For Christmas last year, friends bought me the super-duper, fiftieth-anniversary, single-volume, beautifully-bound, complete Lord of the Rings. So during Lent, I finally took it out of its box and began to read. It was my fourth time through the epic, and like all great books, it improved with age. This time, I took it slowly and savored each page. I didn’t skip over the psalm-like paeans of praise or the pleasantly peasanty folk songs of the hobbits nor the leaping, greeny earth songs of Tom Bombadil.
I took my time, and I admit, my imagination was colored by Peter Jackson’s film trilogy. I like the otherworldly, New Zealand Middle Earth, and Sean Astin’s Sam Gamgee is pretty well perfect, as are the other cast members. Only Galadriel seems more spooky than holy in the film, and sometimes the orcs are too comical, but these are small grumbles. I like the visual help to my imagination, and forgive Peter Jackson and his team their small stumbles.
nderstood more deeply the emotional impact of the echoes of Anglo-Saxon alliteration. I appreciated the intentionally archaic, almost liturgical language J.R.R. Tolkien uses to evoke the royal dignity of the Court of Gondor. I caught at a deeper level the characterization caught in the voices of Gollum—so slimy and slippery—or Sam, so simple and true. I also slowed down and took time with Tolkien’s long passages of geographical and scenic description. He saw the contours of Middle Earth. Instead of racing over them for the plot as I had done before, I took time and allowed my imagination to see the landscape and thus feel the mood. The effect of the language and the descriptions is to evoke emotion, and the philologist Tolkien did not fail. At several points I was caught up in the emotion and wept real tears.
At the Grey Havens, when Merry, Pippin, and Sam say their farewells to Frodo, Gandalf consoles them saying, “I will not say: Do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.” The Eastern Orthodox have an acceptance of their priests weeping in the liturgy for the beauty of it all, and call this innocence and vulnerability “the gift of tears.” So it was with me in this last reading of Tolkien’s great work. I wept when Sam carried Frodo those last few steps up Mount Doom. I wept with terrible joy when Theoden King perished, and Eowyn and Merry slew the Witch-king of Angmar. I wept for the innocent and noble beauty of Eowyn and Faramir’s love and the dignified majesty of the return of Elessar the Suffering King. Finally, I wept at the Grey Havens for the resolution and justice of it all. It was right that Frodo should continue to carry his wound, and just that his sacrifice to save the Shire was for others and not for himself.
As our own society seems plunged into ever darker decadence and despair, the beauty, truth and goodness of Tolkien’s classic is an astringent balm. It is the bright clear air of a spring morning in the midst of the contemporary atmosphere of the Dead Marshes. Confronted with a Shelob or Shagrat for President, reading Tolkien shines the clear light of the Phial of Galadriel in the gloom. Faced with the orcs of ISIS, reading Lord of the Rings sparks hope that a fellowship armed with faith and noble courage will rise up to face the foe. Reading Lord of the Rings was a deep pleasure because it was a purgation, and the tears were not an evil, but a soul cleansing.
The purgation of which I speak is, of course, Aristotle’s catharsis. It is that identification with the hero through which we accompany him on the journey, and as we go on the hero’s outer quest we also share his soul’s pilgrimage. Not only through his cleverly woven plot lines of providence, but also through his use of language, description and characterization, Tolkien masters that most elusive art that captures the heart, takes captive the emotions and by gently releasing them, opens the human soul for at least a moment of redemption.
I once met Tolkien’s daughter after Mass in North Oxford. I remarked on her father’s work, saying that in my opinion he was the supreme Catholic evangelist of the modern age. She gave me a quizzical look and asked why. “Because in his art he reminds millions that ‘there is some good in this world Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.'” She smiled at the quotation and the conversation moved on.
I’m convinced of my opinion, for when the heart opens by the chemistry of catharsis, the soul also opens to the possibility of providence and the apprehension of light.
So read it again, and “I will not say: Do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”
Books on the topic of this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore.
Fr. Dwight Longenecker is a graduate of Oxford University. He is the author of sixteen books and contributes to many magazines, papers and journals including Crisis, Integrated Catholic Life, National Catholic Register and Intercollegiate Review. Visit his blog at Standing on My Head, read his latest book The Romance of Religion and be in touch at dwightlongenecker.com
The Times (£) reports today that a white Christian child was taken from her family and forced to live with a niqab-wearing foster carer in a home where she was allegedly encouraged to learn Arabic.
The story says that child was placed in not one but two Muslim foster homes, against the wishes of her family, by the London borough of Tower Hamlets.
“In confidential local authority reports seen by The Times, a social services supervisor describes the child sobbing and begging not to be returned to the foster carer’s home because ‘they don’t speak English’.
“The reports state that the supervisor heard the girl, who at times was ‘very distressed’, claiming that the foster carer removed her necklace, which had a Christian cross, and also suggested that she should learn Arabic.”
In 2015, Tower Hamlets council was stripped by the government of many of its powers after its former mayor, Lutfur Rahman, was found guilty of corrupt and illegal electoral practices. This year Ofsted inspectors found “widespread and serious failures” in council services provided to children who need help and protection.
In at the absence of any explanation by the council why it dealt with this case in such a way, it would appear that it has behaved with a frightening degree of cruelty, incompetence and ideological zealotry in erasing a child’s cultural identity.
The really frightening thing is that it is hardly alone in this zealotry. For decades, Britain has told itself – and taught its children – that the very notion of its own Christian culture (which, because of its indigenous population, is inescapably white) is racist, colonialist and illegitimate and should be replaced by a multicultural orthodoxy. This requires prioritising minority faiths and cultures (particularly Islam) over Christianity and western values. Anyone who objects to this doctrine is promptly tarred and feathered as a racist or Islamophobe.
This appalling fostering scandal is not the only example of such ideological zealotry to have emerged in recent weeks. Earlier this month Sarah Champion, Labour MP for Rotherham, was forced to resign from Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow Cabinet after she wrote an article in The Sun warning that more must be done to stop gangs of Pakistani men targeting young girls for sex, and calling on the government to investigate why so many men who share the same cultural background are behind bars for abusing young girls.
