Clover - 1989 Bob Dylan didnt have this to sing about

ROTH FAMILY FOUNDATION

Music in America Imprint

Michael P. Roth

and Sukey Garcetti

have endowed this

imprint to honor the

memory of their parents,

Julia and Harry Roth,

whose deep love of music

they wish to share

with others.

1989

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Music in America Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from Sukey and Gil Garcetti, Michael P. Roth, and the Roth Family Foundation.

bob dylan didnt have this to sing about

JOSHUA CLOVER

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu .

University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England

2009 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clover, Joshua.
1989 : Bob Dylan didnt have this to sing about / Joshua

Clover.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-25255-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Popular music19811990History and criticism. 2. Rap (Music)History and criticism. 3. Underground dance musicHistory and criticism. 4. Grunge musicHistory and criticism. 5. Nineteen eighty-nine, A.D.
I. Title.

ML3470.C597 2009

781.6409048dc22 2009018653

Manufactured in the United States of America

18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.481992 (R 1997)
(Permanence of Paper).

God knows how we got here. And yet its a great pleasure to live in a century where such great things are happening, provided one can hide away in a small corner so as to watch the Comedy at ones ease.

NICOLAS POUSSIN

letter to Paul Frart de Chantelou,
January 17, 1649

PART ONE
1989 (THE UNCONFINED UNRECKONED YEAR)

PART TWO
1989 (A SHOUT IN THE STREET)

In 1989, Paris sang La Marseillaise. The new opera house was consecrated near the site of the Bastille prison, stormed two hundred years before, on July 14, 1789.

The Bicentennial coincided with the G7 Summit, opening in Paris that day. Led by tricolor-draped diva Jessye Norman, the finance ministers from the Group of Seven industrialized nations and the assembled heads of state served as a chorus for the triumphal singing of the revolutionary anthem in the Place de la Bastille, signaling the Bicentennial as an occasion for the whole of the First World. The spectacle of statecraft was orchestrated by Jean-Paul Goude, former artistic director of Esquire magazine.

This commemoration would be entirely supplanted in public consciousness before the years end. The sanguine dnouement of the occupation in Beijings Tiananmen Squaresensationalized in the Western media in equal proportion to the Chinese states attempts at media suppressionhad already rendered the French Bicentennial artifactual, mere revolution recollected. Franois Mitterrands press conference concluding the Summit was dominated by questions about China, and about the Soviet Union. He forecast no major changes. In less than four months, cascading European events would culminate in the opening of the border between East and West Germany and the disintegration of the Iron Curtain. By the end of December, 1989 could lay claim to having been the most geopolitically laden year since at least 1945.

La Marseillaise, less famously, was also the marching song of the Russian Revolution of 1917, to be replaced by The Internationale, which would become the Soviet Unions national anthem. The latter would in turn serve as a rallying song for the occupying students and workers in Tiananmen Square. As it happens, The Internationale was originally a French songwith lyrics set to the melody of La Marseillaise.

Thus the song proceeds along two historical paths: one a long arc, a linear narrative in which the nascent French Republic is consolidated over two centuries into a beacon of the First World, an industrial power and cultural center; the other, a series of knights moves from uprising to uprising, changing at every leap. Two routes from 1789 to 1989, each with quite different valences.

It is perhaps only contingent that the modern eras longest and most complex conflictthe division of much of the globe between Soviet-bloc communism and U.S.-style capitalismis seen to end exactly two hundred years after the French Revolution, the political struggle commonly held to have given birth to modernity itself. What is surely less contingent is how each of these events could be dated decisively enough for such neat histories, which seem to have their own inarguable logic. Thus the numerical coincidences of modernity take on the aspect of a linear narrative. As Francis Fukuyama puts the matter: The year 1989the two hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, and of the ratification of the U.S. Constitutionmarked the decisive collapse of communism as a factor in world history.

The French Revolution may have begun on July 14 with the storming of the Bastille; or perhaps it was earlier, with the National Assemblys refusal to disband, its June 20 Tennis Court Oath. The signal political changethe abolition of monarchy, the birth of the Republic, Frances Year Zerowaited until the Fall of 1792. The crucial and contingent events that unfolded in the interim defy enumeration.

Lived history slips away. Of course. It is replaced with images and stories, eventually a single story, a lone reference point: the storming of the Bastille in Paris on July 14, 1789, which the citizens of France celebrate punctually by singing La Marseillaise. But the song in question did not exist, had not yet been written.

It was not even the first popular song of the Revolution. That would be Ah! a ira (its refrain apocryphally inspired by the stumbling French of Benjamin Franklin), which begins Ah! Itll be fine, itll be fine, itll be finearistocrats to the lamp-posts! The sentiments of La Marseillaise bear a somewhat different legacy through the generations:

Arise, children of the Fatherland,
The day of glory has arrived;
Against us, tyrannys
Bloody standard is raised.

The striking disparity between these two songs sensibilities must be in some part one of time and situation. Events were moving with an unknown swiftness; history itself couldnt catch its breath. Ah! a ira is from 1790; The Chant of the Rhine Army, as La Marseillaise was first called, was not composed until 1792. It was brought to Paris by said army; at that moment, with the Revolution at least three years in, it was not clear what would happen next, or what the Revolution even meant.

The song, that is to say, both does and doesnt belong to 1789. It summons affect, image, and event that seem located in that year without actually being from that year. This is saying something more than the truism that songs escape their original contexts and intentions, that messages shift. It puts on display the process by which process vanisheswherein fluid, uncertain, debatable, and analyzable meanings congeal and flatten, grow finally fixed.