfied in the explicitly lyrical fashion of the protest genre.
Released on Capitol Records via retail distribution channels and on tactile storage
media, Hail to the Thief is a classic case of top-down dictation from commercial
artist to a forecasted demographic. Its follow-up album, In Rainbows, contains
less overtly political lyrical content, but was initially delivered to consumers via
an independent online distribution service featuring consumer-determined pricing.
If one undertakes to compare Hail to the Thief and In Rainbows in terms of their
political motivation, countercultural resonance, and the willingness of the band at
the time of each album’s release to challenge the status quo, to what degree should
the albums’ respective media influence our findings?
I suggest that In Rainbows represents a more broadly contemporary agitation
than Hail to the Thief, though to rely on the script provided by protest music
 Why Protest Albums Can’t Teach Dissent 67

one would invariably find the inverse. Where protest music relies on a top-down
approach to establishing countercultural credibility—the artist who articulates a
broader dissatisfaction, the record label that capitalizes on that artist’s potential
resonance, the marketing firm that introduces the artist to buyers and propagates
the artist’s resonance—In Rainbows relies primarily on feedback loops among
potential and existing consumers to legitimize both the brand and the information
in play, discussions that were themselves part of a greater feedback loop about the
migration to alternative distribution channels for the dissemination of content. In
Rainbows was absorbed into the feedback loop, which contributed to its volume.
Radiohead, once considered a band of the “alternative” music trend in the 1990s,
now presented their listener base with something that was, however temporarily,
truly an alternative, both of and enhancing the sociohistorical arc of migration to
an accelerated form of communication, one event and site of interactions in the
meshwork that is a newly dominant paradigm.
One facet of the feedback loop was In Rainbows’ consumer-determined pricing
scheme, which Pitchfork’s Matthew Solarski went so far as to describe as “a moral
question” (Maki). This aperture in the previously inflexible sales structure provides
both space to discuss, and valuable insight into, the perceived value of music and
the participatory nature of consumerism: the transformation of the commercial
action into a discussion about that action, or an unconscious migration to more
accommodating mediums that implied the users’ feelings about music’s relative
monetary worth.
In Rainbows was reported to have sold 1.2 million copies in its first week of
release, at an average selling price of £4, easily outpacing the first week sales
of the band’s previous three albums (Manjoo). These figures originated from
sources connected to the band itself, and were not recognized by Billboard,
vitally complicating the albums’ traditionally understood legitimacy and cultural
resonance. Hail to the Thief, the final Radiohead album released via Capitol
Records, sold 300,000 copies in its first week of release, and one assumes with
a significantly smaller proportion of per-album revenues directed to the band
members. These numbers, which may simply indicate a natural advantage
presented by alternative music distribution channels to those artists with the
resources to develop and implement them (or a preference for In Rainbows’ songs
to those on the band’s previous album), may also illustrate a shift in discussion
from a strictly lyrical exposition of agitation to individual control over production
and distribution itself. The relative success of In Rainbows in comparison to its
predecessors surely points to the existing popularity of the band, but also to the
self-legitimizing nature of online distribution, the “floating-price” model, and
non-participation in tactile systems of information management and control.
The assumption that the very nature of these systems meets the demands of
progressive and politically active individuals, however idealistic, may speak to
the anxiety that produces a paradigmatic overhaul in the first place. The notion
that new media is simply a defensive measure, made necessary by the culture’s
conscious or unconscious desire to privilege rather than marginalize the minority
68 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

opinion, is an appealing one. If that concept proves to be the case, the impetus
to non-participation in systems of material accumulation may very well be the
primary cause of the economic deflation of the music industry. Thus the potential
for a naturally occurring mass exodus—not just from the music industry, but from
the Culture Trust at large—is enormous. The unilateral myths of narrative history
are yielding to a complex manifestation of a social one, a history in which the
countercultural may be accelerated to a point of widespread, perpetual discourse.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann
Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. Print.
Braudel, Fernand. “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée.” Trans.
Arthur Goldhammer. Histories: French Constructions of the Past. Ed. Lynn
Hunt and Jacques Revel. New York: The New Press, 1995. 115–46. Print.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1984. Print.
Frank, Thomas. “Why Johnny Can’t Dissent.” Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos
from The Baffler. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. 31–46. Print.
Johnson, Steven. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and
Software. New York: Scribner, 2001. Print.
Leland, John. Hip: The History. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004. Print.
Lemke, Tim. “Patriotic Music Sales Eases Industry Slump.” The Washington
Times. Sept. 26, 2001. Web. Nov. 9, 2010.
Maki. “Radiohead’s In Rainbows: A Look at Anti-Marketing in the Music
Industry.” DoshDosh. Oct. 2, 2007. Web. Sept. 15, 2010.
Manjoo, Farhad. “A Blockbuster for Radiohead’s In Rainbows?” Salon. Oct. 11,
2007. Web. Sept. 15, 2010.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge,
MA: MIT 1994. Print.
“Press Page.” Facebook. 2011. Web. Jan. 14, 2011.
 Chapter 5
On a Maddening Loop:
Post-9/11 Rubble Music
Isaac Vayo

In the aftermath of 9/11, rubble abounded, be it that of the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon, or of the shattered myth of US invulnerability. That rubble was
swiftly cleared and its fragments forcibly coalesced into a pseudo-unity in the face
of purported threat. Music was not immune to that process, and an examination
of the song “Fly Me to New York” by the tape-collage artists Cassetteboy reveals
how that forced coalescence fails in its attempts to enact a public amnesia, instead
producing a rubble music that underlines US guilt via an alternate coalescence.
This forced coalescence, this jointure, is imperfect, the fissures serving only to
highlight the uneven reassembly of pseudo-unity. Based around samples from
Frank Sinatra songs, and also featuring excerpts from songs by The Smiths and a
number of hip-hop artists, “Fly Me to New York” narrates the events of 9/11 from
the perspective of one of the pilot-hijackers and, in its reconstitution of disparate
fragments, is the best example of the rubble music arising from 9/11. The choice
of Sinatra as a centerpiece is not accidental, and it reflects his noteworthy place
within American popular song, making his work an ideal jumping-off point for the
reflexive critique of US guilt in relation to 9/11. This critique is typical of rubble
music, a music reconstituted from the shattered fragments of a national psyche in
the wake of a traumatic event, from the elements of the past and the passed/pasted
nation, composed of the decomposed, newly mortalized state, soldered together
crudely, the cracks and accompanying caulk speaking and occupying volumes.
Such a rubble music acts reflexively, establishing a new perspective of self-
critique from materials of old that were deficient on that account, rearticulating
an inarticulate past into a more erudite present and future, one professed by the
confessor, the artist owning up to and reflexively apportioning guilt.

Begin the Big Up: The Song (of) Itself

I begin my analysis of Cassetteboy’s “Fly Me to New York” by first briefly

introducing the artist and song (with further attention to follow), then turning to
the song’s engagement with sampling, and finally unpacking the ramifications of
its citational tendencies in relation to an articulation of rubble music. The song was
produced by the British tape-collage artists Cassetteboy (Steve Warlin and Michael
70 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

Bollen), featuring DJ Rubbish, and appears on their 2002 debut album The Parker
Tapes. A brief glance at a handful of the Frank Sinatra samples demonstrates the
way in which “Fly Me to New York” functions as a footnoted, citational text,
an amateur recontextualization of professionally produced recordings that yields
greater critical insight when the sources of the samples are traced and analyzed.
For instance, the latter half of the line “I’ve got a razor in my pocket” is drawn
from the Dean Martin song “Money Burns a Hole in My Pocket” (often sung with
Sinatra in Rat Pack performances), which also features a reference to the Texas
oil industry, paralleling George W. Bush’s past and present relations with Big Oil
and their influence on the decision to invade Iraq. Similarly, the sampled line “you
think you’ve flown before” is part of “The Best is Yet to Come,” specifically the
phrase “you think you’ve flown before, but you’ve never left the ground.” “Fly Me
to New York” also contains an indirect reference to flight training, paralleling the
preparation of pilot-hijackers Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Ziad Jarrah, and
Hani Hanjour (or Nawaf al-Hazmi) at US flight schools.
Furthermore, the first half of the line “I’m mental, and I’m flying the plane”
comes from “I Won’t Dance,” and is part of a verse addressing the singer-narrator’s
burning passion (so fiery as to overwhelm even asbestos) for a woman dancing the
Continental. This verse recalls the airline as point of vulnerability (Continental
being another carrier in the US), and the inferno that overwhelmed the fireproofing
of the World Trade Center towers, as well as concerns over the potentially harmful
collapse-plume that lingered over lower Manhattan. Additionally, the second half
of the line “let’s fly into buildings, let’s turn to ashes” cites the line “watching
my dreams turn to ashes” from Sinatra’s “What Now, My Love?” The song
also contains a verse addressing the tumult of a crumbling relationship, aptly
describing the topsy-turvy feelings in the wake of the towers’ collapse. Finally,
the middle portion of the line “and now my skin is melting away” comes from
“I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” referencing the hijackers’ presence within the
US before the attacks and within the national psyche thereafter. Another verse
states the singer-narrator’s determination to pursue his quarry despite warnings
of imminent failure, drawing attention to the hijackers’ suicidal devotion, the
unheeded warnings before 9/11, and the difficulties of waging a “War on Terror.”
Other samples are drawn from “Fly Me to the Moon,” “Theme from New York,
New York,” “Come Fly With Me,” “Leaving On a Jet Plane,” and “My Way,”
illustrating Cassetteboy’s mining of Sinatra’s broad catalogue and use of songs
both immediately recognizable and slightly obscure. A closer examination of the
methodology of “Fly Me to New York” in relation to citationality will demonstrate
the manner in which Cassetteboy call upon that citationality to facilitate their
autoreflexive critique of US culpability for 9/11, with the deliberate choice of
Frank Sinatra serving as a foundational masterstroke.
 On a Maddening Loop: Post-9/11 Rubble Music 71

Mash Notes: Resembling the Rubbles

Cassetteboy’s ability to citationally renarrate 9/11 through a recontextualization

of fragments gives “Fly Me to New York” a significant critical bite, one which,
at an abstract level, methodologically resembles the machinations of al Qaeda
while maintaining sufficient distance for a renarrativization that gives form to a
new rubble music—a production of the future composed of the present and past.
Simply put, Cassetteboy’s methodology resembles that of al Qaeda in terms
of their online presence. Jon Nelson emphasizes this point in his blog entry on
Some Assembly Required: Tape Manipulations, Digital Deconstructions and
Turntable Creations. Nelson notes that “[f]or the longest time, this was a group
so underground that although their work had been well received, no one knew
who the heck these guys actually were. That is to say, their online presence has
been shrouded in mystery and misinformation.” Out of context—de- and then
recontextualized—citationalized into a discussion of al Qaeda, Nelson’s statement
holds true, reflecting the commonalities between Cassetteboy’s efforts to create
anonymously, to act notoriously, and al Qaeda’s likeminded desire to operate under
the literal and figurative radar and to bring glory to the jihadist movement, both
retaining an anonymity that refers in an amateur fashion, an evasion of celebrity
that accordingly evades professionalism.
Beyond the methodological parallels evident in Cassetteboy’s tightly managed
online presence, additional similarities to al Qaeda can be located at the level
of target selection, where a desire to confront the seemingly inappropriate in a
not so appropriate manner finds precedent in the band’s back catalogue, a lineage
that manifests itself once more in “Fly Me to New York.” The first appearance
of this methodological striking at the symbolic heart of a nation dates back to
fall 1997 and the death of Princess Diana, an event which spurred Cassetteboy to
create the song “Di and Dodi Do Die,” composed from edited samples drawn from
televised and radio broadcast tributes to the fallen princess. Rather than taking
that tragic event as cause for a moment of national mourning, Cassetteboy instead
decided to act, with little mind to the relative sanctity of the situation: “Sod her
lads, this is great material.” In so doing, Cassetteboy set a precedent for swooping
in upon moments of national misery, however misplaced or overblown, to gather
raw materials for their productions, taking the pulse of the country as a portion of
its pulse ebbs, and allowing the blood spilled across media outlets to pool into a
fluid renarrativization at the hands of the sampler. That this pattern should repeat
itself in the case of 9/11, an event of greater magnitude, albeit different national
referentiality, is no surprise.
Much as al Qaeda strikes at soft targets, not so much looking to inflict damage
upon the literal defenses of a country, including military outposts and government
officials, but rather the figurative defenselessness of a country, as underlined by
civilian attacks upon symbolic locations, so too do Cassetteboy in placing Princess
Diana and 9/11 within their sights. There are few softer targets than a nation in
mourning, a nation that has placed certain topics off-limits during a period of post-
72 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

trauma, a nation content to lick its wounds and to lap up narratives of victimhood
and valor, and Cassetteboy do not miss their mark, trimming away the pretense
around each event and exposing what lies (are) beneath. The Middle Eastern meets
Western mash-up present in the death ride of Egyptian department-store and hotel
heir Dodi Al-Fayed and Diana Spencer is met with another Occident on Orient
pseudo-accident upon 9/11, a similar targeting of the soft (the besieged celebrity
wishing only to fade from the limelight, the pseudo-innocent superpower doing its
best to be an able steward to the world). It is not the harder targets that are to the
liking of al Qaeda and Cassetteboy, but rather the fish in a barrel, the auto-sacred
(whether of wheel or wing) whose offensive re-rendering serves to highlight the
offenses that incur that rendering.

Off (the) Fence: Picking Nits and Sides

Cassetteboy’s methodology for constructing “Fly Me to New York” is premised

on offense, an offense that jars via its recontextualization of the grave (9/11) into
the humorous (a satirical pastiche), the maudlin romantic (Frank Sinatra) into the
Muslim ecstatic (the unnamed pilot-hijacker narrator), a citationality that provokes
reflection on the centrality of Sinatra to narratives of US nationalism and, more
specifically, metropolitan splendor vis-à-vis New York City. Chris Dahlen’s “The
Pop Culture of 9/11” focuses on this methodology in its discussion of the song
within the frame of The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, with Dahlen asserting that
“[w]hether out of bad taste, an attempt at political insight, or because they wanted
to take us down a notch, Cassetteboy spliced together a mockery of the disaster
at the World Trade Center.” Dahlen provides a shorthand listing of the spectrum
of motivations ascribed to Cassetteboy, neatly tracing a trajectory of affect from
the rupture of bad taste, the lingering metallic flavor of charred buildings and rung
bells, to the trenchant insight (and its implied notch-taking, alongside the bedpost/
belt notch of the successfully penetrative hijacker) contained within the song’s
manipulation of its chosen samples, a discarding of the tenets of professionalism
and its dictates concerning taste in favor of an amateur, unflinching incisiveness.
Elsewhere, in his review of The Parker Tapes, Dahlen describes Cassetteboy’s
methodology in more direct terms: “The guys break things up with dozens of
music clips and remixes, from hip-hop to pop, making for a kind of post-modern
vaudeville, and they construct each voice track with attention to rhythm and flow”
(“Get That”). Song and dance men of a sort, Cassetteboy provide the choreography
of the plot, following the pilot-hijacker through his daily rounds, bringing an
airiness to the narrative that simultaneously lets the air out of the US’s bombastic
sense of immaculate victimhood.
The decision to base “Fly Me to New York” around Frank Sinatra samples,
principally those drawn from the songs “Fly Me to the Moon” and “Theme from
New York, New York,” stands as the first and perhaps most affecting transgressive
 On a Maddening Loop: Post-9/11 Rubble Music 73

step taken by Cassetteboy, a step that proves particularly jarring to the US psyche.
Given his rise to prominence in the run-up to, during, and shortly after World War
II, Sinatra is inseparably linked to ideas of American nationalism, victory, and
postwar affluence, making his fragmentation into sampled lyrics and reconstitution
into a hijacker narrator especially affecting. Dahlen reinforces this point by
stating that “nothing is as profane as when they [Cassetteboy] retell the events
of the day from the hijackers’ point of view, by splicing together clips from New
York icon Frank Sinatra” (“Pop”). This claim demonstrates the unusual sanctity
accorded to Sinatra (especially given his relatively seedy past with alleged ties to
organized-crime figures) and his iconic status at both the New York City and, by
proxy, national levels. The description of Cassetteboy’s manipulation of Sinatra,
a cracking open of his often hackneyed lyrics as profanity, also ties his import
closely to the linguistic level through the common linkages to profane speech and
deviation from sacred/biblical tenets and their rooting in the primacy of the Word.
Sinatra himself is almost secondary in Dahlen’s indictment, as the main complaint
pertains to the voice given to the pilot-hijacker’s point of view, not the voice taken
from Sinatra, pulled from his throat to pull shapes in the choreographed space
outlined by Cassetteboy.
Dahlen gives further credence to the profanity of Sinatra’s (mis)use by
Cassetteboy in an installment of his recurring column “Get That Out of Your
Mouth” on Pitchfork entitled “Negativland and Cassetteboy Steal Music,” which
redoubles Sinatra’s untouchable status as suggested by his potential mob ties
(though he is less an Eliot Ness figure than an Al Capone in this case). Discussing
The Parker Tapes in relation to the issue of sample clearance (the act of gaining
permission to use a sample from the sampled artist), Dahlen observes that
“[t]hey [Cassetteboy] didn’t get the rights to any of the material and in some cases,
no amount of money would have worked—like when they mix lines from Frank
Sinatra’s greatest hits into a mockery of the tragedy at the World Trade Center”
(“Cassetteboy”). Aside from its upholding of intellectual property rights such that
all samples must be cleared with the artists in question, a process that greatly
limits the potential for citationality and does much to increase the survival rate for
accepted narratives, Dahlen’s statement reflects the unthinkable disservice done
to Sinatra’s music and his legacy by “Fly Me to New York,” a disrespecting of
his elevated ranking by the rank amateurs in Cassetteboy. What Dahlen fails to
recognize is the degree to which Sinatra’s particular vision, one of a bootstrap
America in which the child of Italian immigrants can scale the heights of fame
and celebrity through sheer talent and charisma, is premised on the very sort
of exclusionary mythology that so infuriates the ideologues behind 9/11. Such
opportunities are not available to everyone or accorded to just anyone, be they
members of racial, gendered, or economic underclasses in the US or religious
(Muslim fundamentalist) or national (non-global north/western European/
predominately white) undesirables around the world, and Cassetteboy’s de- and
reconstruction—and de- and recontextualization—of the Sinatran fragments
points to the crucial flaws at the heart of the American-dream mythos.
74 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

Subject to the cut in the act of sampling, Sinatra is also subjected to the perils
of poor taste in his citational implementation in “Fly Me to New York,” a bitter
pill swallowed with a chaser of bile as brought about by the destabilization of his
narrative. In good taste, “Fly Me to the Moon” would have been excluded from
airplay in the weeks after 9/11, much like the songs and artists included in the 2001
Clear Channel memorandum issued after the event (of which “Theme from New
York, New York” was one) (Wishnia). Instead, those two songs form the backbone
of a scathing critique of US culpability for 9/11, an effort indirectly saluted by
Dahlen: “I just have to hand it to Cassetteboy that not only is the piece disturbingly
brutal, but their decision to build it around samples from Frank ‘New York, New
York’ Sinatra is the final nail in the coffin of good taste” (“Get That”). If “Fly Me to
New York” is indeed the final nail in a nation-sized coffin, one wonders what other
spikes found their way into the woodwork (perhaps Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the
Red, White and Blue [The Angry American]” and its ever so delicate expression
of wounded aggression or, perhaps, the “War on Terror”?).
If nothing is indeed sacred, or if nothing remains sacred for all that long, then
that conclusion can only be the result of a probing, a calculated sounding of the event
that looks for its flaws, detects its deficiencies as an efficient way of constructing
counternarrativities, a seemingly offensive act that reveals both the offenses
that motivate the pseudo-victimization of the event and the doubly offensive
response that follows. Dahlen identifies Cassetteboy’s particular sonography, a
fluid-facilitated ultrasounding of the event that generates scarce conclusions and
more numerous questions: “Cassetteboy found our weak spot—that we consider
9/11 untouchable … In the US, 9/11 is sacred. To much of the world, it isn’t.
Are we ready to criticize, or even satirize it? If we censor ourselves, how can
we even talk about it?” (“Pop”). This demonstrates the proclivity to accepted
narrativity that follows the event, a national blinkering (or rather deafening) in the
wake of the shock, a hearing loss that results in a ringing, the call to rally round
the flag that can only flag over time, as well as drawing attention to the national
distantiation that may grant the Brits in Cassetteboy a different, less sentimental/
romantic/Sinatran perspective than that held in the US (though “Di and Dodi Do
Die” suggests otherwise). Therefore, seeming offense is less offensive to nebulous
criteria like taste than to the according of sacred-cow status, calling instead for a
knives-out scenario where the aural cut serves to sever the aura around the event,
while also speaking its own language.
That “Fly Me to New York” may be considered offensive is an unavoidable
conclusion, at least if one is willing to accept the terms of discourse essential to
typical analyses of taste; that said, its purported offense is more aptly filed under
“offensive, going on the,” a card played also by the US in its actions prior to and
in the wake of the event. In his or her review of The Parker Tapes, Everything2
discussion board participant Hazelnut asserts that “Fly Me to New York” “is
supremely offensive and thus a must have,” placing the offense and the offensive
at the heart of Cassetteboy’s methodology and the value of its work. Likewise, it
is the offensive –gone on, taken to, and exercised against the Muslim world – that
 On a Maddening Loop: Post-9/11 Rubble Music 75

characterizes the US pre- and post-event.1 At least when Cassetteboy makes/takes

offense, it is only the class of 1997/98 (Di dying in August of the former, Sinatra
in May of the latter) who die, or who are already dead, if slightly turned in their
graves; the same is not true for the US make and take, underlining the centrality of
offense to its methodology.
Cassetteboy’s choice to resort to offense, to resort to the samples it draws from
Sinatra and elsewhere, permits an evasion of accepted narrativity, such that the
anthracite humor of “Fly Me to New York,” a black coal-escence (or coal essence),
may be aptly construed as being a protest song within the new genre of rubble
music.2 In his entry on the song, included as part of The Stylus Magazine’s “Non-
Definitive Guide to the Pop Protest Song” (2003), Todd Burns states, “With the
aid of sampling technology, Cassetteboy does something here that nearly no artist
has been able to do with a guitar and voice in the past year—convey the terror,
the hurt, the disorientation caused by the September 11th attacks—and disconnect
the jingoistic sentiments that commonly go along with them.” The focus on
sampling technology reinforces the neo-narrative potentiality contained within
the sampler, while also conveying the depth of emotion that may be captured
through the seemingly simple recombinant recontextualization of samples. Burns
finds Cassetteboy to be exceptional, though not for their supposed offensiveness
(exceptionalism being more fittingly assigned to the US pre- and post-event due to
its mythic victimhood narrativity); rather, its exceptionality is rooted in the act of
disconnection that results from the connection of samples.
Placing a song like “Fly Me to New York” within the pantheon of protest
songs, alongside such venerable institutions as Bob Dylan (whose “Masters of
War” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” make the Stylus list), Bruce Springsteen (“Born
in the USA”), and Creedence Clearwater Revival (“Fortunate Son”), seems nearly
impossible: how could a song that openly mocks a national tragedy by editing the
voice of a national treasure register as anything other than a crass utterance of the
“too soon” maxim at best, a treasonous act of amateurs only possible in the extra-
national space of Britain at worst? This difficulty may be resolved by looking at
the narrative positionality of each of the songwriters in question, an exteriority that
places the narrator in clear opposition to accepted narrativities, instead offering a
distanced perspective much like that found in “Fly Me to New York.” As Dylan

1
  A number of offenses may be noted here: the desertion of Afghan proxy forces
after the expulsion of the Soviets from Afghanistan in the 1980s, the exclusion of mujahid
volunteers and the continued stationing of US troops near the holy sites of Mecca and Medina
in Saudi Arabia, the perpetual favoring of the Israeli side of the Israel-Palestine conflict,
or the invasion of two nations and subsequent problematic detentions in Afghanistan, Iraq,
CIA black sites, and Guantanamo Bay.
2
  The choice of anthracite for this comparison reflects the relevance of one of its other
names, “blind coal,” a deviation from the visual that resonates with the primacy of sound
as opposed to the blinkered mono-narrativity of the accepted US victimhood narrative that
surrounds 9/11.
76 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

provides meditations on the turbulence coming from the burgeoning civil rights
and anti-war movements prior to and during Vietnam, as CCR casts a critical eye
on the prospect of serving there, as Springsteen ventriloquizes an amalgamated vet
to portray the actual experience of those who served upon their return, so too do
Cassetteboy step outside of the event by stepping into it, claiming the unoccupied
shoes of the pilot-hijacker, left empty in the course of the devotional act/event, and
filling those shoes by narrating a critical reading of the event. Sampling’s necessary
decontextualization of the citation (though not a complete divorce, with the sample
subjected to shared custody by its originary progenitor and its recontextualizing
projector) creates an auto-externality, an auto-critical positionality that grants a
new perspective as a matter of course, though it matters, of course, who renders
that new narrative.

Rock and Role: Cementing Rubble Music

The citational act of recontextualization/reassembly/renarrativization is

necessarily premised on the presence of fragments, be they the samples extracted
from various originary loci or the crumbled remains of the collapsed World Trade
Center towers, a rumble that emerges from the rubble into a rubble music, a
spectral speech rising from the ashes, redoubling the phoenix of the ignored memo
to memorialize the event, though not in accordance with accepted narrativity.3
This rubble music critiques reflexively, reconstituting the shattered fragments of
a national psyche in the wake of a traumatic event, in this case 9/11, and filling
the void of anti-critique with an ante-critique. Such a music locates the detritus
of past conceptualizations, those thrown off in the violence of the event, devising
new arrangements bent on not so much a reconstruction, but a re-construction, a
new constitution, a sidelong amble that diverges from the arrangements of origin,
filling the ruptures and fissures with a new mortar, lobbed o’er the ramparts with a
mind to shattering previous conceptions, and providing a critical construction that
demonstrates the contrary, the dissonant, which has existed all along.
A listing for The Parker Tapes on retail music website Forced Exposure, one
of the few locations that stocks the album, references the site of that speech at the
World Trade Center site, “under the wreckage of the twin towers” (“Browse”).

  The Phoenix Memo is a memorandum sent by FBI agent Kenneth Williams on

3

July 10, 2001 advising further investigation of students at civil aviation schools in the
US after behavior at area schools aroused suspicion. The memo’s stated purpose was “to
advise the Bureau and New York of the possibility of a coordinated effort by USAMA BIN
LADEN (UBL) to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation universities
and colleges” (Williams). Williams’ recommendation was ignored, though the oversight
was noted in The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on
Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, as well as in a whistleblower action by FBI agent
Colleen Rowley.
 On a Maddening Loop: Post-9/11 Rubble Music 77

One can imagine a shattered hijacker, the Sinatran narrator whose desire to “turn
to ashes,” whose “skin is melting away,” realized in the carnage of its creation
where it comes to rest, returning via the recording to haunt you down among the
wreckage. In this case, it is the fragments that speak, the reassembled samples
and their ventriloquist, the fragmented pilot-hijacker, flecks of flesh formatting
magnetic flecks on the tape, shifting the deeply American Sinatran bon mot into its
own bon voyage, a leaving never to return that can only return, again and again, in
the spectral hijacker voice.
Sinatra’s aforementioned linkage to ideas of American nationalism, victory,
and postwar affluence is additionally evidenced by his status as recipient of the
Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan in 1985 and a Congressional
Gold Medal in 1997, honors which underline his centrality to American identity
and the significant import of his voice to the critical weight of the rubble music.
Such a rubble music establishes a new perspective of self-critique from materials
of old that were somewhat deficient on that account, fracturing Sinatran platitudes
into their nationally referential components, then recombining them into the
narrative of the Sinatran unconscious—everything you always wanted to know
about the neo-cons but were afraid to ask Frank.4 The spectral voice is itself
fragmentary, speaking through a tattered voice box, its dispatches patchy at best
as they filter through the tons of rubble above, requiring an assembly to signify, an
assembled audience to resonate.

The Vinyl Curtain

In extending into the past and future via a separation from temporal limitations,
citational sampling, as practiced by Cassetteboy in “Fly Me to New York,” expands
sound as well, broadening the scope of recognized speech more specifically and
aural data more generally, and thereby widening the discursive space to include
a music of the spheres, an inaudible audibility present in the rubble and its own
music. Speaking of the benefits of certain recording techniques in his More Brilliant
than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, Kodwo Eshun reminds us that “[c]lose-
miking expands the field of hearing. Perception blows up and in the ruins, the
listener goes travelling, climbs the desolate rubble of headphone consciousness”
(112). This field expansion is present in the case of rubble music as well.
As an aural event, 9/11 shorts the circuits, exceeds the limits of perception
in a patent failure of imagination, forcing the listener to seek other locales, other
auralities where it may find a suitable narrativity that will enable it to reconcile the
event, settling finally on the still-settling fragments of the collapsed World Trade
Center towers, in the rubble that gives up the spectral voice after giving up its own

4
  This neo-narrative is therefore a more relevant version of Slavoj Žižek’s Everything
You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), a shift from
the psychoanalytic/filmic pairing to a more psychotic/phlegmatic one.
78 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

structural integrity. Headphone consciousness, the exclusionary privileging of the

aural above other senses, narrows this search, letting the spectral hijacker’s voice
ring true as it sounds the disintegration, the citationality of sampling manufacturing
a structurally sound neo-narrativity whose ribs may be visible in the retained
fissures, but who promises to have a longer lifespan than the aluminum cladding
of the departed towers. “Fly Me to New York” therefore speaks through the rubble,
for the rubble, after its commission but during the mission, making the spectral
hijacker voice and its hijacker always already present through the present-tense
narrativity.

Works Cited

“Browse by Artist: CASSETTEBOY.” Forced Exposure. Web. June 1, 2009.

Burns, Todd. “The Pop Protest Song: The Stylus Magazine Non-Definitive Guide.”
Stylus Magazine. Oct. 31, 2007. Web. June 1, 2009.
Cassetteboy. “Di and Dodi Do Die.” MySpace. Aug. 29, 2007. Web. June 1, 2009.
——. “Fly Me to New York.” The Parker Tapes. Barry’s Bootlegs, 2002. CD.
Dahlen, Chris. “Cassetteboy: The Parker Tapes.” Pitchfork. Dec. 5, 2002. Web.
June 1, 2009.
——. “Get That Out of Your Mouth #15: Negativland and Cassetteboy Steal
Music.” Pitchfork. June 23, 2005. Web. June 1, 2009.
——. “The Pop Culture of 9/11.” Pitchfork. Mar. 28, 2005. Web. June 1, 2009.
Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London:
Quartet Books, 1998. Print.
Hazelnut. “Cassetteboy.” Everything2. May 13, 2006. Web. June 1, 2009.
Nelson, John. “Cassetteboy.” Some Assembly Required: Tape Manipulations,
Digital Deconstructions and Turntable Creations. Nov. 15, 2008. Web. June
1, 2009.
Sinatra, Frank. The Complete Reprise Studio Recordings. Warner Brothers, 1995.
CD.
Williams, Kenneth. “The Phoenix Memo.” The Memory Hole. July 25, 2003. Web.
June 10, 2009.
Wishnia, Steven. “Bad Transmission: Clear Channel’s Hit List.” Lip Magazine.
Oct. 24, 2001. Web. June 9, 2009.
Žižek, Slavoj. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were
Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). 2nd ed. New York: Verso, 2010. Print.
 Chapter 6
Terrorism and the Politics of Improvisation1
Rob Wallace

High-strung, like a violin string, [the oppressed] weep and moan for life, so
relentless, so cruel, so terribly inhuman. In a desperate moment the string breaks.
Untuned ears hear nothing but discord. But those who feel the agonized cry
understand its harmony; they hear in it the fulfillment of the most compelling
moment of human nature.
Emma Goldman “The Psychology of Political Violence”

Beyond the world of improvised music-making in jazz and other genres, the
term “improvised” has been used frequently since 2001 in a surprising place: in
reference to Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs. If improvisation is not solely
the domain of jazz musicians or other artists and can just as easily be used in
discourse about violence, how are these two realms of improvisational practice
related beyond the level of semantics? The following chapter meditates on that
question, and investigates why the term improvised—rather than “homemade”
or “amateur,” for example—has been used in a military context. Ultimately,
I argue that the appearance of the word “improvisation” in descriptions of the
events of 9/11 and after is only the most recent variation on an underlying theme.
Improvisation—largely due to its connection with African American cultural
practices such as jazz—has historically been perceived in the West as a suspicious
activity.

Improvisation at Ground Zero

A few days after September 11, 2001, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen
infamously declared that the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center had
created “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos”—something
that Stockhausen denied he (and, by implication, anyone else) could do with

1
  The seeds of this project were presented as a paper at the 2009 Improvisation,
Community, and Social Practice (ICASP) conference in Montreal, “Lex Non Scripta, Ars
Non Scripta.” A video of the entire panel is available at www.improvcommunity.ca/research/
panel-conflict-justice-and-improvisation. This chapter is in some ways a companion to my
piece “Kick out the Jazz!” from the forthcoming volume, co-edited by myself and Ajay
Heble, entitled People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz is Now! (Duke University Press).
80 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

his music (quoted in Lentricchia and McAuliffe 6).2 Many commentators have
explored what Stockhausen might have meant by his statements. Frank Lentricchia
and Jody McAuliffe, for example, link Stockhausen’s seemingly ridiculous claim
to a long succession of artists who have viewed the creative process as a site
of potential revolution and even violence (5–17). Stockhausen thus follows in a
lineage of musicians who have placed a mystical and transformative power at the
heart of their musical practice.
Stockhausen, along with mid-twentieth-century (white) composers such as
Earl Browne and, arguably, John Cage (despite his own pejorative statements on
improvisation), bucked the long-standing trend in Western art music by opening
some of his pieces up to improvisation. He admired and was admired by many
musicians outside the world of European art music, including Miles Davis and
Sun Ra, whom he once noted was capable of “first-class avant-garde experimental
music that you can’t put in any box. It was incredibly asymmetric!” (quoted in Toop
27). Anthony Pay, a clarinetist who worked extensively with Stockhausen, has
noted that the composer would “say to us that perhaps we should try and prepare
ourselves for each performance by thinking of something that we hadn’t ever done
before. That after each performance we could prepare ourselves in a mental way
for the next performance by thinking of something new” (quoted in Bailey 73). But
the men who destroyed the World Trade Center only had a chance for one unique
and completely novel performance; Stockhausen seemed particularly impressed
that such “artists” could “practice like crazy for ten years, totally fanatically for a
concert, and then die” (quoted in Lentricchia and McAuliffe 6).
The September 11th terrorist attacks provoked confusion precisely because
they were, from a conventional viewpoint, improvisational. Rather than the efforts
of an expensive, well-armed military, the spectacle of violence on 9/11 was caused
by a handful of men using utility knives and fanaticism to make airplanes into
missiles. It soon became clear that the attacks, “improvisational” or not, were
obviously the result of careful planning, not to mention financial expense. Yet to
an audient like Stockhausen, not accustomed to experiencing the “asymmetric”
music of Sun Ra or the guerilla tactics of al Qaeda, such a horrifying improvisation
seemed all the more mysterious and unique. This is assuredly not to say that Sun
Ra’s music is the same as, or is motivated by the same impulses as, terrorism—or,
for that matter, that terrorism is art (a common misconception of Stockhausen’s
statements). Rather, improvisation, whether it comes in the form of terrorism or
music, seems to have the potential to surprise and shock. In music, this effect can
lead to aesthetic pleasure, whereas in an act of terror it can lead to unprecedented
forms of killing.
The authors of the US Government’s official public record of the September
11th attacks also explicitly saw improvisation on 9/11, but from a very different

2
  I quote here from the English translation of Stockhausen’s comments which music
critic Anthony Tommasini used to excoriate Stockhausen. The original German version of
Stockhausen’s interview is accessible at www.stockhausen.org/hamburg.pdf.
 Terrorism and the Politics of Improvisation 81

perspective. The first chapter of The 9/11 Commission Report includes a section
subtitled “Improvising a Homeland Defense,” wherein we learn that “the defense
of US airspace on 9/11 was not conducted in accord with pre-existing training
and protocols. It was improvised by civilians who had never handled a hijacked
aircraft that attempted to disappear” (31, emphasis added). And while the civilians
in question are not explicitly blamed for their ignorance in dealing with the
hijackers, the connotation of “improvisation” here contrasts with the spirit of
artistic innovation that Stockhausen saw in the terrorist attacks. The response to
the hijackings, we discover, was a failure at multiple levels, therefore necessitating
improvisation as a last course of action rather than a creative and appealing
approach to saving lives. The terrorists “broke the rules,” so to speak, whereas
government and civilian officials responding to the attacks tried to stick to rules
which were not designed to facilitate improvisation. These officials, claims the
9/11 Commission Report, “struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improvise
a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never before
encountered and had never trained to meet” (45). Such ambivalent views of
improvisation are, as we shall see, commonplace throughout the history of the
term’s use.

Fear of a Jazz Planet

The word “improvisation,” like “jazz,” has had a dubious history. Like—and
because of its connections to—jazz, improvisation has been alternately lauded
and damned for its supposedly unplanned and thus irrational, unscientific,
primitive, and suspiciously “ethnic” origins. As Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble
have documented, some of the earliest dictionary definitions of improvisation
link the word to a form of “ethnic othering in which the consistent association
between improvisatory discourse and Latin/Mediterranean cultures are implicitly
opposed to Anglo-Saxon culture” (16). For example, peeking into the Oxford
English Dictionary we find an early usage of improvisation cited in the phrase
“Poor Tuscan-like improvisation”—perhaps a reference to the itinerant Italian
improvisatore who, as Philip Pastras has noted, functioned as a foil to the
craftsmanship of “respectable” poets throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries (Pastras 9; Wallace 9–11).
Yet improvisation, in music or in any other aspect of life, is not necessarily a
positive or negative action. It is simply something we do every day; we practice
improvisation as we live. Every situation that we encounter, no matter how
familiar it may appear, is a new experience that we learn to adapt to. Improvised
music such as jazz merely foregrounds the practice of improvising, making it a
principle aesthetic element. The connection between ethics and morality in terms
of musical improvisation, however, becomes more relevant in relation to the
history of improvised music in the Americas. More than an aesthetic preference,
improvisation was often a necessity.
82 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

The African Americans who developed the musical forms of jazz and other
music drawing on improvisational practice used the only options they had been
given. Denied access to legal and political agency, music, poetry, story-telling,
and other creative pursuits became for slaves a primary means of spiritual and
political survival, in addition to the benefit of entertainment and enjoyment
provided by art. The music traditions stemming from slavery are thus more
than entertainment—more than art. But this artistic surplus was not the same as
a Romantic transcendence of culture. Slave artists and their descendents in the
segregated Americas were not Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators.” They
weren’t even acknowledged as people for much of their history in the West, and
thus they had to create modes of legislation outside of the rationality that the
Western Enlightenment provided, creating what Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic
dubs a “counter-culture to modernity” (16).
Nevertheless, the connections between Romantic transcendence and power
envisioned in artistic practice remain tied to (mis)understandings of jazz and
other improvised music. And hence Stockhausen missed the point—if he was
looking for art that changed the world, he needed look and hear no further than
the deep wellspring of music originating in African American culture and now
proliferating around the globe. The suffering of slavery—the psychological and
physical violence of capitalism transmuted into music like jazz or blues. Such
transformations should give us pause when we discount the “real-life effect” that
art can have on the world. That one of the legacies of slavery could be a cultural
matrix so powerful that it would influence almost every society in the world is
surely a testament to the social power of art. Artistic endeavors that undeniably
helped slaves survive, or at the very least allowed them to feel more human than
their masters would warrant, inevitably will be attractive to anyone who wants art
to matter in the world.
Thus it follows that jazz history is rife with musicians and critics alike stressing
an explicitly political value in the music, for good or ill. The creators of jazz,
primarily African Americans from the southern United States, were themselves
held responsible for the positive and negative effects that the improvised art form
was thought to embody. When the effects were perceived as negative, the line
between racism and music censorship blurred, and the resistance to explicitly
improvised art became a part of the denial of human rights for a significant group
of American citizens. Even white musicians, such as the Original Dixieland
Jazz Band’s Nick LaRocca, were proclaiming the potentially chaotic effects of
jazz just as it was beginning to gain mainstream exposure. In a 1919 interview,
LaRocca declared that “jazz … is a revolution … I even go as far to confess we are
musical anarchists” (quoted in Parsonage 135). At a time when actual anarchists
were committing acts of violence, LaRocca’s hyperbole would nevertheless have
sounded provocative. In 1920, for example, just after the Original Dixieland Jazz
Band first toured outside North America with their “revolutionary” music, an
Italian anarchist named Mario Buda bombed Wall Street in what one military-
industrial complex company calls the “first major improvised explosive device
 Terrorism and the Politics of Improvisation 83

incident in the USA.” Thus, at the start of the Jazz Age, almost a hundred years
before the 9/11 attacks, anarchic terror erupted in lower Manhattan.
Whether jazz was actually “anarchic” or not, the perceived threat of African
American equality via artistic creation was met by more than just fear of or
annoyance at the latest dance craze: lynching, legally sanctioned segregation,
and psychological, physical, and political oppression, among other horrors. Such
antipathy is echoed more recently in the Tea Party’s fear of a black president.
Improvised, provisional music and improvised, provisional politics: “community
organizing,” or the anarchic, minority proletariat taking control? Jazz improvisation,
then, was as potentially anarchic as a bomb in the crowd. United against the ruling
whites, dark hordes of improvising musicians and their fans might turn into an
actual army, improvising politics and violence to bring about a real revolution.

