“Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experience to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism, and let freedom ring…”
Two weeks ago, Bruce Springsteen kicked off a new tour in England and opened the first concert by speaking the words written above into his microphone and across the arena and then the world, earning the immediate ire and attempted social media revenge by the thinnest-skin, least cool, least rock-and-roll president in American history, Donald J. Frump (or something like that), who is also the chief cause of the aforementioned dangerous times.
As Springsteen spoke these words, thousands cheered, and the band launched into song, a boisterous anthem about America called The Land of Hope and Dreams, and those thousands sang along to what he had called the righteous power of rock and roll in dangerous times.
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| The Boss |
Frump (or something like that) has lots of reasons to pick a fight with Bruce Springsteen and none of them are genuine. Instead, it’s just his normal sleight of hand: look over here at this cultural kerfuffle while I ignore The Constitution and strip Americans of things like rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are dangerous times, and Frump (or something like that) wants you distracted.
Then the actual President of the United States of America, the man in the highest office of our entire land, took his predictably tarty leadership course when it comes to things like this and wrote a mean middle school kid social media post that event implied a threat to Bruce Springsteen for when he returns to the USA after this tour.
Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States:
Frump (or something like that) is a tiny little wiener of a man, and Bruce Springsteen is The Boss, so whatever, but this kerfuffle did get me thinking about where the righteous power of art, music, and rock and roll can be found in these dangerous times. It’s too much to ask Springsteen at 75 to sing truth to power to the Joe Rogan bros who turned out in legions to vote for Frump (or something like that) the last election. But there must be art at this time to do what it does best: holds up a mirror, amps up the courage, sets the heart to beating, turns up the volume, and cuts through the shit.
Rock and roll, art, music, has to tell the truth, and it’s a lifeline for a country that has been buried by lies and liars for far too long. When you live in farm country like I do, you learn to tell the difference between pig manure and a whole bunch of bullshit: one just smells bad, but the other stinks up the entire place.
I grew up in a house that played music, and it included music from the 60’s and 70’s that was the art of protest and social movement. My dad was both a tough, somewhat conservative state police officer and a man who had the John F. Kennedy quote Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country burned into a small wooden sign that hung above the typewriter where he wrote his police reports. He also had a hell of a record collection: Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, Bob Dylan, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Edward Starr’s song War and Marvin Gaye asking all of us to think about What’s Going On. He could both work for the government and question it, and he liked to play his music loud when he came home and changed out of his police officer blues while the questions rolled across the house in the sound of Motown and rock and roll.
My dad admired people like American folk musician Woody Guthrie who even had the words This machine kills fascists carved into his guitar. Woody Guthrie is gone. Bruce Springsteen is 75. Young people are social media comatose. We need the next generation to step up and pick up a guitar with songs that remind us of who we are and to teach the children well like my dad did for me, telling me to listen to the songs as he played them, and sing along as I learned the words.
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| Woody Guthrie |
So don’t be fooled: when Frump (or something like that) speaks of making America great again, he doesn’t mean the Greatest Generation ethic of the 1950’s, he means the 1980’s when he was on lifestyle shows and partied at the Playboy mansion and everyone envied his wealth. He doesn’t mean the social consciousness of Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 album Born in the USA with songs like My Hometown that told the truth about the America: Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows and empty vacant stores/Seems like there aint nobody that wants to come around here no more/They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks/Foreman says those jobs are going boys, and they ain’t coming back.” This is an America Frump (or something like that) has never known or cared about, except to hawk his cheap, Chinese-made wares and sew hatred and division. He’s one of the reasons the jobs left Main Street in the 80’s and one of the reasons Bruce set to work back then with his rock and roll in dangerous times.
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| The Undisputed Champion of Greed is Good |
My best childhood chum Doyle, the guy I hung out and listened to rock-and-roll records with more than anyone else in high school, now has a podcast about music that is an every-other-week or so highlight of my life called Turntable Talk. In the most recent episode, which includes reviews of three of the top 20 albums on the Rolling Stone list of 500 updated at the end of 2023, he and his podcast partner reviewed Kendrick Lamar’s amazing 2015 hip-hop album To Pimp a Butterfly which includes the song Alright, a song that became the spontaneous official anthem for the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. Its energy and its message fueled the movement and met the moment.
I listened to the album and the song again and it struck me that I haven’t heard much new music since Black Lives Matter that I would call protest music. Music these days is so much more driven to bedazzle social media than to beget change, more to beguile the ignorant than befriend the dispossessed. Where the hell are the protest songs? What could somebody like Taylor Swift or Tate McRae, Beyonce or Bruno Mars do right now to educate and motivate youth if their next albums had songs that speak truth to power? Joe Rogan wouldn’t stand a chance.
In 1970 Gil Scot Heron wrote The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, in my opinion the most powerful protest song ever written. I hadn't ever heard it until my son Tucker, the musical librarian in our family, threw it on a mix he made for me a few years ago. It is a message to the masses then comatose to television culture that change will not come packaged as popular entertainment. We need a Gil Scot Heron for our times to write a message to the masses comatose to TikTok culture and streaming media. The revolution will not be an Instagram post. Frump’s (or something like that) ignorance cannot be met with apathy and ignorance in the form of cute dances and fart machines. I am beginning to think waking up the power of youth will require some rocking on, anthems that have more substance than a diss track between two rappers.
Closer to home Loriann and I caught a concert this weekend where the fantastic local blues rock group The Schrock Bros. played to an audience of forty or so at a small venue called The Lucky Wolf fifteen minutes from our house. We’ve seen them before, great musicians grinding out big music in small, rural Michigan towns. But last night it hit different as I thought about the power of art and music and rock and roll in dangerous times.
Loriann and I grooved along as the bassist Andrew Schrock, wearing his Democracy Now shirt sang the following words from the title track of their 2023 album Faith in Love:
When all your worst fears start to reappear/ The movement of hate draws ever so near/Oh, you can count on me/You know I’ll be right there/To put in faith love once again.
The Schrock Bros. at the Lucky Wolf
During dangerous times, art, music, and rock and roll reminds us that the power of community and faith in love is the antidote to hatred and fear, it builds community, unites purpose and focus by raising voices in song, and gets us up off our asses. These are dangerous times, and we have to sing the songs that defy them.
