Learning to live with what you can't rise above
Bruce Springsteen and Steve Earle wrestle with a post-Sept. 11 America
In the weeks following Sept. 11, I felt pretty much like everyone else — scared shitless. It seems melodramatic now, but back then, the television was replaying incomprehensible images of death and destruction over and over. The ever-present news ticker crept ominously along the bottom of the screen, speculating endlessly about when and where the next attack would come (the water supply! nuclear plants! hazmat trucks!). It truly seemed like the world could end at any moment.
The most unlikely things can give us comfort in those unlikely times. For me, it was a story in the satirical weekly, The Onion. The headline read, "Not knowing what else to do, American woman bakes American-flag cake."
It reminded me of the trip I had just taken to the Red Cross. I went to donate blood, knowing my blood would likely make no difference to anyone affected by the attacks — but not knowing what else to do. Having those feelings of insecurity, helplessness and dread reflected back to me in The Onion actually provided some comfort and sense of community.
If we're to believe what we read — and the sales figures that seem to back it up — comfort is what lots of people are getting from Bruce Springsteen's new album, The Rising. The album, haunted by the ghosts of Sept. 11, came out in July amid the sort of media hoopla normally reserved for returning messiahs.
Press has also been heavy for Steve Earle's Sept. 11 statement, his forthcoming album Jerusalem (out Sept. 24), but the love hasn't been flowing quite as freely. That's probably because, while The Rising uses the tragedy mostly as a confirmation of Springsteen's faith in humanity, Earle's Jerusalem takes the opportunity to question his country's — and his species' — direction.
This is not the first time these two roots-rocking, working-class American songwriters have trod similar paths. Earle's 1986 debut, Guitar Town, engendered frequent com-parisons to Springsteen. While their fortunes have diverged since then — Earle battled drug addiction and missed out on mass popularity, while Springsteen mellowed and domesticated — the two maintained similar positions in the pop pantheon: Both critically adored, politically active and left-leaning, they deftly avoided retiring to rock's oldies circuit.
Fascinating, then, that Springsteen would get hailed a conquering hero for The Rising's earnest efforts, while Earle — largely due to a song he wrote from the perspective of the "American Taliban," John Walker Lindh — has been cast as a villain by right-leaning media outlets like Fox News and the New York Post.
Both characterizations, actually, are way off-base.
There's an oft-repeated story about the genesis of The Rising that goes like this: A few days after Sept. 11, Springsteen was leaving the beach when a man drove by, rolled down the window and yelled, "We need you!" The Rising buys into this contention wholeheartedly. There's no reason to doubt the incident actually occurred, but regardless, it's a shaky foundation on which to base a record. As such, The Rising is overwhelmed by its own mission, consumed by its own importance.
"It's all right, it's all right, it's all right, yeah," Springsteen sings on the opener, "Lonesome Day," before a reassuring organ wash kicks in. Comfort, healing and affirmation are the themes throughout. Noble aspirations, no doubt, but The Rising often invokes cliche as the best path to them. "Waitin' on a Sunny Day" tells us "everything will be OK ... we're gonna find a way ... we're gonna chase the blues away"; "Mary's Place" delivers tired lines like, "How do you live broken-hearted?" and, "I got a picture of you in my locket/I keep it close to my heart" — the latter echoing Springsteen's own 15-year-old lyric ("I got a picture in a locket/That says baby I love you") so closely, it invites charges of self-plagiarism.
Again and again, The Rising settles for generalities when specifics work better — it comes off more like an advertisement for consolation than consolation itself, as if chanting enough about faith, love and hope somehow makes them appear. Springsteen could've used his own tale of loss, 1987's Tunnel of Love — a painstaking portrait of his first marriage's dissolution — as a guide for how to write small, exacting songs that add up to a larger whole. Instead, he tries to take on the whole tragic colossus at once. And to think he could pull this off with an event like Sept. 11 borders on hubris.
When we do get details, it's the wrong ones. "Into The Fire" offers the image of firefighters ascending stairs, but the song adds nothing to what we've already seen. It feels like those montages that began appearing on CNN and Fox News, replaying the terror endlessly, even though there were no more story developments.
Occasionally, The Rising hits its mark. On the haunting "Paradise," Springsteen struggles to portray the mindset of a suicide bomber. Instead of offering more slogans, we get lines like, "I take the schoolbooks from your pack/Plastics, wire and your kiss," and later, "I reach and feel your hair/Your smell lingers in the air." There's no sermonizing, no empty promises of redemption or even comprehension. The effect is near-devastating.
Most impressive is the harrowing "Worlds Apart," where Springsteen steps toward the point he skirts for much of the album: "Sometimes the truth just ain't enough/Or it's too much in times like this/Let's throw the truth away/We'll find it in this kiss/In this skin upon my skin/In the beating of our hearts/May the living let us in before the dead tear us apart."
This is a heroic ideal that Springsteen's expressed before — on 1987's "Tunnel of Love" ("You've gotta learn to live with what you can't rise above"), on 1978's "Badlands" ("It ain't no sin to be glad you're alive"). And for a moment here, Springsteen all but admits that The Rising could never deliver anything more than comfort food. So instead of truth, he's just looking for some human touch.
