The Bill(board 100) of Rights
How much does popular music influence society? How does it shape society’s image of itself? How does it change a society’s image of other societies? It’s been a question pondered by sociologists, anthropologists, and columnists on Sunday nights up against the editorial deadline for Rolling Stone. But the rights alluded to in popular music, particularly American music, play an important role in the global understanding of the individual’s relationship to the State. The individualism of the American music canon is arguably today’s Leviathan.
To illustrate this, I will use experiences with two of my close friends. One grew up in Morocco, the other in Lebanon. Both are female, Francophone Arabs who hold M.Sc. degrees from top UK institutions. Both are multilingual, multi-genre, omnivorous music consumers.
I met my Moroccan friend when she was a masters student. We are both Jay-Z fans and we were excited to attend a Jay-Z concert together in London. Among the songs performed was his hit, “99 Problems.” My Lebanese friend and I saw The Killers together in Las Vegas. The first song played was the band’s radio hit “Jenny Was A Friend of Mine.”
“99 Problems” and “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine” have something in common. Both describe the rights of those suspected of crimes in America (Jay-Z tells of a traffic stop scenario with the police, while the Killers song is the dialogue of a man interrogated about the strangling death of his girlfriend). Both were widely circulated over the Internet to global audiences.
What effect does this type of lyrical proliferation have on others’ views of the liberties and rights Americans enjoy? What sorts of comparative policy debates are implicit in putting these tracks into radio rotation overseas? Both of my friends are more familiar with Jay-Z’s roadside encounter with drug-sniffing dogs than they are with the nuances of criminal procedure taught in American law schools.
The exporting of America’s justice system is part of a larger shipment headed abroad. One of America’s most prolific and profitable exports is entertainment. Baywatch is to television what the IKEA catalogue is to periodicals: ubiquitous export commercialism. But both tell the consumer a tiny bit about the place of origin and what that place might be like (Swedish readers, please hold the hate mail until you read the next sentence). This distorted, ridiculous, unobtainable, impossible caricature of the source takes on a personality of its own. My Iranian ex-girlfriend would recount stories of friends’ carefully smuggled Michael Jackson cassettes in 1980’s Tehran. Jackson wasn’t just a pop star – in these farthest markets, he was an explanation of America. Banned media is heavily distributed at the street level in nearly every country with censorship; by virtue of its being banned, a story takes on a special air of countercultural legitimacy. Stories of the days of honest, noble mercantilism are the mythology of every kleptocracy. The ideas of agnostic materialism are often whispered loudly enough to prevent theocracy. The success stories of self-governing societies often motivate or fuel rebellions against totalitarian regimes.
Music spreads not only what people do, but how and why they do it. Music has the power to encapsulate philosophy in a way that is accessible, compact, and portable. These tracks from Jay-Z and The Killers – describing accused Americans as strong, defiant, and empowered – stand in contrast to the predicaments facing those accused in other jurisdictions, who enjoy fewer rights. It isn’t that American music illustrates a perfect, well-oiled justice system – often, quite the opposite. But the framing of the issues is uniquely American.
I asked my Lebanese friend about American music a few weeks ago. We started to flip through her iPod (she estimates more than three quarters of its 64GB capacity is American music, even though she’s been living in Paris for years) and settled into a discussion about Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman.” The song tells a uniquely American story, but ends with a policeman allowing his brother to escape prosecution – something that I thought might translate well across national borders and cultures. She replied that the song probably would have been misinterpreted as being about corruption in many places she’s lived. Springsteen, however, finesses this favor among brothers into something consistent with the slippery moral code of macho Americana.
American songs, from the sensational shootout in “Ice Ice Baby” to the calm, unintentional killing in Johnny Cash’s “I Hung My Head,” have a unique understanding of right and wrong, cause and effect. America is exporting an intriguing mixture of expectations for justice, fairness, and freedom in ways that SoundScan can’t keep track of and that America can’t live up to.
