Born on the 4th of July
a collection of songs & documents & pictures about America
# of Tracks: around 60
Length: 3 hours, 30 minutes
Themes: Bob Dylan songs without Bob Dylan’s voice ~ Britain’s quirky relationship with America’s manifest destiny compulsion1 ~ three songs about American death ~ two songs by the Pacific Northwest’s greatest ever DIY band Dead Moon ~ a pair of ASMR recordings of train sounds ~ a pair of politically visionary songs by James Brown & Nina Simone ~ some Dolly Parton, Neil Young, Woody Guthrie, Chuck Berry and Beach Boys because America is good at icons ~ a ton of songs with guns in them because, duh ~ one Silver Jews song about Canada
Link: spoti.fi (Spotify) — apple.co (Apple Music) — bit.ly (YouTube)
Tomorrow is the 4th of July. My plan for the day is to drive to Canada. As one does.
This mix was originally posted on February, 14, 2021—a Valentine to America I guess? When I first posted it to social media, back in the days before I joined Substack, I was almost a year into an unexpected pandemic-era exile, during which my nuclear family took refuge with my spouse’s people in Toronto. The January 6th riot at the Capitol had just happened. And yet, there I was, a month later, really missing the United States of America.
Why do I take pride in the USA?
Well, genetically speaking, I am an amalgam of some of the world’s most shat-upon peoples: Irish, Jewish, Eastern European. When people ask me about my ethnic identity, I usually say I’m from “dirt people” stock and leave it that. Even in this era of identity-as-badge I’m going to stick with that description, and do so with pride. Because I’m from a family that’s forgotten where it’s from. And I’m okay with that. In theory,2 America allows cultural randoms like me to thrive or, at least, for the culture made by those randoms to take root and claim a national identity of it’s own. That’s what I love about America. It gives weirdos like me a chance.
I’m no musicologist. So that’s also how I think of American songs. They are a container for our strangeness. I hope you enjoy my selections.
Spotify version
Apple version
YouTube version
The playlist includes songs such as…
^ Anais Mitchell: “Young Man in America”
^ 79rs Gang: “Drama and “Dead and Gone” — Neither song features in this live set but it offers a sense of why this New Orleans group are so great.
^ Peter Perrett: “How The West Was Won” — I love the lyric of this song so much. It’s a bit easier to make out in the official video.
Extra credit: some American documents
• My photograph on a bootleg The National t-shirt: Recently one of my old comrades from The National mentioned they ran across a bootleg t-shirt that featured this picture I took in 2001 or 2002. It’s probably the first proper portrait of the band.
There’s a line of text over the photo: “I have weird memories of you”—a quote from Matt’s lyric for “City Middle,” off their 2005 record Alligator. Like all great pop music lyrics, it can be interpreted in different ways.
I gather the band liked the quote for how, in our later years, our younger selves can seem foreign to our grown-ass selves. Personally, I have weird memories of this band, those days, and of America in general. I remain thankful for the songs that were produced by my friends; that very peculiar 1999 to 2003 era3; and American history itself, in all its twists and turns, maybe hopefully still bending toward justice.
• An alternative AHB’s Goodies 4th of July mix from 2019: A few of the songs from the primary mix linked above recur here. But this earlier mix is largely obsessed with American places—Baltimore, West Palm Beach, Atlantic City, Nebraska, Alaska, et cetera.
• Stitched together footage from the Jan 6th U.S. Capitol riot: At the time of the riots, the American history major in me4 was obsessed with the real time footage of this event—primary documents being the holy grail of that discipline. The version I’m sharing is a reconstruction from Vice Media. I had a hard time thinking of any major historical event, before the era of ubiquitous camera phones, that could have been covered in such detail.5
The January 6th film is terrible, goofy, haunting, so so complete and real. #TriggerWarning: Someone is shot and killed around the 40:00 minute mark. I’m warning you because I disagree with the notion that there’s any utility or public good to watching that sort of violence.
• With Haunted Deodorant (2011) by Josh Kline: A mashed-up, composite portrait of Ariel Pink (indie edgelord / January 6th riot attendee) and Kurt Cobain (who needs no introduction). As seen at Josh’s excellent, timely, funny, and critical Whitney Museum mid-career retrospective. It is up until August 13th. If you roll through New York City, I highly recommend checking it out.