After Corbyn demanded her resignation, Ms Champion apologised for her “extremely poor choice of words”, claiming that the headline and opening sentences” had stripped her words of “nuance”. The paper responded that her team had approved the entire column as published and said they were “thrilled” by it.
Ms Champion’s fruitless attempt to save herself should not distract from the fact that she had asked the right question. For the overwhelming majority of the pimping gangs who have been preying for years on young girls are composed of men from Pakistani Muslim backgrounds and who specifically target non-Muslim, mainly white and often underage girls. This terrible, widespread abuse has been going on for years – and despite a series of criminal prosecutions is still continuing – largely because of the blind eye turned by police and welfare authorities terrified of being accused of racism or Islamophobia.
Lo and behold: for telling such untellable truths Ms Champion was promptly scapegoated. Now another Labour politician appears to have been scapegoated in turn for coming to her defence. And here’s the kicker: this second Labour politician is herself a reformist Muslim.
Amina Lone, a Manchester Labour councillor, said on TV that Sarah Champion was “… not a racist but a brave woman speaking out about a politically awkward issue”. Later she tweeted: “I grew up in a Muslim community where these attitudes were common. ‘White girls are easy’, ‘Nobody cares about them’, ‘They are just slags’, ‘Their parents don’t look after them properly’ etc were/are still said today. I hear it regularly.”
Turns out Ms Lone was also being a brave woman. One week after making these remarks, she failed to be reselected for her council seat. The grounds the council offered as the reason for deselecting her were unusual: that she had a poor attendance and campaigning record. Anyone believe that?
We are living in culturally totalitarian times. Truth, tolerance and decency are being replaced by lies, oppression and cruelty. Such incidents are now occurring thick and fast; and there’s a lot more of this to come.
Maybe the wisdom on this comes from Buck Showalter, who told me this earlier this season when I asked him to explain a slump one of the hitting stars of the game was experiencing.
"Sometimes it isn't anymore complicated than this s---t being really hard," is the way Buck put it.
So it has been hard for Aaron "All Rise" Judge lately after he was not just one of the hitting stars of baseball in the early innings of this season, but the biggest; who looked like 40 home runs would be easy for him the way he was going and 50 might be in reach. He wasn't just a kid hitting home runs this way, he was a Yankee hitting home runs in Yankee Stadium, breaking rookie records along the way, hitting baseballs so far and so hard they seemed to break everything except the debt ceiling.
He took the spotlight away from Mike Trout even before Trout got hurt. He took the spotlight away from Bryce Harper and all the other gifted young players at a time when baseball is so rich with them. Joe Girardi talked about how Judge is built like a defensive end at 6-foot-7 and 270 or whatever he is. Everybody talked about what a polite and respectful and decent young man Judge is. And even when he had started to slump, he hit a home run at Citi Field during the recent Yankees-Mets Subway Series that didn't end up in Flushing Bay, or Vermont, because the upper deck got in the way.
I wasn't the only person who started to think that Judge could be the home run hitter to make 60 a magic number again in baseball, the way it is supposed to be, the way it always was before the juicers came along. Then came the show that Judge put on in the T-Mobile Home Run Derby the night before the All-Star Game in Miami, when he hit balls out of Marlins Park as if hitting golf balls with a souped-up driver. In baseball's home run season, Judge's were the home runs that we were all talking about. He was the home run kid everybody wanted to see.
Only now things have gotten hard.
Doesn't mean they will stay that way for Judge. Maybe on Sunday, at home at Yankee Stadium against the Mariners, he busts out again and goes back to trying to bust up television screens beyond the outfield walls, the way he did at the Stadium during batting practice one day. But for now, the kid who was the great big action hero of April and May and June has looked quite human, and not nearly as big as he did.
For now, the Yankee home run hitter to talk about once again, the way he was at the end of last summer, is Gary Sanchez. Sanchez is the one who hits balls out of sight, at least when he's not trying to hit members of the Detroit Tigers, and there has been a lot of talk lately in New York about moving Judge lower in the batting order, even as his batting average remains around .280. There is still a long way for him to go. But Judge reminds us all -- again -- just how long the season has been already. And maybe how Atlas can shrug sometimes, even though there were times earlier in the season when he made pitchers in both leagues look as if they were throwing him meatballs in the Home Run Derby.
Over the first half of the season, Judge hit .329, with 30 home runs, 66 RBIs, a 1.139 OPS and a 29.8 percent strikeout rate. So far in the second half, he has hit .176, with seven homers, 16 RBIs, an OPS below .700 and about a 35 percent strikeout rate. And there was the stretch when he struck out in 37 straight games, the most ever for a position player.
"He's not Dave Kingman, OK?" one scout said this week, taking that comparison off the table, but trying to explain what baseball has been seeing from Judge lately. The kid hasn't suddenly become a wildly undisciplined hitter, after the wonderful discipline and bat control we saw from him early. But one thing you hear is how pitchers have been trying to use Judge's size against him lately, doing everything possible to get him off-stride and off-balance. No matter how new you are in baseball, this is all as old as the distance between the pitcher's mound and home plate.
Here is another scouting report I got from a smart young baseball guy I know:
"Early in the season they tried an east/west approach across the strike zone -- prototypical soft away. But at some point Judge started to get a lot of low strikes against him and started to look to protect that area, so they started working him north/south mostly with hard stuff. It's mostly mental for him but they are expanding the zone up on him to change his eye level. It's fantastically simple. But, apparently it's worked … Now timing is off on his swing."
It doesn't take much. It has never taken much. In the old days with the Mets' Keith Hernandez, when he would have a bad slump, he would talk about being in a "deep, dark forest." Buck's batting star, Manny Machado, was having a terrible year for someone with his talent and his eye and bat speed, and then all of a sudden, it was as if somebody threw a switch and nobody could get out Machado. He hit three home runs in one game against the Angels, the last a walk-off grand slam. He hit a 12th-inning walk-off home run to beat the A's on Wednesday.
