This episode has it all, from ancient history to must-see-TV, from Bertolt Brecht's "Motto" to Don McLean's "Babylon". It's is a song (and an episode) about dark times and sad songs. Also happy songs. And mellow songs. We've got it all.
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[Start of transcript]
Hi there.
Welcome to 'The Music's Not A Threat', a podcast about culture, history, and an anarchist pop band called Chumbawamba.
Today, we'll be examining all those things and more by looking at the background and themes of a Chumbawamba song called "Introduction".
Yeah, it would have been nice to use it for the introduction episode, or even the second episode, after we did the title song but... oh well.
The album that this song appears on, ABCDEFG, was released in 2010, two years before the band broke up, and it ended up being the last album they made together. So in a way, this is an "Introduction" to the beginning of the end. And interestingly (for me at least), the subject they're considering at the beginning of the end is a familiar one:
Music.
(The album's title, ABCDEFG, refers to the musical notes A, B, C, D, E, F, and G.)
And with this song, they're not just thinking about music, but thinking about what music is for. Which reminds me of another song of theirs—you know the one that goes...
[THEME ♫: "(I know there must be more...) THE MUSIC'S NOT A THREAT! (🎥: Is that a threat?!) ♫: ACTION! THAT MUSIC INSPIRES! (🎥: Is that a threat?) ♫: CAN BE A THREAT! (🎥:Are you threatening me?)"]
From the beginning to the end of their career, they never stopped thinking about this whole "music" thing that they were doing.
And while the two songs, "Introduction" and "The Music's Not A Threat" are about kind of similar themes, this song sounds very different from that one. Even more so than "Sing About Love" from last episode, this is a quieter, softer, more acoustic Chumbawamba:
[♫:"In the dark times, will we be singing?
Yes, we'll be singing of the dark times.
Every new day's dawn
Brings a song of its own.
(Waiting to be sung...)"]
This song is a little too slow for me. I like it, it's pleasant, just a little slow.
But it has a good reason for sounding this way.
And that reason is: the band was watching the show Mad Men on TV, they heard a song they liked the sound of, and they wanted to write something like that.The inspiration for this song coming from Mad Men is, interestingly, not mentioned in the liner notes. It comes from a post the band made as "guest editors" on the website Spiral Earth, ""Song By Song" (February 23, 2010), which provides all kinds of interesting background on the songs of ABCDEFG. Wish I had something similar for every album...
So we're gonna have to have to talk about that episode of Mad Men, but in order to really understand this song, we're gonna need to back up farther than a late twenty-oughts TV show; farther than the fictional 60's that it's set it; we're ultimately going to have to back up a couple of millennia. But first, let's just go back to this podcast's episode on "Sing About Love", where you may remember I quoted a poem by Bertolt Brecht. Well, that's who wrote the lyrics for this song.
Now Brecht is spelled "B-R-E-C-H-T"—I think in German it's actually pronounced closer to "Bresht", but everyone who I've ever heard say it in English says "Brekt",I could be pedantic and insist on the German translation here, but even the National Theatre video quoted earlier uses the hard 'k' sound, and who am I to disagree with such an august institution? possibly because "Bresht" sounds like I'm trying to say "breast" in a bad Sean Connery impression.I'm not imagining the voice of the real Sean Connery here, I'm thinking of Darrell Hammond's Sean Connery impression from Saturday Night Live. I imagine him ordering shautéed cshicken breasht in shaffron shaushe with a shide of shlished shatshumash. Or shomething like that.
Anyway, I quoted Brecht briefly in the last episode, and Chumbawamba liked him a lot, so future episodes will go more in detail on him, but briefly:
Brecht was a politically active German writer of plays, poetry, and literary theory, starting in the 1920s. Unfortunately for him, he was very vocally not a Nazi, and the 1930s turned out to be a bad time for Germans who weren't Nazis,An overgeneralization, and an understatement. so he fled the country and wouldn't return until the end of WWII.Crash Course: Theatre does a decent summary of Brecht's ideas, at least as they apply to the theatre.Watch it on YouTube.
The specific poem this episode's lyrics are based on comes from the Svendborg Poems, a collection of political poetry and songs written during Brecht's time living in exile.
