2008 Pop Conference Bios/AbstractsGreil MarcusGreil Marcus is the author of
The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice and other books. He taught "The Old Weird America: The Commonplace Song from the 19th Century to Bob Dylan" at the New School in New York in the fall of 2007, and is teaching the seminar "Practical Criticism" at Berkeley this spring.
Panel(s):Songs Absorb ConflictSunday, April 13, 2008, 9:00 - 10:45
Moderator:Singing the DisasterSaturday, April 12, 2008, 9:00 - 10:45
Abstract:"
Still Here: The Protest Song at the I'm Not There Revue"
On November 7, 2007, in New York, more than twenty singers and groups took part in an "I'm Not There" concert; that is, various people, mostly those whose work appeared in the "I'm Not There" film or on the soundtrack album, performed various Bob Dylan songs.
It was primary season, with the newspapers full of political reporting, principally about candidates who were not talking about continuing wars. The war in Iraq had all but disappeared from the headlines. In this context—or maybe context had nothing to do with it; maybe contextualizing is precisely not the point—the two songs that were most fully transformed, in any formal musical sense, and that seemed most fully realized, in terms of excavating and dramatizing the visions, or views of the world, that they contained, were both about war: the metaphysical Armageddon of "A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall," performed by Tift Merritt, and "Masters of War," a protest song about arms merchants, performed by the Roots. One performance was utterly bland; the other could have been choreographed by Cecil B. DeMille or Martin Scorsese. Both were in their way titanic.
I have written and spoken about "Masters of War" before, but the Roots' version seemed to turn what I'd done before into a footnote to what might be done. I had never heard of Tift Merritt. Focusing in detail on these two performances—their sound, style, manner, staging, and attitude—for the forthcoming conference I propose to look at how songs absorb conflict, and how they retain their sense of jeopardy long after the conflicts that presumably spawned them have disappeared. Does the world change, and the song stay the same? Or is it the other way around?