Sanchez of the Yankees, who effectively started the season late because of injury, was completely obscured by what Judge was doing, as if he were the one who had been eclipsed. Then Sanchez was the one who started hitting home runs again, in bunches, and wouldn't stop. Sanchez, who hit 20 home runs last season in 53 games, now has hit 27 this season in 95 games. That means 47 in his last 148 games. He might not catch Judge by the end of September. But he might make a run at him, might finish this season the way Judge started it.
The reason may be as simple as Judge getting tired. Hitting a wall instead of bombs. He has already seen the benefits that come with becoming the kind of star he did this season in New York. Now he experiences a slump in the same place and, whether he shows it or not, must sometimes feel as if he is carrying the weight of the slump and expectations and the Yankees' need to make the playoffs this season around like a backpack. He ended up on the bottom of the pile during the big brawl between the Yankees and Tigers the other day. Miguel Cabrera says that Judge hit him in the throat. Judge, who didn't earn a suspension for his part in the fight, denies that.
The kid will get up. Not Kingman. Buck's right, though. Hard game. Really hard, even after you just made it look easy.
On the matter of an outcome in Afghanistan after 16 years of fitful war, President Trump is adamant. “The men and women who serve our nation in combat deserve a plan for victory,” he proclaimed in Monday night’s big speech. “They deserve the tools they need, and the trust they have earned, to fight and to win.”
The president hammered home the point, again and again:
Our troops will fight to win. We will fight to win. From now on, victory will have a clear definition: attacking our enemies, obliterating ISIS, crushing al-Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan, and stopping mass terror attacks against America before they emerge.
Stirring stuff. Or at least it would have been if Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had not, less than 24 hours later, undercut his boss’s bold message. Victory? There is no battlefield victory to be had in Afghanistan, Tillerson maintained at Foggy Bottom. Instead, the modest goal is to convince the Taliban that, while “we might not win,” they won’t win either.
Eh . . . not so stirring.
By the time the secretary was done tinkering with the president’s “plan for victory,” one couldn’t be sure if the Taliban was an enemy, a terrorist organization, or a “peace partner.” Indeed, not content to leave pathetic enough alone, Tillerson contemplated “political legitimacy” for the mullahs, proclaiming that the Trump administration “stand[s] ready to support peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban without precondition.” You read that right: without precondition — not even the condition that they abandon their alliance with al-Qaeda (you know, the reason we went to Afghanistan in the first place). As the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes observed, this is “the same kind of diplomatic tail-chasing that was a priority of the Obama administration’s failed approach.”
The band’s got new players. The pitch is a bit higher. But the song remains the same.
Ultimately, Tillerson elaborated, “it is going to be up to the Afghan government and the representatives of the Taliban to work through a reconciliation process.” Sound familiar? Yeah . . . just like Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, during an April 2016 trip to Kabul, expressing “support for the government of Afghanistan’s efforts to end the conflict in Afghanistan through a peace and reconciliation process with the Taliban.”
The Taliban has now been recognized by the Obama and Trump administrations as the solution to the Afghanistan problem. That is, Trump has adopted The Way of the Swamp: Any problem that won’t go away eventually becomes “the solution.” The strategy — and who says hope isn’ta strategy? — is that the mullahs will finally come to their senses, end their remorseless jihad, and join the ineffective regime we have struggled to prop up for over a decade.
There are two major problems with this approach.
First, the Taliban believe they will win without negotiating because they are confident they will outlast us. They responded to Trump’s speech (and Tillerson’s revise-and-extend exercise) by promising to “sustain our jihad” as long as it takes. Obama could not get them to the table despite having over 100,000 American troops in theater. Trump currently has 8,400, a paltry number he is reluctantly willing to increase by about 4,000 (the administration is being coy about the exact number). Even if he were to double that (not likely), what would be accomplished?
The president rebuked his predecessor over the futility of waging war by advance announcements to the enemy of his withdrawal timelines. Trump has a point. There was no sense in Obama’s approach: pegging wartime troop levels to political rather than military considerations, imposing force-reduction timelines with no regard for battlefield conditions and requirements. All that said, though, from 2009 through mid 2014, Obama kept in Afghanistan a force between three and eight times the size that Trump will have after his mini-surge. Yet, unfazed and unmoved by Obama-Kerry pleas for “reconciliation,” the Taliban continued to fight. As they and their jihadist allies gained ground, Obama responded by withdrawing troops. The Taliban knew they were winning.
Now, beneath Trump’s “we will fight to win” applause lines, the Taliban see that he is resistant to anything but a marginal escalation in what is a skeleton force, on hand more in an advisory than a combat role. They read the papers. They know the president didn’t even want to do that much. They realize that Trump has stated, time and again over the years, that he does not believe any American troops should still be in Afghanistan.
To summarize, the Taliban know they are on their home turf against a commander-in-chief who doesn’t want to be there and who was contemplating total withdrawal as a serious option just a month ago. Why should they budge?
I said that there are two major problems with Trump’s strategy. Alas, the one I’ve just described is the easier one. The second, tougher problem is that the Taliban are still the Taliban.
They are the vanguard of fundamentalist Islam, the Sunni version of sharia supremacism. So virulently anti-American is their totalitarian ideology that the Taliban are making common cause with their Shiite counterparts in Iran to persevere in their jihad against American forces.
It can get tiresome recounting this history, but it is worth remembering that our forces invaded Afghanistan all those years ago because the Taliban, while ruling that country beginning in the mid-1990s, gave safe haven to al-Qaeda to plot, train for, and orchestrate several attacks against the United States. The 9/11 atrocities were not a one-off; they were the last in a series. Even so, President George W. Bush offered to give the mullahs a pass on the condition that they turn al-Qaeda’s leadership over to the United States. Only when the Taliban refused, knowing it meant they would be driven from power, did our forces invade.
