tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/johnny-cash-13189/articlesJohnny Cash – The Conversation2023-06-18T11:17:18Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2050642023-06-18T11:17:18Z2023-06-18T11:17:18ZGordon Lightfoot’s musical legacy extended beyond Canada to reflect universal themes<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531815/original/file-20230613-21-thiwq6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C4752%2C3165&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Gordon Lightfoot's musical impact expanded beyond Canada and into the United States.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span></figcaption></figure><iframe style="width: 100%; height: 100px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" allowtransparency="" allow="clipboard-read; clipboard-write" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/gordon-lightfoot-s-musical-legacy-extended-beyond-canada-to-reflect-universal-themes" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>What does Gordon Lightfoot’s musical legacy mean for Canadians and for the history of Canadian music? In the wake of the singer-songwriter’s death on May 1, it has been hard to answer this question.</p>
<p>The media has been awash in tributes that celebrate Lightfoot’s music as somehow quintessentially Canadian. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, responding to Lightfoot’s death, said he’d “<a href="https://variety.com/2023/music/news/prime-minister-justin-trudeau-honors-gordon-lightfoot-canadian-spirit-1235600917/">captured our country’s spirit in music</a>.” </p>
<p>But these tributes blur the reality that Lightfoot was a musician who had a much wider influence on the popular music scene of the 1970s, well beyond Canada’s borders.</p>
<h2>A powerful nostalgia</h2>
<p>Lightfoot’s voice is undeniably recognizable to many Canadians, and the cluster of songs that have enjoyed <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-1391-a-tribute-to-gordon-lightfoot">a long life on Canadian radio</a> — and therefore in the Canadian consciousness — obviously engender a powerful nostalgia for an earlier time. </p>
<p>With his death, he seems to have been canonized in the same vein as Gord Downie, lead singer of the band The Tragically Hip. Downie died in 2017 and was immediately eulogized as “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/08/20/canadas-unofficial-poet-laureate-is-dying-hes-giving-one-last-concert-before-he-goes/">Canada’s unofficial poet laureate</a>.”</p>
<p>Like Downie and The Hip, some of Lightfoot’s music is rooted in Canadiana. Perhaps no song embodies this more than “<a href="https://youtu.be/PXzauTuRG78">Railroad Trilogy</a>,” in which Lightfoot romanticizes the building of the trans-national railroad and the history of colonial Canada.</p>
<p>But, <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/gord-downies-dedication-to-indigenous-issues-lives-on/article36673092/">also like Downie and The Hip</a>, Lightfoot goes beyond this romantic narrative of Canada’s history with an <a href="https://maisonneuve.org/article/2017/08/1/putting-centennial-sesquicentennial/">invocation of the country’s deeper past</a>: “Long before the white man and long before the wheel, when the green dark forest was too silent to be real.”</p>
<h2>Nationalistic hot takes</h2>
<p>Such nuanced meditations on the Canadian landscape and Canadian history have been largely lost in the effusive eulogies offered up by the media, politicians and Lightfoot’s musical peers. <a href="https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/jim-cuddy">Blue Rodeo frontman Jim Cuddy</a> said that Lightfoot matters so much because he allowed Canadians to “<a href="https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2023/05/08/honouring-gordon-lightfoot.html">embrace our Canadian-ness</a>.”</p>
<p>Trudeau claimed that Lightfoot “helped shape Canada’s soundscape,” and that he was “<a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/article-gordon-lightfoot-death-remembered/">one of our greatest singer-songwriters</a>.” Still other critics and commenters characterize Lightfoot as a storyteller, relating Canadian stories to a homegrown audience: “A Canadian who sang about Canadian things.”</p>
<p>These decidedly nationalistic takes on Lightfoot and his music are curious, given that he is a performer who peaked in the mid-1970s and whose music has long been out of style. How, then, did Lightfoot suddenly become Canada’s greatest musical treasure?</p>
<p>It’s not really so sudden, if we recognize that Lightfoot was a very popular singer-songwriter in his heyday in both Canada and the United States. He enjoyed middling success with his earliest albums in the 1960s, but then broke out with <a href="https://www.allmusic.com/artist/gordon-lightfoot-mn0000667794/discography">several key albums on Reprise Records in the following decade</a>.</p>
<h2>Chart singles</h2>
