“I’m just an American boy”
Saying the Unsayable After 9/11
IN THE WEEKS BEFORE SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, country-rock singer Steve Earle was thinking about putting together an album of protest songs. He already had one in the bag: “Amerika v 6.0 (The Best We Can Do),” an attack on the U.S. health care system which he had written for Nick Cassavetes’ movie John Q. But when two hijacked jets brought down the World Trade Center in New York, another crashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth, thought to be en route to the White House, came down in a field in Pennsylvania, there was suddenly no room in America for dissent.*
On September 14, several media outlets reprinted an e-mail which had been circulated by the giant radio conglomerate Clear Channel; it listed over 150 “lyrically questionable” songs to be avoided by DJs, including “War,” “Imagine,” “Eve of Destruction,” and the entire back catalog of Rage Against the Machine. Clear Channel was quick to insist that it was merely for guidance, rather than an official blacklist, but in the feverish post-9/11 climate, self-censorship was such a powerful instinct that most DJs obeyed the list anyway in the name of “sensitivity.” As Tom Morello commented, “If our songs are ‘questionable’ in any way, it is that they encourage people to question the kind of ignorance that breeds intolerance. Intolerance which can lead to censorship and the extinguishing of civil liberties, or at its extremes can lead to the kind of violence we witnessed.”
Morello was right to observe that the human tragedy of 9/11 was, like a dust cloud, obliterating any public discussion of the political context of the attacks, and, as journalist L. A. Kaufman noted, “definitively interrupt[ing] the unfolding logic of the movements for global justice.” Politics itself became “insensitive.” Steve Earle soon found that Cassavetes was no longer returning his calls regarding “Amerika v 6.0”—apparently, even health care was no longer up for debate.
Predictably, Americans turned en masse to songs they could wear like armor. Lee Greenwood’s flag-waving evergreen, “God Bless the U.S.A.,” returned to the airwaves with a vengeance, while a Harris poll in late September found that 70 percent of respondents had sung “God Bless America” at some point during the past weeks. What chance did a protest song have in such an environment? Not since Pearl Harbor had forced the Almanacs to drop their pro-union songs had a single event so abruptly stunned usually radical voices into silence. R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe referred to the period as “the Great Quiet.” It was clear that whoever broke the silence would have hell to pay.
STEVE EARLE HAD NEVER BEEN a conventional country singer. The year that he started performing in coffeehouses in San Antonio, Texas, as a naïve fourteen-year-old, was 1968, and his mind was blown open: by LSD, by the antiwar cause, and by The Communist Manifesto. Marx, he told his biographer Lauren St. John, gave him “the idea that songs should be about something—that there were more things to write about than girls—although I still write about girls.”
Earle’s debut album, 1986’s Guitar Town, evinced a tough, blue-collar humanism transparently inspired by Springsteen: the New York Times named him one of “Bruce’s Children.” He sifted the legacy of Vietnam on Copperhead Road (1988) and became a fierce opponent of capital punishment after striking up a friendship with Jonathan Wayne Nobles, a convicted double murderer awaiting execution at Texas’ Ellis Unit One. But his activism, among other things, was muted by a snowballing enthusiasm for heroin and crack, which looked set to send him to an early grave. After he detoxed in 1994, he reignited his political zeal with the anti-death-penalty “Ellis Unit One” and a lament for lost ideals, “Christmas in Washington”: “Come back Woody Guthrie / Come back to us now.” Asked if he identified with the working-class Guthrie, Earle demurred: “Me, I can more easily identify with Bob Dylan—to be middle-class but feel guilty about it, and be a radical only for that reason.”
Earle was on tour in Europe in December 2001 when he first heard the name John Walker Lindh. Lindh was a twenty-year-old American who had been named after John Lennon and raised in Maryland and California. He had first become interested in Islam via rappers such as Ice Cube and Public Enemy, and converted in 1997. He studied Arabic in Yemen, then continued his studies at a radical madrassa in Pakistan. In May 2001, he broke off contact with his family and moved to Afghanistan to join the fundamentalist Taliban regime in the fight against Northern Alliance rebels. And then 9/11 happened.