The Taliban is the creation of fundamentalist Islamic elements of Pakistani intelligence, conceived as a geopolitical weapon against India. The Pashto word “taliban” means students – and, as you’ve no doubt guessed, we are not talking about students of comparative lit or macroeconomics. They are students of sharia, Islam’s ancient societal framework and legal code. They refer to themselves as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. They rose to power and have been sustained through 16 years of war because, contrary to what Western progressives would have you believe, they have significant support in what is a modernity-resistant sharia society. That is why they gave al-Qaeda sanctuary. It is why, to this day, they stand shoulder-to-shoulder with al-Qaeda in the jihad.
So what’s our plan? Why, we’re going to “reconcile” them so they can have a share of power.
Fabulous.
Of course, if the Taliban were interested in the foot in the regime door that we are offering, it would only be for the purpose of retaking full power once we leave. If that seems perfectly obvious to you, you are clearly not wired for diplomatic work. The State Department — regardless of which party is in the White House — proceeds on the assumption that the Taliban will make peace with the rickety regime in Kabul. They will join in the governance of the emirate — um, I mean, the country. This time they’ll behave themselves, eventually deep-six their al-Qaeda alliance, and go easy on the subjugation of women, the killing of homosexuals, the death sentences for apostates, the effacement of non-Islamic cultural vestiges, the jihad against the West, and the rest of the classical sharia vision these students have been studying for decades.
Crazy? No crazier than State’s convincing itself that Iran is complying with Obama’s legacy deal and has no interest in acquiring nukes. As the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Tom Joscelyn explains, “officials in the State Department and elsewhere in government are heavily invested in the idea that the Taliban is a legitimate, albeit noxious, political faction that must be reconciled with the Afghan government,” even though “this policy goal has been betrayed by reality at every turn.”
With Trump’s State Department sounding exactly like Obama’s State Department, is it any surprise that The Donald is starting to sound like Imam Barack? Did you notice what was missing from Monday night’s speech? Though Trump was addressing a war with jihadists in which we’ve been mired for 16 years, there was not a single utterance about “radical Islamic terrorism.” That, you may recall from the 2016 presidential campaign, is the enemy Trump has repeatedly said we cannot be afraid to name. On Monday, to the contrary, the president assured us that “terrorists who slaughter innocent people will find no glory in this life or the next.”
Does he reckon that’s what they believe throughout Afghanistan?
To be fair, there are no good answers about what to do in that awful country. But it is hard to imagine a worse answer than trying to reconcile the Taliban to the regime.
There is a vital American interest in preventing ungoverned territories from becoming sanctuaries where jihadists plot against us. In most places, we deal with this challenge without having thousands of U.S. troops on the ground. If you were waiting to hear the president explain why, after all our sacrifice, Afghanistan should not be one of those places, you waited in vain.
The problem in Afghanistan is not the Taliban. The problem in Afghanistan is Afghanistan. The Taliban (and al-Qaeda, and the Haqqanis, and the “ISIS-K” in Khoransan province) are an inevitable consequence of sharia society, not its cause. We cannot change that. Contrary to Washington wisdom, there are no “vacuums” in the Middle East. There is Islamic fundamentalism. Absent the intervention of military force or tyrannical regimes, Islamic fundamentalism produces sharia societies that guarantee savage infighting and repression. As long as such societies endure, there will always be another Taliban to partner with another al-Qaeda; and there will always be Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Qatar, Turkey and the rest to support and exploit them — all the while posing as opponents of “extremism.”
We should be taking every sensible step to protect our society from the threats — kinetic and cultural, ideological and legal — posed by these aggressor societies. On that score, what we do on visa policy and border security is much more important than what we do in Afghanistan. Congress, moreover, should be enacting a new authorization of military force that solidifies the president’s authority to strike jihadist sanctuaries in Afghanistan and wherever else the enemy plots against us.
But let’s face facts: We are now 16 years down the road, and our government still refuses to be clear-eyed about sharia-supremacist ideology. We’ve lost thousands of valiant lives and wasted trillions of dollars trying to better the lot of people who hate us. Our nation, moreover, has no appetite for the formidable war effort it would take to pursue actual victory against our enemies and their sponsors. We should not inch up our forces in Afghanistan. We should strip down to the minimum assets needed to carry out and support counterterrorism strikes. And we should have as little to do with this region as our vital interests allow.
Adam Granduciel is a master of balancing past and present. The Philadelphia-based, Dover-raised singer-songwriter who fronts The War on Drugs has earned indie-darling status by filtering classic rock influences through an ambient dream-pop haze, a formula whose appeal proved near universal on 2014’s critically hailed breakthrough “Lost in the Dream.” Three years later, Granduciel returns with “A Deeper Understanding,” an album that finds the band honing its unique sound.
The brisk opening track “Up All Night” lays out the instrumental palette the band draws from for most of “A Deeper Understanding”: ’80s-style electronic drums, warm keyboards, a blown-out guitar solo. As the drums keep a steady, unchanging pulse, the keyboards induce zoning out and reflection; it’s this combination of propulsion and drift that makes The War on Drugs such emotionally gratifying music. Granduciel’s airy vocals pierce through the fog despite his soft, relaxed delivery, and his lyrics address broad themes of disorientation and romantic malaise in vague, impressionistic language. If you enjoy this song, you will probably appreciate the rest of the album.
Throughout “A Deeper Understanding,” the band doubles down on its idiosyncrasies. Long songs? Six- to seven-minute run times are the norm, with the gorgeously slow-burning “Thinking of a Place” marking the first time in recent memory that a successful artist has chosen an 11-minute song as an album’s first single. Hints of Springsteen? The nostalgic, yearning lyrics and triumphant central guitar lick on “Strangest Thing” are textbook Boss, while “Holding On,” the catchiest, most anthemic song Granduciel has penned since “Red Eyes,” borrows a few glockenspiel notes from “Born to Run.” Anyone who thought signing to a major label would force The War on Drugs to compromise its stubbornly trend-blind aesthetic should find “A Deeper Understanding” a reassuringly familiar listening experience.
The cover photo of Granduciel holed up in the recording studio is an appropriate one for “A Deeper Understanding.” This is the work of a dedicated craftsman, one who labors over every detail until it sounds exactly how he imagined it in his head. From the lush soundscapes to the lyrics, which complement the mood without ever calling attention to themselves, the effect is one of immersion in a wistful waking dream. Put some headphones on, find a good window to stare out of, and let time stretch to the horizon; “A Deeper Understanding” will reward your patience.
