Stuck in a Moment We Can't Get Out Of: 9/11 and America Twenty Years Later
PLUS: An Aaliyah retrospective
In October 2000, U2 released their tenth studio album All That You Can’t Leave Behind. It was well-received by critics and fans alike, with many praising it for its back-to-rock-basics approach after the band had spent the 90s making more experimental music. The album gained a second life, though, following 9/11. The light spiritual quality of the record, which featured songs like “Beautiful Day”, “Walk On”, “Peace on Earth”, and “New York”, offered listeners a reassuring balm in the frightening aftermath of that tragedy.
The second song on All That You Can’t Leave Behind is “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of.” Critics have characterized it as a gospel song, but while I would describe it as soulful, I don’t really hear that. The song is a little plodding—its big moments of release seem to happen in slow motion—but that also serves Bono’s purposes. Bono wrote the lyrics about Michael Hutchence, the lead singer of the band INXS, who took his own life in 1997. Bono has described the song as an argument about suicide that he wished he’d had with Hutchence in order to slap his friend out of the bad moment he was mired in. Every word in the song—which, despite its warm tone, is occasionally angry—is sung deliberately and almost at times like a chant. Its message is not meant to be lost on the listener. It’s as though Bono intended this song to be playing in the background when someone is alone taking a long hard look at themselves in the mirror. “Slow down,” he is saying, “and say these words with me.”
After 9/11, I suspect “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” comforted a lot of people who felt trapped in a scary new world facing an uncertain future. It wasn’t just the prospect of war. It was that getting on an airplane, taking the subway to work, or going to a baseball game all seemed to entail a tremendous act of courage. There was also the feeling that no matter how secure we tried to make ourselves, those who attacked us would find our soft spots. We had spent a decade basking in our victory over a superpower armed with a nuclear arsenal that could have turned every city in this country and all its inhabitants to vapor. That enemy, though, had never set foot on our soil. Now, nineteen suicidal men armed with box cutters had converted airliners into guided missiles and decimated lower Manhattan and the headquarters of our nation’s military, killing thousands of innocent civilians. The perpetrators had been living among us, and there were undoubtedly others who remained in hiding. We had entered an age of vulnerability.
And that’s where we still are, stuck in a moment we can’t get out of. Americans have long moved past the initial shock of 9/11, but we still carry the trauma of that day with us. I’m not sure we’ll ever fully reckon with it, either; with each passing year, it just becomes easier to push it into the past than come to terms with it. Psychologically, though, that day is like the static you’d find on old analog TVs: Scrambled radio waves reverberating through the ether, some dating all the way back to the Big Bang, the origins of our universe. 9/11 is the snowy background noise our politics is broadcast over.
Condoleezza Rice, who served as President George W. Bush’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, once said after 9/11, “Those charged with protecting us from attack have to succeed one hundred percent of the time. To inflict devastation on a massive scale, the terrorists only have to succeed once, and we know they are trying every day.” Those are heavy stakes not only in terms of what could be lost in the event of another attack, but also psychologically. There was no room for error or doubt or even second guesses in what came to be known as the War on Terror, a conflict against a ruthless and elusive enemy that we never knew for sure if we were winning. Every base and more needed to be covered; we could not just act “preventively,” but “preemptively.” It all demanded vigilance and resolve on our part.
Consequently, 9/11 set us up for an overreaction. The War on Terror would excuse errors in judgment by simply asserting it was better to be safe than sorry. Perversely, mistakes, deception, and even crime became proof that someone was willing to do whatever it took to keep the nation secure; they could even be held up as heroes and leaders. As Bill Clinton said after the Democrats lost seats in the 2002 midterm elections, which took place during the build-up to our invasion of Iraq, “When people are feeling insecure, they’d rather have someone who is strong and wrong rather than somebody who is weak and right.”
9/11 happened as a brand of existential politics simmered on the right. Conservative Christians, neoconservatives, and paleoconservatives (the latter of whom generally opposed overseas interventions) may have had their differences, but they agreed on one thing: The danger of American decline. Neoconservatives led the charge to invade Iraq; they wanted to project American power and western values around the world and counter the rise of new powers that might challenge the dominant position the United States and its liberal world order held in the world. For conservative Christians and paleoconservatives, the danger was primarily cultural; they saw themselves as the defenders of a white Christian nation besieged by immigrants, secularists, feminists, and multiculturalists.
9/11, which had been orchestrated by fundamentalist Muslims granted free entry to this country, only heightened the sense among many conservatives that American civilization was in peril. The Bush administration—led by a born-again Christian—weaponized that sentiment by turning the War on Terror into something like a civilizational crusade against foreign forces who hated our freedoms and our way of life, and then aimed all that fear and righteousness at Saddam Hussein. There wasn’t much room for dissent. In the War on Terror, you were either with this administration or against it, on the side of a strong America or in favor of a weak and vulnerable one. Even after the War in Iraq had been exposed as a mistake, people still insisted it was better to have blundered into it than to have fought the terrorists on our own soil. For some, the personal stakes were so high—they had invoked their faith in God and country to defend to a war that had needlessly taken the lives of thousands of Americans and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis—that they couldn’t admit their error without bringing into question everything else they believed in.
