I’m sure it sounds strange to say that we, as Americans, don’t have enough songs to celebrate our American-ness to, but what the hell, I’ll say it anyway. We don’t. I’ve found few songs that seem to capture that pride in being from somewhere for those of us who live here. I’d venture that the reason – not having thought this through well, mind you, making this up as I go – is twofold.
America is excitingly and gloriously heterogeneous, a mashup of any and everything else, a nation of plagiarists and immigrants – which makes it hard to pin down. A love for America, the place, is unwieldy. What, exactly, do you love in this continent-sized country? It is soft and hard, small and enormous, wise and idiotic. It is the mountains and the marshes, the town and the city, peopled by people without a common parent. I’d think the blues would come closest to the seed, the center, of a national popular identity, but even though jazz and soul and rock and all manner of cultural textures – the songs of American reactionaries and revolutionaries, of the mainstream and the counterculture, and most of the truly great American musical achievements of the twentieth century – formed in the womb of the blues and owe their lives to the blues, it’s still a far cry from a truly definitional, universal American cultural possession.
It’s too recent, for one – a lot of our national mythology is centered on a time that was untouched by the modern blues, that easily predates it. Second, for all it’s evolution and metamorphosis, and despite the fact that after whiter-than-white Brits decided it was brilliant and played it back to us the musical offspring of the blues achieved near ubiquity for a time, the blues is in its essence the creation of one American minority, not of America. America sometimes listens to music together, but it certainly doesn’t make music together.
Third, the blues is finite and fading. While all musics take cues from each other on foundational, subsonic levels – in the same way languages have all borrowed the idea of the alphabet, or been shaped by the printing press – hip hop, born of Jamaica and the south Bronx, cannot be truthfully categorized as one of the blues’ children, although of course there are delightful moments of inspiration and cross-pollination between the two. Pilfering a century of recorded music, as deeply rooted in our state of information overload as the delta blues was in wood and wire and the solitary human heart, our current approach to sound is worlds away from the blues masters’. As the sampler and other machines reshaped the American sonic palette and hip hop came to dominate popular music, the reign of the blues, it must be said, came to a close. (Specifically, rock has largely drained itself of the blues and started again, keeping little and filling itself with hip hop and electronica and anything else it found. Hendrix and Zeppelin were the blues writ large, of course, but only an academic with too much time on his or her hands could find the blues buried in Broken Social Scene or Battles.)
Fourth, the blues and its family of popular musics never, even at their height, touched all of America. Bluegrass and other mountain music, wistful parents of the extraordinarily successful, influential, and long-lived popular country music tradition in America, are surely related to the blues, but more distantly, and as contemporaries, not offspring. (Cousins, perhaps? How far can a metaphor bend until it breaks?) Our Latino population – huge and growing, in case you’d forgotten, comprising more of America each day – mostly listens to music that is not the blues, is not descended from the blues, isn’t even related to the blues. And there has always been concert music, marching band music. There has been polka. Americans dance to Celtic reels, croon lullabies, play taps. I love the color the blues gave American popular culture. But we are not the blues.
Has your mind now given up on the word “blues” and set it loose from its mooring? Are you watching it drift away with a bemused, puzzled expression on your face? Have I repeated it so much you now question the spelling, the reality of it? If not, reread the last few paragraphs a few more times. It’s a rewarding experience, I promise you.
So: the heterogeneity of America precludes the writing of a song about what it’s like to be from here. We write plenty of great songs about what its like to be from certain cities – all great American cities have at least two dozen anthems to their credit, I believe that is actually one of the prerequisites to being known as a “great American city” – and what it’s like to be in the Ozarks or sailing down the Mississippi or wandering the Great Plains. Some of our best songs are even more specific, especially in hip hop, which celebrates regionalism on steroids. For most rappers I listen to, I can name not only the city they’re from, but the neighborhood. But as for a song for America as a whole, not a chance.
America is not small, summarizable, even recognizably American from one end to the other. But the other reason there is a dearth of songs that successfully celebrate our American-ness to is related to what America is. The things that are (usually) common to Americans, the things that (in theory) unite us, the things that (for the most part) remain constant throughout our history, are very abstract. It’s not a kind of food, it’s not a way of dressing, and it’s not music, the blues and its noble attempt notwithstanding. It’s the United States Constitution. It’s ideas, attitudes, beliefs. Any song that tries to celebrate America is bound to get mired in platitudes, truisms, boring and bland generalizations. These songs are hobbled by bleary-eyed patriotism and the criminal overuse of words like freedom. The problem with big ideas, noble promises, and the like- from the standpoint of our rhetorical musician, on his merry quest to write a proudly American song, of course- is not only that they’re boring and bland, but that if they’re taken to their logical conclusion, they’re universal. Democracy! Liberty! Checks and balances! etcetera, etcetera. What room does that leave our poor, hypothetical balladeer for expressing joy at being part of this people, living in this place, here, now? Why bother with the word “America” at all? God bless us all.
I’m writing this because I was listening to a song on the car ride home tonight that for me is that song I want – that song about being from somewhere, that happens to be about being from where I’m from. It’s about being from America in a world where there are other options – when so often American songs seem to exist in a fantasy where a few miles offshore, a few steps into the Canadian woods or across the Mexican desert, the world drops away and one falls, if one is stubborn enough to keep walking straight, off of it. It’s about being American, when lots of people are not American, and partying with these people, talking to them, performing for them, and still being not them. Still being from here. From New York City.
