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May 16, 2009
O Superman
Yesterday I ran across David Schmader’s essay on “O Superman” at the Stranger. I’d never heard the song, but since then I’ve listened to it four or five times. It’s kind of amazing, and the video is strangely beautiful as well.
For a song that was written in 1981, it probably says more about 9/11 than anything that’s been written since, and I wonder if that’s more than coincidence. If the same song came out in 2002, I'm not sure it would have been the same song.
In some ways, what it’s saying isn’t unique. Jonathan Safran Foer tried to talk about the day though a series of phone messages. And, well, everyone has tried to talk about it in terms of guilt. But those frames always come up short. There’s a touch of barbarism in even approaching the subject, and even if that weren’t the case, it’s too easy to fall short of what needs to be said; the thing itself is the appropriate metaphor.
But writing from the past is, in a way, writing from a place of innocence—maybe the only place left—and that makes all the difference. There’s no hint of inappropriate detachment or superficial catharsis. How could there be? But, despite the twenty year interval between the song and what it's about (or what it's about now), the song maintains a really uncanny sense of engagement.
Perhaps everything that will ever be said about September 2001 was already written before we got there.
Of course, the song wasn’t really written in 1981 about the future. It was written about the present. I’m not sure it’s possible to hear the song the way it sounded then—it must have been abstract and paranoid. Just another reminder that the past is far away.
Posted by Drew at May 16, 2009 09:19 PM