Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival Aug 18 and 19

IT’S GAAF Weekend — or Glenwood Ave. Arts Fest

August 18 and 19
12 Noon to 9 PM

This year featuring
*Booth 26 dedicated to continuing the work of
Chris Drew and the Art Patch Project
new patches printed on site!

and

**Booth 27 Chicago Labor & Arts Festival
the annual HUMOUNGOUS (great price) BOOK SALE
with books in all categories including kids, Spanish language, black history and literature, fiction and non fiction, Marxist and other political science; buy three, get one FREE.

***Plus we are a source of information about all things ré
Public Education Crisis:

• Occupation Rogers Park Education Committee

• Chicago Teachers Solidarity Campaign

• Various community activities coming up

• How to support teachers and the campaign for World class schools our communities deserve!

It’s not tax deductible, but your $$$ help tremendously!
Please make checks out to CL&AF
and mail to Lew Rosenbaum, 1122 W. Lunt 4A, Chicago, IL 60626

As always, thanks for checking in with us!

PS.  Have you heard about the Pied Piper of Rogers Park?  Ask us about this . . .

To Set Our Souls Free: Dave Marsh and Danny Alexander in Rock and Rap Confidential

Take Em As They Come

Tuesday, August 07, 2012

To Set Our Souls Free, RRC 229

ROCK & RAP CONFIDENTIAL

No. 229

            Please feel free to forward or post this issue widely. We only ask that you include the information that anyone can subscribe free of charge by sending their email address to rockrap@aol.com  If you ever wish to unsubscribe, just send an email with “unsubscribe” in the subject line to rockrap@aol.com.

          You might wonder, for good reason, why we are writing about Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball five months after its release. Some of the reasons have been personal. But  there are better reasons why we’re speaking up now, and speaking in the way that we are. Part of it is that we both like to listen slow, and listen frequently. Too much music writing now seems hasty and undigested, and that takes a toll. (Deadline perceptions are fine if there’s nothing important in the details, vastly inadequate if there is.)  More important was our  desire to hold off until we’d heard a larger dialogue: Just what would the world make of this record and what would we have to add to that conversation? But that dialogue has been slow in coming. Most of what was written and said  about the album missed the overriding sense we have that this record speaks directly to the Arundathi Roy/Grace Lee Boggs maxim: “A new world is possible. A new world is coming. A new world is already here.”

          Because we listen both as long-term Springsteen fans and as activists,  that’s what we heard here from early on. It’s a big part of what makes Wrecking Ball something different, especially in the way these songs interact with the dialogue about the movements for social change currently taking shape in our society.  This album doesn’t sound like anything else he has done, and its call stands apart, both musically and lyrically. It calls for us not only to react, emotionally, psychologically, even spiritually, but also to act, to not just stand but fight “shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart,” the last words sung on the record.

            Such a call requires—demands—a response in kind: detailed, direct and the result of lots of interplay between our own ideas and those of others. So we’ve taken our time and as much space as we needed to use. We hope this is part of a beginning. 

TO SET OUR SOULS FREE….Dave Marsh and Danny Alexander write: Bruce Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball opens with an alarm, with air raid sirens blaring and tribal drums kicking. The singer, recognizing the enormity of what he’s dealing with, begins in quiet caution. He knocks on the palace door; he desperately seeks a map to bring him home; he stumbles over once-kind neighbors turned callous to his suffering and their own. Like the man in “Rank Stranger,” the Stanley Brothers song that influences so many rock dystopias, the singer can’t believe the devastation he’s seeing, not in the streets but in the faces, the gestures, the way people are standing and moving: “Where’s the eyes, the eyes with the will to see…Where’s the work that will set my hands, my soul free…Where’s the promise from sea to shining sea?” There’s one thing he needs to make sure of: He chants it obsessively, as if himself amazed that he still fully believes it, even against all this evidence that it can’t be true: “We take care of our own, we take care of our own / Wherever this flag’s flown, we take care of our own.”

Trying to figure out how to realize that promise occupies the bulk of this album, the most complete narrative work Bruce Springsteen has created since [don't get stuck in the middle of a sentence: click here to read more].

Let Me Begin By Not Beginnin — Bob Dylan in 1964

Wednesday, 11 July 2012

posted in Letters of Note:  Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience

let me begin by not beginnin

Early-January of 1964, at which point his third studio album was soon-to-be released, 22-year-old Bob Dylan wrote the following letter to Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen — both founding editors of Broadside, a highly influential underground magazine of the period — and spoke of, amongst other things, his recent rise to fame, the money and guilt that came with it, and his love for Suze Rotolo. The letter was published in the magazine’s next issue.
Below is an image of its first page, followed by a full transcript; the original signed letter can be seen its entirety, here.

(Source: Broadside Magazine; Image: Bob Dylan, via Lost in the Cloud.)

Transcript
A LETTER FROM BOB DYLAN

for sis and gordon an all broads of good sizes

let me begin by not beginnin [click here to read more]

The Highway Is Alive Tonight: Reflections on Bruce Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball — Lew Rosenbaum

[In the following piece a few things might need to be clarified.  Greta, my sister, died almost 4 years ago, at 80 years old.  Often I want to have a conversation with her.  Occasionally I'll write a letter, as this piece begins, because I still feel the loss and because there is something I want to say anyway.  She was a trained classical musician who listened to me because she said she envied my ability to appreciate so many genre's that she could not.  Chris Drew has contributed to this blog and I've written about him in the People's Tribune as well. Chris died on May 7, 2012 after a heroic battle with lung cancer.  Bill Glahn is a friend and music writer and jack of all trades who shared his insights generously to a community of political thinkers and music enthusiasts of which I am privileged to be a part. Clicking the link for each song will lead you to a video recording of the song.  The entire album may be heard by clicking on Wrecking Ball here.  And last, the comments in this piece reflect what I think of this music, what I take from it into my life, in the spirit of Gwendolyn Brooks, when she wrote: "I give you my poem, it is my life, now do with it what you will."  Because I do believe the Highway is Alive Tonight in ways I have never seen.  This is the most amazing time in which to live.]

Dear Greta,

May 10 is drawing to a close.  I wanted to wish you Happy Birthday, even if it is an abbreviated greeting.  There are just so many things on my mind now, things that I want to talk over with you.  Things like why I think this is such an amazing moment in history.  Things like how it has felt  — felt, not what I think about it, but felt — to wind up the artistic life of Chris Drew.  I want to tell you how that feels.  I want to tell you how when I looked into his eyes as I saw him dying, I thought every minute of you.  That will never go away.

And I want to tell you, perhaps most of all, about music.  I want to tell you about the Bruce Springsteen album, the one I have been listening to over an over again. Wrecking  Ball.   How I would have made you a copy, how you would have said the words were good, but the music is still too loud for your ears.  How we would have had a conversation about the structure of the album.  How I listened over an over to We Take Care of Our Own, learning by bits and pieces the irony and anger and ambiguity and hope in that song.  How my friend Bill Glahn made me understand, even before I heard it, the meanings of Jack of All Trades, how the dirge resonates with me more than any other song in the album.  How at the same time the travelers on the rocky road remind me so much of the rocky road we are all traversing, and how the bridge to Land of Hope and Dreams is so perfect.  And how the tribute to Clarence Clemons which illuminates each show this tour, makes it clear why I am writing this letter.  Bruce tells his audience:  if you’re here, and we’re here, then they (Clarence and Danny Federici also) are here.  And so it is with Chris Drew.  And with you.

But as with Clarence’s now stilled sax,  so it is with your stilled voice.  Rest well.

May 10, 2012

The Highway Is Alive Tonight

I admit to some confusion, some anxiety when I first heard “We Take Care of Our Own,”  the song that opens the new Bruce Springsteen record.   “We take care of our own, wherever this flag’s flown,” he sings. And inside my head I said “Wait a minute: from Fort Bragg to Baghdad, we are not taking care of our own nor of others — or we are taking care of them like the mob does.” More and more, though, the song resonates with questions, ironies, ambiguities.  Who are “we,”  who are “our own,” what is “this flag,” and where indeed is it flown?  This song cannot be taken at face value.