Before the dust around ground zero had even cleared, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was a foregone conclusion. The Taliban was proudly sheltering Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda, the prime suspects in the 9/11 attacks, and rejected a U.S. ultimatum to hand over all al Qaeda leaders and close terrorist training camps in the country. With Bush’s approval rating at a priapic 90 percent, and a similar number of Americans in favor of military action, there was never any real prospect of averting conflict. The first air strikes hit Afghanistan on October 7.
When the invasion began, and the Alliance became U.S. allies, Lindh continued to fight for the Taliban. He was apprehended by the Alliance on November 25, promptly escaped during a major Taliban uprising at the ad hoc prison in which he was held, and was recaptured on December 1, which is when this stick-thin, cracked-lipped, dust-throated, virtually delirious figure was introduced to the rest of the world via an interview on CNN.
Earle was struck by the fact that Lindh was the same age as his own son, Justin. “I became acutely aware that what happened to him could have happened to my son, and your son, and anybody’s son,” he told the Guardian’s John Harris. “Nobody in my country wanted to admit that. It’s one of the most American stories I’ve ever heard: he came to Islam by way of hip-hop, which I find fascinating. He was already looking outside his culture, like a lot of American kids are.”
Earle began writing a song from Lindh’s perspective: “just an American boy, raised on MTV.” Singing in a parched croak modeled on Lindh’s voice in the CNN clip, the narrator of “John Walker’s Blues” is an alienated teenager groping towards a cultural identity to call his own. In Afghanistan, he “fight[s] for what he believes” and is taken back “to the land of the infidel.” The chorus is a line from the Koran (“Asshadu an la illaha il Allah / There is no God but God”) and the song closes with a sample of a Koranic prayer. Setting aside the politically loaded context, it’s a classic first-person character song about an outlaw underdog, with Lindh a successor to the Death Row inmate in “Billy Austin” and the desperate Vietnam veteran of “Copperhead Road.”
“It became increasingly obvious to me that John Walker was being set up as a warning to any American that got out of line while this war against the new bogeyman was being pursued,” explained Earle. “I was trying to humanise him, because everybody else was trying to vilify him.” In the jingoistic hothouse of America in 2002, however, this kind of empathy was a tough sell. When he told his friend Elvis Costello about planning to release the song, Costello replied that he was “fucking crazy.”
Earle included the song on his next album, Jerusalem, where it sat alongside the reclaimed “Amerika v 6.0 (The Best We Can Do),” the all-things-must-pass message of “Ashes to Ashes,” the antiwar “Conspiracy Theory,” and the title track, about the ongoing deadlock in the Middle East. The disc was due for release in September 2002 but advance copies went out to critics two months early, which is when the storm broke. “Twisted Ballad Honors the Tali-Rat,” barked the New York Post on July 21. “Do you think an American would have written a paean to Hitler during World War Two?” a commentator on CNN asked absurdly.
At the exact same time, country radio was hammering another Nashville song: the red-blooded war holler of Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American).” Keith left no patriotic stone unturned: “Old Glory” flying proud, freedom’s bell ringing out, a soaring eagle, a fist-shaking Statue of Liberty, Afghanistan “lit up like the 4th of July,” and so on, like a pick-up truck plastered with bumper stickers. “That record embarrasses me,” complained Earle. “It’s pandering to an audience. But doing that in this atmosphere is dangerous. I have a fear that someone with dark skin and clothing different to what people wear in Tennessee might get hurt because of that song. It scares me.” While Keith’s song was flying high, Earle wrote in the liner notes to Jerusalem: “Lately, I feel like the loneliest man in America.”
EARLE WAS NOT QUITE THE ONLY DISSENTING VOICE in American music, but you really had to look hard for the other ones. Hip-hop, for example, had been paralyzed by the 9/11 attacks, muting its already dwindling antiestablishment voice. Rappers whose territorial pride didn’t previously extend beyond their own backyards suddenly transformed into chest-thumping patriots. “We’re supporting the USA,” rap mogul Suge Knight told the Washington Post. “At this moment, there’s no such thing as ghetto, middle class or rich. There’s only the United States.”