The second section of the Svendborg poems begins with these lines—or rather, since the original poem was in German, one English translation of it begins with these lines:
"In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times."Brecht poem quoted from: Bertolt Brecht. Poems 1913-1956 (New York: Routlage, 1987), 320. Conveniently available from Google Books. I very much appreciate a book in translation that includes the original text so I can look into the literal meaning, not just the translator's interpretation.
Just like the track "Introduction" is a preface to the album ABCDEFG, this poem is also a preface to a collection of songs. The other poems in this section are given titles like "Ballad of [...]" or "[something] Song" although there's no music provided (at least in the versions I've found).
This poem by itself, I've seen called "Motto", but as far as I can tell, in the original collection, it's just placed at the beginning of the section without a title of its own.Most of my information on the Svendborg Poems is based on the tranlation of them included in The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, trans. & ed. Tom Kuhn and David Constantine (London, UK: W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 2019) 649-736.
So let's talk about the idea of songs for the dark times, about the dark times. What does that mean?
I think maybe the easiest way to understand it is to contrast it with some alternatives:
In the dark times,
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing,
To distract us from the dark times.
This is kind of the opposite idea: not songs of the dark times, but songs of the good times to escape from the dark times.
"Escapism" is kind of a dirty word in terms of art criticism, it's an accusation against art that's frivolous. Yeah, maybe it'll take your mind off the bad times, but it doesn't engage with them, it doesn't do anything about them. (The music's not a threat, in other words.)
In the dark times,
Will there also be singing?
No. There won't.
This is the opposite of the escapism argument, or maybe they're just two sides of the same coin. It's the idea that maybe there shouldn't be singing in the dark times (or of the dark times), because maybe music itself is inherently frivolous, and when the going gets tough, time and energy wasted on something like music would be better spent on more serious matters.
Brecht didn't believe that.
He thought that some art was escapist—and he disapproved of that—but he also thought art could be used to inform people and motivate them to action, keeping them engaged with the world rather than carrying them away from it.
I've studied Brecht some before, mostly in a theatre context, and in the theatre, he's probably most well known for the idea of the VerfremdungseffektHow to best achieve this "V-effect", whether Brecht really achieved it, and whether achieving it is a worthwhile goal, is a matter of some debate. "Verfremdung" is a German word that implies distance or strangeness. Basically he wanted to create a distance between the audience and the art.
He didn't want the audience to get lost in his plays, or kind of swept up in the emotions; he wanted people to sort of hold his work at arm's-length, and scrutinize it, and think critically about the characters choices and their situations and how they applied to the real world.Kind of like how I keep pointing out when I'm quoting a translation. It interrupts the flow of the episode for a minute, it takes you out of it for a minute, but I'm doing it on purpose—it's a reminder to myself (and I guess to you) not to get too cocky about how much we understand something when we can't even read it in the original language. I didn't really think of it as Brechtian until just now, but I guess it kind of is.
It's interesting to compare this to last episode, Dick Gaughan talks about wanting to provoke emotion as a motivator for social change; now we've got Brecht, who seems like he want to do just the opposite.
So should music that aims to inspire action aim to provoke thought or provoke emotion?
We've actually gotten a little off track here talking about Brecht's literary theories. We've already covered basically everything we need to for the poem, and by extension Chumbawamba's lyrics for the song.
But maybe keep this idea of thought versus emotion in mind as we pivot from talking about the words to talking about the tune. Because while the lyrics are taken more or less directly from Brecht—with some tweaking and additions—the melody has a much longer, more indirect journey.
As I mentioned at the top of the episode, the band got the idea for the tune from a song they heard on an episode of Mad Men.
Here's a clip of that:
[🎥♫: By the waters,
The waters of Babylon,
We lay down and wept, and wept,
For thee, Zion...]
But to explain that song and where it comes from, we need to go all the way back a couple of millennia and talk about the Babylonian empire.
Babylon was an ancient city in the area that's currently Iraq. But almost 3000 years ago, it was the center of the Babylonian empire. And the Babylonian empire did what empires do: they struck back.
[🎥♫: "The Imperial March" from Star Wars]This is obviously a pun on The Empire Strikes Back, but it's also a subtle reference to the fact that the Neo-Babylonian Empire really did "strike back" after the original Babylonian Empire declined, and it's the Neo-Babylonian Empire we'll be talking about for the rest of the episode.