Jazz or Jihad?

Sayyid Qutb, one of the most influential twentieth-century theorists of the

Wahhabi Islam advocated by al Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist sects, was
himself no fan of jazz. In an account of his visit to the United States in the late
1940s, Qutb claimed that jazz was “a type of music invented by Blacks to please
their primitive tendencies and desire for noise” (quoted in Gray 24). While Qutb
critiqued American culture from the perspective of a devout Muslim following a
strict interpretation of the Qu’ran, his dismissal of jazz as a primitive impulse of
African Americans was not far from the already long-standing hostility facing jazz
and jazz musicians in the United States.
Ironically, the same racialized and racist rhetoric that has surrounded jazz
throughout its history can also be found in the discourse responding to terrorism,
which curiously leads us back to Improvised Explosive Devices. If the Arab-
Egyptian Qutb heard jazz from the same perspective as many racist Anglo-
Saxons, the mainly white and Western empires of the twentieth century often
approached their enemies with similar race-and-culture-based fear. Here the
worlds of improvised music and Improvised Explosive Devices collide against
the backdrop of both real and imagined threats to civilization—real in the form of
undeniable carnage that often kills indiscriminately; imagined in that the history
of discrimination promoted implicitly and explicitly by those faced with IEDs
(Western armies, for example) labels the improvised and provisional as a primitive
throwback that must be destroyed. If the bombs are dangerous, then the bomb-
making people and their cultures, broadly conceived, are dangerous, too.
Like the improvised music of the Americas, the history of Improvised
Explosive Devices reveals a metaphorical and real battlefield of complex and
contradictory racial and ethnic struggle. And, like “jazz,” it is difficult to find the
precise origins of the IED acronym, but it certainly predates the present conflicts
in Iraq and Afghanistan. As of this writing, I have not found any precise date
of origin or a specific person responsible for creating the term. Eydie Herrera,
84 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

Executive Assistant to the Center for Asymmetric Warfare Naval Postgraduate

School, informed me that “the term was used as early as the 1945 when a Captain
Metress was killed while dismantling a Japanese IED. However, there is no
mention of where the term came from … It could have possibl[y] come from the
UK based on the British Bomb Disposal experience.” Ms. Herrera’s suspicions are
confirmed by at least one source which I will discuss later, Lt.-Col. James Styles’
account of British Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) teams, dating back to the
late-1940s. Regardless of who coined the term, it almost certainly originated from
the perspective of a formal, organized military, facing a surprisingly adaptable
opponent.
The US military and NATO definition given here occurs in print at least as
early as 1988, and states that IEDs are “those devices placed or fabricated in an
improvised manner incorporating destructive, lethal, noxious, pyrotechnic, or
incendiary chemicals, designed to destroy, disfigure, incapacitate, distract or harass.
They may incorporate military stores, but are normally devised from nonmilitary
components” (Joint Chiefs of Staff 178). The kinds of IEDs commonly used in
Iraq and Afghanistan are either roadside bombs detonated remotely or by timers,
or car bombs acting as modern incarnations of what Mike Davis calls “Buda’s
Wagon” (the horse-drawn cart that anarchist Mario Buda used back in 1920 to
blow up Wall Street). A particularly confusing and terrifying feature of modern
IEDs is that they can both be detonated by innocuous objects (cell phones, for
example), and they can themselves take the form of innocuous objects.
Still a principle ingredient of bombs, plastic explosives (PE) are almost limitless
in their malleability; the bomb becomes a creative object. From World War II
accounts of resistance fighters accidentally eating the explosives, “mistaking it
for chocolate in the dark,” to more recent devices made from cassette decks and
cell phones, improvised bombs display a high degree of ingenuity and adaptability
(Foot 56). Chris Soghoian notes that German saboteurs in World War II actually
did make “chocolate-bar bombs” to intentionally fool victims. He also catalogues
two kinds of IEDs—improvised explosive devices and improvised electronic
devices, which have been the subject of controversy recently due to US Homeland
Security’s crackdown on all items deemed “suspicious.” These have included,
among other objects, home-made electronic musical instruments. In the shadow
of 9/11, it seems that creativity in the form of any homemade electronic gadgets is
a potential threat. All IEDs are bad IEDs.
Anarchist theorist Mikhail Bakunin once stated that “the passion for destruction
is also a creative passion,” and it is this mixture of creation and destruction that draws
both admiration and fear from those facing IEDs of the destructive variety (quoted
in Gray 21). Irish historian A. R. Oppenheimer’s recent book tracing the Irish
Republican Army’s use of explosives notes that “the IRA’s ‘engineers’ achieved
the highest level of ingenuity and inventiveness with their IEDs … To this day, the
IRA remains the world’s most advanced builders of IEDs and its talent in making
bombs has sadly influenced other terrorist groups” (8). One of the British EOD
operatives assigned to deal with the IRA’s “creative destruction” was Lieutenant
 Terrorism and the Politics of Improvisation 85

Colonel James Styles, whose career as an EOD expert began during the Burmese
insurgency of the 1940s and 50s. His gripping memoir, Bombs Have No Pity:
My War Against Terrorism, provides an insider account on an earlier era of IED-
driven fear. Behind his steely determination and bravery in the face of terrorism,
however, Styles sometimes resorts to rhetoric aligning his Irish adversaries with
the uncivilized, treacherous stereotype that has plagued Irish-English relations
for centuries. In a passage where he describes a failed bomb attack, for example,
Styles wonders: “Did they pick the unconnected pipe deliberately as a warning
of their potential? Or was it Murphy’s Law in operation, the ‘Mick factor’?”
(83). The Irish terrorist—and by extension, all “Micks”—remains essentialized
and essentially unknowable; a paradox of cunning and stupidity caused by ethnic
inferiority. Oppenheimer’s account of the IRA’s bombing campaigns notes that:

In a television news bulletin in July 2006 on the ongoing and increasingly

bloody insurgency in Iraq, the term ‘IED’—Improvised Explosive Device—was
said to be a new one that we would all have to get used to. The IED is hardly
new, having been introduced in the Second World War to describe devices used
by anti-Nazi resistance groups, and then gaining regular coinage in the late
1960s and early 1970s when the Provisional IRA bombing campaign took off in
earnest. Indeed, so closely connected with the IRA campaign were IEDs that you
could be forgiven for calling them Irish Explosive Devices. (7–8)

As Oppenheimer points out in this passage, “IED” permeated the global English-
speaking vernacular in the early twenty-first century, but the term itself dates back
to at least the mid-twentieth century, at a time when IEDs were connected in the
English public’s imagination with an ethnically distinct adversary—the Irish.
Improvisation linked to jazz by this point had already been closely monitored as a
potential threat from African Americans—a black magic blown up from trumpets
and drums. And, for at almost half a century, “improvisation” linked with bombs
has denoted the threat of a dark terrorist.

Improvising against Improvisation

Like every community, the military has developed its own terminology to
describe the world and to allow its insiders to communicate with one another in
shorthand. We might even conclude that the standard shortening of Improvised
Explosive Device to IED takes out the potential negative associations of the word
“improvised” since we don’t actually hear or see the word. Yet it is significant
that the original formulation uses “improvisation” and not “homemade” or “non-
military,” “non-standard”: HED or HMED would be convenient acronyms, for
example. So why “improvised”? One recent blogger, whose blog title derives from
the Talking Heads song “Life During Wartime,” notes that there should be “[n]
o mincing words about it. A bomb is a bomb whether here or there. Calling it an
86 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

IED masks its meaning, much as collateral damage does for civilian deaths. No,
we aren’t being bombed to pieces in Iraq. Yes, there are some IED casualties.
Doesn’t that sound better? (Citizen X). The military euphemism thus belies at least
three interrelated ideas: IED takes the bang out of the bomb and turns the always
changing, dangerous devices into a technical problem; IED makes the actual
bloody events less real and, again, more technical and academic; but, perhaps most
importantly, IED bears the definition of improvisation, which dominant cultures
have typically used to describe their enemies, who coincidentally or not usually
happen to be ethnically distinct—whether they be the blacks in the United States,
the Irish in the United Kingdom, or Arabs and South Asians throughout the Middle
East and Afghanistan.
Thus, even the actions of “friendlies,” the laudable improvisers, so to speak,
become uncanny and perplexing. Journalist Peter Maass, detailing the attempts by
the US military to retrain Iraqi army units, notes:

The American way of combat is heavily planned, with satellite maps, G.P.S.
coordinates and reconnaissance drones. The Iraqi way is improvisational, relying
less on honed skills and high-tech than gut instinct and (literally) bare knuckles.
It is the Americans who are learning to adapt. In briefings that American soldiers
receive, a quotation from T.E. Lawrence is sometimes included: “Better the
Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly.” (46)

The resultant struggle is learning to tolerate what has been intolerable, letting go
of perfection in favor of potential failure, risk, or death. There is even a common
US military slogan: “adapt, improvise, overcome.”3 US soldiers have had to
constantly follow the slogan during the recent wars, especially when faced
with Donald Rumsfeld’s initial philosophy of “going to war with the army
you have” (rather than equipping them and training them properly)—
“doing it tolerably” when your own government won’t.
And thus, the paradox of contemporary combat: how does an army trying to
follow rules improvise against an enemy who can constantly change the rules? Or,
as an article on the struggle against IEDs in Iraq puts it:

How do you defeat a foe who can destroy million-dollar machines with devices
that can be built off the Internet for about the cost of a pizza … America is still
the world’s greatest superpower, and the US military’s capacity to take out a
moving vehicle piloted from half the world away should still provoke a little
shock and awe. But the IED—cheap, easy to make and adapt, and deadly—has
in its own way proved equally powerful. (Thomas and Barry 28)

3
  The myriad ways in which soldiers have followed this motto is detailed by Iraq war
Veteran and author Paul Rieckhoff in Chasing Ghosts.
 Terrorism and the Politics of Improvisation 87

The United States government has claimed that it is promoting democracy in Iraq
and Afghanistan. Mainstream jazz critics and musicians have claimed that jazz
is a kind of American democracy in musical form (in fact, the US government
had already made this latter claim during the Cold War). America’s simultaneous
desire for and fear of improvisation, borne out on the bandstand and the battlefield,
demonstrates that incorporating improvisation into the democratic process is a
challenge at the heart of the American psyche yet to be accomplished.

Conclusion: Sonic Warfare

Musicians are often just as ready to say that their music has no political meaning
or force as they are to boast of its revolutionary powers. An important reason
for such ambivalence is that musicians usually don’t want any one person—even
themselves, at a particular moment in time that they might later come to regret—
to place a strict interpretation on their sounds. But claiming that there is political
significance to a piece of music, even political force and agency, is different from
claiming that there is a direct correlation between what happens when performing
or listening to music and what people do during “actual” political organizing (and
what people do as a result of listening to or performing music). Music is always
more than just sound, yet we sometimes forget the very physical nature of sound
itself. If music cannot create some kind of universal response in humans, then it
can nevertheless have a physical effect on people. Sound is vibration, and humans
have historically regarded music as a mystical area of vibration, harnessing the
various culturally specific traits of musical systems to the inherent physical
properties of sound. Making and listening to music is a physical act. Music very
literally makes things happen—it causes vibrations in the air which travel around
and into our bodies. And, as composer R. Murray Schafer quips, our “sense of
hearing cannot be closed off at will. There are no earlids” (Schafer 11).
During the creation of be-bop in the 1940s, jazz drummers developed a fluency
on the bass drum that departed from the standard “four-on-the-floor” pattern—
that is, constant quarter notes in ¦¼ time—so common to swing music. While
they maintained steady time, they also began to punctuate the tempo with loud,
vigorous accents on the bass drum, a technique that became known as “dropping
bombs” (see Berliner 326–7). At the height of World War II, drummers began to
command greater esteem as they bombed their way into the heart of the melodic
and harmonic activity of the band. Percussionist and author James Blades even
suggests that the instruments which would take millennia to develop into the
modern drumset were themselves weapons, if not bombs. “Percussion—the act of
striking,” writes Blades, “was an art in which primitive man was well skilled. He
survived in every sense by the dexterity of his blow; from which it is fair to assume
that the first instruments to augment the hand clap and stamp of the foot may have
been the implements or weapons upon which he relied for food or survival” (35).
88 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

But sound itself is also a real weapon. As debates surrounding torture

administered by the US military and intelligence agencies have increased in the
decade since 2001, accounts of the use of music in interrogation and battlefield
settings have been widely circulated. In 2007, for example, The Society for
Ethnomusicology issued a statement against the use of music as torture.4 However,
sonic warfare as a theory and practice goes beyond playing Metallica at high volume
(something which many people, Iraqis included, find enjoyable). As Colonel John
B. Alexander notes in his book Future War: “The best known use of acoustic
weapons dates to the time of Joshua and the battle for the seemingly impenetrable
walled city of Jericho … The cause of the structural failure of the stone walls has
long been debated. [One] interpretation suggests that the acoustic vibrations set
up by the rams’ horns actually weakened the internal structure of the walls” (95).
Alexander goes on to describe how this biblical incident is merely one of many
examples of acoustic warfare. He cites the use of loud rock music by the military as
more of a “poorly designed psychological [operation]” than a true acoustic weapon
(96). More interesting and potentially effective, he claims, are “three levels of
acoustic frequencies that might be applied as weapons: infrasound, audible sound,
and ultrasound” (97). Of these three frequency ranges, the infrasound, or low-level
frequencies, seems to have the most promise as a weapon in Alexander’s analysis:
“At low frequencies, it is possible to cause internal vibrations that generate a
number of effects, depending on the frequency and power levels employed. The
effects cannot be overcome through hearing protection, personal perseverance,
or being impervious to pain” (98). While Alexander disputes some wilder, more
violent effects claimed by previous acoustic warfare research (the subtitle of
Future War, after all, states that non-lethal weapons are the book’s subject), the
implications of sonic weapons are chilling to anyone who believes in the positive
power of sound.
To my knowledge, jazz has never been used as a sonic weapon or music of
torture by the US (or any other) military. However, at least one jazz musician
has been arrested as a terrorist—a relatively unknown bassist named Tarik Shah.
Interestingly, despite his connection with musicians like Pharaoh Sanders who
are associated with arguably the most politicized era of jazz—the “avant-garde”
or “New Thing”, beginning in the mid-1960s—Shah has not explicitly claimed
that his music is political; in fact, he has stated that being a jazz musician was the
perfect cover for his goals as a jihadi. Shah never committed any violent act; he
was arrested and convicted for conspiring to give “material support and resources”
to al Qaeda.5 As a practicing Muslim, Shah follows in a long tradition of black jazz
musicians who converted to Islam, took Muslim names, and/or were influenced
by Islamic philosophy and theology, including Randy Weston, Art Blakey, and

4
  This statement can be found online at the following website:http://webdb.iu.edu/
sem/scripts/aboutus /aboutsem/positionstatements/position_statement_torture.cfm.
5
  For more on the controversial nature of Shah’s comments as well as the government’s
case against him, see Feuer, as well as jazz critic Howard Mandel’s coverage of the case.
 Terrorism and the Politics of Improvisation 89

Dizzy Gillespie, for example. But putting the ideas of Islamic fundamentalism
into practice, for Shah at least, seems to be fundamentally antithetical to the
improvised music which sustained so many musicians throughout the twentieth
century. Perhaps Sayyid Qutb was correct in suspecting that jazz and jihadis don’t
mix well.
Improvising in politics, music, and war is potentially dangerous, albeit in
different ways. As improvising musician Bob Ostertag argues, “When organizing
clandestine resistance to a brutal regime, the consequences of making mistakes
are life-and-death matters. In music, the consequences of making mistakes
are nonexistent” (63). At worst, then, improvising poorly in music can lead to
relatively inconsequential embarrassment or boredom. But the particular discipline
of improvisation can also be the foundation of a meaningful experience for both
listener and performer.
And here, in closing, we might return to Stockhausen, and to the city of 9/11’s
Ground Zero. Stockhausen once noted that:

Anyone living today … is confronted daily with the hurtling together of all
races, all religions, all philosophies, all ways of life … New York, the prime
blueprint for a world society, is without question an indispensable experience for
the contemporary artist. Ideas one might have about possible integration, about
a coherent unification, or about possible syntheses of the influences issuing from
all parts of the globe, all these must be tested against living experience if they
are to lay claim to any truth. (quoted in Woerner 139)

Ironically, Stockhausen, writing here over thirty years before the 9/11 attacks,
portrays the city most associated with those attacks as a prime space for
improvisation—in life and in art, a city where, as William James remarked in
1907, near the beginnings of jazz, “the great pulses and bounds of progress … give
a kind of drumming background of life” (quoted in Douglas 118). Guns or butter?
Perhaps the choice is actually between bombs and drums, learning to improvise
against violence, rather than with violence. Art would be meaningless if it did not
move us—and music moves us, quite literally, whether it is “political” or not. We
can let it explode randomly, like a bomb in the crowd, or we can try to understand
its contours as we feel it moving through bodies and history.
90 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

Works Cited

The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on

Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.,
2004. Print.
Alexander, Colonel John B. Future War: Non-Lethal Weapons in Twenty-First-
Century Warfare. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Print.
Bailey, Derek. Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music. New York: Da
Capo, 1992. Print.
Berliner, Paul F. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago, 1994. Print.
Blades, James. Percussion Instruments and Their History. New York: Frederick A.
Praeger Publishers, 1970. Print.
Citizen X. “Improvised Explosive Device.” Life During War: Ordinary Life In
Extraordinary Times, Aug. 12, 2008. Web. Oct. 14, 2010.
Davis, Mike. Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb. New York: Verso,
2007. Print.
Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York:
Picador, 1995. Print.
Feuer, Alan. “Bronx Man Pleads Guilty in Terror Case.” New York Times. April 5,
2007. Web. Oct. 15, 2010.
Fischlin, Daniel and Ajay Heble, eds. The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz,
Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP,
2004. Print.
Foot, M. R. D. SOE In France: An Account of the Work of the British Special
Operations Executive in France, 1940–1944. London: Her Majesty’s
Stationery Office, 1966. Print.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Print.
Goldman, Emma. “The Psychology of Political Violenc.” Anarchism and Other
Essays. New York: Mother Earth, 2010. 85–114. Print.
Gray, John. Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern. New York: The New
Press, 2003. Print.
Herrera, Eydie. Message to the author. Nov. 17, 2009. E-mail.
Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States Armed Forces. The Official Dictionary of
Military Terms. Cambridge, MA: Hemisphere Publishing Corporation, 1988.
Print.
Lentricchia, Frank, and Jody McAuliffe. Crimes of Art and Terror. Chicago:
University of Chicago, 2003. Print.
Maass, Peter. “The Way of the Commandos.” The New York Times Magazine. May
1, 2005. Web. Oct. 14, 2010.
Mandel, Howard. “Tarik Shah Update.” All About Jazz. Jan. 8, 2006. Web. Jul. 7,
2011.
 Terrorism and the Politics of Improvisation 91

Oppenheimer, A.R. IRA, the Bombs and the Bullets: A History of Deadly Ingenuity.
Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 2009. Print.
Ostertag, Bob. Creative Life: Music Politics People and Machines. Urbana, IL: U
of Illinois, 2009. Print.
Parsonage, Catherine. The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880–1935. Aldershot,
Ashgate, 2005. Print.
Pastras, Philip James. A Clear Field: The Idea of Improvisation in Modern Poetry.
Dissertation, Graduate School of New Brunswick, Rutgers, State University of
New Jersey, 1981. Print.
Rieckhoff, Paul. Chasing Ghosts: A Soldier’s Fight for America from Baghdad to
Washington. New York: NAL Caliber, 2006. Print.
Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of
the Word. Rochester, NY: Destiny Books, 1977. Print.
Soghoian, Chris. “Homeland Stupidity: Security Policies that Place the Public at
Risk.” CNET News. Sept. 25, 2007. Web. Oct. 14, 2010.
Styles, Lieutenant Colonel George G. C., as told to Bob Perrin. Bombs Have No
Pity: My War Against Terrorism. London: William Luscombe, 1975. Print.
Thomas, Evan and John Barry. “A New Way of War.” Newsweek. Aug. 20–27,
2007: 28–30. Print.
Toop, David. Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds.
London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995. Print.
Wallace, Rob. Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism.
New York: Continuum, 2010. Print.
Woerner, Karl Heinrich. Stockhausen: Life and Work. Trans. Bill Hopkins.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1973. Print.
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 Chapter 7
Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero and the
Biopolitics of Media Convergence
Katheryn Wright

After the events of September 11, 2001, popular music provided a forum where
artists like Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor could speak out against changes in
American domestic and foreign policy that, arguably, curtailed civil liberties in
the name of homeland security. The USA PATRIOT Act, enacted in October 2001,
followed by the 2003 invasion of Iraq, represented a renewed domestic interest in
securing the United States by any means possible. The PATRIOT Act increased
the power of the federal government to search and detain citizens and immigrants
indefinitely, under the auspices of protecting American freedom, while the invasion
of Iraq was conducted to pre-empt an attack from the country’s mythical weapons
of mass destruction. This national and political emphasis on homeland security is a
contemporary example of biopolitics at work, where biological life as “we” know
it is “protected” at all costs. Any (extremist) threat against that life is rendered
worthy of eradication by any and all means necessary as a means to preserve the
American way of life.
Released in 2007, the concept album Year Zero by the industrial rock group
Nine Inch Nails (NIN) critically engages with the biopolitics of control. The
album presents a dystopia where the United States is enveloped in a perpetual war,
wherein religious extremism and environmental degradation justify State control
over all aspects of social life. Year Zero, however, is more than an album. It is a
narrative world that can be pieced together from a variety of constituent parts,
including tracks from the album itself, an online alternate reality game, and a
variety of fan contributions spread out across the landscape of the World Wide
Web. This multimedia world, what I am calling The Year Zero Experience, offers
a compelling example of media convergence at work, and it is especially unique
given how the music industry has been uprooted by changing social expectations
regarding online music distribution. Year Zero is an important contribution to
the study of post-9/11 popular music because it represents an intersection of the
politics of media convergence with the biopolitics of control. More narrowly,
Reznor’s critique of post-9/11 America includes the power struggle over how
popular music should be managed, and about how media should be produced and
consumed in the twenty-first century.
94 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

Control and Convergence

The concepts of “control” and “convergence” come from two distinct research
trajectories in poststructural theory and critical media studies respectively. First,
Michel Foucault examines the implications of control in the chapter “Right of
Death and Power over Life” from the first volume of The History of Sexuality.
Here, he outlines two basic forms of “power over life”: disciplinary power and
biopower. Disciplinary power focuses on the body “as a machine: its disciplining,
the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces,” while, he argues,
biopower focuses on “the species … the body imbued with the mechanics of life …
effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls” (Foucault
139). Biopolitics extends the power of the State from control over bodies within
a population to control over bodies as a population. Biopower nurtures biological
bodies so that they can maximize their productive capacities as a collective.
In his short essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Gilles Deleuze
describes a dystopic vision of contemporary society that pushes Foucault’s reading
of biopower to its extreme: a system of domination determined by the nature of
code. Deleuze explains, “In the societies of control … what is important is no
longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is the password … The
numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information,
or reject it” (5). In other words, all aspects of society, from the law to education,
filter through the coded logic of control that aims to remake bodies into productive
machines which serve at the will of the corporation(s). Year Zero offers a dystopic
vision of such a world, one where its citizens have become mechanized and are
bound to the service of the panoptic State.
In a statement about the album, Reznor explains that Year Zero presents “a world
[that] has reached the breaking point—politically, spiritually and ecologically”
(“Year Zero”). The historical frame of reference for the formation of this dystopia
is post-9/11 America where, ironically, the fundamentalist logic that justified
the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC was met by a brand of
American fundamentalism required of all of its citizens in the aftermath. Popular
slogans like “Support the Troops” or “Freedom isn’t Free” were transformed into
chants of exclusion for those voices who spoke against both the PATRIOT Act and
the Iraq War, or later, those critiquing the Bush administration’s stance on torture,
the no-bid government contracts to corporations like Halliburton, or the policies of
discrimination against suspected terrorists that justified the erosion of civil liberties
in the United States.1 This “America” was a reaction to 9/11. Citizens were asked

1
  Live performances of certain selections from Year Zero make explicit connections
to the Bush administration. For the Lights in the Sky tour during the election cycle of
2008, a large screen behind the band slowly morphed a headshot of George Bush into the
Republican presidential candidate John McCain during the performance of “Capital G,”
visually connecting Bush’s present America to the future a McCain presidency would offer
for the audience.
 Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero 95

to surrender legal rights in the name of security and freedom for themselves and
others, submitting to the kind of regulatory controls that Foucault describes. To
put it another way, America’s citizens, a particularly ill-defined group in the wake
of post-9/11 jingoism, were asked to submit to a coded nationalism and remake
themselves in the image of corporate America. Attempts to construct alternative
discourses as resistance to these security measures meant the denial of access to—
or total exclusion from—society through arrest on suspicion of terrorist activities.
The second research trajectory that informs Year Zero is that of convergence
culture. From a broader perspective, the term convergence refers to the changing
relationship between the production and consumption of media—including print,
radio, cinema, television, and, of course, popular music. Two factors driving
this transformation involve, from a production standpoint, the concentration and
horizontal integration of media ownership and the impact of digitization on cultural
practices associated with media consumption.2 Henry Jenkins, one of the foremost
researchers of this trend, argues that “convergence … is both a top-down corporate-
driven process and a bottom-up consumer-driven process” (18). In the era of
convergence, audiences consume and create content online, molding that content
to their own desires. These cultural practices contribute to the creative evolution
of the media text; the material boundaries of the book, movie, or television series
begin to fade. A story “so large it cannot be contained within a single medium,”
like The Matrix, unfolds across multiple platforms as a film trilogy, web comic,
and computer game spurred by fans’ collective commitment to learning more
about the world (Jenkins 93). The synergistic marketing strategies of American
Idol, perhaps a more mainstream example, also illustrate a transmedia story. AI
(an uncanny abbreviation, indeed) is simultaneously a musical performance,
reality television show, web series, and movie franchise. Transmedia storytelling
positions the media text as an open system, one that is always evolving through
its interactions with consumers who collectively participate in the production and
consumption of the narrative using relatively inexpensive digital technologies.
This evolution facilitates cultural practices and media literacies dependent
on active participation and group collaboration. For Jenkins, these practices
anticipate “digital democracy,” offering a “changed sense of community, a greater
sense of participation, less dependence on official expertise and a greater trust in
collaborative problem solving” (208–9).
The move toward media convergence represents a seismic shift in the
production and consumption of popular media. Arguably, the reverberations of
this shift caused more panic in the music industry than they did anywhere else.
In July 2001, only two months before the terrorist attacks on the United States,
the legal battle between A&M Records and the file-sharing service Napster ended
when the website was found to be in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act. The rise, and eventual demise, of Napster represented a turning point for a
music industry that had flourished in the late 1990s due to corporate consolidation,

2
  A process cemented by the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
96 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

which ultimately led to higher-priced tickets and CDs, and limited radio access
for independent acts. After the demise of Napster, decentralized peer-to-peer
file sharing platforms, like BitTorrent, enabled fans to download music directly
to their home computers, eschewing middle-men corporate record stores—and,
by extension, labels—in the process. The response from the Recording Industry
Association of America was adversarial, resulting in lawsuits filed against music
fans for illegally downloading music from these file-sharing sites. Though these
suits were intended as a means to exert control over consumers and to protect the
sacred product, the music industry’s antagonism toward file sharing ultimately
highlighted its inability to adapt to the digital world.
However, despite this top-down resistance, many musicians went rogue,
employing their own digital hardware and the vast expanses of the Internet,
particularly on websites like MySpace, to organize a kind of virtual grass roots
movement to distribute music on their own terms. This movement, no matter how
fragmented and decentered it might have been, ultimately gained enough force to
collide—converge—with old media models of music distribution. It is the energy
of these movements that NIN harnessed when creating The Year Zero Experience
and, as I will argue, ultimately improved, as the band concluded their touring
career by giving their music away entirely for free.
Shortly after the release of Year Zero, Reznor came into conflict with Interscope
Records, NIN’s record label. Reznor felt the label was charging too much for the
album in Australia, where it was retailing for approximately thirty US dollars. As a
result, he encouraged the band’s fans to “steal his album” during a Nine Inch Nails
concert (Van Buskirk). To do so, fans would have to download mp3 tracks online.
In the well-publicized split between Interscope and NIN that followed, the label,
quite obviously, expressed anger at Reznor’s subversion. This exchange added an
intriguing twist to the ongoing debate about the merits of online file sharing, NIN
being in clear conflict with the profit-earning motives of their record company and,
it would seem, with their own need to earn a living from their work.
Sadly, attempts to control digital music distribution, like the ones displayed
by Interscope Records, continued to miss the mark when it came to recognizing
how the emergence of new cultural practices associated with media convergence
changed not only the way popular music is distributed but also the form that music
takes—what an album actually is, in other words. As with other popular media, the
material boundaries of the album have been challenged by convergence culture,
particularly at a time when fans’ practices like remixing and sampling make
them participants in the (de)construction of album formats. Without Interscope’s
consent, and prior to his split from the label, Reznor unofficially released
remixable tracks from Year Zero online. “Survivalism” was first made available in
the form of high-quality multitrack audio files that fans could download and remix
a month prior to Year Zero’s official release. In the following months, additional
files circulated through BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer file sharing modules.
In addition, Reznor independently financed and developed, with the help of the
production company 42 Entertainment, a scavenger hunt and alternate reality
 Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero 97

game (ARG) as a means to expand Year Zero’s sonic and thematic reach. As the
game’s proverbial puppetmaster, Reznor initiated a virtual scavenger hunt in which
participants could piece together a series of hidden messages, links, images, audio
cues, cryptic websites, and discussion forums. It is here, in this maze of digital
information, that The Year Zero Experience converges.

Intersections: Past, Presence, and Potential

As much as Year Zero is a product of convergence culture, it also represents the

precise moment, to use Jenkins phraseology, when old and new media collide. The
physical CD was released via traditional corporate distribution models, complete
with paratextual elements like cover art and liner notes. These elements, much
like the title or preface of a literary work, frame the music contained on the album.
For example, the foldout of Year Zero features images of a suit-clad arm holding a
Bible to the left and a muscular arm holding a machine gun to the right. This image
portends the themes of the lyrics to Year Zero’s tracks “God Given” and “Capital
G.” Additionally, and perhaps most strikingly, the album’s cover art depicts the
blurred image of a large figure as seen through a windshield, the streets of a small
town lined with military vehicles in the background. Though serving as a prefatory
note for the album contained within the sleeve, this image also harkens back to a
mystery that began with the viral release of the promotional trailer for Year Zero.
In the video, camera footage shot from the window of a moving vehicle captures
the same giant shadowy figure emerging from a desolate desert landscape. After
capturing the image, the screen degrades to black. Players of the ARG ultimately
discovered the meaning of this figure: it is named The Presence, and it is a mass
hallucination caused by the introduction of the drug Parepin into the American
water supply.
Ultimately, it is the vast collection of websites discovered only through playing
the ARG that tell the back-story of Year Zero. What players uncover is the state of
a world unraveling into chaos: biological weapons, nuclear warfare, restrictions
on free speech, terrorist attacks on cultural institutions, impeachment of the first
female president, the end of free elections, the use of Parepin, the establishment of
a “Coalition for Peace” between governments and multinational corporations, and
a new world order marked by the introduction of a calendar that renames the year
2022, year zero BA (Born Again). These fragmented contextual details explode the
material boundaries of the album, recasting Year Zero as a transmedia narrative.
As such, it asks listeners to explore what else an album can do by participating in
the construction of a narrative world through the ARG, along with the narrative
presented on the physical CD. Reznor is emphatic that the two are absolutely
linked: “What you are now starting to experience IS ‘year zero.’ It’s not some kind
of gimmick to get you to buy a record—it IS the art form … and we’re just getting
started. Hope you enjoy the ride” (“Year Zero”).
98 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

What makes Year Zero so compelling beyond its transmedia components are
the political implications of its structure in the context of the Bush administration’s
post-9/11 America—arguably a society of control. To highlight these implications,
I have structured my analysis of The Year Zero Experience with the temporal
markers of The Past, The Presence, and The Potential, all three of which loosely
correspond with the three acts of the concept album and ARG. The Past discusses
two major topics: the fictional historical events that contextualize The Year Zero
Experience, culminating with the dissolution of the American government, and the
“old” pre-convergence distribution models of the music industry. The Presence, a
play on the figure of “The Presence,” explores the moment of transition in both
Reznor’s society of control and the changing form of the album. The Potential,
ultimately, speculates about what could be, a revolution formed through the
promise of active participation and group collaboration. My core thesis is that The
Year Zero Experience sketches out the emergence of a new kind of subjectivity
that, for Reznor, is the only way to combat the society of control that he sees
looming in the future post-9/11 American cultural landscape.

The Past

A large part of the ARG, and the first act of the album, outlines a historical trajectory
that reinvents America as a society of control, presumably a process that had already
begun by the date of the album’s release (April 17, 2007 worldwide). Two months
prior to the release of the album, in February 2007, a Nine Inch Nails shirt went on
sale in Lisbon, Portugal, the text of which contained a cluster of highlighted letters
that spelled the declaration, “I am trying to believe.” Savvy fans who searched
the sentence online were led to the website http://iamtryingtobelieve.com. This
site contained pictures of newspaper clippings which introduced visitors to the
fictional drug Parepin, an immunity booster and anti-depressant added to the US
water supply in order to pre-emptively control the effects of bioterrorism. Those
fans who scoured the Internet following the discovery of this site, essentially, began
playing the ARG, which had no initial rules or foreseeable resolution.3 Moreover,
the game crossed boundaries between old physical media and new virtual ones, as
the album’s track list, publicity flyers, a succession of chain email messages, posts
on discussion boards, eerie voicemail messages, the physical CD’s liner notes,
billboards, and USB flash drives planted secretly in NIN concert venues (to name
just a few components of the game) all led to the discovery of a seemingly endless
amount of hyperlinks and web pages. Even as the game, at least for the foreseeable
future, has reached its end, the NINWiki archive includes a future history of Year
Zero, suggesting that, as Fox Mulder might say, the truth is still out there.
The term Year Zero refers to the establishment of a new international calendar
by the United States with the support of the Coalition of Peace, a collection of

  See Rose for a detailed timeline of the alternate reality game.

3
 Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero 99

multinational corporations and governments. The dates prior to year zero are
negative, so the year 2011 would be represented as -11. This notation is a kind
of countdown to the reestablishment of a new world order by the United States.
This countdown begins on the date 10/17/-15 (2007), which is fictionalized as the
date on which President George W. Bush signed the Military Commissions Act, an
act suspending habeas corpus, essentially allowing for the unlawful detention of
prisoners (the actual Military Commissions Act of 2006 denies enemy combatants
this right). In Reznor’s dystopia, the government has the ability to hold anybody it
deems an enemy to the State. After a terrorist attack on the Academy Awards using
the toxic chemical ricin on 02/22/-13 (2009), the United States drops nuclear bombs
on Iran and North Korea. Like with the Iraq War, no evidence of a connection
between these countries and the attack is ever established in the game. Eventually,
Muslim nations band together to fight the United States, and the Emergency
Measures Act restricts free speech. The end of free elections, a bioterrorist attack
on Seattle that might be staged, and a country, Belize, devastated by a hurricane
becoming a refuge for American citizens in -02 (2020) all lead to the re-creation
of the United States as an international military postindustrial complex where a
separation between Church and State no longer exists.
The ARG reconstructs the timeline leading to the establishment of Year Zero,
exposing how what Brian Massumi calls the “logic of preemption” has taken
hold of American culture (par. 15). This logic assumes that the mere possibility
of a terrorist attack justifies preemptive security measures and/or military force
in the name of preserving the bodies—their physical beings as opposed to the
abstract collection of constitutional rights that define American citizenship—of
American citizens. When the logic of pre-emption dominates political discourse,
the renegotiation of civil liberties and human rights like habeas corpus and free
speech becomes less important than preserving biological bodies that can be
remade into productive citizens that serve the will of the State—the Coalition
of Peace in Reznor’s world. To pre-emptively craft American citizens means
to provide models of correct behavior that must be followed so that the entire
population can be safe from impending threats. The future security of the whole
rests in the capacity to control the behavior of individuated bodies.
Rather than providing listeners with specific historical details, like the ARG
provides its players, the first act of Year Zero, the album, deals specifically with
individual choices that collectively enable the logic of pre-emption to take root.
Tracks like “The Beginning of the End” and “Survivalism” ask: How could this
have happened? What makes Americans so willing to submit to the networks
of control that can overtake their lives? The lyrics of “The Beginning of the
End” explain that “you’ll be left behind” if you don’t fall in line with policies
and practices enacted by the American government intended to pre-emptively
secure the population. Eliding any specifics, Reznor focuses on the passivity of
the average citizen who enables the growth of the government’s control over the
population through a general passiveness to what is taking place. Inaction makes
“you” (the citizen) unable to, as the lyrics of the song explain, recognize yourself.
100 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

This theme of inaction mimics the passive consumption models of old media, like
the cinema and television, and even the standard music album, where audiences
are spectators as opposed to active participants in the production process.
Year Zero’s first single, “Survivalism,” echoes this message. The song’s
heavy, rhythmic beat mimics a marching mass held together through, as the lyrics
explain, the need to take more and more. “Mother nature” is there to service this
rampant consumerism and conspicuous consumption that leads to environmental
degradation and political upheaval. While the ARG tracks historical artifacts,
the first act of the album focuses on the transformation of the American citizen.
Interestingly, the more general nature of the lyrics enables listeners without
knowledge of the ARG to make connections not with the fictional dystopia Reznor
constructs, but with the Bush administration’s post-9/11 policies. As the Year Zero
timeline, beginning with the signing of the Military Commissions Act, reminds us,
this path is not as far off as it may first appear.
While the content of The Year Zero Experience speaks to the dangers of the
concentration of power in the hands of a few, its form as a transmedia text extends
this critique to include the corporations that produce and distribute popular music.
Much like Reznor’s reading of the American government, record companies
have historically controlled and exploited artists as much as they enable artistic
creation. From the perspective of the listener, they remain subject to the “one
to one” distribution model—a compact disc sold to each listener—that made
record companies so much money in the mid to late 1990s. This model reflects
the biopolitical power structure that enables Year Zero to take shape, where one
power source (the government) has the capacity to control individuated bodies at
the biological level, bypassing the messiness of human rights and civil liberties.
As such, Interscope Records, and the larger corporate infrastructure of which it
is a part, are not so different from Reznor’s dystopia. This dual-edged critique is
also reflected in Reznor’s political commitment to the flexible licensing of creative
content, which was directly in conflict with the contractual agreement between
NIN and Interscope Records.

