Incarnate Rock & Roll

“…it is only in its struggle with tradition, a struggle precipitated in style, that art can find expression for suffering.”
- Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno

Bono, the lead singer of the Irish band U2 has been heard defining the difference between pop and rock music in the following way. “Pop,” Bono says, “is the idea that everything is okay.” “Rock, on the other hand is quite the opposite, it’s the idea that something is wrong.” Indeed rock and roll is a culture that is worth inhabiting because it explores the dissonance of the society in which it is located. While rock and roll recognizes that it is a part of the culture, it insists on stepping outside of itself in order to do its critique. Rock and roll is the culture criticising itself. Thus, those who inhabit rock and roll learn to authentically inhabit their own culture.

Growing up, some of my first memories were the melodies and songs that my father grafted into my life. Whenever we piled into our old station wagon my sisters and I would wait as music was carefully selected to grace our trip. Johnny Cash’s Live from San Quentin, still edited in those days, was my favorite play. My sisters preferred something with less edge and more accessible melody. Artists like The Kingston Trio or Ann Murrey were who they liked to sing along to. The music was a soundtrack to the motion picture outside the car window. I loved the way music felt.

When I entered eighth grade, U2’s album The Joshua Tree entered my life. An older, trusted friend of mine lent me the album and encouraged me to “check it out.” Tony had yet to let me down on recommendations and I had no reason to believe that he would begin now. Regardless, Tony had something that I didn’t have…’cool.’ I gladly accepted his offer, knowing that social currency could come in different forms. I remember retreating to my room and closing the door behind me. I found my 15-watt player, inserted the tape, pressed play and would never be the same.

From the opening, rhythmic delays of The Edge’s guitar in “Where the Streets Have No Name” to the closing whispers of “Mothers of the Disappeared” dissonance ran like a thread through the album. Whether it was in the spacey and ambient production style, a fingerprint of Daniel Lanois, or the questioning lyrics, a spirit of incompleteness was seamlessly woven into the fabric of the album. If the spirit of rock and roll is that something is wrong, then The Joshua Tree bled this reality all over me as a junior higher.

Junior highers certainly don’t need U2 to know that something is dreadfully wrong with the world. They just need to look in the mirror. Yet, even as an eighth grader I could sense that there was something very cathartic in experiencing art that some how spoke into my world. This art somehow connected with my own lack of equilibrium but also hinted at a larger world filled with inequity.

At the age of thirteen, I had never traveled to Central America. I didn’t understand the role United States foreign policy had played in arms trades, injustice and power in this region. All of these themes inspired the song “Bullet the Blue Sky” on The Joshua Tree. The angst and the urgency that U2’s songs conveyed spoke into my personal, eighth grade emergencies. What began as a co-opting of the music for my own experience, started to resemble something else - a world worth discovering.

Midnight Oil, just like their peers U2, were always out of step in the 1980’s. With songs like “Love Shack” by the B-52s and “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go” by Wham cramming the air waves, it is a bit easier to understand how utterly unsexy conscience was during those days. Radio was pop, and rock and roll was such a bore. Peter Garrett, the six-foot-seven front man of Midnight Oil was like a prophet crying in the wilderness. In their native Australia, social justice was an idea that had worked, and interestingly, this melody had made its way into our culture, but would it fit?

Midnight Oil’s album Blue Hill Mining was rock and roll. In the early 90’s I remember reading about the band pulling up a flat bed truck in downtown Manhattan in front of the Exxon Oil headquarters. The truck was loaded with their gear and strung with a banner that read, “Midnight Oil makes you dance, Exxon oil makes you sick.” To this day I wonder if they got to finish their single, “Beds are Burning,” before the powers that be pulled the plug. I can almost hear the chorus ringing down 5th Avenue, “how can we sleep while our beds are burning?”

Posted on September 1, 2006 12:00 AM