<p>A series of well-known singles were chart-topping hits in Canada and the U.S.: “If You Could Read my Mind” (1970), “<a href="https://youtu.be/iYuF99VTEdg">Carefree Highway</a>,” “<a href="https://youtu.be/kv8zyBi4ZXk">Sundown</a>” (1974), “<a href="https://youtu.be/phcDgM2Mazk">Rainy Day People</a>” (1975) and “<a href="https://youtu.be/FuzTkGyxkYI">The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald</a>” (1976). These helped to established Lightfoot as an international name in the world of folk and country music.</p>
<p>Other popular American artists of the time, including Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand and even Elvis Presley, recorded Lightfoot’s songs, <a href="https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/music/2023/05/02/gordon-lightfoots-music-has-been-covered-by-a-number-of-artists-here-are-10-popular-renditions.html">firmly establishing Lightfoot’s reputation as an important singer-songwriter</a>.</p>
<p>As Dylan once famously observed, <a href="https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-songwriter-bob-dylan-thinks-perfect-catalogue/">he could not think of a single song by Lightfoot that he didn’t like</a>. Later in his career, Lightfoot was honoured by the American Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, was a recipient of the Order of Canada and was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame <a href="https://www.songhall.org/profile/gordon_lightfoot">by Dylan himself</a>.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Bob Dylan inducts Gordon Lightfoot into the Canadian Hall of Fame in 1986.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>Types of nostalgia</h2>
<p>But what about this issue of Lightfoot as a musician who somehow captured Canada’s spirit in his songs? This is a contentious and ambiguous claim. I would argue that contrasting types of nostalgia are at the root of this evaluation of Lightfoot and his oeuvre. </p>
<p>The Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Svetlana Boym famously identified two distinct — but not necessarily mutually exclusive — types of nostalgia: <a href="http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/n/nostalgia/nostalgia-svetlana-boym.html">restorative and reflective</a>.</p>
<p>Restorative nostalgia underwrites the kind of nationalistic longing that has characterized the celebration of Lightfoot’s musical legacy — that he is “<a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/gordon-lightfoot-legacy-1.6829139">typically Canadian</a>,” as fellow Canadian singer-songwriter Murray McLauchlan insists.</p>
<p>Reflective nostalgia, by contrast, does not revel in the past nor attempt to recover it. Rather, as Boym observes, it expresses uncertainty about the past as it “dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging.”</p>
<p>Indeed, in surveying the mainstream eulogies of Lightfoot, the tensions and contradictions between these two types of nostalgia are immediately evident: McLauchlan lauds Lightfoot as typically Canadian in the same article that insists the deeply personal and emotive nature of Lightfoot’s music and message make it “universal.”</p>
<h2>A reflective nostalgia</h2>
<p>The very fact of Lightfoot’s popularity in the 1970s, and the attractiveness of his songs to legendary American musicians like Cash, Dylan and Presley, also belies the notion of Lightfoot’s songs as quintessentially Canadian.</p>
<p>At their best, Lightfoot’s songs — ranging from folksy, rambling tunes about riding the rails to tender ballads recounting love and loss to epic narratives about ships and sailors lost in storms — invoke a reflective nostalgia. </p>
<p>His fluid, gentle vocal delivery and simple, direct sentiments lean strongly towards “human longing and belonging,” much more so than they paint a compelling or accurate portrait of Canada.</p>
<p>Simply casting Lightfoot as an exemplar of Canadian-ness overshadows Lightfoot’s legacy. He was a songsmith and a musician who toiled for his entire career — spanning nearly six decades — to bring words and music together in meaningful and enduring ways.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205064/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexander Carpenter does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>After Gordon Lightfoot’s death, the musician was celebrated for his Canadian-ness. But his legacy is more complex than that, and his influence extends beyond Canada.Alexander Carpenter, Professor, Musicology, University of AlbertaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/988162018-07-03T10:32:27Z2018-07-03T10:32:27ZWhy Americans have long been fascinated by gunfighting preachers<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/225799/original/file-20180702-116143-1m8k34g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In June, 2009, people were invited to bring their firearms without bullets during a service at the New Bethel Church Louisville, Ky.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Ed Reinke, Pool</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-gazette-shooting-20180628-story.html">mass shooting</a> on June 28 in Annapolis, Maryland, has renewed familiar concerns about America’s gun culture and gun policies. </p>
