Freedom's Just Another Word for What Exactly?
Aaron Lewis, Bruce Springsteen, and a #1 country song
It kind of feels like summer 2001 all over again. For all intents and purposes, the United States doesn’t have combat troops in Afghanistan. A couple politicians named Bush and Cheney made the news this week. The supermarket tabloids are obsessed with Britney Spears and J-Lo again. But the flashback I didn’t see coming was Staind lead singer Aaron Lewis (pictured above) starting a beef with Bruce Springsteen in the middle of a chart-topping country song.
Remember Staind? Their top ten hit “It’s Been Awhile” was big enough to land them the cover of Rolling Stone twenty years ago this very month. Between 2001 and 2011, they released five albums, each cracking the top five on the Billboard Charts, with three hitting (and two debuting at) number one. They also consistently charted songs high on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock list over that same time period. The band was never a critic’s darling, however, and for good reason. Staind’s overwrought ballads sound like acts of self-flagellation, with Lewis’s lyrics laying bare the parental resentment, struggles with addiction, and mental health issues that left his psyche and personal relationships in ruins. Rather than use music to exorcise or transcend his personal demons, Lewis found it preferable to wallow in his suffering. It may be honest but it’s also joyless, a testament to the idea that misery loves company.
Staind, along with bands like Creed, Nickelback, and 3 Doors Down, was part of a wave of post-grunge bands that emerged at the turn of the century. These groups—each sounding like a very earnest homage to Stone Temple Pilots—rode the tattered alternative aesthetic of 90s-era grunge into a pile-up at the terminus of a musical dead end. While Nirvana and Pearl Jam targeted middle America’s vapidity and intolerance of those beyond the margins of mainstream society, post-grunge bands like Staind instead came across as a bunch of tortured white guys singing from the besieged middle American heartland/wasteland. Looking back, however, they and the fans they cultivated (mostly white men now in their thirties and forties) can be seen as canaries in a coal mine. 3 Doors Down would play Trump’s inaugural concert. Lewis has taken the stage wearing a MAGA cap.
About ten years ago, Lewis embarked on a solo career as a country musician. He hasn’t exactly taken Nashville by storm, but earlier this July his single “Am I the Only One”—a straightforward conservative lament that longs for Americans to rise up and Make America Great Again…Again—became only the ninth song ever to debut at #1 on the country charts. (It also managed to hit #14 on Billboard’s all-encompassing Hot 100.) Lewis achieved this feat without the benefit of airtime on country music radio. Instead, listeners began downloading the song after hearing the spare acoustic ballad promoted on FOX News, SiriusXM’s Patriot Radio, and social media. It’s bounced around the Country Top 40 since then and will be released to country music radio this weekend.
I have my preferences when it comes to country music—I would recommend Miranda Lambert, Kacey Musgraves, Eric Church, Chris Stapleton, and Margo Price—but I tend to discover new country music through non-country channels. Therefore, I probably would have remained oblivious to “Am I the Only One” if the song had not taken a swipe at my all-time favorite musician:
Am I the only one who quits singing along
Every time they play a Springsteen song
So add Lewis to the long list of conservatives who have learned over the past forty years that Springsteen is a liberal. It does make me wonder, though, which of Springsteen’s songs Lewis had been singing along to while remaining oblivious to Springsteen’s political leanings. Was it “Badlands”? “The Promised Land”? “The River”? “Johnny 99”? “Born in the U.S.A.”? “My Hometown”? “Seeds”? “The Ghost of Tom Joad”? “Youngstown”? “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live”? “Land of Hope and Dreams”? The whole Wrecking Ball album?
Actually, it probably wasn’t the music that turned Lewis off to Springsteen. Springsteen has always sympathized with and dignified working-class Americans in his art. Working-class conservatives could at least find their lives, values, and struggles reflected in Springsteen’s music even if he parted with them when it came to which party he believed best reflected and addressed those values. Springsteen probably lost a lot of Republican fans in the 00s when he came out against the War in Iraq and George W. Bush’s re-election, but many working-class conservatives may have finally regarded Springsteen as a traitor to his class and made their break with him permanent after he called Trump a “con man” during the 2016 campaign. Trump, of course, made a major play for working-class Americans in that year’s election by accentuating themes found in Springsteen’s music and then adding white grievance politics to the mix. Springsteen’s vision of working-class America has always been multicultural, so he naturally found what Trump was selling noxious.
I’m guessing Springsteen’s disgust with Trump’s racial politics is what finally soured Lewis to Springsteen’s music, since “Am I the Only One” tries to rally listeners to action by warning them there’s “another statue coming down in a town near you.” That’s a particularly odd sentiment since a.) The lyric is sandwiched between lines bemoaning the treatment of the American flag, and last I checked, most of the statues that got toppled in the United States over the past year were of people who did not fight for that banner but rather against it; and b.) It’s sung by a guy from Springfield, Massachusetts, whose armory manufactured a lot of the rifles the Union Army used in the Civil War. So maybe the song Lewis quit singing along to was “Matamoros Banks” or “American Land” or “American Skin (41 Shots)” (which, interestingly enough, was first released on an album in 2001.)
