What Republicans Are Talking About When They Talk About Voter Fraud
PLUS: A review of "The Past is Still Alive" by Hurray for the Riff Raff AND a tribute to Eric Carmen
I may very well be getting ahead of myself here, especially since the polls currently show Donald Trump with a slight but steady lead over Joe Biden, but it’s probably worth diving into the issue of election fraud now before (as I anticipate) Biden retakes the lead and (fingers-crossed) posts a victory in November. If those events come to pass—and especially if the outcome is close—I suspect we’ll be mob-deep in accusations of a “rigged election” again. Better to begin combatting those accusations now rather than in the moment, when people tend to “both sides” contentious issues.
The first thing to know about Trump’s allegations of election fraud is that in the fifty years between the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and Trump’s debut as a presidential candidate in 2015, few doubted the integrity of the American electoral system. Political figures believed election results were valid and accepted electoral outcomes. Some did occasionally question the way elections were administered, most notably in the presidential contests in Florida in 2000 (which involved a recount) and Ohio in 2004 (where Democrats drew attention to several irregularities that affected predominantly minority and Democratic-leaning precincts.) But politicians did not claim elections were fixed or that vote totals were somehow altered to generate a certain outcome.
That consensus began cracking in 2015 due to Trump, whose initial reason for casting doubt on the validity of electoral results was purely self-serving. Trump did not enter the 2016 Republican presidential primary expecting to win. Most assumed he would use his campaign to enhance his standing within the conservative political movement and then drop out before any votes were cast. But once it became clear to him that he had a real shot at winning the nomination if he stayed in the race, Trump needed to come up with an excuse in the event he wound up losing. The Trump brand, after all, is all about “winning,” and that brand could be damaged if he ended up polling behind Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or John Kasich. Hence the notion that the “elections were rigged”: If Trump won, the votes were counted correctly; if he lost, the “elites” had conspired behind the scenes to rob him of a victory.
Trump first levelled the accusation of election fraud against Cruz following the 2016 Iowa Republican caucus, when he posted on social media that Cruz “illegally stole it.” Trump cited polls showing him with a five-point lead on the eve of the caucus, which he lost by four points (28%-24%). (With margins that small, it would have been very easy for a far more organized campaign like Cruz’s to generate the turnout he needed to win.) To this day, Trump claims he has never lost the three Iowa Republican caucuses he has contested. This episode is important to remember, however, because it shows this was Trump’s go-to excuse for losing from the start, and that he tosses it around no matter who he is running against, be it a Democrat or a Republican.
The same logic applies to Trump’s campaigns against Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden: Unable to tolerate a loss, Trump asserted he was bound to win and then preemptively claimed the only way he could possibly lose was if his opponents stole his victory. Again, that’s a very self-serving argument.
By 2020, however, that argument took on an additional purpose. With Trump now determined to cling to power, Trump justified his own strike at the heart of democracy by alleging (falsely) that Democrats, who would “stop at nothing” to depose him, had struck first by stealing the election. The false claim that liberals stole an election from Trump gave Republican politicians, operatives, and insurrectionists permission to try to steal it for real. In their minds, desperate times called for desperate measures. In the classic Trumpian equation, “corruption” must be met not with a higher standard of ethical behavior, but with corruption.
What follows is the obligatory part of every article about allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election whereby the author states there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in that election nor any evidence of a coordinated effort to alter the true outcome of that election. Rather than flesh out that argument here, I would instead point you to the following resources, which do that job nicely:
“Widespread Election Fraud Claims by Republicans Don’t Match the Evidence” by Owen Averill, Annabel Hazrati, and Elaine Kamarck of Brookings
“An Evaluation of Fraud Claims from the 2020 Trump Election Contests” by Justin Grimmer and Abhinav Ramaswamy of Stanford University
“Trump’s Drumbeat of Lies About the 2020 Election Keeps Getting Louder. Here Are the Facts” by Robert Yoon of AP
“Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case That Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election” by Danforth, et. al.
