BEFORE AMERICA WITNESSED the footage
of two planes crashing into the towers of the
World Trade Center, hip-hop artists the Coup saw
the image on an album cover. Until recently, the
Oakland-based group had planned to release their
forthcoming album Party Music with cover art
portraying the World Trade Center exploding.
Group member Boots Riley--who is known for
agit-prop rapping on albums like 1994's Genocide
and Juice (Capitol)--is depicted holding a
detonator in front of the towers. The Coup's label,
75 Ark, pulled the cover art from its Web site just
hours after the events in New York. A new design
is being planned.
Metaphors have never been more dangerous in the
music community than they are right now. The
Coup have long been supporters of activism rather
than violence--Riley has worked with numerous
youth groups and, along with co-Couper Pam the Funkstress, has long
supported nonviolent solutions to inner-city problems. Yet with World Trade
Center coverage running on endless loop through our brains, the political
commentary in the Coup's songs like the upcoming "5 Million Ways to Kill a
CEO" will most likely be lost on angry listeners who interpret the song as a
literal call to arms.
For similar reasons, the New York dance-music duo heretofore known as I
am the World Trade Center changed its name to "I am the...," fearing that the
original significance of the name would not function very well in light of recent
events. Perhaps the absence of the words World Trade Center in the band's
moniker is more appropriate than an attempt to quickly fill in the space with
something less incendiary. With a single laptop computer and only two
members--both of whom originally hailed from the small indie town of Athens,
Georgia--the name I am the World Trade Center once seemed a satirical
reference to the band's structural and musical diminutiveness. Not anymore.
2001 has thus far been the year of ironic electronic music, with artists like
Peaches and Blechtum from Blechdom acting as pioneers, but the larger
metaphorical significance of bands like I am the World Trade Center suddenly
seems highly irrelevant at a time when all sense of irony is lost. We're left
with a highly developed sense of relativism. Whenever promotional e-mails
reading "Our band is playing a show tonight!" reached the office last week, the
punctuation looked like a sick punch line; the exclamation point is now an
anticlimax. Music is a form of release, but even if we need it now more than
ever, taking advantage of entertainment as a diversion from what is going on
in the world around us can make us feel guilty or hedonistic.
Perhaps it is for the same reasons that the publication of City Pages' own Fall
Arts issue the day after the attacks seemed so incongruous: All of the
meanings of the featured performances had changed. We spent Tuesday
watching the explosions in disbelief, panicking when we couldn't get in touch
with friends and family in Manhattan, feeling numb, and the events we'd
carefully listed were being canceled one by one. It was as if the physical
realm we once lived in had literally disappeared.
I'd booked tickets for the CMJ Music Marathon, a four-day New York City
festival of independent music that was scheduled for September 13-16. The
festival was postponed until October. The musical events I had planned to
attend in Minneapolis at Grumpy's and First Avenue on Wednesday night
were canceled. Artists were scattered all over the country, unable to arrive
for scheduled performances. (One exception was a reading at Intermedia Arts
by Washington, D.C., punk writer Mark Andersen. After evacuating his plane
on Tuesday morning at Reagan National Airport--where he emerged to see
the smoke cloud rising above the Pentagon--Andersen rented a car and drove
all the way here.) Even the artists who could reach their destinations were
often among those who were too emotionally drained to perform. (Nick Cave
called off his upcoming Minneapolis performance, declaring in a press release,
"The band members feel that it is inappropriate and disrespectful to be
performing concerts in a country that is, as described by its president and
media, at war." Whether Cave means he's acting out of sympathy for the
families of the victims or in protest of a retaliation-hungry government is
unclear.)
The fact that sincerity is replacing irony in music is probably healthy for
artists. But for now, it also means that performances are canceled. Top 40
songs are preempted by news broadcasts. MTV VJ John Norris becomes a
reporter, probing the streets of Manhattan instead of interviewing pop stars.
And as I write, there are still no planes in the sky. For a while, everything is
going to be very quiet.
