reborn on the 4th of July, 250 times
American monuments, documents, and speeches—paired with some playlists from abroad
AHB’s Goodies is a mixtape delivery service. It’s for music discovery, without algorithms. I’ve prepared this welcome page to explain what it’s all about.
Consider a paid subscription for exclusive access to my Artist Primers and Genre Primers—dozens of playlists exploring individual musicians and specific sonic worlds, from vintage African music to power pop. In today’s post, I reshare a pair of archival playlists on American themes after a few riffs about the Statue of Liberty.
I posted this image the day after America’s last presidential election. It’s from Gee Vaucher, a member of Britain’s anarcho-punk collective Crass. It’s sat at the top of my Instagram profile ever since.
It captures a feeling many Americans had that day, and have held onto ever since, with varying degrees of daily despair. But we’re a resolute people. And even during the most squalid depths of America’s depraved recent approach to international relations, I can’t think of this place in apocalyptic terms. America is not about endings.
America is about beginning again and again. I think of it as a place always under construction — an echo of this unfamiliar image, of the Statue of Liberty as it was being assembled in France in the 1880s, not long after our Civil War. The statue was a gift to us, while Americans funded the pedestal, and it was an inspired attempt at planting the ideals that drove the French republic—liberté, égalité, fraternité—at the primary entry point to our young nation.
The statue was designed by Auguste Bartholdi and engineered by Gustave Eiffel, for whom it served as a kind of prototype for the techniques he later used in the Eiffel Tower. (Freedom fries! Frontier models of innovation!) Bartholdi was from Alsace, a region whose national identity has always been in flux between France and Germany. He was inspired by the long-lost Colossus of Rhodes and his travels to Egypt where he encountered monuments like the Sphinx and the Pyramids of Giza.
Today the New York Times ran a visual-driven story about this history. It’s an inspiring piece which delves into how even this most hackneyed bit of Americana is actually an amalgam, forged from influences around the world. Because the founding ideal of America was never to replicate a bygone era, but to open new range—a notion of manifest destiny so unique and hybrid it’s sometimes unhinged. A melting pot of world striving, creating something new.
# 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: Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube
Today is the 4th of July.
This mix was originally shared on February, 14, 2021—a Valentine to America I guess?2 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, Ontario, Canada. 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,3 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.
Find the playlist on… Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube
The playlist includes songs such as…
^ Anais Mitchell: “Young Man in America”
^ 79rs Gang: “Drama and “Dead and Gone” — Neither song from the playlist 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
• Another AHB’s Goodies 4th of July mix from 2019: A few of the songs from the primary mix linked above recur in the playlist below. But this earlier mix is largely obsessed with American places — Baltimore, West Palm Beach, Atlantic City, Nebraska, Alaska, swimming with dolphins in Florida, and rocking Adidas in New York City.
• Stitched together footage from the Jan 6th U.S. Capitol riot: At the time of the Trump riots, the American history major in me was obsessed with the real-time footage of the event — primary documents being the holy grail of that discipline. The version I’m sharing is a 45-minute 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.4
The film is terrible, goofy, haunting, so complete and so real. #TriggerWarning: someone is shot and killed around the 40:00 mark. I’m warning you because I disagree with the notion that there’s any utility or public good in watching that sort of violence.
• Alternative perspectives on the 4th of July: Why end on a grim note when there’s ample evidence of hopeful ones? There’s a long history of melancholy but optimistic perspectives on what it means to be an American, such as Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?” or Langston Hughes 1935 poem “Let America be America Again” which begins:
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.(America never was America to me.)
It ends on a ambiguous note “And make America again!” which posits that our country is still an undelivered promise. Both defiant and forward-looking, his poem contains none of the baked-in nostalgia embedded in the MAGA cliché. Rather it’s a demand to make this country live up to its ideals for the first time.
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