The Presence

While a significant portion of the ARG, along with the album’s first act, traces
the past events of a future narrative that strategically relates to the “present-day”
political turmoil of America in 2007, Year Zero’s second act situates the present
as a transitional moment. Within The Year Zero Experience, artists, citizens, and
governments stand at a threshold. In February 2007, a USB flash drive was found
in Lisbon, at the same concert where the highlighted shirt was unveiled, which
contained the mp3 file of the album track “My Violent Heart” and a URL hidden in
the drive’s ID3 tags that revealed the website http://anotherversionofthetruth.com.
This website contains a brightly colored political poster of a red farmhouse nestled
in a green field, the archetypal windmill prominently displayed near the center of
 Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero 101

the screen. Flowing translucently across this image is an American flag framing
the paradoxical text, “A New Beginning: Zero Tolerance, Zero Fear—America is
Born Again.” At the bottom of the screen resides a message proclaiming the site’s
sponsor: the fictional US Bureau of Morality. At the time of the USB’s discovery,
and for several years after Year Zero’s release, the farm image would transform
when the site visitor would track the mouse across the screen (this transformation
no longer took place as of this chapter’s composition). When the mouse cursor was
moved across the screen, the image wiped away to reveal the same location but now
in black-and-white and resembling a war zone complete with a wire fence, smoke,
and, sadly, a dilapidated windmill. The image was framed by an ominous message
that read, “The Beginning of the End: Zero Hope, Zero Chance—Another Version
of the Truth.” In this space, government propaganda quite literally transitioned
into a call for revolution through user interaction. If the user clicked the phrase
“Another Version of the Truth,” a hyperlink would lead to a message board with
posts from the year 0000, which contained threads like “Cops Murder Muslim
Kid” and “Missing in Action,” both of which are vague enough to seem real, even
if they are fictionalized in the context of the ARG. That seeming reality is where
Reznor’s political work takes hold, as the information in these forums encourages
players to question the motives of the American government and the culture of
fear it had been promoting post-9/11.
Similarly, the second act of the album presents a choice: either submit to or
question institutions of power. In a society of control characterized by masked
loyalties and shifting perspectives, this choice is anything but easy. The speaker
of “Me, I’m Not” cannot believe what he has become, asking, “Can we stop?”
while “Capital G” assumes the perspective of Americans who seem to abandon
their own morality in the name of, basically, what amounts to global domination.
These tracks capture the fraught internal dialogue of subjects who struggle—often
in fear—with the networks of power that seek to control every bodily movement
in an effort to secure the safety of the population.
The track “God Given” finds the struggles of these subjects reaching their
collective climax. Here, the speaker faithfully believes that he is one of the
“chosen ones.” However, this faith is momentarily broken, as the speaker begins
to question the validity of his beliefs. Although the song returns to an (ironic?)
statement of faith, it also concludes with a nearly incomprehensible wall of sound,
the chaos of the transition—echoing, arguably, the chaos captured on http://
anotherversionofthetruth.com. For Reznor, the present is always illegible, fuzzy,
and potentially terrifying.
It is not surprising, then, that The Year Zero Experience is personified by that
shadowy hand-like figure The Presence adorning Year Zero’s cover art. The origins
and significance of this figure are the central mysteries in the ARG. (The Year
Zero timeline ends with the appearance of The Presence over the US Capitol on
2/10/0000.) As the textual fragments on the website http://iamtryingtobelieve.com
speculate, The Presence is generated by the introduction of the drug Parepin into
the water supply. Because water consumption cannot be controlled, the amount of
102 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

drugs that enter into someone’s system cannot be regulated. In keeping with the
second act’s theme of inquiry, the “official” documents archived on this site are
littered with marginal comments that question these claims. Two black-and-white
photographs depict The Presence with a subtitle that reads, “‘The Presence’—
Legitimate Phenomenon or Parepin-Induced Mass Psychosis?” This knowledge,
which is available only through participation in the ARG, clarifies the meaning
of selected tracks from the album. For instance, “The Warning” references a
“sign” coming down from the sky to warn the greedy that their time to control
the population is coming to an end. Ironically, one of the side-effects of Parepin is
recognition of the mechanisms of control.
Therefore, The Presence also symbolizes transition. It represents a tool of
control turning back on itself, reawakening a population that, in the past, gave into
(willingly or not) to overarching biopower that promised both security and freedom
while simultaneously negating civil liberties and human rights. This moment of
transition is marked with masked national loyalties, shifting political perspectives,
and chaotic cultural modulations, all of which are paralleled in Reznor’s use of
new digital media, at the levels of production and consumption, to broaden the
scope of his—and his audience’s—cultural vision.

The Potential

Year Zero’s final act offers the means through which Reznor’s fictionalized society
of control can be interrupted. In simple terms, this act outlines the beginnings of a
revolution. The track aptly named “The Great Destroyer” assumes the perspective
of a subject with “limitless potential” to interrupt the society of control. Similarly,
the hopeful “In This Twilight” promises something better beyond the dystopic
reality of the present tense. Perhaps most dramatically, the album’s final track,
“Zero-Sum,” directly addresses the audience and chastises them for allowing the
current dystopia to emerge. The audience is shamed for being “just zeroes and ones”
rather than asserting their own powerful presence in the past. Ultimately, “Zero-
Sum” points to us, “real world” citizens that have allowed the dystopia of post-
9/11 America to sediment itself in our collective consciousness. In Reznor’s mind,
our silence has rendered us as digital code to be manipulated by the mechanisms of
control. Here, Reznor recalls Deleuze, arguing that, in a society of control, “code”
determines accessibility, while the collective “we” has been reduced to a statistical
data set. As a result, it is fitting that the physical CD on which Year Zero’s music
is coded is a heat-sensitive thermo-chrome disc that reveals a message of ones and
zeros, along with copyright information, when it is held for roughly five minutes.
Quite literally, data exists beneath the surface of the album. And this data, in all of
its multimedia forms, is what opens up The Year Zero Experience, an experience
that involves audience participation—not passivity—and which suggests that such
participation is the key to avoiding control in all its forms.
 Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero 103

It is fitting, therefore, that the ARG relied so heavily on user collaboration. In

it, the narrative is interactive, configuring players as archeologists who uncover
digital fragments of a future world already past. As such, the intersection between
the form and content of The Year Zero Experience speaks to the emergence of a
new subjectivity through collaboration and a collective call to action. While the
ARG was openly available for anyone who had access to play along, it was also
geared toward a specialized demographic consisting of people who could decode
messages by cleaning up static; use a spectrometer; maneuver through a great deal
of physical and digital information; and, most importantly, effectively collaborate
with others in an online environment. This form of collaboration points to a
subjectivity based on collective agency rather than individual autonomy, which
has historically been the stuff of countercultural activism. Even though these
players would work together, the game did not encourage them to submit to the
will of the “mass” or to participate in some empty groupthink exercise. Instead,
success in the game demanded that participants learn to collaborate with strangers
across national boundaries and under the radar of institutional power, not the least
of which was that exerted by Interscope Records.
The engaged collective is what The Year Zero Experience inevitably creates.
Rather than standing as a finished product, the physical album stands as merely
a part of a larger narrative—one that allows fans the freedom to create their own
stories, realities, and political statements. The Year Zero Experience’s political
potential rests in its capacity to bring participants together in a shared constitution
other than through the networks of control that define the biopolitical population.
Here, players are more than statistical output. Rather, they are collaborators in a
productive, artistic process that provides the revolutionary answer to control in all
its forms.

Postscript: After 0000

If Reznor’s dystopic yarn concludes with The Presence looming over the US
Capitol, the seat of American government and a building in which we can surely
hear capital echoing throughout its halls, then it is fitting that he concluded Nine
Inch Nails’ recording career (for now) by offering the band’s final album, 2008’s
The Slip, for free online. For a songwriter who lamented monolithic control and
power in virtually every song that he wrote, there could not be a more perfect
ending to his career (again, for now). In the end, he gave it away.
104 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles, et al. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992):

3–7. Print.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction. Trans.
Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Print.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New
York: New York UP, 2006. Print.
Massumi, Brian. “Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption.” Theory and
Event 10.2 (2007): n.p. Project Muse. Web. Dec. 1, 2010.
Nine Inch Nails. Year Zero. Interscope, 2007. CD.
Rose’s, Frank. “Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive
Games.” Wired. 20 Dec. 20, 2007. Web. April 3, 2010
Van Buskirk, Eliot. “Trent Reznor Escapes His Label’s Clutches.” Listening Post.
Wired. Oct. 8, 2007. Web. April 3, 2010.
“Year Zero.” NINWiki. MediaWiki, Jan. 7, 2011. Web. Feb. 12, 2011.
 Part III
What’s Going On, Again?:
Protest and Nostalgia
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Chapter 8
Casualties of War: Hip-Hop and the Old
Racial Politics of the Post-9/11 Era
Aisha Staggers

I am a casualty of war—not a casualty of either war waging in the Middle East,

but of a metaphorical war that has been waged against hip-hop on every political
front since September 11, 2001. The reality is that, in the decade since 9/11, hip-
hop has fought tirelessly for its very survival, as the genre has been the victim of
endless pseudo-militarized censorship campaigns on mainstream radio airwaves.
Similarly, battle-scarred hip-hop veterans remain absent in mainstream music
media coverage—the missing men in the formation of contemporary pop culture.
Just as our nation has come to identify America in “pre-9/11” and “post-9/11”
terms, I have come to define hip-hop in those same terms. I view these “pre” and
“post” eras as distinct periods—the former a time in which hip-hop stood strong
alongside of the towering canon of mainstream popular music, the latter a time in
which hip-hop has crumbled and fragmented into a spectral plume of its former
self. Indeed, it is worth noting that hip-hop largely came of age during a decade,
the 1990s, that was bookended by wars in the Middle East: when rap legend
Rakim sat down to write the lyrics to “Casualties of War,” from the album Don’t
Sweat the Technique (1992), the United States had just ended its involvement in
the Gulf War. Interestingly enough, the song prophesizes much of the social and
political unrest that would occur in the years after 9/11, even though, obviously,
no one could have foreseen the events of that day. Rakim writes of a call for a
(George Herbert Walker) Bush “attack,” and he also details the effects of post-
traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) before it was widely applied to Gulf War—and
Iraq War—veterans. Ultimately, Rakim attaches this trauma to potential terror on
the homefront: “Every time a truck backfires I fire back / I look for shelter when a
plane is over me / Remember Pearl Harbor? / New York could be over, G.” Again,
though about Desert Storm, “Casualties of War” is prescient in its description of a
time of terror. Why, then, has this singular track, along with so many other hip-hop
songs from the 1990s, slid into America’s political—and musical—subconscious?
This question is the central concern of this chapter.
At first glance, my appropriation of pre- and post-9/11 temporality as a means
to contextualize hip-hop might appear unnecessary, because it would stand to
reason that hip-hop would, by default, fall within the larger historical narrative
of America. However, since hip-hop has been systematically excluded from the
American mainstream, a move that parallels the social and political exclusion of
108 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

African Americans from the traditional “American Way of Life,” these temporal
markers are necessary for fully understanding the shifting significance of hip-
hop culture since the early 1990s. These historical categories are also helpful
for distinguishing two critical eras in hip-hop’s development: a Golden Age of
lyrical artistry and freedom, and a flashier Diamond Age driven by consumption
of material wealth and unfettered capitalism.1
Though popular American discourse described 9/11 as an unreal event, it was,
arguably, not inconceivable to many African Americans, whose reality is grounded
in a history that is equally unimaginable. Given this unique historical perspective,
African Americans could be disturbed by the events of 9/11 while also being more
readily accepting of a new reality at the same time. Ironically, though, it seems
that, in the years since 9/11, hip-hop has taken a sabbatical from addressing both
the historic reality of African American culture as well as the reality of post-9/11
America. This thematic shift marks hip-hop’s transformation in the post-9/11 era—a
transformation that finds rappers constructing increasingly irrelevant rhymes that
intend to desensitize contemporary African American youths to their own social,
economic, political, and sexual strife. Hip-hop’s narrations of egregiously carefree
lifestyles ultimately invoke images of the past like Al Jolson and post-Civil War
minstrel shows, rendering many current rappers akin to performers in blackface.
That said, a few artists have tried to breathe life back into hip-hop since 9/11,
though with marginal success. In 2006 interviews supporting the release of his
debut CD Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor, Lupe Fiasco addresses the Diamond Age,
criticizing fans and artists for forgetting the social and political conditions in urban
America. He abhors the fact that ignorance has gained such prevalence in hip-hop
while poverty and crime continue to prevail in inner cities, wreaking terror on
their inhabitants while, ostensibly, the nation is conducting a “War on Terror.” By
making such arguments, Fiasco is able to bridge together two seemingly opposing
forces in hip-hop: entertainment and education. In doing so, Fiasco essentially
redeploys the rap hybrid “edutainment,” established by Golden Age rappers
Boogie Down Productions. This style stands in stark contrast to the flimsiness
of so much contemporary rap music. It is not surprising, then, that Fiasco has
not reached the level of popular success of hip-hop artists like Lil Wayne or even
The Black Eyed Peas. What is even more striking is that Fiasco is a Muslim (born
Wasalu Muhammad Jaco), and his father was a member of the Chicago chapter of
the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. That such an outspoken and potentially
“radical Muslim” cannot be heard in post-9/11 America is an eerie reminder of
how close to home the witch-hunt for all threats “foreign and domestic” actually
is (Frazier).

  “The Golden Age of Hip-Hop” is a term used by hip-hop aficionados that roughly
1

refers to the genre’s ascendancy and peak as a popular cultural form, usually beginning with
rap’s first two breakthrough LPs in 1986 (Run-DMC’s Raising Hell and the Beastie Boys’
Licensed to Ill) and ending with the untimely and unsolved murders of Tupac Shakur in
1996 and The Notorious B.I.G. in 1997.
 Casualties of War 109

On a personal level, I cannot help but agree with Fiasco, and I find myself
continually advocating for hip-hop to return to its roots. It appears that this
sentiment is not unique to me, as many younger fans are arguing for the same thing
as they approach their thirties and are, it seems, becoming disillusioned by the
world in which they live. In her 2002 New York Times article “Hip-Hop Divides:
Those Who Rap, Those Who Don’t,” Kalefa Sanneh claims that the desire to
return to the euphoric Golden Age of hip-hop is most common among those who
can remember when hip-hop was in its purest form during the 1980s and 1990s.
This feeling of nostalgia is largely misunderstood in hip-hop’s post-9/11 era
because the assumption is that there cannot be anything wrong with music that
is profitable. This assumption is flawed because, for those of us involved in hip-
hop, it is not what we do, but rather, in the words of DMX, “who we be.” Hip-hop
is so deeply integrated into our beings that it may as well be a part of our DNA.
That “being” part of us is consistently barraged with what amounts to musical
Weapons of Mass Destruction—songs and artists that are so mass-produced and
mass-distributed that their presence in the industry is damaging an already fragile
musical structure, pulling the culture apart at its very foundation. This structural
damage ultimately establishes a kind of DuBoisian double consciousness, wherein
hip-hop culture is theoretically measured and valued by a business that looks upon
it with “amused contempt and pity,” and the souls of the folk in the culture are
only allowed to view themselves through that perspective, one that is, as always,
provided by those in power (11).
Therefore, to force this matter to its crisis, we need to ask how to reconcile
hip-hop’s conflicting realities. In the post-9/11 era, hip-hop has largely been
commodified, transformed into a saleable product that, at one point, could help
defer the looming post-9/11 recession. Though hip-hop had become progressively
more marketable in the years leading up to 9/11, the final push that sucked the
music into capitalism’s all-encompassing vortex largely occurred after September
11, when most American political figures, President George W. Bush in particular,
co-opted the attacks and encouraged Americans to stand up to the terrorists by
investing in the economy and shopping with reckless abandon. In the pre-9/11
Golden Age, however, hip-hop’s reality was largely concerned with “keeping
it real.” The majority of Golden Age rappers performed their music without
spectacle—no pyrotechnic stunts, no tricks, and no money. For the most part,
these artists were taking political and financial risks to speak the truth—to “keep
it real.” Even though this Golden Age had a spattering of commercially successful
artists like The Fat Boys, MC Hammer, and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince,
their successes hinged on a fairly pronounced rejection of hip-hop and R&B fans
as a means to gain approval from mainstream, mainly white, audiences. Their
impact in the world of black music, in general, and hip-hop specifically, went
largely unnoticed until hip-hop became solidly entrenched in American culture.
The fundamental shift in hip-hop from an openly political genre to an apolitical
one in the years prior to the September 11th attacks was, ironically, a result of
fear. For many MCs, that fear emerged from a recognition of their own mortality,
110 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

particularly after the fatal shootings of Tupac Shakur in 1996 and The Notorious
B.I.G. in 1997. At that time, the future of hip-hop as a distinct genre was largely
uncertain; MCs began to explore other musical genres like hard rock, country,
London dancehall, and alternative rock.2 What compounded these tensions was
another unforeseen fatal tragedy: the death of R&B singer Aaliyah, in a plane
crash, on August 25, 2001. Aaliyah’s death was not upsetting to the hip-hop
community simply because she was a talented R&B artist or because she was only
twenty-two at the time. Certainly, those things were true. Rather, it was the matter
of how she died that bothered hip-hop artists and fans.
When Tupac and Biggie were murdered, the mainstream press largely justified
their deaths with the adage that “if you live by the gun, you die by the gun.” The
same justification was deployed when Eazy-E died of complications related to
AIDS in 1995. However, for many African Americans, the risk of dying in a plane
crash has always seemed minimal. The music business has been shaken by fatal
plane crashes in the past: John Denver in 1997; Ricky Nelson in 1985; members
of Lynyrd Skynyrd in 1977; Patsy Cline in 1963; and perhaps most infamously,
Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens in 1959. In the aftermath of
Aaliyah’s death, though, it was not just mainstream American musicians suffering
these types of losses; R&B musicians had now lost fellow entertainers to plane
crashes in the past as well.
While it is true that Otis Redding, along with four members of the Bar-Kays,
died in a plane crash in 1967, many hip-hop fans were either in infancy or were
not even born at that time, leaving them no first-hand recollections of Redding’s
demise. Therefore, the coverage of Aaliyah’s death gained a particularly
pronounced immediacy for her fans. In simple terms, her death seemed senseless,
random. Indeed, the randomness of the crash has led to continuous speculation
about whether or not the crash was avoidable. Still trying to make sense of that
devastation, the hip-hop community, along with the rest of America, was shaken
to the core just over two weeks later with a slew of devastating plane crashes. Hip-
hop, already at an ideological crossroads, was left vulnerable and impressionable
in the wake of 9/11—a target for both a corporate and political hijacking.
As America began to reclaim its soul in the aftermath of 9/11, hip-hop seemed
to all but lose its own. Becoming less of a forum of socially conscious expression
for young African Americans, and more of a novelty, the music did little to further
the discussion of racial politics in America. This trend continued throughout the
decade, which became all the more distressing as American politics finally saw
the rise of an African American Presidential candidate in Barack Obama. It was
believed that Obama’s election would signify—and ultimately enact—sweeping
change in the hip-hop community. During Obama’s campaign, hip-hop artists,
many of whom had been disillusioned with the political process, were taking to
the airwaves, the Internet, and the streets to assist in getting Obama elected. These

2
  A number of these ventures into other genres also occurred post-9/11, the most
unlikely of pairings being Nelly and Tim McGraw in 2004 on their ballad “Over and Over.”
 Casualties of War 111

artists mobilized a generation that was never welcome in the political process. For
once, this generation believed in the optimism of the rallying cry, “Yes We Can.”
Rap icon Jay-Z possibly put it best: “The day Obama got elected, the gangsta
became less relevant” (quoted in Redding). Indeed, it would seem that Obama’s
election would stand as the fulfillment of the collective thrust of Golden Age of
political rap.
Regrettably, though, Obama’s election did not inspire the grand, sweeping
change for which many longed. While it is naïve to expect that the hip-hop
industry would adopt stylistic flourishes and lyrics that would make it entirely
unmarketable, it would seem that the election of a savvy, educated black leader
would at least have inspired black musicians to interrogate racial divides that had
been bolstered post-9/11 and the ratification of the USA PATRIOT Act. Given
that the omnipresent pressure of that act is (still) squashing civil liberties, rappers,
arguably, have far less freedom as artists now to express their dissatisfaction with
the US than they have at any point in the past. Historically, and particularly in
hip-hop’s infancy in the early and mid-1980s, hip-hop artists could explicitly
challenge key political figures because, quite simply, few people outside of the
African American community listened to hip-hop. Moreover, even fewer political
icons respected the genre.
That context stands in stark contrast to the contemporary one—a context in
which hip-hop is popular among white suburban youths due in large part to the
wide reach of MTV and other mainstream media outlets. In this era of media
saturation, rap and hip-hop artists are outed when they express countercultural
views. For proof, of course, we need not look any further than the outcry against
Kanye West when he uttered his famous statement that “George [W.] Bush doesn’t
care about black people” during NBC’s A Concert for Hurricane Relief fundraiser,
in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, on September 2, 2005. Clearly,
these musicians were no longer afforded the same privacy and protection they
experienced in insular venues like underground clubs and house parties. The
result, therefore, was that these artists—their rhymes and performances—have
come under a form of scrutiny that has allowed savvy politicians to capitalize on
the racial fears of middle-class white America—fears that the PATRIOT Act has
only worked to enhance.
As is so often the case, this political scrutiny is largely misguided, no matter
how much politicking might suggest otherwise. Jay-Z’s influential album The
Blueprint sold nearly half a million copies during the first week after its release.
The album also entered the Billboard charts at #1, all in spite of the fact that
The Blueprint was released on September 11, 2001, when virtually all business
on the east coast was halted by 9:03 a.m. when United Airlines 175 flew into
the South Tower of the World Trade Center. If nothing else, these sales figures
illustrate hip-hop’s broad appeal, suggesting that 9/11 has allowed mainstream
Americans to relate to the sentiments of anger and hopelessness, as well as the
fear of being attacked to which hip-hop speaks. On every September 11 Billboard
Hot 100 chart week since that fateful day in 2001, a hip-hop song has occupied the
112 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

number one spot every single year, not a patriotic one. Though Jay-Z eventually
released The Blueprint 3 during the week of September 11, 2009, a crass and
seemingly explicitly commercial move, he has been open about directing portions
of his overall profits to help families of fallen first responders. He also offers the
children of these victims free access to his shows, and he regularly hosts parties
and fundraisers on their behalf. He also wrote the song “Empire State of Mind,”
a testament to the post-9/11 resiliency of New York City. In plain terms, his
philanthropic work as a famous rap artist and US citizen has been more effective
than the very government that reserves the right to question his patriotism.
The expansive appeal of hip-hop also calls into question the narrative of
American victimization that has been reiterated annually since the September 11
attacks. For the most part, the public face of the 9/11 victims is a white Christian
one, a fact that the recent uproar about the Ground Zero Mosque has made clear.3
Many people of color have quite understandably viewed this portrayal as a form
of cultural whitewashing, as one 9/11 widow, Alissa Torres, has pointed out: “How
did ‘9/11 victim’ become sloppy shorthand for ‘white Christian’? I wish someone
would put out a list of all the ethnicities and religions and countries and economic
levels of the victims. For all the talk of ‘remembering 9/11,’ I wonder if we’ve
missed the patriotic message entirely” (quoted in Colmes).
Unfortunately, though, the literal destruction caused on that September 11 in
2001 simultaneously deconstructed the political import of hip-hop beyond rappers
like Jay-Z. As has been well documented, prior to 9/11, hip-hop addressed the
struggles of young African Americans in America’s inner cities. The subjects of
these narratives were not that familiar to white, middle-class America. For this
reason, hip-hop artists were viewed as relative experts who could accurately
describe and transcribe their own history in their own language. However, 9/11
was a day experienced by all of America; though its events occurred in specific
geographic areas, the attacks were on an unspecified demographic. Therefore,
hip-hop artists could not claim sole ownership of the pain associated with that
day. Moreover, whatever pain they endured prior to 9/11—and have continued
to endure since then—was not considered relevant to larger cultural narratives.
Furthermore, and ironically enough, it was considered insensitive by many to
dwell on individual struggles, even if those struggles involved daily threats from
gang violence and police brutality, when the entire nation was allegedly under
attack.
In this light, it is entirely fitting that one of the most popular rappers of the
post-9/11 era has been Eminem, a white rapper from the suburbs of Detroit.
According to Billboard’s Paul Grein, Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP (2000)
is the best-selling rap album of all time in the United States. Eminem’s rise to
fame, legitimized by repeated Grammy nominations and awards, is troubling not

3
  There was a Muslim prayer room on the seventeenth floor in the South Tower of
the World Trade Center—a fact that the outcries against building a mosque near Ground
Zero entirely overlook.
 Casualties of War 113

so much because he is a white rapper, but rather because his work exudes the
hyperbolic absurdity of so much contemporary rap music. Perpetually narrating
a Freudian psychodrama with his mother; fantasizing in song about killing his
ex-wife; endlessly describing drug use, in his lyrics and in interviews: all of these
carnivalesque subjects define Eminem’s career. Certainly, his songs are comic; but
they are also tragic—both in their solipsism and in their failure to turn personal
rage outward toward the equally tragic American political landscape. Though
Eminem did record the 2004 single “Mosh” ostensibly as a protest song against
George W. Bush, that one track represents a mere blip in an otherwise socially
unconscious career. Not to mention that the song appropriated its title from a style
of dance popular among white punk and hardcore fans—not from anything with
its roots in hip-hop culture.
If music as a whole (and hip-hop in particular) is to survive this new era, we
as consumers must persistently ask our composers for better material, hold them
accountable when they don’t deliver, and, if that is not enough, we must commit to
writing, owning, and distributing the very music we desire. In the current Diamond
Age of hip-hop, the entire genre will become irrelevant unless there is a massive
restructuring in terms of business dealings, ownership, marketing, and sound.
Essentially, it must revert back to the days when listeners, hip-hop enthusiasts,
drove demand, not multinational conglomerates. Artists like The Roots, Common,
Taleb Kweli, and Mos Def should have their stacks tapped for samples to bring
a new authenticity to hip-hop. Artists need to become owners of the medium, the
message, and most importantly, their masters of a new century. Only then will we
see a new consciousness in hip-hop, a cultural awakening.
Just as change is inevitable, popularity is cyclical. The 1990s saw a resurrection
of 1970s fashion and, similarly, the 1980s have made a comeback in the five years
leading up to 2011. Musical expression is no different. Just as The Digable Planets
brought forth a “Rebirth of Slick,” and Method Man and Mary J. Blige revamped
the Motown duet with “You’re All I Need/I’ll Be There For You,” bringing Marvin
Gaye and Tammi Terrell to a new generation, perhaps the Post-Post-9/11 and
Post-Obama Era will see that which I loved return unscathed, and a new wave
of MCs emerge and begin “Raising Hell” once again. It is possible, but in the
meantime I remain hopeful and nostalgic. My nostalgia can be weathered through
the songs stored on any number of electronic devices in my possession, it can
feed my creativity as a writer of music and literature, and it has allowed me as a
parent to expose my daughter to “my” music, the same way my parents exposed
me to theirs. I don’t think anyone can live without a bit of nostalgia; after all, it
reminds us of where we’ve been, where we are going, and, if we aren’t careful,
where we could have been and where we still could end up. Musically, it is how I
celebrate the life I live and the lives of those who have gone on, but have left an
amazing catalog of art and sounds to last me a lifetime. With that said, there comes
a time in the life span of any art form when becoming mainstream is a cause for
celebration, the gaining of wider recognition, massive visibility, and reward for
toiling in the fields of obscurity for so many years. Then there are times when the
114 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

realization that not only is your art, you life’s sweat and tears, owned by another,
so is your soul. When that bomb is thrown, it will be “the best indication that the
art is quickly losing its soul. Now is that time for hip-hop” (Kitwana).

Works Cited

Colmes, Alan. “9/11 Widow: ‘How Did “9/11 Victim” Become Shorthand for
“White Christian”’”? Liberaland. Sept. 8, 2010. Web. Feb. 1, 2011.
DMX. “Who We Be.” The Great Depression. Ruff Ryders/Def Jam Records,
2001. CD.
DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Bantam, 1989. Print.
Eric B. and Rakim. “Casualties of War.” Don’t Sweat the Technique. MCA
Records, 1992. CD.
Frazier, Walter. “Lupe Fiasco Drops Label Beef to Focus on ‘Lasers.’” Billboard.
com. Dec. 30, 2010. Web. Feb. 1, 2011.
Grein, Paul. “Week Ending Jan. 30, 2011: Good News & Bad News.” Billboard.
com. Feb. 2, 2011. Web. Feb. 23, 2011.
Kitwana, Bakari. “The End: Once a Voice of the Voiceless, Hip-Hop Stands to
Lose its Soul.” Newsday. Feb. 16, 2003: A30. Print.
Redding, Jr., Robert “Rob.” “Jay-Z says Obama Marks the Decline of the
‘Gangsta.’” Redding News Review. Apr. 26, 2009. Web. Feb. 1, 2011.
Sanneh, Kalefa. “Hip-Hop Divides: Those Who Rap, Those Who Don’t.” New
York Times. Dec. 22, 2002. Web. March 3, 2010.
 Chapter 9
That Was Now, This Is Then: Recycling
Sixties Style in Post-9/11 Music
Jeffrey Roessner

On their 1971 album A Space In Time, the blues-rock band Ten Years After
released what would become their biggest hit, a song called “I’d Love to Change
the World.” Including lines such as “Tax the rich, feed the poor / till there are
no rich no more” and the bluntly declarative “Them and us / stop the war,” the
song seems to take up the countercultural mantle of the sixties, protesting the
Vietnam War, social inequality, and “world pollution”—that is, unless we pay
close attention to the lyrics in the chorus. Opening with the line “I’d love to
change the world” (a sentiment that could have come directly from The Beatles’
“Revolution”), lead vocalist Alvin Lee continues, “But I don’t know what to do
/ So I’ll leave it up to you.” In two brief phrases, the song puts ironic quotation
marks around its brash lyrical posture, and abandons what initially seemed like
staunch political commitment. Changing the world is a dream, after all, or at least
a very difficult thing to achieve through a rock and roll song. Despite the fervent
ideals supposedly bequeathed by the sixties counterculture, the singer remains
uncertain “what to do.” I suggest that, in its ambiguity, “I’d Love to Change the
World” encapsulates a more accurate vision of the legacy of the sixties than many
music critics and listeners want to admit.
Indeed, as Alvin Lee’s song portends, the idealized politics of sixties music
casts a long shadow over current debates about the effects of musical protest. The
terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001 in particular
renewed questions about the political responsibility of artists and the corporations
that produce and distribute their music. Significantly, many critics have asked
why rock music failed to serve as a more widely shared and effective means of
protest after 9/11. Reebee Garofalo, for example, notes that the “dissent—and in
particular the antiwar protest music—that helped provide the basis for the national
debate on Vietnam was nowhere to be found on mainstream media during the
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq” (4). In such arguments, the premise quickly
becomes clear: rock musicians did write and record songs of protest, but they were
kept from effectively rallying dissenters because of both material constraints on
the distribution of their music and fear of the costs of resistance. But a troubling,
value-laden assumption lurks within this debate: the question really is why didn’t
recent music function more like that of the sixties, which galvanized the anti-
war movement and served as a platform for the civil rights debate? In order to
116 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

complicate this debate, I argue that the “resistance” in sixties rock was bound to
its cultural moment, and that attempts to apply it to contemporary music ignore the
complicated legacy of that decade’s music. In short, post-9/11 rock music has been
inaccurately read through the lens of an idealized vision of sixties politics—one
that both distorts our understanding of the past and blinds us to the contemporary
context reshaping the performance and reception of music.

Sing Out!

In limning the context of post-9/11 music, many theorists have focused on the
significant issue of political protest. After all, artists reflecting a broad range of
styles did produce songs with explicit political messages, especially as the “war
on terror” began in earnest with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The initial
anger and retaliatory sentiments of many musicians quickly gave way to bold
lyrical assaults on the leadership of America and its militarism. In an essay for the
Center for Political Song, Janis McNair offers a wide-ranging survey of protest
songs delivered in the wake of the terrorist attacks, including Ani DiFranco’s
indictment of George Bush and his policies in “Self Evident” (“we hold these
truths to be self-evident: #1: George W. Bush is not president / #2 America is
not a true democracy”); The Dope Poet Society’s “War of Terrorism,” which
identifies oil as the true cause for the conflict (“It’s not a war on terrorism it’s a
war of terrorism … America is killing for oil not for freedom”); and Steve Earle’s
“John Walker’s Blues,” written from the point of view of the young American
John Walker Lindh, who joined Afghanistan’s Taliban army. In the aftermath of
the attacks, artists were clearly offering a provocative and ongoing protest of what
they saw as the misjudgments, ineptitude, and hypocrisy of the US government.
However, despite the variety and volume of protest music during this period,
it generally was not heard on American radio. As explanation for this troubling
absence, music critics have typically described one major threat to free speech
and its lingering effects. Garofalo, for example, highlights a provision in the 1996
Telecommunications Act that opened the door for fewer and fewer corporations to
own an increasingly large share of the media market. He notes that, by the 1990s,
“fewer than twenty” corporations controlled most of the radio markets in the
country, and by the first decade of the new century Clear Channel had “acquired
more than 1,200 stations in the United States” and “controlled 65 percent of the
US concert business” (14). In a similar vein, describing Clear Channel’s vast
market share, Eric Klinenberg notes that the company’s “various holdings reach
roughly 154 million people, or 75% of the US population over the age of eighteen”
(62). To media watchdog groups, the sheer size and staggering power of radio
monopolies were cause enough for concern; however, the corporate response to
voices of dissent proved even more disturbing. Most infamously, in the immediate
wake of the terrorist attacks, Clear Channel circulated a list “containing more than
150 songs described as ‘lyrically questionable’” and asked that “programmers
 That Was Now, This Is Then 117

use ‘restraint’ when selecting songs for airplay” (Nuzum 151). The list included
everything from Metallica’s “Seek and Destroy” and Carole King’s “I Feel the
Earth Move” to John Lennon’s “Imagine” (Garofalo 15). The outrage at Clear
Channel’s list was magnified because the attempt to limit airplay was directed not
only at songs with ominous overtones, such as Steve Miller’s “Jet Airliner” and
the Dave Matthews Bands’ “Crash Into Me,” but also at seemingly benign works,
including Cat Stevens’ “Peace Train” (Nuzum 151). Garofalo contends that “Clear
Channel’s practices could only be read as further reducing the diversity of voices
in an era of already shrinking playlists” (16).
Eric Nuzum goes further, arguing that “while Clear Channel is quick to point out
that there was no explicit censorship connected with the list, it is a perfect example
of music censorship at its most implicit,” and he thus worries about careening
“down the slippery slope towards stifled free expression” (151). For critic Martin
Scherzinger, Clear Channel’s choices seem “motivated less by the content of the
lyrics than by the religious beliefs, antiwar stances, or political persuasions of the
musicians themselves” (96). So the “use restraint” list can be read as a form of
intimidation directed more at the artists themselves than any particular song, with
the effect of suppressing not only artistic expression of dissent, but also public
debate of these issues.
Although Garofalo, Nuzum, and Scherzinger offer compelling arguments
about the problem of corporate radio monopolies and the de facto censorship of
music, each unconvincingly grants enormous power to the companies that produce
and distribute music. Of course, it is troubling that Clear Channel owns so much of
the airwaves, and that its policies dictate what a large portion of the public hears
on a regular basis. Nonetheless, this perspective ignores the crucial question of
audience and what it wants to hear. In short, how long does a company survive if it
does not provide what a buying audience desires? We cannot simply argue that the
radio stations make us like what we in other circumstances would loathe, any more
than Kellogg could somehow force us to eat awful tasting breakfast cereal. In fact,
even as he worries about the chilling effect of censorship, Nuzum himself notes
that “anti-war music failed to ignite much interest among anti-war advocates at
even the most grass-roots level” (154). He simply concedes that very few people,
not even the anti-war demonstrators, wanted to hear protest music.
Moreover, granting corporate radio or the music industry itself so much power
has become even more problematic given the way technology has changed the
consumption of music, particularly since 2001. Post-9/11, many artists, including
the Beastie Boys, R.E.M., and Green Day, offered their anti-war songs as free
downloads online (McNair, Janis). So if a music-savvy and politically attuned
younger generation wanted to hear protest music, it was literally there for the
taking. To understand the politics of music after 9/11, then, we have to go beyond
blaming corporations for quashing dissent. Instead, we need to interrogate the
idealized view of sixties music that still holds sway for many critics, and explore
how that vision in fact hinders our understanding of rock music produced in the
wake of the 9/11 attacks.
118 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

Deliver Me from the Days of Old

Many cultural critics operate with an idealized notion of the politics of sixties
music, as though the airwaves then were flooded with protest songs. They were
not. If the argument is that media corporations stifled dissent after 9/11 because
they did not promote protest music, then we should apply the same standard to the
sixties. In doing so, what we quickly discover is that very few songs with explicit
political lyrics charted in those heady days. If we compile the names of songs from
the sixties with lyrics expressing resistance and protest, we arrive at a fairly short
list. And if we trim that roster to songs that received substantial airplay, then we
have, in fact, a minuscule list. It’s true that Peter, Paul and Mary made the charts
in 1963 with their cover of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and that Barry
McGuire had a #1 hit in 1965 with “Eve of Destruction.” But when we look at
a list of the most popular records in the sixties, protest music is virtually absent
(Weinstein 5).
In fact, the bands and musicians that now stand as emblems for the sixties
were strikingly apolitical in their lyrics. In the entire Beatles catalog, there is one
song—one song!—that even comes close to taking an explicit political stance:
“Revolution.” And John Lennon was so ambivalent about its content that the two
versions recorded by the band include slightly different lyrics: on the slower,
White Album version, he sings “When you talk about destruction / don’t you know
that you can count me out … in”; however, by the time the band recorded the
faster, electric version, he had decided that wanted to be counted “out,” a position
that he reiterated throughout his life (Lennon 197). Ultimately, The Beatles’ highly
qualified endorsement of revolution led to excoriation from the New Left, who felt
betrayed by their cultural heroes (Roessner 148–9). Other popular artists from the
era exhibit a similar lack of political commitment: The Rolling Stones offer up
“Street Fighting Man,” for example, but little else.
If there is any basis for the vision of sixties music as steeped in protest, then,
it is not in the chart hits of the decade, but in the folk protest tradition evident
in Bob Dylan’s early work. Drawing on the activist strain of his hero Woody
Guthrie, Dylan served up a string of songs with overt political implications in the
early sixties. Aside from “Blowin’ in the Wind,” he penned the anti-war anthems
“Masters of War” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and numerous tales of social
and racial oppression along the lines of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”
and “Only a Pawn in Their Game”—the latter about the murder of civil rights
activist Medgar Evers. However, although these songs admittedly helped solidify
Dylan’s folk-protest persona, they were generally not radio singles. And, more
significantly, as early as 1964, Bob Dylan expressed the desire to eschew overtly
political “finger-pointing songs,” opting instead to pursue his poetic, French-
symbolist-inspired brand of social commentary (Hentoff 65). And for every Dylan
song of protest, of course, there were hundreds of hits performed by bands that
had little interest in making a political statement. To take one prime example,
The Beach Boys—or “America’s band,” as they eventually became known—
 That Was Now, This Is Then 119

rarely ever came close to political engagement in their lyrics. Rather, with their
dense harmonies, unusual instrumentation, and recording studio experiments, they
represent the musical innovation that is as much associated with the sixties as any
form of political rebellion.
So what accounts for the lingering notion that protest music saturated
the airwaves and drove the debate surrounding the conflict in Vietnam? In
his consideration of advertising culture in the sixties, The Conquest of Cool,
Thomas Frank points toward an explanation of this potent narrative of rebellion.
Specifically, Frank argues that we have been bequeathed a countercultural
mythology in which the “unchanging and soulless machine” of capitalism is
pitted against a youthful rebellion that represents a “joyous and even a glorious
cultural flowering” (4–5). This narrative of sixties protest has become a seamless
part of our popular culture, to the point that sixties iconography serves as an
unquestioned sign of dissent. As Frank contends, “Commercial fantasies of
rebellion, liberation, and outright ‘revolution’ against the stultifying demands of
mass society are commonplace almost to the point of invisibility in advertising,
movies, and television programming” (4). But for Frank, this is not a simple tale
of co-optation, in which genuine rebellion is derailed by capitalists cynically using
images of dissent to sell products. Rather, he argues that the “counterculture may
be more accurately understood as a stage in the development of the American
middle class” (29). In short, the values of the counterculture and of advertising/
capitalism were intertwined from the beginning, and it is a mistake to imagine them
as polar opposites. As Peter Doggett argues, both The Beatles’ “Revolution” and
The Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” were “the products of multi-national
corporations, whose activities ranged from broadcasting to the manufacture of
weapons” (220). He goes on to note that, by 1968, Columbia Records had begun
its infamous “But the Man Can’t Bust Our Music” campaign, as the company
explicitly tried to identify itself with countercultural revolutionaries (220). Despite
these inherent contradictions, however, the countercultural mythology persists in
a seemingly endless media loop fueled, ironically, by the corporate advertising
culture that was allegedly part of the problem.
Disseminated through commercial fantasies of resistance, the subversive aura
of sixties rock is also supported by the highly charged political context of the era,
which gave meaning to the music, rather than the other way around. Think of any
documentary footage you can about Vietnam, the civil rights movement, or the
assassination of John or Bobby Kennedy: these images almost immediately call
to mind the soundtrack of sixties music that assuredly accompanies them. The
images have been so closely linked to the music that listeners are led to ascribe
a political charge to the music—even when it is utterly absent. Moreover, many
contend that the lyrics of rock music in the sixties were beside the point: the
politics resided in the sound of the music itself, which was brash, impudent and
signaled a clear rejection of inherited values (Altschuler 107–108). The music
was the aural equivalent of the famous dictum not to trust anyone over thirty:
those were the adults who had driven the country to war in Vietnam, who had
120 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

turned a blind eye to overt racism and sexism, and who treated the young with
patronizing contempt. In short, the music provided a jolting, sonic shot across the
bow, delivering the message that times had changed (Gitlin 41–2). From this point
of view, the lyrics to The Beatles’ “Revolution” may have been conflicted, but the
distorted, slashing guitar intro accompanied by Lennon’s shriek of primal rage
delivered an unmistakable paean to revolt.
This argument about sonic rebellion has in fact been borne out by studies that
suggest how wide the cultural rift between generations was in the sixties. It’s
worth reminding ourselves that most adults in the sixties did not like rock music
or conceive of it as part of their culture: a study in 1966 indicated that a full 44
percent of adults positively disliked rock music, while a mere 4 percent identified
it as their favorite genre (Taylor and Morin). So the feedback-laden guitar of Jimi
Hendrix in his performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock, for
example, was a politically charged sound wave with racial and countercultural
overtones that could quite clearly be heard, both by young people who looked to
him as heralding the future and by their disapproving parents.
But in the post-9/11 American soundscape, rock does not, prima facie, signify
rebellion or a generational divide. As a recent Pew study makes clear, while rock
was quite unpopular with adults in the sixties, currently a stunning 75 percent of
those over age sixteen responded that they listen to rock often or sometimes; in
fact, rock is the number one genre of music for every age category except those
over the age of sixty-five (Taylor and Morin). So while boomers cranked the
stereo in defiance of adult authority and hypocrisy, today’s youth cannot easily
deliver the same sonic message to their elders: “Don’t trust anyone over sixty-
five” hardly seems a radical sentiment. Moreover, as we have moved to inhabit
a culture fully saturated with rock and the corporatized mythology of rebellion,
the shift in musical taste has been accompanied by a corresponding shift in
values. Astonishingly, young people today actually defer to rather than castigate
their elders when it comes to morals: while only “about a quarter of the public
(26%) says there is strong conflict in society today between the young and old,”
over two-thirds of those under age thirty believe that older adults have a stronger
work ethic, a stronger sense of morality, and more respect for others (Taylor and
Morin). Indeed, “Hope I die before I get old” has lost its taunting edge as rockers
themselves have aged and their music has become the soundtrack of our everyday
lives.
The shift toward the acceptance of rock has irrevocably redefined the genre’s
meaning as a cultural signifier. As an aside in the Pew study, authors Paul Taylor
and Richard Morin note the irony that “while the music has largely stayed the
same, its generational and cultural context has flipped. For boomers, rock was
rebellion. For their children, it’s mainstream” (Taylor and Morin). The Pew study
emphasizes what should be evident to music critics: rock is part of living history.
As such, its rhythm, its timbre, and its volume cannot simply be assigned a static
and unchanging meaning based on past associations. Rather, the context of its
present reception and distribution helps determine how it is consumed, who buys
 That Was Now, This Is Then 121

it, where and how it’s listened to, and what role it plays in public social spaces.
The fact that both Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones have performed NFL
Super Bowl half-time shows in the five years before 2011, for example, indicates
how far the culture has come from the sixties, when so many adults actively
disliked the music. Now it routinely serves the soundtrack for one of the largest
rituals in American popular culture: who could watch these shows and imagine
that the artists are somehow staging rebellion? In such arenas, we chart what
Thomas Frank described as “bohemian cultural style’s trajectory from adversarial
to hegemonic” (8). From Frank’s perspective, the aging hippies didn’t simply
abandon the revolution; rather, their countercultural style became dominant as “the
way American capitalism understood itself and explained itself to the public” (26).
In short, the bohemians won the cultural revolution, but in victory their style—
particularly the distinctive signature of sixties music – lost much of its formerly
radical political and social valence.

