Songs are funny. They go out to who needs them when they need them. | | | | Destiny's Child performing at the 9/11 benefit The Concert for New York City at Madison Square Garden, Oct. 20, 2001.
(Scott Gries/Getty Images) | | | | | | “Songs are funny. They go out to who needs them when they need them.”
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| | rantnrave:// Nineteen years ago this morning, a little after 9 a.m., I was at home in Brooklyn when my best friend called and frantically told me to turn on the TV. It took me a long time to process a lot of things that day. My first thought, I swear, was, "Oh God, can the airlines get any worse?" And then, once I understood the horror of what I was looking at, my thoughts turned to how do I get out of my 11 a.m. weekly MTV NEWS meeting at 1515 Broadway, 20something floors up, because I didn't want to go anywhere near a skyscraper that Tuesday morning—an embarrassing, in retrospect, combination of selfishness and not, in fact, understanding the horror of what had happened in the previous half-hour. Not grasping that there wasn't going to be an 11 a.m. meeting. Not grasping that there might not be an 11 a.m. Not grasping that the world may have stopped turning, as one well-meaning but maudlin country song would put it two months later. And then I grabbed my stuff and headed to work. Or so I thought. There was no map for any of this. The only song I've truly loved about the events of that day is one that expresses no anger and no desire for vengeance, that points no fingers and asks no questions. BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN's "THE RISING" drops us, with no musical intro, no lyrical set-up, no warning of any kind, into the middle of a story whose narrator seems to be in the same predicament we listeners are in: Can't see nothing in front of him. Can't see nothing coming up behind. He knows exactly where he is and he's lost. The music, spare at first, offers little information as to where this is going. The phrasing is awkward, details like "On my back's a 60-pound stone" not quite lining up with the beat. It sounds raw and hurried even though it's obviously a carefully crafted song. The effect is disconcerting and stunning. I've been inside the 9/11 MEMORIAL & MUSEUM, which opened 10 years later, exactly once, and I didn't last long. You enter via a long, slow, contemplative walk down a ramp that takes you 70 feet below ground, into the foundation of what was once the WORLD TRADE CENTER's North Tower. Then, when you reach the main space, you're bombarded almost everywhere you turn with photos and videos of planes hitting buildings and buildings burning and buildings collapsing, and I guess I understand why but that's not how I wanted to contemplate. I was out of there in minutes. "The Rising" is a different kind of remembrance. It puts you in a dark, smoky, doomed stairwell somewhere inside one of those two buildings, with a 60-pound stone on your back and a half-mile of line on your shoulder, out of reach of any media or politics or cellphones, and leaves you there until a (literally) rapturous chorus extends its hand and offers a way out: "Come on up, lay your hands in mine." It's a song of acceptance and processing, of sorrow and longing, of faith and hope. The faith is underscored by gospelly harmonies that are good as the E STREET BAND ever got, and by the Biblical imagery of the song's second half, when the setting moves from a smoky stairwell to the afterlife. (The imagery seems spiritually prescient in this summer of wildfires and Covid.) It’s a song about a firefighter's death, but by the end it has also revealed itself as a "dream of life," a phrase Springsteen sings repeatedly in a call-and-response with himself that still makes me cry two decades later. The responses float around the mix of "The Rising" like plumes of smoke in the wind. That Tuesday afternoon, I spent about 45 minutes in a line that wrapped around the block that's home to Beth Israel Medical Center, hoping to donate blood, and my memory is that in those 45 minutes I didn't advance an inch. (It turned out, tragically, that blood wasn't needed.) Later, I sat on the grass in Grand Ferry Park in Williamsburg, staring at the smoke still rising across the East River, feeling lost. A long, slow walk up the ramp back to my own dream of life would have seemed impossibly far away if I had thought about it. But it did await me. I just needed to process. And grieve. And think, a lot, about those stairwells, and the office floors above, and wherever those stairwells may have led if they just kept going. Come on up indeed... It's FRIDAY and that means new music from MICKEY GUYTON, KELSEA BALLERINI, WAYLON PAYNE, CONWAY THE MACHINE, YOUNGBOY NEVER BROKE AGAIN, UNIFORM, MASTODON, MARILYN MANSON, KEEDRON BRYANT, FLETCHER, LUCRECIA DALT, the FLAMING LIPS, MOONCHILD SANELLY, ARTEMIS, CHICK COREA, RANDY BRECKER & ERIC MARIENTHAL, TERJE RYPDAL, SIDI TOURÉ, PJ HARVEY (TO BRING YOU MY LOVE demos), ELIZABETH COOK, RILEY GREEN, the DILLARDS (Bluegrass Hall of Famers' first album in more than 20 years), STONE FOUNDATION, BT, DOVES, KAIRON, SUSANNA, CLINAMEN, JOCKSTRAP, MANA, B.O.B, BROTHER SUNDANCE, DEAD QUIET, DELTA SPIRIT, LO TOM, EVERYTHING EVERYTHING, BLITZEN TRAPPER, SUZANNE VEGA and MATT COSTA... DOMINIC FIKE launches a new FORTNITE concert series Saturday afternoon (APPLE users not invited; they will be blocked)... PATTI LABELLE and GLADYS KNIGHT battle it out old-school style on VERZUZ on Sunday. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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