> "When The President Talks To God" by Bright Eyes
http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20051212&s=trb121205
TRB FROM BOSTON Trite Eyes by Jason Zengerle
Late last month, as President Bush's approval ratings hovered near an all-time low and the number of Iraq war dead continued to rise, the singer-songwriter Conor Oberst came to Washington to perform at Constitution Hall. Depending on which music critic you ask, Oberst is "the next Bob Dylan," "the new Bob Dylan," "the indie rock Bob Dylan," "the Bob Dylan of Generation Y," or "Dylan for the prescription drug generation." The 25-year-old has been eliciting plaudits ever since he was a precocious teenager in Omaha, Nebraska, who warbled folk-tinged, verbose songs of love and betrayal. But it was only in the last few years, after he changed the focus of his music from teenage heartbreak to political angst, that critics began affixing the Dylan halo to his head.
In the run-up to the war, Oberst started performing a song called "Don't Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come," in which he hisses, "They say we must defend ourselves. Fight on foreign soil. Against the infidels. With the oil wells. God save gas prices." Early this year, his band, Bright Eyes, simultaneously released two albums whose songs dwelled heavily on the war. And, shortly after that, Oberst put out a new single called "When the President Talks to God." The influential Portland, Oregon, alternative paper Willamette Week subsequently hailed it as "this young century's most powerful protest song."
So, without further ado, here are the opening lines of the protest song of the century: "When the president talks to God, are the conversations brief or long? Does he ask to rape our women's rights? And send poor farm kids off to die? Does God suggest an oil hike when the president talks to God?" Yes, the lyrics are that bad, and the instrumentation--provided by a lone, off-putting acoustic guitar--isn't much better. And then there's the problem of Oberst's voice: It is fey and timorous, which may be good for lamenting lost loves but is ill-suited for stopping a war.
Although some excitable critics have likened "When the President Talks to God" to Dylan's early protest songs, such comparisons serve only to highlight Oberst's shortcomings. Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," for instance, is not only a churning anthem that captures the listener's attention; its lyrics are also remarkably literate, with an opening--"Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son? Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?"--that evokes the opening of the seventeenth-century ballad "Lord Randal." "When the President Talks to God," in contrast, is a plodding dirge filled with clichés and juvenile put-downs; were it not for its nasty comments about Bush, the song would amount to little more than white noise. Where Dylan's protest songs awe and maybe even frighten you with their power, Oberst's make you want to give him a hug and tell him everything's going to be OK. Dylan was an angry young man; Oberst is a whiny boy.
Some of Oberst's shortcomings can be laid at the feet of the culture to which he's singing. Dylan both came out of--and was informed by--his travels in New Left circles, which enabled his music to strike a deep and immediate chord with the countercultural youth movement that, in the early '60s, was in the midst of being formed. As Todd Gitlin explained in his book The Sixties, "Dylan sang for us: we didn't have to know he had hung out in Minneapolis's dropout-nonstudent radical scene in order to intuit that he had been doing some hard traveling through a familiar landscape. We followed his career as if he were singing our song; we got in the habit of asking where he was taking us next." Today, because there is no draft--and hence no powerful motivation like self-interest to serve as an organizing principle--there is no broad-based antiwar or countercultural youth movement to influence Oberst, much less to look to his music for anything more profound than entertainment.
But, even if there were such an audience, it's unlikely that Oberst's words would be sufficient to reach it in the same way that Dylan's words resonated with people in the '60s. As Dylan demonstrated, a good protest song is not simply political, nor is it narrowly confined to the issue that it's protesting. The best protest songs provide historical and artistic context for an alternative worldview and, in doing so, give legitimacy and a powerful sense of inevitability to the protest; even if the target of the protest never hears the actual song, he's ultimately unable to ignore its message and the followers that message inspires. "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"--which Dylan wrote during the Cuban missile crisis--never specifically mentions war. Instead, it uses apocalyptic imagery--"I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests, I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans. ... I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin', I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin'"--to convey the horrors of war and, in the process, transcends its topic. As David Hajdu wrote in his book Positively Fourth Street, the song "provoke[s] feeling and thought as well as action."
The only thing that's provocative about Oberst's celebrated protest song is its insults. "When the president talks to God, do they drink near beer and go play golf?" Oberst sings. "When he kneels next to the presidential bed, does he ever smell his own bullshit?" Indeed, "When the President Talks to God" is so literal and narrow in its concerns--with its talk of "women's rights" and "voter fraud" and "which convicts should be killed, where prisons should be built and filled"--that it hardly differs from the anti-Bush screeds you might read in a magazine or a newspaper. Far from being a lasting commentary, it's utterly ephemeral.
At a basic level, then, Oberst is less a protest singer than an editorialist. And, when he performed at Constitution Hall last month, he took advantage of his proximity to the White House to do plenty of editorializing. According to The Washington Post, Oberst introduced one song with the explanation that the tune was "about a protest that happened in New York right before we went to war for no ... reason. No, that's not true: We're at war so rich people can be richer. And poor people can be poorer. Or dead." And, when Oberst came out for his encore, he played "When the President Talks to God." Before launching into the song, Oberst made an announcement. "I want to wake up the [expletive] who sleeps across the street," he said. Alas, as the Post noted, Bush was in Asia at that moment. But, even if he had been home, it's certain that the president, much as he ignores the newspapers, would have paid the singer absolutely no mind. Jason Zengerle is a senior editor at The New Republic.
-- Michael Pugliese