North Dakota

This is a post primarily about North Dakota, but also a little bit about South Dakota and various other places (SD will eventually get its own post too). It's not that I want to cop out here, but come on. There just aren't that many songs about either North or South Dakota. The two I've chosen to discuss this bastion of coldness and remoteness (home to a whopping 9.738 people per square mile!) are Killers b-side 'The Ballad of Michael Ballantine' and a return to Bright Eyes' 'Four Winds.'



North Dakota in winter doesn't look to conducive to driving, but this post will be about a great American tradition-- the road trip. The Killers have given interviews explaining the titular character of 'Michael Valentine' as a traveling gambler, one of the carefree, itinerant figures who populates American literature, folklore, and history itself (see: Huck Finn, Lewis and Clark, the millions of settlers who went west in pursuit of Manifest Destiny). The compulsion to get in your car (or Mississippi River raft or covered wagon) and go anywhere else is an American compulsion. Springsteen expresses the desire to escape by heading West, but Conor Oberst and The Killers seem like they only want to wander. To spout an insufferable cliché, the journey is the destination.

North Dakota, as one of arguably the remotest states, becomes a stand-in for any faraway destination in what I'll call "road songs." In both 'Valentine' and 'Four Winds,' North Dakota is contrasted with Mexico as locations visited by the traveling narrators. America is a vast place, and there's a certain pride in the declaration that you've made the journey from one far-flung point to another. Maybe it's a way we embrace our pioneer spirit in the modern era when there's less to explore. Michael Valentine also visits Memphis and New Orleans, southern outposts in the American odyssey. The journey is remarkably similar in 'Four Winds'-- Mexico, Dakota, and Cassadaga. The West, far North, and South are viewed as places that still require a substantial journey from the population center of the eastern seaboard.

Like contemporary road movies and books, 'Michael Valentine' portrays an American road trip as an extended celebration; the narrator is the road trip compatriot to the title gambler. Valentine meets women in each city on his aimless progress. There's no plan in his journey. The song begins, "I caught up with a friend in Dallas/ We took a trip to New Orleans/ Those black-eyed ladies/ Won't say they're sorry/ We finally caught a train to Memphis. Where everybody talks the same/ Those blue suede babies/All know my name." Valentine just having an interstate party in a "new suit and black tie." The final line before the last chorus is "I ain't gonna let you rain on this parade." Then the track loops back to another classic American trope-- the American dream of Hollywood. "I've got the buzz like Greta Garbo, walking forward into the sun," the narrator concludes. It sounds like westward progress, toward the sunset, but in the most cheerful way possible.

Bright Eyes' road trip is somewhat less cheerful and slightly more focused on the history of the Dakotas. There's a definite correlation there (we've all seen Fargo, North Dakota isn't exactly a wonderland). As we've seen, Oberst visits all the corners of the country-- Mexico and Cassadaga in the West and South, the "Ivy League moons" of the East, and North Dakota to-- obviously-- the North. Oberst returns to the frequent image of the sunset as well ("shadows lengthen in the sun"); it's a visual that emerges as a metaphor for westward progress and change in the American imagination, closely tied to migration. But Oberst's journey is more thoughtful than joyful, a reflection on "caste, class, country, [and] sect." "A genocide sleeps in the Black Hills, the Badlands, the calloused East." Oberst considers the toll of our conquest of the land, the loss of traditional, pre-Columbian cultures in our push westward. He also casts a different light on the benefit of the road trip. In most incarnations it's a valued learning experience; here it seems hollow and he doubles "back by rented Cadillac and company jet/like a newly orphaned refugee retracing [his] steps/All the way to Cassadaga to commune with the dead." Unlike Michael Valentine, he can't enjoy the journey-- like the solider in 'Yankee Bayonet' he thinks of the past and wants to get home.

