Many of my posts and comments convey confidence and a degree of certainty in my political philosophy. However, I enjoy art and ideas that embrace ambiguity and uncertainty. With that in mind, I share Laibach’s “cover” of the US national anthem from their 2006 album Volk.
Laibach, the anti-ABBA of Slovenia, is a truly unique group in terms of musical style and how they juxtapose seemingly contradictory visual and philosophical elements. The result is a dissonance on multiple levels that usually leaves audience members putting the pieces together themselves. The reaction tells you more about the audience than the performance. In this way, the songs are like Rorschach tests.
For the Volk album, Laibach reworked the national anthems for a number of countries. The song “America” is based on the US national anthem “The Star Spangled Banner”. This song is challenging aesthetically and in its political ambiguity. Let’s give it a go for this year’s Fourth of July.
The song opens with some typical Laibach industrial noise. It quickly quiets down to a keyboard noodling the notes from a D minor chord with some sirens in the distant background. A guest singer then comes in with a very subdued and almost quivering vocal using the melody and some lyrics from the Star Spangled Banner. Other lyrics are altered into melodramatic questions.
So the Land of the Free
And the Home of the Brave ,
Are your stars still so bright?
Does your banner still wave?
Oh, the Land of the Free
And the Home of the Brave,
Are you heaven on Earth?
Or the gloom of the grave?
Because these are questions, as listener we fill in the answers ourselves. We can think, “Yeah, what makes America think it is so great?” Or, we can think, “Who are these guys to question whether America is still great?”
But, it gets better. Laibach’s lead “singer” comes in with one his guttural spoken word parts over a minimalist synthesizer base line (plus that distant siren again). But, not just any words…Words based on the Preamble to the US Constitution… And, again in the form of questions.
You.
The people of the United States.
Did you form a perfect union?
Establish justice?
Ensure tranquility?
Secure the blessings of Liberty?
To yourselves and your posterity?
How blind can you get?
For your country right or wrong?
America.
The melting pot.
Note how innocently aggressive it is to change “We the People” to “You the People”.
As with the questions from the chorus, again, the audience can react:
- “Yeah, those Americans are arrogant and don’t live up to their own ideas.”
- “Who are these people to question America? We aren’t perfect but at least we believe in ideas worth striving for.”
I like the touch at the end about the melting pot. This is another twist in that other countries and peoples must face the fact that some of its own have certainly left to become Americans. America is not entirely “the other.” America is always a looking glass where beholders may see an image of themselves as similar or different, uglier or more beautiful.
***
After a repeat of the opening “chorus” with fuller musical backing, there is another break and shift to a synthesized orchestral part. The “vocal” overlain on this is an excerpt from a fire and brimstone type sermon from the South.* This is more melodrama but also insightful because America is one of few Western industrial nations that retains a significant religious element to its culture.
The sermon itself speaks to the gap that may always exist between human aspirations and actual achievement… a metaphor for a similar gap between American ideals and imperfect reality.
We children,
We children are born of Sin.
We are born of Sin.
That is why we must let
The Light of God, the Light of God
Into our hearts, children.
We are all Children of God,
But to the Lord we are Sinners.
We are Sinners.
We must let the Light, let the Love of God,
The Eternal Love of God into our hearts.
Or we will Burn
Burn in Hell.
Burn in Eternal Damnation.
The listener can again interpret this in multiple ways. A critic of America can focus on the sin and argue that the ideals are not worthy due to corruption. Or, a proponent can focus on the ideals and how rejecting them due to imperfection will lead to horrible consequences.
***
Immediately after the sermon, the song powers up the orchestral part with a stop’n’start drum track, a bell (probably tubular), a wandering backing vocal, and a return of the guttural spoken word that spins the religious theme off into a different direction, yet still open to interpretation.
Praise the Lord
And Praise the Holy Spirit
To save us from your
Freedom, Justice, Peace
Accordance and Illusion
From Arrogance and Pride
From Violence and Confusion
The Great Despair
And Great Depression
Satanic verses
Of your superstition
The Land of Plenty.
Your Bill of Rights
The Enterprise
The Free Will
And the Unbroken One
Your Self-Esteem
And Self-Desire
Your Trust in God
And in Religious Fire
America
The end of History
The end of Time
The end of Family
The end of Crime
The juxtapositions of needing to be saved from “Freedom, Justice, and Peace” and “Illusion” leading to “Violence and Confusion” do capture an ambiguity about the idea of American Exceptionalism.