Teenage Symphonies to God

Given that rock has become the favorite genre for most people, it’s not surprising
that many contemporary artists have turned to the sixties for inspiration. Indeed,
the Pew study indicates that The Beatles are popular across a wide swath of the
culture, landing among the top four most popular artists for every age group
studied (Taylor and Morin). And of course rock bands have consistently flaunted
their indebtedness to their sixties heroes well before 9/11. Examples include
everything from R.E.M.’s covers of Velvet Underground tunes to Oasis’ collage
of Beatles’ ephemera to the multitude of tribute albums devoted to bands such as
The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, and The Who. But the particular adaptation of
sixties style after the 9/11 terrorist attacks bears special attention in this context.
Contemporary rock artists do continue to draw heavily on the stylistic innovations
of their sixties forebears, and in this sense share with many critics a deep nostalgia
for the era. What recent artists don’t generally seem to do, however, is see protest
as an integral part of what they have inherited.
Indeed, if the legacy of sixties protest were to appear in recent music, we might
well expect to see it in bands who came of age in the wake of the terrorist attacks
and whose music is richly evocative of the earlier generation. Two illustrative
contemporary examples are Grizzly Bear and Fleet Foxes. More so than many
of their peers, these bands ground their aesthetics in the folk genre (with its rich
link to the protest tradition), while also exhibiting the signature harmonic and
studio experimentation of earlier artists. The members of Grizzly Bear all attended
New York University, and the band released its first recording, Horn of Plenty,
in 2004 (Goodman). Their West Coast peers Fleet Foxes debuted as a band in
2006, and released their initial effort, the Sun Giant EP, in 2008, when main
songwriter and singer Robin Pecknold was twenty-two years old (McNair, James).
Along with reaching maturity in the age of terrorism, both bands—although not
122 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

remarkably similar in their sound—share the distinctive influence of sixties music.

In particular, Grizzly Bear was tagged with the label “freak-folk” in their early
days (Bemis). As for Fleet Foxes, Pecknold tells stories of family sing-a-longs to
Crosby, Stills, and Nash tunes, and claims, “I was obsessed with Dylan … The
first song I learned was ‘The Times They are A-Changin’’” (Scaggs; Simmons
86). With such a pedigree, Pecknold in particular might be expected to take up the
finger-pointing cause.
Ultimately, though, Grizzly Bear and Fleet Foxes share a debt to another,
decidedly apolitical strain of sixties rock music: both bands reflect the formative
influence of Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys; in fact, they are frequently linked
to the genre of chamber pop, the heir to the baroque pop of such sixties luminaries
as Phil Spector and Brian Wilson (Gendron 172). As producers, Spector and
Wilson helped widen the palette of rock by employing classical instrumentation
and emphasizing complex choral rather than solo vocals. With its venerable
heritage, baroque pop has long fascinated aspiring rock musicians, and chamber
pop itself can be traced back at least to the mid-1990s and artists such as Sufjan
Stevens and Eric Matthews. But it wasn’t until the first decade of the twenty-first
century that the choral vocal style came to prominence and Fleet Foxes arrived at
commercial success (Frere-Jones).
Of the two bands, Grizzly Bear reflects a more pronounced indebtedness to Brian
Wilson, and their musical style is anything but community-minded or politically
engaged. The songs echo with reverb, and often sound as if you are overhearing
a piano played in a distant room or inhabiting a house that is musically haunted.
The effect is the opposite of clarity or an obsession with fidelity. Indeed, the music
often features “found sounds,” instruments that do not sound like themselves, or
ones that are paired in unexpected ways – all tactics famously explored by Wilson
on Pet Sounds (Lambert 3). Moreover, Grizzly Bear seems to have taken vocal
cues from the complex fugato style of Wilson’s arrangements, in which multiple,
independent melodic lines are successively introduced and interwoven (Lambert
19). In short, the songs are not rousing or rebellious, but complex, layered, and
multivalent.
Given the dream-like quality of much of this music, it is no surprise that
the lyrics, too, downplay communal feeling, instead offering brief meditations
on isolation and introversion. Edward Droste’s home recording project—which
became the first Grizzly Bear record, Horn of Plenty—opens with the song “Deep
Sea Diver” and an image of submersion: “I’m a deep sea diver with my fins / and
underneath your current I do swim”; driving home a sense of disconnection, the
final lines refer to “losing air” and “sad swimming” while the object of affection
simply doesn’t care. As he calls up images of suffocation and loss, Droste distills
Brian Wilson’s self-consciousness to its essence, and seems to drown in the waters
that The Beach Boys once surfed. Although the lyrics Wilson set to his music
often exhibited introspection and longing (“Caroline, No,” “I Just Wasn’t Made
for These Times,” or even “In My Room”), the singer never seriously voices
defeat, even if he at times feels dejected, and for listeners there is always the
 That Was Now, This Is Then 123

promise of a rousing chorus on the next track. In contrast, Grizzly Bear revels
in tentative, desolate moods that hang like thick fog, and which are underscored
by lyrics that have so far been sparse in the extreme. On their first full-length
recording as a proper band, Yellow House, the singers deliver a total of 624 words,
with the longest song, “Marla,” offering 148 words and the shortest, “Colorado,”
featuring a mere twenty-two. Here self-expression fails to console, as language
remains minimal, fragmentary, and suspect.
So what can we make of Grizzly Bear’s oddly enchanting but disconsolate
music as a response to the post-9/11 world? The band seems less interested in
offering a lyrical message than in establishing a musical mood and enhancing it
with brief, suggestive phrases. This spare tone is enhanced by the lack of verbal
coherence, reflected in the jarring syntax of the lines. The first track on Yellow
House, “Easier,” includes the lyrics “I know, I know, the doors won’t close, the
pipes all froze, just let it go. Argue with me.” The disjunctive grammatical structure
and frequent parataxis open spaces in meaning, akin to the spaces separating the
people who inhabit this relationship. And the songs themselves are generally
offered as shards, blending into one another, with fragmented lyrics that confirm
a shattered sense of personal identity. On Yellow House, the lyrics are presented
underneath the disc in the jewel case, run together without titles or line breaks.
If Grizzly Bear’s music can be read as a response to the post-9/11 world, then, it
does not function as a call to protest or urge us to adopt a strident pose in the face
of assault; rather, the band offers an evocative, harmonically dense dissection of
anguish, self-doubt, and loss.
In a similar vein, Fleet Foxes eschew activism, though they don’t escape
the present so much by looking inward as by looking backward. The melodic
inventiveness of The Beach Boys stands out as a primary influence on their music,
too, but the vocal interplay of The Band and the folk melodicism of Fairport
Convention loom large as well. Fleet Foxes open the breakthrough EP Sun Giant
with the largely a cappella tune “Sun Giant,” which only briefly introduces a
plinking mandolin after the singing has ended. Their first full-length offering,
Fleet Foxes, opens in a similar vein, with an a cappella verse of “Sun it Rises,”
before breaking into characteristic acoustic strumming and lilting, bell-like guitar
lines. With little sign of strident posturing from the male lead vocalist, the records
feature harmonized vocals often awash in reverb. The intricate choral arrangements
underscore the sense of this music as a hearkening back.
The timeless feel of Fleet Foxes’ music is also reflected in the archaic language
and subjects of their lyrics, which helped establish the band’s popularity. The very
song titles, such as “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song,” “White Winter Hymnal,” and
“Sun it Rises” (with its poetic inversion), suggest a bygone era. And, throughout,
the themes invariably wind their way to a celebration of the natural world. In
“Blue Ridge Mountains,” for example, the singer invites his brother to “drive
to the countryside / leave behind some green-eyed look-alikes” so that “no one
gets worried, no.” And in “Meadowlarks,” you’re assured of the meadowlark
“singing to you each and every day.” The closest approximation to this style in
124 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

the sixties might be The Beatles’ “Mother Nature’s Son.” With their shimmering
vocal texture and assurance of finding solace in nature, Fleet Foxes achieved some
measure of popular and critical success: Fleet Foxes, for example, was selected by
Mojo readers as the best album of 2008 and wound up on many critics’ best-of-the-
year lists as well (Simmons 80; Clayton). Such success indicates that their music
expresses a sentiment or evokes a mood that is shared.
But the communal feeling does not incite action or express a common political
vision. In this sense, Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear help us chart the evolution
of folk music away from hard-line social activism. For many, folk music of the
late fifties and early sixties signified communal resistance, with the singer as
the mouthpiece exposing political corruption and highlighting social ills. The
music thus functioned as a social conscience, often supported by a rigid morality,
and it offered a clarion call to awakening. Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are
a-Changin’” encapsulates the general tenor of folk poetics in this tradition, as it
puts conservative and morally stunted adversaries on notice that they had better
get out of the way if they “can’t lend a hand” in remaking the culture. Although
Grizzly Bear and Fleet Foxes adopt some of the stylistic markers of the tradition—
hence the label freak folk—they reject the very element that made it explicitly
political: its finger-pointing morality. In this sense, the bands are as heretical as
Dylan, the infamous turncoat who abandoned folk and picked up an electric guitar.
In the brooding introspection of Grizzly Bear and the poignant lyricism of
Fleet Foxes, we hear the search for solace in the face of loss and the attempt to
recover of a sense of enduring, mystical beauty. From a literary standpoint, such
themes are essentially Romantic. In setting such longing to music, both bands
do adapt a variety of styles associated with the sixties and situate themselves as
prodigal heirs to the folk tradition that they have proceeded to reimagine. But as a
response to the chaos and threat of the post-9/11 era, their music reminds us that,
for contemporary artists, the sixties represent far more than protest and rebellion.
Startling musical inventiveness, studio experimentation, dense harmonic layering,
and the general quest for individual identity in an indifferent cultural landscape,
these markers of sixties style fire the imagination of younger musicians much
more than the protest themes of topical songs.

The Future of the Sixties

Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear, of course, do not represent the only way that sixties
musical styles have been adapted in current music. And I am not suggesting
that all rock lyrics and music have become apolitical. As was made clear above,
much music of protest was released in the first decade of the twenty-first century,
particularly as the invasion of Iraq stalled and President Bush’s popularity sank
to a remarkable low. But Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear do represent the complex
legacy of the sixties in their adaptation of earlier musical styles. Along with many
other rock bands in the post-9/11 world, they did not give the political response
 That Was Now, This Is Then 125

that critics may have hoped for. Indeed, the most prevalent wish of those seeking
political meaning in rock music is that it retain (or recover) a sense of community
that it supposedly solidified in the sixties. It’s telling, for example, that Ray Pratt
opens his book Rhythm and Resistance with an evocation of the soundtrack to
Oliver Stone’s Vietnam film Platoon juxtaposed with an account of a 1985 concert
by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band; in the book, Pratt goes on to explore
this music as “significant and deeply moving examples of mass popular culture
consumed and experienced by millions of people that may, some say, function
simultaneously as a national and perhaps even international language” (2). This
desire to read music as a “national language” suggests how deeply we want to
believe that the music so many find personally meaningful must have a larger
political effect. And the Platoon example—wed as it is to the sixties—underscores
the search not just for communal meaning, but for the supposed political activism
of an earlier age.
The problem is that sixties music presents anything but a coherent message
when it comes to political action. Contrary to the image handed down to us,
protest music was not a pervasive or popular genre then. And the more general
rebelliousness expressed through rock was directed at a specific target: the adult
authority of that era. Furthermore, the model of communal engagement called
upon by recent critics seems strikingly out of key with much of the music
produced in the wake of 9/11. In bands seemingly well positioned to wake up the
echoes of sixties protest, we hear the homage to past styles, but not the dream of
community. In short, the music offers not a feeling of empowerment or solidarity,
but confusion and a growing sense of isolation and introversion, which makes
a unified, politicized community increasingly hard to imagine. Moreover, the
dream of collective action is difficult for contemporary music to inspire given the
increasing fragmentation of audiences. As music critic Elijah Wald hyperbolically
states, “For the first time in history, nobody has the faintest idea of who is listening
to what” (Wald). For contemporary music, there is no simple equivalent to the
record sales charts of days past. While sales figures can certainly tell you how
many listeners are snapping up the latest Justin Timberlake offering, they are
especially awful at indicating the distribution of independent artists. For those
deeply invested in music as a reflection of their identity, listening and trading
largely happens underground, electronically and illegally. Only in high-profile
file-sharing lawsuits do you get a sense of the enormity of the problem, or how
difficult it is to track listening habits.
If for many contemporary artists the legacy of the sixties is not protest, and the
very idea of a community of listeners has been challenged by fragmented audiences,
what might be the enduring legacy of that decade? One tentative answer comes
from John Lennon (who, incidentally, only turned to consistent political activism
through his music in the early 1970s, after the break-up of The Beatles). In his
song “God,” Lennon alerted us that “the dream is over,” meaning the dream of
The Beatles, gurus, hippies, Dylan, or any other supposed savior. In this context, I
read the “dream” as a belief in the value of countercultural protest for its own sake.
126 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

In other words, Lennon recognized that style is not political substance. Wearing
your hair long, or appropriating the folky stylings of early Bob Dylan, or stepping
on your distortion pedal has no inherent political valence. To think otherwise is
to succumb to a nostalgia that, in fact, distorts history. Through his own political
commitments, Lennon demonstrates that such nostalgia obscures a clear-sighted
engagement with the present. Consequently, Lennon’s ever-vigilant attempt to
wake up to the present moment—that might be the most valuable legacy of the
sixties.
 That Was Now, This Is Then 127

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Ten Years After. “I’d Love to Change the World.” A Space in Time. Chrysalis,
1971. CD.
Wald, Elijah. Interview with Laura Fitzpatrick. Time. June 24, 2009. Web. Oct.
22, 2009.
Weinstein, Deena. “Rock Protest Songs: So Many and So Few.” The Resisting
Muse: Popular Music and Social Protest. Ed. Ian Peddie. Burlington, VA:
Ashgate. 3–16. Print.
 Chapter 10
A New Morning in Amerika: Conservative
Politics and Punk Rock in the 2000s
Matthew Siblo

Considering the profound impact of September 11, 2001 and subsequent military
efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan had on American culture, the reaction from the
punk community was cautious, if not muted. It was not until the beginning of the
2004 presidential election cycle where musical protestation, be it from punk artists
or otherwise, became increasingly pronounced. At that point, President George W.
Bush’s approval ratings were dropping, particularly regarding his handling of war,
ultimately dipping below 50 percent (Arak). The outsized presence of musicians
during the election was “notable for both the unprecedented amount of direct
political action and activity occurring within popular culture during the campaign
and the interactions that took place between the formal campaign and these various
cultural venues and actors” (Jones 196). Political engagement occurred on a large
scale with MoveOn.org’s Vote for Change tour featuring Bruce Springsteen and
Pearl Jam, along with genre-tailored outreach focused on youth-centric musical
niches. Music for America collaborated with indie rock bands like Death Cab for
Cutie and Modest Mouse, while Punk Voter mobilized the punk audience, a group
traditionally resistant to large-scale advocacy (Ventre).
Punk Voter was the brainchild of ‘Fat’ Mike Burkett of the popular punk
band NOFX—and partially funded by Silicon Valley mogul Andy Rappaport—
who intended to “build a coalition of kids 18 to 25” including “punks and other
disenfranchised young people to vote as a bloc, which no one has ever done before”
to defeat President Bush (Garofoli; Wiederhorn). Punk Voter’s Rock Against Bush
campaign was all encompassing, featuring nationwide tours and two successful
compilations on his record label Fat Wreck Chords, which reportedly sold over
650,000 copies, the proceeds subsidizing billboards in northern swing states and
full-color ads in US Magazine (Pedersen; Wiederhorn). At the peak of its popularity,
Punkvoter.com received 15 million hits a month and helped raise more than one
million dollars, as Burkett entertained the organization becoming “a lobby group
like the AARP or the NRA” (Garofoli; Winter 7). Given their historically anti-
authoritarian leanings, punk musicians rallying against the Bush administration
was not surprising; Punk Voter’s engagement with mainstream political activism
was more remarkable, especially from Burkett, whose band’s pointed anti-MTV
stance made him an unconventional spokesperson alongside popular left-leaning
musicians such as Springsteen and Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder. Thus, the group had
130 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

its critics. Though the press provided ample, largely positive coverage to Punk
Voter, singer Stephan Smith-Said wrote in an editorial for The Progressive that
MTV initially declined to cover the Rock Against Bush campaign, claiming it was
“not relevant” (Smith-Said). Propagandhi, a politically outspoken Canadian punk
band signed with Burkett’s label, requested that its contribution to the first Rock
Against Bush compilation include the statement “this message was not brought
to you by George Soros” in the liner notes (Aubin). The comment was a swipe at
the controversial billionaire who donated heavily to progressive causes but had a
long-standing history with the controversial Carlyle Group. Burkett, skittish about
alienating partnering groups who received funding from Soros, asked that the band
be placed on the second Rock Against Bush album, where the note would receive
less immediate attention. They declined (Aubin). The reticence by Propagandhi to
make this concession also occurred within Washington, DC punk activist group
Positive Force, some members feeling like supporting Punk Voter meant acting as
a spokesperson for mainstream politicians (Andersen and Jenkins 412).
The criticism stemmed from Punk Voter’s collaboration with an unusual ally:
the Democratic Party. In an interview with Greg Winter of CMJ, Burkett said his
goal for Punk Voter was to register 500,000 young people, an idea that came from
NOFX’s playing a show in Florida shortly after the controversial result of the 2000
presidential election (Winter 6). He felt like it had become his “civic duty” to use
his influence since it could have helped alter the outcome. Burkett, who famously
refused to do interviews with his band, was a guest on nationally syndicated
talk shows and attended Democratic National Committee meetings, even sitting
down with the Democratic nominee himself, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts
(Garofoli).
In the wake of Punk Voter’s widespread visibility and, for some, disagreeable
alliances, “conservative punk” emerged as an ideological counterpoint within the
hyper-partisan and deeply divisive political landscape. Conservativepunk.com and
others like it found their way into the BBC, The New York Times, USA Today, and
The Washington Post, vocalizing its disdain for Punk Voter’s codified view of punk
politics. The coverage of these websites focused on the seemingly paradoxical
impulse of punk fans and musicians aligning themselves with conservative politics,
a development leading to great consternation among punk’s most ardent and vocal
followers. But how novel is this combination? Time has shown the conservative
punk movement of 2004 to be little more than a countercultural Potemkin. At the
time of writing, nearly six years later, the movement is nearly invisible, and the
clandestine majority purported by its founders revealed itself to be nonexistent.
But why couldn’t conservative politics be understood within the traditionally
rebellious youth culture, given its tendency to perseverate on the glories of the
past? Were conservative punks distilling its movement’s initial spirit by bucking
convention, or do these political associations somehow betray punk’s fundamental
principles of independence and disobedience?
 A New Morning in Amerika 131

A Riot of Their Own

Andrew Wilkow was instrumental in making conservative punk a reality through

his New York talk radio show. He explains:

The idea of conservative punk was born on the air when I said that I can’t be
the only one who likes punk rock and conservatism. Let’s create something for
young people to let them know they’re not alone. Their favorite bands were
telling them that they couldn’t think this way. The first time I went to a punk
show, it was about energy and music. Who are you to tell me this genre of music
has a cemented political leaning?

In his tome “Punk Rock, Diversity, and the Gonzo Conservatives,” Dave Smalley,
Conservativepunk.com columnist and member of seminal punk bands Dag
Nasty and Down by Law, articulates the contradiction of a regimented political
belief system within punk. Chiding those claiming to promote an open-minded
atmosphere while reinforcing ideological absolutism, his principles of so-
called gonzo-conservativism described those “punk rockers who believe in the
government staying as small as possible, keeping taxes low and acting when
necessary to defend the country” (Smalley). Smalley’s vision comes closer to the
individual freedoms promised under libertarianism—which are similarly fetishized
within punk—rather than traditional conservative principles, particularly since
many identifying as conservative punk shied away from the hot-button social and
cultural issues that dominated much of the Bush reelection campaign.
Like Punk Voter, those involved with conservative punk did not receive direct
funding from any political party, but its goals were far narrower. Whereas Burkett
regularly met with politicians and political action committees, the conservative
punk movement, if it can be described as such, was a loosely assembled group of
fans intent on obtaining visibility. Here, conservative-minded punks appropriate
the idea that “there exists in the electorate a hidden conservative majority; that the
social division with the greatest political significance is not that between the ‘haves’
and ‘have nots’ but between the liberal elite and everyone else” (Kirkpatrick 103).
Most of Conservativepunk.com’s media coverage, fielded by founder Nick Rizzuto
and Wilkow, reiterate that very point: We are not alone (St. John). Rizzuto hoped
to “discredit the stereotype that aligns punk voters with liberalism by informing
young people of more conservative ideals through punk music,” a forum “more
welcoming to conservatives” (Shea and Green 189). In an interview with Dorian
Lynskey for The Guardian, Rizzuto referred to himself as a “fearless voice of a
silent majority” and claimed support from anonymous musicians he did not feel
comfortable mentioning, “especially in a European newspaper” (Lynskey).
Speaking with Dave Segal of The Washington Post, Rizzuto claimed that
Conservativepunk.com received over one million visits as of October 2004,
though he admitted much of the attention stemmed from the “freak factor” of his
beliefs and that half of the emails he received from the site were “hostile” (Segal).
132 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

Borrowing the phrasing of the controversial ban on gays in the American military,
Rizzuto claimed that before the existence of his site “it was almost don’t-ask,
don’t-tell (in the punk scene). If you were conservative or libertarian and not a
bleeding-heart liberal, you almost felt like a bit of an outcast” (Ross). As well as
Wilkow and Rizzuto, former Misfits lead singer Michael Graves spoke on behalf
of Conservativepunk.com, which according to Rizzuto, resulted in the cancellation
of Graves’ European tour after a promoter read about his right-leaning views in
The New York Times (Lynskey). In an essay published on Conservativepunk.com,
Graves wrote that the punk political left “seem to indulge themselves in voguish
conspiracy-mongering and an increasing belief that they are persecuted from all
directions” (Graves). Echoing Rizzuto’s post-9/11 political awakening detailed in
The Washington Post, Graves goes on to say:

Rebellion against the center of society and its politics is nothing new to punk
rock. The stakes, however, have become much higher … what happened on
September 11, 2001 forever changed the dynamic of not only our country, but
our lives, and if not paid proper attention to, the politics and anti-politics of
the young will become more and more dangerous to everyone and everything.
(Graves)

Like others on the right, Graves utilized the lingering anxieties of the 9/11 attacks
to propose a life-threatening ultimatum: it is our way or impending catastrophe.
The events of September 11, 2001, providing the very real threat of terrorism,
changed the familiar script of the culture wars. Flipping the narrative, Republicans
controlled all levels of Congress until 2006 by perpetuating an underdog mentality
that capitalized on persecution from “the other” (Tiefer 234). This allowed for
an ideological upper hand (pro-American, us vs. them), where they maintained
control by positioning themselves as besieged by threats, both authentic and
imagined. Identifying as the minority against them (defined as the terrorists,
the non-patriotic), the right was given the platform of persecution from outside
sources while retaining dominance. Though the political circumstances were
largely different, this mentality resembled the neo-conservative movement of the
1990s, in which politicians tapped into the frustration and anger of an encroaching
threat to middle-class values while upholding the advantages afforded to them
through gender, socioeconomic status, and education.
Punk rock and conservative politics overlap in their branding of outsider status
to the decidedly privileged worldview of the white middle-class male, a profile
that makes up a majority of those who now consider themselves punk (O’Hara
40). Punk rock conservatives in 2004, fashioning themselves as a minority within
both their own liberal subculture and society at large, are afforded the self-
identity of the ultimate outsiders while enjoying the insider benefits of the social
and political majority. For conservative punks, their marginalized status derives
from a principled stance against subcultural conformity, defying the hegemony
of Punk Voter’s liberalism. According to them, the result of their convictions—
 A New Morning in Amerika 133

cancelled tours, supporters too scared to reveal themselves—was irrefutable proof

of persecution and justifiable righteousness. Prioritizing their rebellion against
the punk community’s ideological expectations diffuses the contradictions that
emerge from an alignment with conventional authority.
Given Burkett’s claim that “the punk scene is very united. We’re gonna get
every punk-rock band together, and I think we can take over the country and
change the world,” categorizing oneself as a conservative punk, and supporting the
policies of the President of the United States, can be seen as daring (Wiederhorn).
When punk conservative Johnny Ramone thanked George W. Bush on stage at
The Ramones induction to The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002—itself a
conservative enterprise—it might have been the most audacious gesture he could
make (Fowler). Furthermore, Rolling Stone’s Anthony DeCurtis told the BBC, “In
a lot of ways in the United States, the Republicans have gotten much more punk
rock than the Democrats. The right has become more punk than the left: they’re
much more pugnacious, much more aggressive and much more forceful about
putting out their ideas and drawing a line in the sand” (Fowler). Yet, considering
the paucity of artists actively supporting the conservative punk movement,
DeCurtis’ assessment was more theoretical than prophetic. In Liz Worth’s profile
on conservative punk for the zine Punk Planet, the previously unknown Atilla and
the Huns is the only band interviewed to identify with the label. Though not nearly
visible as Rock Against Bush, Crush Kerry: A Conservative Punk Compilation
was released in September 2004 on the now defunct American Streak Records.
It featured two songs by The Undead, a new project from Bobby Steele of The
Misfits, otherwise compromised little-known but colorfully named bands like The
FlipFloppers, and Smart Bombs and Apple Pie. Yet, even if the few conservative-
leaning punk bands failed to match the cadre of Punk Voter’s anti-Bush allies,
punk’s intersection with right-leaning politics is far more complicated than
Rizzuto and his cohorts let on.

A Conservative History of Punk Rock

One well-known example is The Ramones’ Johnny Ramone. A staunch

conservative, he did not believe the band should incorporate political issues into
their music, preferring that it be “fun and entertaining” (Melnick and Meyer 163).
This led to a spat with Joey and Dee Dee Ramone over the lyrics on “Bonzo
Goes to Bitburg,” a song decrying Ronald Reagan’s controversial trip to Germany
in 1985, where he attended a wreath-laying ceremony for forty-nine SS troops
(Weinraub). The title was eventually reduced to a parenthetical phrase on the 1986
album Animal Boy, since Johnny considered Reagan “the best president of our
lifetime” (Gillespie and Doherty). The proliferation of hardcore—punk’s harder,
punchier offshoot—in the 1980s resonated with a largely white, working-class
audience, and the politics of its most popular bands—Fear, Murphy’s Law, and
The Cro-Mags—had a semblance of right-wing rhetoric. New York hardcore band
134 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

Agnostic Front’s song “Public Assistance,” written by Peter Steele, who went on
to front metal band Type O Negative, is explicit in its mistrust of immigrant groups
and social programs by lambasting the “crying minorities” who receive subsidized
abortions but should be “cleaning the sewers” (Blush 192).
Ideologically, antipathy toward governmental intrusion is a unifying thread
between punks and conservatives, both groups balking at the imposing reach of
federal authority. Worth argues that this resentment and the importance of “thinking
for one’s self” is common ground between the two, but remained skeptical whether
both could peacefully co-exist (70). Fueled by the economic inopportunity in the
UK during the late 1970s, punk’s vitriol stemmed from diminished expectations
and resentment toward immigrant populations, with whom many young people
had to compete with for work. In the UK, “Pakis” (a derogatory term for Pakistanis
and other South Asians) were often targets. The far-right group the National Front,
to cite just one example, made use of this resentment to gain credibility in the
burgeoning punk culture (Barker and Taylor 270). Mark Anderson of Positive
Force believes:

There’s a conservative aspect present through punk’s various movements but it’s
always clearly the minority. Someone like Ian Stewart of Skrewdriver quickly
moved his band in a very hard right direction in the early 1980s. He found an
audience within parts of the English working class where more right wing politics
flourished. A band like Sham 69, who was not in that scene necessarily, had their
gigs interrupted by skinheads. Is skinhead punk? It is certainly identified with it
but it’s not the dominant strain.

Straight edge became its own distinct punk-related subculture in the 1980s,
taking its inspiration from a song of the same name by Washington, DC hardcore
band Minor Threat. Straight edge was a popular musical movement advocating
temperance, where “participants develop [sic] personal identities grounded in an
ascetic lifestyle of not doing drugs and not engaging in promiscuous sex,” partly
developed in response to the self-destructive impulses of early punk (Williams
176). Those classifying themselves as straight edge—mostly white, middle-
class males aged fifteen to twenty-five—cultivated a complex subcultural code
comprising both lifestyle and musical genre, with the rules of both seen as dogma:
There are no exceptions and membership must be consistently reinforced for life
(Haenfler 409).
At different points in its complicated history, straight edge has had pockets
of followers who expanded it to include militant animal-rights activism, devout
Christianity and Hare Krishna, but rarely traditional political perspectives. While
straight edge often dovetails with punk’s fierce individualistic mindset, the
perceived homogenization of its music and participants has made it an easy target
for criticism in light of punk’s aspirations toward open-mindedness. Ian MacKaye,
the influential singer of Minor Threat and Fugazi, has since distanced himself from
the movement:
 A New Morning in Amerika 135

A lot of the people who really sign on with straight edge, or even hardcore, are
really conservative. They are essentially the same as greasers, guys who still
want to look like Elvis. We’re talking about people who are saying “this is the
way it should be done.” They may have felt that within their context, within
punk rock, they were being reactionary, but they are essentially lining up with
the whole of America, or at least a significant part of it.

He finds the injection of conservative politics into punk unsurprising:

Personally, I thought you’d see it sooner because someone like Johnny Ramone
was conservative since day one. But there was always this slight kind of irony
about it, like the “We love America” thing, which in the late ’70s made sense. At
that time, to be even remotely patriotic was considered not cool. Punk rockers,
being antagonistic as we were, we would say things like “Fuck Iran!” I was also
17 years old. What is surprising to me is that many of these conservative punk
people are grown men and women.

True to punk’s reactionary tone, Andersen recalls, “the very first band MacKaye
was in, The Slinkees, had a song called ‘Conservative Rock.’” This type of enmity
is typical, punk being riddled with contradiction since its formation in the mid-late
1970s. With the initial influence of glam, David Bowie’s blond Fuehrer is one of
the first examples, however extreme, of right-wing imagery being used by one of
the genre’s predecessors as a shock tactic (Hebdige 60). Swastikas were de rigueur
among certain crowds in the late 1970s, including bands like The Dead Boys,
though its intent belied a desire to antagonize and not necessarily to sympathize
with Nazi politics (McNeil and McCain 248).
These provocations reflected the era’s increasing joblessness and shifting moral
standards, with punks dramatizing the idea of crisis to make the mood tangible
(Hebdige 87). Aspiring to commercial success while glamorizing nihilism, punk
called for revolutionary upheaval and utter depravity, sometimes within the same
breath (Barker and Taylor 265). Nearly forty years later, ascribing a definitive
meaning to punk is a quixotic task, with its usage now more diffuse but a firm
meaning no less obscure: a word that could appropriately describe a lifestyle, a
guitar line, or a haircut. The semiotics of punk style was an intentionally outlandish
representation of rebellion against the middle class. It resembled other subcultures,
but a process of commoditization gradually developed, neutering its outlandishness
by uniformly adhering to a singular representation. In Subculture: The Meaning of
Style, Dick Hebdige describes this process as “taking two characteristic forms: (1)
the conversion of subcultural signs (dress, music, etc) into mass-produced objects
(i.e. the commodity form); (2) the ‘labelling’ and re-definition of deviant behavior
by dominant groups—the police, the media, the judiciary (i.e. the ideological
form)” (94). The other is then turned into “a pure object, a spectacle or a clown”
(94). The irony—an anti-establishment youth movement guided by regimented
standards of behavior and dress—is compounded by the broader culture’s co-
136 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

option of these semiotic indicators, stripping the gestures of their intent as a means
of reducing its power in the same way MacKaye describes the misappropriation
of the greaser sixty years after the fact. That some segments of punk style have
remained mostly static since its inception in the late 1970s heightens the sense of
compliant nonconformity.
These traditionalist tendencies are fitting since, as a musical genre, punk’s
effectiveness is often judged against narrow parameters. Songs abiding by a
punk template—specific chord progressions played at a specific speed with
specific instruments—have followed an easily identifiable structure nearly for the
genre’s entire existence. The success of the music comes in its listener’s ability to
recognize the sound (loud, fast, and angry) and respond with preordained behavior
(jump, push, punch). In this rigidity, a creative tension emerges, with various
approaches and dichotomies that continue to this day: Is Punk Voter’s goal of
ideological coherence an uncomfortable but necessary push toward self-definition,
or is it another example of punk’s conflicted inner dialogue? Does clothing and
musical preference make one punk, or is it the absence of artistic restriction? Is it
the eternal outsider, the snarling kid in the corner flipping off The Man, defined
by its distance from the mainstream, or should it be part of a broader movement
aiming to remake the mainstream, to overtake and transform society? (Andersen
and Jenkins 414).

Flex Your Head

By its very nature, punk rejects coherent ideology, which is the point; its existence
is a direct negation of prevailing societal belief systems. “Mass movements are
always so unhip. That’s what was great about punk. It was an anti-movement,”
proclaims Punk magazine founder Legs McNeil (McNeil and McCain 275). In
Stephen Blush’s American Hardcore: A Tribal History, the lead singer of hardcore
band TSOL Jack Grisham put it bluntly, professing that “one of the things I think
people get wrong is that they try to classify hardcore as a big social movement.
The majority of the kids were dropouts and they had no plans. It was just a bunch
of jerks. We were for anarchy because anarchy was fun” (352). This is partly
true. It is difficult enough to construct a cohesive understanding of what punk
“is” or “means,” never mind a governing political affiliation. Punk’s mobilization
of youthful frustration began as an amalgam of -isms, borrowing from numerous
vaguely leftist ideologies, anarchy being the most prominently espoused. Punk’s
partnering with Rock Against Racism in the late 1970s introduced an explicit
social commentary and political criticism reinterpreted within a wide spectrum
of progressive politics in the 1980s by bands like Crass, Conflict, and Discharge
(UK), The Ex, and The Dead Kennedys (Widdicombe and Wooffitt 12; O’Hara
71).
The majority of bands in the 1980s rallied against President Reagan’s America
with crude, blistering precision. Punk’s objectives, once culturally transformative,
 A New Morning in Amerika 137

focused toward a more insular, underground audience. In doing so, it embraced

an ethos of do-it-yourself (or DIY), eschewing major labels, thereby changing the
modes of production and distribution. The genesis of this underground network is
well chronicled in Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, highlighting
how zine culture and record labels such as SST, Dischord, and Touch & Go helped
to forge a thriving network outside of the industry. “It was sort of a conservative era,
money conscious, politically nasty and Republican,” Mission of Burma drummer
Peter Prescott asserts in the book’s introduction, “And that usually means there’s
going to be a good underground” (Azzerad 9). By the 1990s, punk’s increased
acceptance in the wider culture, coupled with the country’s economic stability,
provided bands an opportunity for commercial success that formerly eluded them.
Two of the biggest, Nirvana and Green Day, broke through to larger audiences
by harnessing punk’s aggressive, anti-establishment bent in a largely apolitical
manner. Politically inclined punk continued to thrive in certain circles, yet many
subsects developed under the “person is political” ethos of mainstream liberalism,
focusing on the dominant issues of the day, which, according to Craig O’Hara’s
The Philosophy of Punk included environmentalism, vegetarianism/veganism,
sexual identity, and gender politics.
Punk’s pre-eminent source for politics during the 1990s was Tim Yohannan’s
Maximumrocknroll (MRR), a popular Bay Area zine operating since the late
1970s, which has long provided explicit declarations for proper punk living. As its
influence steadily grew, MRR did “what the web would later do for the culture at
large: It removed the limitations of place and substituted for them an unplumbable
pool of information and discourse” (McNett). At the height of its popularity, the
zine “received criticism for promoting specific politics … that MRR has too much
power over the punk scene. Too many punks now depend on MRR to inform them
of who to support and who to boycott” (O’Hara 67). In 1997, Burkett’s band
NOFX recorded a song entitled “I’m Telling Tim,” in which the narrator threatens
to report all non-punk indiscretions to Yohannan. Despite Yohannan’s intentions—
to shield the underground from an encroaching mainstream—MRR developed
an orthodoxy of ideological certitude with actions put forth for the right reason,
which is at the heart of modern conservatism (Tanenhaus 22).
Growing up in the Bay Area, Hutch Harris, lead singer of Portland punk band
The Thermals, was familiar with MRR’s formidable presence. “It was in the mid
1990s when Maximumrocknroll laid down that they were only going to review a
certain type of record. It was the bible for so many people for so long but there
were now so many rules,” Harris explains. He continues:

To me, the more rules that you have, the more you reflect the mainstream, having
to categorize everything. Where I was coming up, I didn’t have a conception of
punk as a leather jacket and a mohawk. It meant DIY to us. We’d always call it
a punk show but if someone heard the music, it would be confusing. “That’s a
punk show? That’s not like The Sex Pistols!”
138 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

One response to this sense of imposed inflexibility, both artistically and

ideologically, was punk adopting an increasingly constructivist lens. “Those who
take a constructivist position,” writes Maxine Green, “will reject the notion that
there exists a representable set of phenomena the same for everyone” (112). By
generating internal schemas based on one’s own experiences, this position “rejects
the idea that a truth corresponds to some objective state of things … to refuse the
visions of a self-sufficiently and idealized real,” challenging definitive declarations
of what is or isn’t punk (Green 110). With her Riot Grrrl band Bikini Kill, Kathleen
Hanna was interested in “taking the idea of punk rock and not thinking of it as a
genre, but as an idea [which can then be applied] to different styles of music you’re
making up” (Oakes 126). Illustrating this malleability, Harris concedes that, “as
liberal as I am, it would be unfair to say that a punk couldn’t be conservative.”
In the absence of defining criteria, Wilkow interprets punk’s DIY work ethic
as an extension of a conservative institution: the punk band as the embodiment of
the American small business. Inspired by his father’s work ethic, Wilkow gained
an appreciation of free enterprise where hard work was prized and rewarded. In
punk, he saw musicians personify that same independence and perseverance.
Indeed, for many within the independent music scene in the 1980s, “the definition
of independence came down to one thing: work. Making music was work.
Touring was work. Booking shows was work” (Oakes 44). Rizzuto remarked to
the BBC, “I would see the conservative viewpoint as being more punk than a
liberal one, because a conservative viewpoint places a lot of emphasis on personal
responsibility” (Fowler). This sense of responsibility extended beyond just the
bands. Punk’s egalitarianism broke down the divide between performer and the
audience, strengthening the authenticity of punk’s message by dismantling the
traditional rock and roll hierarchy. Its artists could be trusted to tell you how
they saw things (Barker and Taylor 271). It also offered opportunity: If you were
inspired, why not start your own band? By valuing gumption and passion over
proficiency, punk reinforced its own authenticity, touting that those without musical
talent could produce something more meaningful than those who knew how to
play their instruments (289). “It’s one thing to pour your heart out to a crowd when
you’re making a million dollar payday, but it’s another to pour themselves out for
a smaller audience,” says Wilkow. “I was so attracted to the fact that somebody
genuinely gave a damn whether you personally applauded. You were so close that
you were right there in it.”
These ideals are easily reconciled with the tenets of Kirkpatrick and Wilkow’s
conservative philosophy: anti-elitism and free enterprise. The barriers to success—
the privilege accompanying one’s ability to access instruments, and the time and
the money or status to acquire lessons—no longer exist. Cheap equipment played
poorly provided entry into a culture that rejected normative indicators of musical
talent. Artists found inspiration in the hope that if they demonstrated the will or
conviction to start a band of their own, success—however defined—was possible.
Substantial monetary gain being unrealistic for most punk bands, a common
indicator of success to a group has been the opportunity to have its message heard.
 A New Morning in Amerika 139

This was certainly Burkett’s intent with Punk Voter, a venture he was willing
to lose money on because he felt passionately about the cause (Wiederhorn).
However, this mentality illustrates a generational shift; a miscalculation by Burkett
in assuming that today’s punk fan was interested in heeding the ideas behind its
best-selling compilations.
Chris McEvoy, the executive editor of National Review, decried the political
nature of music in 2004 as an environment where artists acted as political tools.
He argues, “In the Reagan 1980s, you could have loved The Clash and not sided
with the Sandinistas” but that “political rock is an entity now, a true genre …
[It] has more than policy suggestions—which rock is filled with, from the inane
to the plausible—it has a candidate. It is a partisan political machine. Don’t
think otherwise” (McEvoy). The increased political consciousness of musicians
led to a countrywide debate played out on op-ed pages and cable news round
tables regarding the merits of artists expressing their political views. “Someone
plays a song, so that qualifies them to speak out on any cause, regardless of their
knowledge? Do they even know what they are talking about?” asks Wilkow.
“I like bands that have no agenda. Because you like music, that doesn’t mean
you care what they think. When bands get political, I get turned off.” MacKaye,
whose highly regarded band Fugazi is known for its steadfast dedication to DIY
ethics, experienced this contention from his audience, challenging the notion of a
universally receptive underground:

I think the conservative punk thing closely follows what’s happened in

mainstream America. The first really brilliant and devious thing in Reagan’s
revolution was fucking with language. I think the surge in irony was a direct
descendent of that. A term that sprang from the Reagan era that I find particularly
offensive is “politically correct.” Somehow, it became wrong to care. It’s a
complete inversion. It started to manifest within punk with bands not stating
their intentions because it was uncool. Punk is as susceptible as anything else
because it spread through the whole culture. You were ridiculed if you advocated
for anything.

