Track Review: "No One Would Riot For Less", Bright Eyes' Cassadaga

Originally posted Friday, October 26, 2007

This track starts as a more up-to-date version of Leonard Cohen’s “Who By Fire” – itself a modernization of the Yom Kippur psalm to a God who shapes our ends by a logic that remains necessarily mysterious. Both songs list various horrors by which we leave the world, then partly submerge that horror in the beauty of its evocation. Cohen uses swooning back-up singers and a stark modal melody that shares its harmonic language with the songs of faith and mystery of synagogue services. Oberst uses the build-up from a lone voice, nearly lost in reverb, lapped by incoming strings to a symphonic climax that is the universal pop language for you are not alone.But “No One One Would Riot For Less” tells a fundamentally different story from “Who By Fire”. While Cohen’s version would not be entirely out of place in a ceremony for the Day of Atonement (it’d have to be a reform synagogue, of course), Oberst sings of what can’t be forgiven, of bombs and bullets falling in patterns no one seems able to account for, of a way of life so poisonous it promises to render the earth uninhabitable in a matter of centuries. Yet this song, too, looks to unify its various horrors into a single mystery: “From the madness of the government/to the vengeance of the sea/well everything is eclipsed/by the shape of destiny.”Which, at first glance, looks like a load of poetic crap. There’s a difference, a rather large difference, between 50-odd civilians blown up by a misfired “smart bomb” and a boat going down in a sudden and unpredictable storm. Until every soldier, every engineer, every mourner, every taxpayer, every last carrier of human memory is wiped off the face of the earth by some final environmental apocalypse, dead by a precision-guided bomb in your apartment in a working-class Baghdad neighbourhood is not the same as dead by bad-luck waves crashing over the side of a passenger ship.But then, that might just be the point. Maybe the word destiny means something different now than it did when the psalmist penned his lines about fire and water, sun and darkness – when it was maybe still possible to believe that things happened in their own time, in God’s time, and that there was a time for everything, even the end of time.And it meant something different when Mr. Cohen, in the wake of Vietnam and with the cold war still hovering, brought those words up to date with reference to barbiturate suicides and the self-destroying acts of the powerful – when it was no longer sufficient to speak of the ancient human frailties, terrible and intractable but somehow almost comforting, almost absolving in their necessity – not now, when we held in our hands the possibility and responsibility for complete global destruction. And it means something else again when that possibility, having gained momentum from decades of looking away, feels like it’s rolled right out of our hands.On the first track of 2003’s Lifted, Oberst signals his awakening as political songwriter with a shrilly self-lacerating tirade against a young person who tries to make sense of the world with his head stuck up his ass: “You can try and live in darkness, but you will never shake the light….When you’re wrapped up in your blankets baby, in that comfortable cocoon. But I’ve seen the day of your awakening boy, and IT’S COMING SOON.”The tone on “No One Would Riot For Less” could not be more different. “Wake, baby, wake,” Oberst sings in the final verse. “But keep that blanket around you, there’s nowhere else safe.” Meaning that the terrain of destruction is vast and unnavigable, the space of earth that we can warm and protect is real enough, but very small.I think in this song we are being asked, very gently, to give up hope. Not to ignore what’s happening exactly, not to stop recycling or donating to Oxfam or buying local or performing whatever minute acts of resistance make up the daily political life of the just-enlightened-enough-to-be-terrified-slash-stricken-with-guilt liberal masses.Just that as the world become more and more a place where things happen that we (meaning me) can’t even really imagine, maybe a little darkness isn’t such a bad thing. I don’t know. Maybe I don’t need to read another book on Iraq or Cambodia or the Holocaust just now, trying to put together the pieces on something I can only pretend to understand, pretend to look for solutions I’d never have the guts or power or sense of direction to help bring into being. Maybe if there are things we can’t forgive, things we can’t ask forgiveness for, maybe forgetting is what we’ve got, everything eclipsed by the shape of destiny, etc.I don’t know. I’m not sure I like this song, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the “love let us be true to one another, because the world is shit” resolution. But I’m also not sure I can answer the questions it raises. Why do you (and by you, I mean me) want to understand? If you understood fully, intellectually, emotionally, imaginatively, what’s happening in Baghdad, or the war-zones of the Congo, or the upper echelons of the Bush administration, what good would you be, anyway, either to the people suffering in countries you “can’t even pronounce the name of” or to the people around you? If you understood, all you could ever do is mourn.