The War on Drugs and Adam Granduciel, third from right
Philadelphia has always been known for lush music – from the richly orchestrated proto-disco Philly Sound to the kaleidoscopic psych scene that spawned the War on Drugs. Steadily widening the canvas since co-founder Kurt Vile's departure, leader Adam Granduciel achieves full-on sonic rapture with his band's latest LP, an abstract-expressionist mural of synth-pop and heartland rock colored by bruised optimism and some of his most generous, incandescent guitar ever.
Which is hardly to say the War on Drugs have become a boogie-till-you-puke jam band. Granduciel is still more about layered textures and tight-woven phrases than he is about noodling, and anxiety still lurks under heady aural comforts, laid out in his nasal, Dylanesque vocal tones. On "Up All Night," literal or metaphoric gunshots ghost the narrative, and hot-forged guitar lines push through confetti-cannon electronics. The restrained builds make even subtle peaks feel ecstatic, like the spine-tingling slide-guitar ascent midway through "Holding On," or the squirming feedback, played by Granduciel like a hooked trout, preceding his solo on "Strangest Thing." There and elsewhere, his leads burn magnesium-bright, the sound of a modern, low-key guitar hero who knows just when to lay back, and when to let rip.
The War on Drugs’ New Album Doesn’t Reinvent the Wheel
Adam Granduciel of The War on Drugs performs at Grande Halle de La Villette on Oct. 30, 2014 in Paris. (Burak Cingi/Redferns via Getty Images)
A Deeper Understanding, the new LP from the mischievously titled Philadelphia outfit the War on Drugs, is an album that has long felt predestined for end-of-year lists and essays claiming, lo and behold, rock isn’t dead after all. Now it’s finally here, and the fact that it almost entirely lives up to this destiny is just one of its many achievements. A Deeper Understanding is the War on Drugs’ first release since Lost in the Dream, an indie smash that topped more Album of the Year lists than any other in 2014 and won the band a contract with Atlantic. Songwriter–frontman–multi-instrumentalist Adam Granduciel has put his major-label budget to good use. A Deeper Understanding is the most exquisitely well-produced rock album you’ll hear this year, a headphones experience so intoxicating it threatens to obscure the most quietly remarkable thing about it: In 2017, Granduciel and co. have made a rock album that you can (and should) dance to.
The story behind the making of Lost in the Dream is now semi-legendary. The album was recorded over a two-year period, with Granduciel battling intense anxiety and depression, dueling perfectionism and self-doubt. What emerged was a sprawling, spacey work that dwelt in the airier reaches of psychedelia. It was gorgeous, but at times almost deliberately distant. What’s remarkable about A Deeper Understanding, then, is its full-throated vitality, a roaring ebullience and joy that never feels forced or telegraphed. The albumopens with “Up All Night,” a pulsing midtempo dazzler that nestles its simple, plaintive melody against a lush array of hooks and warm, throbbing chords. “Holding On” weaves shimmering keyboard, guitar, and vocal melodies into a syncopated backdrop of bubbling drums, bass, and synthesizer lines. And “Nothing to Find,” with its wheezing harmonica playing perfect counterpoint to Granduciel’s half-whispered vocal, is so infectiously effervescent it wouldn’t be out of place on a 1970s Paul McCartney record.
The War on Drugs is one of those strange phenomena that unmistakably sound like the sum of their influences, yet I enjoy their music more than that of any of those influences. The band has strong traces of Springsteen but with none of the parodic overstatement of the E Street Band rhythm section. It sounds a bit like U2, but Granduciel’s wry and weary voice dispenses with the humorless theatricality of Bono. It bears a glancing resemblance to early Arcade Fire, but it doesn’t conflate maximalism with sincerity. Its music is sometimes described as “heartland rock,” an odd characterization since the band is from the East Coast, but Lost in the Dream was a killer road-trip record, full of sprawling soundscapes and vast open spaces. It sounded like a horizon breaking over the Great Plains, or at least what a bunch of guys from Philly imagine that sounds like.
A Deeper Understanding expands upon rather than departing from these aesthetics, but its embrace of an unconventional and distinctly synthetic sonic palette breathes new life into a subgenre often fettered by its own luddite fantasies of authenticity. For starters, A Deeper Understanding really isn’t much of a guitar record. There are still requisite solos here and there (on “Pain” and “Thinking of a Place,” to name just two), but as its cover art indicates, A Deeper Understanding is a keyboard album through and through. There are acoustic and electric pianos, organs, and synthesizers galore: ARPs, Prophets, Junos, Yamahas. None of these sounds are new, and in fact most are decidedly vintage. But they’re put to beautiful use here: They’re expansive and freeing, a fantasy of a future filtered through the past that emerges as something that sounds timeless.
Album Review: The War on Drugs’ ‘A Deeper Understanding’
“Atmospheric rock band with six-minute-plus-long songs and extended guitar solos” is just about the worst possible template for chart success in 2017. Yet here comes the War on Drugs, a long-running Philadelphia band masterminded by husky-voiced singer/virtuoso guitarist Adam Granduciel, with a long string of sold-out gigs behind them and years of support from an unlikely source: the Pitchfork set. Indeed, the group’s template is a vintage one — flashes of “Love Over Gold”-era Dire Straits, Springsteen’s more epic moments and Wilco’s whispier episodes abound — but Granduciel’s sweeping melodies and cinematic sonics are unexpectedly welcoming, beckoning to the listener like the irresistible intro to a Wim Wenders film or a binge-able TV series. Rather than pairing the group with a proven hitmaker, for “A Deeper Understanding,” the group’s major-label debut and their fourth album overall, Atlantic has allowed them to do their own thing, keeping close to the formula of their 2014 breakthrough album “Lost in the Dream,” except for the occasional jaunty keyboard line.