Just like The British Empire, the Roman Empire, the Empire from Star Wars, they conquered territory, subjugated, killed, or abducted the local populace, replaced and re-arranged the local government... just standard empire stuff.
And obviously, all this conquering, abduction, subjugation that goes hand in hand with imperialism is... not fun... for the people it's happening to, but you don't usually hear about these things from their perspective because imperial history is usually written by the empires.
But in the 500s BCE the Babylonian empire happened to do all of those things to the Kingdom of Judah: they trashed Judah's capital city of Jerusalem, including the temple that was their center of religious worship, and did the whole abduction/subjugation thing to a chunk of the population, and basically just turned the whole into an imperial spare room.
And all this would be just another footnote in the bloody history of empires, except that the history of Judah got written down and collected into what became the Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible, also called The Old Testament.
It's pretty popular, maybe you've heard of it. A lot of folks study it religiously.
So the history of this particular moment in imperialism is interesting: first, because the most-read source on it is from the perspective of the people who got conquered, not from the conquerors'. And secondly, because the reason this source is so frequently studied is that it it's part of the foundational religious text for several of the world's major religions.
As such, I can't really talk about just history here. Yes, we're talking about real events and real people—at least in the broad strokes I'll be talking about today, the religious version of events is more of less corroborated by other historical sources—but they're events and people that have been endowed with metaphorical and metaphysical significance by a couple billions of the world's people, as of this recording.
So, treading carefully here, we're gonna try and do this in a way that's sensitive, accurate, and appropriately thorough, given the runtime of the episode. (This isn't Cecil B. DeMille's The 10 Commandments—that movie's 3 and a half hours long, this episode is 25 minutes.)
So, here goes. Starting with:
Tehillim is the Hebrew name for the collection of religious poetry that's included in the Tanakh. In English it's usually called The Book of Psalms. (I'm simplifying the linguistics here, but "Tehillim" means "praises" as in "to sing the praises of"; "Psalm" comes from the Greek word for music with instrumental accompaniment.For more on the history of the book and the name, see the entry for "Psalms" by Emil G. Hirsch at The Jewish Encyclopedia. Basically, the book is a collection of song lyrics before there were websites for this kind of thing. (As for why translators of English Bible would use a Greek name for this book instead of the original Hebrew one... It's a good question, but we don't have time to get into that here.)
There are other parts of the Tanakh that get more into the history of the Babylonian Captivity, but one of the songs in the Tehillim, number 137, is very specifically about it as well.
I'd like to read it for you now, in the original Hebrew... except I don't speak Hebrew, so—just like the Che Guevara quotes in the last episode, or the Brecht quotes from earlier—once again, an English translation will have to do—in this case, the King James BibleMy choice of the King James Bible here is based on my own familiarity with it, and my impression that this is probably the version upon which the the Melodians and Phillip Hayes versions are based.—where Psalm 137 includes these lines:
1 By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. [...]
3 For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
4 How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?"KJV text of Psalm 137 from Bible Gateway, Hebrew original available here. And a Jewish study guide with a lot of good information and insights here.
So it's a song of mourning after being abducted, and now being too depressed for music.
Yeah, for a book whose original title translates to "praises", not all of the Tehillim are particularly joyful, and this... is one of the sad ones.
And reasonably so. It's a song about sad things and dark times. Some very specific sad things and dark times, but over the years, it's also gained significance beyond just the literal meaning.
For one example of this process, since it shows up in that song, let's talk about "Zion".
Literally, it's the name of a hill in the city of Jerusalem. As a figure of speech, sometimes it's used instead to refer to the city as a whole, sometimes to the whole surrounding area, and/or the people who live in any of those areas.
But after Babylon paved Jerusalem and put up a parking lot, everybody, especially the people who no longer lived there, found that you don't know what you got 'til it's gone. Nostalgia is a powerful force, and looking at it in the rearview mirror, 'Zion' becomes more than just a place:
It's a wistful memory of the way things were before the dark times. It's a symbol or a metaphor for the good times, the good place.This metaphorical usage of "Zion" is used in The Matrix to refer to the stronghold of the liberated rebels. Also their ship is called The Nebuchadnezzar after the Babylonian king who oversaw the start of the Babylonian captivity, but it seemed like too much of a tangent to work into the episode proper.
