Titus Andronicus, "Four Score and Seven"

A battle cry, well done, brings a rush of blood to the head. Your pulse quickens, and you throw a fist in the air and join in the chant. It’s a waking up from waking up, and you feel a sudden solidarity with everyone around you. This swell of romantic feeling is largely the preserve of the young. Those of us in middle age are, after all, the incumbents: the very authority to be defied, opposed, resisted. But this is not to say we can’t be roused for battle, too. It’s just we have a better sense of the kind of damage that can result, if we let our passions get the better of us.

When you think about it, rock music really is a gift to Western society. For decades now we’ve heard the fretting, from preachers and politicians and other like-minded busybodies, over the steady corrosion of morals that necessarily follows when young men and women are allowed to pick up guitars and shout about how they feel. And maybe, too, the young men and women with guitars went out of their way to court trouble, with all their songs about Satan and sex and cop killing. But they were only speaking the fuck you in all of us, and in some countries the teenagers skip the guitars entirely and go right to suicide vests. Someone more conspiracy-minded than I am might wonder if the Establishment invented rock ‘n’ roll specifically as a safety valve, to keep the rebellions of the last sixty years largely confined to the dance floor or festival ground. And if they really wanted to make that case, they would note that this trend of mass shootings by young white American men started right around the time Internet message boards overtook the rock show, as the principal outlet for expressing youthful outrage.

I was never any kind of a radical. I never joined a subversive organization or engaged in “un-American” activities. But there was that one night in Columbus in 1993, when five of us were standing in the packed club and Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” (Apple Music, Spotify) came on over the PA. I stood tall with my brothers on that day, and with my fist in the air and Zach De La Rocha egging us all on, I shouted over and over with the rest of them:

—FUCK YOU, I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME—

Though it meant nothing at all, it was a powerful feeling. At least enough that it’s lodged in my memory thirty years later. 

And this is the thing. At some point when we’re coming of age, we have to get our heads around the notion of joining, and thereby perpetuating, The System. When we’re kids, Said System keeps to the shadows. To be sure, it works its hooks into us from Day One, sending carefully crafted messaging out over the airwaves, or buzzing down wires into our homes. Its operatives address us from the front of our classrooms and even sit with us at our kitchen tables, softening us up to their conviction that Whatever is, is right. But it is only when we come of age that The System steps into the light, extends its hand, and makes a true, self-assured son-of-a-bitch introduction: You don’t know me, but I’ve always been here and always will be. Oh, and there’s fuck-all you’re gonna do about it.

So yeah, who would begrudge any one of us, particularly those with the aggro triggers on our Y-chromosomes, the opportunity to tell The Man to stick it? We grew up reading adventure stories about spies and pirates. The System spun up Pete Mitchell and John Rambo for us to admire, and it called on us to celebrate the Boston Tea Party and subsequent taking up of arms against British authority. When Luke decapitated a galaxy-wide Empire with two proton torpedoes, we cheered him on. Then what? We turn twenty, and we find out there’s no space for us to live similarly romantic lives? That it’s laughable and for that matter verboten for us to fight for something? For anything? Bullshit.

Enter the Clash, and the Sex Pistols, too. It’s the best years of your life they want to steal. I wanna be me. I wanna be anarchy. I want a riot of my own. There’s a reason why I found this music in college and grabbed onto it like a life preserver. Or maybe a hand grenade.

There is a rhythm to revolution, and I’m not talking about Topper Headon’s drumming. There is a timed cyclical nature to youth culture’s various attempts, successful or not, to overturn What Is and Is Wrong. This much is inscribed in the very word “revolution,” after all, which first described a circular path of travel. Like the Earth’s journey around the Sun: back where you started on January 1, and off you go again.

Back in the day, Stereolab caught on to the rhythmic call-and-response of economy and politics. They wrote and recorded a song about it, and it’s called “Ping Pong” (Apple Music, Spotify):

It’s all right ’cause the historical pattern has shown how the economical cycle tends to revolve. In a round of decades, three stages stand out in a loop: a slump and war, then peel back to square one and back for more.

Stereolab are the black turtlenecks of rock music. In the café, gripping their copies of Piketty’s Capital, making the intellectual case for Revolution, and I love them to death. 

They could as readily have sung about the insurgencies that rise and fall, like clockwork, within their own industry, because it sure seems like every fifteen to seventeen years, one or more bands takes to the streets and raises a ragged flag to rile up the kids. In 1977, UK punk bands fanned the flames: the aforementioned Pistols and Clash. In the early ’90s, Rage Against the Machine took its turn. 

Then, like clockwork, fist punches sky once again, in 2008. To avoid any doubt about their intentions, Titus Andronicus called their first record The Airing of Grievances. They rose up out of Glen Rock, New Jersey, some wild chimera comprised of equal parts Springsteen, Pogues, Replacements, and eleventh-grade AP History textbook. I could have seen them tour on their first record, when they supported Los Campesinos! at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston. But I showed up too late that night to catch the opening act.

Driving home from work two years later, I had WBUR, Boston’s NPR station, on the car radio. Robert Christgau was on the broadcast reviewing The Monitor, Titus Andronicus’s second record. (This was May 28, 2010. You can hear Christgau’s review here.) I was gripped, instantly. A folk/ punk-rock concept album, loaded with eight-minute tracks interweaving front-man Patrick Stickles’ lost-girlfriend angst with Civil War tropes? Songs introduced by extended quotations from William Lloyd Garrison and Abraham Lincoln, read aloud by, among others, Craig Finn from the Hold Steady and Stickles’ high-school English teacher?

