Eight Years of Bush, Eight Years of Music
Ned and Dylan both have thoughtful, totally reasonable lists of music that best captures what it was like to live in America in the time of Bush. And while their picks range from ones I totally agree with (“Intervention” by Arcade Fire) to ones I like, yet don’t quite see how they relate to Bush (Tha Carter III, “The Modern Age”), I have to say that I can’t really evaluate the popular culture of 2000-2008 in terms of the socio-political environment.
With the exception of some TV shows, movies and songs – which, besides 24, were generally rather mediocre -that very explicitly dealt with the politics of the day, it’s damn near impossible for me to make these types of judgments. That’s because not only have the last eight years been the years of Bush, they were also the eight years of the greatest personal, physical, emotional and social development of my entire life. While hoping to avoid knotty philosophical quandries, it’s safe to say that I’m a totally different person at age 18 then I was at age 10. And since the consumption of cultural bits, especially pop cultural bits, can not be disentangled from the person consuming them (in my case, me), it’s hard to seperate my own personal development over the past eight years from how the culture has developed. So, I will always reflect on pop culture in the age of Bush as first “pop culture while I was a teenager” and then second in its larger social and political context.
True enough, and I suppose that applies to me as well. I first heard “The Modern Age” a couple days after 9/11, which makes the two hard to disentangle (though I think it applies lyrically to the generally apathy and nihilism of the early Bush years as well).
Just on the Tha Carter note – on “Tie Your Hands” in particular, and the album more generally, it’s shot through with Katrina, which is why I chose it.
Dylan Matthews
December 22, 2008 at 12:15 am
Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of room for ambiguity; that’s why I limited my list to albums that were really obviously politically charged. But there’s no denying that it’s more a list of protest albums that resonated with my personal reaction to the Bush administration than anything else.
Ned Resnikoff
December 22, 2008 at 12:32 am