Revisiting My Words on Springsteen
Our identities are Our War, too; and our identities are shaped by music
Last week on this site, I wrote some thoughts about Bruce Springsteen, activism and whether rock and roll culture had failed us.
Had we fallen in the thrall of a paper tiger? Had we been lured into complacency by the Woodstock Illusion and Hot Topic-ism (i.e., mistaking relatively easy and broad acts of cultural “rebellion” for actual activism)? I now recognize that piece may have been a little extreme, a little didactic, a little one dimensional. Maybe more than a little.
Music isn’t just a weapon to potentially protect our rights and our republic; it is also a powerful tool to shape our identities. And our identities are our gorgeous differences. And our differences, our identities, and our right to maintain, cultivate, and protect them, is Our War.
And the role of music in our lives — and the role music plays in inspiring us, on every level of our social and personal engagement — is the essential and ferocious frontline in the battle of identity. And this battle, sometimes beautiful, sometimes brutal, lasts our whole lives.
Who am I to say that the fight to create, define and protect our identities isn’t as important as any battle we’d wage on the picket lines, or under the satanic fog of pepper spray? After all, before we can stand up for anything or take a stand on any issue, we must stand up for ourselves. This is the first and most significant fight of our lives: Being able to say, “This is who I am.”
The songs and the artists that shape us and move us are weapons in this fight. They are weapons in the biggest war of our lives: the fight to find our peers; find people as strange or as passionate as us; find those who help us feel less alone; find those we will be bonded to by the intense and exotic feelings music inspires in us. The community created by a song is as important as any action it inspires; in fact, it is the action. The community created by a song is the shiver of hearing a voice of truth in the darkness, a friend when we need a friend most.
One of the greatest battles of our lives is the battle not to feel alone; to feel heard and seen; to have the freedom to turn to someone and say, “Have you heard this? Read this? Seen this?” One of the greatest battles of our lives is the battle to find who will stand alongside us as we choose who to love, how to love, what to fight, who will fight alongside us. This battle comes before all others, and one of the primary weapons in this battle is music. All movements begin as social; music is one of the primary keys to enter the doors that will lead us to this place.
It is up to you what you do with those keys.
I had no right to make any judgements regarding how you fight your war.
I had no right to minimize the lifetime we have spent fighting to find our peers in the Kingdom of Outsiders.
If you are reading this, it is very likely you are a citizen of the Kingdom of Outsiders.
The Kingdom of Outsiders is a passport-less nation of the lonely, bookish, bullied and sensitive, a congress of misfits and dreamers, a parliament of anti-jocks and prom no-shows.
But one day, we saw a flag, and we gathered under it.
This flag was music.
Music was one of the essential elements in creating my identity. Anything that came afterwards is because of music. I am who I am because of a song, many songs.
Music gives us the courage to find identity, an identity which often places us outside of the mainstream.
To be different, especially now, is to be on the frontline of a war.
If music hands us the tools — the weapons — to not just find and form that identity, but to have the courage to parade it in unfamiliar and often unfriendly settings, then it is obviously a powerful tool of action and activism. I believe this: We are at war. And if music gives us courage to be ourselves, if music serves as a flag under which the residents of the Kingdom of Outsiders can gather and find companionship, safety, and encouragement, then music is a valuable weapon, whether it literally topples an oppressor or not. Sometimes — many times — it is just enough not to feel so alone.
Everything brave or exotic in my life has been encountered via my love for music.
I am proud warrior in the army of the Kingdom of Outsiders. For all my blather, for all my pointed words, I may never have the courage to risk being maimed by a rubber bullet; but I am myself, strange and proud, and in love with a world that allows us to be strange and proud. Music showed me the way, handed me the keys to the kingdom, and gave me a tribe.
For Bob Clark, Deb Sprague and Kara Tucker, and dedicated to the spirit and memory of Tracy Zamot and John Loscalzo.
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