And Babylon becomes a metaphor for the opposite: the bad times. The bad place. Everything oppressive, and evil, and wrong with the world.
And this metaphorical "Babylon" carries through to Christianity as well:
In the Christian New Testament, The Book of Revelation is a vision of the end of the world, which includes the imagery of 'Babylon the Great', associating it with murder, filth, fornication, idolatry, and all around wickedness.See Revelation chapter 17 on Bible Gateway. See also the Wikipedia article "Whore of Babylon"
Classic empire.
And while the "true" interpretation of The Book of Revelation is a question for the ages, I'm going to guess that this wasn't meant to predict the literal resurgence of the Babylonian empire—which at that point had been gone for centuries—but rather, it's invoking the image as a more general symbol of empire and oppression and evil.
The early Christians themselves, to put it mildly, had a rough relationship with the Roman Empire. And as such, it's not hard to see how they might have found the story of another empire relatable.
The empires change, but the song remains the same.
As just one more example, the metaphor carries through from Judaism to Christianity to another religious tradition: Rastafari.Pronounced like "Ras-ta-far-eye". (Based on my research, it seems like "Rastafari" is the preferred term, rather than "Rastafarian" or "Rastafarianism"—but as with everything I'm saying about other people's religions in this episode, don't take me as a primary source here.)My broad-strokes knowledge about Rastafari comes from Rastafari: A Very Short Introduction by Ennis B. Edmonds (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012). Conveniently available for preview (as of this writing) on Google Books.
Quick history refresher: starting in the 16th century, the colonial empires of Europe again did what empires do—
[🎥♫: "The Imperial March" again]
—kidnapping and enslaving millions of Africans and transporting them to the Americas. Rastafari ideas developed among that African diaspora, first in Jamaica, then spreading elsewhere. And that history—that legacy of enslavement and imperialism—looms large over Rastafari thought, with a corresponding emphasis on achieving liberation and freedom from enslavement, both literal and metaphorical."Emancipate yourself from mental slavery/none but ourselves can free our minds" Bob Marley, "Redemption Song".
And with literal enslavement a relatively recent memory, and it's after-effects still impacting their daily lives, it's not surprising that the image of Babylonian and captivity versus Zion and liberation would be especially resonant to people in those the circumstances.
Different time, different place, different people having been carried away into a different strange land by a different empire, but it isn't hard to see the parallel.
And just like the Psalm sets the Babylonian Captivity to music, Rastafari ideas carry into music as well.
Taking, for example, probably the most famous Rasta of all time, Bob Marley's song "Exodus" parallels the liberation of enslaved Africans with another Biblical story of freedom and captivity: Moses freeing the slaves from Egypt, in the book of Exodus.
[♫: "Exodus... Movement of Jah people..."]
Babylon is also used here, again as a symbol of oppression and captivity, and achieving liberation is, metaphorically, "leaving Babylon":
[♫: "...leaving Babylon... We're going to our fatherland..."]For more on the use of literal and metaphorical geography in Rastafari thought, take a look at the article "Biblical Symbolism and the Role of Fantasy Geography Among the Rastafarians of Jamaica" by L. Alan Eyre (1985), Journal of Geography, 84:4, 144-148. Available online here.
...and the metaphor continues in other Bob Marley songs like "Babylon System" or "Chant Down Babylon".
Talking about religion and music, when it comes to the Tehillim, since there's no explicit musical instructions, lots of composers and musicians over the years have taken a crack at writing some.
And in 1970, a Jamaican group called The Melodians recorded what is probably the most famous version on Psalm 137 in all of popular music:
[♫: "By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down,
and there we wept when we remembered Zion..."]
The Melodians' "Rivers Of Babylon" starts from the English text of the Psalm, incorporates some Rastafari terminology like "King Alpha" and "Far I" instead of "Lord", it also works in some words from another Psalm, as well as some original lyrics, and sets it all to this tune that's much more upbeat than you might expect given the words.There's an interesting Jewish perspecitive on the Melodians song from Ancient Jew Review here
And you may have heard this version, but the most famous recording of The Melodians' song was actually a cover, recorded by the disco group Boney M a few years later in 1978, which sounds like this:
[♫: "And the wicked carried us away in captivity,
requiring of us a song..."]
