Saturday July 18, 2009
moments of modern genius - #1 in an occasional series
I’m listening to Patti Smith’s 2004 record ‘Trampin’ on high rotate. This record captures my current mood and I can’t stop hitting ‘play’ again and again.
There is a moment on the epic song ‘Radio Baghdad’ where she screeches
“shock and awe! shock and awe!”
taking Bush’s abhorrent war cry and turning it on its head.
It’s hard to convey - but it makes my blood run cold. I listen to this bit over and over. (It is around 4.58 mins into the song, FYI)
I’m not the only one to notice:
“The 12-minute epic “Radio Baghdad” sounds much braver and riskier, trading concision for dramatic vitality. Less an anti-war poem than a noisy self-exorcism by an American ashamed of her country’s actions, the song expounds on Baghdad’s history, culture and ruin, and conjures the kind of righteous fire missing from “Gandhi”. Smith yelps “shock and awe shock and awe” with such mighty defiance and disdain that the words sound hardly human.”
-Stephen M. Deusner
Yes, I declare this tiny bit in this big, big song a moment of modern genius.
I love a good howl in a song, a feral growl, a barbaric yawp....Sinead O’Connor singing ‘Jerusalem‘, Kristin Hersh in most anything she sings, that wonderful bit at the end of Lou Reed’s ‘Satellite of Love’ when David Bowie does those creepy werewolf like howls...god I love those…
A while ago, I wrote a poem with a howl in the end of it. It was one of the last to go into the book.
For a quiet person, I am spending a lot of time thinking about screaming.