So the Wu-Tang Clan poked out from their usual labyrinth of Islamic mathematics and arcane conspiracy theories to proclaim, “America, together we stand, divided we fall,” on “Rules” New Orleans MC Mystikal, a veteran of the first Gulf War, recorded the defiant “Bouncin’ Back (Bumpin’ Me Against the Wall)” MC Hammer persuaded a handful of U.S. congressmen to dance in the video for his boosterish new single “No Stoppin’ Us (USA)” and Canibus went further than anyone on his loopily belligerent “Draft Me!”: “I wanna fight for my country / Jump in a humvee and murder those monkeys!” Not that such lyrics were commonplace, but it was surprising to hear this kind of sentiment at all. “Before 9/11 motherfuckers couldn’t stand [Bush’s] name,” rapped Paris on “What Would You Do.” “Now even niggas waving flags like they lost their mind.”
How did this happen? Certainly, there was a financial disincentive to rock the boat: the risk of lost airplay, sales, and sponsorship deals, of hysterical denunciations by tabloids and talk-radio hosts. Easier to stay quiet. But in many cases the desire to speak up wasn’t there in the first place—the muscles of protest had grown flabby. “During the Clinton years there wasn’t a common enemy to feed off so hip-hop reverted to a more relaxed atmosphere,” suggests Damien Randle of Houston duo the Legendary K.O. “By the time Bush junior came into office the industry believed that consumers didn’t want to go back to the sociopolitical thing and wanted to stay in escapist mode.”
To criticize the war required a modicum of geopolitical knowledge. To respond to a blatant atrocity in the heart of America (and New York was also the epicenter of hip-hop) you only had to go with your gut. So what dissent there was came from battle-hardened veterans like Public Enemy (“Son of a Bush”), Paris (Sonic Jihad), Nas (“Rule”), and Michael Franti (“Bomb the World”), with little or nothing to lose in terms of mainstream exposure.*
Rock was, if anything, even quieter. While Earle was undergoing trial by tabloid, another long-standing liberal voice, Bruce Springsteen, navigated a cautious path on his album about 9/11, The Rising. Neither waving the flag nor tearing it down, he homed in on the rescue workers and victims and crafted a consoling narrative about endurance and rebirth. “All people have is hope,” he explained. “You can’t be uncritical, but just a hope grounded in the real world of living, friendship, work, family, Saturday night. And that’s where it resides.” These were old Springsteenian themes, dusted off and applied to the new situation.
By the time the media storm hit Steve Earle, however, the world’s attention was turning from the existing operation in Afghanistan to a more contentious imminent one in Iraq. “It’s been a long, weird year and, take my word for it, there’s an even longer, weirder one coming,” Earle told an audience in Philadelphia that autumn. “Just remember that no matter what you hear it’s never, ever unpatriotic or un-American to question any fucking thing in a democracy.”
IN MARCH 2003, a group of congressmen meeting with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice received a surprise visit from President Bush. “Fuck Saddam,” said the commander in chief. “We’re taking him out.” Bush’s administration was stacked with neoconservative foreign policy hawks, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, who believed that the United States should remove potentially dangerous regimes with preemptive strikes rather than merely “containing” them with sanctions and inspections. They believed the world was a minefield and only the United States had the power and the moral authority to clear it. Top of their hit list was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and 9/11 gifted them a golden opportunity. Once Tony Blair, who had already practiced what he called humanitarian intervention in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, realized that Bush had Iraq in his gunsights, he decided that Britain had no choice but to stand squarely by America’s side.
However, preemption was not an easy doctrine to sell to the public in either country, so the official casus belli proved remarkably flexible. At first, the Bush administration tried to demonstrate links between Iraq and the 9/11 hijackers. When those proved nonexistent, they gathered evidence pointing towards Saddam having weapons of mass destruction (WMD), ignoring any findings to the contrary. The case was liberally dusted with talk of Saddam’s human rights abuses, his flouting of UN resolutions, and his potential threat to the stability of the region. “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD,” recorded a secret Downing Street memo in July 2002. “But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
Spurious though many of the professed motives turned out to be, they succeeded in subduing opposition: if those in the know claimed Saddam was a serious threat, well, then maybe he was. Uncertainty bred apathy, as Guy Garvey, front man of the Manchester band Elbow, discovered when his band played the V festival in August 2002. “I said, ‘I know you’re all going to have a great afternoon.’ And they all cheered. ‘I know you’re all going to get really drunk.’ And they all cheered. ‘I know you’re going to tell your elected leaders that they’re not killing anybody in your name.’ And there was stony silence among seventeen thousand people. It completely stunned me.”