[♫: "By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down,
Yea, we wept when we remembered Zion..."]
This version sanitizes out all of the Rastafari terminology. "King Alpha" is changed back to "lord" and "O Far I" is just replaced with "here tonight". Even the basic Rastafari emphasis on liberation is toned down; where The Melodians call on their listers to "sing a song of freedom", Boney M just wants to "sing a song of love". This is pop music, after all.
And even more so than The Melodians' version, Boney M has turned this song into an upbeat party jam. We'll come back to this tonal contrast between the melody and the lyrics here, but for now just keep it in mind, and compare it to the next pop music version of Psalm 137 that we're going to talk about. It came out year after The Melodians, but its history goes back about 200 years earlier:
In the 1700s, English composer Phillip Hayes wrote an arrangement of the first verses of Psalm 137 as a canon.
[💥: BOOM!]
(Not that kind of cannon.)
A canon (spelled with one 'n') is a classical music form similar to a round. Sometimes it's exactly like a round, where every part is the same, some cannons get more complicated, each repetition introducing variations on the theme. There's lots of different types of canon.
[💥: BOOM!]
Anyway, Phillip Hayes' version apparently sounded something like this:
[♫ (sung in a round): "By the Waters of Babylon
We sat down and wept, and wept, and wept: When
We remember'd thee, remember'd thee, O Sion.
As for our Harps: we hang'd them up, upon the trees that are therein."]The singing here is mine, the sheet music was found by YouTube user "Streetsinger John".
So that's, I think, more or less, the original version that Phillip Hayes wrote. But it's mostly notable now thanks to American singer-songwriter Don McLean.
[♫: "So bye bye, miss American Pie,
Drove my Chevy to the levy, but the levy was dry..."]
Yeah, that's him.
(Just as a side note, American Pie is the first song where I can remember getting really interested in what the lyrics meant. Like, I remember finding this one website that was just a long essay in plain text, just sort of breaking down all of the images in the song and what they probably meant. It was really thorough and well-researched, and now that I think about it, getting into that was kind of the first step into doing what I'm doing now.)
Anyway, in 1971, a year after the Melodians' song came out, Don McLean released the album American Pie, which includes as it's last track, this song:
[♫: "By the waters, the waters of Babylon,
We lay down and wept, and wept, for thee Zion..."]Interestingly, there's a pretty good version of Don McLean's arrangement sung in Hebrew on YouTube, but I've been uable to track down any information on the artist.
On the album itself, McLean credits the tune as "traditional", with the musical arrangement by "L. Hays and D. McLean." (I believe L. Hays is Lee Hays of The Weavers—no relation to Phillip Hayes. It's spelled it differently.)
But it seems pretty clear listening to it that the original tune they're riffing off of is Phillip Hayes'. They've taken out some of those fast little ornamentations (which is I think is a change for the better), they've gotten rid of the fourth part of the round (which I think was the weakest bit anyway).
It's simpler, more streamlined, less ostentatious, and (I now know from experience), much easier to sing.
There's very little chance that you'd have have heard the Hayes original before just now, but there's some chance, especially if you're into this kind of music, that you have heard the McLean version—it is on the same album as his most famous song.
Or you might have heard it on an episode of:
That's where Chumbawamba heard it.
Mad Men is a TV show set in a New York advertising agency in the 1960's. And this episode, from the middle of the first season, is called "Babylon"."Babylon" episode recap from Vulture for more detail than I go into here. It finds Don Draper (the main character) trying to figure out an ad campaign for the Israeli Tourism Bureau.
He talks to his one Jewish friend...
[🎥:
Rachel: "And I'm the only Jew you know in New York City?"
Don: "...you're my favorite..."
Rachel: "Jesus, Don, crack a book once in a while."]
They talk about Babylon...
[🎥: Rachel: "Jews have lived in exile for a long time, first in Babylon, then all over the world."]
...and they talk about Zion, both as real places and as metaphors:
[🎥:
Rachel: "For me it's more of an idea than a place."
Don: "Utopia."
Rachel: "...maybe."]