“The road to good intentions has grown dry as a bone.”  This line ends the first verse, that emphasizes the stance of the song and the album.  The “good intentions” –debatable of course, but rhetorically correct — of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” FDR’s “New Deal” have no promise left in them.  They came from knocking at the door of the throne room.  The throne! The uncrowned emperor of the USA.  So when the singer intones that we take care of our own, from shotgun shack to the Superdome, it evokes an abdication of responsibility during Katrina specifically, but a more general abdication, a boast that covers a festering reality.

Where are the eyes with the will to see . . . where’s the promise from sea to shining sea?”  This series of questions deepens the dissatisfaction with we take care of our own. We can’t really be doing what we are saying. And “this flag” — if it is the flag of the USA, that “wherever” also is an opening to a bigger question, since “this flag” is flown in the most distanced parts of the world, from countries in a crescent surrounding China and Russia, to the NATO countries to wherever there is an armed forces presence around the world, thousands of military bases.  Are we taking care of our own?  Even if “our own” is defined as US citizens?  The casualties, deaths, trauma just among “our own” soldiers.  But what about the question about who “our own” really is? Don’t we bear responsibility for the destruction of the countries we bomb, the people killed and left homeless?  Are they not as much “our own” as the soldiers we have sent to render that destruction?

These are all questions raised by this song not because the song is explicit, but because it is deliberately ambiguous.  And because of this it raises the ultimate question for me:  how do we get to the place where “we”  –  the working class — take care of our own, protect our international class brothers and sisters, wherever our flag, the flag of the international working class, is flown.  That is the challenge of this album and it starts from the first song.

“Easy Money” seems like it doesn’t belong.  But here is this character in the bleak world, that is tumbling down without him even seeing it, already described, who takes his Smith and Wesson 38 to go out on the town looking for easy money.  “Put on your red dress,” we’re goin’ out on the town “lookin’ for easy money.”  Bravado without substance marks this song, it seems to me.  Can’t make it any other way, which then leads into “Shackled and Drawn.”   Bruce Prescott, in a blog he calls “The Mainstream Baptist,” writes about this song:

Bruce Springsteen describes the result of the inequities of our economic system in a number of songs on his new “Wrecking Ball” album. Here’s my favorite:

Gambling man rolls the dice,

working man pays the bill

It’s still fat and easy up on banker’s hill

Up on bankers hill, the party’s still going strong

Down here below we’re shackled and drawn.

Shackled and drawn, shackled and drawn

Pick up the rock son, carry it on

We’re trudging through the dark in

a world gone wrong

I woke up this morning shackled and drawn.

The gambler and the banker are the ones making the easy money. The poor boy in a world gone wrong can pick up his smith and wesson, but that won’t get him anywhere.  The bankers rob you without a gun (or rather, with the armed force of the state behind them).  The song ends calling on you to stand up and be counted and pray tonight.

Prescott might like “Shackled and Drawn” best, but “Jack Of All Trades”   hits me hardest.  “I’ll mow your lawn, clean the leaves out your drain,I’ll mend your roof to keep out the rain.”  I’ll do anything, I can do anything — pull that engine apart  –  “the hurricane blows, brings a hard rain,  when the blue sky breaks, feels like the world’s gonna change, we’ll start caring for each other, like Jesus said that we might, I’m a Jack of All Trades, we’ll be all right.”  We’ll be all right is still sung like a dirge, an enduring funeral march almost, a death march, a survival march.  But with a hint of possibility this time.  It’s not the fantasy of easy money, it’s not the despair of shackled and drawn, it’s not the sarcasm or irony of we take care of our own.  It is the bridge to possibility of taking care of our own.

Now, jack-of-all-trades, in my family recollection, was always followed by the phrase “master-of-none.”  Meaning not being able to do anything well.  You can always count on him, he can do anything, he’s a jack-of-all-trades;  versus don’t let him do anything too complex, because he can’t do the really tough jobs. Taken collectively, and referring back to “we take care of our own,” the working class is that jack of all trades.  All trades are found within the class, all are developed to their specialities within the class.  The class will survive.  The class will be all right.

I’m not writing an exegesis of each line or even each verse, but read these lyrics, listen to the patience and sorrow of “it’s all happened before, it’ll happen again,”  living through rough times and good times, and bad times of all varieties, and yet you see a chance, a possibility, a new world that hearkens back to a promise made before (the Jesus image), meanwhile living with what exists, making and re-making.

the banking man grows fat

working man grows thin

it’s all happened before

it’ll happen again

now sometime tomorrow

come soaked in treasure and blood

we stand the drought

now we stand the flood

there’s a new world comin

I can see the light

I’m a jack of all trades

we’ll be all right

so you use what you’ve got

and you learn to make do

you take the old

and you make it new

. . .And then there is that one line, coming near the end, where  frustration breaks out but where the tone is the same patient sound that has filled this song, the same dirge, and still the character says what he would do

if I had me a gun

I’d find the bastards and shoot em on sight.

No hint that that was coming.

The song ends with an instrumental wail of defiance. This is a Tom Morello solo, a scream of guitar sounds which says more than we’ll be all right, says we will triumph, foreshadows the challenge to those who wield the wrecking ball of the title song. Which then leads into “Death to My Hometown.”

This is not a quiet death, but it is accomplished without one shot being fired.  No blood soaked the ground.  No bombs from the sky. Still “they brought death to my home town.”  The singer mourns the destroyed factories and homes, the vultures picked their bones.  Intensity identifies the corporate enemy, and while others have commented about the allusion to Irish music, I hear a French carmagnole, the tumbrils of the mind filled with the bodies of the oppressor. In a workshop on May 13, leading up the the protests against the NATO summit taking place in Chicago, poet Matt Sedillo reminded his audience that the bombs raining down on civilians (and combatants) in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere were only part of the story.  The economic side of NATO, the G8 were carrying out murder in the cities of their own countries, but without weapons of mass destruction, other than starvation, deprivation of health care, and numerous other methods accomplished without soaking the ground in blood. The very point that this song intensifies.

Next comes “This Depression,”  another dirge.  And death to my home town is something to be mourned, to be depressed about.  I’ve been down, but never this low.  I need your heart, I need your love in this depression.  There is a depression of the economy, clearly spelled out in “Death to My Home Town,” alluded to in “Jack of All Trades” and “We Take Care of Our Own.”  And perhaps when he sings “I’ve been strong but I’ve never felt so weak” it’s both the physical and emotional toll of the overwhelming and matching depression.  I mean it is obvious that there is an emotional toll taken and sung about.  But when he says “I’ve never been so low,” it seems that is both.

“Wrecking Ball,”  the title song, is a song of defiance.  Written about the destruction of baseball stadiums (Mets and Giants), these arenas assume a metaphorical relation to society, where indeed giants have also played the game and suffered the same consequences that we learned about in “Death To My Home Town,”.  The character in this song, having weathered the coming and going of hard times over and over again, refuses to accept this fate.  Bring on your wrecking ball is at once a voice of experience, coming from the depths of depression, and a challenge.  Here is a John Henry for the modern era. In the mythic past, men strove to compete with machines, to prove they were better, faster, harder working.  They could not be replaced.  But as the machine itself was replaced, so was the life of the town in which they were housed.  That death also squelched the lives of the people left behind.  Except from out of the rubble, people emerge to challenge the wreckers.