In short time, many applied the mindset they had adopted to justify the War on Terror to our politics here at home. Republicans in particular demanded vigilance not only in the fight against enemies abroad but against those who would question their domestic agenda. It was easy to re-channel fears of cultural decline back home, as Republicans came to believe Democratic political victories not only threatened to undermine our military’s attempts to defend America’s culture from foreign opponents overseas but also struck at the pillars of our culture here in the states. The next Democratic president and the nation’s first Black chief executive was vilified by the right, many of whom believed he was a foreign-born Muslim. The man most responsible for promoting that view would succeed Obama as president. And the most prominent article urging Republicans to vote for Trump in 2016 despite his evident “buffoonery” and “vulgarity” (and, I should add, his autocratic inclinations, which the article conveniently avoided) was titled “The Flight 93 Election.” It began
2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.
Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.
Four years later, when just about the most mainstream politician in America defeated Trump in a fair election, his supporters stormed the building Flight 93 was aimed at on 9/11. I guess in this long 9/11 moment we’re stuck in (and to echo another conflict that still haunts us) sometimes you have to burn the democracy to save it.
Of course, the irony is that during the 2016 election Trump railed on Hillary Clinton and, through the figure of Jeb Bush, George W. Bush for having supported the invasion of Iraq. (Trump said he opposed the invasion then; he actually seemed to reluctantly support it at the time in an interview with Howard Stern.) By now, though, the political echoes of 9/11 have less to do with direct questions about national security than with matters of cultural existentialism. In this view, the threat is both foreign (they’re called immigrants; it’s why we need a wall) and domestic. If they’re given an inch, they’ll take a mile. It’s a zero-sum political game, one we lose if the other side is legitimated with a victory. Winning demands resolve, vigilance, and a willingness to push beyond the normal bounds of politics to preserve our status in the world. It’s the mindset we adopted following the horrors of 9/11 to wage the War on Terror, only aimed back at ourselves now.
The other irony is that the political legacy of 9/11 is callous in its attitude toward death. Every two days this month, the pandemic has generated a death toll in this country equal to what we experienced as a nation on 9/11. Our post-9/11 politics, however, have made it exceptionally difficult to arrest that problem even though the solution resides in pharmacies throughout the land.
But that’s the moment we’ve found ourselves in for much of the past twenty years. The sort of trauma we experienced on 9/11 led us to lash out at others and then lash out at each other. I’m not sure how you walk people back from the feeling that they are standing on the edge of a cultural apocalypse. Perhaps by validating their place in the wider community, or providing them with some greater degree of social security? Or maybe another event will come along to reorient our politics along different lines. Perhaps our best hope is to simply age out of it. Ten years from now, nearly half the country won’t be old enough to remember 9/11. Let’s see what the 30th anniversary of this sad day holds in store for us.
Photo credit: Istock
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Column of the Week
“Oh My F***ing God, Get the F***ing Vaccine Already, You F***ing F***s” by Wendy Molyneux (McSweeney’s, September 2, 2021)
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Top 5 Records Music Review: An Aaliyah Retrospective
I was in a used bookstore a few weeks ago rifling through their used CDs when I came across a copy of Aaliyah’s self-titled 2001 album. I snatched that up as fast as I could. The store charged me $2 for it. When I got to my car, I looked the album up on Amazon. While I was not surprised to find a used copy selling for considerably more than two bucks, it was a bit jaw-dropping to see it retailing for $149.95.
Aaliyah, a popular R&B singer in the mid-to-late 90s and early 00s, has become something of an enigma since 2001, the year she was killed in a plane crash while returning from a video shoot in the Bahamas. She was only 22 at the time of her death. While some new music was released posthumously, her record label—which is operated by her uncle—quit distributing her catalog ten years ago. Not only did that mean it was now impossible to purchase physical copies of Aaliyah’s music in stores, but also that her albums have never made it onto streaming services like Spotify. (It also meant younger generations knew her less for her music than as the underaged girl R. Kelly had groomed and married back in 1994; her parents annulled the marriage a few months later.)
All that is changing now, though. Aaliyah’s estate (managed by her mother) and her record label have finally managed to make her music available to the public again. As of today, Aaliyah (2001) has joined Aaliyah’s other two albums—Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number (1994) and One in a Million (1996)—on Spotify and is also on sale on Amazon for $9.99. At $2, I still got it for a bargain, but I’m guessing the market for its resale has bottomed out.
Aaliyah’s music deserves a comeback. Not only is her work a culmination of many trends that had developed in R&B in the 1990s, but it also foreshadowed a style of R&B that has more recently come to prominence. Looking back, it could be argued Aaliyah is the pivotal figure in the development of early 21st century R&B.