It's part of a larger theme of the episode about feeling like you're in your own personal Babylon, and trying to find your own personal utopia.
So at the end of the episode with all of this background built up, when they're in a folk club and the band starts playing this, it has all of that metaphorical weight behind it:
[🎥♫: "By the waters, the waters of Babylon,
We lay down and wept, and wept, for thee Zion..."]
It plays over a montage of the various characters and their personal Zions and Babylons, and ends the episode on a somber and moving note.
Never mind that the folk singers are clearly using Don McLean's arrangement when the episode takes place 11 years before McLean's version came out. But it's not like he was the only person to hear Phillip Hayes' original—maybe it was floating around the folk scene before that, and as The Melodians showed, neither of them have a monopoly on setting these words to music.
Maybe it's also worth noting that while the Rastafari or the Roman Christians used Babylon as a metaphor, it was still a pretty literal comparison of empire to empire: Rome is Babylon, Colonial Europe is Babylon. This idea that the "personal Babylon" these fictional middle-class white Americans are living in is any kind of comparable to our previous examples is maybe a little overdramatic, maybe overselling their suffering, or underselling the tragedy of the literal exile or enslavement.
Not saying the metaphor is totally invalid—the whole point of metaphor is to compare things that aren't exactly alike—just with any metaphor, however helpful or resonant, it's always good to keep in mind the ways in which it might not apply.But of course, see also the quote from "Redemption Song" in a previous footnote. Literal and metaphorical interpretations are not mutually exclusive. There's an interesting Jewish perspective on Mad Men as a whole in a piece titled "Mad Men and Babylon" by Lauren Goodlad in the 2014-2015 newsletter of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
So we've traced the origins of the tune and we’ve talked about the origin of the lyrics, from Babylon to Bertolt Brecht.
So... what do they have to do with each other?
Maybe nothing. The Chumbawamba tune isn't really even based on "Babylon", just inspired by the general feeling of it.
And it's pretty likely that the band didn't do the historical deep-dive I just did on the history of the song, so any connections between the text and the music could be totally coincidental.
But that doesn't mean they're not interesting, so let's talk about them.
If nothing else, the mournful tune connects with the dark times that Brecht talks about and that Brecht was living through while he wrote it. The idea of exile is an obvious paralell—the Brecht poem isn't explicitly about it, but the fact that he wrote it wile in exile hangs over the entirety of the Svendborg Poems.
So in a sense, both the Psalm and Brecht's poem are songs about dark times spent in a strange land, whether it's millennia ago, or less than 100 years.
And another interesting paralell with Psalm 137: it's a song about dark times, but you could also argue that it's a song about songs.
Specifically, it's a song that asks, how are we supposed to sing under these circumstances? "How shall we sing the lord's song in a strange land?"
Interestingly the Hayes/Hays/McLean arrangement—the one that Chumbawamba based the tune on—doesn't include that line from the original Psalm. But that line is probably the most relevant one to the Brecht poem that they picked for the lyrics.
So in at least this one way, the Chumbas are actually kind of closer to the original meaning than Don McLean was, even if it's just by accident.
It's interesting that Every musical version of Psalm 137 that we've talked about takes liberties with the original text. Phillip Hayes used the first two verses, and Don McLean dropped the second. The Melodians used one, three and four, then added words of their own; none of them use verses five through nine at all, and of course they're all in English rather than Hebrew.
Similarly, Chumbawamba made some changes to Brecht's poem, changing "will there be singing" to "will we be singing", as well as adding some of their own lyrics.
A deeper study could find more meaning in who made what changes and why. For now, I just thought it was worth noting.
Another thing I find interesting about Psalm 137 is that it kind of answers its own question kind of implicitly: How shall we sing" under these circumstances? But this is a song. If you're asking the question in a song, then you're already singing in these circumstances—singing this song, about these circumstances.
How do you sing? You sing this.
With Brecht's motto, the answer is more explicit:
What do you sing in the dark times? You sing of the dark times.And that idea isn't just coming from Brecht: if you listen back to the Melodians song, you can hear one of the things that they added is an encouragement to sing:"
[♫: "Sing it out loud! Sing a song of freedom, sister!"]
Bob Marley's "Chant Down Bablyon" is not just singing about Babylon, but that the singing is a part of what will help bring Babylon down. Like the music in-and-of-itself might be a threat.