A few months later, Elbow essayed a deliberately enervated version of Thunderclap Newman’s “Something in the Air” by way of satirical comment. “The original’s quite a rabble-rouser,” Garvey said. “We wanted to give it a lethargic, almost comical air because there is a general spirit of lethargy among the youth. It’s always been in the hands of young people to speak out and nobody gives a fuck. That’s scarier than the threat itself. It’s not cool to express your opinion or challenge authority anymore. If you’re seen to be waving your fist on a soapbox, it’s almost too ’69.” Garvey would later channel his disappointment into 2005’s bristling “Leaders of the Free World”: “I think we dropped the baton / Like the 60s never happened.”
At the end of 2002, Garvey’s was one of only six names from popular music on the Stop the War Web site, a feeble tally compared to dozens of writers, actors, and filmmakers. The others were Billy Bragg, Brian Eno, Kevin Rowland (formerly of Dexy’s Midnight Runners), Damon Albarn of Blur, and Robert “3D” Del Naja of Bristol duo Massive Attack. Albarn, a committed pacifist, had worn a CND T-shirt to the MTV Europe awards in November 2001 and announced, “Bombing one of the poorest countries in the world is wrong. You’ve got the voice, use it.” “I just felt really stupid,” he said a few months later. “I felt like I was pretty much on my own but I’m glad I did it.”
Del Naja was “slightly unsure” about the war in Afghanistan, but was adamantly opposed to any action in Iraq. He and Albarn began talking regularly about the situation and forging links with the newly founded Stop the War movement and the venerable CND with a view to mobilizing music fans to join demonstrations. Del Naja is a rare and endearing combination of intellectual curiosity, principled concern, and modesty. He only came to politics late himself, during the second Palestinian intifada in 2000, and decided to approach other musicians via their managers rather than directly, so as not to be seen to be exerting moral blackmail. Again and again, to his and Albarn’s bemusement, the answer came back: no.
There were a few reasons. Some people were genuinely persuaded by the case for war; a few even asked Del Naja if he supported Saddam. Some were frightened of controversy. Some were tired of being attacked for their politics. “It feels untenable for me to say anything,” Nicky Wire said at the time. “I just think it would be completely misinterpreted.” Some doubted their involvement would have any effect. “Perhaps those of us who still believe there’s some point in being involved in political action are being old-fashioned,” said a beleaguered Brian Eno. “Perhaps [other musicians] think the whole conversation isn’t going to achieve anything. And sometimes I have to agree.” Or, as Oasis’ Liam Gallagher put it, “Nobody’s gonna listen to knobhead out of Blur…. No one even listens to Bono.”
But many declined for the same reason that some Labour-voting musicians snubbed Red Wedge: they didn’t want to sign up to someone else’s campaign. “I think the problem is vanity,” reflected Del Naja. “Bands like to attach themselves to pet causes. What me and Damon tried to do was rise above all that but, as it went on, we gave up thinking about the bands and thought about the people.” Del Naja and Albarn joined an estimated four hundred thousand protesters in London for the first major march against the war in September 2002, signed petitions, wrote impassioned blogs, and placed awareness-raising ads in the music weeklies. What they did not do, however, was write songs about it. “It takes a particular kind of genius, which I don’t think I’ve been blessed with, to write a song which draws you in without being too black-and-white in its message,” says Del Naja.
One person the pair did not approach, and probably should have, was the man who had recorded the first significant British protest song about Bush and Blair’s wars: the former boy-band pinup turned blue-eyed soul star, George Michael. It was unfortunate that August 2002’s “Shoot the Dog” had an anodyne dance-pop groove, incoherent lyrics, and a crassly satirical animated video, but there was no gainsaying its bravery. Michael was ridiculed in the tabloids on both sides of the Atlantic. “I was hugely depressed by the lack of support from any quarter,” he grumbled afterwards. “What kind of snobs would not have asked me at that point to be something to do with it? I’d already stuck my neck right out. I’d actually made a record to be pilloried. I read the interviews with Damon Albarn and he was horribly simplistic and uninformed. And you know at the time they thought they were too good to give me a ring.”