• William McCarthy’s Italian music mix: In case you think the vibes are off listening to my weird version of Americana on tomorrow’s sorta cringey holiday, here is some counter-programming from another music comrade, William McCarthy. He has relocated to Europe in recent years, and embraced his Irish roots. So I may be on dangerous ground saying I love him as a fellow “dirt person.” When I got to know him in the 2000s, however, that was one way I connected with him—as a fellow traveler with an intense life story who overcame all.6
I’d put him in the lineage of Bruce Springsteen or Woody Gutherie, Eugene Hutz7 or Manu Chao. He’s a punk troubadour with ENERGY and a truly global outlook—and he brings that vim and perspective to this mix:
If you’re so inspired, the best way to support Billy’s ongoing explorations is on Patreon or Bandcamp.
People Who Died: Rick Froberg ~ Robert Black
The deaths that have impacted me this month feel a bit closer to home than usual. These are not global icons but personal ones. I don’t know if I ever had a proper conversation with Rick or Robert, but I definitely crossed paths with both of them.
With Rick, I was first a fan of his highly regarded and mathematically unhinged post-hardcore band Drive Like Jehu, back in my zine-making days. Later, he was a presence at my first (and in some ways only) proper dayjob, when I worked as a producer at digital studio Funny Garbage in the late 1990s and early 2000s. By that point, I think Rick’s primary source of income was as a distinctive illustrator who sometimes did work for the studio. He died a few days ago, at age 55, of natural causes. Way too young for someone that, throughout his music career, seemed so expert at bottling the vital spit and vigor of youth.
Robert Black was mostly known as a new music bassist, but also for his work at the Hartt School, where he was a teacher for almost three decades. He performed in all manner of settings, but perhaps most famously with the Bang on a Can All-Stars. I managed Bang on a Can’s Cantaloupe Music label for a few years around 2010. I didn’t last because new music can be perilously abstract and cold, and I never failed to let my bosses know that. As the video above shows, however, Robert knew how to approach the form with humor and intensity and virtuosity in equal measure. This piece—as much performance art as it is music—is funny and weird and beautiful. It’s pretty rare that a musician captures all my primary life values in one performance. So to Robert, I say thank you for your service to music.
At the end of the day, my relationship to this country can feel as unhinged as the daily headlines. Our music is what I pledge my allegiance to. I hope you enjoy my eclectic selection of American songs.
…in songs by Joe Strummer, Billy Childish, and Peter Perrett.
I love good writing, and so I loved reading Ketanji Brown’s beautifully angry dissent to the Supreme Court’s recently decided and very depressing affirmative action case:
“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. And having so detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world problems. No one benefits from ignorance. Although formal racelinked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and today’s ruling makes things worse, not better. The best that can be said of the majority’s perspective is that it proceeds (ostrich-like) from the hope that preventing consideration of race will end racism. But if that is its motivation, the majority proceeds in vain. If the colleges of this country are required to ignore a thing that matters, it will not just go away. It will take longer for racism to leave us. And, ultimately, ignoring race just makes it matter more.”
Until we have a saner way of determining the composition of our Supreme Court, and the length of time justices are allowed to serve, I look forward to Justice Brown and two of her female peers outliving a great number of their colleagues, and lodging similar sentiments on all manner of issues, so the historical record will show that not all of our most powerful judges were monsters.
You can read Justice Brown’s dissent in full over here.
Whenever I have reason to go back to the computer file folder in which I’ve archived those early pictures of The National, I am shocked to discover they’re in the same place as these pics I took near the World Trade Center site after 9/11.
Yes, that dump truck I captured driving near the site has the phrase “Air Craft Parts” spray painted on its side.
…with honors!
We don’t have this kind of footage of Pearl Harbor or JFK’s assassination; there’s a reason each of those events have inspired so many conspiracy theories, with only sketchy, incomplete documents like the Zapruder film to guide us through them.
At the same time, there is something peculiarly evocative about incomplete documentation. I grabbed this gut-churning still showing Jacqueline Kennedy reaching out toward a Secret Service agent from Wikipedia. They refer to it as Frame 371—every fragment its own history painting.
There’s a documentary about Billy, his life and his hero’s journey in music. Here is a trailer:
Around the turn of the century, I interviewed Hutz, a native of Kiev, Ukraine who had become a central figure in the New York nightlife of my early years living in the city. The chat included this question & answer:
I was wondering if you consider yourself a global citizen or an American? You were a New York City celebrity long before you were on the international stage.
Spiritual wise, I feel like a citizen of the world, but I try to go out on a limb and say good things about America. I am constantly in conversations about how much it sucks. Everyone bitches about it in rock & roll circles, but let’s not forget the good stuff. Everything musically progressive in the last century was from America, and I’m proud I’ve been embraced by the culture that gave us jazz, hip-hop, punk, techno and a hundred other stuff.