1/ dj/rupture - afghanistan - frescoe
2/ karen dalton - katie cruel
3/ pixies - cactus (live edinburg)
4/ oblivians - live the life
5/ magnetic fields - world love
6/ r.e.m. - swan swan h
7/billie holiday - strange fruit (1939 single)
8/ pj harvey - missed
9/ nico - these days
10/ townes van zandt - high low & in between
11/ will oldham - lie down in the light
12/ calexico - dance of death
13/ jane’s addiction - ripple
14/ black star - thieves in the night
15/ old crow medicine show - we’re all in this together
16/ gillian welch - ruination day (part 2)
17/ cat power - free
A Tolerable Anarchy: The Mixtape
Sections taken from A Tolerable Anarchy
The mixtape is the shadow of the book. It says what the book did not find a way to say, is what the book did not find a way to be. Just its existence is a confession of failure, or at least disappointment.
By setting out the shape of a disappointment, though, the mixtape also sets out what the ambition of the book was, and with a clarity that the book itself—because it became something else—does not preserve.
A Tolerable Anarchy is a book about American ideas of freedom. That’s my habitual phrase for explaining it, anyway. I wanted it to be something else, though: a study of the experience of freedom, what John Adams called “the sensations of freedom” and Edmund Burke freedom’s “sensible object.” Where these songs add valuably to the book, I think it is because they express that sensation more directly and vitally than (my) words on the page.
I don’t know what Jace Clayton, aka dj/rupture had in mind when he named the first cut on Uproot “Afghanistan: Frescoe.” It is short, wordless, and sounds to me like a record of a change in weather—literal, ideological, or military. The music is steadily percussive, dry, metallic, not so much driving as persistent. The sounds mixed could be a factory in a slow season, or a village metalworker’s shop on a hot afternoon, when everyone is tired. Then an electronic version of an organ or strings takes over, as if clouds suddenly consumed the horizon, or jets drowned every sound but theirs and blacked out the sun.
dj/rupture - afghanistan - frescoe
karen dalton - katie cruel
From within this devouring ambience, the banjo begins Karen Dalton’s “Katie Cruel.” The song is built around the simplest formula: “If I was where I would be, I would be where I am not. Here I am where I must be, where I would be, I cannot.” In its spare lyrics and simple structure, the song calls up the wide horizons of the half-Cherokee Dalton’s native High Plains and the narrow ones of the town where her narrator has washed up, among men who toasted her when she was young and had beauty’s endless promise, and now “hand me the bottles empty.” The long horizon of “where I would be” become an empty promise too. The banjo makes a refugee sound: its grip on the earth feels tenuous. This one is intermittently washed away by strings that echo those of “Afghanistan.” Dalton’s voice is as lean as her instrument, with the same tenuous strength.
The live version of the Pixies’ “Cactus,” from their reunion tour in the middle of the aughts, may or may not follow from “Katie Cruel.” There is a lot of this questionable sequencing in the playlist, and I wish I had a better answer to the questions than I do. I put this song early because it vividly expresses the alchemical moment when desire becomes an intolerable, imperative need. The song is a demand, which I have always heard as coming from half a continent away, for proof that a lover is alive and still embodied.
“A letter in your writing doesn’t mean you’re not dead.”
Like a lot of the Pixies’ early work, the song is full of images that could come from the Old Testament or pagan myth. It climaxes on a call for something like a ritual sacrifice that is the only proof that the singer and the beloved are still linked:
“Bloody your hands on the cactus tree. Wipe it on your dress and send it to me.”
With “Cactus,” I had in mind a moment in the life of Frederick Douglass, who plays an archetypal role in the book, as the insurrectionary who remakes an idea of freedom by defying and destroying some of its hypocritical compromise. Douglass wrote that “the turning point of my life as a slave” was a choice to resist a beating by his master, Edward Covey: his defiance could have got Douglass killed, but, he reflected, if he had not resisted, his spirit would have died.
It bothers me that there is something trivializing in comparing “I miss your kissing and I miss your head” to Douglass’s heroic resistance, but both the song and Douglass’s story crystallize how human need becomes a demand, and the demand either receives an answer that changes a life, or goes unanswered or gets punished, which also changes a life.
Later in the book, I say that Douglass’s legacy shows up in gay and lesbian people who refused to conceal themselves, sometimes at considerable personal risk and cost, and, like Douglass, contributed to an expansion of American freedom—from abolition to gay rights.
The Oblivians, from Memphis, are candidates for the much-contested distinction of being America’s most debauched band. That lends an obvious irony to their gospel-soaked exhortation,
“You’ve got to live the life you sing about in your songs.”
Here I was pretty directly calling up what generations of American reformers such as Douglass have done: turn euphonious phrases like “All men are created equal” into uncompromising demands to the country, that it become what it says it is or shut up and sit down. Whatever its superficial ironies, this song feels like being in a baptismal fount that has turned into a waterfall, pounding down liquid grace, running into your eyes so you can’t see, on the edge of knocking you over and washing you away.
