GHOSTS FROM THE PAST

My good friend brain coral made the point the other day (on notes, a fine adjunct to his primary site) that was on my mind all morning today. Namely, how a great tragedy can radically recontextualize a pop song.

He references Joy by Lucinda Williams, but I think he's really after Lake Charles from the same album (Car Wheels...). It's an ode to Louisiana in the form of a lament, and beyond all the requisite place names that currently clog the cable alphabet news nets, there is the chorus, which now seems painfully prescient:

"Did an angel whisper in your ear
And hold you close and take away your fear
In those long last moments"

We have spent the last week being collectively overwhelmed by long last moments...

But of course, this is not a song about the aftermath of Katrina. And that is part of the magic of the best pop.

Although it is such a circular medium (think verse/chorus/verse/chorus; think cylinders, 78s, 45s, LPs, reel to reels, cassettes, CDs, the wheel on your iPod), pop curiously lacks a center. It can have a POV, an agenda, maybe even a subtext, but the best of it is out there waiting to be willfully and willingly misinterpreted. And in the act of misinterpretation and being misinterpreted, it can take on an almost unbearable increase in gravity. I have heard Lake Charles at least 100 times, and for all its lyrical, transportive grace, I was never moved by it so much as I was when I listened to it this morning. And misinterpreted...

The last time I experienced this transformative moment with such power was in the days and weeks directly following 9/11. During that period, I listened to Abernant 1984/85 by The Mekons at least a few times every day. Sometimes it was the sole accompaniment to my 20 minute ride home from work. Listen. Repeat. Listen. Repeat.

I was intellectually aware that it is a song about the miners' strikes that roiled the UK in the mid 80s. I was not compelled to listen to it because it was helping me to form some thesis about how the callousness of the Thatcherite/Reaganite years had led us to 9/11. Rather, I was reacting quite viscerally to this:

"Vengeance is not ours it belongs to those
Who seek to destroy us
How much more is there left to lose?"

That is such a slippery couplet, but it affected me so profoundly, and in ways that I don't quite fully comprehend to this day. But the act of willfully misinterpreting once again got me through...