Photo by Jamelle Bouie
Sometimes softball questions can be the most revealing ones.
At the end of an interview last Tuesday on CBS This Morning, anchor Gayle King asked newly-minted Republican presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz a pop-culture question. It’s the kind candidates get asked occasionally as an afterthought or lighthearted way to end an interview. Every little thing means something in the hyper-scrutinizing world of politics, but pop-culture topics are usually reserved for Rolling Stone interviews. In network TV and political news, it hardly comes up.
"What do you do for fun?" King asked. Namely, what music kind of music are you listening to? Both President Barack Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney were asked questions like this as candidates well into 2012 election season. Cruz, being the first major candidate to announce, got it out of the way early.
This is why softball questions can be the most revealing. And Cruz’s unintentional reveal was really something.
"I grew up listening to classic rock and I’ll tell you sort of an odd story," Cruz said. "My music taste changed on 9/11. And it’s a very strange… I actually, intellectually find this very curious, but 9/11… I didn’t like how rock music responded, and country music collectively, the way they responded, it resonated with me, and I have to say it, just as a gut level, I had an emotional reaction that says, ‘These are my people.’"
If you’ll forgive a little political scrutiny mixed in with your music criticism, that is very curious. Pop culture questions—while they might seem trivial or out-of-place—work as an implicit gauge of a candidate’s cultural compass. The answers can even point to their intellectual frame of reference—say, generationally—as a potential leader. If nothing else, it’s a rare question that candidates can answer sincerely without they or their staff feeling like they have to calculate too much—a question they don’t feel pressed about, maybe. Sure, it was probably a calculated answer to appeal to the Republican/Tea Party base that Cruz has so successfully pandered to. Country music speaks—at least stereotypically—to that base. He’s looking to get nominated. Whatever.
But what Cruz said was also telling, mirroring a growing cultural split among conservative—not between Republicans and Tea Partiers, so much—but generationally and between authoritarians and libertarians. To be sure, our listening doesn’t always line up with our political beliefs (or ambitions, in this case). Lately, there’s been a curious trend of young Republican political stars listening to rebellious music and blithely ignoring the actual lyrical message. Sen. Marco Rubio, another potential presidential contender for the GOP, is an avowed fan of Public Enemy. Romney's 2012 running mate Rep. Paul Ryan loves Rage Against the Machine. Rep. Ryan and Sen. Rubio don’t seem to mind their lyrics. Sen. Cruz's answer indicates he did mind rock music’s lyrics—what they did or didn’t say/imply politically—after 9/11. He didn’t like rock music’s tepid post-9/11 response, preferring country’s bombastic one.
But what Cruz is missing out on is the conservative takeover of mainstream rock.
When did conservatives steal rock'n'roll from us?
After 9/11, rock music never really got its political feet back under it. On the day, rock radio opted for inspirational songs like U2’s "Beautiful Day" and later the wistful "Walk On". Incubus’ mellow hit "Drive" was ubiquitous for its chin-up chorus, "Whatever tomorrow brings, I’ll be there/ With open arms and open eyes."
As the days and weeks wore on, any radio-rock bands that could’ve been conduits for important political dissent were notably squelched. Having disbanded in 2000, Rage Against the Machine’s entire discography was de facto banned from Clear Channel-owned radio stations indefinitely. System of a Down’s "Chop Suey!", the lead single off its 2001 LP Toxicity, was on that list, too, with its chorus of "self-righteous suicide."Toxicity—with album cuts like "Jet Pilot" and informed by a clearly Armenian-American perspective—would end up debuting at number one on the Billboard album charts that fateful Tuesday. The invective toward System of a Down online was likely the first knee-jerk manifestation of Islamophobia in American music post-9/11. Regardless, neither band cut 9/11 response or anti-Iraq War songs.
As the months wore on into 2002, rock had the odd dissenters. Disturbed’s single "Prayer" off Believe criticized Christian leaders—by name, at times—and organized religion overall for using 9/11 as a source of demagoguery. The band didn’t toe the Support the Troops line its radio-rock peers 3 Doors Down and Linkin Park did. Disturbed pointed fingers in its music while Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de la Rocha and Tom Morello spoke their piece. System of a Down’s Serj Tankian took a gentler approach in an essay called "Understanding Oil," asking for context, peace and togetherness while about to embark on a U.S. tour called—shit you not—The Pledge of Allegiance Tour. They were noble efforts, but country artists had gained control of the post-9/11 American zeitgeist.