<p>Yet this was not the only June shooting to make national headlines.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/06/20/gun-owning-pastor-who-shot-killed-would-be-carjacker-outside-walmart-speaks-out.html">Fox News</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/06/21/the-pastor-whose-steady-aim-ended-a-walmart-shooting-spree-was-practicing-what-he-preached/?utm_term=.fa3c2025bfc7">The Washington Post</a> reported an earlier story involving the quick-thinking actions of a church leader who also happened to be a trained emergency responder. Spotting an armed carjacker exiting a Walmart Supercenter, in Oakville, Washington, the gun-owning pastor took pursuit – then shot and killed the man in the parking lot. </p>
<p>Compared to the Annapolis shooting, the Walmart incident offers a far more convenient narrative for gun-rights activists. At the same time, it highlights the intersection between America’s gun culture and its religious cultures. </p>
<p>In this, the event is hardly unique. As I’ve found in <a href="https://www.stevepinkerton.com/outlaw-preachers-profane-prophets">my research for a study</a> of “Outlaw Preachers and Profane Prophets,” the image of the gun-toting preacher has recurred with remarkable persistence in U.S. history and culture.</p>
<h2>‘With a Bible and a gun’</h2>
<p>The Walmart shooting joins a long tradition of stories about well-armed American preachers – both real and fictional – who seem to embody national attitudes toward guns and religion, violence and justice.</p>
<p>Just picture Jesse Custer, the protagonist of the popular AMC TV series <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5016504/">“Preacher.”</a> One typical episode finds Jesse, in his preacher’s collar, firing round after round from a semiautomatic rifle to protect his little Texas church from the malevolent forces that threaten it. </p>
<p>On rock band U2’s 1993 song “The Wanderer,” originally titled “The Preacher,” singer Johnny Cash summons another version of this resonant archetype – that of the preacher who journeys forth with God on his side, armed with the Book of Life in one hand and an instrument of death in the other:</p>
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<p>I went out walking
with a Bible and a gun … </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">‘The Wanderer’</span></figcaption>
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<p>It’s telling that the song’s composer, Bono, should have written “The Wanderer” specifically for Johnny Cash. Growing up in Dublin, Ireland, Bono <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/opinion/20bono.html">had experienced</a> enough of “Bibles and guns” during the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/troubles">decadeslong clashes</a> between (mostly Catholic) Irish nationalists and (mostly Protestant) British loyalists. And Bono ordinarily sings his own lyrics. </p>
<p>In this case, though, it’s as if the Bible-and-a-gun theme required an American icon to sing it. But why should that be so? </p>
<h2>A Christian country</h2>
<p>One answer is suggested by two notable features of U.S. culture. First, this remains a remarkably Christian country. It has <a href="https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/which-countries-have-the-most-christians-around-the-world.html">the largest Christian population in the world</a>, with some <a href="https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/which-countries-have-the-most-christians-around-the-world.html">70</a> to <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=90356&page=1">83 percent</a> of Americans identifying as Christian. </p>
<p>Second, the U.S. has a uniquely robust gun culture, as well as <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/americas/us-gun-statistics/index.html">the world’s highest rates of gun ownership</a> and <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/11/06/562323131/gun-violence-comparing-the-u-s-with-other-countries">extraordinary levels of gun violence</a>. </p>
<p>Put these national characteristics together – the religion and the guns – and it’s not hard to see the appeal of figures, both real and fictional, that combine the two.</p>
<p>Consider the <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/great-reads/la-na-pistol-pastor-20130405-dto-htmlstory.html">real-life example of the “pistol-packing pastor” – a Pentecostal preacher, named James McAbee,</a> from Beaumont, Texas. McAbee has earned a reputation for offering firearm training in his own church. </p>
<p>Other such examples are not hard to find in American history. Back in the early 1900s, there was the Reverend J. Frank Norris, one of the country’s most popular preachers, who was widely known as “the pistol-toting divine.” He also once fatally shot an unarmed man during an argument, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=IJQfBgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Barry+Hankins&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiXzoH5murbAhXly4MKHZ93AoMQuwUITTAG#v=onepage&q&f=false">according to</a> historian <a href="https://www.baylor.edu/history/index.php?id=7724">Barry Hankins</a>. </p>
<p>Norris pleaded self-defense and was acquitted. Few would call his actions heroic, yet they seem only to have increased his appeal for his many fans. </p>
