We’ve tackled patriotism in posts here and here; now Roy Kasten, Contributing Editor at No Depression and DJ at KDHX, offers some more thoughts on freedom and the Fourth. Don’t miss the long list of Independence Day-minded tunes at the end.

When I was growing up in Elmhurst, Illinois, a northwest burb of Chicago, my family of 10 would go out to see the fireworks at the park every Fourth of July. At home, my father opposed—and couldn’t afford–any fireworks fiercer than sparklers, snakes or snaps, and about the latter he wasn’t too thrilled. But to the park we’d go, with our blankets and jugs filled with “bug juice” as dad called it, to stare skyward for the minor explosions the Elmhurst fire department arranged.

One year, the rockets went up–and the rockets came down. I remember the cascade of sparks and embers, burning all the way down around us, my sisters screaming, my dad trying to be calm as he protected us, the shadowy forms all around covering themselves in blankets, and everyone getting the fuck out of there as the burning bits came down.

As a boy, I had little idea what the holiday meant, save that we always hung a flag outside our porch, we always had a barbeque and sometimes we’d go to the parade—oh, and that my father had a rare day off from work. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve years old, I didn’t know or care what it meant to be patriotic. But I knew about fun.

Forty-two years old, I don’t much like the Fourth of July, but then I don’t much like holidays of any kind. And yet I love many, many songs about the Fourth and songs that draw on the day’s images. Those images resonate through rock & roll (especially, but also in country), not surprisingly, since the Fourth remains a symbolic reservoir of fun, freedom, youth, independence and America—and perhaps most importantly, some communal recognition and collective sharing of these feelings, which are also primary rock & roll tropes. Sure, the historical birth of the nation is there in the background, but the experience, the lived-through feeling of the holiday doesn’t draw much power from that—at least it never did for me.

In popular music, it’s those mythopoeic qualities that matter: Van Morrison’s “Almost Independence Day” and Springsteen’s “4th of July, Asbury Park” are the great examples. Greil Marcus, rightly, draws a line between Jefferson, the Cuckoo (who only sings on the fourth day of July—or the fifth, if you believe Ramblin’ Jack) and Bob Dylan’s “Tears of Rage.” For obvious historical reasons, black artists seem little interested in following that line (on a side note, a recent Pew Research Center study finds that 41% of blacks fly the flag vs. 67% of whites). The literal and symbolic promises of Independence Day have failed many.

The shadow of that failure is cast over many songs. There’s Dave Alvin’s defeated, working class lover in “Fourth of July” and Springsteen’s son saying goodbye-to-all-that in “Independence Day.” If the Fourth serves to symbolize freedom, it also signifies the opposite. The promise can feel more than a little broken; sometimes it seems lost to another time entirely. “It’s one of my faults that I can’t quell my past,” Aimee Mann sings in her wonderful, regretful “4th of July.” No one can, and that’s part of what makes us us. It’s also part of what defines America. It’s hard to believe in the red, white and blue stories; it’s hard to disbelieve them too.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” declares the great text. But those truths are self-evidently unrealized—they are promised and yet unfulfilled. No amount of flag waving or parades can change that. And yet the promise remains. The birth place of rock & roll is a land which doesn’t just pronounce ideals; it’s a nation of actual laws which would embody and defend them. And when laws are perverted or negated—as with the recent scandalous assault on habeas corpus and the authorization of torture—then there are other laws, and animating truths, by which we must reclaim them. America, for all its past and present betrayals, remains en potentia a place where life, liberty and happiness, symbolized and propagandized by the Fourth, may yet be. That’s not an American dream; that’s an American right—worth struggling for, worth expanding as much as possible.

A good Fourth of July song can remind us just what’s at stake in keeping a promise.

“4th of July” by X (written by Dave Alvin) from See How We Are
“4th of July” by Aimee Mann from Whatever
“4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” by Ben E. King (written by Bruce Springsteen) from One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Songs of Bruce Springsteen

View a long list of songs about, for and relevant to Independence Day.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 at 12:44 am and is filed under Guest Writers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.