The album also finds the group getting closer than ever before to the transcendent moments they can reach in a live setting; previous albums found Granduciel burying his guitars in layers of effects, obscuring his formidable shredding skills. Suffice it to say that’s not a problem here, as his crystalline solos are among the album’s highlights. And while he’s surrounded himself with a gang of top-notch musicians, there’s never a shred of doubt about who’s in charge: War on Drugs is Granduciel’s E Street Band, with virtually every note providing a frame or a backdrop or an embellishment for his vocals or guitar, and the songs go on for as long as he wants: This album’s lead track is the 11-minute-long “Thinking of a Place.” (At a WoD gig several years back, we can remember watching the drummer’s face gradually contort into a grimace as Granduciel’s solo went on and on for nearly 10 minutes; he massaged his battered hands miserably when the song finally ended.)
Yet for all the grandstanding, the intensity here comes gradually and in measured steps, and while “next-generation Dad rock” is an overly reductive catch-phrase for this masterful band, broadly speaking, the shoe fits.
Bandleader Adam Granduciel is a student of that history, and his music often poses questions few rock fans may have thought to ask. Like, “What if Don Henley’s ‘The Boys of Summer’ was 10 minutes long?” or “Why can’t we live inside the fourth minute of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Jungleland’ forever?” But he taps the past with a sensibility that’s new. The sounds of ’60s psychedelia are here, yet not the questing, form-free sensibility associated with psychedelics. Signifiers of ’70s and ’80s excess also abound, but the twitchy bravado or desperate intensity that critics might have described as “coked out” doesn’t. Rather, these songs pulse steadily and patiently, doling out climaxes of euphoria at carefully considered intervals. With apologies for using one of the iffiest tropes of record reviewing: This is classic rock on MDMA.
Granduciel and a shifting cast of band members have been recording under the War on Drugs name since 2005, with their greatest commercial and critical breakthrough arriving via 2014’s Lost in the Dream. That album’s standouts “Red Eyes” and “Under the Pressure” perfected a formula for immersing listeners: Over a chugging and unfailing rhythm, the band tunefully layered guitar heroics, vintage keyboards, and Dylanesque vocals—all cloaked in dreamy reverb. The songs infiltrated streaming-service playlists, publications’ year-end lists, and the consciousness of the rock mogul Jimmy Iovine, who proclaimed the band’s impending hugeness. Granduciel signed to a major label, Atlantic Records, and has now delivered an album of spectacular scale and ambition.
Granduciel and a shifting cast of band members have been recording under the War on Drugs name since 2005, with their greatest commercial and critical breakthrough arriving via 2014’s Lost in the Dream. That album’s standouts “Red Eyes” and “Under the Pressure” perfected a formula for immersing listeners: Over a chugging and unfailing rhythm, the band tunefully layered guitar heroics, vintage keyboards, and Dylanesque vocals—all cloaked in dreamy reverb. The songs infiltrated streaming-service playlists, publications’ year-end lists, and the consciousness of the rock mogul Jimmy Iovine, who proclaimed the band’s impending hugeness. Granduciel signed to a major label, Atlantic Records, and has now delivered an album of spectacular scale and ambition.
It’s the rhythm that first defines most of the songs on A Deeper Understanding, with drum and bass interlocking for, say, a Creedence Clearwater Revival shamble, or a Tom Petty toe-tap. Once established, the groove is almost never interrupted—even as the song mutates for five, six, or 12 minutes. This is a technique most reminiscent of ’70s German rockers like Neu!, but also, structurally, of techno and house music. For Granduciel, it’s a way to achieve something novel and, perhaps counterintuitively, unpredictable. He told Vice, “I don’t like drums dictating the song; like when you hear a fill and then you know the chorus is coming up.”
The reliable hum lends itself to easy listening—and easy criticism. You can clean your house or host a dinner party to A Deeper Understanding, absolutely, and as it filters in you might find yourself thinking, “I like this song, the one with the pretty piano part,” or “this one, which reminds me of ‘Free Bird,’” only to eventually realize there are a number of tracks that fit those descriptions. Drive-by absorption might also make certain listeners write off the band as it transgresses common ideas of coolness and taste. The singer Mark Kozelek, for example, infamously once heard The War on Drugs playing on a distant festival stage and sneered at their “beer commercial lead-guitar shit.” That wasn’t an inaccurate description, to be fair—but it sold short the full scope of the music.
It’s the close listen that reveals Granduciel’s real talent. In interviews, he’s talked about obsessively fussing over every sound in the mix, and the payoff from that attention is serious: Each instrumental element is crisp and fully rendered, familiar yet fresh. Synthetic strings, for example, may not have been this capable of producing actual emotion, since, well, the early-’80s that Granduciel so often references. Some of the album’s most powerful guitar-shredding passages, played full blast, will make it seem as if an amp is plugged in in your living room.
But the point is not only the feel of these sounds. Granduciel writes generous, poppy hooks and deploys them at the moment of maximum possible impact. The guitar line that defines “Strangest Thing”—one of the best songs of the year—doesn’t arrive until 2 minutes and 40 seconds in, transforming what had been a wistful comedown tune into something massive, like “Purple Rain” played on cathedral bells. On that song and elsewhere, it becomes clear Granduciel’s arrangements aren’t nearly as repetitive as they may initially seem. Melodies emerge, move among instruments, and then seem to die. Rebirth, minutes later, is always possible.
In the rare occasions that Granduciel varies the rhythm of a song, the effect on the listener is like that of a seismic event. I jumped a few times listening to the awesome new-age-y workout of “In Chains”: first when a drum fill did, for once, announce a chorus, and later when the song’s heartbeat hiccuped into the classic “Be My Baby” pattern. Contrastingly, the 11-minute single “Thinking of a Place” unwinds into a lush, long portion without drums. When the song’s main groove snaps back in, it’s like a magician pulling off a reveal—scarily sudden, but also smooth. Such moments show that through the ever-pretty, ever-nostalgic haze of his arrangements, Granduciel wants to keep the senses and the mind awake.