Without getting too in depth here, these are those reports’ major findings:
Multiple reviews and recounts in closely-contested states confirmed Biden’s victory and found no instances of widespread or systemic voter fraud.
Instances of voter fraud were extremely rare, committed by individuals acting independently rather than as a group, typically resulted from administrative or voter error without resulting in criminal charges, and would not have affected the outcome of the election (even at the precinct level.) In fact, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has tabulated only 1,465 instances of voter fraud since 2005, a miniscule number given that tens of millions of people vote in presidential elections every four years. Historically and statistically, voter fraud is practically non-existent and has only affected the outcomes of a handful of local races. (The most recent case involved an absentee ballot scheme in a North Carolina congressional race that tipped the election to the Republican candidate.)
State and federal courts throughout the nation resoundingly rejected claims of fraud and misconduct brought by the Trump campaign following the 2020 election.
There was no proof of foreign interference in the election, that undocumented immigrants and non-citizens voted in the election, that voting machines were tampered with, that election officials intentionally double-counted ballots, that “suitcases” containing pre-marked ballots were dropped off at tabulation centers, or that “ballot mules” illegally deposited numerous ballots in drop boxes.
Many of the Trump campaign’s claims about voter behavior as well as their analyses of electoral outcomes were false, based on false assumptions, reflected a misunderstanding of how elections are conducted, or were filled with analytical errors.
Perhaps most damning of all, Trump’s own team—including both officials in the Justice Department and members of his own campaign—found no widespread evidence of voter fraud and even told him so. You can read more about this in the recently published book Disproven by Ken Block, who was paid $800,000 to investigate claims of voter fraud for the Trump campaign in the two months following the 2020 election and, time and time again, reported no evidence existed supporting such claims.
Accusations of voter fraud in general should be treated with great skepticism. To begin with, it makes very little sense for individual voters to engage in voter fraud, since their individual efforts, which might net a handful of extra votes for their preferred candidate, are highly unlikely to swing the outcome of even a close election. Some might counter then by arguing the problem is when many individuals commit voter fraud at once, but that would likely result in dozens if not hundreds of irregularities, which in turn increases the odds this behavior would be spotted by election monitors. Furthermore, if dozens or hundreds of people were involved in a conspiracy to commit voter fraud, it’s going to be very hard to keep that conspiracy under wraps. More than anything else, though, given the extremely poor odds of successfully altering the outcome of an election and the high costs that accompany getting caught (i.e., fines, jail time, losing the right to vote) individual voter fraud simply doesn’t pay. That’s why it’s so very rare.
Others claim the problem is really systemic voter fraud, which occurs when election officials manipulate the results from on high. Maybe they tamper with voting machines, register and cast votes for fake voters, produce thousands of pre-marked absentee ballots, or double-count votes. Bulk fraud would not go unnoticed, however. Elections are audited. There are paper trails. Partisan poll watchers keep tabs on who has voted for get-out-the-vote efforts. Elections officials may not know who an individual voted for, but they know if an individual voted, and that’s a record that’s easy to review. Turnout rates, past election results, and comparisons between precincts can hint at abnormalities. Additionally, candidates in contested local races—which involve smaller constituencies and smaller margins of victory—will keep an eye out for any sign of organized foul play. It’s easy for someone with a feverish but simple-minded imagination to concoct a wild conspiracy involving systemic voter fraud; it’s much more difficult to pull that scheme off in the real world.
But when it comes to Trump, let’s not overlook another purpose these claims of voter fraud serve. To most Americans, “voter fraud” is something that happens in cities like New York and Chicago, which have reputations for political corruption dating back to the machine-driven politics of the 19th and 20th centuries. We’re all familiar with stories about big city political operatives who would “vote the graveyards” or party loyalists who were urged to “vote early and vote often.” It has long been speculated that Democratic Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley used voter fraud to help John Kennedy win Illinois during the 1960 presidential election, although a historical review found the number of suspicious votes, while significant, would not have changed the outcome of the election. (It’s hard to know what to believe, though, when it comes to Daley’s political machine: As David Greenberg of Slate wrote about the 1960 election, “Many of the [contemporaneous allegations of voter fraud] involved practices that wouldn’t be detected by a recount, leading the conservative Chicago Tribune, among others, to conclude that ‘once an election has been stolen in Cook County, it stays stolen.’”)