Meanwhile, a major figure who might have been expected to join the antiwar camp, given his fury over Central America in the 1980s, maintained a diplomatic silence. Bono had recently made himself a spokesman for Third World development issues and felt that any comment on Iraq would alienate the politicians whose fingers were on the foreign aid purse strings. “You’re asking, ‘Don’t you speak up? Don’t you get out on the streets?’” he says. “And I gave up that right once I was in a genuine position of voicing the aspirations of millions of people who had no voice. I did say to Condi [Rice], ‘Really think about what happened in Ireland. The British army arrived in Ireland to protect the Catholic minority but when you’re standing on street corners in hard hats and khaki carrying that kind of hardware you very quickly become the enemy.’ But I wasn’t there for that.”
Whatever the reasons, a pattern of disunity was being set for the rest of the Bush years: several disparate musicians voicing their dissent, yet feeling that they were the only ones. The protests came piecemeal, often in the form of songs posted online. Some, such as R.E.M.’s solemnly acoustic “Final Straw,” Zack de la Rocha’s broiling hip-hop track “March of Death,” and Billy Bragg’s sardonic “The Price of Oil,” were quite powerful. Others, like the Beastie Boys’ “In a World Gone Mad” and Lenny Kravitz’s appallingly smug and fuzzy-minded “We Want Peace,” were not. None, to be honest, nailed their constituency as effectively as Toby Keith nailed his. In the event, the music world’s defining political statement of the period—in fact, its most significant in years—wasn’t a song at all, but a spontaneous comment made on a London stage.
PRIOR TO MARCH 10, 2003, nobody would have fingered the Dixie Chicks as potential troublemakers. Natalie Maines, Emily Robison, and her sister Martie Maguire all hailed from Lubbock, Texas, a quintessential red-state heartland. When they sang the national anthem at Texas Rangers games in the 1990s, Governor George W. Bush and his wife sat in the front-row box seats and chatted with the band. In January 2003, they performed the national anthem at the prestigious Super Bowl half-time show. A few weeks later, on March 1, they set a single-day record for ticket sales, pulling in $49 million for their forthcoming U.S. tour. Their album Home was enjoying its sixth week on top of the country charts, with the single “Travelin’ Soldier” about to follow suit. They were, unquestionably, country music’s sweethearts.
By then, the United States and its allies were days away from war with Iraq. For months, Blair had been driving efforts to secure a new UN resolution to authorize the invasion, but that day French president Jacques Chirac declared that he would veto the resolution, and a White House spokesman made it clear that if the UN did not act, the United States would. The back story that later emerged, namely that the United States and the UK had long been committed to war, was already dawning on many of the war’s opponents. On February 15, antiwar protestors had marched in around six hundred cities across the world, images from which Michael Moore edited into the video for System Of A Down’s “Boom!” Among over a million gathering in London were Del Naja, Albarn, and Bragg. “There was a sense of jubilant naïveté in the thought that it might change something,” says Del Naja. “That, apparently, was never going to happen.”
The headlines on March 10 were full of WMD, ultimatums, and last-minute diplomatic scrambles. That evening, the Dixie Chicks’ Top of the World tour kicked off at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London. After “Travelin’ Soldier,” an apolitical character song about a GI in Vietnam, Maines told the crowd: “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence.” She paused, smiled, fiddled with the tuning heads on her guitar. “And we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” As the venue filled with warm applause, she shot her bandmates a broad grin. “I got hot from my head to my toes,” Robison later told Time. “Just kind of this rush of ‘Ohhh, shit.’ It wasn’t that I didn’t agree with her 100 percent; it was just, ‘Oh, this is going to stir something up.’”
If it hadn’t been for the Guardian’s reviewer, Betty Clarke, the incident might have gone unreported, but here was a Middle American superstar explicitly condemning Bush’s rush to war; it was surely worth a mention. An influential conservative Web site, FreeRepublic.com, picked up the story and began mobilizing a grassroots boycott campaign. “Travelin’ Soldier” was yanked from playlists, and began free-falling down the charts, while sales of Home virtually halved within a week.* Lipton Iced Tea withdrew its lucrative sponsorship of the tour. Some radio stations set up trash bins in which outraged fans could deposit their Dixie Chicks CDs. “They should send Natalie over to Iraq, strap her to a bomb and just drop her over Baghdad,” opined one caller to WDAF-AM 61 Country. Americans with long memories thought back to the frenzy surrounding John Lennon when he said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, or to Pete Seeger and HUAC. Merle Haggard, the one-time scourge of the hippies, looked back further still, saying that the furor “reminded me of things I’d read about in Berlin in 1938. It pissed me off.”