What is it that can tell the rulers/destroyers of our society “Bring on your wrecking ball”? From where does the defeat of the new world order come?  “No school ever taught it,” Springsteen sings,  “no one ever bought it,  Baby you’ve got it come on and give it to me.”   This is the real thing.  One thread running through all of Springsteen’s work has been trying to find out if love is real.  In the context of this record, what are we to think of this love song, “You’ve Got It”? There is a quiet intensity to this piece, sort of a parallel in intensity to “Jack Of All Trades.”   No school, because you can’t teach someone “this.”  “It” is not a commodity to be bought and sold.  We inherit this consciousness by our experience and by our devotion to exploring and learning.  It demands an engagement with new ideas that challenge our connection to what makes up the old society.  For me this means definitively a break with private property.  I say “for me” knowing I am treading on my ground here, not necessarily Springsteen’s.  But I would also argue that now that it is out in public, it is the responsibility of the listener to make of it what he or she will.  And I would argue that this is a love song to the collective, and “give it to me” is the only love that can transform society.

And then comes “Rocky Ground,”   which is my second favorite song on the album.  We’ve been traveling over the rocky ground.  We certainly have. From “We Take Care of Our Own”  to this one, filled with religious allusion without hope for religious redemption. There’s a new day is coming (repeated quietly in the background), but its up to us. Of course every song on the album is a collaboration.  But this one seems even more a collaboration of styles and artists, reinforcing the collective response to the collective experience of traveling on rocky ground.  Just the repetition of “we’ve been traveling” makes this a journey of suffering and of quiet redemption. In the midst of this comes a  gospel influenced rap segment that leads inevitably and seamlessly to the “Land of Hope and Dreams,” where all are welcome.

All of the cast out characters of the previous songs are welcome on the train leading to the “Land of Hope and Dreams.”  This train is filled with people who will take care of their own. Whores, gamblers, lost souls, saints, sinners, losers and winners. Don’t know where you’re going but you know you won’t be back.  Thankfully.  We’ll take what we can carry and we’ll leave the rest. We don’t need the baggage that drains us where we live now. It is a glorious celebration, reaching  back to “there’s a new day coming,” rescuing us from the depths of despair and misery.   (The album contains a version that includes the Clarence Clemons solo;  touring for the album and playing sax is Jake Clemons).

“We Are Alive” closes the album http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXrHQsmON2U&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PLCCF33C028B32189C .  “We” are of course reading this.  “We” are listening to this album.  “We” are listening to Clarence Clemons saxophone solo, Clarence who died 6 months ago. “We” are the ancestors who died in freedom struggles, but who are alive and with us.  Bruce intones, in his concert performances, “If you are here and we are here, then they are here.”  We are alive if we are engaged in the struggle for the future that this album implies is possible.

In another song, from another album, one which he performs regularly with Tom Morello, “The Ghost of Tom Joad,”   Springsteen’s narrator sings “the highway is alive tonight.”  Indeed it is, it has not been so alive in decades.  And if you look in their eyes, those who populate the highways, you will see the ghost of Tom Joad everywhere.

The highway is alive tonight.

Democracy Now Celebrates Woody Guthrie’s 100th Birthday

Woody Guthrie At 100: Democracy Now

Commemorations are being held across the country this year to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of the country’s greatest songwriters, Woody Guthrie. Born on July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma, Guthrie wrote hundreds of folk songs, including “This Land Is Your Land,” “Pastures of Plenty,” “Pretty Boy Floyd,” “Do Re Mi” and “The Ranger’s Command.” While Guthrie is best remembered as a musician, he also had a deeply political side. At the height of McCarthyism, Guthrie spoke out for labor and civil rights and against fascism. In this one-hour special, you will hear interviews and music from folk singer Pete Seeger, the British musician Billy Bragg, and the historian Will Kaufman, author of the new book, “Woody Guthrie, American Radical.”

“Woody’s original songs, the songs that he wrote back in the 1930s … with these images of people losing their houses to the banks, of gamblers on the stock markets making millions, when ordinary working people can’t afford to make ends meet, and of people dying for want of proper free healthcare, you know, this song could have been written anytime in the last five years, really, in the United States of America,” says Bragg, who has long been inspired by Guthrie.

Guthrie’s most famous song, “This Land Is Your Land,” was written in 1940 in response to Kate Smith’s “God Bless America.” “Woody saw ['God Bless America'] as a strident, jingoistic, complacent, tub-thumping anthem to American greatness,” Kaufman says. “And now, he had just come from the Dust Bowl. He’d just come from the barbed-wire gates of California’s Eden there. He’d seen the Hoovervilles. He’d seen the bread lines. He’d seen labor activists getting their heads busted. And so, he’s thinking, what — God bless — what America, you know, is Kate Smith singing of?” In 2009, Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen performed “This Land Is Your Land” for the inauguration of President Obama.

AMY GOODMAN: Commemorations are being held across the country this year to mark the hundredth anniversary of the birth of one of the country’s greatest songwriters, Woody Guthrie. Born on July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma, Guthrie wrote hundreds of folk songs, including “This Land Is Your Land,” “Pastures of Plenty,” “Pretty Boy Floyd,” “Do Re Mi” and this song, “The Ranger’s Command.”

NARRATOR: Two fragments of film survive of Guthrie performing. One of them, lost in the archives for 40 years has only just come to light.

WOODY GUTHRIE: [singing] But the rustlers broke on us in the dead hours of night;
She ’rose from her blanket, a battle to fight.
She ’rose from her blanket with a gun in each hand,
Said: Come all of you cowboys, fight for your land.

AMY GOODMAN: A rare 1945 video recording of Woody Guthrie. Known as the Dust Bowl Troubadour, Guthrie became a major influence on countless musicians, including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs. While Woody Guthrie is best remembered as a musician, he also had a deeply political side. At the height of McCarthyism, Guthrie spoke out for labor and civil rights and against fascism. He died in 1967 after a long battle with Huntington’s disease. But his music lives on.

Over the next hour, we’ll hear from folk singer Pete Seeger, the British musician Billy Bragg and the historian Will Kaufman. But first, Woody Guthrie, in his own words, being interviewed by the musicologist Alan Lomax

ALAN LOMAX: What did your family do? What kind of people were they, and where did they come from?

WOODY GUTHRIE: Well, they come in there from Texas . . .   click here for the rest of this story and/or to hear the program.

Robert Loss Writes: Bruce Springsteen Shouts at the Hard of Hearing

Image from Bruce Springsteen’s 2012 Wrecking Ball Tour website

Bruce Springsteen Shouts at the Hard of Hearing

By Robert Loss 8 June 2012

The Boss, Flannery O’Connor and The Common Good

“You’re walkin’ tough baby, but you’re walkin’ blind….”
—Bruce Springsteen, “The Ties That Bind”

“Seems like every time I got a nickel, I had to spend a dime.”
—The Canton Spirituals

5 March 2012: The first sounds we hear on Wrecking Ball are resolute drums and the nervous siren of a lead guitar processed to sound as if it’s emanating from Mars. Cue the wall of guitar, the chiming melody soon doubled by Springsteen’s trademark glockenspiel. Quickly the sound of “We Take Care of Our Own” is as big as “Born in the U.S.A.” but more orchestral, more carefully arranged, and, because it’s been staring for too long at the unfulfilled promises of America, not as surprised by what it sees. “Easy Money” and “Shackled and Drawn” lope along, free and vicious. The tone plummets on “Jack of All Trades”, where a desperate man—it could be a woman just as easily—says, “If I had me a gun, I’d find the bastards and shoot ‘em on sight”. Is it a threat or a boast? “Death to My Hometown” jigs along to its bitter end: the first act’s promised gunfire.