Within the volatile climate of the 2004 election, separating an artist’s politics from
their music had shifted from preference to an imperative, with McEvoy concluding
his editorial with the statement, “We’ll listen to the bands we like that still play
rock and (for the most part) shut-up about politics. We already know how we’re
going to vote.”
In The Fort Collins Weekly, Burkett admitted that he doesn’t “actually read
as much as I should, because the more I read the more bummed out I get, when I
read political books. I don’t want anything to do with this garbage” (BurnSilver).
The necessity to get involved trumped any reservations: “I just thought somebody
in the punk rock music scene had to step up. There’s too many people in rock ’n’
roll bands who don’t want to go out on a limb, because they’ll get Dixie Chicked.
You might say something and lose a lot of your audience” (Garofoli). Dennis
140 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

Lyxzén, lead singer of the Swedish band The (International) Noise Conspiracy,
a band upfront about its politics in songs like “Capitalism Stole My Virginity,”
was surprised at the opposition he encountered during a 2004 tour with the multi-
platinum punk band The Offspring: “People got really, really offended that we
talk about politics and the fact that if you elect the president in the United States,
it’s going to affect everyone. People get pissed off and this is at a punk rock
show, it doesn’t make any sense” (Green). The disconnect Lyxzén highlights—
punk bands discussing left-wing politics being met with indifference or worse—
illustrates the potentially large rift between those who see punk as a lifestyle or
creed, as dictated through adherence to governing bodies and subcultural norms
à la Maximumrocknroll, and those who simply enjoy hearing The Offspring play
loud, fast music. The difference is not easily accounted for since there is no way
of gauging one’s commitment to a subculture. Outside of their preference for a
certain style or type of music, that person might otherwise be quite conventional
(Widdicombe and Wooffitt 27).
Particularly with advancements in technology making “the demarcation
between the mainstream and indie unrecognizable,” and as Ramones songs pipe
through football stadiums and Sex Pistols t-shirts are sold at major department
stores, Burkett’s idea of a voting bloc made up of dyed-in-the-wool liberal punks
reveals a sizable theoretical leap (Oakes xiii). Punk’s considerable advances
within the popular consciousness and its increased appeal have led to a broader
swath of listeners, many of whom are either unaware of or uninterested in punk’s
historical relationship with politics. Paradoxically, an obscurity like the Crush
Kerry compilation arguably hems closer to punk’s sense of defiance and DIY
attitude than Burkett’s sheepishness over Propagandhi’s insulting George Soros
and taking meetings with Sen. Kerry. Burkett’s effort to rally the troops, with its
tinges of Sham 69’s anthem “If the Kids Are United,” disregards the continuing
difficulty of promoting collective action in an era still defined by identity politics’
individualized resistance, where every struggle against dominance is valid,
regardless of legitimate distinctions. Why should people attend a rally or call
their congressional representative, when their lifestyle choices have become an
adequate replacement (Buechler 452)? Only four years after the 2004 election,
the success of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign would be credited for
its ability to seize young voters’ current preference for passive engagement via
social media and micro-donations, demonstrating how the nature of political
participation has changed. That said, the efforts of Punkvoter.com and other like-
minded organizations undoubtedly helped the youth turnout in 2004, bringing
approximately 20.1 million 18–29-year-olds to the polls, a dramatic increase from
the 2000 presidential election and a demographic Democratic nominee Sen. John
Kerry won by 9 percent (Dahl).
 A New Morning in Amerika 141

Searching for a Former Clarity

Conservativepunk.com and Punkvoter.com had no active presence in the 2008

presidential campaign, their founders apparently burnt out on its experimentation
with national politics. In 2011, Wilkow hosts the right-leaning “The Wilkow
Majority,” on Sirius/XM satellite radio in New York, which Rizzuto produces.
He is not currently involved with conservative punk, stating that he was glad to
have “lit a spark and let someone else continue it.” Conservativepunk.com went
offline in 2010, though www.conpunk.com has replaced it, describing itself as “the
misfits of the misfit crowd” (“About”). Burkett’s connection to Punk Voter is one
of distance. “I want to keep Punkvoter.com going. Put news stories up there. I
will always be politically active, but not like I was in 2002 to 2004,” he told
The San Francisco Chronicle in 2007 (Garofoli). Proud to have spearheaded a
coalition of artists against the Bush administration, he added that “Democrats are
not the dream party” and that his time campaigning was too much work and “not
fun” (Garofoli). As of the time of this writing, the domain Punkvoter.com is not
currently active.
Outside this foray into electoral politics, punk has begun to settle into
an increasingly conservative pose in its middle age, finding consolation in
“identif[ying] itself as the guardian and advocate of a vanishing past and present,
and a righteous bulwark against loss” (Brown 699). If the incessant drumming
of punk’s demise has grown tiresome, the willingness of its most exciting artists
to slide within the safe confines of the rock and roll canon has been dispiriting,
particularly as new bands continue to look to the past for preordained modes of
acceptable behavior. “Usually the dudes, because it’s almost always dudes, who
are the conservative ones essentially spend a lot of time discussing the back
in the day type of crap,” asserts MacKaye. “‘That’s when things were really
happening.’ I’ll go fetch my slippers and pipe.” That conservative punk stirred
such an impassioned response from the punk community speaks to the necessity
for a continued discourse, one that fosters ideological growth and internal critique.
Punk doesn’t thrive in the absence of agitation. It requires an external catalyst
to fend off stagnation and sustain relevance. By 2010, those who once fought
against the musical dinosaurs of its era recount their rose-colored antics in copious
books and documentaries. Perhaps Mark Anderson said it best when describing a
series entitled “Punk Pioneers” at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. “This
tribute,” Anderson says, “however well intended—carried a slight aroma of death;
the prophet safely entombed, now ready to be honored, if not really heeded”
(Andersen and Jenkins 403). Despite punk’s backwards-looking lens, MacKaye
is focused and optimistic about the future. “Punk is always going to be in the
factions. I see it as the free space where new ideas get to come out. It may not even
be called punk, but that’s the idea. And there will always be a new idea,” adding
“I’ll be goddamned if I ever declare punk dead. I only want to declare something
alive.”
142 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

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Agnostic Front. “Public Assistance.” Cause for Alarm. Relativity Records, 1986.
CD.
Andersen, Mark. Telephone Interview. Sept. 3, 2009.
Andersen, Mark and Mark Jenkins. Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the
Nation’s Capital. New York: Akashic, 2009. Print.
Arak, Joel. “Poll: Bush’s Approval Sinking.” CBS News. Jan. 17, 2004. Web. Dec.
30, 2010.
Aubin. “Fat Mike / Propagandhi Clarify Situation.” Punknews.org. Mar. 16, 2004.
Web. Feb. 11, 2011.
Azerrad, Michael. Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie
Underground 1981–1991. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002. Print.
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2001. Print.
Brown, Wendy. “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservativism, and
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Dahl, Melissa. “Youth Vote May Have Been Key in Obama’s Win” Msnbc.com.
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Fowler, Damian. “George W. Bush: Punk Icon?” BBC News: Home. May 18,
2004. Web. Dec. 30, 2010.
Garofoli, Joe. “Beyond PunkVoter: ‘Fat’ Mike Burkett Built a Legitimate Interest
in Politics among Apolitical Punk Listeners, but Who’ll Carry That Torch in
2008?” The San Francisco Gate. May 27, 2007. Web. Dec. 30, 2010.
Gillespie, Nick, and Brian Doherty. “I Dreamt I Saw Joey Ramone Last Night.”
Reason.com. Aug. 1, 2001. Web. Jan. 26, 2011.
Graves, Michael. “Conservative Punk Rock?” Intellectualconservative.com. Mar.
3, 2004. Web. Dec. 30, 2010.
Green, Stuart. “Bad Religion: Rocking For the Free World.” Exclaim! July 2004.
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Greene, Maxine. “A Constructivist Perspective on Teaching and Learning in
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Haenfler, Ross. “Rethinking Subcultural Resistance: Core Values of the Straight
Edge Movement.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 33.4 (2004): 406–
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Harris, Hutch. Telephone interview. Aug. 20, 2009.
 A New Morning in Amerika 143

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 2001. Print.
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Pedersen, Erica. “The Day the Music Voted.” AlterNet. Oct. 25, 2004. Web. Dec.
30, 2010.
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Young Voters. Ed. Daniel M. Shea and John C. Green. Lanham, MD: Rowman
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Smalley, Dave. “Punk Rock, Diversity, and the Gonzo Conservatives.” scooterbbs.
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April 2006: 68–70. Print.
 Chapter 11
“Agony & Irony”: Indie Culture’s Sardonic
Response to America’s Post-9/11 Devolution
S. Todd Atchison

9/11 exists as a distorted event in both sensory and cognitive terms: the sounds of
planes flying too close, collisions, and explosions sending sonic shockwaves. We
felt the impact from thousands of miles away while attempting to find meaning
within the hyper-reality of the event—a catastrophe far removed from our
conceptual framework. We relied on mass media to define the event and devise the
plot. The resulting fallout created a meta-narrative reliant upon quick soundbites
and Internet headlines. America’s growing dependence upon the twenty-four-hour
news cycle allowed corporate capitalism to exploit the commodity of identity—
where everything is reduced to a simplistic formula of redundancy exemplified
by the mass-produced representations of the “war on terror,” the bumper-sticker
phraseologies of “Roll On,” “No Fear,” and the co-opted “NYPD/FD.” Our
political personalities mirrored the pundits of CNN or Fox News. In the months
that followed, citizens were advised to revitalize the national spirit by embracing
economic freedom, therefore boosting consumerist-driven democracy and capital.
Americans embraced a similar blind-faith sense of nationalism, accepting the
authoritarian grand narrative and its ensuing isolationist xenophobia.
In the early 1980s at the core of the punk culture movement was a desire
to critique such cultural stagnation and sameness beyond the boundaries of
mainstream media. These critiques involved delving into the taboo, the forbidden,
to bring these ideals forth in dark satiric art. Such measures also provided a means
of warning society concerning the regressive herd mentality that reverberated
through market-driven media. In this chapter I explore how today’s alternative/indie
rock subculture perpetuates punk culture’s anti-corporate caveat by employing a
parallel strategy that emphasizes its own consciousness of its marginality, and thus
holding to “its position on the edge of the narrative” (Gray xvii). This alternative
status remains driven by its satirically ironic representation railing against the
status quo in a self-conscious refusal to be defined (much like Jon Stewart’s refusal
to have The Daily Show taken seriously, while simultaneously confronting real
political figures and issues).
Subcultures are reactionary, relying on what is reviled as a part of their
identity. Several bands that were highly critical of President George W. Bush
and his administration’s ensuing “war on terror” entered the political fray. Indie
culture’s resistance surfaced with the likes of punk band NOFX’s political album
146 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

The War on Errorism and similar performances by heavy hitters like Alkaline
Trio and Green Day during the 2004 Rock Against Bush tour. Indie rock’s post-
9/11 response offers a localized narrative that opposes the hegemonic discourse
put forth by the Bush administration. In this chapter I address how these
counternarratives operate in multiple ways: by amplifying the “death drive” and
fear reflected in current American culture; countering the meta-narrative put forth
in the mass-media post-9/11 that perpetuates consumerist-driven democracy;
examining how the late-punk response found in the dark satirical lyrics of bands
like Alkaline Trio remonstrates the consumer-capitalist ideals of isolationism as
well as the “idiocracy” of mainstream America. Finally, I demonstrate how Green
Day’s American Idiot—a rock opera that has made the transition from recording
to stage show—produces a spectacle of revolt through its self-reflexive critique
of America’s media-saturated culture. I draw from Guy Debord’s Society of the
Spectacle to demonstrate how American Idiot (the musical) attempts societal
change through subverting mainstream culture.

Shock and Annoy: The Dark Dawn of Punk

“If it’s popular, it ain’t culture!”

Vivienne Westwood1

When punk culture erupted to the surface, the movement was an irrational, brash,
knee-jerk disruption of social norms with the initial intent to shock and annoy.
Punk’s pathos portrayed a deliberate outsider aesthetic with an ironic stance: to
have a good time meant to have a bad time (Savage xiv). Yet for punk to remain
reactionary it also had to remain fluid and undefined through its attacks or critiques
on multiple fronts—sexual taboos, gender politics, fashion, classism, and racism—
to agitate through overkill. Punk worked best through a symbolic subversion of
mundane items or areas found in our everyday lives. Dick Hebdige demonstrates
how punk embraces dissent through manufacturing contradictions that contain a
“series of subjective correlatives for the official archetypes of the ‘crisis of modern
life’: the unemployment figures, the Depression … converted into icons (the safety
pin, the rip, the mindless lean and hungry look) these paradigms of crisis could
live a double life, at once fictional and real” (65). Punk distorts real phenomena,
common commodities, and it violates social codes in order to resituate meaning
within the dominant framework. Doing so amplifies the subordinate versus
dominant tensions found within forbidden contexts, such as class-consciousness
and sexism, in an attempt to disrupt hegemonic discourse.

  Quoted in Rabid, “V. Vale Interview Part 1” 115.

1
 “Agony & Irony” 147

Today we nurse hangovers from weapons of mass destruction while gridlocked

in Washington due to knee-jerk political punditry delivering pre-emptive strikes.
One tactic to disarm such pre-emptive strikes is to embrace the right’s absurdity
and to build resistance through an alternative position—a cynical one that
demonstrates and disrupts the official discourse. One such example within late-
punk culture is the satirical side-project from Devo’s Jerry Casale, dubbed Jihad
Jerry & the Evildoers, where Casale reinterprets the symbolic representations of
religious extremism. Jihad Jerry is a turban-wearing middle-aged white male who
exploits the media’s portrayal of Muslim extremists. In doing so, his detached
irony reveals that there is little truth behind the dominant ideological fantasies.
Through a sardonic stance, one can deflect the right’s pre-emptive accusations
of treachery by mirroring their fantastical constructs, and show the absurdities
within their misinformation and punditry. Punk turns media against itself with a
self-aware ironic parody in the distortion of representation, thereby using media
as a means to define the subculture’s rejection of dominant structures. Punk
reframes experiences through the signifiers within our mainstream ideologies.
Political pundits use media under similar terms by turning fantasy into reality
through social frameworks—in other words, situating order and organization as
the formation of stabilized identities. The Bush Administration built the resulting
post-9/11 grand narrative on such fantasies by refusing a representation of fact-
based reality, to mislead the American people through a base rhetoric of hatred
and fear. As a nation in mourning, the US looked for easy answers that yielded
complacency in the comforts of simplicity. Bush’s cowboy code offered a revenge
fantasy entailing a “Coalition of the Willing” destroying an “Axis of Evil” that
danced in Americans’ heads as they occupied Iraq.
Lee Edelman demonstrates how diverse political positions compete for the
power to define and reshape collective identity through the shaping of signifiers
that instill their own symbolic reality (7). We strive to define ourselves through
social and linguistic codes that set us apart from the Other, yet this self-reflexive
stance cannot bridge the gap between us and the ideology we choose to embody
because we become signified as well—this works in ways similar to how punk’s
subculture exists through representations of representations. Edelman argues that
queerness as a means of existence embraces a “death drive” that stands in contrast
to the parent culture’s hope for future within the dominant hetero-procreative
drive. Edelman’s death drive, like punk’s pathos, embraces a Lacanian jouissance
as “a violent passage beyond the bounds of identity, meaning, and law … undoing
the consistency of a social reality” (25). Mary Harron, editor of Isis, similarly
articulates this manifestation, reflecting that punk culture captured the “nihilism
in the atmosphere, a longing to die. Part of the feeling of New York at that time
[circa 1975] was this longing for oblivion, that you were about to disintegrate,
go the way of this bankrupt, crumbling city” (quoted in Savage 133). Harron’s
statement eerily acts as a harbinger of when the Towers fell: within the falling ash
and embers, the once-removed threat of terrorism blanketed us; the threat became
distorted reality. Within jouissance there lies presence in absence, where the death
148 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

drive manifests itself through fetishized objects that help shape symbolic realities.
Punk’s obsession with death and annihilation serves to rupture cultural signifiers
through a juxtaposition of social contradictions (e.g., the current obsession
with vampire culture and goth styles of the walking dead delivers a presence in
absence, a living with no future; or the dominant ideology of American democracy
that results in a capitalist-feudal state); these ruptures offer a self-reflection that
resists definition. Punk’s subculture strives to defy definition through the chaos of
creativity—a nihilistic reaction toward popular culture and politics. This method
is best exemplified by publicist Val Vale, known for his zine Search & Destroy,
who envisions punk as owning a “negative dialectics”: a philosophical negation
that blasts the fakery of commerce and explores the taboo to rail against cultural
authoritarianism. The acerbic stance of punk culture’s post-9/11 counternarratives
serves as a warning to shock us out of our complacency for misinformation.
American post-9/11 culture has devolved through its appetite for distraction
toward an antithesis of a democracy—what once embodied the ideals of tolerance,
education, and progress has digressed toward a herd mentality that ceases to think
critically. The “millennial generation”—those born between 1980 and 2000—were
raised on information overload, multitasking, and texting without vowels. English
professor Mark Bauerlein deplores the distractive amount of “screen time” wasted
by this generation. His basic argument holds that, while these digital natives are
tech-savvy, ironically, they cannot use their technical abilities to glean pertinent
information. Bauerlein notes that their reading scores fall flat, that “employers
complain about the writing skills of new hires … college students [majoring] in
math [are now] a rarity, remedial course attendance [is] on the rise, and young
people worry less and less about not knowing the basics of history, civics, science,
and the arts” (109). Ultimately, Bauerlein complains that we have become
ethnocentric, self-centered consumers who no longer consider civic responsibility
nor seek accurate information regarding science, the environment, or health. And
this is exactly the point about post-9/11 American society that I want to critique:
that we have devolved into self-centered apathy.
Devo’s Jerry Casale, in an interview with Jack Rabid, discusses the devolution
of American society: “in the struggle between democracy—democratic ideals:
humanitarianism, egalitarianism—and capitalism, democracy was a clear loser”
(Rabid and Freilich 63). The basis of democracy holds that every citizen is
educated enough to take on leadership roles and governance, and that every citizen
should care about the community we inhabit. Casale’s remarks illustrate how we
have become devoid of personal responsibility because we prefer someone to
bear the burden of providing it for us. And while we’ve become obsessed with
reality television and social Internet sites, Bush turned America into a “corporate,
feudal state, beholden to the world global system” (Rabid and Freilich 65). Bush
used the crisis of 9/11 and the resulting “war on terror” to further coerce us to
embrace capitalism as the steadfast solution. The deregulation of the private
sector and the Bush administration’s unwillingness to provide a real governmental
solution caused the economic system to collapse. The damage is done. Hope and
 “Agony & Irony” 149

change should have occurred in 2004, not 2008.2 Hope and change have become
commodified and vacuous terms as well. Hope and change are hard terms to
embody, especially when change enacted through protests no longer matters.
Like Plato’s cave analogy, if one informs people of how they’ve been duped and
misinformed, it results in a silencing and a marginalizing of enlightenment. Today
it’s difficult to get people to rise up and take to the streets; today conformity is
cool (Rabid and Freilich 67). Conformity to democratic capitalism has allowed
a “manufacture of consent” where the ruling class—the top 2 percent, who own
the wealth—delegates common interests and shapes public opinion through
propagandistic representation in mass media.
If punk’s ethos is to shake us from our complacency, to rail against the
status quo by remaining on the boundaries of society, what happens as these
boundaries shift and become more accommodating of consumer identities? With
the increased popularity of Alkaline Trio and Green Day occupying the shelves
in mainstream stores, what exactly is being consumed? Both bands cut their teeth
on late-punk culture, grown from modest record sales to corporate recognition,
thereby transitioning from small independent labels such as Asian Man Records
(Alkaline Trio) and Lookout! Records (Green Day) to sign deals with Columbia
Records’ Epic imprint and Warner Brother’s subsidiary label Reprise. Alkaline
Trio currently record on their own Heart & Skull label, and Green Day, at least for
now, retains indie-rock’s purist ideals even while recording for a corporate label.
Green Day holds to their position on the periphery because of their ability to use
media’s spectacle as a means to revolt.
Popular media thrives on market saturation and trending to create demand
and control. And this raises a very interesting issue: as subcultures become more
accepted, what was once held as taboo comes to the forefront in commercialized
culture.3 What was once reactionary has become a commodified conformity. The
gothic styles that were once found only in underground S&M stores now can
be found in chain stores in suburban malls. Does the mere commodification of
subcultural styles serve to demystify these countermovements? Punk fashion is still
striking, even if it’s easily attainable at a mainstream store. The resistance remains
subverted within popular culture—bright pink hair-dye retains its astonishing
affect. Though punk’s initial intent was to succeed through failure, ironically the
movement still succeeds because nothing has changed; there is still inauthenticity
everywhere. Rabid and Vale continue to demonstrate how a DIY mentality remains
an essential element for combating the devolution of culture, even if it is through
subversion. Rabid and Vale finally determine that punk’s ultimate contribution,

  See Rabid, “Autopsy”.

2

  This progression strikes a similar chord with Vale, as he tells Rabid: “All the
3

supermodels have bellybutton piercings and all this crap, like the tattoo right above the low
pants line above the butt that every suburban woman has now. These things are just a new
kind of conformism! [sic]” (“V. Vale Interview Part 2” 102).
150 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

and this idea they borrow from William S. Burroughs, reminds us to question the
reality they give you, to think critically, look longingly, and analyze.

The American Scream: Alkaline Trio

And early on they saw the warning signs and symptoms all day long
Wonder how far from here we’ll fall before we hit the ground running on empty.
Alkaline Trio, “Warbrain”

Even before the Twilight saga and True Blood series resulted in a phenomenal
obsession with the undead, goth-punk culture infiltrated teen suburbia, attracting
awkward and standoffish adolescents (and eventually finding an audience among
women in their thirties and forties). Independent stores doled out goth-infused
fashions for lost teens seeking to define themselves, and reclaim a sense of
bodily self amid a sea of school uniforms. The goth-punk culture of the naughts,
especially post-9/11, embraced its commodified identities where everything’s
branded. So why not death? Perhaps just looking like the undead projects a sense
of surviving a decade dominated by fear. Masculine mascara-laden bands like
Alkaline Trio project dark carnival videos of forlorn love lost by sinister means as
a caustic mimesis—one that talks back to a vacuous popular media by denoting a
generational loss of innocence caused by the “war on terror.”
Alkaline Trio’s late-punk doom-pop approach seethes a sinister cynicism by
reflecting the jaded lives of suburban kids raised on skull candy. Founded in 1996
around McHenry, Illinois, the band consists of Matt Skiba (guitar, vocals), Dan
Andriano (bass, vocals), and Derek Grant (drums), who fall in line with punk’s
simple mantra of “form three chords, go start a band.” Lyrically they’re dark and
ironic, even graphic at times (see tunes such as “Mr. Chainsaw” or “All on Black”).
Most of their songs provide glimpses into a variety of societal breakdowns, such as
substance abuse and the emotional entanglements that result from it. For example,
the explicit metaphors of betrayal in “All on Black” portray the song’s protagonist
as being stabbed in the back, left bleeding on the floor, and mourning the loss of
something inside the self. The song’s chorus abruptly turns toward clichéd jokes
such as “What’s black and white? / What’s read all over? / This tired book / This
organ-donor” to sardonically show the complexities that lie in the ambiguities of
life and loss. The dualities of religious imagery (both Christian and Satanic—a
popular binary in gothic-punk) conveyed through the lines “Sweet blasphemy my
giving tree … What’s upside down? / What’s coated in silver? / This crucifix is my
four-leaf clover,” yield images of sacrifice (an offering of self: “virgin ears”) that
are lost because of the knowledge that everything’s too complex, re-emphasizing
America’s “idiocracy” through its desire to have everything readily defined in a
period of post-9/11 uncertainty.
 “Agony & Irony” 151

Religious hyperbole abounds in Alkaline Trio’s songs through metaphorical

twists that demonstrate tensions between life, love, loss, and faith: agony and
irony. Tunes such as “Armageddon” and “Mercy Me” are two great examples. In
“Armageddon,” which is essentially a breakup song, the narrator receives a piece
of mail with a photograph of a couple “arm in arm (up in arms again).” Its self-
reflexive narrative is a beer-fueled rant on the aforementioned photograph which
its writer fears everyone will hate. “Armageddon” not only signifies facing the
demise of a relationship, it also forces the song’s protagonist to find something
to believe in, thereby portraying the tension between attempting to save your
soul, to save something, before the “end times.” In contrast, the song “Mercy
Me” centers on the loss of love, faith, and fear as a result of being desensitized
by an oversaturated culture. The emotional release once offered by goth-punk’s
obsession with darkness and death are now lessened by societal acceptance.
The lines within the chorus, “Oh mercy me / God bless catastrophe,” evoke an
appreciation of the spectacle where we drive ourselves insane through obsessions
with death and the fear exposed by media outlets.
Alkaline Trio are not overly political, although they released “Warbrain” on
the Rock Against Bush compilation and accompanied several bands (the likes
of Flogging Molly, Sum 41, and Green Day) on a tour to promote that album.
“Warbrain” has nothing to do with President Bush per se, but falls in line with
their other war-narrative lyrics in songs such as Agony & Irony’s “Over and Out”
and This Addiction’s “The American Scream.” Both songs portray characteristics
of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in returning servicemen. “Over and Out”
does so by demonstrating the dissolution within American society and its reflection
in frayed long-term relationships. The lyrics consist of dialogic moments between
a man and woman (though it is ambiguous whether it is referring to one single
relationship). She suffers in a hospital bed. He deals with PTSD from Vietnam and
ultimately decides to commit suicide. The universal nature of the song conveys a
sense of shared trauma that extends well beyond this relationship. Ultimately, the
band offers itself, even this song, as solace and consolation, to “run for cover and
you’ll find us there / To take on the anger, make it disappear … Let this candle
burn ’til you get home / Never forget your face, never lose hope,” as a means to
keep a vigil, and keep memory.
The song “The American Scream” is based on a news story Matt Skiba read
about a serviceman who committed suicide at his mother’s grave after returning
home from the Iraq War. The narrative plays out this soldier’s experience and
serves as an anti-war song that delivers a cynical critique of our nation’s failure to
properly remember military men and women. The opening lines make reference to
yellow ribbons around oak trees—a standard symbol for remembering soldiers—
that eventually yield to worn-out prayers and faded hopes. The second verse
mirrors the first by describing a tourniquet wrapped, like the yellow ribbon, around
a pipeline—metaphorical for both oil and blood—that “carries all the pain in this
world,” to the American public that remains isolated from a war far removed.
The chorus comes across as both simplistic and hyperbolic—“And that’s where
152 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

they found me / in the cemetery / a smoking gun in my hand now I’m damned
for the land of the free / Sing with me / The American Scream”—conveying a
critique of our society’s forgetfulness that portrays us “blindly [clapping] from the
sidelines,” outwardly demonstrating a symbolic parallel with the yellow ribbons
on SUVs. This war, once narrated by embedded reporters, now offers very limited
coverage concerning the veteran’s dire needs: financial assistance, health care, and
transitional issues for those who risk their lives for our “freedom.” From both the
White House and the corporate media, there has been little sacrifice asked of the
American people in support of this war in monetary terms, like tax cuts (while the
national debt mounts), nor in energy usage to derail the country’s dependence on
foreign oil supply.
Perhaps Alkaline Trio’s best assault on divisive punditry comes through in
“We’ve Had Enough.” Ironically, this was Good Mourning’s first single, an anti-
radio song to premiere on the airwaves. The song seemingly lashes out at Clear
Channel’s corporate monopoly and its list of censored songs in the days following
9/11. Musically, the tempo is a concussive staccato with a bemoaning end-gong
that echoes in the background. The narrative meanders through dark passages of
mourning with shadowed images of heads hanging low, hearing the cries of angels
with voices “reminding you to breathe.” The protagonist comes to rest on a bed
of concrete stating, “That’s all we live for … we’re only second-handed sick and
lonely / fighting back the tears / and every urge to Van Gogh our ears,” symbolic of
our residual cultural trauma. The “second-handed sick” represents our distanced
experience through the media representation of a shared traumatic event where
the coverage of the catastrophe becomes a banal commentary stuck in a repetitive
loop. The protagonist moves toward an angst-fueled rant against corporate radio,
exclaiming, “That’s it we’ve had enough / please turn that fucking radio off /
ain’t nothing on the airwaves of the despair we feel.”  Skiba cautions against
the media insulating the public with the distraction of a grand narrative where
uncertainties become readily defined. He reminds listeners that the radio cannot
articulate the anxiety nor fully frame the grief through quick soundbites. Punditry
and popular culture appeal to us on a base level, meaning we do not have to think
about the information (or lack thereof) we receive. Our minds are shut off; that’s
Skiba’s biggest fear: “The only tunes that you hear / come via antenna through
your car radio.” To reiterate the epigraph from the previous section from Vivienne
Westwood: “If it’s popular, it ain’t culture” (quoted in Rabid, “V. Vale Interview
Part 1” 115). We live in a world that bombards us with (mis-)information wrapped
in trumped-up fears of Ground Zero mosques and Qu’ran burnings. Alkaline Trio
retains that role of art as a mimesis of life’s dark ironies to evoke a response—to be
a catalyst for change, to shake us from those apathetic diversions offered through
vacuous corporate media.
 “Agony & Irony” 153

Conclusion: Green Day’s American Idiot and the Manufacturing of Dissent

I don’t believe illusions

’cos too much is real
So stop your cheap comment
’cos we know what we feel.
Sex Pistols

Since 9/11, America has become an abysmal place with everything wrapped in
ambiguity. The true complexities of American foreign policy, religious tolerance,
and the acceptance of those marginalized have fallen to diversions of fear and
hatred. Having things undefined can be very threatening, and the current role
of corporate media is to create readily defined, simplistic narratives to ease the
public’s displacement and fuel their fear. Lisa Finnegan identifies the lack of honest
reporting as an attempt to allow for “cognitive dissonance,” a psychological term
that denotes our need for our beliefs and actions to remain harmonious. When we
suffer a national trauma it is befitting that “people avoid information that increases
this distress and search for ways to relieve the discomfort” (33). The result,
Finnegan argues, is a press reluctant to examine America’s rogue foreign policy,
which could have incited the attacks in the first place. Americans, she claims,
simply do not want to consider their government’s actions abroad (33). Bush’s
aphorisms—“They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of
speech”—quelled American discomfort, thereby enabling them to tune out and to
displace their discomfort by obsessing over Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie instead
(34). Part of punk’s ethos is to resist such cultural distractions and to shake us from
complacently accepting what we are being given by corporate-fed pundits. Yet to
enter the political fray is to take a position.
Billie Joe Armstrong, lead singer and guitarist of Green Day, seems obsessed
with exploring how individuals can define themselves in an increasingly mass-
marketed society—a theme that resounds within Green Day’s album American Idiot.
Armstrong states, “We were in the studio and watching the journalists embedded
with the troops, and it was the worst version of reality television” (Hendrickson
43). Marred and desensitized by our society’s obsession with sensational media,
he relays how it has become inescapable: “Switch the channel, and it’s Nick and
Jessica. Switch, and it’s Fear Factor. Switch, and people are having surgery to
look like Brad Pitt. We’re surrounded by all of that bullshit, and the characters
Jesus of Suburbia and St. Jimmy are as well. It’s a sign of the times” (Hendrickson
41). American Idiot is Green Day’s rock opera, with its protagonist, the Jesus of
Suburbia, navigating through our post-9/11 landscape, finding solace within late-
punk culture and guidance from St. Jimmy—self-described as a “product of war
and fear that we’ve been victimized.” The rock opera holds up the adage of “sex,
drugs, and rock and roll” by portraying a female love interest in Whatshername
154 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

and a landscape riddled with pot, heroin, and Ritalin. In the process, the work rails
against the Bush Administration’s “red neck agenda.”
Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt, and drummer Tre Cool successfully convey
what it is like to be part of a generation growing up under George W. Bush in
a post-9/11 world consisting of ineffectual war coverage bombarded with
the branding of CNN and Fox News. The lyrics within the album’s title track
admonish this knee-jerk-reaction nation under the thumb of television’s trumped-
up hysteria. We become so tuned-in that fear becomes a fad—“everybody do the
Propaganda! / and sing along to the Age of Paranoia”—in corporate-ruled “Idiot
AmericaTM.” Here, Armstrong amplifies America’s devolution under vacuous
media with an emblematic trademark. We are proud to conform without question.
Our blind nationalism leads to isolationist paranoia. Hawkish political pundits
rebuke war protestors for supporting “faggot America’s” emasculated diplomacy.
These talking heads have their audiences amped up on anxiety. They warp reality
to create real-time revenge fantasies.
Post-9/11 reality is paradoxical, ruled by the media—where the virtual is
real, the real virtual. Stephen Duncombe suggests that the way to reach a sheep-
like populace so easily distracted is by manufacturing dissent (9). In the case of
Green Day, they successfully embrace the media spectacle of fantasy to mimic
reality. American Idiot, being a concept album, illustrates America’s irrational
media, social, and political hypocrisy through its narrative structure. Armstrong
wants to shake us out of complacency, to wake us from an apathetic stasis; as
Armstrong says of making the album: “I made it to give people a reason to think
for themselves. It was supposed to be a catalyst” (Fricke 141). Green Day strives
to make a difference through subversion—leading a message of revolt through the
mass production found in popular media.
Green Day carried the commercial success of American Idiot toward further
spectacle by promoting a Broadway play based on the album’s anti-war themes
(along with tunes from their follow-up album, 21st Century Breakdown). Directed
by Michael Mayer and co-written with Armstrong, the adaptation works with Idiot’s
ambiguities to recreate the album’s narrative while filling in some of the spaces with
an Iraq War veteran and set-pieces of broken-down urban landscapes—numerous
television sets repeating a message of “Tune in. Zone out. Buy. Enlist” (Gardner
6D). Those messages mirror the distractions pulsing through the hegemonic
discourse of revenge fantasy put forth by those Bushisms that embraced capital,
commerce, and democracy—“They hate us for our freedom,” “We’ll be greeted
as liberators”—concepts that echo in the show’s rendition of “Holiday”; a number
that best exemplifies an attempt to rein in reality from a media overdose. The
protagonist begs to “dream and differ from the hollow lies” that distract our lives.
He “hears the drum pounding out of time” with once well-intentioned protestors
joining the other side because there is more money to be had by branding the
war. He deciphers a news image consisting of “a flag wrapped around a score of
men” as “a gag” that exists as insignificant as “a plastic bag on a monument.”
Media soundbites lead to simplistic bumper-sticker mantras that repress those
 “Agony & Irony” 155

discomforting ambiguities that arise from analyzing what led up to the attacks.
These ideas resound through “Before the Lobotomy” with Tunny, one of the play’s
characters, who derides American society for our willingness to forget: “Dying /
everyone’s reminded / hearts are washed in misery / drenched in gasoline,” it is the
“brutality of reality” that prevents him from dreaming of a promising future. The
characters within American Idiot (the musical) struggle to retain a sense of identity
while trapped in a “static age” distorted by an oversaturation of media and readily
defined patriots who wear trademarked slogans. Patriotism as branded by popular
culture in consumable goods is a means to outwardly demonstrate the cause
rather than actively take part in civic responsibility; with a yellow-ribbon magnet
on the back of their SUVs people support the troops without truly considering
their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. American Idiot (the musical) offers
consumers the spectacle of revolt. It portrays our desire to reclaim localized
personal identities from the hegemonic grand narrative.
American Idiot (the musical) works in similar ways to how Guy Debord
defines the spectacle as a manifestation of “society’s real unreality” through mass
production (13). At first glance, Debord’s argument seems to decry grand-scale
representations for their capacity to only reify the ideologies prevalent within the
parent culture, considering that such depictions “epitomize the prevailing model
of social life” that yield a plastic reality (13). The plasticity of representation
within grand productions reveal the “spectacle’s essential character … as a visible
negation of life—and as a negation of life that has invented a visual form for itself”
(14). Debord cautions against a society that is heavily influenced by the spectacle—
events that he also deems as ineffective forms of art such as propaganda, protest,
or entertainment—because spectators remain passive observers and not active
participants. However, Debord then advocates the creation of a “transformative
action” through events that correlate actors with their larger society toward an
active engagement with a text, a work of art, or a dramatization (Duncombe
130). The implication of Debord’s treatment of transformative action is that
artistic representations should be avant-garde works of negation, thereby calling
attention to their own act of representing (135). The spectacle of American Idot
(the musical) works in similar ways through self-critique. The musical production
negates the media’s influence by using its own amplification of those plastic
realities created on the stage. The multiple screens flashing repeated consumerist
mantras serve to remind audiences that they are, in turn, watching a production.
The information overload alienates spectators in ways that mimic the all-intrusive
modes of diversion forced upon the post-9/11 generation. Ironically, American
Idiot’s success is also Green Day’s failure. For a band that began writing songs
mostly concerned with marijuana and self-effacement, Green Day evolved a
political conscience. The more critical they became of American society—dating
back to the 2000 album Warning—the more popular they have become. Jon Savage
brilliantly illustrates the ironic post-punk tensions of success when he writes: “To
succeed in conventional terms meant that you failed on your own terms; to fail
156 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

meant that you had succeeded” (195). Yes, Green Day sold out, but at least their
spectacle says something through subverting popular culture.
Punk’s detachment was engineered to fail. It was built to spill as an antagonistic,
anarchistic approach without a center. The movement shocked and illuminated a
consumer society through a harsh cultural critique of corporate influence. Devo’s
Jerry Casale tells Jack Rabid that “just by questioning the idea of progress and
culture getting better—that is, more and more people having a better life, just
by questioning that—we scared people” (Rabid and Freilich 63). Similarly, Mark
Motherbraugh argues to NPR’s Guy Raz that punk’s abrupt confrontational
reaction began to lack affect because it became predictable (“Devo”). He views
cultural change as coming through subversion—to find the means for disruption
from within the established media outlets. Punk, by necessity, has a short shelf life.
Perhaps this explains the Sex Pistols’ legacy as the eternal “what could’ve been,”
an ironic stance of abruptly ceasing artistic production at the pinnacle of success.
Within that dismantlement of the distortion is the inability to comprehend. In
several ways, this is similar to our cultural memory of the catastrophic events
of 9/11. The tragedy of the Towers disrupted our lives. 9/11 exists as event that
remains on the periphery, it resists definition, and remains distorted in a realm
that cannot be fully understood nor articulated. The music and message of the
late-punk bands covered in this chapter reside in a stance of “agony and irony,” as
an ambiguous open-ended betrayal, culminating in a chaotic interruption without
closure, with no coda—only a dark, ironic reverb that generates reflection and
resonates alongside us.
 “Agony & Irony” 157