Does music this visceral need to mean anything? Granduciel sings in a pleasing but unvarying rasp, and he likes obvious rhymes: “All my waiting was in vain / I walked alone in pain / Through an early morning rain,” etc. Generally the songs tell of striving, endlessly, for bliss—in another person, in a place, or in one’s self. So if it seems on-the-nose for him to sing of a sky “painted in a wash of indigo” or of “somewhere they can make it rain diamonds,” it’s worth remembering that music, across eras, has often been about envisioning paradise through sound. He’s executing that mission with extreme care, finesse, and—most remarkably—consistency. The best passages of A Deeper Understanding are shot through with sadness simply because they eventually have to end, but with this high, you can expect another wave soon.
Well, I’m tired of being yanked from one side to another on the Robert E. Lee question, based on what I’m reading online. I went to the library today and checked out Michael Korda’s lengthy biography of Lee. I’ll read it and make my own mind up.
I was thinking the other day about the Confederate controversy, in light of the fact that the South is a shame-honor culture, and one where people are deeply rooted in a sense of family and place — for better or for worse. Might it be that non-Southerners, for cultural reasons, simply cannot understand why it’s difficult for Southerners to execrate their ancestors, even if their ancestors did bad things?
That thought came back to me after listening to this amazing episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast. It’s about country music, and what sets it apart from other American musical genres. Malcolm Gladwell is not the first person I would go to for insight into how country music works, but boy, was this great.
On the podcast, Gladwell explores why country music has so many sad songs, but rock music does not. After listening to Vince Gill’s “Go Rest High On That Mountain,” which is about the death of country singer Keith Whitley, who drank himself to death, as well as Gill’s own brother, who died young of a heart attack, Gladwell says:
It’s heartbreaking. Listening to that song makes me wonder if some portion of what we call “ideological division” in America actually isn’t ideological at all. How big are the political differences between Red and Blue states anyway? In the grand scheme of things, not that big. Maybe what we’re seeing instead is a difference of emotional opinion. Because if your principal form of cultural expression has drinking, sex, suicide, heart attacks, mom, and terminal cancer all on the table for public discussion, then the other half of the country is going to seem really chilly and uncaring. And if you’re from the rock and roll half, clinging, semi-ironically, to “Tutti Frutti Oh Rudy,” when you listen to a song written about a guy’s brother who died young of a heart attack, and another guy who drank himself to death, you’re going to think, “Who are these people?”
Gladwell says America is divided along a “Sad Song Line.” Nearly all the performers of the greatest country music songs of all time (according to a Rolling Stone magazine list) are from the South, including Texas. Gladwell says you can stretch that out to the Top 50, or Top 100 country songs, and you’ll see the same pattern.
“Basically you cannot be a successful country singer or songwriter unless you were born in the South,” he says. There are no Jews on the country list, only a couple of blacks, and no Catholics. “It’s white Southern Protestants all the way down.”
On the other hand, writers and performers of the greatest rock songs include Jews, blacks from Detroit, Catholics from New Jersey, Canadians, Brits, and more. “Rock and roll is the rainbow coalition,” he says. That diversity is why there’s so much innovation in rock and roll, says Gladwell, “but you pay a price for that.”
Country music is not like that — and neither, in fact, is hip-hop. Gladwell says if you look at the background of the most successful hip-hop writers and performers, you’ll find “an urban version of the country list.” That is, they’re all from South Central L.A., New York City, Englewood, NJ, or areas very close to them.
When you’re speaking to and about people from your own culture, says Gladwell, people who understand you, you can tell much more detailed stories, and “you can lay yourself bare, because you are among your own.”
I can’t recommend the “King Of Tears” episode of Gladwell’s podcast strongly enough. I’m not a big country fan, but I learned a lot from it. And it made me think of this, regarding the culture war over Confederate monuments.
To understand why a more primal and violent culture of honor took root in the American South, it helps to understand the cultural background of its early settlers. While the northern United States was settled primarily by farmers from more established European countries like the Netherlands, Germany, and especially England (particularly from areas around London), the southern United States was settled primarily by herdsmen from the more rural and undomesticated parts of the British Isles. These two occupations — farming and herding — produced cultures with starkly different notions of honor.
Some researchers argue that herding societies tend to produce cultures of honor that emphasize courage, strength, and violence. Unlike crops, animal herds are much more vulnerable to theft. A herdsman could lose his entire fortune in one overnight raid. Consequently, martial valor and strength and the willingness to use violence to protect his herd became useful assets to an ancient herdsman. What’s more, a reputation for these martial attributes served as a deterrent to would-be thieves. It’s telling that many of history’s most ferocious warrior societies had pastoral economies. The ancient Hittites, the ancient Hebrews, and the ancient Celts are just a few examples of these warrior/herder societies.
As it happened, the Scotch-Irish settlers that poured into the Southern colonies from the late 17th century through the antebellum period were genetic and cultural descendants of the war-like and pastoral Celts. Hailing from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, and the English Uplands, these Scotch-Irish peoples made up perhaps half of the South’s population by 1860 (in contrast, three-quarters of New Englanders, up until the massive influx of Irish immigrants in the 1840s, were English in origin). As the Celtic-herdsmen theory goes (and it is not without its critics), their influence on Southern culture was even larger than their numbers. These rough and scrappy Scotch-Irish immigrants not only brought with them their ancestors’ penchant for herding, but also imported their love of whiskey, music, leisure, gambling, hunting, and…their warrior-bred, primal code of honor. Even as the South became an agricultural powerhouse, the vast majority of white Southerners – from big plantation owners to the landless — continued to raise hogs and livestock. Whether a man spent most his time working a farm or herding his animals, the pastoral culture of honor, with its emphasis on courage, strength, and violence — characterized by an aggressive stance towards the world and a wariness towards outsiders who might want to take what was his — remained (and as we will see later, continues even to this day).