Bruce Springsteen

Wrecking Ball

(Columbia; US: 6 Mar 2012; UK: 5 Mar 2012)

The first five songs on Wrecking Ball constitute the most sustained bout of anger Springsteen has put to record since the four-song sequence on Live 1975-1985 which began with a furious version of “Born in the U.S.A.”. That performance was recorded in 1985, well after President Reagan attempted to hijack the song for his re-election campaign, and in the song’s final minutes, Springsteen and the E Street Band strangle the song’s neck so there will be no misunderstanding of its meaning. This segues into a brutal version of “Seeds”, a performance so good the song never needed to be recorded for a studio album, a touching, bitter “The River” and a stomp through Edwin Starr’s “War”.
Together those four songs told the story of a young man who goes to war, survives, and comes home to a lack of jobs, pervasive desperation, depression and rage.
Sound familiar?
I took immediately to Wrecking Ball‘s anger. For whatever its aesthetic misfires, the album speaks to the despair, confusion, frustration and drift in our lives, including my own: work lost, unavailable, and scrounged for; medical conditions uncovered, untreated; bills unpaid, bill collectors dodged, tightropes walked between responsibility and reality. This is what it means to be working poor in America.
It’s embarrassing to talk about one’s own economic status, particularly in our materialistic, glamour-of-success culture. And there are limits to what I’m willing to share, and what you are most likely willing to listen to. I will say this, however: for many years I lived in a constant state of tension. Even when my income was relatively secure, I felt that one mistake or one day of bad luck—a car breakdown, a slip on the ice, a misplaced word—could ruin me. Next thing you’d know, I’d be walking across cars like Michael Douglas in Falling Down.
This is the kind of personal narrative Springsteen has always excelled at: songs about frustrated working-class men and women who cannot fathom the political forces shaping their lives and lash out in personal, local ways. Yet most of Wrecking Ball is unabashedly pointed, broadly drawn, public and deeply political.
Why has Springsteen set aside his storytelling in favor of social jeremiads? Who is he singing to? Why is he trying to do something different now, or is it just, as some critics claim, his brand of righteous rock as usual? The critical questions are not about the subjects—he’s been singing about them for years—but instead, style, method and strategy.
28 March 1979: Everything goes to hell at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in the middle of the Susquehanna River in south central Pennsylvania. A valve sticks, man can’t talk to machine, and how-do-you-do: partial nuclear meltdown. A jeremiad almost comes true.
Living less than five miles from the nuclear plant, my father manages a local wastewater treatment plant and has to stick around while hundreds of thousands evacuate. Years later he writes me that, days after the incident and “to my utter amazement, the plant’s corporate owners GPU continued to report that there had been no leak of radiation material. By that, I took them to mean that there were no uranium rods laying out in the front yard.”
21-22 September 1979: Well-meaning musicians perform at No Nukes: The Muse Concerts for a Non-Nuclear Future at, where else, Madison Square Garden in NYC. (“Muse” is, in fact, an acronym: Musicians United for Safe Energy, and they raised money recently for tsunami relief in Japan.) As captured on film and as heard on the inevitable live triple-album, the performances seem oblivious to the terror and displacement months prior in rural Pennsylvania. Everyone has a good, easy time of it, and they look fab doing it. James Taylor, Graham Nash, Carly Simon and John Hall mime their way through, what else, “The Times They Are A-Changin’”. The Doobie Brothers perform something.
By performing at No Nukes, Springsteen wades into the Cool Whip of rock-star political consciousness for the first time. Until this point, he has infused his music with politics in the primal sense of the word: politics as the meeting place between the individual and society. Like most recording artists, he’s done this by way of character and story, only with more acuity and toughness. But now he’s on stage for a cause, and he responds with “The River” more than a year before it will be released on the eponymous album. Dedicating the song to his brother-in-law and sister, Springsteen nonetheless conjures up the fears and bitterness of people besieged by forces greater than themselves. “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?” he sings—worse as in the forced evacuation from your home in the wake of a partial core meltdown, or having to stay because that’s your job.
Maybe there comes a time when you can’t afford to be subtle. Or maybe the anger just springs up, as it must have in the days after the incident at Three Mile Island, when Springsteen wrote and recorded the manic “Roulette”, a song which sounds like the soundtrack to a realistic horror film someone has yet to make. “Roulette” was recorded in the first days of the first session for what would become The River, but it never made that album and wasn’t performed at the No Nukes concerts. In fact, it wasn’t performed live until 1988 when Max Weinberg had to beat the hell out of the drums to rein the band to a tempo Springsteen could sing over.
1978-1982: Springsteen Reads Flannery O’Connor
Until The Ghost of Tom Joad, Springsteen revealed more about his politics on tour than he did on record—he didn’t campaign for a political candidate until he played at rallies for John Kerry in 2004—and like many of us, he stuck to causes, not parties or overarching ideals except for the highest and most abstract: equality, freedom, dignity. These aspirations worked because Springsteen has always known how to throw a punch. In the liner notes to the outtakes CD which accompanied The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, Springsteen wrote that around that time:

“I knew the stakes I wanted to play for, so I picked the hardest of what I had, music that would leave no room to be misunderstood about what I felt was at risk and what might be attained over the American airwaves of radio in 1978. Power, directness, austerity were my goals. Tough music for folks in tough circumstances.”

But Darkness on the Edge of Town was not “We Shall Overcome”. The lyrics were not explicitly topical, and only occasionally optimistic. Springsteen’s directness was contained within stories that maintained a degree of ambiguity. It was up to the listeners to make the connections, even if, on startling songs like “Roulette”, the connections were glaring.
I’ve always found it interesting that beginning in the late ‘70s and especially close to the time he recorded Nebraska, Springsteen was reading the American and very Catholic fiction writer Flannery O’Connor. Known primarily for her odd, brutal short stories of grace and violence in a South divided by race and class and tradition, O’Connor cared less about her characters’ politics than she did their salvation. These are recognizably normal people whose strangeness seems to be the great American secret, and through relentlessly terrible decisions, blind ignorance, comfortable smugness and simple bad luck, their salvation is real, even if it’s horrifying to witness.

We Have Abandoned an Idea Central to the American Character

There aren’t many examples of her overt influence on Springsteen’s work. The title of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find (Pittsburgh)”, recorded in 1982, echoes one of O’Connor’s most famous short stories. Maybe Springsteen pinched the title of “The River” from O’Connor’s story, but their tales are quite different, even if the subject of redemption runs through both. More influential was O’Connor’s perspective on humanity, especially on Nebraska. In an interview with Doubletake in which he explained reading her work, Springsteen observed that O’Connor “got to the heart of some part of meanness that she never spelled out, because if she spelled it out you wouldn’t be getting it. It was always at the core of every one of her stories—the way that she’d left that hole there, that hole that’s inside of everybody.”
By comparison to protest folk, O’Connor was subtle, but in literary terms, she was a shouter. There’s a rage to much of her writing, rage at the hypocrisy of the religious and the apathy of everyone else, a wonderful shrillness that goes hand-in-hand with her utter weirdness and the unanswerable mysteries inside her characters. This she famously explained in a speech included in her book Mystery and Manners:

