Glacial Errata, No. 62

[Editor’s Note: The results of last week’s Bibliomancy exercise will appear next week. Also, a Tidal playlist for this week can be found here.]

One: The Ghost of Tom Joad

I was watching a livestream. It was February of 2011, and protesters had occupied the Wisconsin state Capitol Building, attempting to block Governor Scott Walker’s disastrous Budget Repair Bill. At some point, someone posted a link to a live performance by Bruce Springsteen of his “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” with Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine joining him.

I’d been a sporadic fan of Springsteen most of my life, of course, but I’d not heard this performance before, and it blew my mind (Morello’s guitar playing gets a little over the top by the end, but whatcha gonna do, it’s Tom Morello—you buy the ticket, you take the ride). Chiefly, though, it was probably the first time in my adult life that I’d really come back to, and understood what a protest song could be, and what it could do.

Two: Masters of War

I think growing up I’d fallen too heavily for the “Dylan goes electric” narrative, that implied that protest music was brittle, fleeting, and one-dimensional, whereas true art is introspective, avoids didacticism, and is about universal themes like love and self.

I think I’d always kind of assumed that there was something sanctimonious about protest music, a kind of twee righteousness that might capture the moment but had little enduring value. But I think I was wrong.

For one thing, as has often been said of late, protest music is cringe, and more and more, I think we’re all realizing, we need to be cringe. We need to put it all out there, without irony or distance. What we believe, what we’re fighting for, what matters to us. Springsteen’s anthems are great because they’re cringe, because they’re not afraid of holding up values and ideals and saying THIS. If it’s a little cringe, so be it.

But beyond that: listening again to Dylan’s “Masters of War,” one thing I’ve come to realize is the degree to which protest music can capture a deeply ugly kind of anger. More so than his more famous protest anthems, “Masters of War” is full of hatred—a debasing kind of hatred that’s as embarrassing as it is necessary. It’s not “We Shall Overcome.” It has no hope in it, no sense that the long arc of history is bending towards justice. It’s the voice of a young man, watching young men all around him going to war and dying for no reason, unable to make sense of any of it and lashing out with rage.

What I’ve had to sit with myself over the past year and change is just how angry I am all the time—perfectly understandable, perfectly legitimate, but a kind of anger I hate about myself and wish I could leave behind. For all the damage being done to the vulnerable right now, there’s a knock-on effect for those of us not directly impacted but trying our best to help. A gradual accretion of anger and sadness like sediment in a stream, slowly choking off the flow of water and changing its directions in ways that aren’t easy to predict.

The way Dylan’s song ends—”And I hope that you die / and your death will come soon / I’ll follow your casket / by the pale afternoon / And I’ll watch while you’re lowered / down to your deathbed / And I’ll stand over your grave / ‘Til I’m sure that you’re dead.”—is to me a reminder of how much it all costs. Not just for the victims, but for all of us. That desire for revenge that is not only entirely understandable and perhaps even necessary, but will also drag us down as well.

A good protest song, I think, takes on some of this hate for us. It recognizes we can’t live with this indefinitely. We can’t take all this on ourselves. So one thing a good protest song can do it to take that rage we’re all feeling and give it a voice—a voice external to us, singing from a place outside ourselves, from a place where we can put some of the anger so it doesn’t entirely consume us.

Three: War Pigs

Even before I’d discovered Dylan, I’d grown up on metal, and one of the signature themes that runs through metal—from its earliest incarnation to the present day—is an absolute loathing for the senselessness of war. The purity of that outrage towards needless suffering. Black Sabbath’s second album, Paranoid could not be given the title they’d originally proposed, War Pigs, because the record label thought it would be too controversially anti-Vietnam. It’s not even just “War Pigs” itself, one of the greatest heavy metal songs ever written and one of the greatest anti-war songs ever written; there’s also “Hand of Doom,” written about the prevalence of drug addiction among Vietnam vets suffering from PTSD. This was only the second heavy metal album ever recorded, and from the very beginning the priorities of the genre were clear.

Not just Sabbath; throughout the 70s, 80s and into the 90s, metal defined itself by being stridently anti-war: Maiden’s “Two Minutes to Midnight,” Metallica’s “One,” Anthrax’s “Indians,” Megadeth’s “Peace Sells” RATM’s “Killing in the Name”—any iconic metal band has its antiwar songs, and they’re always among the most iconic songs in the catalog.

Even as the draft itself became a distant memory, I think, metal became a kind of oral tradition that kept the injustice and horror of it and war itself to a subsequent generation. I’d say, on the one hand, that such a message was largely, but not exclusively, for young white, suburban men like myself. But I would also say that the proliferation of covers in all genres of “War Pigs” in particular speaks to the universality of its emotion.

I don’t care who you are, if you’ve ever sung “War Pigs” out loud—in your teenage bedroom, at karaoke, in your car by yourself speeding down the freeway—you know how it stirs that sense of righteous, almost gleeful rage: the long, open syllables that open up your chest and give voice to the endless, utter disbelief that we are still fucking dealing with this shit.

Protest music, I think, when it works best, tries to channel some of that deep, ugly rage into something else—perhaps hope, perhaps sorrow, perhaps solace. But I say “tries” because the best protest music is always on the verge of failing. These are emotions that, ultimately cannot, and should not, be fully contained. There’s still work to be done.

(If metal isn’t entirely your thing, I recommend the cover by First Aid Kit, which captures some of the incandescent rage of the original.)

Four: Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)

“We’re glad to see you, and happily surprised that so many of you…. We really didn’t expect anybody tonight. And you know why, everybody knows everything, everything is everything, everything is everything, and you know why. But we’re glad that you’ve come to see us, and hope that we can provide some kind of something for you this evening, this particular evening, this Sunday, in this particular time in 1968. We hope that we can give you something, whatever it is that you need tonight.”