Thinking about these road songs brought me to the ultimate American road trip-- Kerouac's On the Road. As spontaneous as 'Michael Valentine' and discontent as 'Four Winds,' Kerouac's work is the road story that every other storyteller aspires to. Like Bright Eyes and The Killers, his journey includes a foray into Mexico (which somehow becomes a de-facto part of the US in a lot of these road trips) and ends looking westward into the sunset. Whether or not Brandon Flowers and Conor Oberst read or were inspired by On the Road (my guess is yes for Oberst at least), the links between the text and lyrics suggests an ideal road trip that American travelers can make. But a song about Kerouac himself bursts the bubble of the road trip idyll.

Death Cab for Cutie's "Bixby Canyon Bridge" is not about North Dakota, but about DCFC frontman Ben Gibbard taking his own journey to a remote place in hopes of finding inspiration. Gibbard wrote part of the album Narrow Stairs in a cabin in Big Sur where Kerouac himself suffered a nervous breakdown. They're a little long, but I'll post the full lyrics here because you really need the whole story:


I descended a dusty gravel ridge
Beneath the Bixby Canyon Bridge
And soon I eventually arrived
At the place where your soul had died

Barefoot in the shallow creek
I grabbed some stones from underneath
Waiting for you to speak to me

And the silence, it became so very clear
That you had long ago disappeared
And I cursed myself for being surprised
That this didn't play like it did in my mind

All the way from San Francisco
As I chased the end of your road
Because I've still got miles to go

I want to know my fate if I keep up this way
It's hard to want to stay away
And everyone you meet all seem to be asleep
You wonder if you're missing your dream...

Then it started getting dark
And I trudged back to where the car was parked
No closer to any kind of truth
As I must assume was the case with you

This is more a 'Four Winds' road trip than a 'Valentine' one. 'Bixby Canyon Bridge' is another story of disillusionment following a journey. Rather than being enlightened in the place where a great author once sought inspiration or solace, Gibbard finds only emptiness. Gibbard and Oberst each recognize the ghosts in the place they visit, lingering sorrows that conflict with what they expect from the expansive West of American dreams. Whether it's the genocide sleeping in the Black Hills or the emptiness of the place where Kerouac faced personal misery, what the destination in the road trip provides is further distress rather than clarity. Maybe the problem is that the modern road trip can only be an escape-- we no longer have places to explore, we're only trying to get away from the ghosts we know. It's interesting to note that Gibbard also closes with an image of sunset in the form of nightfall. He tints the idea of westward progress with a suitably more grim conclusion, just waiting for the coming of darkness rather than following in the path of the sun.

And there we are. An entry about road trips in a blog that's a virtual road trip. Meta or something. Hope you've enjoyed the ride.

Tracks:
Four Winds
The Ballad of Michael Valentine
Bixby Canyon Bridge

Florida

I went back by rented Cadillac and company jet,
like a newly orphaned refugee, retracing my steps,
all the way to Cassadaga to commune with the dead.
They said, 'You'd better look alive.'
Four Winds, Bright Eyes




I don't have any particularly warm feelings about Florida. Disney World is nice and all, but I doubt I'll ever want to live in a place where the average humidity is a steamy 91% in July and alligators could chomp down my dog/child/leg like a Kit Kat. So why begin my journey here? I started this blog by making a list of each state and then listing the songs I could think of, just off the top of my head, that spoke about it. Some, like the painfully un-rhyme-able Hawaii, remain blank for the moment. Florida, surprisingly, hit upon two of my favorite artists-- Bruce Springsteen, who name drops the state in 1984's 'Working on the Highway,' and Bright Eyes (the sometimes stage name of Nebraskan singer-songwriter Conor Oberst), who penned the lyrics above for 2007 album Cassadaga.

As much as I love The Boss, 'Four Winds' prevailed because it says so much about what I too want to say about America as I write. But we'll get there soon-- some background on the song first. 'Four Winds' was the first single from Cassadaga, an album named for a small Floridian community of psychics. The track itself is replete with Oberst's beloved literary references and SAT vocabulary. (Check out the full lyrics: here). Broadly, it's a song about American cultural diversity, but the concept doesn't get the same laudatory treatment it got in your high school history textbooks. "She breaks, she breaks, she caves, she caves," is the song's final line. Four Winds is about cultures failing to mesh, oil on water rather than a melting pot.