The Dixie Chicks’ perceived sin was threefold: they had personally insulted the president; they had done so on foreign soil; and they had flown in the face of country music’s red-state constituency. “It had to be some group that seemed like all-American girls,” Maguire later reflected. “It had to be the unlikely voice from what looks like the conservative heart of America saying it. That was perfect.” By virtue of their genre, the trio became flak-catchers for Middle America’s patriotic fury; the uproar that greeted Seattle alt-rock band Pearl Jam when they sang the satirical “Bu$hleaguer” with a mask of the president hanging from singer Eddie Vedder’s microphone stand was dwarfed by the hurricane engulfing the Dixie Chicks.
On March 14, two days after the Guardian review appeared, Maines offered a guarded apology for her “disrespectful” remark while still insisting on a diplomatic solution to the Iraq situation. As she later clarified to interviewer Diane Sawyer, she felt she’d chosen “the wrong wording”: “Am I sorry I said that? Yes. Am I sorry I spoke out? No.”
Maines was no radical firebrand. She had not called for Bush’s assassination. She had not raged against AmeriKKKa. She had simply dared to express an opinion shared, as poll after poll revealed, by the majority of the world’s population. If her apology had been accepted, she might have left the matter there. But anonymous opponents dumped trash outside Robison’s home and sent letters to Robison and Maguire’s father, calling him a traitor. Former Nixon and Reagan aide Pat Buchanan called them the “Dixie Twits.” Fox News attack dog Bill O’Reilly said they were “callow, foolish women who deserve to be slapped around.” Even the president passed comment. “The Dixie Chicks are free to speak their mind,” he mused. “They shouldn’t have their feelings hurt just because some people don’t want to buy their records…. Y’know, freedom is a two-way street.”
The trio, Maines especially, took on a reckless energy. They posed for the cover of Entertainment Weekly, their naked bodies stenciled with some of the epithets thrown their way in recent weeks, both positive (“Patriot,” “Brave”) and howlingly negative (“Dixie Sluts,” “Saddam’s Angel”). In one scene from Shut Up and Sing, a documentary about the controversy, the band is discussing whether their career will ever recover from their airplay purdah. “Now that we’ve fucked ourselves anyway,” reflects Maines, “I think that we have a responsibility….” She pauses, grins. “To continue to fuck ourselves!”
The U.S. leg of the Top of the World tour opened in Greenville, South Carolina, on May 1, the same day that President Bush stood on the flight-deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared victory in front of a banner reading “Mission Accomplished.” Unfortunately for the Dixie Chicks, Bush appeared vindicated. The invasion had begun at dawn on March 20 and Baghdad had fallen on April 9. The stage-managed toppling of a statue of Saddam by crowds of cheering Iraqis was shown around the world. Outside the Greenville show, Bush-boosters brandished placards such as “Try the Chics for Treason.” Inside, Maines wittily invited her detractors to boo, “because we welcome freedom of speech.” When Toby Keith mocked up a picture of Maines cuddling Saddam, the singer retaliated with a homemade T-shirt reading “FUTK,” which, she deadpanned, stood for “Friends United Together in Kindness.” But some of their opponents were more dangerous: in Dallas, they were escorted to the stage by policemen after receiving an anonymous letter saying that Maines would be shot dead during the concert. At each step, they toughed it out, and even managed to joke about it. At a press conference, Martie Maguire said: “We heard they’ve turned what happened to us into a verb—you can get Dixie Chicked.” She smiled. “And if we had to be the example that’s fine.”
AFTER THE DIXIE CHICKS AFFAIR, the ground moved. Maines, Robison, and Maguire had been hounded, barracked, boycotted, and threatened, and they had not just survived; they had put the antiwar cause center stage like no other musicians. And they did so at the peak of the war’s popularity. At the time of the Mission Accomplished speech, Bush’s approval rating hovered around 70 percent, from which perch it began a steady descent.