If The Rising succeeds in comforting, it's not the kind that comes from connecting on a deep, intimate level. It's more the comfort of a hug from an old friend — an assurance that "everything's gonna be OK" when you know damn well it's not. That kind of consolation is still noble, but it shouldn't be confused with art. The Rising is music for the guy who yelled, "We need you!" But there's a fine line between rising to a challenge and pandering. Springsteen's most enduring work — albums like Darkness on the Edge of Town, Nebraska and Tunnel of Love — has emerged when he ignores those voices and follows his own.
If Springsteen soothes, Steve Earle simply seethes. More than focusing on Sept. 11, Jerusalem serves as Earle's post-Sept. 11 State of the Union address. And as he sees it, the Union has gotten itself into quite a state.
A fiery vision of Armageddon, "Ashes to Ashes," opens the record. "One day they say the sky gave way/And death rained down and made a terrible sound," Earle snarls. Lines like, "Every tower ever built tumbles" and, "Someday even man's best-laid plans will lie twisted and covered in rust" purposefully recall Sept. 11, but the song is more a screed against fundamentalism. Earle calls out those who'd insist their vision "comes directly from God," but it's not clear who he's skewering here — terrorists attacking the World Trade Center or George W. Bush casting the war against terrorism as simply a fight between good and evil. And that, of course, is the point.
Some will surely blanche at the moral relativism, but is there anything particularly off-putting about suggesting there are multiple relevant truths at work here — and if they keep getting ignored, the future looks pretty bleak for all? Earle's hardly the first to suggest it — Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal, among others, have staked out even more radical positions — but it's a bold idea to try to squeeze into a pop song.
It's "John Walker's Blues," though, that has sparked most of the barking over Jerusalem. A New York Post story under the headline, "Twisted ballad honors Tali-rat," claimed that in the song, "American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh is glorified and called Jesus-like." In the online edition of alternative weekly New York Press, William Repsher tees off on Earle for condoning the brutal practices of the Taliban. Such knee-jerk condemnation is as absurd as the Ashcroftian insinuation that Earle is somehow anti-American for exercising free speech.
Despite inflammatory lines like, "If I should die, I'll rise up to the sky/Just like Jesus, peace be upon," the song hardly glorifies Lindh. It merely tries to answer the question everyone asked after Sept. 11: "What kind of person would do such a thing?" — or as Newsweek asked in a cover story, "Why do they hate us?" To cast Earle's first-person narrative as justification for Lindh's actions is not just an incredibly shallow reading of the song, but of folk music in general. Trying to see the world through the eyes of outlaws, to understand the forces that drove them, is nothing new. Check out Woody Guthrie's "Jesse James" and "Pretty Boy Floyd," or even Springsteen's exceedingly dark ballad "Nebraska," about serial killer Charlie Starkweather.
In fact, "John Walker's Blues" is a damn good song. Earle's weary voice tugs the tune along at a deliberate pace, over a noxious swell of guitars and organs, imagining Lindh's odd mixture of sadness, pride, confusion and desperation. Anyone needing further proof that Earle doesn't consider Lindh a hero needs only to hear this song. It's not a celebration, it's a death march.
The album closes with hope, its title track a jangly, folk-rocker reminiscent of Bob Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom." He rejects the contention that enmity between Israelis and Palestinians (and between East and West) is as inevitable as it is seemingly eternal — startling for an album that opened with a vision of the Apocalypse. But where The Rising's faith and hope often feels conjured from thin air, Jerusalem seems like the result of soul-searching, as evidenced by the rest of the album.
No matter what you think of Earle's politics, Jerusalem can't be accused of pandering. But in the end, his efforts fall far short for many of the same reasons Springsteen's do.
Both of them make the mistake of trying to tackle the post-Sept. 11 world head-on. It probably would've made more sense to approach these events on more of a personal, emotional level. After all, the most inspiring Sept. 11 songs were actually written beforehand, and simply took on new meaning afterward. The Rising actually contains one such song, "My City of Ruins," and Springsteen's back-catalog is filled other examples — enough, in fact, to assemble a better Sept. 11 album than The Rising (see "New York City Serenade," "Born to Run," "The Ties That Bind," "Reason to Believe," "Valentine's Day," "Land of Hope and Dreams" and pretty much all of Darkness on the Edge of Town).
Truly, Sept. 11 still triggers such overwhelming emotion that any attempt to make sense of it is doomed to failure. The only thing left to offer are individual perceptions, and neither The Rising nor Jerusalem gives much indication how Springsteen and Earle themselves reacted to the attacks. Both offer stories about other people and, as a listener, they feel like stories about other people. Most didn't rush the towers with hoses, or join the Taliban, or even know someone who died that day. But we all felt something. It's hard to find a reflection of what that was, exactly, in these records.
Surely, it ain't no sin to overreach. But trying to speak for a nation is futile. Earle and Springsteen would've been better off just speaking for themselves.