<p>These examples illustrate the extent to which, historically, many Americans have not only tolerated but celebrated the conjunction of preachers and firearms. But this is hardly the full story.</p>
<p>My <a href="https://www.stevepinkerton.com/outlaw-preachers-profane-prophets">research</a> into the cultural representations of gun-slinging ministers suggests that such figures appeal to Americans’ interest in vigilante justice – in the capacity of a lone hero to save the rest of us when our institutions fail to. </p>
<h2>Righteousness and retribution</h2>
<p>The attractions of such vigilante justice help to explain the popularity of Westerns, especially those – like the classic 1953 film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046303/">“Shane”</a> – in which a lone horseman rides into town, has a shootout or two, and then rides off heroically into the sunset.</p>
<p>Country singer Willie Nelson combined that popular narrative with the figure of the preacher in his hugely successful 1975 music album <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/willie-nelson-red-headed-stranger-20120524">“Red Headed Stranger.”</a> That album tells the story of a man, called only “the preacher,” who ultimately shoots and kills his unfaithful wife and her lover.</p>
<p>We may not like that turn of events, but the album itself presents the preacher’s actions as justified, even heroic: a fantasy of righteous retribution.</p>
<p>In the 1985 Western <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089767/">“Pale Rider,”</a> Clint Eastwood plays another character known only as “the Preacher.” Like Nelson’s album, this film marries a classic Western scenario to the weaponized preacher theme. In the mold of other Western heroes, Eastwood’s character rides into a small town from parts unknown and rescues a rural community from the malevolent forces that threaten it.</p>
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<span class="caption">Clint Eastwood in ‘Dirty Harry,’ a 1971 American crime thriller.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/21591159560">Paul Townsend</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
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<p>Watching Eastwood’s preacher at work, audiences can enjoy some of the same pleasures provided by Eastwood’s other famous vigilante character, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066999/">Dirty Harry</a>: a ruthlessly effective police officer whose methods often run afoul of what’s strictly legal. But with “Pale Rider,” viewers enjoy the additional thrill of watching a “man of God” take down the bad guys – with the aid of his trusty six-shooter.</p>
<p>Where other vigilantes might appeal to their own, individual codes of justice, the preacher figure carries the authority to discharge God’s justice. His vengeance carries always the suggestion that it’s divinely inspired.</p>
<h2>The avenging preacher</h2>
<p>The idea of the gun-toting preacher thus showcases the power of individual self-assertion, while also often emphasizing the importance of protecting and preserving a wider community. </p>
<p>It also resonates with specific features of American religious life today. These include <a href="https://www.texasobserver.org/pistol-packin-christians/">public debates</a> among pastors over the appropriateness of concealed carry in the pulpit and of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/us/26guns.html">“open-carry celebrations”</a> at church – not to mention <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/12/21/167785169/live-blog-nra-news-conference">the NRA’s contention</a> that only “a good guy with a gun” can stop a bad guy with one. </p>
<p>With a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other, the avenging preacher confirms the view that true justice cannot be enforced by institutions alone – and that God is on the side of those who would take the law into their own hands when necessary.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/98816/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Steve Pinkerton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>There is a long line of well-armed American preachers – both real and fictional – in US history and culture, confirming perhaps the view that true justice cannot be enforced by institutions alone.Steve Pinkerton, Lecturer in English, Case Western Reserve UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/710312017-01-10T10:52:19Z2017-01-10T10:52:19ZDavid Bowie’s late revival belongs to a grand tradition dating back to Beethoven<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152237/original/image-20170110-29041-17godvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'Look up here I'm in heaven'. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/drust/2736892055/in/photolist-5aRhE4-aq29ku-3NYPfc-CWju5G-59DMQh-CjkW-e9hNjw-fjiPEw-9jrUa9-HcLiXB-qEEisz-eosGCw-pXiqni-cXgCC1-C6YXhr-5Zn12H-pXjTmK-fgYVQV-fhV3JJ-fhV3uS-fhELx4-fheapo-fhV3xd-fhV3N9-4c6avV-4domSo-H9QssJ-aNqfsn-qLdjTq-6bjWsp-qxXMFe-CVX2ED-CYSGZU-7oa2Zh-akUvsS-9ezBjR-896foR-Cw9MhP-31oxo-agqhCR-H9TRd-xpQ171-4PupDP-4PupkD-avEdjq-EeyJ-4Q3Ct5-EeyK-4SrXMh-apGmfo">Derek Rust</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s now already a year since the death of David Bowie. Combined with the <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/lists/in-memoriam-2016-artists-entertainers-athletes-who-died-w457321/arnold-palmer-w457369">recent deaths</a> of other musical greats like Prince, Leonard Cohen and George Michael, we have now reached the stage where we are witnessing the decline of the mass culture of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. </p>