It is not, either in sound or in lyrical content, a song that encompasses all American experience. It’s clearly specific to being a dance DJ based in NYC and touring Europe – and how many of us can really say, why yes, that is my life. That is so me. But it is not about living in New York City – hey aren’t these summers hot, we’re from Queens and you’re from the Bronx, let’s hang out at Coney Island, or any of the other variants on this theme – it’s about being from New York, out in the world. Greetings. We are North Americans. We are North American Scum. In a funny way, this song stumbles upon that one thing that is universally shared in this country, what does unite us: when traveling abroad, we are Americans. It is only through others’ eyes that we merge – like in one of those magic eye pictures – into a cohesive unity, and that the nationality American takes on meaning, whatever it is – usually revered, reviled, or approached with some curious combination of the two. A little strange and unsettling, that the meaning of American is largely determined outside of America (and often based on very limited information), but that is our lot in life.
That’s what you get when you are in content, complicated, and in temperament, a pushy egomaniac. Not for us the humility that lets small European countries pick a specific beverage, the production of some condiment or another, a favorite craft perhaps, and brand themselves with that, carefully assemble a matching set of food, music, dancing, writing. Hey, did you hear the saxophone was invented in Belgium? Not for us the defining catastrophe, or the narrow tribal identity, or the single eternal struggle. We suffer Attention Deficit Disorder when it comes to our cultural pursuits and purposes. And our image is largely out of our hands. Try as she might, Mrs. Rice can’t make a neat package of all this – anyone who tries to brand America as one thing will find a thousand angry representatives of the other at their gate.
I’m seriously considering reopening that account I had with a server where I posted music files – I used to link to them on my old blog – in order to post, then link to, this song. It was one of my favorites last year, and I kept playing it for people hoping someone else would agree, but I played it in my car, so they looked at me funny. What I need to do is get a party going, get people buzzed, talking loudly, and then put it on. See if they think I’m crazy then!
It thrums. It buzzes. Then the drums crash, snap, plink, and generally elicit smiles that spread across your whole face, if, like me, you are someone who is tuned just so and loves this sort of thing. “North American Scum,” from the startlingly brilliant and occasionally quite moving Sound of Silver by LCD Soundsystem. These are the guys who made the cowbell cool again. Really cool. Later on, there are choppy guitar chords. Your dopey grin makes another appearance.
An aside:
Wait, “again”? When was the cowbell cool the first time? Or ever?
Moving on:
Our narrator is not in business of selling America, of praising it’s Constitution, of listing it’s virtues. It’s just that he happens to live here. “You see, I love this place that I’ve grown to know.” It’s as simple as that: this is my home, this is familiar, this is mine. He has gripes: the rent is too high, for one, the kids are uptight, and our parties apparently pale in comparison to those thrown in Europe. “We can’t have parties like in Spain where they go all night – shut down in North America – or like Berlin, where they go in nothing, like- alright!”
Nevertheless, he is proud to be North American Scum in our age of anti-Americanism. “Yeah, I know you wouldn’t touch us with a ten-foot pole” he says, to everyone looking down their noses. And while he’s not one to turn others’ anti-Americanism into an excuse for xenophobia – it’s actually kind of sweet when he says “I hate the feeling when you’re looking at me that way, ’cause we’re North Americans” – he doesn’t renounce his citizenship. He revels in it. Talk-sung-chanted over this pounding, proud house track, lines like “We love North America” and “Take me back to the States, man,” and even the oft-repeated, charmingly direct declaration “We’re from North America” seem to capture something other songs never have for me, something I love. America is not the world. America is not perfect, not eternal, not right, not free or just or any other silly word. But it happens to be my home. I love this place that I’ve grown to know.
The ideas, ideals of America; the invention, innovation, and creation that takes place here; all the gooey abstract goodness; of course I have great affection for these things. I have great affection for Frank Capra movies and the voice of Ella Fitzgerald, the phrase “the great American novel,” the pursuit of happiness, checks and balances. But abstractions do not a nation make. To the extent that our abstractions are jingoistic and exceptionalist, they are blind and wrong. And to the extent that they’re universal, well, they’re better filed under “membership in human race” or “residence on planet Earth” than my allegiance to the specifics of this place – my neighbors, my weather, the local gyro shop staffed by young Latinos.
Of course, I’m a big believer in History with a capital “H” and the unity of human destiny, and I’m happy to live in that mode, don my Member Of Humanity nametag, in most of my intellectual pursuits. I celebrate our interconnected, globalized species, our great collective triumphs – a million people lifted out of extreme poverty in China by market forces, global hunger beaten down in the last three decades by bioengineering, the cell phone revolutionizing Africa, Christina Aguilera winning the Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance twice. But I’m also a proud North American. American-ness gets in its own way – our boastfulness, our self-importance, stands between us and what I think a lot of people have, a simple, basic love of their home, love for whatever nation they happened to be born into. We warp that love, try to build something impossible and foolhardy around it, bind it to big words like liberty. Who needs that? Why not let liberty be liberty, let human rights and market capitalism and constitutional liberalism and democratic pluralism stand on their own two feet, live and die by their merits in that great testing ground of abstractions, the grand stadium of History? We hold these abstractions back – why saddle them with our imperfections, our transgressions, tie them to us as if they would cease to have merit were we to falter? And beyond these Platonic dreams, why not open a space for us to say, hey, by the way, we’re from North America. We are North Americans. We love North America.
We are North American Scum.
This Joyful Noise 
