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June 8/9, 2002
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
June 7, 2002
Michael Colby
Bush to the Nation:
You're All Cops Now
Tanweer Akram
Howard
Zinn's "Terrorism
and War": a review
David Krieger
New Security Challenges
Sam Bahour
The Palestinian
Intifada:
A Very American Struggle
Tom Turnipseed
A Crisis of Confidence
in US Leadership
June 6, 2002
Michael Colby
White House
vs. EPA:
Political Hot Air and
Global Warming
Ron Jacobs
The Indo-Pakistan Conflict:
It's Just a Shot Away
Francis Boyle
Take Sharon
to The Hague:
Prosecute Israeli War Crimes
at Jenin
CounterPunch Bulletin
60 Minutes and President Chavez's
Censored F-Word
Mark Weisbrot
Spying
and Lying:
The FBI's Shameful Past
June 5, 2002
Robert Fisk
Berlusconi the Censor
Danielle Brian
Nuclear
Plants and Terrorism
Ardeshir Cowasjee
For What Do We Fight?
George Monbiot
Kashmir
on the Brink
Michael Neumann
What is Antisemitism?
June 4, 2002
Dave Marsh
Bono the Useful Idiot
William Evan / Francis
Boyle
Kashmir:
Invoking Intl. Law to Avoid Nuclear War
Cockburn / St. Clair
The Future Wellstone Deserves
June 3, 2002
Ramdas / Makhijani
India,
Pakistan and Nukes:
A Road Map to Peace
Fran Shor
Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan
Neve Gordon
The Caterpillar
Effect
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June 8/9, 2002
Musicians Against
the Death Penalty
The Executioner's Last Songs
by Jeffrey St. Clair
That motormouth Bono announced to the world (everything
he says these days seems to have the weight of a Papal Encyclical)
in a recent interview in Time magazine that he's given up on
music as a political force. From here on out Bono says he's going
to use the persuasive aura of his own personality to wipe out
Third World debt. After all his are the lips that smooched Jesse
Helms and the hands that caressed Orin Hatch. Is it too soon
to say good luck and good riddance?
Bono's self-directed exit (was he ever
really there to begin with?) leaves the field open to artists
who still believe that music has the ability not only to stir
the soul but change the heart and minds of people willing to
listen. One such artist is Jon Langford, who has been around
longer than Bono and has never given up on the power of popular
music to reach people and inspire them toward social change.
Langford is a leader of the great British
punk band The Mekons, a group of Leeds University leftist and
anarchists, who, along with The Clash, The Sex Pistols and Gang
of Four, produced some of the most politically-charged music
of the late seventies and 1980s. In fact, I'm not sure I could
have survived the  eighties without the knowledge
that a new record by the Mekons could be expected every six months
or so. The Mekons made records that sounded just as pissed off
as I felt about the Thatcherites and Reaganites and the liberal
wimps who stood by as the rightwing goons turned the government
into a thermo-nuclear subsidiary of the transnational corporations.
And, of course, the Mekons were a raucous counterpunch to the
kind of musical fare we were being spoon-fed through the eighties
(led by the narcissistic sputum of Madonna, Michael Jackson,
and Duran Duran), as the corporatization of rock was in full-bloom.
The Mekons may never have acquired the
international following of the other bands, but they never sold
out either. The Mekons made music their way: confrontational,
experimental and uncompromising. They were versed in Marx, Tzara
and Debord, but they also knew their Bob Wills, Bill Monroe and
T-Bone Walker. Some of their records were odd, some truly bad,
and some, such as Rock
n' Roll, stand with the best music made in those dreadful
decades.
While many other punk-influenced bands
imploded, died off, retired, or, like U2, morphed into pop autmatons
for the big music conglomerates that rule the soundwaves, the
Mekons, in their various guises (such as the Waco Boys and Pine
Valley Cosmonauts), kept on making their own kind of music. Often
a species of punk-country. Usually out of Chicago, once the city
that electrified the blues, now an emerging center for neo-roots
music.
There is, of course, no more potent symbol
of the ultimate authority of the state than the death penalty.
And it's prevalence here offers a peephole into the true character
of the American political system, where the execution of prisoners
often serves as a kind of obscene offering to the electoral gods.
Remember Rickey Ray Rector, the black, brain-damaged inmate Clinton
rushed home to put to death in the heat of the 1992 campaign?
Thus, it's scarcely surprising that upon relocating to the US
Langford and his cohorts would soon begin to agitate, both musically
and politically, for its abolition.
And it's also apt that when the time
came to make a full-blown musical manifesto against the death
penalty Langford chose to burrow into the American past to reinterpret
old-time music, the music that came out of what Greil Marcus
calls the Weird America, the Invisible Republic of cotton field
workers and hillbillies, juke joints and charismatic churches.
There was a time when American music
was filled with stories of everyday violence, the cruelties of
prison life, vigilantism, mob violence and the horrors of execution.
The old dialectic of freedom and confinement was at the core
of the lyrical content of the regional music that gave birth
to rock n' roll. The blues, bluegrass, mountain ballads, Ur-country-roots
music, as the labels market it today--all dealt frequently--even
obessively--with these themes that were so much a part of being
poor and/or black in America. To a large extent this tradition
of American music is only being carried on these days by hip-hop.
So now Langford and his Pine Valley Cosmonauts
give us: Executioner's
Last Songs, a collection of 18 songs "of murder,
mob law, and cruel, cruel punishment." The title of this
release, from Chicago indie label Bloodshot
Records, is at once a play on Norman Mailer's account
of the 1977 killing by the State of Utah of Gary Gilmore (the
first execution since the Supreme Court reinstituted the death
penalty) and a prophesy of sorts. The band, with help of an amazing
collection of like-minded artists, reworks music from the Louvin
Brothers, Charley Pride, Johnny Paycheck, Cole Porter, Merle
Haggard, the Stanley Brothers and Johnny Cash with the intent,
according to Langford, "of consigning them to the realm
of myth, memory and history."
