Friends, it’s been weeks, not because I haven’t been writing about the bizarre and troubling saga of MAGA, but because what came out was a lot of unfocused and unsalvageable rants and ramblings. But with the work of busy December behind me and with some perspective on the weeks since Biden’s victory was confirmed, I blasted this out, grabbing some of the pieces and parts of my journal that didn’t suck. I thus wrap them with a bow to wish you Merry Christmas In Spite Of Everything 2020. (And down below there is music commentary! Imagine.)
One useful thing I did this month was pull off the shelf my copy of Daniel Boorstin’s book The Image: A Guide To Pseudo-Events In America. It’s one of the first great prophetic studies of the dumbing down of our the country in the modern age, published way back in 1962. “We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusion so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in a dream,” he observed. “We are the most illusioned people on Earth.”
This was soon after the first televised presidential debate and before the maturation of consumer marketing and an eon before the social internet. The Image warned about the new phenomena that were stripping our civic life of its seriousness and sustainability – domestic propaganda, celebrity-worship and the rise of what Boorstin brilliantly called pseudo-events, “an event produced by a communicator with the sole purpose of generating media attention and publicity,” a “public relations tactic” rather than a thing of note that happened in the world. (A certain landscaping service parking lot comes to mind.) Boorstin critiques the merger of corporate interest, politics and the press that led to the infomercial, the advertorial, the paid-for cover story, image consultants, the cable news wars, junk campaigning and the decline of trust in the press. Television cultivated that corrosion with ruthless efficiency because divided demographics derive more value. The internet turbo-charged it. Donald J. Trump spiked that hucksterism and gullibility with Christian theocratic fundamentalism and won the White House. Thank god only once.
Yet we, the most illusioned people on earth, have spent decades spinning farther out of control than perhaps even Boorstin feared, into distilled, viral delusion. When the question was whether Trump was a national security danger or a lawbreaker or a corrupt politician, there was always room for subjectivity and debate, however low-grade. But events of 2020 have at last delivered unto us a crystalized, binary test of loyalty to truth and the country or to a despot and his self-protective fantasies. Did Joe Biden win the presidency fair and square? Yes or No?
Rarely is something this provable. Trump’s absurdly loyal Attorney General couldn’t find any systemic election fraud that he was willing to take before the courts, and it’s certain that he looked for it. Trump’s own government, led by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and its unanimously confirmed Republican director Chris Krebs, affirmed that 2020 was “the most secure in American history.” (For this he was fired; he’s bravely speaking out and suing.) Remember, when a leader makes a statement like this, it reflects the joint testimony and verdict of the hundreds of civil servants who work for the agencies behind that statement.
Then there are the 50 states. When they “certify” their election results, it’s no mere ceremony. It’s their consolidated conclusion, after weeks of scrutiny and review, that the results are correct and fairly reached. Beside all this (and I shouldn’t even have to say it), the president’s accusation of mass voter-initiated fraud on behalf of Democrats is implausible on its face. As has been repeatedly proven, there’s no way to coordinate tens of thousands of voters without leaving an obvious trail of receipts and individuals eager to expose the plot.
Evidence, however, isn’t really a thing for MAGA, unless it comes in the form of incendiary scare stories about Democrat pedophiles, George Soros, Hunter Biden’s laptop, Obama’s secret loyalties or the Clintons’ murder spree (and they’re all connected of course). Trump’s mere proclamations about the election are enough proof for this paranoid mob. Yet when he took his case to court more than 50 times, it became a drama so absurd and ignoble and dark that Kafka, Camus and Hunter S. Thompson couldn’t have come up with it. At this point, Kraken summoner Sidney Powell has become a sort of residue that even most Trump supporting pols are trying to scrape off their shoes, and she’s going to be sued into oblivion by the voting systems companies she’s defamed, and she’ll may well be disbarred. Yet on they go! No loss is too humiliating. No shame can’t be wiped away, like a cut to commercial. The MAGA media is a zombie army that just keeps coming, because your American freedom and liberty entitles you to believe whatever demented fantasy makes you feel righteous. So what used to be a fringe nuisance for a country constantly rattled by pop culture distraction and relentless marketing hucksterism is now a post-modern, incoherent ideology for tens of millions of people, quite a few of whom seem ready to resort to violence at any random time. (And of course that’s already happening.)
