Rant In D Minor: Barack 'N' Roll

Obama won a Grammy. Must admit, I got a bit of a jolt when I heard the news that the Illinois Senator had triumphed in the best spoken word category for the audio book of The Audacity Of Hope.

Rumblings in the entertainment industry carry more prophetic weight than seasoned readers of political entrails might acknowledge. Only a buffoon would consult with Ted Nugent at the ballots, but rock ‘n’ roll sometimes telegraphs imminent regime change.
In Route 666 – On The Road To Nirvana, her excellent chronicle of the American indie underground in the 1980s, Gina Arnold wrote, “(Kurt) Cobain’s songs had inspired a kind of defiance of the norm that augured strangely for the year – an election year – to come. When I heard that Nevermind, an album whose first line is ‘Load up on drugs and bring your friends,’ had gone to number one the first week of 1992, my first thought was, ‘Bush will not be re-elected.’”
I had the same feeling when Neon Bible entered the Billboard charts at Number 2 last spring. Or maybe I manufactured the feeling out of pure blind optimism.
In his collection of essays on Elvis and the Clinton years, Double Trouble, Greil Marcus asserted that Bill Clinton seemed doomed to the status of also-ran in the presidential chariot race until he sat in on the Arsenio Hall show and played ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ with the house band, and it was as though Elvis worked his voodoo on the public consciousness through the bell of Bill’s sax.
Fanciful stuff of course. But America takes its rock ‘n’ roll seriously. The motherlode of American music – ragtime, minstrelsy, blues, jazz, showtunes, agitprop folk, rockabilly, pop, hip-hop – is not just an adjunct to the leisure and entertainment industries, it represents the country’s oldest indigenous tradition, its culture. Rock ‘n’ roll isn’t a matter of life and death, as Bruce once said – it’s more important than that. Flame painted muscle cars and skull tattoos are more than mere retro-fashion accessories in God’s country, they’re totems of a national heritage. It’s different here. Irish popular mythology goes back millennia to the Fianna, and Albion has its Arthurian legends, but white America’s national religion is Presleytarianism, it’s mythic hero Elvis, a deity who walked among us a mere 31 years ago.
A few weeks ago the video for ‘Yes We Can’ by Will.i.Am was posted on the internet. The track sets the text of Obama’s New Hampshire address from last January to an acoustic guitar track, with cameos from actors and musicians. Given that one would normally cross the road to avoid anything penned by Will.i.Am, never mind a tune featuring his celebrity cronies, the result is not nearly as nauseating as you might imagine, mainly because of the core text. Obama may have exited the traps as a rank outsider and untested political animal (I know what he’s against; I’m just not sure what he’s for) but one can’t deny his oratorical skill. Unlike certain other presidents, you feel this guy might have pondered the incongruities and paradoxes of the Bible instead of parroting passages committed to memory in rehab, or fed direct to autocue by the speechwriter.
Obama’s New Hampshire clarion call wasn’t exactly Lincoln’s Inaugural Address or Pearse’s Ireland Unfree speech or Martin Luther King’s sermon on the mount (John McCain’s deriding of Obama’s calls for change as “eloquent but empty” last week must have caused a few lefties to wince with the pain of recognition) but it is nonetheless a pretty respectable chunk of rhetoric, with a nifty closing line:
“We’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope… but in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.”
Barack the builder.
Can he fix it?

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