Works Cited

Alkaline Trio. “The American Scream.” This Addiction. Heart & Skull/Epitaph
Records, 2010. CD.
——. “Armageddon.” From Here to Infirmary. Vagrant Records, 2001. CD.
——. “Mr. Chainsaw.” From Here to Infirmary. Vagrant Records, 2001. CD.
——. “All on Black.”Good Mourning. Vagrant Records, 2004. CD.
——. “We’ve Had Enough.”Good Mourning. Vagrant Records, 2004. CD.
——. “Mercy Me.” Crimson. Vagrant Records, 2005. CD.
——. “Over and Out.” Agony & Irony. Epic Records, 2008. CD.
——. “Warbrain.” Remains. Vagrant Records, 2007. CD.
Bauerlein, Mark. The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young
Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30).
New York: Penguin, 2008. Print.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New
York: Zone Books, 1995. Print.
“Devo: Back in Focus, Tongue in Cheek.” All Things Considered. Host Guy Raz.
National Public Radio, June 27, 2010. NPR.org. Web. July 10, 2010.
Duncombe, Stephen. Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in an Age of
Fantasy. New York: The New Press, 2007. Print.
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke
UP, 2004. Print.
Finnegan, Lisa. No Questions Asked: News Coverage since 9/11. Westport, CT:
Praeger, 2009. Print.
Fricke, David. “Billie Joe Armstrong.” Rolling Stone. Nov. 15, 2007: 140–42.
Print.
Gardner, Elysa. “‘American Idiot’ Elevates Hope Above Nihilism.” USA Today.
Apr. 21, 2010: 6D. Print.
Gray, Richard. “Introduction.” South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture.
Ed. Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Monteith. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP,
2002: i–xxiii. Print.
Green Day. American Idiot. Reprise Records, 2004. CD.
——. “Before the Lobotomy.” 21st Century Breakdown. Reprise Records, 2009.
CD.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Methuen & Co.,
1979. Print.
Hendrickson, Matt. “Green Day.” Rolling Stone. Feb. 24, 2005: 40–44. Print.
Rabid, Jack. “Autopsy of a Recession: Big Takeover Readers Were Warned!” The
Big Takover 64 (2009): 10–14. Print.
——. “V. Vale Interview Part 1,” The Big Takeover 62 (2008): 109–117. Print.
——. “V. Vale Interview Part 2,” The Big Takeover 63 (2008): 100–106. Print.
—— and Claude Freilich, “Devo Interview Part 1.” The Big Takeover 63 (2008):
62–7. Print.
158 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

Savage, Jon. England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond.
New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1991. Print.
Sex Pistols. “Pretty Vacant.” Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.
Warner Bros. Records, 1977. CD.
 Part IV
Idle American, American Idol:
Mainstream Media and Ideology
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 Chapter 12
Post-Dixie Chicks Country:
Carrie Underwood and the Negotiation of
Feminist Country Identity
Molly Brost

“Watch out, boys,” journalist Jessica Yadegaran cautioned in the May 20, 2007
edition of the Contra Costa Times. “The new women of pop, rock, and country
don’t bother with getting mad. They skip to getting even” (Yadegaran). Citing
Lily Allen, Beyoncé, and Carrie Underwood as examples, Yadegaran declared that
“music’s new seven-letter word is revenge,” and that while “it would have been
a risk for a female performer … to sing songs like these twenty-five years ago,”
revenge songs were becoming increasingly common among mainstream female
performers. Yadegaran was not the only reporter to pick up on this trend; in July
of the same year, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Dan DeLuca similarly noted that
“in pop music in 2007, the ladies [were] wielding the most powerful weaponry”
(E1). Though he cited many of the same examples listed by Yadegaran, he noted
that, for country singers like Underwood and Miranda Lambert (who had a hit
the same year with the revenge anthem “Gunpowder and Lead”), the success of
such songs was particularly noteworthy: “It’s not as though angry women have
commandeered the country music industry” (E1). In the week his article went
to press, in fact, only one of the top ten songs on the Billboard country charts
was sung by a woman; industry trends indicate that this is not an anomaly. Since
the Academy of Country Music began holding an annual awards show in 1966,
there have been only seven female acts to win the coveted Entertainer of the Year
award, and when Underwood accepted the award in 2009 she was the first to win
it in nine years (Gerome). While it would be easy to point to many female country
singers who would be considered successful—Shania Twain, Reba McEntire, and,
of course, Dolly Parton—when compared to their male counterparts, these women
receive only a small fraction of country music’s commercial success and critical
acclaim.
Country-music scholars indicate that this gender imbalance might have
something to do with the prescribed dictates of authenticity to which country
musicians are expected to adhere. As Gabriel Rossman notes, “Country music
has always been associated with pastoral white America and its values, such as
independence, patriotism, and religion” (68). Clearly, revenge anthems do not
embody these values. Lesley Pruitt further suggests that there is a gendered
162 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

component to this construction: “In American country music, certain gendered

discourses dominate, wherein men are expected to exhibit traits considered
masculine, such as aggressiveness, reason, rationality, and protection; women
should demonstrate the corresponding feminine attributes: peacefulness, caring,
emotion, and vulnerability” (86). Pruitt also suggests that these expectations are
“more binding” than they might be in other genres like rock and folk, leaving
female country performers little room for deviation from the traditional country
model (86).
Much like any attempt to achieve cultural authenticity, the dictate that female
country singers should always and everywhere embody “traditional” femininity
can be impossible to fulfill. As Pamela Fox notes in “Recycled ‘Trash’: Gender
and Authenticity in Country Music Autobiography,” women in country music must
first and foremost “embody ‘home’” (244). She continues, “From its inception in
the late 1920s, traditional country mythology has made the family its centerpiece,
envisioning distinctly gendered roles for that institution’s maintenance and
protection” (244). Ironically, when a female country musician embarks on a career,
the demands of touring often require that she leave that home. Success, then, as
Fox argues, renders female country musicians “distinctly gendered ‘failures’ of
country authenticity … By ‘choosing’ the tour bus … they lose their claim to
‘home’ altogether” (244). While this Catch-22 situation has somewhat loosened
its grip in an age where country musicians often travel in tour buses large enough
to house their husbands and children, many female country performers still find
themselves confined by domestic demands. In interviews, contemporary country
singers, such as Faith Hill and Martina McBride, have discussed arranging concert
tours around their children’s school schedules, an issue that is rarely brought up in
interviews with male country singers. Additionally, scholar Jocelyn Neal notes that
interviews with such singers often work to reposition them in the home; interviews
with Hill, for example, frequently emphasize the singer’s “devotion to her family,”
as well as “the influence of her love life on her musical productivity” (112).
Given this context, Carrie Underwood’s success seems rather extraordinary.
How did Underwood not only have a hit song with a decidedly anti-domestic
revenge anthem like “Before He Cheats” but also attain a level of success in
mainstream country music that few women ever achieve? My contention is that
Underwood’s skilled use of the mainstream media has allowed her to reposition
herself within more traditional country discourses of home, family, and respect
for tradition, which has bolstered her perceived authenticity—an authenticity that
allows her the space to perform songs that would otherwise be considered risky
for a female country performer. Furthermore, as evidence that a country singer’s
popularity has as much to do with his or her perceived authenticity as the songs he
or she performs, I place Underwood in contrast to the Dixie Chicks, who similarly
had a hit with a revenge anthem, 1999’s “Goodbye Earl,” only to be effectively
banned from country radio when lead singer Natalie Maines criticized President
George W. Bush, the archetypal American cowboy of the new millennium.
 Post-Dixie Chicks Country 163

First, it is worth tracing Underwood’s biography as a means of excavating her

roots—her authentic roots, as it were. The daughter of a paper mill worker and an
elementary school teacher, Carrie Underwood grew up in Checotah, Oklahoma
and pursued a major in broadcast journalism at Northeastern State University in
Tahlequah, Oklahoma (“Carrie Underwood Biography”). She was catapulted to
fame in the country music community in 2005 after winning the reality competition
show American Idol. Her debut album, Some Hearts, was the best-selling album
by a female country singer in 2005, 2006, and 2007; as of 2010, it is also the best-
selling debut album by an American Idol winner (“Biography”). In 2006, she was
awarded the Country Music Association’s Horizon award, which is given to a
promising new artist each year, as well as the Country Music Association’s Female
Vocalist of the Year award. In the same year, she similarly won the Academy of
Country Music’s Top New Female Vocalist and Top Female Vocalist awards
(“Carrie Underwood Awards”). She continued to find success in the country music
community, winning the same award from the Country Music Association in 2007
and from the Academy of Country Music in 2008 (“Carrie Underwood Awards”).
Most significantly, in April 2009, she became the first woman since 2000—and the
seventh female act in history—to win the Academy of Country Music’s Entertainer
of the Year award (Gerome). While her debut album included songs, such as the
title track, that were decidedly more pop than country, Underwood emphasized to
the press upon the release of her second album, Carnival Ride, that she would be
targeting an exclusively country audience.
In spite of her geographic and economic links to America’s heartland—that
expansive space that is allegedly home to “real Americans”—her authenticity as a
country artist has been called into question. Since the country music community
traditionally favors hard-won rags-to-riches and pay-your-dues-to-play-the-blues
stories—stories, it should be noted, that are in keeping with the ideology of the
American Dream—Underwood’s success on a television game show has rendered
her illegitimate in some critics’ eyes. Furthermore, American Idol is a decidedly
commercial venture. As scholar Joli Jensen notes, commercialization itself often
renders an artist or work as “inauthentic” in the public eye:

The charge of commercialization imagines an uncommercialized past that

produced culture naturally and spontaneously. This past—like the hills and
honky-tonks and (after much rhetorical work) the Nashville recording studio of
the early 1960s—is the origin of cultural material that “comes from the heart.”
These allegedly more natural places, and processes, are imagined in contrast
to contemporary life … where professionally created material is manufactured
and disseminated through commercial channels—insincere production, for the
market, false, empty, not “from the heart.” (137)

While Jensen does qualify these claims, noting that “it does not necessarily
follow that commercially mediated culture is worse than communally constructed
forms,” it stands to reason that, regardless of the quality of the music performed by
164 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

American Idol contestants, that music might be labeled as “inauthentic” by those

who feel that art should not be created or performed for an explicitly commercial
purpose (137).
For that reason—and even though Underwood is careful to express gratitude
to the show that made her a star (often thanking the show itself and her fans in
awards show acceptance speeches, as well as making appearances on subsequent
seasons of Idol and at Idol publicity events)—she also sometimes appears
almost apologetic for having achieved success that way. While accepting the
Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year award in 2008, she
thanked the country music community for accepting her, noting that she took an
“unconventional route” to country music success, and that they certainly didn’t
have to welcome her with open arms. Underwood is aware, then, that her reality
show past might make her seem less legitimate to some fans and critics, and she
makes consistent efforts to circumvent such criticisms.
Furthermore, she often emphasizes how important belonging to the country
music community is to her: “I want to be a country artist in a country world
with country fans,” Underwood told Entertainment Weekly’s Dave Karger. She
continued, “You can call me ‘not country’ until your face is blue, but I sing country
music” (Karger). As evidence, she cited the fact that though “Before He Cheats”
had crossover success on pop radio, she refused to allow the song to remixed as
a pop song; the version heard on pop radio stations was exactly the same as the
version released to country stations—fiddle, steel guitar, and all (Karger). Jensen
highlights the importance of these qualifications, noting that, traditionally speaking,
“to ‘crossover’ into pop music was to perform, record, and promote country music
in a way that would appeal to a larger audience and, thereby, increase radio air
play and record sales. But such success would also lead to accusations of having
‘abandoned’ country music” (5). To put it another way, Underwood plays up the
fiddle, the steel guitar, and its musical brethren, to maintain her ties to authentic
country music—not allowing her music to be fiddled with in the (re)mixing booth,
that space of artificial studio constructionism.
Underwood also frequently positions herself within traditional country
discourses of rural life, home, and family. She does this primarily by invoking
tropes of blue-collar, middle-American life. For example, her song “Jesus Take the
Wheel,” in keeping with the popular bumper-sticker slogan “Jesus is my copilot,”
finds her singing about turning to Jesus in trying times. Likewise, in “Don’t Forget
to Remember Me,” she wistfully recalls the family members (parents, siblings,
and a grandmother) that she left behind at home while she took off in pursuit of
her dreams. Even in the edgier “Before He Cheats,” Underwood specifies that
she is trashing her boyfriend’s “pretty little souped-up four-wheel-drive,” evoking
images of a pick-up truck that might be used to traverse country roads on the way
to work at a blue-collar job.
However, perhaps more powerful than these gestures to rural life are
Underwood’s repeated reminders of her continuing ties to her rural roots. Though
Underwood often refers to her Checotah, Oklahoma upbringing in interviews, she
 Post-Dixie Chicks Country 165

has also immersed herself in charitable causes in her hometown. In August of

2009, it was widely publicized that Underwood returned to Checotah to donate
$120,000 worth of musical instruments to the town’s elementary and high school
music programs. When presenting the instruments during a school assembly, she
invited a student onstage to sing with her (Witten). During the visit, she announced
that this was “only the beginning” for her new foundation, Checotah Animal,
Town, and Schools (quoted in Witten). While Underwood presumably performs
such philanthropic work with the intention of giving back to her community, this
work has the dual function of reminding country fans that she is from a small, rural
community, and that she has not forgotten where she came from.
It is also worth noting here that Underwood’s philanthropy establishes the
basis for seemingly direct—and seemingly authentic—connections between her
and her fans. As Neal notes:

Within the tradition of country music, artists are expected to connect with their
fans through shared biographical experiences and the relevance of their personal
backgrounds to a stereotyped country identity. These tokens of authenticity
amplify the genre-identity of an artist’s output—Loretta Lynn’s coal mining
roots, Merle Haggard’s time on the wrong side of the law, or Dolly Parton’s
Smoky Mountain upbringing are all frequently invoked as synonymous with the
content, meaning, and impact of their music. (111)

By reminding fans of her small town roots, Underwood reinforces her identity as,
in her words, “a country artist in a country world with country fans.” When she
releases a song that might be considered a bit more provocative than is typical
for country music (such as “Before He Cheats,” “Last Name,” or “Cowboy
Casanova”), audiences may be more accepting of it because they see it as coming
from someone whose background and experiences closely match theirs.
As edgy as Underwood might seem in comparison to the themes of most
contemporary country music, it is important to note that Underwood is not the
first or only country singer to balance more provocative fare with an emphasis
on her rural roots and more traditional values. As Mary A. Bufwack and Robert
K. Oermann note in Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in Country Music,
Loretta Lynn, who had her first hit in 1960, “created a whole new subgenre of
country song” with music written, in Lynn’s words, “from the women’s point
of view” (309). As Lynn states in her autobiography Coal Miner’s Daughter,
“There’s plenty of songs about how women should stand by their men and give
them plenty of loving when they walk through the door, and that’s fine. But what
about the man’s responsibility? … I feel there’s better ways to handle a woman
than whipping her into line. And I make that point clear in my songs” (quoted in
Bufwack and Oermann 309). Such songs were sometimes met with controversy,
as Bufwack and Oermann note: “[Lynn] got by with ‘Rated X’ (1973), which
condemned people who look on divorced women as used goods and sexually
easy, but her birth control celebration ‘The Pill’ (1975) created a furor” (311).
166 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

Her continued success rested, Bufwack and Oermann assert, “in her proud-to-be
country attitude and her assertive woman’s stance” (313). As Underwood would do
decades later, she balanced more controversial song choices with firm expressions
of pride in her working-class roots.
In the years between the height of Lynn’s popularity and Underwood’s
mainstream popularity, other mainstream female country singers would have
success with songs handling more provocative subject matter—even, in some
cases, revenge anthems. Both Yadegaran and DeLuca note the example of the
Dixie Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl,” in which the trio gleefully recount the story of
Mary Anne and Wanda, who band together to kill Earl, Wanda’s abusive husband.
The Dixie Chicks, like both Underwood and Lynn, can count themselves among
the seven female acts to win the Academy of Country Music’s Entertainer of the
Year award, and to this day, they remain the best-selling female group in any
genre. Moreover, their music can arguably be seen as fitting even more firmly in
the country genre than Underwood’s, with band members Martie Maguire and
Emily Robison playing the fiddle and banjo, respectively. Yet the Dixie Chicks are
no longer part of the mainstream country community, nor do their songs receive
significant airplay on country radio, for reasons having nothing to do with their
music itself and everything to do with a statement made by lead singer Natalie
Maines at a 2003 performance at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London, England:
“Just so you know, we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from
Texas.”
In the aftermath of that statement, the group was effectively banned from
country radio. Some radio stations, like Kansas City, Missouri’s WDAF, set up
trash cans and organized events for listeners to throw away their Dixie Chicks
CDs. Similarly, Houston, Texas’s KILT-FM and Talladega, Alabama’s WTDR-
FM suspended play of the Dixie Chicks’ music. The fact that these responses
were provoked by a comment a band member made while espousing a personal
and political belief—and not in response to anything that the group was doing
musically—illustrates that being accepted in the country community has as much
to do with demonstrating a shared background and values with the audience as it
does with producing “authentic” country music. Scholar Claire Katz reaffirms this
notion, claiming that the Chicks were viewed by many as betraying not only their
country but also country music: “[The Dixie Chicks’] version of country music
[was] simply not country enough” (142–3). This response, however, was largely
contradictory. As Katz notes, “Prior to the ‘incident,’ they were viewed as too
country for country,” largely due to the prominence of the fiddle and banjo in their
songs (143). However, since Maines’ comments seemed to signal a treasonous
act among the group’s fan base, it became clear that country music ultimately
“becomes a claim about politics—country music stands for certain ideologies”
(Katz 143). Given this context, it is pretty clear why Underwood takes such pains
to identify with her audience. If she isn’t with them, then, apparently, she must be
against them.
 Post-Dixie Chicks Country 167

It would, of course, be a generalization to suggest that all country music

fans share the same political and ideological views. As scholar Randy Rudder
chronicles, when music journalist Chet Flippo claimed in an anti-Dixie Chicks
column that “country music fans are largely conservative and patriotic,” author
Bill Malone “took [him] to task,” stating, “I am sorely offended by your attempts
to argue that the country music audience is monolithic, or that some of us are
more patriotic than others because of our attitudes toward [George W. Bush]”
(211). Indeed, journalist Chris Willman observes that “it’s worth remembering that
country music is massive in plenty of blue-collar states in the north and Midwest
where, unlike the nearly union-free South, labor has a strong political presence and
the Democratic party hasn’t completely squandered the double-digit advantage it’s
enjoyed in union areas” (9). Even some contemporary country artists have spoken
about the need for country music to cross political party lines. For example,
Gretchen Wilson has argued that “Country music is supposed to unite people. And
we all do our own things and we have different opinions, but we all get along and
have so many things in common that I don’t see red and blue” (quoted in Willman
9). Thus, certainly not all country fans would have seen Maines’ statement as a
“betrayal.”
However, it is noteworthy that Maines’ statement made much more of a stir
than similar statements made by other celebrities. As Rudder notes, anti-Bush
comments made by public figures such as Pretenders’ lead singer Chrissie Hynde
and actor Jennifer Aniston did not get nearly as much public attention (208). Dixie
Chicks member Martie Maguire has stated that she believes that the reaction to
Maines’ comment is “all about the fact that we’re in country music” (quoted in
Willman 41). It is also worth noting that other country musicians have expressed
liberal political views on different occasions, both in interviews and in song.
Martha Hume, editor of the Journal of Country Music, argues that perhaps the stir
over Maines’ statements comes from the fact that the Chicks had not expressed
similar political opinions in the past:

To the fans, their statements came out of left field. Willie [Nelson] and Merle
[Haggard] can sing anti-war songs or anything they want and even audience
members who are voting for Bush will say, “They’re good men, they can do it.”
But when the Chicks did it […] There’s something there, and I don’t know if it’s
sexism. My feeling is that it’s because their politics are not otherwise reflected in
their work, and with [Johnny] Cash and those guys, their politics were, so when
you hear what they’re saying, it’s consistent with the character they’ve put out
there. (quoted in Willman 33)

Conservative Dixie Chicks fans might have reacted in such a manner because they
were surprised to learn that the Dixie Chicks did not share their political views.
Willman suggests that this is not terribly surprising. He states:
168 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

The polarization of America has resulted in an atmosphere where red types

and blue types tend to emigrate where they feel the most camaraderie—if
not literally uprooting and moving across borders … then certainly selecting
churches, private schools, and workplaces where like minds are the norm …
And if your neighbors all fall in line, why not assume that the Dixie Chicks,
talent and good looks aside, are just like you? That’s the very cornerstone of
country music: that the entertainers are no different from their audience, a rule
not found in any other genre. (33)

Therefore, there might somewhat understandably be a backlash when a country

artist espouses viewpoints that are inconsistent with those held by many of their
audience members. It is not only the case that certain audience members might be
offended by hearing a contradictory viewpoint but also that they would feel (as
Katz observes) betrayed to learn that the artist held a contradictory viewpoint in
the first place. As Willman explains, “In the Chicks fracas, some country fans may
have been wounded by the realization, subconscious or otherwise, that they aren’t
really so tight with the people who they believed gave a voice to what was in their
hearts after all” (33).
Moreover, fairly pronounced changes in country radio have occurred since
Loretta Lynn’s voice first graced the airwaves. As Lynn notes, even though her
song “The Pill” was controversial:

The women loved it. But the men who run the radio stations were scared to
death. It’s like a challenge to the man’s ways of thinking. See, they’ll play a song
about making love in a field because they think that’s sexy, from a man’s point
of view. But something that’s really important to women, like birth control, they
don’t want no part of, leastways not on the air. Well, my fans … forced most of
the radio stations to play it. (quoted in Bufwack and Oermann 311)

Fans, then, played a large part in making sure that the song got radio airplay.
However, the radio consolidation that followed the Telecommunications Act of
1996 (which lifted caps on radio ownership) led to a radio industry in which, as
journalist Alec Foege notes, “most commercial stations … measure their success
primarily by advertising revenue, not listenership” (114). Therefore, the support
of advertisers became more important than the preferences of individual listeners,
leaving many individual radio stations far less power to promote individual artists
than they might have in the past.
It is not surprising, then, that the political climate following September 11
also played a large part in the Dixie Chicks’ reception. As scholar Aaron A. Fox
notes, following September 11, “Traditional working-class patriotic nationalism
had emerged from the wreckage at Ground Zero” (173). Country music, perhaps
by default, became a place to assert “a privileged claim to speak for the nation
in the voice of (white) working class experience” (172). Thus, the Dixie Chicks’
statement emerged in a political environment where their views were counter
 Post-Dixie Chicks Country 169

to the values that largely conglomerate-controlled country radio was espousing.

Though their viewpoint might have been tolerated at one time, in a post-9/11 radio
environment it was difficult, if not impossible, for them to get support from radio
stations.
With these events in the background, it is perhaps unsurprising that Underwood
would present herself as endlessly respectful of the traditions of country music.
During her time as a contestant on American Idol, she cited Martina McBride
as both a favorite and an influence; on the show, she performed country songs
whenever possible, including McBride’s “Independence Day” and “When God
Fearin’ Women Get the Blues.” Similarly, in 2009 she had a hit with a cover version
of country mainstay Randy Travis’s “I Told You So.” She then returned to the Idol
stage to perform the song as a duet with Travis during the week he served as the
contestants’ mentor. She also often shows a great deal of humility and reverence for
veteran country singers. In an article publicizing her 2008 appearance on Saturday
Night Live, she discussed her experiences at country music awards shows—where,
as previously noted, she is a frequent winner—stating, “I still don’t feel like I’m
supposed to be there … because I’m looking around and all of the people around
me are the musicians I was listening to and seeing in concert when I was in high
school and college” (quoted in Baca E-01). She further exhibited her humility in
a reflection on her co-headlining tour with Keith Urban: “We’re co-headlining,
but he’s been doing this for much longer than I have, so he should play last. I
love watching him night after night, and picking out things I like” (quoted in
Baca E-01). She likely gains favor not only with country fans but also with the
mainstream country music community as a whole by showing respect for country
singers who have been in the business for a long time. In doing so, she sends
the message that even though she might not sing country music exactly like they
do, or about topics that they might choose to sing about, she is not interested in
replacing them—or in disrespecting anything they have done in the past. She also
makes it clear that she is not interested in doing anything that flies in the face of
the values of such singers, or of her fans.
In contrast, the Dixie Chicks made a more aggressive effort to distance
themselves from the country music community in the fallout from Maines’
comment. In 2006, Maguire told Time magazine, “I’d rather have a smaller
following of really cool people who get it, who will grow with us as we grow and
are fans for life, than people who have us in their five-disc changer with Reba
McEntire and Toby Keith. We don’t want those kinds of fans. They limit what
you can do” (quoted in Tyrangiel). While Underwood consistently expresses her
solidarity with both other mainstream country artists and with country fans, the
Chicks are now equally emphatic about their unwillingness to adhere to the gender-
and genre-specific expectations of the country-music community. Regardless of
their music’s sonic ties to traditional country sounds, their offstage comments
make it clear that they would prefer not to be associated with the genre.
Despite their lack of interest in remaining part of the country music community,
it is impossible to deny that the Chicks have had an influence on the female singers
170 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

who have appeared on the scene in the years since 2003. Indeed, without the
example of “Goodbye Earl,” it is hard to say whether “Before He Cheats” would
even have existed. “Nobody can for one minute say that they aren’t believably
talented and that they haven’t broken down doors,” Gretchen Wilson acknowledges
(quoted in Willman 52). She continues: “The Dixie Chicks made it easier for me to
say ‘Hell yeah’ on the radio—there’s no doubt about it” (quoted in Willman 52).
Thus, while the Chicks themselves are no longer part of the mainstream country
community, their musical example lives on in singers like Underwood, Wilson,
Lambert, and even Taylor Swift, who had a hit with the revenge anthem “Picture
to Burn.”
That being said, such artists might do well to acknowledge the issues that
the Chicks’ 2003 incident brings to light. For example, it is fairly clear that the
criticisms leveled at the Chicks were gendered in nature. As Katz reminds us, “The
Dixie Chicks were not simply called unpatriotic, they were called ‘Dixie Sluts’ and
‘Dixie Bitches,’ terms reserved only for women and, in particular, women who,
in almost every case, act contrary to the prescribed passive role assigned to them”
(151). Pruitt underscores this, noting that “traits typically deemed ‘feminine’ have
been used in several ways to construct a negative portrayal of the Dixie Chicks.
Following the notion that women are immature and unable to think rationally,
the Dixie Chicks were represented as irrational and childlike” (90). This—
and the Chicks’ 2003 incident as a whole—suggests that, for a female country
performer, the consequences of stepping outside prescribed genre boundaries can
be especially harsh.
However, some scholars remain optimistic that these boundaries are widening
to make room for a country woman who does not so closely adhere to traditional,
prescribed gender roles. Alena Horn, for example, cites Wilson, along with
Underwood’s “Before He Cheats,” as examples that indicate that “boundary-
pushing song lyrics … are being embraced by the industry” (471). If nothing else,
female country musicians have a wider range of roles available to them than those
described by Jensen. In her words, traditional female country musicians “are either
angels (waiting at home, patient and loving) or fallen angels (sitting in honky-tonks
with tinted hair and painted lips)” (30). As Carrie Underwood, who would just as
easily smash up her boyfriend’s car as she would ask Jesus to drive it, indicates,
today’s female country musicians need not divert solely to either extreme.
 Post-Dixie Chicks Country 171

Works Cited

Baca, Ricardo. “Carrie’s Success Story: Underwood’s Crossover Appeal Evident

in the Millions of Albums Sold, SNL Appearances.” The Denver Post. March
9, 2008: E-01. LexisNexis. Web. Sept. 21, 2009.
“Biography.” The Official Carrie Underwood Site. Web. Sept. 21, 2009.
Bufwack, Mary A., and Robert K. Oermann. Finding Her Voice: The Saga of
Women in Country Music. New York: Crown Publishers, 1993. Print.
“Carrie Underwood Awards.” CMT.com. Web. Sept. 21, 2009.
“Carrie Underwood Biography.” CMT.com. Web. Sept. 21, 2009.
DeLuca, Dan. “Songs of Revenge, Rage Rule Charts.” Chattanooga Times Free
Press. July 13, 2007: E1. LexisNexis. Web. Sept. 21, 2009.
Foege, Alec. Right of the Dial: The Rise of Clear Channel and the Fall of
Commercial Radio. New York: Faber and Faber, 2008. Print.
Fox, Aaron A. “‘Alternative’ to What? O Brother, September 11, and the Politics
of Country Music.” Country Music Goes to War. Ed. Charles K. Wolfe and
James E. Akenson. Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 2005. 164–
91. Print.
Fox, Pamela. “Recycled ‘Trash’: Gender and Authenticity in Country Music
Autobiography.” American Quarterly 50.2 (1998): 234–67. Print.
Gerome, John. “Carrie Underwood Wins ACM Entertainer of the Year.” The
Associated Press. Apr. 6, 2009. Lexis Nexis. Web. Sept. 21, 2009.
Horn, Alena. “‘Keepin’ it Country’: What Makes the Lyrics of Gretchen Wilson
Hard?” Popular Music and Society 32.2 (2009): 461–73. Print.
Jensen, Joli. The Nashville Sound: Authenticity, Commercialization, and Country
Music. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 1998. Print.
Karger, Dave. “The Confessions of Carrie Underwood.” Entertainment Weekly.
Oct. 18, 2007. Web. Sept. 21, 2009.
Katz, Claire. “‘The Eternal Irony of the Community’: Prophecy, Patriotism, and
the Dixie Chicks.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 26.4
(2008): 139–60. Print.
Neal, Jocelyn. “The Voice Behind the Song: Faith Hill, Country Music, and
Reflexive Identity.” The Women of Country Music: A Reader. Ed. Charles K.
Wolfe and James E. Akenson. Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press,
2003. Print.
Pruitt, Lesley. “Real Men Kill and a Lady Never Talks Back: Gender Goes to
War in Country Music.” International Journal on World Peace 24.4 (2007):
85–106. Print.
Rossman, Gabriel. “Elites, Masses, and Media Blacklists: The Dixie Chicks
Controversy.” Social Forces 83.1 (2004): 61–79. Print.
Rudder, Randy. “In Whose Name? Country Artists Speak Out on Gulf War II.”
Country Music Goes to War. Ed. Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson.
Lexington, KY: The University of Kentucky Press, 2005. 208–226. Print.
172 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

Tyrangiel, Josh. “Chicks in the Line of Fire.” Time Magazine. May 21, 2006. Web.
Mar. 14, 2008.
Underwood, Carrie. Carnival Ride. Arista, 2007. CD.
——. Play On. Arista, 2009. CD.
——. Some Hearts. Arista, 2005. CD.
Willman, Chris. Rednecks and Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music. New
York: W. W. Norton, 2005. Print.
Witten, Kelsey. “Carrie Underwood Duets with Lucky 5th Grader.” People.com.
Aug. 28, 2009. Web. Sept. 21, 2009.
Yadegarden, Jessica. “R-E-V-E-N-G-E.” Contra Costa Times. May 20, 2007.
LexisNexis. Web. Sept. 21, 2009.
 Chapter 13
Walking the Great Line: Underoath and
Christian Fundamentalism in Punk Rock
after 9/11
Gerrit Roessler

When dealing with the unimaginable—with an unimaginable catastrophe—a

need for simple explanations arises. These explanations are often rooted in
tested, familiar structures and ideologies. In Welcome to the Desert of the Real!,
Slavoj Žižek argues that 9/11 shattered American reality, or, rather, “the symbolic
coordinates which determine what we perceive as reality” like no other event in
recent history (16). At the same time, the 9/11 attacks produced new fantasies,
and affirmed old ones, about the self and the other. Around the time that Žižek
made his observations, during the immediate aftermath of the events, many of the
cultural and national narratives were already forming that now, ten years later,
frame mainstream American perceptions of 9/11. The “us and them” dichotomy,
established by the rhetoric of the Bush administration, seems to have found
its continuation in the populist hubris of the Tea Party Movement and its self-
appointed spokespeople, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. Moreover, the religious,
predominantly Christian, basis of that dichotomy can be traced from Jerry Falwell
and Pat Robertson’s statements on The 700 Club immediately after the events,
in which they blamed America’s alleged hedonistic and immoral lifestyle for
the attacks. Similarly, the more recent debates over the so-called Ground Zero
Mosque—opponents of which argue that a Muslim cultural center so close to the
“hallowed grounds” of the former World Trade Center is an insensitive, if not
ill-willed, gesture toward the victims of 9/11—also reek of a kind of Christian
egocentrism.
Žižek points out that the religio-political answer to 9/11 is at least problematic,
if not entirely paradoxical. Muslim fundamentalism was accused of attacking
the freedoms that characterize Western society in part by those who claimed that
Western society had not adhered enough to the order of Christian fundamentalism
(Žižek 84). In the case of the Ground Zero Mosque, for instance, the freedom of
religious expression that the Taliban suppressed so violently in Afghanistan is not
unequivocally granted in the society whose freedoms were allegedly at stake on
9/11.
However, not all post-9/11 narratives were religiously motivated. Writing
for Time Magazine, Roger Rosenblatt proclaimed as soon as four days after the
174 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

attack that “one good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of
the age of irony.” The unimaginable catastrophe had, in a way, renewed a need
for metaphysical truths and absolutes and had shaken the postmodernist ivory
tower. In a time that needed stability, the fantasies of free-market capitalism and
liberal parliamentary democracy were more tempting than cultural relativism or
deconstructionist différance. In response, Stanley Fish found himself arguing
in the New York Times against a post-9/11 discourse that was “grasping for the
empty rhetoric of universal absolutes to which all subscribe but which all define
differently” (A19).
What these narrative reactions have in common is that they are based on
dichotomies—us versus them, freedom versus fundamentalism, irony versus
truth—intended to fulfill a desire for meaning, a desire to come to terms with
the unexpected and unimaginable. What they also have in common, like all
epistemological dichotomies, is that they are based on contradiction. As Jacques
Derrida teaches us in Dissemination, we are unaware of these contradictions
because one side of the pair is always privileged and dominant, while the other
is subjugated and controlled. We operate under the illusion that these hierarchies
are natural, stable, and inevitable. In other words, for such a dualism to become
the structuring narrative by which we can make sense of the unimaginable—the
catastrophe of 9/11, in this context—we have to choose sides, to put a halt to play
and ambiguity, and submit to the law of what Derrida calls the “god-sun-father-
capital” (1832). We have, to paraphrase Roger Rosenblatt, to put an end to irony.
If an alleged mainstream is constituted by contradictions, if its homogeneity
is merely a fantasy, and if a sudden event reveals it as fantasy and contradiction,
where do we situate those cultural layers that define themselves in opposition to
this mainstream? It seems that countercultures would either have to find different,
pluralistic strategies to cope with such an identity crisis or that they would have to
embrace homogenous and absolutist discourses even more radically. In this essay,
I will argue, using the example of the punk-rock band Underoath, that subcultures
have historically been characterized by the same desires and contradictions as the
mainstream. Moreover, I contend that it was the absolutist mainstream discourse
after 9/11, rather than the postmodernist relativism of the pre-9/11 era, that
opened the doors for fundamentalist ideologies to establish themselves within
the anti-establishment punk subculture. By successfully negotiating the line
between ideological uniformity and individualistic plurality, Christian punk rock
demarcates the basic lines of the political and cultural discourses of the decade
since 2001.
In 2006, Underoath’s album Define the Great Line debuted at #2 on the Top
200 Billboard Album Charts; another, Lost in the Sound of Separation, reached
#8 in 2008 (“Underoath”). That a band performing in a punk-rock variety often
referred to as “screamo” entered the Top 200 at such a high position would be
reason enough to examine the possible implications for the state of mainstream
culture. In 2006, for example, Underoath found themselves in the neighborhood
 Walking the Great Line 175

of Nelly Furtado, and her songs about a “promiscuous maneater,” while in 2008,
they shared the top ten with Detroit’s Kid Rock (“Music Albums”).
Even more remarkable is the fact that Underoath simultaneously made #1
in the Top Christian Albums list (“Christian Albums”). In the past, Christian
popular culture existed with its own infrastructure for production, distribution,
and marketing—an infrastructure that was strictly separate from, and deliberately
alternative to, the secular mainstream. The few Christian bands who managed to
cross over into the secular market—like Sixpence None the Richer and Creed,
for example—either had to downplay their Christianity or formulate religious
messages so vaguely that they would be lost on most non-Christian listeners. Other
Christian artists would often limit their religious content to a general mention
of God or “Him” but avoided reference to Jesus, the Lord, or other specifically
Christian terms and motifs.
Simply put, Underoath does not do any of that. In interviews, lyrics,
performances, liner notes, and the like, they unapologetically stand by their
Christian beliefs. A number of questions immediately arise here: What is it
about punk that enables it to harbor Christian beliefs without being a specifically
Christian genre? What happens to the very idea of “genre” if its definition is so
malleable that it can describe something that seems to be utterly other to it? And,
along those same lines, what happens to the idea of “mainstream” if it can contain
something that, like punk, defines itself in opposition to the mainstream?
I am using punk rock here as a somewhat fluid term that allows me to include
hardcore punk, emo, and a plethora of other variations and subgenres. I believe
this is appropriate, as they all share a common narrative of origin. The rules and
conventions that define and delineate each variant are legitimized and authenticated
by, sometimes rather incompatible, interpretations of punk’s creation narrative, so
to speak. I will return to the broader question of how to interpret shared narratives,
as well as to the matter of authenticity, later in this essay. For now I will offer a
very brief overview of its creation narrative and the ways in which it crosses paths
with Christian popular culture.
By the mid-80s, the rock and roll of Jimi Hendrix, the flower-power of Scott
McKenzie, and the art-rock of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer had become part of
the cultural establishment. Former hippies now held Wall Street jobs and voted
for Ronald Reagan. The commodification of high-profile symbols like Woodstock
and the Vietnam Protests, in, for example, the musical Hair, and its subsequent
film version, left a sense that the members of the 60s counterculture had betrayed
their ideals. Punk emerged during the mid-1970s, first as an expression of British
working-class culture, and then as a radical subcultural youth movement in
deliberate political and aesthetic opposition to the baby-boomers in general and
to hippies in particular. Always careful to avoid becoming part of the loathed
establishment—or “selling out,” as the term goes—the punk scene refused to
participate in established structures of the music and fashion industries and,
instead, developed an alternative subcultural infrastructure. Similarly, Christian
popular culture, which emerged in the late 1960s and was also a reaction against
176 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

hippies and the excesses of the “Summer of Love,” kept its own record production
and distribution, as well as journalism and fashion, independent of the commercial
and cultural establishment. Christian popular music, however, did not intend to
place itself in direct opposition to the mainstream music and fashion industries,
as punk arguably did. Rather, Christian pop music attempted to mimic the fashion
and music of the “flower-power” generation in an effort to redefine them in terms
of the Christian faith. The “Summer of Love” was to be the “Summer of Love for
Jesus.”1
There are, of course, many different and often mutually exclusive Christian
beliefs. Each denomination is based on its own reading of the Bible, and each
denomination claims to know the one true reading of the Scriptures and does
not accept other readings as equally valid. Characteristically, they share an
imperative to “save” non-believers by winning them over to accept their particular
interpretation. Bruce Lincoln calls these communities “maximalist,” because they
strive for a maximum of religious foundation (59). Religion serves as a stabilizing
factor and normative corrective of cultural practice (Lincoln 59). Hence, Christian
popular music is not a musical genre, but a revision of an existing genre according
to a fundamentalist belief system. The genre’s rules are slightly rewritten according
to the code of conduct of a particular Christian viewpoint, based on the Bible as its
fundamental document. The aim is as much to minister to a secular culture as it is
to provide an alternative to it.
Punk, on the other hand, is not so much a belief system as an attitude, which
started as rage against all social determinism, making it decidedly “antibürgerlich”
(“anti-bourgeois”; Büsser 86, my translation). When punk threatened to become
part of the commercial mainstream in the early 1980s, movements like straight
edge and hardcore developed as ideological and stylistic radicalizations of the
attitude. In order to continue identifying with the “punk idea,” fans needed to
create new labels that would signify a purified mode of the genre. This game of “I
am more punk than you” pushed punk towards more and more specific political
agendas. Hardcore, for example, was intended as a return to punk’s mythical
working-class and anti-establishment origins at a time when Johnny Rotten and
Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols had become fashion icons and when punk style
was absorbed into the London art scene via Vivienne Westwood. As Martin
Büsser points out, hardcore increasingly adopted fragments of a variety of other
ideologies (120). Ecological, economical, racial, and feminist causes, to name but
a few, were taken on, ultimately leading to straight edge, a near-ascetic lifestyle,
whose proponents relinquished drugs, alcohol, and often even sex. The similarities
to Christian culture reach beyond the asceticism: as each of the subgenres claims
to be the most authentic and legitimate heir to the punk-rock idea, they become
inevitably exclusive and dogmatic, or, one might say, fundamentalist.