But the days of big city voter fraud passed with the demise of big city party machines. Changing city demographics as well as the rise of the primary system had a lot to do with that, as cities dominated by one party (like Chicago) became the sites of competitive intraparty primary elections. That led party factions to demand more transparent election processes so that the old party bosses couldn’t continue to manipulate the results. State administrators and federal courts have also stepped in to ensure election integrity. As a result, there is no reason to assume urban elections are crooked; in fact, between 2008 and 2018, out of 9 million ballots cast in Chicago, only ten were flagged as suspicious, and none of those were deemed criminal.
Yet the stereotype of the “corrupt city”—where it’s easy to imagine an election worker adding a few thousand fake votes to the results without anyone ever noticing—persists. In our era of polarized politics, when the urban-rural divide is one of our most pronounced national rifts, Trump has weaponized that stereotype to his advantage. As Trump and his supporters understand it, cities are unkempt and falling apart, full of minorities and immigrants, beset by crime, and governed by crooked politicians and liberal elites. These hell zones do not represent “real” America but threaten real America. This critique has surfaced throughout American history, but Trump has taken it to a new level, stating that, if re-elected president, “in cities where there’s been a complete breakdown of public safety, I will send in federal assets, including the National Guard, until law and order is restored.” Trump’s invocations of “voter fraud”—which always implicate battleground-state cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Phoenix, and, for good measure, Chicago—reinforce the belief that the forces that have facilitated the so-called corruption and cultural degradation of America’s metro areas are coming to corrupt and degrade the rest of America. Whereas Democrats have spent the past eight years agonizing over how to reconnect with white rural voters, Trump has been using the boogeyman of urban America to rile-up his white rural base.
There isn’t space here to push back on Trump’s demonization of urban America; for now, this farm kid would just remark that the negative image of big cities sold to rural Americans by Republicans is greatly exaggerated and ignores the many problems currently afflicting the so-called Heartland.
Instead, it is more important to note the substantive effects Trump’s obsession with voter fraud has on American politics. More than anything else, Trump’s accusations are ultimately used by Republicans to justify attempts at voter suppression.
To begin with, the desire to stamp out what is virtually non-existent voter fraud has prompted Republican-led states to pass more restrictive laws (like onerous voter ID requirements and new restrictions on absentee ballot requests) that now make it more difficult for tens if not hundreds of thousands of Americans to vote. Furthermore, some enforcement efforts, like Florida’s voter fraud task force, which actually arrested people who received word from election officials that they could legally vote, could discourage many from voting. All of this is a completely disproportionate response to something that election experts say isn’t really a problem. We should not pretend, however, that these laws are intended to crackdown on voter fraud. Instead, they are designed to make it more difficult for Democrats to win elections. Don’t take my word for it: It’s an explicit part of the RNC’s campaign strategy for 2024.
Additionally, some efforts to uncover and counter voter fraud threaten to make elections less secure. Concerned that machines are altering vote tallies, some conservative activists have become advocates for counting all votes by hand, which is a far less accurate and reliable way to count votes. Multiple states have withdrawn from ERIC, the bipartisan interstate alliance that helps states maintain the accuracy of voter rolls. Finally, many professional elections officials, exhausted by the hysteria and harassment directed at them by voter fraud conspiracy theorists, have resigned, depriving the field of their expertise at a time when that expertise is needed more than ever.
Will any of this change the mind of a member of the MAGAverse? Doubtful. Many Republicans won’t bring themselves to admit Trump’s claims about election fraud are bogus, either. But Democrats can flip the script on these debates when they know what Trump and his Republican followers are really talking about when they talk about non-existent voter fraud.
Signals and Noise
By Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times: “Biden Says America is ‘Coming Back.’ Trump Says We’re ‘In Hell.’ Are They Talking About the Same Nation?”