This is Nina Simone, speaking while she plays a few plaintive chords during the opening of “Sunday in Savannah,” off her 1968 live recording, ‘Nuff Said. The concert was recorded on April 7, 1968, in Westport, New York. In the original release of the album, “Sunday in Savannah” is only 3:25 minutes long, and that entire monologue is cut. Quite by accident I discovered a few years ago that an expanded edition of ‘Nuff Said had been released, that restored the songs to their original length. In its full version, “Sunday in Savannah” is nearly six minutes long, and begins with this monologue where she expresses happy surprise that anyone made it out to the concert.

Listening to it now, it’s not just the way her voice almost breaks on that word “hope,” it’s also the way she hits that word “why,” not once but twice: “And you know why…and you know why.” What’s she’s alluding to, of course, is what had happened only three days before, on April 4, 1968: the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

But she also hits that word, I think, because she knows what’s coming in a way that her audience doesn’t, for later that night she’ll debut a song written by her bass player, Gene Taylor: “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead),” an incredible piece of music that still, to this day, dazzles me with the recognition of not just how good it is, but that Taylor had just written it and taught it to Simone and the rest of the band that same day.

The way she inflects the word why in the opening of “Sunday in Savannah,” has a flatness and a finality—it’s happened, it’s finally happened, the thing we all dreaded. I know how you’re feeling and I know why. But in Taylor’s song the finality is pulled back into a cry of disbelief, a sob beyond sorrow. The song ends on an open question, as though Taylor is hoping beyond hope for some potential, some possibility, that yet may come from disaster.

In the first release of the album, “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)” is 5:44 minutes long, whereas in the unedited, expanded edition, it’s nearly 13 minutes long. The song begins with another monologue from Simone, and builds slowly towards its unforgettable crescendo, reaching about 9 minutes in length before the band finishes and stops.

And then, after a moment, Simone keeps going. She finds her voice again, she finds the piano’s keys, and begins to take stock of the moment. “Who can go on,” she says. “Do you realize how many we have lost? Then it really gets down to reality, doesn’t it? Not a performance. Not microphones and all that crap. But really something else. We’ve lost a lot of them in the past two years.” She goes on to list others—not just King, but Otis Redding, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansbury. “We can’t afford anymore losses, oh no, oh my God,” she says, in a half-laugh, half-sob. “They’re shooting us down one by one. Don’t forget that. Because they are. Killing us one by one.”

And just as it seems like she’s just completely lost in her own thoughts, in a monologue of despair, she stops, and returns to Taylor’s song—the band rising behind her instantly, as though these five men are nothing more than an extension of her, snapping instantly in line and swelling in immediate intensity (my god they have just learned this song, they are playing it like they’ve known it for decades but this is its very first performance) as she brings us back to the final chorus one more time. One last chance to ask, “What’s gonna happen, now that the king of love is dead?”

The edited performances as they were originally released are canonical masterpieces, to be sure. But in the release of the original, unedited performances you can see how these songs are constantly on the verge of falling apart. Not out of any failing on the part of the musicians, of course, but because of the way that truly great music makes a space for rage and for sorrow at its own expense.

Five: Warning

All of this has been on my mind this week listening to Cameron Winter’s new song, “Warning.” To me, it’s an ominous, disconcerting song, unlike anything else I’ve quite heard, and something that matches our moment in a way I was not at all expecting.

I think we still need, in this moment, songs like Springsteen’s “The Streets of Minneapolis,” that connect to that older tradition of fire and hope. The kind of stirring, triumphant anthems that not only bring us together in the moment, but remind us of a common lexicon that stretches back centuries and has found a universal voice time and again.

But Winter’s song is not like that. It’s ugly, deeply ugly, bordering on terrifying. The spare instrumentation of its strings, stabbing out jarring chords in an uneven tempo, the grim and bitter resignation in Winter’s voice. These lines: “There’s a tall, far off thing / with eyes / whose existence I cannot prove or disprove / looking at everybody all the time / every single day / but you’re gonna find / it’s not been looking at me in the same strange way / it’s been looking at you.” They’ve stayed with me all week—a hope for some kind of omniscient justice to punish the guilty, for sure, but also an awareness that such a thing must be itself beyond horror. For how monstrous must a thing be, if it is to encompass and contain and hold sway over the endless monstrosity we see before us every day?

And yet, somehow, for them, for those in need of this warning, the alternative is even worse, as Winter goes on, turning the question of justice on its head: “If you’re not wrong / and there’s really nobody out there / who can do the impossible / then who’s going to forgive you? / Who is going to forgive you?”

These monsters, visiting violence on us and our neighbors and the people we love every single fucking day, how they better hope that there is some kind of loving God—or something—who will pass judgment on them, who will weigh their sins against a feather and find them all unworthy and give them one final chance to plead or explain. Because, Winter’s voice almost trembling in that final verse, the alternatives are worse.

Unlike “War Pigs” or “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” it’s not a song I want to sing along to. Unlike “Masters of War” or “Why?,” I hope it does not become a staple, some kind of masterpiece shared down through the generations. It feels like something summoned as a last resort, bringing with it a feeling that we hope to be able to banish as soon as it’s no longer needed. The way the song ends, apoplectically, with Winter’s voice distant and buried beneath the shrieking, striking chords, shouting FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU. There is no mastery here, no solace, no container for that rage. The song tries and it fails.

As it should. There’s still work to be done.

(Winter’s song appears on a compilation raising money for the charity organization War Child UK, which helps children caught in conflict zones, from Gaza to Sudan to Ukraine to Colombia. This newsletter you’re reading is free; please donate whatever you think reading this was worth to you to War Child UK.)