1
  Romanowski’s “Roll Over Beethoven” is particularly strong on these subcultural
connections.
 Walking the Great Line 177

This escape into ever more esoteric circles was also motivated by what Büsser
calls pointedly the “Fehler im System” (“flaw in the system”; 86, my translation):
if everybody were punk, what would there be to revolt against? Likewise, if there
were nothing to rebel against, how could one still be punk? This systemic flaw
requires any underground culture that defines itself in opposition to the mainstream
to be constantly in flux. Punk as a subculture either denies any prescriptive
value, because it opposes all types of ideology and thus cannot be pro-anything
but only contra, or it becomes so radically prescriptive that it has to refract
constantly into ever smaller subcultures. Today, aged punk veterans like “Fat”
Mike Burkett of NOFX compensate for their commercial success with a mere
gesture of loudmouthed juvenile rebellion against the alleged mainstream Other,
while also professing nostalgia for the ultimate anti-attitude as Punk’s mythical
origin narrative. The compatibility of this gesture with mainstream culture is well
illustrated by Green Day’s Broadway success based on their 2004 album American
Idiot, which, much like the musical Hair or the more recent Rent, represents yet
another kind of commodified vision of anti-establishment feel-good rebellion.
Whether a mere gesture or an ideological foundation of the genre, the anti-
dogma, anti-establishment attitude that constitutes the origin fantasy of punk is
difficult to square with fundamentalist Christianity, particularly in a time like
post-9/11 America, when Christianity seems to dominate the social, cultural,
and political mainstream. However, as I have noted, Underoath is a band that is
unwilling to hide or downplay their Christian beliefs, while simultaneously taking
part in non-faith-based festival tours and providing interviews for non-Christian
music magazines. In interviews, videos, and onstage, the band members emphasize
the importance religion plays in their lives—thus blurring the line between their
performative personae and their “real” lives offstage. On their website, discussions
of social and political issues frequently take recourse to faith and concrete Bible
passages, and their song lyrics deal with classical conversion stories, chastity
narratives, and calls for the unconditional love of God. In doing so, they fulfill the
conditions of fundamentalist religious practice as outlined above: Religion is the
central domain of cultural practice. The reverse is true as well: All practices and
preferences are secured by grounding them in religion.
They’re Only Chasing Safety (2004) is the band’s fourth album and the first
with their current lineup. While Christian bands usually change to a secular
mainstream label to obscure their faith-based origins, Chasing Safety, and all
of Underoath’s subsequent records, were released on the influential Christian
record label Tooth&Nail. The song “Some Will Seek Forgiveness, Others Escape”
explicitly contains the word “Jesus,” a divergence from the customs of mainstream
Christian bands, many of whom revert to the term “Him.” In the song’s lyrics,
the lyrical “I” promises an “unfaithful” other to teach it the Christian virtues of
forgiveness, love, and spiritual strength. “Jesus” is asked to welcome it back
home. The constant repetition of the lines “Jesus, I’m ready to come home” and
“I will love you” turn the song into a kind of prodigal-son story, in which the son
earns his return by converting the unfaithful. Guitarist Tim McTague explains in
178 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

an interview with the popular Christian periodical CCM Magazine that “the song
is about realizing the error of your ways, asking for forgiveness and making a
vow to start over and do what’s right” (quoted in Jenison). Furthermore, McTague
explains that the group did not want to “accommodate” and put “their beliefs on
the backburner and [forget] why they started the band in the first place” (quoted
in Jenison). Underoath are clearly setting up a contrast between themselves and
other faith-based bands by suggesting that their religious integrity is greater than
that of others. The band thus creates a narrative of authenticity based on the myth
that their spirituality is radical and uncompromised. This narrative parallels punk’s
perpetual refraction(s) into a more radical, more “authentic” version of the genre.
The lyrics to the track “In Regards to Myself,” from Define the Great Line, also
deal with truth and authenticity. Here, the lyrics’ religious connotations are not as
obvious, although they do make frequent references to God. However, alongside
the song’s video by Linus Johansson, the Christian message becomes difficult
to miss. The main theme of the song is the recognition of one’s true self. This
acknowledgment of truth is brought about by “light” that “is blinding to the naked
eye.” This line combines two Christian tropes: Jesus as “the light of the world”
and the impossibility of looking upon God directly (John 8.12). It encapsulates
the promise of salvation and the imperative of faith without empirical proof—the
two central paradigms of Christianity. The line also alludes to a biblical passage in
which Jesus heals a blind man on the Sabbath. As the story goes, Jesus is accused
by the Pharisees of breaking the law, since no work must be done on this day.
He responds by saying: “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the
blind will see and those who see will become blind,” suggesting that he will
make those see the truth who believe in him and that he will blind those who only
think that they can see (John 9.39). The lesson here is that authentic, true belief
is not measured by following the law or going through the ceremonial motions.
Underoath appropriate these concepts, suggesting in their own work that true faith
can involve a critical attitude to established and institutionalized forms of religious
practice.
Underoath extend these themes in their video for “In Regards to Myself,”
which criticizes the act of idolizing pop stars. Roughly halfway through the video,
the band can be seen performing at the heart of a labyrinthine system of corridors.
Three sevens appear suspended from strings and attached to a mesmerizing spiral
behind the band. The spiral seems to have captured the audience and rendered
them apathetic. One little girl breaks the spell as she takes the sevens and runs
away. Toward the end of the video, the girl uses the numbers to unlock an escape
door out of the labyrinth. In Christian popular culture, the triple seven has become
a sign for positive Christianity as a symbolic counterpart to the triple six, which
represents Satan. Whereas the latter is scripturally founded, the former is a very
recent custom. Underoath also incorporates the triple seven into the URL for
their website (www.underoath777.com), which allows the numbers to reverberate
against an even larger set of reference points. The triple sevens now stand not
only for God and Christianity but also for Underoath—a mediated product, issuing
 Walking the Great Line 179

a warning not to be distracted from the gospel by false pop-cultural prophets.

By establishing these connections, Underoath triangulate the realms of Scripture,
Christian pop culture, and punk rock, rendering themselves authentic in each facet
of that trinity, because, clearly, they reside at the center of it.
Heather Hendershot suggests that it is questionable whether or not evangelical
youths actually listen carefully to the lyrics of contemporary Christian music
and interpret them “properly” (71). She remarks that, although the Christian
component of the music is almost exclusively evident in the lyrics, it remains
uncertain whether “Christianized” lyrics produce more peaceful and chaste fans
(71). With respect to Underoath, this remark is particularly relevant because the
band’s vocals—screamed loudly and aggressively—are almost impossible to
understand. However, the lyrics are available online and, frequently, in the liner
notes. Moreover, the band supports religious interpretations of the lyrics through
the Christian symbolism of some of their videos, as well as in statements in
interviews. They also provide increasingly theological reflections on their life and
work on their blog. Not all band members offer the same amount of theological
insight, but the blogs by Tim McTague are especially personal accounts of
spiritual development. In particular, McTague expresses both personal religious
reflections as well as suggestions about appropriate Christian behavior, based on
his interpretation of the faith. For a band trying to woo an exclusively Christian
audience, none of these gestures would be remarkable, since this kind of reflection
is an integral aspect of evangelical religious practice. However, for a band that
shared a concert bill on the 2009 Warped Tour with punk standard-bearers Bad
Religion, Underoath’s brand of good religion is nothing short of provocative.
Still, this does not mean that the band is singularly out to convert their secular
audience. During the 2006 Warped Tour, “Fat” Mike Burkett of NOFX famously
poked fun at the band from the stage, saying that “Underoath doesn’t believe
that dinosaurs existed” (quoted in Saitowitz). When Underoath left the tour for
undisclosed reasons, speculations arose as to whether they had quit in response
to the rejection by such an established and overtly secular punk band (Paul).
In an interview with the Canadian online punk rock magazine PunkTV, two of
Underoath’s members, bassist Grant Brandell and drummer Aaron Gillespie, joked
about an online game that would put Burkett and their own vocalist Chamberlain
up against each other in a fight to the death. The game, released in 2006 as Warped
Tour Game by FuseTV, features bloody battles of popular musicians with a Warped
Tour background and blasts of music from the player who emerges victorious.
Brandell and Chamberlain predicted good chances for their own combatant
because Burkett is, in their opinion, old and fat (quoted in Christie). We can see
that the overtness of the band’s Christian message does not seem to contradict an
otherwise ordinary decorum for a punk-rock band, as they display bawdy humor
and an interest in video games with a jocular use of violence. Furthermore, the
band regards itself as the next “real” thing in punk rock: a younger and newer
counterpart to the aged and settled punk establishment.
180 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

In the October 2006 issue of Alternative Press Magazine, Underoath’s McTague

and NOFX’s Burkett were confronted about their disagreements. In the story,
Burkett expresses a number of problems he has with the opinions of individual
band members. He refers, for example, to a conversation he had with McTague,
where “[McTague] made himself very clear … He thinks homosexuality is wrong.
He doesn’t think gays should be able to get married. And he thinks that gay people
are probably that way because they were molested as children” (quoted in Staddon
186). Burkett’s response is emphatic: “I think that is backward thinking and I will
ridicule [McTague] for that publicly” (quoted in Staddon 186). Burkett goes so far
as to claim that Underoath proselytize in concert by saying that they perform in
the name of Jesus Christ: “I think they’re being evangelistic by doing that. They’re
trying to get kids to think it’s cool to join an organized religious group. I don’t
think that’s cool” (quoted in Staddon 186). Burkett’s band emerged in the 1980s
and has been politically outspoken, particularly against organized religion, ever
since. In 2003, they released a record called The War on Errorism, punning on the
rhetoric employed by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of 9/11,
which featured a caricature of the president. In 2006, they released Never Trust a
Hippie, ridiculing both Christianity and punk’s original nemesis, with a drunken
Jesus figure as the original flower child on the cover. As such, Burkett’s comments
are not entirely surprising.
Rather than spend his time defending the band’s right to practice their faith
openly, McTague’s rebuttal mainly takes issue with the implied correspondence
between Christianity and sociopolitical conservatism. Underoath frequently refers
to the religious establishment as “Americanized Christianity,” to emphasize how
Christianity has been appropriated for political and social agendas, particularly
in the post-9/11 environment. Spencer Chamberlain, Underoath’s lead screamer,
laments that the punk community “judge[s] us for something that Americanized
Christianity has turned into, which is everything that we kind of stand against”
(quoted in Silnicki). The terminological dissociation of America and religion
implies a desire to untangle the conceptual unity of national and religious symbols
that post-9/11 civil religion had revived so radically. Underoath explicitly want
not to be “like your average Christian band,” where “Christian” is synonymous
with being pro-war, pro-life, and xeno- and homophobic (quoted in Reay). The
mainstream political appropriation of religious symbols and rhetoric has, in the
band’s opinion, harmed the perception of their spiritual content. Mainstream
religion is no longer about faith but is rather about a conservative self-image.
Tim McTague sees mainstream Christianity in America as being homophobic,
patriarchal and pro-war, whereas he identifies himself as “a mixture of red and blue,
as far as my political color goes” (quoted in Staddon 184). The use of terms like
“mixture,” the detachment from institutionalized Christianity, and the emphasis on
individual and personal articulations of faith seem to imply a relativist, anything-
goes attitude. Yet, an analysis of the band’s work and public statements, like
those presented here, makes it clear that they maintain a fundamentally dualistic
 Walking the Great Line 181

worldview based on the belief that Christian faith will ultimately reveal a truthful
understanding of the world and will provide salvation from its troubles.
McTague’s defense against Burkett’s accusations makes it apparent that
Underoath feel misunderstood and somehow unjustly persecuted for their beliefs.
This is, of course, a biblical narrative as much as it is a punk-rock narrative.
Criticism especially has strengthened the musicians’ status as quasi-martyrs who
risk their commercial success by refusing to downplay their spirituality, by resisting
the temptation to sign a major record deal, and, ironically, by quarreling publicly
with punk rock icons like Mike Burkett. Punk rock’s inherent need for perpetual
radicalization, and its concurrent push to oppose its own established structures,
provides a perfect point of entry for this type of Christian self-perception. The
dissociation from traditional images of organized religion and the association
with punk rock values generates a novel image of Christianity: Christianity as
underground—Christians as the underdogs of punk-rock culture.
At the beginning of my discussion, I suggested that Underoath is a Christian band
that is successful in the secular American mainstream. Later, I situated Underoath
within the punk-rock tradition and presented the band as a bastion of pseudo-
subversive countercultural thinking. Which of these descriptions is true? Well, in
a way, both are accurate. “Underground,” like “punk,” has become a commodified
label. Martin Büsser writes that punk’s “corpse” had already started to “smell”
in the early 1990s, referencing the increasingly indiscriminate, and increasingly
distasteful, use of the term punk for all kinds of pop-cultural phenomena (147).
Certainly, there still is the self-administered community that does not strive for
commercial success, but it no longer exists as an independent alternative to the
mainstream. In fact, there is no homogenous mainstream anymore, and perhaps
never has been, but rather a heterogeneous mix of marketable labels, all of which
promise authenticity and originality. Tom Holert and Mark Terkessidis argue as
much, claiming that stylistic and ideological deviance is no longer streamlined but
has become a commodity in itself (10).
Underoath’s unapologetic display of religious fervor secures the disapproval of
the established punk community, and their punk decorum secures the disapproval
of those religious conservatives, who, post-9/11, claimed to represent mainstream
America. It is this double movement of marginalization which makes Underoath
and similar bands—such as Mute Math, Switchfoot, and Norma Jean—particularly
marketable. Their claims to authenticity makes them implicitly political without
the need to take sides in the dominant political discourse.
The established cultural and political institutions failed to create a homogenous
response to 9/11 precisely because homogeneity is not a quality of mainstream
culture. The dyadic structures which characterized the dominant attempts at making
sense of the events were too overtly revealed in their inherent contradictions by
the events themselves. Given the choice between “us and them,” the answer was,
too often, neither. This “neither” was, it seems, not a rejection of metaphysical
truth claims in favor of deferred meaning. On the contrary, as the phenomenon of
Christian punk shows, the desire for “truth” has not lessened, but it is packaged
182 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

inside an established genre repertoire which presents absolute truth as a choice and
an expression of independence, freedom, and rebellion, rather than a totalitarian
imperative. That Christianity sees itself in the position of the marginalized outsider
is not new and not particular to Underoath or Christian punk. What makes this case
special is that the label “Christianity” was used to describe both the mainstream and
the subcultural response and that the ideological structures of these responses—
the fundamental truth claim and the radically dyadic world view—were identical.
Yet, in case of the mainstream, the knowledge of the alleged truth informed its
choices, and, in case of the subculture, Christian truth was just one of the choices,
even though it was clearly marked as the one that was more authentic and “punk.”
Underoath’s religious beliefs serve as an authoritative, moral foundation in
which fans can ground their individual spirituality. It is this balance between
essentialist absolutes and laissez-faire non-conformity that is so appealing to
post-9/11 America, whose central cultural myths had just been revealed as mere
fantasy, and whose central cultural and political institutions had failed to provide
a satisfactory and stable framework within which to cope with the unimaginable.
From its peculiar position of “knowing truth,” Christian punk can provide answers
in a more profound way than the fundamentalist evangelical discourse that
dominated the public response to the attacks. By distancing themselves from the
teachings of evangelical figureheads, and from the political establishment from
both sides of the congressional spectrum, without explicitly specifying their own
point of view on critical issues such as gay marriage, the “war on terror,” abortion,
and creationism, Underoath avoid the prescriptive didacticism of Jerry Falwell
and the destructive polemics of secular figures like Michael Moore. The disastrous
events of 9/11 did not, perhaps, put an end to irony, but rather opened a space for
highly ironic articulations such as Christian punk. If Christianity, as I argue above,
serves as a source of truth and absolute values, and punk rock as the antidote to
the sociocultural dogmatism of the mainstream, the question remains at what point
either label loses its credibility and at what point of commercial success this novel
mode of an otherwise established genre can no longer—to use a variation on the
title of Underoath’s 2006 album—“walk the great line” between the ideologically
dogmatic and the highly adaptable and individualistic.
 Walking the Great Line 183

Works Cited

The Bible. New International Version. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2001.
Print.
Büsser, Martin. If the Kids Are United: Von Punk zu Harcore und Zurück. 6th ed.
Mainz: Ventil Verlag, 2003. Print.
“Christian Albums.” www.Billboard.com. July 8, 2006. Web. Jan. 21, 2011.
Christie, Dixon. “Underoath Interview at Warped Tour 2006 with PunkTV.ca.”
www.PunkTV.ca. 2006. Web. Aug. 29, 2009.
Derrida, Jacques. “From Dissemination.” Trans. Barbara Johnson. The Norton
Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York:
Norton, 2010. 1830–77. Print.
Fish, Stanley. “Condemnation Without Absolutes.” The New York Times. Oct. 15,
2001, late ed.: A19. Print.
Hendershot, Heather. Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative
Evangelical Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Print.
Holert, Tom and Mark Terkessidis. Mainstream der Minderheiten: Pop in der
Kontrollgesellschaft. 2nd ed. Berlin: Edition ID-Archiv, 1997. Print.
Jenison, David. “Underoath: A Hardcore Day’s Night” www.ccmmagazine.com.
2004. Web. Feb. 13, 2011.
Lincoln, Bruce. Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion After September 11.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Print.
“Music Albums, Top 200 Albums and Music Album and Charts.” www.Billboard.
com. 8 July 2006. Web. 25 Aug. 2009.
——. www.Billboard.com. Sept. 20, 2008. Web. Aug. 25, 2009.
Paul, Aubin. “Fat Mike Addresses Underoath Rumors.” www.Punknews.com. July
31, 2006. Web. Aug. 29, 2009.
Reay, Cathy. “Interview with Underoath.” http://Europunk.net. July 17, 2006.
Web. Aug. 29, 2009.
Romanowski, William D. “Roll Over Beethoven, Tell Martin Luther the News:
American Evangelicals and Rock Music.” Journal of American Culture 15.3
(1992): 79–87. Print.
Rosenblatt, Roger. “The Age of Irony Comes to an End.” www.Time.com. Sept. 24,
2001. Web. Aug. 25, 2009.
Saitowitz, Paul. “Punk Band NOFX Working Hard to Enjoy this Year’s Van’s
Warped Tour.” www.pe.com. June 29, 2006. Web. Aug. 29, 2009.
Silnicki, Graham. “A Grill of One’s Own.” www.andPOP.com. June 17, 2006.
Web. Aug. 29, 2009.
Staddon, Tristan. “Sometimes You Walk the Line, Sometimes the Line Walks
You.” Alternative Press Magazine 219 (2006): 180–86. Print.
“Underoath Album and Song Chart History.” www.Billboard.com. n.d. Web. Feb.
20, 2011.
Underoath. “In Regards to Myself.” Define the Great Line. Tooth&Nail, 2006.
CD.
184 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

——. “In Regards to Myself.” Dir. Linus Johansson. Tooth&Nail, 2006. Video.
——. “Some Will Seek Forgiveness, Others Escape,” They’re Only Chasing
Safety. Tooth&Nail, 2004. CD.
Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11
and Related Dates. New York: Verso, 2002. Print.
 Chapter 14
War Is Heavy Metal:
Soundtracking the US War in Iraq
Steve Waksman

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 US
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 US
government. Yet portions of the film show those same soldiers to be acting in full
accordance with US 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 offscreen, interviews one final US 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
186 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

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 US 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 offscreen 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 US military
engagement.1
Films about the war in Iraq have proliferated in the past several years, and one
of the recurrent trends in these films is the use of heavy metal as an integral part
of the cinematic soundtrack built around the war. Such use should not be taken
for granted. After all, by certain logic, country music would be a more obvious

1
  Pieslak has written the most thorough study of music in the context of the Iraq War
to date. Also see Gilman for a revealing inquiry into soldiers’ uses of music.
 War Is Heavy Metal 187

genre to employ in connection with the war in Iraq, as country musicians have
produced the most overt and widely recognized expressions of musical patriotism
in conjunction with the war effort.2 Yet in both documentary and fictional films
about the second Iraq war, country music has occupied a decidedly subordinate
role, and heavy metal has vied with rap for a sort of musical hegemony in the
aural world of the US soldier. Moreover, metal’s role in these films has not been
limited to its association with US combatants, but in one significant case—the
documentary film Heavy Metal in Baghdad—has been positioned as an integral
medium for a group of young Iraqis who are themselves living with the day-to-
day stress of war and, later, geographic displacement and exile. As one key facet
of the cinematic soundtrack to the Iraq War, heavy metal has not therefore given
rise to a single sort of battle-ready subjectivity, but has been employed to project
a surprisingly diverse range of subjects who occupy markedly different positions
in relation to the larger field of conflict and of representation. Recognition of this
diversity is not meant to celebrate a benign pluralism of musical identities where
the war on film is concerned, but should awaken our attention to the complex
cultural work that popular music is made to do in contemporary portrayals of
warfare.
To explore these matters, I have organized this essay into three main sections.
In the first, I consider the role of heavy metal in the soundtracks of two recent
documentary films about the second Iraq war: the aforementioned Soundtrack to
War, and Gunner Palace, an on-the-ground film focused on a group of soldiers
who are housed in the former palace of Uday Hussein, Saddam Hussein’s eldest
son. The second section explores heavy metal’s use in two fictional narratives,
The Hurt Locker and The Messenger. The combined focus on documentary and
fiction is strategic and meant to highlight a double-sided dynamic: the parallels
between the music used in the two types of films lend greater realism to the
fictional narratives, while the use of music in the documentary films has significant
implications for the ways in which these films convey a sense of the subjective
experience of warfare that is akin to their fictional counterparts. In the third
section, I examine the documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad, using the film to
raise questions about how heavy metal operates on the war’s “other side,” where
metal is alternately construed as a way toward freedom of expression and a symbol
of a nation under attack.

In her astute survey of the first wave of Iraq War films, Susan Carruthers
distinguished between two basic categories: “those that align their sights with the
US military, and a smaller subset … that strives to convey the texture of everyday
life under occupation for ordinary, and extraordinary, Iraqis” (31). Pat Aufderheide
makes a similar distinction in an essay concerning the different publics that Iraq
War films seek to address, adding a category of films “about the legitimacy and
logic of the war” (57). For both authors, Gunner Palace figures as a paradigmatic

2
  See Schmelz on the alignment of certain country artists with US military objectives.
188 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

film of the first sort, a “grunt doc” in which documenting the war through the
US soldiers’ perspective is the first priority. Carruthers and Aufderheide both
criticize the limitations of this documentary mode and are more favorable in their
assessment of those films that make more effort to acknowledge the Iraqi experience
of the conflict. It is unfortunate, then, that neither writer includes any reference to
Soundtrack to War in her respective survey, for the film is distinguished not only
by its focus upon the place of music within the war, but by demonstrating shared
concern with both US combatants and Iraqis living amidst the conflict, and as such
goes against the grain of critical classification.
There are several possible explanations for this omission, but in part it reflects
a problem recently identified by Corey Creekmur that “the almost exclusive
attention critics have paid to images (or language) in the ‘War on Terror’ threatens
to return to a once common neglect of the role of sound … in the production
and reception of mass media” (84). Seeking to correct this oversight, Creekmur
identifies what he calls a sort of “aural Orientalism” that has filtered into a range
of film and television sources, which consists of “the sound of cultural difference
mediated through questionable forms of expertise and ideological control” (91).
This mode of aural representation can be heard in the way that spoken Arabic
language is not accompanied by subtitles in several recent film works, so as to
serve as a pure mark of sonic otherness for presumed English-speaking audiences;
or in use of the sounds of Muslim prayer to convey a sense of narrative tension and
even dread. Insightful as Creekmur’s observations are, though, they are predicated
on their own strange omissions; for he pays almost no attention to the ways in
which Western popular music figures in the soundtracks of recent film works,
fictional or documentary. The present chapter is a step toward filling that gap.3

Soundtrack to War opens with what has often been hailed as the ultimate “extreme”
metal statement: Slayer’s “Angel of Death,” the opening track of the band’s
highly influential and controversial 1986 album Reign in Blood. With lyrics that
seek to inhabit the mind of Josef Mengele, architect of the Nazi “final solution,”
“Angel of Death” is a song that deliberately blurs the line between celebration
and critique where the portrayal of violence is concerned. It occupies a position
from which genocide is treated not as immoral but as amoral, a position that is
designed to elicit shock from the listener. Director George Gittoes employs the
song in a highly edited fashion, rearranging bits of the Slayer recording (a mid-
tempo breakdown that occurs halfway through the song, a squealing near-atonal
guitar solo, singer Tom Araya screaming “Angel of Death” at song’s end) over the
film’s title shot and then over a rapidly paced sequence of scenes taken from the
streets of Baghdad, intercut with snippets of interview footage with US soldiers.
“Saddam, what you doing, we’ll be coming for you,” says one African American
soldier into the camera, accompanied by a frenetic blast of drums from the Slayer

3
  Several of the essays collected in Ritter and Daughtry address uses of music on
television in the months and years after 9/11, but none takes up the uses of music in film.
 War Is Heavy Metal 189

track. About forty-five seconds in, the music recedes as another white soldier holds
up a compact disc while interviewed from within what appears to be a tank, and
explains: “This is the one we listen to the most. This is the one, we travel, when
we’re killing the enemy, going through war, coming up here into Iraq, coming into
Baghdad.” Rather incongruously, given the preceding sounds, the soldier reveals
this most listened-to selection to be not Slayer but Drowning Pool’s “Bodies”
(often called “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor”) about which he further elaborates:
“That was the motto for our tank, ‘Let the Bodies Hit the Floor,’ ’cuz it was just, it
was fitting for the job we were doing.” As a recording of the song enters the non-
diegetic soundtrack, the soldier adds, “War itself is heavy metal, yes.”
Heavy metal is hardly the only musical style featured in Gittoes’ documentary.
Rap music appears almost as frequently as does metal, typically in the form of
original raps delivered by African American soldiers. Elsewhere, one can hear
singer-songwriter styled music played with acoustic guitar and voice; an a cappella
rendition of an original patriotic paean to America sung in the style of contemporary
rhythm and blues by a white female soldier; a group of black soldiers collectively
singing an old style gospel shout; and, in an especially poignant sequence, two
Iraqi brothers—one of whom was a former prisoner at Abu Ghraib—harmonizing
a version of the Bee Gees song, “New York Mining Disaster.” Despite this
relatively broad range of sounds, Gittoes’ decision to bookend his film with bursts
of heavy metal carries considerable weight; it appears as both a reflection of the
musical preferences of many of the soldiers with whom he came into contact, and
an aesthetic decision on the part of the filmmaker to draw upon the aural power of
metal to serve as an index of the war’s affective dimensions. “War itself is heavy
metal” may be a line spoken by one of his interviewees (and, actually, by more
than one, as we’ll see), but it also seems indicative of an equation that Gittoes
makes through his choices of what sounds to foreground. Yet the statement “war is
heavy metal” is hardly as transparent as either the filmmaker or his subjects would
seem to have us believe. What can it mean to say that “war is heavy metal”?
One possible answer to this question comes about twenty minutes into the film,
through a short interview with soldier Bradley Corkins. Among the more offbeat
personalities to appear in the film—so much so that he is pictured on the cover
of the DVD release—Corkins first enters not through his image but through the
sound of his amplified electric guitar, on which he plays a distorted, single-note
low-end riff that hovers somewhere between heavy metal and surf music. As the
camera pans toward him, we see Corkins playing a red Stratocaster-shaped guitar,
with a small amplifier just in front of him. At his left side are two rifles poised
standing against a wall; at his right is a fellow soldier who listens appreciatively.
After finishing his performance of the riff, Corkins notes that he plans to write
some “gore metal” lyrics to go along with it—gore metal being a subgenre in
which charging, brutal music is matched with lyrics that describe acts of physical
violence in graphic, gruesome detail. He caps his brief statement by saying,
“To me, war is heavy metal,” and flashes one of the most recognizable signs of
metal subculture, the devil horns, to the camera while sticking out his tongue.
190 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

His companion, who goes unnamed, builds on Corkins’ proclamation: “War is

heavy metal. It’s fast paced, heavy and emotional. It gets your adrenaline going, it
helps you feel what you got to feel, get it out of the way. Help you relax and end
of the day, it can give you anything you need to feel.” Gittoes does not let these
statements go uncontested, but refers to Corkins’ own encounters with “gore”
during his deployment—he evacuated a convoy that was hit with an improvised
explosive device (IED) and had bodies fall apart in his hands—and asks whether
the soldiers’ taste for such music might be “feeding on the pain” of those who
have died. Corkins stands his ground, emphasizing that much gore metal is in
fact about war, and that the graphic details of the lyrics explain what war is in an
effective and convincing manner.4 The segment concludes with Corkins’ account
of some lyrics he’d written, “I sold my soul to thee / And hell has started for me,”
using the conventions of metal word craft to express not his impressions of bodily
dismemberment but his feelings of basic powerlessness in the face of his military
duties.5
Power is an issue that comes up repeatedly in academic treatments of heavy
metal. Deena Weinstein and Robert Walser, in their respective sociological and
musicological analyses of the genre, both emphasize “power” as the central
preoccupation of heavy metal in aural and visual terms. Power is audible in
metal’s stress upon extremes of volume, in the distorted timbre of the guitars,
the magnified crash of the double bass drum, the vocals straining for either the
highest of high notes or the lowest of low, depending on the subgenre. Power is
visible, in turn, in the profusion of studded leather, the demonstrative virtuosity
of metal instrumentalists, or the fascination with the trappings of masculinity. The
presumption in these works and others is that metal’s projection of power proves
empowering for its dedicated listeners, and that metal often fosters a distinct sense
of empowerment among those whose social position teeters between privilege and
marginality—young white males of lower-class standing who yearn for a field
in which to achieve some sense of mastery yet often experience frustration in
these desires. As Lisa Gilman suggests in her study of the value of popular music
among US soldiers in Iraq, it is precisely the “combination of real powerlessness
and the necessity of being confident and physically dominant” under conditions of
warfare that leads soldiers toward heavy metal as a preferred genre (8). Corkins’
appearance in Gittoes’ documentary exemplifies this maxim, and it is the tension

  One example that Corkins references in this connection is the group Six Feet Under
4

and its recording Warpath, which opens with the song, “War Is Coming.” A sample lyric,
from the second verse of the song, is as follows: “Blood’s pouring from the hole in your
side / Take the pain – it’ll focus and strengthen you / Take the pain—or your life’s fuckin’
through / Face the pain—let it become part of you / Take the pain.”
5
  Corkins elaborates: “What I meant by that is by, uh, basically joining the Army I
feel I sold my soul to the Army … they’re in charge of me until I get out, and uh, ‘Hell has
started for me’ was the day we got out here, to Iraq.” Pieslak addresses this scene briefly
(115).
 War Is Heavy Metal 191

between the soldier’s lack of power within the chain of military command and his
need to feel empowered for the purposes of committing or otherwise dealing with
acts of aggression that presents itself as one way to interpret the declaration, “War
is heavy metal.”
Within the terms of Soundtrack to War, though, this understanding of heavy
metal’s place in the scheme of the Iraq War is incomplete. Soldiers are not the only
ones who find the sounds of metal emotionally resonant and culturally useful. This
point becomes clear in a segment, ten minutes after the exchange with Corkins,
where Gittoes leads us into the underground practice space of the Iraqi heavy
metal band Acrassicauda. Some years later this band would be the subject of a
separate film, Heavy Metal in Baghdad, to be discussed in a subsequent section.
Here, the group is shown at an earlier stage of its history, with three members—
drummer Marwan Riyadh, guitarist Faisal Talal, and lead guitarist Tony Aziz—
playing through portions of their song “Massacre” and discussing the meaning of
its sentiments, with an unnamed friend observing.
Not a song specifically about the US occupation of Iraq, “Massacre” addresses
“the massacre all over the goddamn fucking planet, this miserable planet … [in]
Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa,” in the words of drummer Riyadh, who quotes some of
the lyric in piecemeal fashion: “It’s talking about how the boy’s crying, how the
boy’s starving, his mother’s heart inside burning, they stole my land, they stole
my home, they stole my flesh, they stole my bone.” To this guitarist Talal adds,
“This song is really talking about a tough thing, which is called the massacre, and
really means that someone wants to smash your fucking home and you’re really
pissed off and you don’t want them to smash it.” Encouraged by Gittoes, the band
moves into a performance of the song, preceded by a unison shout of “let’s rock!”
the lightheartedness of which offers stark contrast to the anger of the foregoing
comments. The members of Acrassicauda never literally say “war is heavy metal,”
but their performance and surrounding remarks convey the different weight that
such a statement carries when articulated from the position of the occupied rather
than the invading forces. As Riyadh and Talal explain to Gittoes, “We are born in
war, and we have lived in war, but we are not going to fucking die in the war. I
mean, there have been three wars since I have been born [says Talal, but Riyadh
corrects the number to four] … Come on, for god’s sake, I want to live, I’m young,
I’m too young to die.” Riyadh punctuates the exchange: “What we are looking
for is a better place that can support us, where we can just go out for the people
without being afraid from saying, ‘Yeah, we are an artist, and we play heavy metal,
so let’s bang and shit.’”
Gunner Palace does not accord the same prominence to Iraqi perspectives
as does Gittoes’ film. The Iraqis that appear in Gunner Palace play a notably
subordinate role, not only in the amount of screen time they are given—in
this, the two films are not so different—but in their relationship to US military
operations. Two such figures, going by the names “Roy” and “Super Cop,” have
made veritable careers out of cooperating with US forces; a title in the film tells
us that together they have captured 300 Iraqi insurgents. Another, nicknamed
192 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

“Mike Tyson,” appears to have a similarly cooperative arrangement until he is

arrested and accused of photographing targets for the insurgents, an occurrence
that leads filmmaker Michael Tucker to claim in somber voiceover, “Nothing is
black and white here anymore.” Otherwise, Iraqis mainly appear as the victims of
nighttime raids or as anonymous background to the work of the soldiers. When
music enters into the relationships between soldiers and Iraqi citizens it often does
so in ways that reinforce the power of the former, most notably (and notoriously)
in a brief scene introduced with the title “Scaring the Natives,” in which a PSYOP
(psychological operations) speaker truck projects loud heavy metal music at the
local population while en route to the Baghdad airport.6
In this regard Gunner Palace differs from Soundtrack to War, but in other
particulars the two films have marked similarities. Both make considerable use
of first-hand interviews with the war’s participants, shot in a close-up style that
conveys the tenor of a personal exchange between filmmaker and subject (and,
by extension, the viewer). The two films are episodic and largely non-narrative
in structure. Most salient to the current discussion, although Gunner Palace is
not ostensibly about the musical lives of US soldiers in Iraq, music is one of the
primary features of the film, and its attention to the musical tastes and habits of
those stationed in Iraq strongly echoes the emphasis of such matters in Soundtrack
to War. As Gunner Palace’s co-director Michael Tucker explains, the film’s focus
on music occurred almost by accident; the music was so omnipresent among the
soldiers he filmed, and so compelling, that became integral to the fabric of the
work (Fuchs). The resulting film integrates music made by its soldier-subjects in
a variety of ways, sometimes as explicit diegetic content and other times as non-
diegetic source music that provides an aural backdrop to the soldiers’ activities.
Musically speaking, Gunner Palace is narrower than Soundtrack to War in the
range of styles featured. The film’s soundscape is dominated almost exclusively
by rap music and heavy metal, and, of the two, the former dominates. African
American soldier/rappers appear intermittently throughout the film, their
tone sometimes aggressive, sometimes more subdued, but in either case often
remarkably lucid about such issues as the psychological effects of deployment,
the conditions that shape wartime violence, and the discrepancy between their
experience in Iraq and that of the average American back home who only sees
images of the war through the news media. This latter theme dovetails with one
of the main emphases of the film as a whole, which co-directors Tucker and Petra
Epperlein develop throughout. Tucker’s intonation two minutes into the film—
“Most of us don’t see this on the news anymore. We have reality TV instead.

6
  This scene is unusual among the films surveyed for showing direct evidence of the
use of music as a part of combat operations, rather than an adjunct to combat, something
used by US soldiers to mentally prepare for battle or to cope with the trauma of combat
experience. For a pivotal discussion of music’s utility in waging cultural and psychological
warfare and the disturbing ethical implications this raises, especially with regard to
processes of interrogation, see Cusick.
 War Is Heavy Metal 193

Joe Millionaire. Survivor. Well, survive this. A year in Baghdad without changing
the channel”—is echoed almost an hour later by Specialist Richmond Shaw,
who offers a low-key but harrowing rap that concludes: “When we take a dip,
we try to stick to the script / But when those guns start blazing and our friends
get hit / That’s when our hearts start racing and our stomachs get woozy / ’Cause
for y’all it’s just a show but we live in this movie.” In this instance and others,
rap music stands as an ultimate mark of the film’s authenticity, its street-smart
accounts of everyday violence eminently well suited to the business of patrolling
(or cinematically documenting) the war-torn streets of Baghdad.
War, then, is not heavy metal within the cinematic frame of Gunner Palace,
which instead moves more commonly to the cadences of rap. Still, heavy metal
plays an important supporting role in the film through the presence of Stuart Wilf,
the youngest of ten soldiers with whom Tucker shares sleeping quarters during
the time that he is embedded with the 2/3 Field Artillery. Only nineteen, Wilf is
presented as part of the “new army” that has been recruited to serve in Iraq. A
high school dropout from Colorado Springs—proximate to both “Columbine and
South Park,” Tucker tells his viewers—his cheerful demeanor and acerbic humor
make him something of a comic foil for the filmmakers. Yet he also serves as a
sort of moral compass in the film, someone who uses humor to cope with the mix
of boredom and fear that constitutes day-to-day life in Baghdad, but who can also
be more reflective when called upon to do so. When the viewer is first brought into
the confines of the palace where the soldiers are housed, Wilf is shown holding
a standard sized sheet of paper on which are printed the words “Gunner Palace,”
serving as a mock placard while caught in a fast tracking shot that zooms in on
Wilf’s fake-serious posture. At film’s end, Wilf is given the last words. Asked by
Tucker, “How do you rationalize the loss of life?” the young soldier shows no
signs of his usual jocularity. “I couldn’t even answer that question,” says Wilf,
who pauses and then continues, “There’s not really any rationalization behind
someone’s child dying. I don’t think [this war is] worth the death of someone’s
family member,” gazing directly into the camera as the screen fades to black.
Alongside the other qualities he exhibits, Wilf is also a guitarist, and his playing
on electric and acoustic guitars appears at several points. Indeed, in the final scene
recounted above, Wilf holds his electric guitar in his hand while speaking, and
his words are underscored by his strumming a minor-key progression on acoustic
guitar, a fact made plain when the fade gives way to an image of him playing. This
juxtaposition of electric and acoustic guitars matches the breadth of Wilf’s persona
as portrayed in Gunner Palace, the two instruments carrying rather different
cultural connotations and used to convey distinct emotional registers. Here, the
sound of the acoustic guitar projects a pathos that trumps the visual symbol of the
electric guitar, which more commonly suits Wilf’s more playful, ironic or even
aggressive side.
Two earlier scenes in the film place Wilf’s electric guitar more in the
foreground, to contrasting effect. The first gives the best evidence of Wilf’s
metalhead leanings. It also offers one of the most peculiar exchanges in the film
194 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

between a US soldier and an Iraqi citizen. Wilf wields his guitar on the outer
steps of the palace, and plays a characteristic death metal riff concentrated on the
instrument’s lower strings, using fast staccato picking and a tone rich with piercing
distortion. Directly in front of him stands an older Iraqi man who, we are told in a
title, is Basil, “Attorney by Day, Interpreter at Night.” Wilf directs his playing at
Basil, putting his arm up in the air and grunting, “Basil rules!” while encouraging
his compatriot to grunt with him (which he does). In a linked interview clip, Wilf
stands beside Basil, calling him the “coolest Iraqi I’ve ever met” while sporting
a t-shirt for the death metal band Exhumed, who are notable exponents of the
same “gore metal” subgenre favored by Soundtrack to War interviewee Bradley
Corkins. Another clip, nearer to the end of the film, shows Wilf playing a version
of “The Star-Spangled Banner” on electric guitar. Here, the filmmakers clearly
seek to evoke, if not entirely recreate, Jimi Hendrix’s era-defining performance of
the national anthem at the 1969 Woodstock festival. Wilf’s rendition of the song
lacks the aural fireworks of Hendrix’s. He plays the melody fairly straight aside
from the distorted guitar tone and a few chromatic flourishes at the end that have an
identifiable heavy metal inflection. However, the framing and editing of the scene,
in both visual and aural terms, stretches the boundaries of the song significantly.
Wilf wears full combat fatigues, including a helmet strapped securely to his chin,
and plays on what appears to be a rooftop, at times backlit by the sun and the orange
Iraqi sky, at other times with shots of Baghdad visible in the distance. Meanwhile,
his image is crosscut with that of a military helicopter flying through the sky, the
churning sound of its propeller and at one point of automatic rifle fire intermixed
with that of Wilf’s guitar. Like Hendrix’s potent act of musical deconstruction,
the mix of sonic and visual signifiers here seems to connote something rather far
from the untrammeled patriotism for which the national anthem is usually made to
stand. Wilf appears and sounds, instead, like an American out of place, his guitar
and his soldier’s uniform sending contradictory signals about the soldier’s role in
the war on terror.
Taken together, these various scenes involving Wilf portray a figure possessing
a distinctly mobile form of subjectivity, and his engagement with music is a
crucial constitutive part of that mobility. This mobility, in turn, fosters what music
and media theorist Anahid Kassabian has called an “affiliating” form of cinematic
identification. Unlike “assimilating identification,” which seeks to narrow the
field of relations between cinematic perceivers and onscreen subjects, affiliating
identification leaves that field more wide open, allowing for a broader range of
engagement and a less finite sense of the personhood of who we are watching
onscreen (3).7 For Kassabian, this sort of identification is especially characteristic
of recent films that use a “compiled” rather than a “composed” score, one that is
put together from a collection of popular songs, often already familiar to the film’s
auditors in style if not in actual substance. Both Soundtrack to War and Gunner

7
  “Perceivers” is Kassabian’s preferred term over the more typical “spectators,” as
it admits that the perception of film is multisensory, involving more than the visual realm.
 War Is Heavy Metal 195

Palace present a distinctive form of compiled score, in which popular music styles
enter the frame through soldiers’ own modes of musical practice. In the former
film, however, while “heavy metal” as a genre may be shown to have considerable
social fluidity, the individual interview subjects tend to be defined by their stated
musical preferences in a more straightforward one-to-one fashion. Gunner Palace
gives its soldier-subjects more room to maneuver, musically and otherwise; and
Wilf personifies this flexibility, his taste for heavy metal seemingly bringing him
closer to the Iraqis around whom he serves, and his guitar playing providing a
musical analogue for the ambivalence of his commitment to service.