The Biden campaign has released a proposed budget for fiscal year 2025 that would offer tax breaks for families, raise taxes on corporations and billionaires, lower health care costs, and cut deficits.
🚨 🚨 🚨 While talking about immigrants during a rally in Ohio Saturday night, Trump said, “I don’t know if you call them [immigrants] people. In some cases they’re not people, in my opinion. But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say.” It is a terrible thing to say, and you just have to be a decent human being to understand why. Trump’s language is dehumanizing language that encourages his followers to think of immigrants as less than human, undeserving of humane treatment, and unentitled to the protections afforded to them by universally-recognized human rights. It has always been a tactic of fascist and genocidal regimes to dehumanize their perceived enemies so that their followers are more willing to tolerate or commit violence against them. For more, see this interview from NPR with David Livingstone Smith, author of Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others 🚨 🚨 🚨
Tim Dickinson of Rolling Stone reports fundraising ads for Don Trump’s campaign are running alongside pro-Nazi content on the streaming platform Rumble.
Susan Glasser of The New Yorker, Jonathan Last of The Bulwark, and Ed Luce of The Financial Times all write about how Americans have grown numb to and unalarmed by Trump’s craziness.
In an interview with CNBC, Don Trump mentioned the idea of “cutting” entitlements like Social Security. The Biden campaign quickly attacked. Trump attempted to clean up his comments later in the week. MORE: “Why Trump Might Cut Social Security and Medicare in a Second Term” by Jonathan Chait of New York magazine
In the same interview, Trump gave a rambling answer when asked about whether he supports a bill moving through Congress that would force the Chinese owners of TikTok to sell the social media app for be banned in the US. Trump, of course, wants to maintain his “tough on China” image but is reluctant to upset the young voters who like using the platform. (Matthew Yglesias, who points out Trump is attempting to woo TikTok investor Jeff Yass, digs into the problems with TikTok.)
In addition to “closing the border” and “DRILL, BABY, DRILL,” Trump said his other first act as president would be to “Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned.” Those convicted for their actions on January 6 are neither “hostages” nor “wrongfully imprisoned.”
Jacqueline Sweet of The Guardian reports Alexander Smirnov, the FBI informant and star witness of the House investigation into Hunter Biden who is now under indictment by the FBI for lying about Hunter and Joe Biden, was paid $600,000 the year he began lying to the FBI by an American company whose CEO is a stakeholder in a UAE company connected to associates of Trump.
Matt Lewis of The Daily Beast advises Biden to hammer Trump by reminding Americans just how chaotic and miserable 2020 was.
Don Trump’s former vice president Mike Pence announced he would not endorse Trump for president in 2024, citing multiple issues that put Trump at odds with the conservative agenda. Pence also said he would not vote for Joe Biden. MY TAKE: This has the potential to turn into a major problem for Trump. Everyone knows who Pence is. He’s not an obscure former Cabinet member, but Trump’s former hand-picked running mate who at one time was an ardent supporter of the ex-president. This can grab people’s attention. Also, because Pence broke with Trump over Trump’s conservative credentials rather than Trump’s actions on 1/6 (which people could see as a too-personal reason for Pence to break with Trump) and because Pence said he would not vote for Biden, either, he creates the space for conservatives to withdraw their support from Trump for principled conservative reasons. Maybe conservatives just don’t care what Pence thinks, but if a conscientious conservative is looking for a way to ditch Trump, Pence just showed them how.
Trump’s hush money case in New York was delayed a month after a last-minute evidence dump by the prosecution.
The judge in the Georgia election interference case ruled the case could proceed but either Fulton County DA Fani Willis or Nathan Wade, the prosecutor she hired to oversee the case (and that she had a romantic relationship with) had to step aside. Wade stepped down. It was a win for Willis, but her the entire episode has seriously damaged her credibility. She should be advised to hand the case off as well.
The judge overseeing Trump’s classified documents case rejected a motion to dismiss the charges against Trump connected to the Espionage Act.