“Am I the Only One” is a case study in reactionary politics, a product of what author Mark Lilla would call the “shipwrecked mind.”
[The reactionary’s] story begins with a happy, well-ordered state where people who know their place live in harmony and submit to tradition and their God. Then alien ideas promoted by intellectuals—writers, journalists, professors—challenge this harmony and the will to maintain order weakens at the top….A false consciousness soon descends on the society as a whole as it willingly, even joyfully, heads for destruction. Only those who have preserved memories of the old ways see what is happening. Whether the society reverses direction or rushes to its doom depends entirely on their resistance….
The reactionary mind is a shipwrecked mind. Where others see the river of time flowing as it always has, the reactionary sees the debris of paradise drifting past his eyes. He is time’s exile. The revolutionary sees the radiant future invisible to others and it electrifies him. The reactionary, immune to modern lies, sees the past in all its splendor and he too is electrified. He feels himself in a stronger position than his adversary because he believes he is the guardian of what actually happened, not the prophet of what might be. This explains the strangely exhilarating despair that courses through reactionary literature, the palpable sense of mission—as the reactionary American magazine National Review put it in its very first issue, the mission was to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop!” The militancy of his nostalgia is what makes the reactionary a distinctly modern figure, not a traditional one. (The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction by Mark Lilla, 2016, pgs. xii-xiii.)
Listen to “Am I the Only One” and hear Lewis share his sense that the future is overtaking him (“Am I standing on the edge of time?”), that a degenerate new order is supplanting the old (“they’re taking all the good we got”), that those who share his views are dwindling or outnumbered (it’s there in the title). You can get a whiff of how much he values the patriarchy when he sings, “I think I’m turning into my old man” and that he “worries ‘bout his kids/ As they try to undo all the things he did.” He plays the old love-it-or-leave-it card (albeit with more colorful language) to defend the status quo and sees a false consciousness descending over a “brainwashed” society. And then there’s his militancy, his willingness to “fight” and “bleed,” which is scary in light of 1/6.
The things Lewis appears “willing to bleed/ Or take a bullet for” are the flag, statues, and freedom. In all fairness, Lewis only has four-and-a-half minutes to communicate his views to the listener, but there isn’t a clear sense in this rather forthright song how Lewis conceives of freedom, what he finds valuable about it, or what it can be used for. The opposite is true when you listen to Springsteen. In his songs, freedom is often symbolized by the car and the road. It’s about escaping bad situations or a dreary life for something better. It allows for self-improvement, but it also often involves risk. While work is always honored, work is not synonymous with freedom; in fact, freedom is often a release from work into a world of joy and fun. As Springsteen grew older, community and companionship became essential to freedom. A good community would nurture individual freedom: It would pick people up when they fell, accept anyone regardless of their background, and give them the space to live life on their own terms. As he sings on “Long Walk Home” (hear the song below):
My father said, “Son we’re lucky in this town
It’s a beautiful place to be born
It just wraps its arms around you
Nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone”
For Springsteen, creating and maintaining this sort of community was essential for individuals to flourish.
For Lewis, freedom is just a symbol like the flag or an inheritance like a statue. It’s a value of some sort, but deep down he can’t really articulate its value; he believes in it, but he doesn’t know why. In that way, it’s nothing more than a word he associates with the social and political order he prefers. If that order begins to vanish, freedom will too, so “freedom” becomes deeply intertwined with power. The scary thing is he’s been told that word is something worth bleeding for.
But “Am I the Only One” is also a lament, and Lewis sounds exhausted singing it. If we’re lucky, maybe this song is a sign the whole Tea Party/MAGA Movement is finally running out of steam and Lewis is resigned to its fate. Or maybe it’s a reflection of the sort of calm that comes with a newfound sense of clarity and focus. George Washington University just released a poll finding 47% of Republicans believe “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.”
In “Me and Bobby McGee,” Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” I get what she means: The things you bind yourself to—your possessions, your expectations, your commitments, your achievements, your aspirations—if you shed them or suddenly find yourself stripped of them, you can recreate your life on whatever new terms you choose. It’s a liberating sentiment, although not one I or maybe even the song’s author Kris Kristofferson necessarily agree with. (I’d argue freedom becomes more meaningful with a commitment to some notion of a good life; Kristofferson’s song is rather ambiguous on the matter.) In another light, though, that lyric could be read as somewhat dark and nihilistic. For the socially unmoored reactionary who senses that the order that brought their life meaning is slipping away, it becomes a death wish. I hope it never comes to that. I fear we’re closer to it than we think.
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Photo credit: Aaron Lewis Facebook page
Exit music: “Long Walk Home” by Bruce Springsteen (2007, Magic)