Florida is a great place to begin because it was one of the first places were cultures brushed. Ponce de Leon's expedition of Spanish explorers in search of gold and youth landed in Florida in 1513 and Europeans in all parts of the Americas wasted no time in obliterating, intentionally or just carelessly, the native cultures they found (with the exception of the stupendously hapless Cabeza de Vaca, who really deserves a minute of your time on wikipedia). 'Four Winds' suggests that we haven't made much progress since Ponce de Leon and his contemporaries blazed through pre-Columbian America. "Your class, your caste, your country, sect, your name or your tribe/ There's people always dying trying to keep them alive," Oberst begins. America is a nation founded on taking risks, accepting the possibility of death, to keep your beliefs and your culture alive. But this isn't a song about the American dream. The next verse begins: "The Bible's blind, the Torah's deaf, the Qur'an is mute/ If you burned them all together you'd be close to the truth," dismissing the value of the traditional religious beliefs that so many Americans hold dear. Oberst isn't very hopeful about America in general. "There's bodies decomposing in containers tonight/in an abandoned building where/ squatters made a mural of a Mexican girl..." Multiculturalism, sure. But squatters and decomposing bodies too.

'Four Winds' isn't a song about the American dream, and this blog isn't about that either. What surprised me most as I looked over that song list was how many tracks reflected what Oberst says so beautifully. There's a darkness to America that seeps out through its music; there's glamor, and hope, and beauty-- but there's something richer, too. A sense that sometimes the spiral is unwinding, the seams are splitting because there's so much underneath. I considered the possibility that this just said something about my music taste, but the spectrum of musicians that voiced similar opinions was remarkably broad. 'Four Winds' is a song about the processes of convergence and divergence that we face in such a vast nation. Cultures don't blend like they might; they're blind, deaf, and mute to one another. The titular winds never converge: they ruffle the hair of the Mexican girl, "cry" and level stands of trees. There's pressure from all sides, and Oberst isn't sure we can stand up to it.

Expansion, another key aspect of the American dream, isn't the answer either. (This theme will come up over and over again as I write.) The notion of a frontier is one of the earliest aspects of American literature, extending back to Sir Walter Raleigh's travels "to seek new worlds, for gold, for praise, for glory” after being slighted by Elizabeth I. Traditionally a symbol of attainment and success, the frontier in modern music remains present but becomes less tangible than it was for early explorers. In 'Working on the Highway,' the young couple at the center of the song reach their frontier-- a new life in Florida-- but aren't allowed to stay. Their motivations weren't so valorous anyway; they ended up in Florida to escape disapproving parents. Oberst's description of himself as a "newly orphaned refugee, retracing [his] steps/all the way to Cassadaga to commune with the dead" suggests that he doesn't place much faith in exploration either. He and the psychics of Cassadaga seek belonging among a group that is no longer even on Earth, never mind in Florida. Is it because he doesn't feel there's any place for him among America's living population? Because that population is so lacking in cohesion that there's no way to identify it and decide if he could belong?

That's what America is about, after all. People seeking a place where they can belong. In this blog, I'll explore the way musicians belong to their places, or come to the conclusion that they actually don't.

Florida is a place we go at the beginnings and ends of our lives, softened in memories with a humid haze around the edges. As children we take a spin in Walt Disney's magical teacups, and when we're old we retire there to bask in the enveloping warmth of tropical sun. It's a place to escape from what happens in between these two poles of existence, apart from Springsteen's seedy romance and Oberst's bitter dismissal of our cherished national identity. A place at the fringe of our country, for people on the fringe of society like Cassadaga's psychics. A place to visit, but not to stay. So let's go on.

Tracks:
Working on the Highway
Four Winds
The Killers' fantastic Four Winds cover