There are now dueling discharge petitions in the House regarding Ukraine aid, one sponsored by Democratic leadership that would bring the Senate’s bill up for a vote and another sponsored by a bipartisan group of House members who would limit the aid to military assistance. The latter petition only has a dozen signatures, however, while the Democratic petition has roughly 170 signatures but has yet to win over any Republicans.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has indicated he plans to hold a vote on Ukraine aid under the suspension calendar, which means the bill will rely on Democratic votes to pass. He also raised the possibility of splitting the bill into separate bills for Ukraine and Israel aid, respectively.
Way short on evidence, House Republicans investigating President Biden are considering simply making a criminal referral to the Justice Department (which would likely be ignored) rather than going forward with an actual impeachment. The move would be the equivalent of waving a white flag.
Republican Colorado Rep. Ken Buck announced he will resign at the end of the month rather than serve out his term. That will leave House Republicans with a 218-member majority, the exact number needed to maintain a majority.
Fewer than 100 members of the House Republican caucus attended a three-day member retreat in West Virginia aimed at building party unity, with one representative telling Juliegrace Brufke of Axios that the presence of alcohol at the retreat could raise tensions. “I’d rather sit down with Hannibal Lecter and eat my own liver,” the representative said.
“I’ve traveled all over the country—all 50 states—I’ve been in good places and bad places. The one thing I saw, we are losing our kids to a satanic cult.”—Republican Alabama Senator and professional fearmonger Tommy Tuberville speaking in Utah
According to a new poll, Democrats’ advantage among minority voters is at its lowest point since the 1950s. Nate Silver digs into the data and confirms the finding, noting Biden’s support among white voters hasn’t slipped by his support among Blacks, Latinos, and Asian-Americans has.
Gregory Korte of Bloomberg found the states at the top of the misery index—a combination of the unemployment rate and the inflation rate—are swing-states.
Andrew Restuccia and Eliza Collins of the Wall Street Journal write about Gen Z, America’s most disillusioned voters.
Jonathan Last of The Bulwark argues that while RFK Jr’s campaign is currently drawing more voters from Biden than Trump, in the long run, his campaign’s focus on crank issues should end up hurting Trump more.
Weird goings-on at the newly-Trumpified RNC: Its finance and digital teams have been relocated to Palm Beach (home of the Trump campaign) and mass layoffs (including senior staffers) with less than eight months to go until Election Day. Some of those laid-off were asked to resign and reapply in a letter that appears to be so quickly written that the RNC official who signed it incorrectly spelled his own name at the end of it.
The federal court system is cracking down on the practice of “court-shopping,” which occurs when a group files a suit in a jurisdiction with presumably sympathetic judges. Conservatives have used this tactic in recent years to challenge national legislation by filing lawsuits in a federal court in Amarillo, where the only judge in that division is a Trump appointee with very conservative leanings.
Philip Elliott of Time warns that after the fall of Roe v. Wade, the right to same-sex marriage is in jeopardy.
Theodoric Meyer and Leigh Ann Caldwell of the Washington Post preview races for the control of statehouses in the battleground states of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott said people were so upset about the influx of migrants into Texas that they would privately pay for the $150 million price for busing them to liberal cities. CNN found Abbott has raised less than 1% of that amount through private donations. The state is on the hook for the rest.
Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck of CNN report the GOP nominee for state public school superintendent has called for violence against Democrats in the past, including the executions of Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Moms for Liberty may be crashing, but Douglas Soule of USA Today reports its members make up half of the government-sponsored board that is advising Florida librarians on book removals.
After Biden said an Israeli invasion of the Gaza city of Rafah would cross a “red line,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated his willingness to cross it. AP looks at the political dynamics behind the Netanyahu-Biden relationship.
Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer—the highest-ranking Jewish political figure in American history—has called for new elections in Israel to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Punchbowl News observe Schumer’s speech marks the beginning of a new political dynamic in American-Israeli relations.
An aid ship delivered 200 tons of humanitarian supplies to Gaza. More and larger shipments are expected to follow.