Few would argue 90s R&B suffered from a dearth of memorable artists. Acts like Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men anchored the pop charts. New Jack Swing, which brought the rhythms and production style of rap to R&B in the music of such artists as Janet Jackson and Bell Biv DeVoe, flourished in the first half of the decade. Those who felt New Jack Swing watered-down rap’s impact for commercial appeal may have preferred Mary J. Blige’s brand of hip-hop soul. Yet R&B in the 90s was challenged by the rise of alternative rock (which looked down on any music with pop aspirations) and gangsta rap (which positioned melodic soul music as an artifact of a bygone era.)
The sudden popularity of gangsta rap in the early 90s also halted the ascension of eclectic alternative rap groups like De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, and Arrested Development who liked to experiment with novel arrangements and sounds. It also stood in stark contrast to the neo-soul movement that emerged mid-decade. Neo-soul—most closely identified with artists like Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, and Meshell Ndegeocello—adopted the adventurous spirit of Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, relied on live instrumentation (often performed by members of the Roots), and played around with jazz and blues stylings, but still found ways to incorporate nods to contemporary hip-hop. Today, neo-soul artists are regarded as the inspiration for many of R&B’s most critically acclaimed albums; in the 90s, they were respected for their artistry but sometimes knocked as throwbacks.
An astute observer of the music scene in the mid-90s (which I was not) would have seen that neo-soul reflected some R&B artists’ dismay with the way the music industry seized upon gangsta rap while marginalizing more hybrid or eclectic styles like New Jack Swing and alternative rap. That’s where Aaliyah comes into play. In search of innovative collaborators who would push the boundaries of contemporary R&B, Aaliyah turned to the relatively unknown Timbaland and Missy Elliott to produce her 1996 record One in a Million. Timbaland and Elliott were interested in developing hip-hop music with freaky rhythm tracks drawn from the burgeoning southern rap scene to move past the laid-back g-funk and hard rock aesthetic of gangsta rap. Just notice the difference between that album’s title track and a song like “Waterfalls” (1994) by TLC, one of the biggest hip-hop soul/R&B acts of the 90s.
TLC, who was signed to L.A. Reid and Babyface Edmonds’ LaFace Records, root their slow jams in a style that owes a heavy debt to Parliament-Funkadelic. It’s an iconic single of the 1990s. “One in a Million” by contrast is light, almost brittle. It’s a slow jam from a different R&B universe.
That doesn’t necessarily mean Timbaland didn’t supply Aaliyah with thick, bouncy beats. You can hear that on a song like “Are You That Somebody?”, one of the 90s most radical pop songs that, oddly, can be found on the soundtrack to the 1998 Eddie Murphy film Dr. Doolittle.
The song’s rhythm track is practically alien; nothing else at the time sounded like that. Equally striking, however, is Aaliyah’s vocal. Where other singers may have felt compelled to match the song’s rhythmic power with vocal force, Aaliyah instead floats through the song, drifting away and into the beat. Like Janet Jackson, who also sang to heavy New Jack Swing beats supplied by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Aaliyah doesn’t have an overpowering voice. Yet (and I say this as a huge Janet Jackson fan) Aaliyah has a better voice with a sturdier expressive range. It makes her something like a neo-soul singer with a genuinely new (rather than old) soul performing avant-garde New Jack Swing or hip-hop soul. And she was only 19 when it was released.
Other artists would follow Aaliyah’s lead. Brandy copied her formula to rise up the charts, but her singles lacked the memorable rhythmic hooks supplied to Aaliyah. The group that came closest was Destiny’s Child, whose rhythmic sense was also somewhat off-kilter and whose vocals could also be as delicate. But Aaliyah shot past them on her 2001 self-titled album, whose every track seemed to suggest a new musical path for her to explore.
Aaliyah wouldn’t get the chance to realize that potential. Instead, it was Beyoncé, the lead singer of Destiny’s Child, who would dominate R&B in the new decade. Unlike Aaliyah, though, Beyonce was at her best as an R&B belter in the vein of rock-styled singers like Tina Turner. Aaliyah’s influence would be felt more in the next decade when Aaliyah’s more sensual and adventurous spirit found its way onto records by artists such as Solange, SZA, and Kelela. Musicians like Justin Timberlake, Drake, Frank Ocean, and Rihanna also owe her a substantial debt.
Some artists like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain had short recording careers but left behind an impressive musical legacy. Aaliyah deserves to be included in this group. She was a genuine musical innovator. Her music wasn’t cool but chill, more of an inquiry than a declaration, less an act of seduction than an extended flirtation. She sang with an usual amount of ease, intelligence, and confidence for someone of her age. It suggested she possessed something that would have made Ms. Jackson proud: Control.
Thanks for reading.
Exit music: “Rock the Boat” by Aaliyah (2001, Aaliyah)