“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

It’s compelling to think that Springsteen read Mystery and Manners, or at least came across this well-known quote, but I can’t say with any certainty that he did. Like O’Connor, though, he got to the meanness in his characters, and he did it by never shying away from “large and startling figures”, never moreso than on Nebraska. Released nearly 30 years ago to the day as I write this, that record journeys as far down into the well of American blankness as you can go and still get out. Its muted voice is shocking, and its speechless rage a kind of shout.
I’m convinced that on Wrecking Ball, Springsteen is shouting at the hard of hearing. Which might mean that, as in 1978 and in 1982, Springsteen doesn’t assume his audience holds “the same beliefs” he does.
Which might be the most dangerous and exciting thing an artist can think.
May 2012: And what beliefs does Springsteen assume we might not share with him? To what have we become hard of hearing and almost blind?
If there’s one thing Springsteen is shouting on Wrecking Ball, if there’s one message he knows his audience in its fullest might resist and thus screams even louder, it’s that we have abandoned an idea central to the American character: the common good.
The promise of America was that a balance would be struck between the individual and the collective, one that avoided the uniformity of an oppressive government and, on the other hand, what the philosopher Thomas Hobbes called in Leviathan “a war of all against all”. This balance would be achieved by a sense of shared purpose and connectedness wherein the individual had room to breath but was not abandoned by his fellow man. It’s the tension at the heart of American culture, and the heart of its politics.
These days, however, individualism has never been a stronger ideal, and the collective good has been consumed by materialism; the only collective good we care about is the one we can buy. We have forgotten the question the late historian Tony Judt asks in Thinking the Twentieth Century: “How do you stop capitalism from creating an angry, impoverished, resentful lower class that becomes a source of division or decline?” Without a sense of public, common good, Judt writes later, “What gets lost…what is corroded in the distaste for common taxation is the very idea of a society as a terrain of shared responsibilities.”
On Wrecking Ball, the notion of a common good is pervasive: the many songs sung in the second-person, the equal opportunity of “Land of Hope and Dreams”—especially as it recalls Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready”—and the shared sacrifices of striking railroad workers, Civil Rights protestors, and modern-day Mexican immigrants in “We Are Alive”. More effective, perhaps, is how Springsteen brings to life the results of a society disinterested in being a civil society: the desperation of the couple in “Easy Money”, who might die this night; the bondage of the jobless man in “Shackled and Drawn”, the drifting “Jack of All Trades” and the infuriated voice in “Death to My Hometown”. There’s nothing subtle, sublime or ironic about any of this.
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Why is it necessary for Springsteen to shout? I suspect it’s because he thinks too many in his diverse audience no longer believe in the common good. We write it off as a romantic, naïve ideal, one that simply isn’t pragmatic.
Maybe he thinks his conservative base of listeners have misinformed or narrow ideas about the common good. Springsteen unashamedly claims that a common good cannot be achieved solely through family, town and church, and yet reaffirms that each of those is worthwhile and in need of protection from greed, hypocrisy and crass materialism. Alternately, perhaps the Left needs reminding of the ideal upon which it was built: the progressive social vision of progress, which does not mean fiddling while unions burn or practicing Facebook slacktivism. (Okay, we all do that.)
On Wrecking Ball, Springsteen sings, “Hold tight to your anger… and don’t fall to your fears”. He dares to suggest that anger is equal opportunity. Those who’ve allied themselves with the Far Right and the Tea Party have legitimate reasons to be angry, he says, but warns that the fears nurtured by its opportunistic party leaders are destructive. The Left should hear a different message: Get angry. If you believe in equal rights for all individuals, and if you believe in the government’s ability to positively affect people’s lives—on and on the list goes—then damn it, you should be angry right now.
But the real strength of Springsteen’s vision is that he realizes most of his audience does not fall neatly into categories like Left or Right. He recognizes that most people hold conflicting beliefs and find themselves confused about what they believe. Even so, if we hold key beliefs which conflict greatly with others, we also believe in certain values that do not conflict—if we can just remember what they are.
And since nobody seems to remember or believe in the common good anymore, Springsteen is not only shouting for all of us, he’s shouting at all of us.
Walkin’ Tough, Walkin’ Blind
Perhaps no other song on Wrecking Ball has come under as much criticism as “Jack of All Trades”: Pitchfork claims it has “overly broad characterization”; in a New York Times review-as-conversation, Jon Parales says it “verges on self-parody” and Jon Caramanica, actually expects us to believe that “the sodden workingman empathy literally made me nauseous”; and over on Slate, Rosen compares Springsteen to the well-intentioned but naïve director-protagonist in the Preston Sturges film Sullivan’s Travels. Apparently, like Sullivan, Springsteen has mainly been pumping out comedies up to this point (knee-slappers like Nebraska, Tunnel of Love, and The Rising), and now has abandoned the safe confines of Hollywood—or rather, New Jersey and its sixth-highest rate of unemployment as of April 2012—to mingle with the Common Man. Implicit in Rosen’s comparison is that The Boss can’t understand such folks because he is, after all, Rich and Famous.
What’s in the song is a simple, painful idea: a desperate plea for work. Give me something, anything, I’ll do whatever. When the job you were trained for disappears, when your education has not given you the tools to adapt, when what you thought was a sure thing vanishes, you’ll take all comers. “You want me to set some stone?” the song’s narrator asks. “I’ll do it. Want me to harvest crops? Done.” “Jack of All Trades” is the story of trying to cobble together an income, a livelihood, with some dignity.
Certainly a record reviewer has never been in that position, right?
What infuriates me about so many of the reviews of Wrecking Ball, positive and negative alike, is that they refuse to take the idea of a common good seriously. Maybe that’s impossible, though, if you refuse to believe that “common” and “ordinary” are anything but pejoratives, or if you simply have no idea what millions of people are experiencing.
On Wrecking Ball, Springsteen has re-imagined his audience, or rather come to terms again with its diversity, even if he knows his outrage will shake some people and give others unexpected ammunition. If he can throw a punch, he can take one, too; his career certainly can. But it’s invigorating to see him throwing punches at all. Whether or not the album works on its own terms—and those are the terms by which it should be judged—I don’t see anyone else taking the risk of being wrong.

Robert Loss teaches writing and literature at Columbus College of Art and Design. Other work about music and comic books has appeared in The Panelists, Ghettoblaster and OxMag. His short fiction has appeared in Filigree and Mayday. In his other life he fronts The Wells, a rock band in Columbus, Ohio.

The World Watches Wisconsin: Tom Morello Gathers Messages of Solidarity

Tuesday, 05 June 2012 09:33 By Tom Morello, Truthout | Op-Ed

Tom Morello on the steps of the Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, February 21, 2011. (Photo: Dave Hoefler)

Tom Morello played a concert in Madison, Wisconsin, on Friday in solidarity with the effort to recall Governor Walker. In advance of the concert, he solicited messages of solidarity from around the world and they came pouring in from Spain, Quebec, Chile, Greece, Tunisia and Egypt.

Here is a collection of the statements.

From Spain: 

From Madrid, we send our support and solidarity to the people of Madison on their fight, which is our fight too. We are part of a global non-violent movement that claims for a true, direct and participative democracy of people and for the people. Because we are the 99% we fight for a change in the system, since the current system does not represent us.

The ruler’s mistakes, sponsored by the dictatorships of markets and financial systems, are provoking the destruction of the deepest roots of the Rule of Law. We will not allow more reforms to undermine the basic rights.

The same claim sounds all around the world, in different languages: “we don’t gonna pay this crisis” in Spain, “Your time is up” in Wisconsin and it has the same meaning: the power belongs to the people. “Madison, we are with all of you. We are the 99%.”

(From Toma Madrid, the communication group of the 15M.)

From Quebec:

The fight we are currently leading in Quebec is the same as the ones workers and students of Wisconsin and throughout the world are in.

We are only a small part of a global struggle against social and economic injustice.

We have to restart to think about concrete ways to ensure solidarity between our struggles.

Over the borders, over our own interests, over our differences, we can find a global link that unites us all.

We are eager to be free.

Free from domination, oppression and domination from the corporate elites.

We might only be writing the first lines of the story of a global fight, but one thing is for sure, we all know the end of that story.

In the end, our solidarity will beat their oppression!

Quand l’injustice devient loi, la résistance est un devoir!

Which means: When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes a duty!

(From the Quebec student organization ASSESolidarite, sent in by ASSESolidarite member Guillaume Lagault.)

From Chile: 

Un fuerte abrazo desde Chile a todos los estudiantes y trabajadores de Wisconsin. Hemos estado luchando durante más de un año, y contra todos los pronósticos, para mantener la bandera de la igualdad de derechos para todos y por un sistema de educación pública y gratuita. No permitan que un grupo de personas decidan por todos, sin hacerles ver las injusticias que ustedes demandan.

Mantengan la fuerza, deben seguir luchando por sus derechos!

A warm hug from Chile to all the students and workers from Wisconsin. We’ve been struggling for more than a year and against all the odds, to maintain the flag of equal rights for everyone and for a free public education system. Don’t allow one group of people to decide for all, without letting them know the injustices that you’re complaining for.

Keep up your strength, you all must fight for your rights!”

(From Giorgio Jackson, a Chilean student leader.)