There’s an irony in that. Rock artists were some of the most openly patriotic and of service after 9/11, they just weren’t dicks about it. Except for maybe Kid Rock who, surprising absolutely no one, was a dick about it. In terms of sheer enthusiasm, he led rock’s patriotic post-9/11/pro-Iraq War response, doubling down on his "American Badass" jingoism. The network-TV telethon response was predominantly rock and pop artists who led massive fundraising efforts. America: A Tribute to Heroes and The Concert for New York City were a Who’s Who of mostly rock musicians. And they were acknowledged—barely, momentarily—over country’s screaming "God Bless the U.S.A." squall. Indeed, mainstream rock seemed largely inert or perfunctory in its response, at least in comparison to country, falling short on anything truly rocking the boat. Certainly in terms of protest, 40 years after the first anti-war/pro-civil rights songs of the '60s, rock choked.
Neil Young, a legend of the era, seemed to flip flop after 9/11. Young took up the mantle of patriotism—tempered by his signature plainspoken storytelling and apolitical empathy—with his 2001 song "Let’s Roll", released just months after the attack, later re-releasing it on his 2002 LP Are You Passionate? It took him about five years more to cut an anti-Bush protest song, "Let’s Impeach the President", for 2006’s Living With War.
It raises the question, then, what the heck happened to rock'n'roll? What made it so afraid of its lefty protest roots after 9/11 and during the 2003 Iraq War, when America needed it most? You could start with New York Times pop critic Kelefa Sanneh, who wrote the first mainstream inventory and condemnation of Rockism, exposing the parochial—even patriarchal—roots of modern rock'n'roll. In 2004, Patton Oswalt asked condemningly, "When did conservatives steal rock'n'roll from us?!" on his comedy special No Reason to Complain. In a bit on his love-hate relationship with National Public Radio, Oswalt critiques and inventories the music and culture behind conservative and liberal news media.
"All the AM stations, with nothing but racist, fascist douchebags, all their break music is this blasty-ass, gut-bucket rock'n'roll!” he laments, begging NPR to "play some Zeppelin, for God’s sake!"
One of those racist fascist douchebags, Glenn Beck, ran into some trouble with English rock band Muse. Beck played, endorsed and even recited the lyrics to the band’s hit single "Uprising" in 2009 on The Glenn Beck Program, calling them "one of his favorite bands."
There are plenty of examples of rock’s rising conservative cultural ownership after 9/11. But the Beck/Muse feud is particularly telling. Since 9/11, the English band has been the only new (well, new to the U.S.) rock band making bold political statements with a global, or at least transatlantic, audience. It’s only fitting that the band’s political spectacle arguably peaked in 2009, a year of global economic recession. It led The Resistance to capture the zeitgeist: a crisis of confidence in governments, leaders, banks, etc.
And there, in conservative America, was Glenn Beck right alongside them. Beck and Muse singer/guitarist Matthew Bellamy were put on a pop-cultural collision course that seems inevitable in hindsight. By their own admission, they’re both libertariantypes, but on opposing ends of a liberal-conservative spectrum. Any common ground they could’ve shared was spoiled by their public back-and-forth over a kind of ownership of Muse’s music.
It’s one of the more recent demonstrations of a sad truth: rock is more co-opted by conservatives than ever today. A listener is more likely to hear lead rock guitar in break music on an AM talk radio station than a top 40 FM one. The lefty protest songs of '60s classic rock have become a mere memory of youth to the Baby Boomers, who grew in age and into more conservative values. Hell, Republicans can openly be fans of the Doors now, apparently.
Yet, rock’s overall relevance didn’t wane immediately after 9/11. It just wasn’t with protest songs anymore. Instead, the genre looked inward, in a scene located too close to Ground Zero for its comfort. The scene was blooming in downtown Manhattan, predating the Brooklyn boom. The island was captive, at an eerie standstill in the days following 9/11, so the kids downtown found comfort in the brat-punk discontent of rock'n'roll like the Strokes' 2001 debut Is This It. And even there, no political songs took root. "New York City Cops", the band’s closest thing to a protest song, was cut by RCA Records due to post-9/11 sensitivities, leaving the rest of the record in a fit of lyrics about girls and nostalgia. It left Is This It to play as a blissful retro escape of post-9/11 rigors for New York and, in time, the rest of the nation.
The downtown scene’s heartfelt response came in 2002, courtesy of Interpol's post-9/11 triumph of the maudlin, Turn on the Bright Lights. Written before 9/11 and recorded afterward, it captured the city’s zeitgeist in shadows, romance and Dadaist lyrics. "For a few short weeks in New York, everybody was your best friend," Interpol drummer Sam Fogarino told Pitchfork. "Everybody had your back. Everybody held the door for each other."
Rock'n'roll wasn’t interested in protest songs. As the years after 9/11 went on, rock continued to turn inward, falling into an apolitical oblivion of angst, genre revivals, retooled cliches and nostalgia. Any sense of dangerous youthful rebellion rock once had would slowly migrate toward electronic music, culminating in American EDM about a decade later. Rock would come to rely largely on legacy acts—commercially and artistically—for relevance. Much like conservatives do for their ideas.
Senator Cruz missed all this, apparently. He concluded the CBS interview saying, "I’m an odd country music fan." Maybe he should consider returning to the fold.