“World Love,” by the endlessly charming Magnetic Fields, is a deliberately glib song, smooth and self-assured as it promises a solution to troubles “from Tokyo to Soweto”: “Love, music, wine, and revolution.” It’s a Romantic’ formula, but the mood of the song is more that of a jaded seducer who still enjoys his craft: “This too shall pass, so raise your glass to change and chance; and freedom is the only law: shall we dance?” I actually love this song, as I do much of the Fields’ work. I would say that I am routinely seduced by it. But part of what I appreciate, I think, is the sly intelligence that shows how easily “freedom” slides into a seductive monologue that adds up to more of an atmosphere than an idea.
There’s irony, too, in R.E.M.’s “Swan Swan H,” though we’re not in a jazz club anymore, but somewhere near a Civil War battlefield. I used the acoustic version, and the dominant sound over a rudimentary guitar arrangement is Michael Stipe’s gray voice, dragging through the lyrics like a harrow.
“We’re all free now,” he says, but that comes in the midst of ironic questions that throw the listener’s attention off balance: What’s the price of fans? What’s the price of heroes? Captain, don’t you want to buy a bone-chain?
The song is desolate without the stark nobility that desolation sometimes implies. It seems at once lonesome and, with its Civil War imagery, strewn with the trash of a passing army. It seems to ask whether we can afford our own myths, particularly the one that we’re all free now.
The whole first part of the playlist has been bending toward Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” The lynching that this song describes is at once factual—the detail is as precise as any in songwriting (“the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth…the sudden smell of burning flesh”) and metaphysical: the violent death becomes a part of the grove in which it happens, a principle of nature “for the wind to suck…for the tree to drop.” Strange, but as much at home in the scene as the fruit that grows from the tree.
Early white Americans’ “sensation of freedom” was rooted essentially in who they were not: black slaves. There was, Edmund Burke thought and recent historians have agreed, no separating the freedom that elevated and dignified them from the subjection of the people they owned. In Rituals of Blood, Orlando Patterson, the Harvard sociologist and student of the idea of freedom in Western culture, argues that the violence Billie Holiday describes was near the heart of white Southern identity and community. There really is, as she sings, “blood at the root.”
billie holiday - strange fruit
PJ Harvey’s “Missed” is, accordingly, a traumatized song. Harvey’s urgent voice, over a skeletal but driving accompaniment, is demanding to the point of panic. “He” is hidden, taken away, and although the song addresses some (imaginary?) tormentors who might have him (“Don’t deny it/and don’t you hide him”), all the energy gathers in mourning: “Yes I miss him.”
In my mind, it isn’t clear, and it may not matter, whether he is just missing, or, like a redemptive God who may not come, might never have existed. Or maybe “he” is just an unkept promise. What is clear is that he is necessary, he is absent, and everything else PJ Harvey says is built around her devastation at his absence.
If “Missed” ushers in despair, “These Days” speaks from the exhaustion and flatness of the other side. Nico, the Velvet Underground’s sometime female vocalist, sings of matter-of-fact renunciation: no new lover, no new highways, not much talking or gambling or dreaming anymore. Her lyrics are a direct answer to the Oblivians’ exhortation, and so to a whole mode of American inspiration: “If I seem to be afraid to live the life that I have made in song, it’s just that I’ve been losing for so long.”
After so many unkept promises, heroic or electrifying images that came to nothing, all that remains is anorexic (literally un-desiring) repose. The narrator’s matter-of-factness only makes clear that her heart is broken. The song ends with a request that devastates me:
“Please don’t confront me with my failures. I had not forgotten them.”
Here I think the mixtape wanders farther from the book and becomes even more personal. If I have been listening carefully, I am ruined by now, and the next three songs are healing pieces. Townes van Zandt’s “High, Low and in Between” is perhaps the most hopeful song—not optimistic, but hopeful—by one of the bleakest songwriters. The singer recites all the Townes touchstones: traveling endless miles, tracked by a hungry poison, with only a shadow for company.
In a quiet soliloquy, without repeating a phrase, we pass into the vale of exile where most of his songs are set. Like Nico in “These Days,” TvZ says the living world is not for him. He wishes the world’s fathers well, as they “build with stone to stand and shine,” but he will be with the others, who get blown away in the wind. Then, though nothing changes in the quiet underlying melody, a different thought comes to him: he doesn’t mean what he just said, it’s the highway that is talking. Then he offers this halfway affirmation:
“All things that are alive are brothers in the soil and in the sky, and I believe that with my blood, if not my eyes.”
There isn’t much proof of this idea—not enough to see—but if it is not true, then we are not who we feel we must be. This imperative hope drives us back to the mixture of blood and dirt of “Strange Fruit.”
“Lie Down in the Light” and “Dance of Death” are rapturous, luminous songs born out of the seed of affirmation at the end of “High, Low and in Between.” Will Oldham’s song is gospel for pagans, mystical prayer for atheists.
Calexico’s instrumental number, “Dance of Death,” which reworks the original by guitarist John Fahey, is really a resurrection song. It is funereal at times, renewing at others, with the overall feel of a cycle bending upward through its nearly seven minutes.