How to respond and go forward in the face of such obstinance and unknowing unreasonableness is the question of our time. While I despise the figureheads and propagandists who enable this new splinter faction, I don’t hate the citizens themselves. They’ve been piss-poor judges of character, policy and history. They’ve been conned in the most extravagant way. Their victimhood complex is infuriating. Their fanatical militia elements need to be crushed by law enforcement. But the citizens themselves? They’re not our enemies any more than we are theirs. They’re furious in their belief that “elites” disrespect them, even as they exhibit behavior and engage in rhetoric unworthy of respect. They’re jacked up on Trump, domination, messianic Christianity (about which there’s much more to say) and the gangrenous lie of a “stolen” election. They’ve turned Covid denial into an article of faith, with catastrophic consequences. It’s a terribly dark, radicalized, dangerous situation, and it’s wild to watch this reality begin to cleave the Republican party, as death threats blow up the phones of ostensible allies, like Georgia Secretary of State Ben Raffensperger, who merely assessed real evidence and fulfilled his duties and who by comparison seems like a brave hero for doing so.
A traditional conservative would counsel praying for those who are lost, and I do, I swear I do. But chiefly I think our union only hangs together and rebuilds if the likes of us double down on reason, evidence and democratic values. The 50-plus years I’ve been alive could be seen as a domestic struggle between the illusionists and the realists, with corporate spin, public relations, political propaganda and partisan news on one side and a kind of rebel alliance in the “reality based community” trying hard to use persuasion, journalism, education and the law in the service of truth-finding and consensus-building. Some argue that’s bringing plastic tableware to a gunfight, but we come from a long line of success in the Pen > Sword department, stretching from the Enlightenment through the founding of America through Abolition and the Civil Rights Era. We are the team of post-Watergate government reform and investigative reporting, the coalition of anti-McCarthyism and anti-racism. We’re the defenders of testimony, science, the humanities and the arts, civil justice and equality before the law. And while our ship has taken on water, sailed through storms and been shot at by enemies foreign and domestic, it’s not going down.
Craig H. 12.24.20
* Correction: My friend Paul, expert in early television, pointed out that I incorrectly pegged the first televised debate as post 1962 when it was of course Nixon/Kennedy in 1960. String regrets the error.
New Work
My Outstanding And Essential Albums for 2020
In a year bereft of most live music, recordings took on added import and resonance. I upgraded my home stereo in February, unaware that I’d be spending more hours between the speakers than ever. Given the artistic abundance of our Americana music community, that was no problem at all.
The year’s albums engaged in a fruitful, righteous dialogue with the tumult of the world, including the ones made before the pandemic. Many projects seemed prophetic. Artists channeled their anguish over living under an abusive, dishonest leader by reaffirming their commitment to empathy, honesty and care. There were veterans trying something new, voices from marginalized communities, updates of venerable traditions and exciting debuts. So let’s get to it.
The Grateful Dead are the Rorschach test of American music, and given the chemistry, social science and voodoo technology that have come out of Menlo Park, Palo Alto and San Francisco where the Dead were born, I’m not even sure this is a metaphor. Maybe it was all a big clinical trial, run on our peculiar national psychology. Stare into the Dead’s kaleidoscopic ink blots and you’ll see something about yourself and the culture. Skeptics and fanatics of the band don’t know quite what to make of each other (we’ve long been a divided nation). If you don’t embrace ambiguity, you may never get it.