From Greece:

From Greece and Europe to Wisconsin and the Midwest, bankers, politicians and the 1% club are trying to make the rest of us pay for their crisis. In the process, they are attacking salaries, pensions and basic labor and collective bargaining rights. It is time for all of us to say: Enough is enough! It is time for all of us to join the movement of resistance to social and economic injustice, a movement that has been spreading from Tahrir square to Madrid’s Puerta del Sol; from Greece to Iceland; and from New York’s Zuccotti Park to Madison, Wisconsin, and hundreds of other cities and towns around the country and the world. Stop the social barbarism they have in store for us, join the struggle!

(From Costas Panayotakis.)

From Tunisia: 

18 months ago, we defeated a 23 year long dictatorship, one of the worst in the world. The power had not heard the silence of the crowds which announced a global geopolitical earthquake that began in a small town, in a small country in North Africa.

Today, the World citizens growl and revolt and the power refuses to hear the bells tolling for him. Institutions that govern the world are inhabited by men; the decisions taken there are human choices. We can change them right away; it is our choice to live differently. The pains, injustice and misery of our world are not inevitable, but the choices we make.

It is for this reason that I reiterate the call of Tunisian revolution to the world.

It Is Time For action. We Must Stand Together Against the Same Forces That Oppress and Exploit Us Both – Us All. The World is Art Of Being One, instead of being Nothing. This is a call to action. This is a call for the freedom. For the outliers. For the forgotten. This is a call for intellectuals. A call for journalists. This is a call for free thinkers. A call for the intelligentsia. This is a call for poets. A call for the strong. And a call for the weak. This is a call to the youth. To the wise. To the clever.

Occupy the World, Occupy your mind, get back the power.

(From Kerim Bouzouita, a well known Tunisian musician, professor and cyberactivist.)

From Egypt: 

The truth of revolution is the ecstasy that never shows a way … neither sends you away. It’s a faith that its path would never let you lose hope … neither it’ll let you lose the confusion. And that’s a faith that us, revolutionaries need, others don’t. There’s no march that is just another march. Keep rocking the chair. Some people might call us ignorant, radical or they might just wave us way wishing us to grow up. I say we actually are radical – a revolutionary never takes half-answers, that’s what tells revolution and defeat apart. And we might be ignorant of what’s behind the hill, but we just know that we hate that goddamn hill! With revolution, time and space become meaningless … thus we never age. If these words of mine come across, then know … the revolution is well.

(From Amor Eletrebi, a young organizer who spent weeks in Tahrir Square leading up to the ouster of Mubarak.)

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Tom Morello

Tom Morello is a musician and activist leader, and was the co-founder and lead guitarist of Rage Against the Machine. He currently performs as The Nightwatchman.

Gil Scott Heron – Passages, Interludes, Subtext n’ Understandin’

Welcome to *the Guild!*

Take a look around to learn more about our events and community…

Gil Scott Heron – Passages, Interludes, Subtext n’ Understandin’

Gil Scott Heron – Passages, Interludes, Subtext n’ Understandin’

Friday 06/08/2012 7:00 PM — 10:00 PM

Cost: Free

Phone: 877-394-5061

Email: info@guildcomplex.org

Venue: Experimental Station

Address: 6100 S. Blackstone (south on Dorchester, east on 61st – free street and university lot parking), Chicago, IL, United States

Join us for an evening of poetry, music and discussion of the legendary poet/musician/activist. Presented by the Guild’s “Applied Words” series, with support from the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture – University of Chicago, and the Friends of Blackstone Library.

Featured speakers and performers:

Carol Adams As one of the nation’s most esteemed educators, Dr. Adams helped to bring about the convergence of art and education in Chicago, particularly in its museums and public schools.  Former positions include Chairman of the African American Studies Department at Loyola University; Director, The Center for Inner City Studies at Northeastern Illinois University; and most recently the Secretary of the Illinois Department of Human Services. Carol Adams has spent much of her career engaged in cultural arts research, analysis and production. Her unique perspective on art and its integral role in shaping and defining culture and community is informed by her parallel study of sociology and Africana history and culture. Among her many awards and honors is the Illinois Arts Council Governor’s Award in the Arts.

Maggie Brown is a tremendously talented singer and performer using her gift to not only entertain, but educate as well. Maggie is the daughter of the late Oscar Brown, Jr. a world renowned composer, social activist, and legendary giant on the Jazz music scene. Mr. Brown passed on his artistic integrity to his daughter who now uses her own voice to create images that excite and inspire. For 19 years, the songstress has nationally toured her one-woman show, “LEGACY: Our Wealth of Music” which follows the history and evolution of African American music and covers a wide range of musical forms. Miss Maggie’s vocal musicianship proudly heralds the LEGACY left by those who came before us. “Music is a powerful force. We need to use our music, which is our cultural expression, in a way that uplifts humanity, rather than simply for material gain,” said Brown. The singer, actress, and educator Maggie Brown is no stranger to jazz-vocal legends with unique styles of songwriting: she grew up with one in her father. In 1999 Brown worked with the late singer/composer Abbey Lincoln on her CD, “Wholly Earth”.

Krista Franklin is a poet, visual artist and performer from Dayton, OH who lives and works in Chicago. Her poetry and mixed medium collages have been published in lifestyle and literary journals such as Vinyl 5, The New Sound, Coon Bidness, Copper Nickel, RATTLE, Indiana Review, Ecotone, Clam and Callaloo, and in the anthologies Encyclopedia Vol. II, F-K and Gathering Ground. Her visual art has been featured on the covers of award-winning books, and exhibited nationally in solo and group exhibitions, and her chapbook Study of Love & Black Body was published in 2012 by Willow Books. Franklin is a Cave Canem Fellow, a co-founder of 2^nd Sun Salon, a community meeting space for writers, visual and performance artists, musicians and scholars. www.kristafranklin.com

Travis Jackson is an ethnomusicologist whose work centers on jazz, rock and recording technology. His theoretical interests include urban geography, race/culture and identity, ethnographic method, performance and aesthetics. He is the author of the forthcoming Blowin’ the Blues Away: Performance and Meaning on the New York Jazz Scene, as well as articles on topics ranging from the intersection of jazz and poetic performance to the interpretation of meaning in rock. His current work focuses on the affective attachment of musicians and listeners to recording labels.

Keith M. Kelley is a poet, spoken word artist, musician and audio artist. He has been performing professionally since 1991 with his spoken word band, Funky Wordsmyths and in his one-man “Electric Poetry” show that blends spoken word, rhythmic utterances, and live instruments with effects processing and live phrase sampling and looping. In addition to performing, Kelley has been conducting Poetry, Spoken Word, and Music workshops with youth and adults for 20 Years. Kelley is the Executive Director of the Spoken Word Academy of Chicago, a not-for-profit organization established to provide a comprehensive resource for learning, practicing, performing, and experiencing the spoken word art form.

Quraysh Ali Lansana is author of five poetry books, including They Shall Run: Harriet Tubman Poems (Third World Press, 2004); a children’s book titled The Big World (Addison-Wesley, 1998); and editor of eight anthologies, including Dream of A Word: The Tia Chucha Press Poetry Anthology (Tia Chucha Press, 2006). He is Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing at Chicago State University, where he served as Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing from 2002-2011. He is a former faculty member of the Drama Division of The Juilliard School and former Associate Editor-Poetry for Black Issues Book Review. Quraysh earned a Masters of Fine Arts degree at the Creative Writing Program at New York University, where he was a Departmental Fellow. Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy & Social Justice in Classroom & Community (with Georgia A. Popoff) was published in March 2011 by Teachers & Writers Collaborative and was a 2012 NAACP Image Award nominee. mystic turf, his third full-length book of poetry, will be released in November 2012 by Willow Books.

Mario , Chicago poet, educator, activist and radio personality,  hosts “News From the Service Entrance” on WHPK 88.5FM/whpk.org/iTunes. He has written essays for Chicago’s public radio affiliate WBEZ , appeared on Voice of America, provided Election Night 2008 analysis for BBC Devon, and has performed his poetry at DePaul University, University of Chicago, Traffic Series at Steppenwolf Theater (Inaugural Season), MCA, United Nations Dialogue Among Civilizations, Old Town School of Folk Music, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Cultural Center.

Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor of In These Times, where he has worked since 1983. He is the host of “The Salim Muwakkil” show on WVON, Chicago’s historic black radio station, and he wrote the text for the book HAROLD: Photographs from the Harold Washington Years. Muwakkil has also written for the Washington Post, Chicago Reader, The Progressive, Newsday, Cineaste, Chicago Magazine, Emerge Magazine, The Black Scholar, and Utne Reader among others. Muwakkil has won a variety of journalism awards including the “Top Ten Media Heroes of 1994,” from the Institute of Alternative Journalism, the “Black Rose Achievement Award for 1997,” from the League of Black Women, and the 2001 Studs Terkel Award for Journalistic Excellence from the Chicago-based Community Media Workshop. In his spare time, Muwakkil serves as a board member for the Progressive Media Project and the Chicago-based Public Square. He has been a faculty member of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest’s Urban Studies Program, and an adjunct professor at Columbia College, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Primeridian, a hip-hop based, power group consisting of Simeon Viltz (See-Me-On), and Darshon Gibbs (Race), hail from the eclectic, historical music scene of Chicago. With musical influences from blues and R&B, to house and acid jazz, the Primeridian fuses these influences into a soulful, jazzy, acid-funk sound independent of musical genres and classifications pushing hip hop to new levels of exposure, experimentation and expression using thought-provoking lyrics, a touch of humor, skilled production and musicianship and years of explosive live performances. Simeon AKA “V,” a native of Chicago’s southeast Hyde Park area, represents the ‘the soul’ of Primeridian. Darshon “Race” Gibbs is an electrifying and captivating emcee able to entice those in earshot with lyrical prowess, depth and a distinct, strong voice. Original member, Jaime “Tree” Roundtree is now a teacher, focused on making connections with his students as an educator and his audience as an artist.

David Stovall is Associate Professor of Educational Policy Studies and African-American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).  His scholarship investigates four areas 1) Critical Race Theory, 2) concepts of social justice in education, 3) the relationship between housing and education, and 4) the relationship between schools and community stakeholders. In the attempt to being theory to action, he has spent the last ten years working with community organizations and schools to develop curriculum that address issues of social justice.  His current work has led him to become a member of the Greater Lawndale/Little Village School of Social Justice High School design team, which opened in the Fall of 2005. Furthering his work with communities, students, and teachers, Stovall is involved with youth-centered community organizations in Chicago, New York and the Bay Area.  In addition to his duties and responsibilities as an associate professor at UIC, he also serves as a volunteer social studies teacher at the Greater Lawndale/Little Village School for Social Justice.

avery r. young is a writer, performer and teaching artist.  He is a Cave Canem Fellow and his works have been published in AIMPrint, Callaloo, Spaces Between Us and many other anthologies and periodicals.  He is also featured on Urban Audiology:  The Art of Audio Truism and other compilations.

Springsteen lashes out at bankers in Berlin show

By Erik Kirschbaum

BERLIN | Wed May 30, 2012 8:44pm EDT

(Reuters) – Rocker Bruce Springsteen touched on a nerve of widespread discontent with the financiers and bankers at a Berlin concert on Wednesday, railing against them as “greedy thieves” and “robber barons.”

Springsteen, a singer-songwriter dubbed “The Boss” who has long championed populist causes, played to a sold-out crowd at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, singing from his album “Wrecking Ball” and speaking about tough economic times that have put people out of work worldwide and led to debt crises in Greece and other countries.

“In America, a lot of people have lost their jobs,” said Springsteen, 62, who performed for three hours to some 58,000 fans in the packed stadium that hosted the 1936 Olympics and the 2006 World Cup final.

“But also in Europe and in Berlin, times are tough,” he added, speaking in fluent German. “This song is for all those who are struggling.” He then introduced “Jack of All Trades”, a withering attack on bankers that includes the lyrics: “The banker man grows fat, working man grows thin.”

Europe has been especially hard hit since 2008′s financial meltdown that sparked an enduring sovereign debt crisis. Unemployment on the continent has risen to levels not seen since the 1990s.

Springsteen’s “Wrecking Ball” tour began on May 13 in Spain, which is struggling with its crushing debt load, and it runs for 2-1/2 months with 33 stops in 15 countries before concluding on July 31 in Helsinki.

‘FAT AND EASY ON BANKER’S HILL’

Berlin, largely a working class city, has been a special place for Springsteen since his July 1988 concert behind the old Iron Curtain in East Berlin.

Watched by 160,000 people, or about 1 percent of then Communist East Germany’s population, it was the biggest rock show in East German history, and The Boss boldly spoke out against the “barriers” keeping East Germans in their portion of the city.

Some historians have said the concert fed into a movement gaining moment at the time that contributed to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall 16 months later in November 1989.

“Once in a while you play a place, a show that ends up staying inside of you, living with you for the rest of your life,” he told the crowd on Wednesday after being handed a poster from a fan thanking him for the 1988 concert. “East Berlin in 1988 was certainly one of them.”

Even though Germany has managed to come through the current financial crisis in fairly good shape, Berlin itself is struggling with a double-digit unemployment rate, low wages and a high poverty. And some of the lyrics in Springsteen’s “Wrecking Ball” album clearly struck a chord with the crowd.

In “Shackled and Drawn”, Springsteen sings about “Gambling man rolls the dice, working man pays the bill. It’s still fat and easy up on banker’s hill. Up on banker’s hill the party’s going strong, down here below we’re shackled and drawn.”

With “Easy Money”, Springsteen rips into the “fat cats” who will “just think it’s funny … when you’re whole world comes tumbling down.” In “Death to My hometown”, Springsteen assails the “greedy thieves and robber barons” who “destroyed our families, factories and they took our homes.” In the song “Wrecking Ball”, he sings: “Hold tight to your anger.”

“The financial world has caused us all a lot of our problems and Springsteen has always been a critical spirit – that’s what I like about him,” said Kathleen Wapp, a 42-year-old doctor’s assistant from Wolfsburg who was at the show. “I like the way he’s not afraid to put a critical light on the key issues.”

“I think it’s great the way he’s taking on the banking industry – he’s got it dead right,” said Matthias Beck, 46, a carpenter from Leipzig. “There’s hardly anything good about banks. They take advantage of the little people, and it’s always hard to find someone who’ll take responsibility when it all goes wrong.”

(Reporting By Bob Tourtellotte)

RRC Extra No. 28: Dave Marsh Writes About Austin Hopes and Dreams

RRC Extra No. 28: Austin Hopes and Dreams

Please feel free to forward or post this RRC Extra widely. We only ask that you include the information that anyone can subscribe free of charge by sending their email address to <mailto:rockrap@aol.com>rockrap@aol.com. If you ever wish to unsubscribe, just send an email with “unsubscribe” in the subject line to <mailto:rockrap@aol.com>rockrap@aol.com.

The massive South by Southwest music festival (SXSW) has been held in Austin, Texas in the spring of every year since 1987. Dave Marsh reports on this year’s shindig.

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I know something about SXSW keynote addresses. Little Richard and Smokey Robinson both did theirs as, in part, dialogues with me—sitting live in front of several hundred people, Richard being Richard, Smokey being serious, sincere, smart, and as handsome as seventy will allow.

To a certain extent, it’s a setup: All the attendees who don’t care find other things to do and most of the rest come to have expectations affirmed. But it’s not that simple either. I had the best fun of the last twenty years just asking four questions, sitting and watching Little Richard rave for (I timed it) 17 and a half minutes without pausing for breath. Then he turned to me, clearly winded, and said breathlessly, “Ohhh, Dave! You’re still here. I bet you want to ask me some more questions.”