One of the themes of A Tolerable Anarchy is that utopianism, the ambition to remake the world in a more nearly perfect form, is a legitimate part of our moral and political life, and we are much poorer without it. Its critics identify utopianism with violent mechanical schemes to impose order on a supple and organic world, and in that form it has, indeed, abetted and even inspired some terrible things.
One of the themes of A Tolerable Anarchy is that utopianism, the ambition to remake the world in a more nearly perfect form, is a legitimate part of our moral and political life, and we are much poorer without it. Its critics identify utopianism with violent mechanical schemes to impose order on a supple and organic world, and in that form it has, indeed, abetted and even inspired some terrible things.
But the utopian impulse is also part of the supple and organic world. Its roots don’t lie in abstract ideology, but in elements of experience. It is the thought that our shared lives must make room for more of human experience than they have so far—especially generosity, pleasure, spontaneity, and joy. Once we know these, they can become permanent ambitions, as we try to reweave the world around them. The rising ecstatic course out of despair that these songs take feels to me like a sketch of that process.
The version of the Grateful Dead’s “Ripple” that Jane’s Addiction recorded is my touchstone song. The lyrics of the original are the very best of questing hippie mysticism: there are no cheap promises, no spurious resolutions, just a forward movement that is its own purpose, because it is life, undertaken in a spirit of (uncertain) hope and (fractured) trust. I turn to the JA version, always, because the Dead’s is too pastoral, too steady. In Perry Farrell’s rendering, every phrase feels seized out of a moment in which it could just as easily have been lost. This song rises out of the Dance of Death to complete this cycle.
The playlist could have ended here. Instead, it enters another cycle, this one less rapturous, more of a quarrel between pessimism and optimism along the stony road that the last cycle disclosed. We are again closer to the book here. Each of the next three songs subtracts something from the promise of the last cycle.
In “Thieves in the Night,” Talib Kweli and Mos Def, recording as Black Star, restate the worry that opens and closes the book: if “freedom” collapses so easily into the moral arrogance and posturing of George Bush’s America, and into the nihilistic capitalism that runs alongside the moralizing, what is it really worth? Is it a mistake? The power of the song is that it is not an anti-Bush polemic, but directed inward, at black Americans, for being “not free, only licensed,” “not strong, only aggressive,” “not compassionate, only polite,” and “chasing after death just to call ourselves brave.”
I borrow the song to turn the same words on all America in the aughts: at once inhibited and self-indulgent, self-righteous and querulous, confusing violence with freedom. This is the oldest objection to the ideal of freedom—that “liberty” turns into “license,” self-indulgence and mutual predation, and these well-turned words tap that tradition and bring it to bear on the US today in an arrestingly concrete way. Still, the nay-saying is always set in contrast to the other set of possibilities: good, strong, free. You can hear the song’s condemnation as preserving the possibility by naming the false version.
“We’re All in This Together” is just what it sounds like, a song about isolation, interdependence, and the courage to reach out to others along the “slow road to freedom” that is “all there is.” I can’t save that sketch from sounding like a slogan, but the song itself is beautiful, aching and precise, and poised between question and answer like “Ripple,” but in shadows that deepen the question and obscure the bright promise of an answer.
There is an argument near the heart of A Tolerable Anarchy that the basic challenge of common life is to integrate two parts of our nature. The first is our insurrectionary individuality, with its infinite possibility and infinite demands on the world. The second is our need for one another, with the vulnerability and limits that it brings. This song is not an argument, but it is that idea.
I feel an obligation to the original playlist, made in conjunction with the release of the book. If I could revise, though, I would add a song by my brilliant North Carolina neighbors, Gambling the Muse. The song, “Nickel and Dimed,” captures the interweaving of despair, disgust, and exhaustion with celebration and joy that is the basic shape of this project.
gambling the muse - nickel and dimed
Arranged in the moonless-night style of alt-country, the song takes lostness and abandonment as its basic facts. At the same time, the music offers affirmation in quick flashes that take over the sound. As Emerson wrote and this superbly intelligent band seems to understand, our faith comes in moments, and those moments are the fine innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim.
“When they turn out the lights, we’ll still be nickel and dimed, so sing in the dark with me.”
Gillian Welch plays on nearly any mixtape I make, and in “Ruination Day (Part 2),” she takes us one more time through all the American blood that runs through history, and seems to spring up in violence to stem progress again and again: the Great Emancipator, she reminds us, took a bullet in the back of the head.
Chan Marshall, Cat Power, gets the last song, and not just because it’s conveniently titled “Free.” The simple, punchy guitar carries along lyrics that don’t claim to solve any dilemmas or scale any mystical heights. I think of this song as a partial scrapbook of aphorisms for the road, above all the incontrovertible, but easy to neglect,
“Don’t fall in love with the autocrat, just fall in love when you sing your song.”
Easier sung than done, but a good motto for all scales of autocracy, which is so easy to choose over the imperfect experiments of freedom.
