To show how darn more youthful he is than the top of his ticket, Paul Ryan in his Republican National Convention showcase Wednesday night gently mocked the “elevator music” on Mitt Romney’s iPod and extolled his own hep tastes.
Of his own favorites, Ryan specifically name-checked two groups – one formed 39 years ago, and another formed two years before he was born. Neither of them American; both established kingpins in hard rock, or rather the classic rock he was likely subjected to in Janesville, Wis.
“My playlist starts with AC/DC and ends with Zeppelin,” Ryan bragged.
Of course! AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” would perfectly encapsulate the encroaching darkness of the Republican National Convention (though “Big Balls” would have fit too).
And quibble if you will about his playlist apparently ending in “L” – it is Led Zeppelin he’s speaking about, after all – that band’s remake of Memphis Minnie’s “When the Levee Breaks” would have been the most eloquent thing said all week about the rampaging destruction of Isaac that was otherwise scarcely mentioned in the tightly scripted Tampa convention:
“If it keeps on rainin,’ levee’s goin’ to break/ When the levee breaks I’ll have no place to stay…cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good/ when the levee breaks, mama, you got to move.”
(And let’s leave to others the notion of rich English musicians appropriating and putting their name on a song written by American blues artists of modest means about the devastation of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927).
Singling out hard rock in his vice presidential acceptance speech squared with the even more bizarre news shortly after Ryan was picked as running mate: That he was a fan of the band Rage Against the Machine.
Rage is at least a band of this era, formed just 21 years ago. But its radical politics would seem to be opposite of Ryan’s rightward stance, a band whose backdrop after all is the red star on the black flag of Mexico’s Zapatista Army of National Liberation, of whom Ann Coulter once said, “They’re losers, their fans are losers.”
It’s an endorsement that’s already been eloquently disavowed by the band’s brainy guitarist Tom Morello. Writing in Rolling Stone, Morello said, “Paul Ryan’s love for Rage Against The Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades.”
More than that, he pointed out, it comes from a long line of misunderstanding in rock. “Charles Manson loved the Beatles but didn’t understand them. Governor Chris Christie loves Bruce Springsteen but doesn’t understand him. And Paul Ryan is clueless about his favorite band, Rage Against the Machine.”
Indeed, as keynote speaker at the convention Tuesday, Christie name-dropped Springsteen’s “Darkness at the Edge of Town” in his speech and a Bruce-signed guitar that the governor probably purchased was displayed in the intro video. (Nevertheless, the hulking Christie bounded on the stage, hilariously, to the Strangelove’s “I Want Candy,” as played by the house band led by G.E. Smith, the onetime “Saturday Night Live” bandleader who spent a dozen years in Bob Dylan’s band).
As with Ryan’s love for Rage, Christie’s longtime Springsteen enthusiasm would seem at odds with his politics. On the new “Wrecking Ball,” Springsteen sings in
“Shackled and Drawn,” what could be the opposite of the Republican platform: “Gambling man rolls the dice, working man pays the bill. It’s still fat and easy up on banker’s hill. Up on banker’s hill the party’s going strong, down here below we’re shackled and drawn.”
In “Jack of All Trades” on the same album, he sings, “The banker man grows fat, working man grows thin.”
But people have been misunderstanding Springsteen for decades, dating back to the 1984 election when Ronald Reagan tried to appropriate his name in a Jersey stump speech.
Conservatives keep packing his show. This summer David Brooks followed a series of shows in Spain and France, following a conservative pundit path blazed by George Will more than a quarter century ago, who like millions of others still somehow hear “Born in the U.S.A” as a patriotic anthem instead of a stark indictment of post-Vietnam America and its treatment of veterans.
Springsteen over the years had to perform such contorted versions of “Born in the U.S.A’” in some tours to get its point across that he sometimes left off its anthemic chorus altogether.
At a stadium show for the Boss some years back, while making a brief political observation about throwing out Bush/Cheney, one lunkhead started bellowing for him to shut up and sing. Uncharacteristically, I yelled back to him to shut up himself, thinking I’d at least be backed up by the rest of the stadium. But would I?
Maybe the place was filled with reactionaries who were attracted to the sound but not the message, though I can hardly fathom how these people do it.
The Republican Convention this week is showing us what kind of concert it could stage with just conservative artists – obscure country dudes, a guy from Damn Yankees and 3 Doors Down.
Clearly, progressive ideals have long fueled rock ‘n’ roll, and so it’s always been, from the time fussbudgets tried to shut down Alan Freed’s traveling jubilees, hide Elvis Presley’s hips on television or prevent dancehalls from becoming racially mixed.
Pure rock ‘n’ roll is all about freedom: driving down the road, flaunting the man, dancing in the street.
Simply Chuck Berry’s description of an exhilarating cross country ride from Norfolk, Va., to Los Angeles – “Tell the folks back home this is the promised land callin,’ and the poor boy’s on the line” — told of a understood spirit in the music.
Maybe that’s got Lee Atwater, the most strident of Nixon’s dirty tricks men, to take up electric guitar and teach George H.W. Bush the duckwalk in 1989.
The music is good; Republicans don’t want to be left out, despite their core beliefs, so they find a way to hear their messages in a different way, the same way they have twisted the notions of liberty (to do business without regulation!) and freedom (from paying taxes!).
But there was also real content. Freedom and progress have been at the forefront of the hit parade since rock began. For every “Ballad of the Green Berets” there was two or three “Eve of Destructions,” Neil Young decrying “Four dead in Ohio,” the Rolling Stones abdicating ringing out “Street Fighting Man,” Marvin Gaye wondering “What’s Goin’ On?” and even the Beatles weighing in on “Revolution.”
And just as Tea Party activists have jumped on a ’60s style protest and overthrow, albiet from the other side of the political spectrum, they’ve also adopted a similar political rage, or in Ryan’s case, the band named Rage. To them, the federal government and what Ryan now calls “the sanctimony of central planners” is the machine to rage against (though they have their own different plans to be sure).
Republicans may remain tone deaf to the nation’s woes in its convention posturing this week. But it takes a special kind of tin ear to blot out the message of a band’s total output.