Read Online History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs by Greil Marcus - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Greil Marcus
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music throughout the night. Music in a mellow mood.”
“Don’t touch that radio! Don’t touch it! Turn it up! Turn it up! I’ve never heard music like this before! It speaks to me! Taj! Dad! This is unbelievable . . . If this is out there, think of how much more is out there! This is the kind of music that tells me to go out there and be somebody!”
“My Country ’Tis of Thee” was the song Martin Luther King, Jr., seized on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on 28 August 1963: “And this will be the day—this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, ‘My Country ’tis of thee. Sweet land of liberty. Of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride. From every—mountainside, let freedom ring’ and if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.” There was no pause at all between the last word of the song and the and if that followed, suspending America’s greatness between past and future, a future American might never serve. As King spoke, his own words entered the song, and Kelly Clarkson appeared to be listening to the song, and hearing that story telling itself within it, as she sang.
She had to follow Aretha Franklin, who had performed the song at Barack Obama’s first inauguration, and she didn’t shame herself. As she slowly turned the song toward a bigger and bigger presence, she was both a star and self-effacing, commanding and modest. Moving into the forgotten third verse, then the fourth, she made the country start, saying, There is so much we don’t know, there is so much to remember.
Let music swell the breeze,
And ring from all the trees,
Sweet freedom’s song;
Let mortal tongues awake;
Let all that breathe partake;
Let rocks their silence break,
The sound prolong.
Joe Biden looked shocked, and thrilled. You couldn’t tell whether he hadn’t heard the verse Clarkson sang before, or if he hadn’t heard her before.
Beyoncé closed the show; swathed against the cold in clothes that looked like extensions of her blonde hair, of her aura, she did the National Anthem as a show-closer, drawing attention to her own gorgeousness. Near the end she raised her left hand in the gesture of an orator emphasizing a point; the gesture was so much more that of a politician than of a singer it let you imagine she was inaugurating herself. As the song ended she remade it into the last number of some quasi-historical-religious Hollywood epic, Ben-Hur if not Les Misérables: “Brave, brave— the Brave! ” Back in the real world, Beyoncé and her husband, the hip-hop emperor Jay-Z, seated behind her, made up almost as big a power couple as Hillary and Bill Clinton; that night, according to the next day’s news, she danced until three at the White House with the president. But as a show-closer this was also a warm-up.
With a $50 million contract with Pepsi, with her face on the cover of Vogue and half a dozen other magazines, with the ghost of Vince Lombardi providing a voice-over thatkicked off the performance less as a pole dance than a Tony Robbins rally—“The will to excel, the will to win, these are the things that endure”—at her Pepsi-sponsored Super Bowl show Beyoncé appeared on a pedestal as her own statue. She brought herself to life as her own Pygmalion, breathing into her own mouth. Throwing off the restraint of the inauguration, she plunged into the melismatics that turn every song into a mirror into which the singer gazes at her own beauty. From her first records with Destiny’s Child— the group brought back together for this night—through her long string of number-one hits, “Crazy in Love,” “Baby Boy,” “Check on it,” “irreplaceable,” “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” she followed in the footsteps of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey in replacing even a memory of soul music with its counterfeit. The transformation is magical in its completeness. What used to be called worrying a
“Don’t touch that radio! Don’t touch it! Turn it up! Turn it up! I’ve never heard music like this before! It speaks to me! Taj! Dad! This is unbelievable . . . If this is out there, think of how much more is out there! This is the kind of music that tells me to go out there and be somebody!”
“My Country ’Tis of Thee” was the song Martin Luther King, Jr., seized on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on 28 August 1963: “And this will be the day—this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, ‘My Country ’tis of thee. Sweet land of liberty. Of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride. From every—mountainside, let freedom ring’ and if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.” There was no pause at all between the last word of the song and the and if that followed, suspending America’s greatness between past and future, a future American might never serve. As King spoke, his own words entered the song, and Kelly Clarkson appeared to be listening to the song, and hearing that story telling itself within it, as she sang.
She had to follow Aretha Franklin, who had performed the song at Barack Obama’s first inauguration, and she didn’t shame herself. As she slowly turned the song toward a bigger and bigger presence, she was both a star and self-effacing, commanding and modest. Moving into the forgotten third verse, then the fourth, she made the country start, saying, There is so much we don’t know, there is so much to remember.
Let music swell the breeze,
And ring from all the trees,
Sweet freedom’s song;
Let mortal tongues awake;
Let all that breathe partake;
Let rocks their silence break,
The sound prolong.
Joe Biden looked shocked, and thrilled. You couldn’t tell whether he hadn’t heard the verse Clarkson sang before, or if he hadn’t heard her before.
Beyoncé closed the show; swathed against the cold in clothes that looked like extensions of her blonde hair, of her aura, she did the National Anthem as a show-closer, drawing attention to her own gorgeousness. Near the end she raised her left hand in the gesture of an orator emphasizing a point; the gesture was so much more that of a politician than of a singer it let you imagine she was inaugurating herself. As the song ended she remade it into the last number of some quasi-historical-religious Hollywood epic, Ben-Hur if not Les Misérables: “Brave, brave— the Brave! ” Back in the real world, Beyoncé and her husband, the hip-hop emperor Jay-Z, seated behind her, made up almost as big a power couple as Hillary and Bill Clinton; that night, according to the next day’s news, she danced until three at the White House with the president. But as a show-closer this was also a warm-up.
With a $50 million contract with Pepsi, with her face on the cover of Vogue and half a dozen other magazines, with the ghost of Vince Lombardi providing a voice-over thatkicked off the performance less as a pole dance than a Tony Robbins rally—“The will to excel, the will to win, these are the things that endure”—at her Pepsi-sponsored Super Bowl show Beyoncé appeared on a pedestal as her own statue. She brought herself to life as her own Pygmalion, breathing into her own mouth. Throwing off the restraint of the inauguration, she plunged into the melismatics that turn every song into a mirror into which the singer gazes at her own beauty. From her first records with Destiny’s Child— the group brought back together for this night—through her long string of number-one hits, “Crazy in Love,” “Baby Boy,” “Check on it,” “irreplaceable,” “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” she followed in the footsteps of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey in replacing even a memory of soul music with its counterfeit. The transformation is magical in its completeness. What used to be called worrying a
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