Compared to their documentary counterparts, the fictional portrayals of the Iraq War
under discussion—The Hurt Locker and The Messenger—have a much stronger
tendency to foreground the individual over the collective experience of war, and to
organize their narratives around a single main protagonist. The Hurt Locker starts
from the premise that “war is a drug,” as an opening title announces, and immerses
the viewer in a high-tension series of events driven forward by the cannily named
William James, whose apparent addiction to the rush of defusing explosives puts
him and his two fellow squad members in harm’s way. The Messenger concerns
itself more with the after-effects of war, the lingering trauma that is magnified by
lead character Will Montgomery’s assignment to the task of notifying families of
soldiers who have died in combat. Music is used rather sparingly in both films, but
both use the sound of heavy metal at key moments to mark the subjectivity of their
protagonists. In The Hurt Locker, the music seems to reinforce James’s supposed
“wildness,” albeit with some potentially hidden undertones. The Messenger uses
metal to amplify the lead character’s struggle to connect with the world outside, a
world from which he is distanced by his physical and emotional wounds.
Probably the most broadly acclaimed film about the Iraq War, with its Academy
Award for best picture and director Kathryn Bigelow’s historic award for best
director, The Hurt Locker has also been criticized for its lack of open engagement
with the politics of the war.8 Like Soundtrack to War and Gunner Palace, The Hurt
Locker places its focus not on macro-political matters but on the details of soldiers’
experiences. More than those non-fiction works, The Hurt Locker is especially
concerned with the intensity of combat and of soldiers’ work in the field, elements
it can represent more directly precisely by not having to “document” them. Yet
it shares with the documentary works an overarching recognition that the lines
between combat and non-combat experience become exceptionally blurry for the

8
  In Cineaste, for example—a magazine known for placing much value on film as
political engagement—Robert Sklar opened his review with the question: “Is it possible to
make a film dealing with the US war on Iraq without condemning, or at least acknowledging,
the mistakes, failures, and illegal acts committed by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and
their cohorts?” (55). He does not quite go on to say that the film refuses politics entirely, but
does argue that it deliberately avoids any sense of “ideological arm-twisting” in favor of a
more “timeless and universal” approach.
196 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

contemporary soldier. Day-to-day life in Iraq is filled with dread, or at least with
the potential for violent outbreak, even in moments of supposed downtime; and,
while most soldiers wish for a reprieve from the relentless sense that something
bad is about to happen, Will James thrives on that possibility and his power to
defuse it.
Heavy-metal music arises at three instances in the film. Its first appearance
coincides with James’ entry into the film’s narrative. He is sent as a replacement
team leader for a squad charged with the responsibility of disarming explosives; his
predecessor was killed by an IED found on a busy Baghdad street. When existing
squad member J.T. Sanborn comes to welcome James, he finds the sergeant alone
in his room with very loud, abrasive heavy metal music blaring. In Bigelow and
director of photography Barry Ackroyd’s framing of James’ introduction, the
music precedes the soldier’s image; the screen is black for a moment, the darkness
shortly giving way to a shot of James crouching in an unlit room, his head buried in
his outstretched arms, almost in a position of prayer but for the cigarette he holds.
When Sanborn enters, James turns the music off, and quickly enlists his colleague
in removing the protective board from his lone window, his preference for sunlight
over safety foreshadowing the recklessness of his combat demeanor. Their brief
meeting concluded, James cranks the music back up, grinning at Sanborn with the
declaration “home sweet home,” which proves to be less ironic in James’ case than
it would first seem, the military front being the place where he feels most at home.
The coincidence between James’ taste for heavy rock music and his approach
to his military responsibilities becomes clear in the next scene, when he and his
fellow squad members—Sanborn and Owen Eldridge—go on their first mission
together. From the moment they reach their target destination, James acts with a
bravado that catches his colleagues off guard. He refuses to rely on the robotic
device used by the squad to investigate possible IEDs, choosing instead to venture
into the field and put himself at risk. The protective suit he dons to exercise his
task is one of the film’s great elements, enclosing the character in a self-contained
sensory world in which he is left alone with his heightened perceptions and
the sound of his own breathing—which is prominently featured on parts of the
soundtrack—his only contact with his fellow soldiers through a radio headset.
This is James’ true home, the scene reveals, the place where he is most himself,
and his enclosure within the suit mirrors his immersion in the high-volume sound
of metal within his military quarters. Making the connection all but explicit, James
announces, “Let’s rock and roll, man,” as he leads himself forward to disarm the
explosive, prompting his team members to label him alternately “rowdy” and
“reckless.”
The Hurt Locker is in many ways a film about the male-to-male chemistry
between soldiers. As much as James seems to follow no direction but his own,
his placement alongside Sanborn and Eldridge, and the conflicts and loyalties that
ensue, are at the core of the film’s drama. It is no surprise that heavy metal, a genre
widely recognized for its masculine connotations, accompanies one of the film’s
most vivid scenes of male bonding through a mix of friendly camaraderie and
 War Is Heavy Metal 197

competitive struggle for dominance. After a prolonged and successfully waged

effort to flush out a group of snipers in the middle of the desert, the trio returns to
James’ quarters to let off steam. The charging metal music, strongly reminiscent of
the sounds that first accompanied James’ appearance in the film, marks the scene
as taking place within his territory, literally and symbolically. It also matches the
playful but aggressive wrestling bout occurring between James and the African
American Sanborn, who trade punches while enacting a ritual of dominance and
submission, the older and more highly ranked (and white) James making sure he
keeps his black counterpart in his place.9 Meanwhile, Eldridge, the youngest team
member not just in age but in demeanor, largely acts as a combination spectator
and referee, his own masculinity being too far beneath his fellow soldiers to be
admitted into the fight.
James’ masculinity is distinguished from his compatriots along several lines:
age, rank, experience (he reveals in an earlier exchange that he also saw action in
Afghanistan), and race, in relation to Sanborn. Not least among these factors is
James’ paternity. Unlike his younger counterparts, he has a son back home, whose
picture he keeps in a box of his possessions that also contains souvenir parts from
various explosives he has dismantled, and his wedding ring strung on a chain
necklace (both of the latter he classifies, sardonically, as “stuff that almost killed
me”). James’ paternity supports the authority he wields over his men, but it also
stands as his greatest point of vulnerability, because as a father James is flawed
beyond repair. “Everyone’s a coward about something,” the older soldier says to
the child-like Eldridge, who admits having been scared during the encounter with
the snipers. For James, as for so many iconic American heroes, his fear is mainly
stoked by the prospect of domestication and the responsibilities of fatherhood.10
In this light, the third moment in which heavy metal asserts its presence on
the soundtrack consolidates the thematic trajectory wherein Will James flees
from his domestic and paternal duties into the adrenalized masculinity of military
engagement. The Hurt Locker’s penultimate sequence shows James at home, his
tour of duty over. From the first glimpse of the character walking through the
aisles of a supermarket as though in a stupor, it is made clear that James does not
belong here. The benign, easy-listening background music that plays beneath the
scene only reinforces the sense that James is out of place in a seemingly normal
setting; amidst the undemanding routine of everyday consumerism, he loses his
bearings. Later, putting his infant son to bed, he offers an unsettling monologue
about how, as a person grows older, the field of things for which one can feel
love continually shrinks. “By the time you get to my age maybe it’s only one or

9
  Whitsitt makes a provocative if heavy-handed argument regarding the integral role
of the “interracial romance” between the white male James and the black male Sanborn,
connecting The Hurt Locker to such archetypal American fictions as The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn.
10
  Faludi discusses the imperilment of American masculinity in the wake of 9/11, and
the corresponding cultural need to valorize heroic masculine saviors.
198 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

two things,” he tells his son, “With me I think it’s one.” With that, the sound of a
helicopter signals James’ reenlistment and return to Iraq, a decision underscored
on the soundtrack by the fluctuating sound of an Arabic woman’s singing voice
over a building mechanical drum beat. The film’s final image is of James back in
his protective suit, walking toward another thing that might kill him; as he does
so, the texture of the music becomes increasingly dense, filled with the sound of
distorted guitars, and then swells to maximum volume as the image dissolves to
show the end credits, over which the song continues.
Like the other two metal-sounding songs heard earlier, this closing musical
piece is by the industrial metal band Ministry. A longstanding force in the world
of industrial music, with a career stretching back to the early 1980s, Ministry
makes an odd choice to define the tastes of a soldier in the 2000s. One might take
the presence of their music as a sign of Bigelow and writer Mark Boal’s efforts to
denote James’ age. Yet such a reading is too literal and does not take into account
another key factor concerning Ministry: that, as an ongoing entity in the 2000s, the
group—and, specifically, creative figurehead Al Jourgensen—dedicated the bulk
of its recent output to a thoroughgoing and relentless sonic critique of the Bush
administration and its military aggression.11 The Arabic voice in the film’s closing
song, “Khyber Pass,” is therefore not used as simple mark of “aural Orientalism,”
in Creekmur’s terms, but is meant to evoke the voices of those victimized by US
policies, voices that may be alternately energized or at risk of being drowned out
by the surrounding din. When James’ taste for metal is shown to be a taste for
contemporary Ministry—all three songs in the film come from the band’s 2007
album, Rio Grande Blood, the title a play on Bush’s Texas background—then the
music’s role in the film expands beyond its support for James’ hyperbolic enactment
of military manhood. The sound of metal also serves, however implicitly, as a
critique of the larger military and political initiatives that convert masculinity into
a vehicle for annihilation.
Unlike The Hurt Locker and the documentary films discussed above, The
Messenger is set not in Iraq, but rather in the US, where Sergeant Will Montgomery
has returned after becoming an injured and decorated soldier during his deployment
in Iraq. Beset with an eye injury that prevents him from being able to cry,
Montgomery carries some powerful inner conflicts within him. Labeled a hero for
his service, he is haunted by the truth behind his supposed heroic acts: his injury
occurred during a failed attempt to keep another wounded soldier alive. Beside
this echo of his military service, he is emotionally torn by his relationship with
Kelly, the young woman he left behind upon enlisting, and who has subsequently
become engaged to another man. His assignment, upon his return home, to the
Casualty Notification arm of the military only adds to the tensions within his
character. Repeatedly confronted with the difficult task of telling others about the

11
  Writing for AllMusic, Jeffries describes the three Ministry albums released after
9/11— Animositisomina, Houses of the Molé, and Rio Grande Blood—as a “George W.
Bush hating concept trilogy.”
 War Is Heavy Metal 199

death of their loved ones, Montgomery is made to face his own emotional isolation
as a soldier who has “returned” in body but not completely in mind.
Despite the pronounced differences between The Messenger and The Hurt
Locker in plot and setting, the films use music—and heavy-metal music in
particular—in some markedly similar ways. As with Will James, so with Will
Montgomery, the sound of metal becomes a marker of the connection between the
character and his personal space. Through much of The Messenger, Montgomery’s
apartment is the place where he is left to himself, where the private dimensions of
his romantic and military life become magnified by his set-apartness. The scenes
that feature Montgomery in his apartment are almost always at night, dimly lit,
and often accompanied by metal music on the soundtrack, sometimes clearly as
part of the diegetic space, as music that he has chosen to hear. An early scene,
immediately following his having learned of his Casualty Notification assignment,
shows Montgomery brooding around his apartment in his underpants at night.
On the soundtrack, moody, arpeggio guitar lines give way to a heavy, distorted
melody as the soldier sits on his bed, the high volume shown to be internal to
Montgomery’s environment as we hear the sound of a neighbor’s voice shouting
through the wall, “It’s the middle of the fucking night, turn that goddamn music
off!” In a later scene, after a particularly difficult death notification, Montgomery
returns to his apartment and listens to an emotionally painful phone message from
Kelly, who retracts her earlier invitation for him to attend her engagement party.
Montgomery responds by punching a hole in his apartment wall, and then turns
on some music to accompany him in his anger, the same loud but somber metal
song heard before.
If a particular species of heavy metal—marked by alternation between quiet
and loud passages, minor-key guitar melodies, an absence of vocals, and an
emotionally downtrodden affect—amplifies Montgomery’s withdrawal from
the world beyond his apartment walls, another sort signals the possibility of his
reconnection with that world. Two characters in the film represent this possibility:
Tony Stone, his accomplice and commanding officer in his Casualty Notification
duties, and Olivia Pitterson, the widow of a deceased soldier to whom Montgomery
becomes drawn, against the ethical standards of his assignment. In a pivotal scene
involving the latter, Will spies Pitterson in a shopping mall with her young son
Matt while he is helping to recruit young men into military service. Shopping for
clothes to attend her husband’s funeral, Pitterson interrupts the recruiting efforts
in protest, shouting about the details of her husband’s remains. Will immediately
assumes a protective air toward Olivia; when she leaves the mall, he follows her in
his car. As he drives up to offer her a ride while she waits at a bus stop, his car stereo
plays a song by the upbeat, groove-heavy metal band Clutch, “Profits of Doom.”
Although the resulting interaction between them is filled with awkwardness, the
song—with its propulsive, almost funky rhythm and gruff, spirited vocal by singer
Neil Fallon—suggests a more optimistic direction that is realized in the film’s
final scene, when the two promise to stay in touch after Olivia relocates to New
Orleans.
200 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

This narrative trajectory in The Messenger makes it into a very different portrait
of military masculinity than The Hurt Locker. Whereas Will James leaves his
family behind to return to the front, eschewing the heterosexual scene of married
domesticity for the homosocial setting of the Army, Will Montgomery longs for
some kind of familial connection. That Olivia is shown to be not just a widow but
a mother is a crucial detail in this regard, indicating that she has a capacity for
nurturance that is balanced by her own need for emotional healing. That heavy
metal music plays a critical role on the soundtrack to the film at precisely the
moments when Montgomery’s desires take shape is equally crucial, and also,
perhaps, unexpected. Metal has tended to be associated more with the kind of
masculinity personified by Will James, demonstrative, reckless, and narcissistic.
Yet its use to support the character of Will Montgomery is not an aberration so
much as it is a demonstration of Robert Walser’s assertion that, in heavy metal,
“there are no ‘real men,’” but instead a variety of ways of enacting manhood
through engagement with the genre and its trappings (136).

Neither The Hurt Locker nor The Messenger has much to offer regarding the
relationship between US soldiers and Iraqi citizens, or the Iraqi experience
of the surrounding war. In this they suffer in comparison to their documentary
counterparts, Soundtrack to War and Gunner Palace, however limited the
latter may also be. Another strain of Iraq War documentary has placed Iraqis
more squarely at the center, what Pat Aufderheide refers to as “Learning from
the Iraqis” films that are directed to “a public that is called into being around
its vivid awareness of common humanity” (61–3). Soundtrack to War displays
traces of this tendency. A far more dedicated example of this branch of Iraq War
cinema, though, is Heavy Metal in Baghdad, a film that parallels Soundtrack to
War in its emphasis on music as a path toward understanding the experience and
impact of war, but goes well beyond that earlier film in drawing attention to Iraqi
protagonists first and foremost (albeit depicted through the lens of two Canadian
journalists and filmmakers, Eddy Moretti and Suroosh Alvi, whose presence in the
film is pronounced). Beginning with the effort to document a seeming anomaly—
an Iraqi heavy metal band—Heavy Metal in Baghdad becomes something more
than a standard-issue music documentary, and reveals much about the conditions
of dislocation and displacement that have been produced by years of protracted
conflict.
Writing about the place of rock music in Iran, where public culture is
circumscribed by a combination of religious proscription and political repression,
historian Mark LeVine has observed that life in general tends to happen “inside.”
“Inside you don’t need to wear your veil, you can blast your music, dance, watch
pirated copies of the latest Hollywood—or Bollywood—movies,” claims LeVine,
who expands on this notion regarding rock and other forms of “nontraditional
music,” which are heard “not just indoors, but quite literally underground,
in basements, the storage rooms of apartment buildings, and parking garages”
(175–7). These remarks appear to apply directly to the experience of the Iraqi
 War Is Heavy Metal 201

heavy metal band Acrassicauda, who were shown in their “literally underground”
practice space during a sequence in Soundtrack to War, and are the primary
subjects of Heavy Metal in Baghdad. In the group’s six-year history up to the time
of the latter film’s 2007 release, they had managed to play a total of eight public
gigs, six in Baghdad—half of which occurred before the onset of war in 2003—
and two more after their 2006 relocation to Syria. Acrassicauda is a band whose
sense of togetherness has mainly been forged in their private rehearsals, and the
film captures the group members’ shared commitment to heavy metal music under
the most trying of circumstances.
Alvi, a Canadian of Pakistani background who was a founding editor of Vice
magazine, is the principal narrator of Heavy Metal in Baghdad, and from the outset
his involvement with the group goes well beyond that of the usual relationship
between filmmaker and documentary subject. The first major event portrayed in
the film is a 2005 concert organized by Vice on behalf of Acrassicauda at the
Hotel Al Fanar in central Baghdad. Alvi and Moretti, traveling through Beirut, got
stuck in transit due to bomb explosions in Lebanon and so had to enlist the help
of a Danish photojournalist friend to facilitate the concert and its filming. This
was only the beginning of the hardships faced in seeking to offer Acrassicauda
an opportunity to play, as shots of tanks and blast walls in the immediate vicinity
of the hotel offer visual evidence of the security risk undertaken just to make the
event happen.
Despite the band following all the required protocols, including subjecting their
equipment to a scrupulous search, as show time approaches the security forces
guarding the hotel refuse to admit any of the attendees, “probably because of their
Iron Maiden t-shirts and so on.” Luckily, a conversation with a soldier stationed
nearby allows the band to proceed as planned, but the time leading to the show is
full of other moments of uncertainty: at one point a power failure, at another the
sound of a mortar round exploding nearby. When the performance finally begins,
it is as though the band has won a victory against fate. The all-male audience’s
enthusiasm, evident in localized versions of headbanging and moshing and in the
preponderance of t-shirts for a wide swath of metal bands, illustrates drummer
Marwan Fiyadh’s comments: “You just feel like you’ve been, like, caged, like
there’s chains all around you. So like, we just like, for two hours, three hours, the
practice time or the live performance, we want to free ourselves from that chain.”
And the explosion of excitement that the band’s music elicits makes all the more
poignant Alvi’s voiceover explanation at the end of the show that this would be the
last concert Acrassicauda would ever play in Iraq.
Besides its focus on this unusual group of Iraqi heavy-metal musicians,
Heavy Metal in Baghdad stands out in relation to the other films discussed so
far by unfolding over a much longer period of time. Both the documentaries
and the fictional narratives about the Iraq war have tended to happen over fairly
compressed time frames, a matter of weeks or maybe of months, but rarely so
long as even a year overall. Heavy Metal in Baghdad, however, moves across
a span of years rather than months, and so the cumulative effects of the war are
202 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

more fully apparent. Thus, when Alvi and Moretti travel to Baghdad in 2006, in
what will be their first face-to-face meeting with the members of Acrassicauda, the
circumstances of life in Iraq have changed dramatically, and not for the better. Of
the group’s members, only bassist Firas Al-Lateef and singer Faisal Talal remain in
Baghdad. Guitarist Tony Aziz had moved to Syria almost a year earlier, just after
the group’s last concert, to escape the violence and try to earn money to support
his family, and drummer Fiyadh had joined him some months later. Violence due
to the surrounding civil war had become pervasive and all but inescapable. In
these conditions, the band existed in a state of fractured, suspended animation best
indicated by the fact that its rehearsal space of several years, where they had been
filmed in 2003, had been blown up by an exploding missile. Alvi seeks to arrange
a visit to the bombed-out space with Al-Lateef, but the dangerous conditions
of the Baghdad streets only allow them to film at a distance while driving past.
Instead, Firas shows his own homemade video of the wreckage taken shortly after
the explosion, as he and Faisal vent about the anger and despair they feel at the
senselessness of what surrounds them.
After another four-month ellipsis, Alvi and Moretti reconnect with the members
of Acrassicauda, all of whom had now made the move to Syria. Alvi recites a set
of statistics and news reports to offer a context for the band’s situation: the Iraqi
insurgency has placed even greater restrictions on musical activity in the country
than had previously existed; the death toll from the combined occupation and
civil war had risen to 655,000 by fall 2006; and, most notably, Iraqi refugees had
dispersed widely to various surrounding countries, with Syria alone drawing 1.2
million. For its final half-hour, Heavy Metal in Baghdad becomes a story of this
exodus as viewed through the experiences of four twenty-something Iraqi heavy-
metal musicians. We see Acrassicauda play its first Syrian concert in a combined
pool hall and Internet café, the first concert the band will have played together
in almost two years, and an event around which their future as a band hinges.
Marwan explains to the camera, upon surveying the sparse attendance in the hall:
“We made a decision, all four of us, that this concert, if we made a big gig down
here, we’ll last forever, we’ll keep playing music, because the whole situation
is different for us right now [as Iraqi refugees in Syria] … So, probably this is
going to be the last gig for Acrassicauda.” However, as with the earlier concert
in Baghdad, the show is a minor triumph. The small crowd was won over by the
band’s convincing covers of Metallica songs, and the group eventually broke from
its plan to play only covers, and finished with a number of its original compositions
to a spirited reception, leaving Marwan to contradict his earlier pessimism and
proclaim, “Metal up your ass,” a phrase made popular by Metallica in that group’s
early career.
This sense of triumph is integral to the fabric of Heavy Metal in Baghdad,
but it is not definitive or conclusive. Indeed, the film leaves its viewers less with
a sense of uplift than of uncertainty filtered through the growing homesickness
of the band members. A sequence in which Acrassicauda goes into a Damascus
recording studio to record a demo, with assistance from the filmmakers, offers
 War Is Heavy Metal 203

strong evidence that their musical aspirations remain intact. Yet when interviewed
after the session has ended, their pride is undercut by an inescapable feeling of
displacement. Firas reveals that, during the session, he got a phone call from his
mother, who tells him, “Never come back.” Marwan also describes his guilt about
the family members he left behind. These sentiments become intensified in the
final moments of the film, when the band watches rough footage of the film being
made about them. Nostalgia for Baghdad informs the group’s response to the
footage from the start; but when the film reaches the scenes of their old, bombed-
out rehearsal space, that nostalgia turns to open sadness, especially for Marwan,
who had already left when the space was destroyed. His final address to the viewer
echoes the words of the soldier/rapper in Gunner Palace, for whom the reality of
war was impenetrable to the outside observer: “These are things that you lay your
back on. These are things that you turn off the TV whenever or like change the
channel when it’s on. So for you fuckers down there, this is how it goes, this is the
daily life in Iraq. This goes to all of you, fuckers. Pigs.” Following this climactic
note of indignation, Heavy Metal in Baghdad ends with a series of titles explaining
that the band had to sell its instruments to pay rent, continues to live in limbo, and
“is still trying to find its way to a place where they can live in peace, grow their
hair long, bang their heads and play heavy metal again as loud as they want.”

The reality stressed by Iraqi metal musician Marwan Fiyadh and that sung about
by African American soldier Richmond Shaw may be viewed as two sides of the
same proverbial coin, or as an indication that the Iraq War, like any other complex
political event, has no single reality but assumes meaning through a variety of
competing narratives that may be more or less commensurate with one another.
One could say the same for the uses to which heavy metal music has been put in
films about the Iraq War. Certainly, there are shared tendencies among these five
films under discussion. The association between heavy metal and masculinity, for
instance, is inescapable in all of the films surveyed. This includes Heavy Metal
in Baghdad, in which the all-male constituency for Acrassicauda’s concerts is
openly recognized by the band members and explained as a mark of the country’s
“traditions.” Yet this example also speaks to the circumstantial nature of heavy
metal’s relationship to masculinity, for Iraqi proscriptions on the ability of
women to participate in public cultural events hardly explain the use of metal to
support the construction of military male subjectivity in The Hurt Locker or The
Messenger. That these latter two films contrast significantly over the values they
attach to their white American male subjects only reinforces the larger point that,
while heavy metal is a strongly masculinized musical form, there are a plurality of
masculinities that find definition through the genre, in or out of a zone of combat.
Such diversification is also characteristic of heavy metal in a more fundamental
sense. Like all music genres, metal is composed of a system of signs—sounds,
images, aspects of discourse—in which those elements that confer the appearance
of integrity are continually in dialogue with those elements that encourage
differentiation. There has never been just one right way to play metal or one right
204 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

sort of metal fan; and the variety of subgenres that collectively comprise the metal
genre have expanded dramatically since the early 1990s. Films about the Iraq War
offer much evidence of this diversification of the metal genre and the different
sorts of meaning that might become attached to metal in different circumstances.
For Bradley Corkins and Stuart Wilf, gore metal provides an important resource
for grappling with the more extreme violence encountered in the course of combat.
In The Hurt Locker, by contrast, the music of industrial metal band Ministry brings
a politically critical subtext to what might otherwise seem a basic correlation
drawn between musical and military aggression. The Messenger, in turn, plays
two distinct kinds of metal sounds—one that might be classified as progressive
metal, the other as blues metal—against each other to inform the multiple
registers of its protagonist’s emotional response to his return from war. Across
these examples, we see that, despite the commonsense linkage between metal and
the will to destruction provocatively posited by Michael Moore in this essay’s
opening example, heavy metal has not simply been used—either by soldiers or by
filmmakers—to aurally represent the kind of power that clearly exerts itself over
others. Instead, different types of metal have been employed to portray distinct
forms of experience and subjectivity associated with the war.
Another dimension of this tendency toward variation in metal has been the
genre’s increasingly global reach. Studies of metal and globalization by Mark
LeVine, Emma Baulch, Jeremy Wallach, and others have shown that, while metal
may be a genre with clear roots in the US and Europe, it has been invested with
considerable local significance as it has moved to other regions of the world. Keith
Kahn-Harris has added an important comparative element to this line of analysis,
and emphasizes that the current “extreme metal scene”—which encompasses most
of the varieties of metal discussed herein, including that played by Acrassicauda—
can best be understood as a “global scene that includes local scenes within it”
(22). The significance of metal for the members of Acrassicauda is clearly an
exemplification of this globalizing tendency, and reveals both the power and the
fluidity of heavy metal as a term of identification. For bassist Firas Al-Lateef,
heavy metal transcends any specific national or political interests; interviewed
after the completion of Heavy Metal in Baghdad, he connects himself primarily to
a “country” of metalheads, who themselves are global in scope (Capper and Sifre
151). However, heavy metal is integral to the continuing sense of connection that
he and his band mates feel toward Iraq as they become exiled from their country
of origin. Iraq is where they discovered heavy metal, and where they forged their
connections with each other through their mutual attraction to the genre, which
was fortified in underground spaces where the music seemed, temporarily at least,
like all that mattered. For them, heavy metal has become the sound of Iraqis in
exile, political casualties of the US “war on terror.”
 War Is Heavy Metal 205

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Comments About the Sexual Politics of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker.”
Jump Cut 52 (2010). Web. Oct. 10, 2010.
 Index

Acrassicauda (band) 191, 201-205 The Beatles [“The White Album”] (album)
Afghanistan xi, 15, 16, 75, 83, 84, 86, 87, 6, 118
115, 116, 129, 155, 173, 191, 197 “Revolution” (song) 115, 118-120
United States War in Afghanistan 15, Bloodhound Gang (band) 185, 186
75, 83, 84, 86, 87, 115, 116, 129, “Fire Water Burn” (song) 185, 186
155, 173, 191, 197 Braudel, Fernand 58, 59, 63, 64
the album 7, 49. 57-68, 93-103 longue duree (Braudel concept) 58,
digitization of album 66, 67 63, 64
downloading 66, 67, 96, 103, 117 Burkett, “Fat” Mike 129-131, 133, 137,
performed live in entirety 7 139-142, 177, 179-181
physicality of album 66, 67, 93-103 Bush, George H. W. 107
protest albums 57-68 Bush, George W. xii, 9, 34-36, 40, 70, 94n,
Alkaline Trio (band) 9, 146, 149-152 99, 109, 111, 113, 116, 124, 129,
“All on Black” (song) 150 131, 133, 145-148, 151, 153, 154,
“The American Scream” (song) 151, 162, 167, 185, 198
152 administration of 13, 15, 34, 36, 94, 98,
“Armageddon” (song) 151 100, 129, 141, 145-148, 154, 173,
“Mercy Me” (song) 151 180, 185, 195n, 198
“Over and Out” (song) 151 criticism of administration 94, 100,
“We’ve Had Enough” (song) 152 141, 145-148, 154, 185, 198
America’s Army (video game) 14, 17, 18 Butler, Judith 14, 16, 19
as recruitment tool 18
American Airlines Flight 11 3 Cage, John 47, 80
American Idiot (musical) 146, 154, 155, Casale, Jerry (Devo) 147, 148
177 cassette tapes 7
American Idol (television show) 5, 6, 9, 95, Cassetteboy (recording artists) 8, 69-78
163, 164, 169 “Fly Me to New York” (song) 69-75,
Anderson, Mark 9, 134, 141 77
Armstrong, Billy Joe 153, 154 The Parker Tapes (album) 70,72-74, 76
Atta, Mohamed 2, 3, 70 Certeau, Michel de 62, 63
Attali, Jacques 3, 4, 31-33, 35 Cheney, Dick 36, 195n
Clear Channel 74, 96, 116, 117
Basinski, William 1, 2, 4, 7, 47 “questionable” songs list 116, 117
The Disintegration Loops (album) 1, Clinton, William Jefferson (Bill) 35
2, 4 code (with networks) 31-41, 102-104
Baudrillard, Jean 3n, 61 the Cold War 17, 46, 51, 62, 87
Beach Boys, The 118, 122, 123 Columbia Records 119, 149
Beastie Boys 108n, 117 compact discs xv, 59, 96, 100, 166, 189
Beatles, The 6, 34, 40, 61, 115, 118-121, conservativepunk.com (website) 130-132,
124, 125, 128 141
208 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

counterculture 8, 34, 37, 39, 40, 61-63, 66- Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die,
68, 111, 119-121, 130, 174 Those Who Tell the Truth Shall
activism and 103, 125 Live Forever (album) xi, xii, 5n
in America 57 controversy surrounding xi
in the 1960s 115, 120, 121, 175
musical counterculture 40 Facebook 59, 60, 63, 65
country music 161-170, 186, 187 Fahrenheit 9/11 (film) 185, 186
revenge songs 161, 162, 170 Fiasco, Lupe (rapper) 108, 109
“The Creed” (commercial) 20 file sharing xii, 25, 60, 95, 96, 125
Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) 35, 36 Fleet Foxes (band) 9, 121-124
Cusick, Suzanne 16, 17, 192n Fleet Foxes (album) 124
Sun Giant (EP) 123
Dahlen, Chris 72-74 Foucault, Michel 33, 37-39, 94, 95
Danger Mouse (recording artist) 6, 39 The History of Sexuality 94
The Grey Album (album) 6, 39 Frank, Thomas 57, 119, 121
Davis, Miles 7, 80 The Conquest of Cool 119
Debord, Guy 146, 155
Deleuze, Gilles 33, 39, 41, 94, 102 Garofalo, Reebee 13n, 16, 115-117
Derrida, Jacques 174 Gittoes, George 185, 186, 188, 189-191
Desrosiers, Mark 4 Go Army (website) 17
digital downloading xv, 6, 25, 45, 49, 50, Green Day 9, 33, 34, 117, 137, 146, 149,
96, 117 151, 153-157, 177
Digital Millenium Copyright Act 95 American Idiot (album) 34, 35, 146,
Dirty Beaches 46, 51 153-155
discipline 33, 34, 37-39, 89 Grizzly Bear (band) 9, 121-124
Dixie Chicks, The 9, 139, 162, 166-170 Horn of Plenty (album) 121, 122
controversy surrounding anti-War Yellow House (album) 123
views 166-168 Gunner Palace (film) 187, 191-195, 200,
“Goodbye Earl” (song) 162, 166, 170 203
Dylan, Bob 5, 7, 40, 57, 61, 62, 65, 75, Guthrie, Woody 57, 62, 118
118, 122, 124-126
“The Times They Are A-Changin’” heavy metal 7, 9, 20, 185-204
(song) 57, 122, 124 power and 190
“nu metal” 7
Edelman, Lee 147 Heavy Metal in Baghdad (film) 187, 190,
Eminem 33-36, 112-113 191, 200-204
“Mosh” (song) 34-36, 113 Hebdige, Dick 135, 146
Explosions in the Sky (band) xi-xvi, 5n Subculture 135
All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone Hendrix, Jimi 40, 120, 175, 194
(album) xiv hip-hop 9, 48n, 69, 72, 107-114, 187, 189,
cover art for xiv 192, 193
The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place Diamond Age of 108, 113
(album) xiii politics and 9
impact of 9/11 upon xii hipsters 46, 47
Take Care, Take Care, Take Care Hrasky, Christopher xii-xvi
(album) xv Hurt Locker, The (film) 187, 195-200, 203,
204
Hurricane Katrina xi, xiv, 111
 Index 209

Hussein, Saddam 186-188 Music Television (MTV) 21, 22, 111, 129,
130
improvisation 8, 44, 79-89 MySpace 63, 96
improvised explosive devices (IED) 8,
79-89, 190 Napster (filesharing service) 33, 39, 60, 53,
Indie rock xi, xiii, 129, 146 95, 96
Internet xii, 6-8, 13-26, 31-33, 40, 48-51, National Recording Preservation Act of
59, 86, 96, 98, 110, 144, 145, 148, 2000 6, 7
202 networks (computing) 31-41, 49, 57-68
iPod 8, 31, 33, 38-42, 46, 49 New York City 1, 3-5, 41, 57, 69-78, 89,
Iraq xi, 15, 16, 70, 75, 115, 116, 185-204 107, 112, 147,
United States War in Iraq 8, 9, 15, 34, New York City Fire Department 3, 145
36, 46, 79-89, 93, 94, 99, 107, 124, The 9/11 Commission Report 2, 3, 20, 72,
129, 147, 151, 154, 155, 185-204 76n, 81
iTunes xv, 39, 49 Nine Inch Nails 6, 8, 33, 34 39, 93-103
The Slip (album) 6, 103
Jay-Z 5, 6, 111, 112 Year Zero (album) 8, 34, 35, 93-103
The Black Album (album) 6 NOFX (band) 129, 130, 137, 144, 145,
The Blueprint (album) 5, 111 177, 179, 180
The Blueprint 3 (album) 112 noise 3, 4, 32, 33, 37, 44-48, 50-52
jazz 8, 79-89 nostalgia 7, 34, 35, 43-52, 115-126
free jazz 44 technostalgia 43-52
Jobs, Steve 40, 41
Johnson, Steven 59, 60, 63, 65, 66 Obama, Barack 110, 111, 113, 140

Keith, Toby 5, 74, 169 Palumbo-Liu, David 13, 18

“Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue Pentagon 3, 69, 115
(The Angry American)” (song) 5, Pitchfork (online magazine) xi, 1, 8, 31,
74 53, 65, 67, 73
Kerry, John 35, 36, 130, 133, 140 politics xiii, 9, 13, 16, 19, 26, 32-34, 45,
Kid Rock 20, 175 52, 57, 58, 83, 89, 115-118, 148,
195
bin Laden, Osama 36, 46, 76n American politics 4, 110
LCD Soundsystem (band) 4, 7 biopolitics 93-103
Lennon, John 117, 118, 120, 125, 126 conservative politics 129-141
lo-fi 1, 3, 4, 8, 44, 51, 52 gender politics 146
Lynn, Loretta 165, 166, 168 musicians as apolitical 47, 87
musicians and political activism 33-36,
MacKaye, Ian 9, 134-136, 139, 141 103, 129, 134, 140
McCartney, Paul 5, 121 digital activism 18, 19
McLuhan, Marshall 58, 59, 66 politics of race 107-114
McTague, Tim (Underoath) 177-181 PopMatters (online magazine) 1, 8, 44
Messenger, The (film) 187, 195, 198-200, Propagandhi (band) 14, 18-20, 23, 25, 26,
203, 204 130, 140
Metallica 88, 117, 202 “(America’s Army) Die Jugend
Ministry (band) 198, 204 Marschiert” (song) 14, 18, 19
Moore, Michael 182, 185, 186, 204 protest music 9, 13, 14, 19, 26, 52, 57, 58,
mp3 files 6, 8, 25, 33, 38, 39, 47, 96, 100 61-63, 66, 67, 115-119, 125
210 The Politics of Post-9/11 Music

anti-War protest music 115, 117 Tea Party Movement 83, 173
“big tent” protest movements 58, 66 Telecommunications Act of 1996 95n, 116,
in post-9/11 context 52, 118 168
punk rock 9, 129-141, 146-156 3 Doors Down 14, 21, 24, 26
Christianity and 9, 173-182 “Citizen/Soldier” (video) 14, 16, 17-26
Punk Voter 129-133, 136, 139-141 as recruitment tool for National
conservatism and 9, 129-141, 180, 181 Guard 20-26
trauma 69, 72, 76, 107, 151-153, 192, 195,
al Qaeda 32, 33, 71, 72, 80, 73, 88 198-200
Tucker, Michael 192, 193
Rabid, Jack 148, 149, 152, 156 2004 United States Presidential Election
Radiohead 6, 8, 66, 67 35, 129
Hail to the Thief (album) 8, 66, 67 Rock Against Bush campaign 129, 130,
In Rainbows (album) 6, 8, 66, 67 133, 146, 151
Ramones 64, 133, 135, 140, 142, 143
Reagan, Ronald 77, 133, 136, 139, 175 Underoath 9, 173-182
Reznor, Trent see Nine Inch Nails “In Regards to Myself” (song) 178
Rizzuto, Nick 131-133, 138, 141 Underwood, Carrie 5, 9, 161-166, 169
Rock Against Bush campaign see 2004 “Before He Cheats” (song) 162, 164,
United States Presidential Election 165, 170
Rock Against Bush (album) 130, 133, 151 United States military 14, 15, 17-20
The Rolling Stones 57, 118, 119, 121 US Army National Guard 14, 16-18,
“Street Fighting Man” (song) 118, 119 20-26
Roszak, Theodore 37, 38 USA Patriot Act 34, 93, 94, 111
R.E.M. (band) 35, 117, 121
Vale, Val 148, 149
September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks xi-xiii, Vietnam War 13, 19, 21, 40, 57, 76, 115,
1-5, 7, 8, 34, 41, 69-81, 89, 109- 119, 125, 151, 175
112, 132 vinyl records xv, 7
media coverage of 2, 3, 5, 8, 145 resurgence of vinyl 7
patriotic responses to 5, 9, 94, 95 Virilio, Paul 41
Sex Pistols (band) 137, 140, 153, 156, 176 Vivian Girls (Brooklyn, NY band) 46, 51,
Sinatra, Frank 7, 8, 69, 70, 72-75, 77 52
Skiba, Matt (Alkaline Trio) 150-152
Slayer (band) 5, 7, 188, 189 Waksman, Steve 7, 9, 24
“Angel of Death” (song) 188 “the war on terror” 13, 14, 17-20, 23, 26,
God Hates Us All (album) 5 70, 74, 108, 116, 145, 148, 150,
Reign in Blood (album) 7, 188 182, 188, 194, 204
Soundtrack to War (film) 185, 187-192, Wavves (band) 44, 46, 50, 51, 54
194, 195, 200, 201 weapons of mass destruction (WMD) 93,
Springsteen, Bruce 1, 75, 76, 125, 129 109, 147
The Rising (album) 1 West, Kanye 111
Stockhausen, Karlheinz 79-81, 89 Wilf, Stuart 193-195, 204
Strokes, The (band) 3-5 Wilkow, Andrew 131, 132, 138, 139
Is This It (album) 3-5 Williams, Nathan see Wavves
Woodstock Festival (1969) 34, 35, 120,
Taliban Movement 116, 173 128, 175, 194
John Walker Lindh and 116
 Index 211

World Trade Center 1, 3, 5, 15, 35, 69-80, YouTube 8, 20, 22, 25, 59
111, 112, 115, 152, 168, 173
Ground Zero 79, 89, 112, 152, 168, Zizek, Slavoj 2, 3, 13, 16, 77n, 173
173 Welcome to the Desert of the Real! 2,
Ground Zero Mosque 112, 152, 173
173