The essay is really insightful about the roots and the particulars of Southern honor culture, especially how (and why) Southern whites were much more likely to value thick family ties, and ties to place. And here’s how it played out in the Civil War:
While both the North and the South saw the war in terms of honor, what motivated the men to fight differed greatly. In the North, volunteers joined the cause because of more abstract ideals like freedom, equality, democracy, and Union. In the South, men grabbed their rifles to protect something more tangible — hearth and home — their families and way of life. Their motivation was rooted in their deeply entrenched loyalty to people and place.
But what if a man felt allegiance both to the principles espoused by the North, and the honor of the South? The ancient Greeks had grappled with what to do when one’s loyalties to one’s honor group conflicted with one’s loyalty to conscience. Such a conflict has been a struggle for warriors ever since, and is best embodied during this time in the life of Robert E. Lee.
Lee was the perfect example of the South’s genteel honor code and what William Alexander Percy called the “broad-sword tradition:” “a dedication to manly valor in battle; coolness under fire; sacrifice of self to succor and protect comrades, family, and country; magnamity; gracious manners; prudence in council; deference to ladies; and finally, stoic acceptance of what Providence has dictated.” He had also served and greatly distinguished himself in the United States Army for 32 years, so much so, that as the Civil War loomed, Lincoln offered Lee command of the Union forces. Lee was torn; in the days before secession, he wrote, “I wish to live under no other government & there is no sacrifice I am not ready to make for the preservation of the Union save that of honor.” Lee did not favor secession and wished for a peaceable solution instead; but his home state of Virginia seceded, and he was thus faced with the decision to remain loyal to the Union and take up arms against his people, or break with the Union to fight against his former comrades. He chose the latter. Lee’s wife (who privately sympathized with the Union cause) said this of her husband’s decision: “[He] has wept tears of blood over this terrible war, but as a man of honor and a Virginian, he must follow the destiny of his State.” In a traditional honor culture, loyalty to your honor group takes precedence over all other demands — even those of one’s own conscience.
Read the whole thing. Really, do it. The author says that even though modernization and urbanization have mitigated the Southern honor code a great deal, you can still see it in Southerners. He’s absolutely right. I see it in myself, wrestling with what to think about the Confederate statues. The North’s cause was right, but even if I knew nothing of the history, I can feel in my bones the mandate to fight on the side of one’s people. Robert E. Lee embodies the tragedy of the American South: he was the best military man in America — remember that Lincoln offered him command of the Union Army — and wanted to keep the Union together. But his sense of honor directed him to violate his own conscience and stand loyally with his own people — defined by him as the people of Virginia.
A Northerner sees him as a traitor and a warrior for slavery. Yes, some no-count Southerners would see Lee as a warlord for white supremacy, and cherish him for that. But more thoughtful Southerners see him as a tragic figure: a good man who fought in a bad, doomed cause, from a sense of loyalty to his people. Moreover, this makes sense to us, because we see it in our own lives and families all the time, in all kinds of ways. It’s why we’re such good storytellers — and songwriters. We have a tacit understanding of the ways human beings fail, despite themselves. Until the day I die, I will meditate upon my own family’s story, and how my late father and my late sister, two of the most morally decent and worthy people I have ever known, set out to protect the legacy of family and place, but chose to do it in an honor-obsessed way that ended up destroying it.
Every family has a story like that somewhere. Robert E. Lee? Hell, that’s my own father’s story. He was a good man whose fierce dedication to family and place, and sense of honor, led him to pursue a strategy that cost him the thing he treasured most of all. Even though I suffered personally from his tragic arc, it doesn’t make me feel hard towards him, not at all. It makes me ache for him, because I know he would not have wanted it this way, but he could not see what he was doing. Same with my late sister. They could have been me. It might yet be me one day, because men are frail, men are blind, the heart is deceitful above all things … and life is tragic.
Northerners think they’ve found us out when they point out that we are the most religiously observant region of the country, but also the most morally unruly (to put it delicately). “Hypocrites!” they say. We just shrug. We see no contradiction there. The distance between our ideals and our behavior, and all the contradictions within that space, is the truth of our lives. Often it’s our shame, and sometimes it’s our honor, but we are strings anchored tautly together across that valley of human experience. The collision of time and fate with those strings strikes what Lincoln called in another context “the mystic chords of memory,” and the music it makes can break your heart, just like Malcolm Gladwell said.
The point I wish to make here is that even though Northern iconoclasts are morally and historically correct to judge the Confederate cause wicked, they would do well to understand that the fact that we white Southerners feel a visceral sense of piety towards our ancestors does not mean that we hold them blameless. They would also do well to understand that they are asking us to despise our family and our homeland to prove to them that we are morally acceptable.
That’s not going to happen.
Finally — to tie up the Gladwell insight and the Southern honor culture material — consider The Band’s song “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” written by Robbie Robertson (a Canadian!) with historical research assist by Levon Helm of Arkansas. The rock critic Ralph Gleason wrote of the song:
Nothing I have read … has brought home the overwhelming human sense of history that this song does. The only thing I can relate it to at all is The Red Badge of Courage. It’s a remarkable song, the rhythmic structure, the voice of Levon and the bass line with the drum accents and then the heavy close harmony of Levon, Richard and Rick in the theme, make it seem impossible that this isn’t some traditional material handed down from father to son straight from that winter of 1865 to today. It has that ring of truth and the whole aura of authenticity.
Here’s the Band performing the song. Listen especially to the third verse — the land, family, death, defeat — and know that for very many of us, that is the South. It’s not the whole South. “Strange Fruit” is also the South. But it’s one true story of the South, and if you can’t feel the tragedy and the heartbreak of a poor, proud Southern man laid low in this song, friend, I cannot help you:
UPDATE: Look, if you are going to go to the comments section and say, in effect,“But enough about Southern white people and Civil War history, what about Southern black people, huh, HUH?!” — save it. I’m not going to let you threadjack. This is not a post meant to put down or to diminish the point of view of Southern black people. It’s meant to speculate on why many Southern white people who are not particularly racist nevertheless have complicated feelings about how we ought to remember the Civil War and those who fought it on the Southern side. If you have something to add to that discussion, let’s hear it. If you just want to whatabout, and say the same things here that you’ve said on every other thread we’ve had about monuments, save it for later.