The Defense Department rummaged through the cushions and found $300 million worth of weapons to send to Ukraine.
The Washington Post reports that with American funding for the war stalled, analyses of the situation in Ukraine have grown bleak, and things don’t look good even if Ukraine gets the funding.
Paul Abelsky of Bloomberg finds Russia’s “whac-a-mole” economy (so named for the way it is able to avoid sanctions) is humming, thanks in part to the massive militarization of its economy.
Florida may soon face a surge in migrants from Haiti, which is plunging into chaos as the government fails and gangs have taken control of the island nation.
Top 5 Records Music Review: The Past is Still Alive by Hurray for the Riff Raff
Many Americans today long to get back to the “good old days.” It’s not only those trying to make America great again, but everyone hoping to rewind the clock on the MAGA movement as well. There’s just a collective sense that the country took a wrong turn somewhere. If we could only return to some pre-pandemic, pre-Trump, pre-recession, pre-Iraq, pre-9/11 moment in time. Or maybe to some Pre-Reagan, pre-1968, or pre-November 22, 1963, version of America. Or perhaps we yearn for a more undefined era, like some time before the factories closed, or some time before Americans lost touch with God. Regardless, many of us seem to dream of returning to some idyllic moment when everything was, if not right with the world, at least pointed in the right direction, and the problems of modern life did not weigh on us. If only we could push reset.
But for some, there are no good old days to dream of returning to. For them, the past is pain—something to escape from—and its legacy is a present day filled with hurt. The language of a “reset” is the sound of betrayal.
These wounded souls are the people who populate The Past is Still Alive, the latest work by singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra, who releases albums as Hurray for the Riff Raff. Segarra is a Bronx native of Puerto Rican descent reared on hardcore punk. Like a troubadour from the days of Jimmie Rodgers and Woody Guthrie, they left home at seventeen and crisscrossed the country by freight train. Segarra eventually made their way to New Orleans, where they began self-releasing Americana albums in the late 00s. Their two most-recent records, The Navigator (2017, ATO Records) and Life on Earth (2022, Nonesuch) found them adding synthesizers to their songs.
Segarra dials back those synth textures on The Past is Still Alive, however, as they return to their Americana roots. It’s an interesting choice, since the traditionalism inherent to Americana music would seemingly clash with the disdain for the past embedded in the album’s lyrics. Artists like the Band and Neil Young have used the sounds of Americana to mourn the passing of an era, but that’s not what Segarra is up to here. Instead, the album sounds like Segarra playing the thread out, as if to say this music, this tradition, this country exhausted itself long ago and can’t offer a way forward.
The characters on The Past is Still Alive are all on the run. During “Snake Plant (The Past is Still Alive)”, Segarra sings, “I’m so happy we escaped from where we came,” recounting their time spent riding the rails, but liberation doesn’t promise relief. Hard times always follow. After telling a fellow traveler to “Remember Narcan”, Segarra bids farewell by saying, “Maybe someday I’ll see you again/ In a field, a war, a kingdom of sand”. They’re destined to live a less than glorious life. On “Hawkmoon”, another song about their cross-country travels that recounts time spent with a trans woman who was “beaten in the street” and then disappeared, they remark they’re “becoming the kind of girl that they warned me about”. They seek to upend their life by fleeing home, but they can’t shake their fate.
“It’s all in the past,” Segarra sings on “Vetiver”, “but the past is still alive.” There is no clean break, no starting over. The past hounds the people in Segarra’s songs and keeps putting them through the ringer. “Time/ Can take you for a ride” they observe on the album’s lead track “Alibi”, a song about a drug addict spiraling toward their doom. They begin the song by telling their friend, “You don’t have to die if you don’t wanna die,” but it feels foreordained. A different future is hard to imagine when so much we’ll need to draw on to get there is predicated on our past.