But it’s not that simple either. The best moments can also be absolutely pedagogical: Smokey ended with a seven minute spiel telling people how to find and deal with stardom, beginning with an admonition (“Thicken your skin”) and ending with a parable about the invention of show business. Since 2010 that last part’s gotten almost half a million hits on YouTube. Richard, who appeared in ’08, seemed to just rant but in reality he was preaching a sermon on the same theme as Smokey, offering all kinds of nuggets but coming back to the main point over and over again: “Sign your own checks!…Sign your own checks!” Afterwards, a young woman came up to me, eyes a brimful of tears, and said, “Thank you, thank you, that was everything I came here to learn.”

Steve Earle began by lecturing his audience: “Let me make something extremely clear. Kiss is not cool, Kiss was never cool, Kiss will never be cool.”

But Bruce Springsteen, this year, was something else again. He offered career advice wrapped in biography, history complete with instructive examples of where he’d swiped a couple of his classics: the doo-wop crooning that led to “Backstreets,” the way the Animals’ “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” provided the core of “Badlands,” and how and why “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” is “every song I’ve ever written including the new ones.” Rocker he may be, but not rockist: “The elements you’re using don’t matter. Purity of human expression and experience is not confined to guitars, to tubes, to turntables, to microchips. There is no right way, no pure way, of doing it. There’s just doing it.” Bruce wrestled with Lester Bangs and Woody Guthrie, post-authenticity, the transformative self, Roy Orbison’s paranoia, Phil Spector’s musical violence, the cover of Meet the Beatles as “the silent gods of Olympus,” the barely comprehensible existence of Nintendo-core, black death metal, and the yearning needs of soul. It was as if someone had managed to translate “A wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom tutti frutti” into a comprehensive treatise on the development and meaning (or lack thereof) of the past sixty years of Anglo-American popular music.

He avoided the hard political realities at the core of his new album, Wrecking Ball, in favor of talking eye to eye with an audience he assumed (correctly) consisted of people who either knew these things or needed to find them out. It was a practical speech, aimed at a specific group of people. He didn’t even know it was being broadcast live or, as far as I can tell, imagine that it would wind up all over the Internet, words stuck in the heads of millions of listeners. (The full audio’s at <http://npr.org>npr.org. It’s also worth looking at the segments posted on YouTube, particularly the stuff about the Animals.)

Raves arrived immediately, but I don’t think anyone’s used the term that best describes it for me: Generosity. The speech gave far more than it took and it held back on self-promotion (granted that the entire speech was wrapped in Bruce’s persona, but I’ve already quoted the only reference to his new album.)

Springsteen never has opening acts. That day he had five. Before the SXSW speech, Jimmy LaFave, Eliza Gilkyson, and Juanes sang Woody Guthrie songs (plus one original by Juanes). It was beautiful and loving, and all the things that a tribute to a great artist on his centenary ought to be. The highlight for me wasn’t Juanes singing a verse from “This Land Is Your Land,” which he told me later was the first time he’d ever sung in English onstage, but Juanes stepping up to challenge the audience when it didn’t sing along heartily enough. LaFave sang wonderfully as he always does, his Oklahoma roots deliberately on display, and his commentary on Woody’s music and life more trenchant than ever. And Eliza, firebrand that she is, kept the music contemporary, insisting on its relevance—or rather, insisting on her listeners paying attention to its continuing relation to the world descended from the one Guthrie described. Eliza has been the best female singer-songwriter for several years now, LaFave has been the best interpreter of Guthrie, Dylan and Springsteen for longer than that, and maybe this performance will help the news spread from Austin. Juanes, of course, is a rock star of Springsteen’s magnitude throughout Latin America and much of Europe; imagine John Lennon in Spanish.

That evening at the Moody Theater Springsteen had two openers–Low Anthem and Alejandro Escovedo with his full band each did about 45 minutes. (Springsteen had done a couple of numbers with Alejandro the night before at the Austin Music Awards show.)

The Austin show was only Springsteen’s second since the release of Wrecking Ball and, like its predecessor—an Apollo Theater benefit in honor of SiriusXM’s tenth anniversary—it contained some beautiful one-off wrinkles. Instead of invoking Curtis Mayfield, Wilson Pickett and Smokey Robinson (and James Brown by way of a lunatic climb into the rigging), this time Woody Guthrie framed the action. Bruce opened with his now-17 member E Street Band doing “I Ain’t Got No Home” a cappella and closed with “This Land is Your Land” with Escovedo, Low Anthem, Joe Ely, and a couple members of Arcade Fire helping out.

Is there another performer in our culture who operates in both the folk-rock and soul-gospel traditions? It’s as fashionable lately to evoke Springsteen as a literary figure as it once was to display him as an articulate pseudo-gas station attendant. But what’s most remarkable is the ability to move smoothly among soul and gospel music and the folk and country tradition in the way that Springsteen does. He has reached the point now that on Wrecking Ball’s “Land of Hope and Dreams” he does both in the same song. Generally, one is lurking in the background of the other in any of his songs, especially live. (Which can’t be discerned if all your attention is on the lyrics which is where, I suppose, the shade of the Great American Poem lurks in the minds of the critics who think it’s mostly about the words.) Yet in pulling these sounds together, Springsteen is capable of convincing more than a few that the beloved community truly could be in our future.

The Wrecking Ball songs (at the Moody he played eight of the eleven) have the strongest connecting thread of any Springsteen album since The River–from the furious social questions of “We Take Care of Our Own,” through the economic despair and determination of “Jack of All Trades” and “Death to My Hometown” to the glorious anthem of hope “Rocky Ground”—with its invocation of God, who does not answer—to the final, unambiguous call to action, “We Are Alive.”

I don’t suppose Bruce Springsteen has a much clearer vision of where, exactly, that action must lead to prevent the “hard times come and hard times go” cycle that he pounds away at six consecutive times in the song “Wrecking Ball.” But you can glimpse what it might feel like in any great musical performance, not just one of his. And, from my perspective, that is the real purpose of SXSW. Truth is, there hasn’t been a commercially important act that broke out of the conference since Hanson, fifteen years ago. But so what? It’s still the biggest, best music school in the United States, maybe the world.

And while Bruce’s show couldn’t offer the kind of community that he evokes in songs like “Land of Hope and Dreams,” it did evoke a sense of musician solidarity that’s essential to what happens with SXSW at its best. It’s a glimpse, but even a full-on Bruce and the E Street Band show is just a glimpse of what it would be like to live with equality and justice every day.

SXSW is as imperfect as any other human project. The sheer size of it has outstripped Austin’s transportation infrastructure and its deficit is ever-widening. The business panels are just the record industry trying to talk itself into believing it still exists. Hip-hop, dance, and ethnic music never get an equal shot in the press coverage and Austin’s local Mexican/Chicano community is invisible.

But.

What SXSW offers is a chance to attend that music school not only as student but as teacher. Not to study music but to observe and participate in the stewing mess of it. I have gone to Austin for this peculiar rite of March madness for the past, I think, nineteen years. I went to speak, I went back to listen. I keep going back not because I think I’m going to find any next big thing, but because I might run into musical glory.

This year, I got it in half a dozen ways—from Bruce, of course, but also from Eric Burdon, whose surprise (even to him and Springsteen) appearance to sing “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” at the Moody was a fiery proof of every accolade heaped upon the Animals’ frontman earlier that day. Where else could I interview, in the space of forty-eight hours both Juanes and Eric Burdon? Where else could I see old Austin friends like LaFave, Gilkyson, Michael Ramos, Michael Fracasso, Joe Ely and the Krayolas? Where else could I spend an afternoon and evening at a taqueria with Alejandro, Jesse Malin, Lenny Kaye, Rosie Flores, and new favorites like Maren Parusel?

Where else could I (with massive help from David Alvarez at KUT-FM and my producer Jim Rotolo) put on a live Sunday radio show, from nine to eleven AM, with seven musical guests? None of them played a record or sang a song I’d ever heard before. And all of them were flat-out great. None of them got paid—at SXSW no artist at an official gig ever gets paid, and very few get paid at any of the others, either. It is, most of the time, music for the love of music.

I go to SXSW to recharge, to remember why I love music, why we’ve still got a chance. And this year, like that young woman said, I got everything I came to learn.—D.M.

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