On the Map /// August 27, 2006 08:13 PM /// dispatch from Chris!
It has been five years since the World Trade Center fell, five years since the Pentagon was attacked, five years since the ‘War on Terror’ was declared; Five confusing years that have gone by both quickly and slowly, five years that have made it hard to remember what waking up on September 10th, 2001 was like. And yet, with such a seismic shift in international politics and attitude, the lack of worthwhile and/or meaningful artistic responses to the events of September 11th, 2001 leaves me puzzled. Those in the ‘spotlight’ who’ve tried have generally failed: Green Day’s American Idiot? Naïve. Oliver Stones’ World Trade Center? Exploitative. (Admittedly, I haven’t read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; The novel seems an appropriate place to explore the complexity of the event and its aftermath.) I suppose its easier to pick on the President and his cronies; Easier to critique the half of the populous willing to support them; Easier to condemn the war in Iraq and our nation’s bumbled foreign policy. But again, everybody’s talking but nobody’s saying anything. Maybe it’s because the 9/11 news coverage was so cinematically unbelievable or that the resulting political “spin” so loud. Or, perhaps, our culture’s fear of stagnation has made it impossible to react, without irony, to the events of ‘today’ without spoofing – or being criticized for co-opting – the political music of the 1960’s. Maybe in our cynical ‘modern’ climate it isn’t possible to write a contemporary equivalent to a song like Bob Dylan’s defiant “Let Me Die in My Footsteps.” Still, there remains one song that I look to as evidence that it can be done: Casey Holford’s modest “On the Map” from his 2003 self-released album Bad Spell, Good Spell. To date, “On the Map” is one of two songs explicitly about the events of September 11th that doesn't make me cringe (the other being Kimya Dawson’s “Anthrax”). The song succeeds because of its simplicity: It doesn’t preach, it doesn’t pander, it doesn’t push. Holford tells it as it was from the perspective of someone unwillingly thrust into the middle of the first significant global event of the New Millennium. It was an honest and immediate reaction to an event that, with time, has only grown more unbelievable and unapproachable. Now, five years on, maybe the opportunity to address 9/11 in song has passed, the appropriate sentiment no longer achievable, but at least Holford’s song will stand as proof that it could be done, and – at least once (or twice) – it was.