The proceeds from the album will go to
the Illinois
Death Penalty Moratorium Project, which has done unyielding
work on behalf of death row inmates over the past few years.
In the outside world, this toil is largely thankless, but in
2001 17 people in the state of Illinois alone walked off Death
Row, in part due to the project's tireless efforts.
But let's be clear. The real movement
against the death penalty isn't about only keeping innocent people
from being killed by the state. What rational person (WARNING:
Antonin Scalia is NOT a rational person) would not be opposed
to the killing of innocents? No. This is about abolition, period.
The rising tide of executions (there
have been 763 killings since Gilmore, with more than half of
those having been carried out in the last five years) is America's
equivalent of Argentina's so-called dirty war, where hundreds
of souls are carted off to their doom with little hope of appeal.
Call them America's disappeared.
There are now more than 3,700 prisoners
on death row, with a new one being added nearly every other day.
States, led by the killing machines of Texas and Florida, are
putting women, children, the sick and the mentally-ill. Meanwhile,
constitutional rights to effective counsel, a jury of your peers
(people who oppose the death penalty are not permitted to serve
on juries in death penalty cases) and habeas corpus have been
gutted.
Executioners' Last Songs isn't a No Nukes
or We Are the World type of endeavor. It's a genuine oppositional
undertaking. The death penalty remains sickly popular in America
and resistance to it is scarely a ticket to career enhancement.
Artists who take on this cause in a serious way-such as Springsteen,
Steve Earle, and Langford and company-do so at some risk to their
livelihood. It's one thing to attach yourself to a cause like
saving the Amazonian rainforest and quite another matter entirely,
in this nation at least, to demand that the state should not
have the legal or moral right to kill prisoners, even if they
have committed unspeakable crimes.
But though the issue is almost unbearably
grim, there's nothing solemn or preachy in this offering, no
pious sermonizing or Bono-like preening for the cameras. There
is, however, a blistering rant-in all the best senses of that
word-by Tony Fitzpatrick. With a nod to Dylan, Fitzpatrick titles
his call-to-arms Idiot Whistle: "Politicians love the death
penalty because it makes a bunch of candy-asses look like tough
guys."
The music moves through its own stages
of grieving and lamentation, puzzlement, revulsion, querulousness
and outrage: from the lovely and gifted Neko Case's elegaic Poor
Ellen Smith and the Faulknerian black comedy of Jenny Toomey's
Miss Otis Regrets to The Aluminum Group's 25 Minutes to Go (a
bracing countdown to an execution) and Rick Sherry's full-throttle
version of Don't Look at the Hanged Man.
The Advert's 1977 punk classic Gary Gilmore's
Eyes is countryfied by Deano from the Waco Boys' with help of
Sally Timms from the Mekons. The inimitable LA alt-country phenom
Rosie Flores sings, with a voice somewhere between Melba Montgomery
and Iris Dement, Hank Williams' I'll Never Get Out of this Place
Alive. Steve Earle breathes new life into Tom Dooley, making
that old story sound urgent, new and familiar all at the same
time. To my mind, Earle is the most compelling American rocker
out there today. He's certainly the most interesting, producing
music that just keeps getting better and deeper. Earle's got
a voice that can chill your spine and a guitar-style as raw and
accomplished as anything hatched by the great westside Chicago
bluesman Hounddog Taylor.
Remember George Bush and Karla Faye Tucker?
Lanford and Johnny Dowd do in their song Judgement Day: "God
gave her life, but the mighty state of Texas took it away. She's
dead. Gone. To a better place. The governor's so ashamed he won't
even show his face.Just one thing I want to say: She ain't the
only one facing the Lord on Judgement Day."
Chicagoan Diane Izzo contributes a defiant
version of the sinister ballad, Oh Death. Her exquisitely eroded
voice reclaims the old Dock Boggs song from the malign purposes
it was put to in the Coen Brothers' offensive minstrelsy-show
of a film, Oh, Brother Where Art Thou, where Ralph Stanley's
resigned voice is outrageously rerouted through the mouth of
a Klansman.
Last phone calls. Last letters. Last
kisses. Last meals. Last songs. Dreams of escape, freedom and
commutation. Last prayers to Jesus, Allah, Elvis. Final goodbyes.
It's all here in the songs; the unspeakably cruel circumstances
of everyday life on America's death row.
The CD closes with Paul Burch's assured
version of Walls of Time, a beautiful bluegrass tune penned by
Peter Rowan, which became a signature song for Bill Monroe. It's
a kind of ghost story, really, a ghost story that ends on a quavering
note of love, reunion and redemption.
Executioners' Last Songs provides an
eerie kind of testimony to just how wrong Bono is. The songs
are haunting, angry, and, often, funny--the kind of gallows humor
that only works when it's done by those who know what's really
at stake. So take those ridiculous U2 cds down to the used record
store, trade them in and recycle the money into something that
matters: Executioners Last Songs. And feel good about it. You
can make a difference. Music isn't going to lead the way to radical
change (that's going to take lawyers, organizers, activists,
politicians and judges with courage), but it sure as hell can
provide the marching tunes. Langford and friends have given us
an unexpected message of hope amidst the bleakest of circumstances.
Hope through struggle, that is.
Jeffrey St. Clair can be reached at counterpunch@counterpunch.org
Today's Other Features:
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
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