Re: 9/11 writing
That's really good, Frank. Here's a column that I just finished for Amplitude Magazine (So. Cal music publication that I'm writing for,) it will be out in Mid-october. For some added information, I'm 19, now, 20 in January, so I was 16 or so in 2001. This column is about that:
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It was a documentary that brought back the musical memories, oddly enough. Seven Days in September, a documentary highlighting amateur video footage taken in the week after September 11, 2001, played on A&E the other night, and it brought it all back to me.
I remember hearing about it early Tuesday morning, and watching the endless news footage in history class that afternoon. ("Want to know why you should read history books?" my teacher asked. "This is why.") But it didn't hit me until the next morning. Me and a friend, whose father was in the Navy, got into an argument over it. She was frightened for her father, and I was angry, and I didn't care. I remember now only stomping out of the classroom, nothing more about the substance of the argument. I retreated to the neutral ground of the newspaper offices, the TV in the corner playing even more highlights from CNN. Afganistan. Osama Bin Laden. Who the hell were these people? Where was this place? I sat in the corner and cried. And then I went home.
The first thing I did was get my CD player, and my headphones, and play Mogwai's Rock Action album. It's a sweeping, noisy, melodic, cacophonous album. At times angry, sinister, and at others hopeful, like a small candle in the middle of a dark room, staving off the night. It fit the day.
A few days later I heard a song by Gillian Welch called "April the 14th, Pt. 1." It's an eerie, haunting piece, a folk song about the day before the day that things go wrong. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on the 15th of April, the Titanic was sunk on the 15th, and the Oklahoma City Bombing occurred only a few days after that. It was the only song I listened to, for days on end.
But it was the documentary that brought it all back. A circle of New Yorkers stood on a deserted city street and sang "Amazing Grace." A candle light vigil led to an impromptu rendition of "Give Peace a Chance", with a trumpet backup. And it occurred to me just how visceral and profound music is, when it reminds us of the things we've been through. There are songs that remind me of my great grandmother, songs that remind me of my two cousins, who died not too long ago. Some of them were playing when I heard the news, or were playing when I was thinking about them, or were even just playing, and then I thought of them, because it seemed right.
You've got your own songs, I know, and maybe they're more profound than a CD by a group of noise rockers or a sad folkie with a guitar, and that's okay. I'm not a Christian, but I get chills every time I listen to "Amazing Grace," and I think that that's probably true for a lot of people, all over the world. There's that one song that does it to them.
You watch Seven Days in September, and you can't help but entertain all the thoughts that crossed through your head on that day. How can anyone hate so much? That they would kill thousands of people, indiscriminately. You wonder if it's more of a sin to kill indiscriminately than it is to kill discriminately. They're all people.
I'm of the opinion that there are millions of things that bind every human. The most basic being, that we all live on this one little planet, that we breathe the same air, that we drink the same water, and eat (ultimately) the same food. But moreover, I think music binds us. I think a sad melody is universally recognized as a sad melody, a happy tune as a happy tune. With many songs, you don't even have to understand the lyrics to feel the heartbreak, or to feel the joy. Or the anger.
That's the power of music, that it communicates. There are a good number of artists that don't want to use their music as a platform to voice their opinions, or to speak out on this issue or that, and I won't begrudge them that, but I think musicians (and writers, and filmmakers,) have a duty, not only to themselves, not only to their audience, but to their art, to address the real issues. When the only songs being sung on street corners after 9/11 are by singers and writers that are already dead, what does that tell you? Our musicians have dropped the ball. But maybe someday someone will write the next "Give Peace a Chance" or "Amazing Grace." Maybe they'll do one better, maybe they'll write a true universal tune. The song that gives everyone chills, because it runs so deep; the song that moves everyone to tears, because it means so much to them, because they heard it on some junkie's boombox, while they were riding home on the subway after visiting their dying mother or father at the hospital, and it made them, just for a moment, happy.
I would like it if no one had to sing the new "Give Peace a Chance" or the new "Amazing Grace" on a deserted city street in the middle of the night, because that would mean that everyone was still safe, everyone still together. Maybe they could stay inside, and invite the neighbors over for dinner, with the warm night air floating in through the open windows. And maybe they could sing songs after dessert, with their children on their laps. Maybe they'd be doing it halfway around the world, too. I would like that very much. I think you would, too.
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Listening to NPR this morning, I was also reminded that there are a TON of independet films being made and shown at festivals all around the world, not only about 9.11, but about the myriad of other issues that spring from it (The Iraq war, terrorism, etc). Some of these are not as cut and dried as "liberal" or "conservative", they seem, from what I hear, anyway, to be just the same as any other medium when it comes to these things, just trying to cope, just trying to *figure it out*, to figure where they stand, to explore what it's like to exist in "interesting times", as the Chinese curse goes. It's all the same, and art's got a responsibility to address it.
