Real Life Rock (235 page)

6
Negatones,
Snacktronica
(Melody Lane)
Why people hate smart alecks.

7
T. C. Boyle,
Drop City
(Penguin)
Almost impossible: a novel about a 1970 hippie commune in which the author embarrasses neither his characters nor himself.

8
Bob Dylan, “It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding),” from
Live 1964: Concert at Philharmonic Hall—October 31, 1964
(Columbia)
Everyone who's heard Dylan perform this number in the 39 years since it appeared on his
Bringing It All Back Home
knows what will happen when the line “Even the president of the United States sometimes has to stand naked” (as it's sung here) comes up: the crowd will stomp and cheer to show what side they're on, or rather what messy choices they're superior to. But on this night Lyndon Johnson had yet to be demonized. Nixon had not been elected. Ford had not replaced Nixon, or Carter Ford, or Reagan Carter, or Bush Reagan, or Clinton Bush, or Bush Clinton. No one had heard the song before—and it's so strange to hear the line produce only silence, as if it's not obvious what the line says.

9
“The Fog of War: Robert S. McNamara and Errol Morris in Discussion,” University of California at Berkeley (Feb. 4)
Throughout a long talk arising from Morris's 2003 documentary
The Fog of War
, moderator Mark Danner pressed the former Secretary of Defense—under Kennedy and Johnson the tribune of the Vietnam War—to apply his conclusions from that time to the present day. Again and again, McNamara—at 88 in frightening command of his faculties, vehement, direct, lucid, at times even monomaniacally focused—ignored the question, dodged it, refused it, denied it. Finally Danner announced that he would read the “Eleven Lessons” from McNamara's 1995
In Retrospect: The
Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam
: “I'll ask you while I do so,” he said, “to keep the present situation in mind.”

One by one, the items went off like small bombs: “ ‘We failed to . . . We failed to . . . We failed to . . . We failed to draw Congress and the American people into the pros and cons of a large-scale military action before it got underway. . . . We did not realize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. . . . We do not have the God-given right to shape other nations as we choose . . .' ”

“When I read these lessons again I felt a chill go through me,” Danner said. “I was in Iraq. In October, reporting . . . they seemed to reflect with uncanny accuracy—it's for that that I've tried to push you, not only about—” McNamara cut him off.

“What he has done,” he said to the audience, “is extract those lessons from this book. The lessons are in there. . . . I put them forward not because of Vietnam, but because of the future!” He turned to Danner: “You want me to apply them to Bush. I'm not going to do it.” He turned back to the audience, full of people who decades ago fought him with everything they had. “
YOU APPLY THEM TO BUSH
.”

10
New York Times
,
“ Music Albums Chart, Billboard/Soundscan, February 9 through 15” (Feb. 23)
#1 Norah Jones, #2 Kenny Chesney, #5 Josh Groban, #6 Harry Connick Jr., #7 Evanescence, #10
2004 Grammy Nominees
compilation—it's probably pointless to read anything into this sudden domination of comfort, balm, reassurance, and acceptance at the start of an election year. At least I hope it is.

MARCH
24, 2004

1
Mendoza Line, “It's a Long Line (But It Moves Quickly),” on
Fortune
(Cooking Vinyl)
From people hiding in present-day America—just as the Mekons of
Fear and Whiskey
and
The Edge of the World
were all but moles in Margaret Thatcher's Britain—a swift, irresistible put-down song (“She called you a cab and they brought you a hearse”). Debbie Harry had her finger on this trigger in Blondie's “Rip Her to Shreds,” but Shannon McArdle makes you think she didn't pull it.

2
The Bear, 95.7 FM, San Francisco, music criticism (Feb. 24)
I.e., following Toby Keith and Willie Nelson's 2003 lynch-mob ode “Beer for My Horses,” where everybody who's not swinging from a tree meets “up back at the local saloon,” with Reba McEntire's 1992 version of “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” where the judge rushes off to dinner and “they hung an innocent man.”

3
“In other news,” official Sleater-Kinney website (
Sleater-Kinney.com
, March 3)
“Urban Outfitters, the store dedicated to reselling your childhood back to you via nostalgia and irony-based fashion, is selling a T-shirt that says: ‘Voting Is For Old People.' Unless you are under the age of 18, this shirt will be banned from all Sleater-Kinney shows.”

4
Sons and Daughters,
Love the Cup
(Ba Da Bing!)
Except for an edge of restraint, the edge of not telling all they knew, there wasn't anything on this Glasgow quartet's folky 2002 EP
The Lovers
to suggest the snaking tension—or the pounding fury—of the tunes here. “Fight” begins slowly, then blows up in the singers' faces; “Johnny Cash” opens as the murder ballad “Pretty Polly” taken at a fierce pace, the curses of the words chasing David Gow's drums until Adele Bethel, Ailidh Lennon, and Scott Paterson are screaming for the tune's last minutes as if they've already killed who–ever it is the song wants dead.