As controversial as the Grateful Dead have been though, almost everybody loves at least a song or two from Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, two landmark albums that are being widely celebrated and extrapolated in this, their 50th anniversary year. Opus four and five in the band’s studio catalog marked a shift in style and a new level of mainstream interest. Often regarded as bookends or even a virtual double album, the 1970 releases – June 14 and Nov. 1 respectively – marked the band’s “transition from psychedelia to songcraft,” as historian Jesse Jarnow puts it in a new podcast about the albums. With the nation in turmoil and the Bay Area scene in flux, the Dead served up American roots two ways, drawing on their shared folk and bluegrass history. Jerry Garcia and co-writer/lyricist Robert Hunter went way back as bluegrass pickers. Even so, the albums reached beyond three-chords-and-the-truth, evoking a novel acoustic mysticism and a postmodern blues. The albums gave us the songs “Uncle John’s Band,” “Friend of the Devil,” “Casey Jones,” “Ripple,” “Box of Rain” and many more standards, for the band and for American music.
The anniversary brings a stash of new ways to hear and understand Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty. Warner Records and Rhino have released Deluxe Edition CD packages pairing new masters of the albums with live shows from February of 1971 in Port Chester, NY, where much of the albums’ radically new repertoire was integrated into the evenings. Also this year, the Grateful Dead’s in-house operation has digitally released hours of session outtakes, rehearsal passes and studio banter from both albums under the title The Angel’s Share. “Compiled from dozens of 16-track reels that were recently discovered in unlabeled boxes, The Angel’s Share includes outtakes for every song on the album, which have been unheard since they left the studio over 50 years ago,” the organization says. Moments from that remarkable tape help enliven the new Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast series, an audio documentary in which historian/fans Rich Mahan and Jesse Jarnow burrow into the albums’ history and implications at the detail-rich, cut-by-cut tempo of a song per episode. There’s even a new limited-edition American Beauty inspired D’Angelico hollow body guitar for sale. Whether you’re a devotee, a dabbler or a puzzled newcomer who never took the trip, this is the time to reckon with a pair of masterpieces that directly inspired folk-rock, alt-country and the Americana movement of the past half century.
Read the rest of the essay at WMOT.com…
Perhaps my favorite episode of The String came out on Dec. 11, featuring a joint interview with Americana star Margo Price and her partner in music and life Jeremy Ivey. Her album That’s How Rumors Get Started was one of the year’s most surprising and refreshing shifts in direction. Ivey has released two fine, first-ever albums of intelligent snark-rock. My show notes and the streaming audio of the show is here.
New On String Theories
folklore - My favorite pop album of 2020
I worked hard on my year-end albums list for WMOT, part of which was a brief debate with myself over whether to include Taylor Swift’s lovely folkore in our “Americana” roundup. I saw at least one publication that categorized it as such, and while it’s not crazy, I think that misunderstands the boundaries of Americana and the intent of the album. While the 16-song set isn’t folk music, it does satisfy the folk fan’s craving for intimacy and storytelling, while the instrumentation and mix is a treat for those of us who value creative sonic architecture. What I hear is as an ambient pop album with more roots on its beautiful woods-in-mist cover than in the grooves. But I do love folklore, and I turned to it often for its tranquil buzz and shapely stories.
Discovery: ARTEMIS
They're super. They're a group. Draw your own conclusion.
We live in an age of high efficiency learning. We can instantly access endless documentaries and video lectures and online coursework in everything you can imagine. In that spirit, the debut album from the band ARTEMIS offers a concise and delectable introduction to some of the exceptional women working in jazz today. I had a pre-existing fan-based relationship with two of these artists and have used the hours listening to this September release to learn about the rest, filing their other albums for future enjoyment. They use the term ‘supergroup’ in their press matter, though I’m hesitant to endorse the term. Sure, it’s a gathering of elite and established players, but jazz has always churned its talent pool, assembling ever-changing ensembles for sessions that reflect the parts and the sum. Granted, most of those rounds robin don’t get band names. So I’ll grant that ARTEMIS is a group. And their first record, for Blue Note, is super, superb and superlative.