The Foo Fighters, according to Stereogum, performed their song “Times Like These” for the recent Joe Biden inauguration concert that also included Bruce Springsteen and Lady Gaga… yes, that Lady Gaga. This is a fact immediately depressing, on one hand, seeing as the song came out about 16 years ago or so, its selection also ironic given that I’m pretty sure it was originally meant to soundtrack an administration of atrocities in Bush/Cheney.
But in a way, on the other hand, it just seems to fit in with the grotesquely optimistic, hopelessly cheesy discourses proffered at a presidential inauguration that it almost makes me feel good, in a way. My mom had Democracy Now blaring yesterday starting about 9:30 (which is typically about an hour and a half before I wake up) up through the noontime inauguration and all the ensuing scuttlebutt. I heard any number of watered-down, fly-by-night terms, phrases and little nuggets of generic “hopefulness” from that poet laureate girl, the guy in charge of the “benediction” (who did actually say something articulate about how we have to “make friends with our enemies,” something none too easy to do). I heard simplifications of the situation in our nation, as if to cast off all other events that have ever taken place before the year 2015, as if serving in presidency doesn’t involve any upholding of tradition but rather complete revolution, more or less. Much of this adds up to a considerably pompous and condescending enterprise, in my opinion, much of why I typically pay no attention to politics.
Sometimes you can just see stuff coming a mile away and you’re completely powerless. That’s about the time I tune out. Political dissent was still extremely vital in the late ’60s, obviously, with Buffalo Springfield’s “For What it’s Worth” and Neil Young’s “Ohio,” etc. It was still viable and logical, though, around the first gulf war. And so we got “What’s up?” by 4 Non Blondes and that gaggle of mostly annoying sh** by Public Enemy.
By the time of Foo Fighters’ “Times Like These,” it’s just ridiculous. If we’re bit**ing about the war machine this much and still haven’t gotten a revolution, we are the weakest body politic in this entire era. Sure, it’s possible we’re going up against the strongest adversary.
When the 2003 war in Iraq hit, I’ll admit, I got suicidal. I started lacing my weed with opium more often (granted this is also concurrent with my discovery of opium). The music I turned to was textural and mosaic — I craved escape, not relevant or applicable discourse. I think my favorite song was “Little Martha” by the Allman Brothers.
But I tuned out. And sure, ultimately, I do enjoy Green Day’s American Idiot and The Suicide Machines’ War Profiteering is Killing Us All. This being said, the best stuff on American Idiot is probably the stuff that’s least political, “Give Me Novacane” and maybe the hilarious supernarrative segment “St. Jimmy,” hence calling into question whether music and politics should even intermingle at this point at all (that’s probably the worst Suicide Machines album though I do find it a serviceable and stylistically commendable foray into hardcore punk on their part). If anything, to me, the Decemberists dirge “When the War Came” from their excellent The Crane Wife album seems to speak loud and clear, for its heady maturation of replacing cheeky, juvenile optimism and “spunk” with genuine melancholy and emotional paralysis, so to speak, to atone for the atrocities that had taken place.