[♫:"Reggae music, come we chant down Babylon
This music, come we chant down Babylon..."]This idea of music bringing down one's enemies reminds me of another Biblical story: the "Battle" of Jericho. See The Book of Joshua chapter 6, especially verse 20.
I wonder what Bertolt Brecht would think of this, just like I wonder what he'd think of Don McLean's "Babylon", given his preference for intellectual over emotional engagement.
As songs go, "Babylon" is basically 100% emotion. Musically and lyrically, it's an expression of mourning—it sounds mournful, it is mournful.
Sure you can engage with it intellectually, as you might have done listening to me talk about it for the last 20 minutes, but the song doesn't really ask you do anything but feel.
So I don't know that Brecht would have cared for it.
And it's easy to criticize Brecht for being anti-emotional. That’s definitely one way to interpret his theories. If you want to motivate people to change the world, you’re probably going to need that critical, intellectual engagement that Brecht wanted, but I don't think that means there's no place for emotion either.
One of the reasons songs like "Babylon" are so effective is that they can connect with people emotionally across time and space. Psalm 137, this poem, this song about the Babylon Empire thousands of years ago has connected and resonated with with Roman Christians, and enslaved Africans, and fictional 60's ad executives, and one-hit-wonder anarchists, and... maybe even us, here, now.
And if that's where it stops—if we just sort of wallow in those emotions and never do anything about it—then yeah, maybe then Brecht would have a problem with that. But feeling those connections to other people—to the joy, or pain, or fear—can be an important part of motivating us to action.
(And on a personal level, even some things that could be considered "wallowing in emotion" aren't necessarily bad. Allowing ourselves to acknowledge the darkness and feel sadness in our own dark times can be an important step in moving through that darkness, to continue making our way out of our own personal Babylon(s).
And inasmuch as music has a place in that journey, the music that can help along the way will different at different times and for different people.
Maybe today you need the sad, mournful Don McLean "Babylon", maybe tomorrow it's the mellow Melodians version, or the upbeat, disco stylings of Boney M. Or maybe none of the above, I don't know your life.
Here's one last quote from Brecht:
"The question of what artistic devices we should choose is simply the question of how we can get our audiences to become socially active [...] We should try out each and every conceivable artistic device which can help towards this aim".I found this quote in the video "An Introduction To Brechtian Theatre" by the National Theatre, here. It's a shame that don't cite the source for it, but surely such a reputable institution has done their due dramaturgy, right...? (If anyone knows the original source, let me know.)
If we're talking about music meant to help change the world—and accepting this podcast's basic premise that what changes the world is action—then the only measure of success has got to be that action, that impact on the world.
It's not about the style of the music, or the genre, or even the intent of the original artist. It's how we take it, and how we use it, and what we do with it
Because the music's not a threat.
Action that music inspires... well, you know.
[♫: "Come, we go chant down Babylon one more time
(Come, we go chant down Babylon one more time)"]
I'm especially indebted in my research for this episode to two books: Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137 by David W. StoweDavid W. Stowe. Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016). Convieniently available to preview from Google Books, with additional information on the author's website. and Rastafari: A Very Short Introduction by Ennis B. Edmonds.Edmonds, Rastafari, see citation above.
Also, more generally, now that we're a couple episodes in, I feel like I really need to give more credit to Archive.org.
Between using their Wayback Machine feature to see old versions of Chumba.com Frequently Asked Questions page (and other sites), and their archive of scanned print resources including hundreds of punk zines going back to the 80's—probably half of my research material for this podcast, in one way or another, comes from Archive.org. And it's all completely free.
And so, like I did with the Wikimedia Foundation in the first episode, I'm going to pay it forward (or maybe backward), for all of the benefits I've gotten from their free resources over the years.
If you'd like to join me in supporting Archive.org, one of the greatest resources on the internet in my opinion, I'll put a link to do that on the website, where as always you'll find a transcript, footnotes, citations for my sources, and other miscellanea.
The page for this episode is MusicThreat.net/ep/003, that's MusicThreat.net-slash-E-P-slash-double-O-three.
Go in peace. And whatever you do, please cite your sources.
Thanks for listening.
[End of transcript.]