Natural disasters in song

As long as I am posting about disasters, I might as well write about this thing that’s been bugging me for a couple of weeks now, on a Katrina-related topic.

One of my very favorite bands is called Reckless Kelly, and they have a new album coming out at the end of June. I am (not coincidentally) taking a trip to Austin, Texas, at the same time the album comes out, so I will be at the album-release show on June 24th at Antone’s. Really I am going to see several of my college friends, Jess, Mel, Scott, and Jenn, but I scheduled it to overlap with the Reckless show on purpose, of course. What’s the use of being obsessed with Texas country music, going to Austin, and not seeing any music?

I have already heard the album, despite the release date being almost a month away. I’m not hooked up with the band in any way; I just spend a lot of time on the internet: http://store.yeproc.com/album.php?id=13387. You can click on the link and listen to the songs.

Reckless Kelly is not a band that usually writes songs that have a lot of social or political commentary. They’re more likely to sing about ex-girlfriends, broken hearts, being on the road, and drinking. They’ve also got two songs about skiing, one about the Beatles, one about traveling to Ireland, and a new one, only available as a free download if you preorder the new album, about baseball. But nothing really political, until this new album. Bulletproof features two songs with a political bent: “American Blood,” about the war in Iraq, and “God Forsaken Town,” co-written with Robert Earl Keen, about New Orleans and Katrina. “American Blood” is pretty good, though I think the lyrics are slightly confusing at one point. “God Forsaken Town,” on the other hand, I do not like at all. Which hurts. I love Reckless, and I love Robert Earl, and while I am willing to admit, grudgingly, that Reckless’ lyrics are sometimes boilerplate or just not particularly well thought out, I trust Robert Earl to write a good song and I think he and RK fell down on this one.

I’ll give you the lyrics:

“They say we gotta leave but there’s no way to go
And this ain’t the first time we’ve weathered out a storm
And I ain’t got nothing but at least I know it’s mine
And I’ll be goddamned if I leave here before the day I die
So let the rain sting my neck
Let the mighty Mississippi take this godforsaken town
Let the storm and all the fury come and carry me away

Take me to that place somewhere on higher ground
The voices on the radio are cracking off and on
The Quarter’s under water and the levee’s all but gone
There’s children in the treetops and soldiers in the sky
It’s too late now to run I’d never make it out alive

So let the rain sting my neck…

Everyone sit tight help is on the way
I don’t think Junior’s gonna last another day
We got a sawed-off and a red-hot .44
So all you looters best come heavy when you’re knocking on my door

So let the rain…

We all know this Crescent City just won’t be the same again
I’ll still be standing when the Saints go marching in
The Xs on the windows say there’s no one left inside
If you count the painted numbers you’ll know just how many died
And I’m one in half a million, so at least I’m not alone
The hurricane is over but the storm still rages on

So let the rain…”

Alright. Nice enough, right? Something about it made me nervous, though, so I thought about it, and thought about it, until finally I came up with this. First, they got their facts wrong. It sounds poetic and all in the chorus, but the real problem in the city was Lake Pontchartrain, not the Mississippi River. Also, the Quarter was never under water. The French Quarter was built on the highest ground in the city and happens to be right next to the Mississippi River. The problem was the levees on Lake Pontchartrain and on the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal (not to be confused with the river itself), which broke, and flooded the neighborhoods next to it, which are anywhere from 5 to 10 feet below sea level, as opposed to the French Quarter and other neighborhoods along the MS River, which are 10 to 15 above sea level. The broken levees on the MR-GO flooded a great deal of Eastern New Orleans, on the other side of the river from the French Quarter.

Maybe we can chalk that all up to poetic license. But my real problem is with the third verse. “We got a sawed-off and a red-hot .44/So all you looters best come heavy when you’re knocking on my door…” I was living here in Mississippi in during Katrina and its aftermath, and I remember that time pretty clearly. In the first week or two after the storm hit, there was a controversy over the depiction of the storm’s survivors in the media. News outlets were running lots and lots of pictures of people gathering food and supplies from the wreckage of the city. Several online blogs started to notice that whenever the media (it was several different outlets, if I am remembering correctly) ran a picture of a black person involved in this activity, they were “looting.” When they ran a picture of a white person, they were “salvaging.” It is true that there was a great deal of looting (and salvaging) done during the aftermath of the storm. (Read this article for more on the subject: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/29/national/nationalspecial/29crime.html?ei=5090&en=1ba20914f5888e10&ex=1285646400&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1127998837-dUb23oxvthQ0MrMgl9neEg&pagewanted=print.) But the controversy illustrates the willingness of middle America to believe the worst on account of someone’s race, and the problems that ensues when those connotations and rumors are believed. “Looting” became associated with blackness (and being poor, which is that invisible social marker that often tags along with its more visible counterpart, I'm not saying they are the same thing, but they are all too often connected and confused in the American mind). So when the song uses the word “looters” to characterize these people, and then threatens what amounts to vigilante violence…well, let’s just say that to define someone using a word that suggests they are black, then to suggest that vigilante justice is the best way to deal with those people, in the deep South, makes me very, very nervous indeed.

In fact, there doesn’t seem to be any deliberate reference to race at all in this song. Not in the lyrics, and not in the music. It’s a fairly straight-ahead rock ballad with a few instrumental flourishes (a French horn here, a really bad alto sax solo there) that are clearly meant to evoke the music of New Orleans, but wind up evoking a generic kind of NO jazz without really showing any kind of respect or understanding of the diversity and origin of the city’s musical heritage. The refusal to see race elides the worst part of the tragedy, of how power and politics in America, in Louisiana, and in the city of New Orleans have served to privilege the few over the many, always along racial and class lines, and how these kinds of disasters affect these people the worst. The song, in short, has no sense of history.

I seriously doubt that the band was thinking about any of these things when they wrote the song. I don’t think that Reckless Kelly or REK are racist at all, and I don’t mean to suggest that. But that sort of lets them off of one hook right onto another. It’s unthinking. There is a more incisive thought process that should have happened here and didn’t. It’s one thing to fudge the facts when you’re singing about an ex-girlfriend and how she did you wrong. It’s another, I think, to make a statement about something like the citizens of New Orleans and their experience of one of the worst natural and man-made disasters the United States has ever seen and to get your facts, and your connotations, wrong. It shows a lack of respect for those people and their suffering. So as much as I would like to love the song, to stand behind Willy and the rest of the band for their attempt to make a statement, I just can’t. I guess that makes this another song for a bathroom break.