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Praise Chorus (+ Ange Mlinko)

The keynote talk at the EMP conference was pleasing and educational.

Sarah Vowell is working on presidential assassinations; it's an interesting pursuit, and she is always incisive and witty. She had along with her one Jon Langford, allowing for some musical divagations that ranged from the charming (Jon and Sarah duetting on a forgotten Johnny Cash assassinationist's lament; sheesh, Cash is sure fixated on the scene of the condemned man waking on gallows day) to the sublime (Jon singing the schoolyard classic "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school").

Therein lies what Shakespeare calls the rub. Sarah’s sort-of-musicological but mostly historical-cultural and mostly fascinating narration of the evolution of "Battle Hymn of the Republic" began with her evocation of the song’s use on a national and international stage immediately after September 11, 2001. Very New Yorker house style, starting with the contemporary tableau vivant before racing back to the beginning of the tale, when the machine that will get us to that tableau is first set in motion.

I remember the days after 9/11 as filled with fear, media exhaustion, and anger. But also a kind of discomfiting excitement; meanings seemed once again up for grabs. For a period, the republic was a land of opportunity. It was a land of opportunity for a President and his cadre to take up the terrible swift sword of righteousness for their own ends, for a New American Century.

At the end of her presentation, Sarah asked everyone assembled in the EMP's "Sky Church" to stand and sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” That's what the song is for, after all, at least per Sarah's hypothesis: singing as democracy, the body politic constituting itself as body through collective voice. But given the song’s story, and the story Sarah herself told with such uncritical economy and grace, she couldn’t help but be asking us to stand for the transcendental collapse of the Lord, the military, and the bottom line into a single point.

Some people do not wish to stand for that America (though some have no choice). Moreover, some people do not stand for the phrase "glory glory hallelujah," under any circumstances.

Kids changed it to "...the burning of the school" because they have already learned to resent institutional domination, and they are not interested in the coming of the Lord. They and we have better things to do with our collective rage and despair. And peace to everyone who stayed down for this moment; I didn't note each person, but certainly Raquel Cepeda and Jon Caramanica. It is out of respect for Greil Marcus, whom I was sitting next to, that I didn’t spit, as any of the figures whom I most admire (many of whom I learned about from Greil) would have done without hesitation; I apologize for my failure.

Click on the link below to read Ange Mlinko's deep-as-the-Marianas Trench descent into the song "Walltz #2" by Elliott Smith.

When Elizabeth Peyton paints the young men that come into her ken—both through her social circles and magazine photos—and turns them even more red-lipped and dreamy-eyed and lithe, the question critics ask (in strict denial of the obvious) is “Elizabeth, why do you paint these attractive guys?” And in response, she says something along the lines of, “Because they live a Beautiful Life that inspires me.” That sounds either very Third-Century C.E., if you’re a Neo-Platonist scholar, or very 1960s trust fund Bohemia. But I think she is talking about Autonomy, that which Beauty underwrites for itself. Money is one of the least interesting ways of guaranteeing it. Take her early portraits of Napoleon: autonomy for him meant no less than conquering Europe and crowning himself king. But as Belle and Sebastian sing, “If my family tree goes back to Napoleon / Then I will change my name to Smith.”

“Now I’m a crushed credit card registered to Smith / Not the name that you call me with,” replies Elliott Smith. Supposedly, I’m here to explain why “Waltz #2 (XO)” once occurred to me as the Greatest Song Ever, and avoid either reliance on the ineffable (e.g., it’s just a transcendent melody!) or the literary (e.g., I’m doing critical karaoke on a song about karaoke, in which Smith deftly imbeds song titles to tell the backstory for him. Clever!). So one of the reasons is how I experienced it the first time I heard it: Live, 8 months before the record came out, in a tiny packed bar with a handmade ticket for an almost secret show. And the last time I had seen him there had been only 40 people or so in the audience—he was practically an unknown. This, to me, was privilege. I was in grad school, hiding out from the world, eking out my meager stipend in the presumptuous, not to mention anachronistic, role of Poet. I was living a Beautiful Life.

It’s the chorus, of course. [In sync with song:] “I’m never gonna know you now, but I’m gonna love you anyhow.” For an audience who imagined the very insiderness of this show to be a privilege, the outsiderness of the lyrics heightened the glow. (The moebius strip logic of indie scenesterism is obvious that way.) But the chorus speaks to the fan at large. Smith is reverse karaoke-ing my desire. He designed the song to be sung back to him. Not because he’s the beautiful boy as depicted in an Elizabeth Peyton painting of his photograph. But because he gave us a little present, just a little song, out of some otherworldly luck and an understanding that in the long run, in the big picture, it means almost nothing.

This is my bid for the ineffable beauty of the song, where ineffable beauty is the embodiment of Autonomy—[In sync with song:] “the place where I make no mistakes” being as good a description of ineffable beauty or autonomy as any I could come up with. Opting out of the top 40 contest and a historical narrative of technical innovation, refusing to make millions of dollars or reach millions of people, it strives for the opposite, in fact—reaching just a few, almost no one, really. To have faith in that is quixotically the Beautiful Life, devotion on the scale of [In sync with song:] “I’m never gonna know you now, but I’m gonna love you anyhow” epitomizing the poet in love with poetry (in its twilight, in its afterhour), and maintaining an eternal eligibility on its behalf

Posted by jane at April 23, 2004 10:52 AM | TrackBack