It sounded like a smarter American Idiot, and Christgau was promising battle cries. I couldn’t sign up fast enough.

The reason why is that at this time we were smack in the middle of the Great Recession, and I was smack in the middle of a three-year-long job hunt. My gig at the time, in the Office of the General Counsel at Harvard, was term-limited, and I’d already overstayed by two years. My boss was allowing me to stick around so long as I kept looking in earnest for my next job. It’s just there were no next jobs.

—Most of all disappointed, I say, atop this mountain as I urinate into the void. Fuck, I’m frustrated freaking out something fierce would you help me? I’m hungry, I suffer and I starve and I struggle and I stammer—

By this time I was thirty-six years old. I had lowered my fist and my flag a long time ago. I had internalized the values of The System—compliance, patience, commitment, deference—and was even starting to impress them upon my children. I was due to be rewarded. But now I was finding that The System favored instead the creeps who cut corners, who threw elbows, who lied, cheated and stole, up to a point of saturation where the greed and the reward-to-merit ratio had become so astronomically distorted that the entire Economy was verging on collapse into a black hole.

—About how long since our forefathers came on this land, we’ve been coddling those we should be running through? Please don’t wait around for them to come and shake hands—they’re not gonna be waiting for you.—

For sure, my problems were First World of First World Problems. Nobody was foreclosing on my house. I didn’t have hospital bills bankrupting me, and by the grace of God and yes, Harvard University, I was employed. All I was doing was looking for a next step forward in my career.

Still, this was enough to reawaken the angry young man in me. As before, I didn’t go into the streets and take on the riot police. I played music. But where before it was Rotten and Strummer and De La Rocha putting words to my feelings, now it was Stickles. For weeks on end I would drive home from work playing The Monitor at max volume, singing Titus Andronicus songs until I could feel the blood in my cheeks again. This was my answer to what the banks had done to America.

It may be true that with each turn around the cycle, we’re only echoing what came before and was more real. The Revolution is smaller, and quieter, at each turn. See here the insurgency conducted by a middle-class man in his late 30s, alone in his sea-green Toyota Prius, strictly between the hours of 5:30 and 5:55 PM, as prescribed by a sexagenarian rock critic on National Public Radio.

Track 6 on The Monitor is a song called “Four Score and Seven” (Apple Music, Spotify), which may just be one of the most powerful songs ever recorded. Sprawled out over eight minutes and thirty-eight seconds, the song has an unbelievable buildup, and its messaging is profound, poetic, and masterfully rendered. “Four Score and Seven” is miserable quote-unquote art—Stickles’ words—in its most concentrated and pleasurable form. And at its crescendo, Titus Andronicus offers us this take-home message, which will stick with me forever:

—IT’S STILL US AGAINST THEM, IT’S STILL US AGAINST THEM, AND THEY’RE WINNING—

And that’s really it, isn’t it? The human condition, captured perfectly in a single sentence. Just as it is natural for the young to be strident and fierce and uncompromising, it is natural for us all—encoded into our DNA, arguably, as a principle of natural selection—to strive to find affinities with like-minded others. We bind together in groups, for our protection. And the groups have greater definition, they cohere better, if they stand against something. If they fight together.

IT'S STILL US AGAINST THEM—

More recently I was in the car, again listening to NPR. No music recommendations on this day: instead a commentator was presenting his theory about the root cause of the extreme partisan politics that is mauling the fabric of American life. What has made the situation so combustible, the man argued, is that leaders on both sides have managed to convince their constituencies that they’re losing the battle. Each side is told the conflict is existential and on a knife’s edge, and the enemy needs only to strike one last blow to secure total victory. Voters on the right hear and believe that The System’s most influential institutions, from public schools to the universities to Hollywood and the mass media, are acting in concert to extinguish their culture and eradicate their values, so as to reduce them to a permanent minority. On the left, we hear and believe that Republican officials are using gerrymandering and voter restrictions to lock electoral politics in their favor, and they’ve thrown the key to their six Supreme Court justices for safekeeping. And if it isn’t enough just to rig The System, they have all the guns and will overthrow it by violence.

—AND THEY’RE WINNING.

Maybe we need to reexamine who is us and who is them. Might be a proper telling of the story is that they are the few who know just how to push our buttons, and we are the many who respond self-destructively when they do it. The button-pushers are most definitely winning.

Seems to me a going-forward strategy might be we all get into our cars, turn the radio all the way up, shake our fists and sing along—to Titus Andronicus, Taylor Swift, Beethoven, whoever lights our candle. Get all our angst and grievance out and on the table, then flip that table over, Simon LeBon-style, in our own private, self-contained Revolutions (“riots of our own”). Then we can take that sense of urgency that’s boiled up in our blood and apply it toward building a better world. If nothing comes of that, and the they I’m thinking of keep on winning, then at least we’ll have rocked out in our cars. We might even in that moment draw consolation, and solidarity, from another of The Monitor’s signature battle cries:

YOU’LL ALWAYS BE A LOSER, YOU’LL ALWAYS BE A LOSER—AND THAT’S OKAY.