There is more melodrama with references of despair and depression and the idea of the Land of Plenty as a superstition. After the line about the Bill of Rights, it sounds like the singer says “The Enterprise” but I keep thinking the better lyric would have been “Free Enterprise” since America is also known for its capitalist business culture.
The ending lines become ambiguous almost to the point of intentional inscrutability. The end of History could refer to Francis Fukuyama’s theory that the end of the Cold War represented the end of ideological evolution and permanent acceptance of liberal democracy. Historical progression ends and, as such, maybe an end of Time. Extended to the triumph of freedom and individualism, one could argue that there is an end to Family (read as communal groups and tribes). And with the end of group competition, an end to the crimes that groups commit against each other. Or, maybe not. Like I said, sometimes I think Laibach is intentionally inscrutable. Why would they do that? Maybe it’s just for fun.
How Does This Tie in to the Fourth of July?
I suspect that many listeners, especially from outside the US, interpret this song as critical. It really doesn’t bother me that some people do not like America. We are who we are. And, as of July 4, 1776, we are free and independent. It is up to us/U.S. to decide.
The idea of individual human freedom is simply the most radical idea ever invented. It threatens everyone who wants to impose their will on others by force rather than persuasion. So, even though I started writing this before Kerry’s open call question about what are we proud of, I can directly assert that I am proud that America is built on the idea of individual liberty. Perfection is not yet achieved but that does not make the idea wrong. I think it would be hard to argue that any of the autocracies have a better idea on which to build a moral society.
***
*For another piece that makes use of a sermon, listen to John Adams’s “Christian Zeal and Activity” from the album The Chairman Dances. The sermon in that piece makes use of a metaphor of Jesus healing a man with a withered hand. It’s quite powerful in the context of Adams’s minimalist music. Here is a YouTube video that is a slightly edited down version of the piece. Sorry, but the LEGO animator seems to be one of the few classical music fans working on YouTube.
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Comments
Freedom is a work in progress, and I do mean "work". It isn't easy, and requires a lot of care and integrity on the part of those who claim it.
Good and thoughtful stuff you've given us!
In business, there are always to ways to measure. Do you compare yourself to your desired result (maybe an ideal)? Or do you compare yourself to competitors? The answer is normally that you do forms of both. The rorschach test intended by this post is to see how different people might react (assuming I get any readers).
American exceptionalism is the result our greek and enlightenment following founders, nothing home-grown about it.
Face it 5-0, you owe almost all of your hubris to the French!
Mary, the vid works for me so it must have been a temporary YouTube bug.
Any nation that has monumental aspirations will have both monumental failures and monumental successes.
Oahusurfer embodies the unfortunate "hate America" tendency of some of those on the left. Yup, with these folks you can't say anything nice about the U.S. without them foaming at the mouth.
But if the U.S. had never existed as a nation, we can only speculate what would have happened had the French, Spanish, and who knows what other countries had split this place up among themselves -- what other wars and oppressions might have occurred. And if the U.S. had never existed as a democracy, and had never provided a model for the rest of the world, who knows what the world today might be like.
In the end, perhaps the problem in the Candide; it cannot be a perfect world the Candide learns, because of original sin.
Thank you, and happy Fourth of July. In the end, it is a human vanity, perhaps they say, that one can dispense with God and base reality on human will alone.
My first reaction to this song in 2006 was affected by the state of the union at the time, and its foreign policy. Being Canadian, I was raised with general distrust of American ideal and action, while quietly admiring many aspects of the country. I thought to myself that the song America was simply an anthem of world-wide disapproval of American leadership. But Laibach texts sometimes become more relevant long after they are penned, and now I have a new perspective. Listening to it now, in the age of 'hope,' the questions are difficult to answer for many reasons.
The 'sermon' section is actually is thought provoking... It is not just a sampling of something distinctly American for theatrical effect. Laibach have referred to what they call (in English) the Imminent Consistent Spirit before and when the 'preacher' mentioned the Holy Spirit, I thought it was significant (of what, I'm not sure). The text of the 'sermon' is a blessing and warning at the same time, and I suspect less ironic than some would automatically assume.
Considering Laibach's admonishing of England in their song Anglia, America got off pretty easily. I hear in the song America a yearning for the Heaven on Earth, a status to which people romantically elevate the America, but also a lamentation of the state of the Union.
Like the original anthem itself, if you actually listen to it (rather than just hear it at ball games), it brings about questions about the past and present of the country. And, obviously, it ends in a question.