Contrary to the popular American notion that we can just shed our past and start over again, Segarra asserts we are always the accumulation of everything that’s come before us. That’s a formidable obstacle to overcome for those who have lived tough lives. As Segarra confesses on “Hourglass”
I always feel like a dirty kid
I used to eat out of the garbage
I know I should probably get over it
But somehow it feels I’m still in it
At the end of that song, Segarra sings, “a boulder is just sand/ In an hourglass,” emphasizing not only the weight but the enduring, temporal nature of one’s burdens. It’s a brilliant lyric.
Please don’t assume this is a depressing album. It’s actually a compassionate record, a work that encourages listeners to not only empathize with those on the margins of American society but questions why we don’t do more as a nation to reach out to rather than demean the so-called riff raff. Segarra doesn’t just think America today is too callous, but believes it always has been. It’s pathological—a feature of its past that it just can’t shake—making the nation irredeemable. “Say goodbye to America/ I wanna see it dissolve,” they sing on “Colossus of Roads”, adding, “I can be your poster boy for the great American fall.”
All these themes are woven together on “Ogallala”, the magisterial final song on The Past is Still Alive. Segarra and a companion are running from the cops in the middle of Nebraska, their “American footprint/ Tracks of blood left out in the snow.” They realize this is how it’s always been and how it’s always going to be, but like that addict in “Alibi”, it feels like time is finally running out, that this nation they live in—“an image of a photocopy of a lie”—has run its course. But over the song’s somber Americana strains, Segarra also admits they don’t like change or goodbyes. They’re an old soul: They’re supposed to be singing with Woody around the campfire, keeping the faith, not, as they imagine, playing with the musicians on the deck of the Titanic.
But then again, maybe that is their calling. “I used to think I was born into the wrong generation,” Segarra sings, “But now I know I made it right on time/ To watch the world burn.” They reconcile themself to the end. It’s this damaged, old soul’s fate to provide the soundtrack for the grand finale. No more talk of resets. This is what cruel, cruel “time” has always had in store for them, for us. And with that, The Past is Still Alive—one of the best albums of the year—comes to its glorious, cacophonous conclusion.
Exit Music: A Tribute to Eric Carmen
Eric Carmen, lead singer of the 1970s power-pop band the Raspberries, passed away last week. Like a lot of the era’s power-pop groups, the Raspberries didn’t have a lot of hits, but their biggest one, “Go All the Way” (1972), with its crunching guitars and wispy vocals, is arguably the genre’s high point.
If you want a pithy definition of power-pop, try “the Beatles, but performed by the Who.” You can hear the influence of Lennon-McCartney (especially the latter) all over Carmen’s songwriting. During an era when rock and roll got serious, Carmen, the Raspberries, and other power-pop bands kept the simple, joyful, and (not so) innocent promise of pre-psychedelic rock and roll at the center of their songwriting. And when Carmen did go epic, as on the criminally-overlooked “Overnight Sensation (Hit Record)” (1974), it was with the sort of down-to-earth drama that lit the imaginations of small-town rock bands throughout America.
It should come as no surprise, as he admits in the liner notes to a Raspberries compilation, that Bruce Springsteen drove around New Jersey in the late 1970s with a Raspberries cassette stuck in his pick-up truck. (Springsteen likely cribbed two River-era song titles—“I’m a Rocker” and “I Wanna Be With You”—from the Raspberries.)
The Raspberries only lasted about five years, but Carmen would have a few other solo hits, including the power-ballad-of-power-ballads “All By Myself” (1975). That song reveals Carmen’s training as a classical pianist, as its verses are those of Rachmaninoff's 2nd piano concerto. (Its guitar solo, though, is pure George Harrison.)
Carmen faded from view by the 1980s, yet re-surfaced as the artist behind the song “Hungry Eyes” (1987) from the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, which is not so surprising given the film’s 1963 setting. Carmen followed that up with one more hit, “Make Me Lose Control” (1988), an MTV-era memorial to the eternal youth of a Baby Boomer generation that had just started turning forty. I must confess, that song annoyed the hell out of me when I was a kid, but today, even if it is rather on the nose, it has to be heard as a love letter to the early-60s music Carmen and his fans cherished. RIP.