Shadowbahn(54)

? ? ?

In fact there are two correct responses, thereby doubling every contestant’s chances. Both are provided not by any of the would-be patent holders, who know neither answer, but by a bystander in the room representing Nuovo Abyssinia. Up until relatively recently called Ethiopia, N/A has no interest whatsoever in a patent on “America,” which paradoxically imparts to the final verdict greater moral logic, given the council’s further determination that, as an idea, “America” has existed since before America, since the beginning of time, when only Abyssinia existed.





song of arches


The “country” becomes crisscrossed by so-called shadow highways that remain the only geography recognized as federal land still subject to national sovereignty. Fifteen thousand miles of such thoroughfares are marked by countless arched bridges, constructed by squatters—desperate to live on or over whatever part of the landscape can be called America anymore—so close to each other that the roads resemble less open highways than horizontal chutes. Sometimes these cults build overnight cities on the highways themselves, risking collision and vehicular slaughter for the privilege of assuming the mystical self-identification “American.” Although the cultists are viewed by most with suspicion, nonetheless other continental occupants gather at the sides of the highways to listen to the music that comes from these makeshift cities. In the dark of night, in any spot of the late country that blasts out all its horizons, the arches of America can be heard in either direction as a series of chiming rings stretching as far as the ear can listen.

? ? ?

The music is unlike any heard by anyone since what once was called the “American century,” when the predominant music of that century, so compelling as to have spread beyond America, was the expression of and then rebuttal to America’s self-betrayal—when the music was about America regardless of whether it came from America, whether it believed in America, whether it thought of America, whether it spurned or rejected America. The previous century’s music knew of America whether anyone knew that it did. At the previous century’s root was a blues sung at the moment when America defiled its own great idea, which was the moment that idea was born. It was a blues born of American slavery and made by slavery’s children, each evolution swallowing whole what preceded it, blues swallowing minstrelsy, ragtime swallowing blues, jazz swallowing ragtime, Tin Pan Alley swallowing jazz, pop swallowing Tin Pan Alley, rock and roll swallowing pop, hip-hop swallowing rock and roll, hip-hop becoming future-minstrelsy among young whites. In the same way that once the twenty-first century was the future, the predominant music of the future—so compelling as to have spread beyond its own moment—was the expression of and then rebuttal to the future’s self-betrayal, the future’s defilement of its own possibilities at the instant they became possible, which is to say the instant they were imagined. When the date arrives for the Towers to repeat their now-apparent pattern of bi-decadal manifestation and to reappear forty years AD (After Dakota), they’re nowhere to be found. In fact, unknown to everyone, they have returned after all, not more than a hundred and fifty miles from the Badlands, buried half a mile beneath the ground on the eastern side of the Missouri River bridge at Chamberlain that was crossed, on the same day that the Towers actualized themselves all those years ago, by the first man to see them.





tracks 20 and 21:


    “Murder Incorporated” and “Blind Willie McTell”


Portraits of the nation written and recorded within months of each other in the last twenty years of the twentieth century, by two singers variously anointed at one time or another their country’s troubadour laureate, its National Voice. But songs like these weren’t what the nation had in mind during the administration of the half century’s most popular and ruthless president, a political genius who learned before he ever was in politics that playing an unheroic, ignoble role as somehow heroic and noble anyway is political genius’s first law. Everywhere you look, life ain’t got no soul, goes the first song, borrowing its lyrical motif from the designated assassins of thirties and forties organized crime; by the eighties the whole country was Murder Incorporated, and when the singer nears the end of the song, the listener realizes that in fact the story’s narrator is dead. The second song is a blues that no one can sing like Blind Willie McTell, who is not the song’s singer and barely its subject. Seen the arrow on the doorpost saying this land is condemned, these blues begin, and then a minute or two in, the song’s horrors unfold, whips cracking and big plantations burning. Both songs were mysteriously withheld from release by their singers in favor of inferior songs, maybe because none of the other songs could stand association with two such unforgiving statements. Not twins or brothers, not father and son (eight years separated them), when they wrote these songs the singers—Jersey-shore successor to his Midwest ice-plains predecessor, who was in no mood to be succeeded—were at opposite ends of their particular arcs. What aesthetic misjudgments or careerist concerns turned the creation of these songs into psychodramas for which the only denouement was the songs’ suppression? The successor was on the verge of being appropriated by a jingoism that he despised even as he may cannily have understood its expedient uses in terms of his stardom. The predecessor struggled to emerge from an exile to which his audience dismissed him less than twenty years after he became his country’s most important white musical figure, with a mystique so outlandish and improbable that he found it publicly repellent even as some part of him relished it. The worst that could be said of the predecessor is that he was an inspired borrower—so was he unsettled, as he rarely showed evidence of being, by the unmistakable resemblance of his melody to another called “St. James Infirmary,” about a man who goes looking for his lost love in what may be a charnel house or prison or even a brothel like the House of the Rising Sun, only to find his love cheating on him or incarcerated or dying, depending on which of countless versions is heard (including one by the actual Blind Willie McTell)? In any case “Blind Willie McTell” is so powerful as to momentarily overwhelm any listener’s recollection of its antecedent, and nearly powerful enough to have overwhelmed the singer’s inclinations, wavering among arrogance and petulance and self-sabotage, to deliver and render stillborn not just the song but any impact it might have on his audience’s consensus. Consensus is a lynch mob. Each of the two singers has his lynch mob, with—even as the successor repeatedly paid homage to the predecessor, who did nothing less than change the music that the successor came to save—the predecessor palpably resenting the successor in the same way that every king resents his prince, and conversely in the same way that sons declare their independence of fathers. It’s hard to know whether my son has any use for either of these supposed laureates. Even remembering how absolutely riveted I was as a teenager by another song, a wildly surreal musical eruption of insolence about the incomprehension between generations, between predecessors and successors, half a century later I found it almost completely losing its power when my own teenage successor heard it in the car and concluded it was as faintly ridiculous as the rest of his father’s sixties pretensions. “He screams back, ‘You’re a cow’?” mocked Parker. “What the f*ck?” As it happens, I last listened to “Blind Willie McTell” on September 10, 2001, noting how even the song’s lines of horror and abomination were beautiful in the poetry of their expression and singing. Watching over and over film of the next day’s attack with “Blind Willie McTell” playing in my mind, I’ve never been able to hear it again.