Something was clearly not right in Iraq. The victorious coalition forces didn’t appear to have any clear vision for building a safe, democratic nation. The weeks following Saddam’s defeat had seen rampant looting and chaos on the streets, to which Donald Rumsfeld blithely responded, “Stuff happens!…Freedom’s untidy.” In May, the newly appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, diplomat Paul Bremer, made the catastrophic decision to dissolve the Iraqi army, turfing forty thousand disgruntled, penniless soldiers onto the street. The process of de-Ba’athification removed thousands of government employees who belonged to Saddam’s Ba’ath party from their posts, thus creating a skills vacuum and driving a wedge through the middle of Iraqi society. In August, the UN headquarters in Baghdad was ripped apart by a terrorist bomb. Was this what victory looked like?
Just as the conduct of the operation was looking shaky, the bottom was falling out of the original moral case for war. The all-important stockpiles of WMDs had yet to materialize; indeed, there were growing doubts that they had ever existed. In the UK, the BBC reported that the government’s crucial September 2002 dossier, setting out Saddam’s WMD capability, had been deliberately “sexed up” to exaggerate the threat. The rumored source of the story, Ministry of Defence scientific advisor Dr. David Kelly, was called before the Foreign Affairs Committee, where he seemed flustered and confused. On July 18, his body was found on Harrowdown Hill, near his Oxfordshire home, an apparent suicide (his death inspired Thom Yorke’s eerie, accusatory “Harrowdown Hill”). Many Britons who had supported the war were beginning to feel duped; those who had opposed it felt too queasy for schadenfreude.
The big international song of the summer was “Where Is the Love?” by Los Angeles rap group Black Eyed Peas. A pacifist anthem seemingly modeled on “What’s Going On,” it included an eyebrow-raising line which called the CIA “terrorists” and another which said flatly, “A war is going on but the reason’s undercover.” Band leader Will. I. Am had begun writing it after 9/11 and recorded it during the lead-up to war in Iraq. “I never thought that song was going to be played on the radio,” he confessed. “If I did I would never have said that. Honestly.”
A very different kind of summer soundtrack was Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief. The title phrase had been used by critics of Bush’s disputed election in 2000, which made it seem too bluntly political. The working title, much better, had been The Gloaming, an old-fashioned word for twilight. “The gloaming,” Thom Yorke explained, was “the imminent sense of moving into the dark ages again. The rise of all this right-wing bigotry, stupidity, fear and ignorance.” Another possible title was The Lukewarm, referring to Dante’s word for “the people who don’t give a fuck…. The lukewarm are on the edge of the Inferno, cruising around near the gates but they can’t actually get out. They’re like, ‘What are we doing here? We didn’t do anything at all.’ And in Dante’s eyes it’s, ‘That’s exactly why you’re here. You did fuck all. You just let it happen.’”
Yorke had become a father in 2001 and was spending a lot of time at home with his son, listening to multiple news programs on Radio 4 every day. When a phrase leapt out of the radio and snagged his attention, he jotted it down. The lyrics became jumbles of second-hand language, ripped out of context but still trailing tendrils of ominous meaning, and threaded together with the haunted, half-lit language of fairy tales. “This was the noise going round my house, and so it was the noise that ended up in the songs,” he told NME’s John Robinson. “Everything felt wrong.”
Of course, Yorke had been saying everything felt wrong for his entire career, but since Radiohead’s last album world events had rushed to meet his fearful imaginings. The attacks of 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq: ice age coming. Radiohead’s music spoke to people’s fear; “Where Is the Love?” expressed a vague, comforting pacifism; Steve Earle and the Dixie Chicks brought compassion and courage to the issue. Every variety of concern was now, at last, finding a voice.
On June 5, Michael Stipe went with some friends to see Radiohead play a small show at New York’s Beacon Theatre. During “No Surprises,” he noticed something remarkable. When Yorke sighed the lines, “Bring down the government / They don’t speak for us,” the crowd roared the words with an almost desperate force. The reawakening of dissent that had begun with Steve Earle had finally found its voice. “I felt that the tipping point had occurred,” Stipe told the Independent’s Craig McLean. “Having felt what I call The Great Quiet…where people couldn’t raise their voices—at that moment, that changed for me. I realized it was shifting rapidly.”