<p>The consolation is that we could be in for a very rich creative period as a result. Francis Whately’s <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b088ktm6/david-bowie-the-last-five-years">new documentary</a> David Bowie: The Last Five Years, which premiered on UK television just ahead of the anniversary, pays tribute to Bowie’s late creative renaissance. </p>
<p>He produced two acclaimed albums, The Next Day and, particularly, Blackstar, as well as a Broadway musical, Lazarus – an EP of the tracks written specially for the musical has just <a href="http://www.nme.com/news/music/new-david-bowie-no-plan-ep-video-released-mark-birthday-1937158">been released</a>. The quality of this output was remarkable, but also in line with what happens to many great artists in their final years. </p>
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<h2>You want it darker</h2>
<p>Bowie was looking back on his career in this material. Blackstar was a self-composed epitaph, written as he faced his mortality head-on. Leonard Cohen’s <a href="http://www.leonardcohen.com/music/you-want-it-darker">You Want it Darker</a> is very much in the same vein. Also released shortly before his death last November, it sees Cohen facing death in his signature style, combining maudlin piano melodies with his distinctive vocals and wit. Like Bowie, he approached his art with more urgency towards the end, releasing three albums in four years after a long period of wide gaps between new material. </p>
<p>In 2010, Gil Scott-Heron issued I’m New Here, his first new album in 16 years. It received <a href="http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13893-im-new-here/">great reviews</a> for its themes of regret and redemption. It generated much excitement about the prospect of a new prolific period for the American singer/poet following years of addiction, but this was cut short when he died the following year. </p>
<p>Johnny Cash may not have been releasing new material at the time of his death in 2003, but he had recently returned to prominence with similarly reflective subject matter. His 2002 single <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9IfHDi-2EA">The Man Comes Around</a>, which he had written a few years earlier and re-recorded for the <a href="http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1331-american-iv-the-man-comes-around/">America IV</a> album, is all about judgement and the Book of Revelation. Then came the double A-side <a href="https://www.discogs.com/Johnny-Cash-Hurt-Personal-Jesus/release/652597">Hurt/Personal Jesus</a>, which highlighted his failing health, devout Christianity and reconciled him to death. </p>
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<p>Bowie and these other examples echo what happened to Ludvig van Beethoven, whose late period was famously examined by the German thinker <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/831019?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">Theodor W Adorno</a>. His ideas were developed more recently by the American literary professor and critic <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n15/edward-said/thoughts-on-late-style">Edward Said</a>. </p>
<p>Adorno thought there was something distinct about the late style of artistic geniuses like Beethoven (and the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe). He identified two common moods: either resolution and reconciliation or anger and dissonance. Adorno sees Beethoven’s 1823 mass <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGNthTj3Hzk">Missa Solemnis</a> as an “alienated masterpiece”, in which the internal struggle of the artist’s impending death and need for creative resolution results in a work riddled with contradictions and intrigue. </p>
<h2>I’m a Blackstar</h2>
<p>In a similar way, Bowie alludes to his past works in Blackstar while continuing to develop, alongside composition that incorporates both convention and dissonance. Bowie was of course a master of reinvention – as suggested by the title of the 2013 Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition <a href="http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/david-bowie-is/">David Bowie Is</a>. He made a career of changing personas, with the likes of Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke and the “Serious Moonlight” Bowie of the Let’s Dance era. </p>
<p>There was even reinvention within his 2010s renaissance, with Blackstar <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/what-to-listen-to/david-bowie-blackstar-first-listen-extraordinary/">a departure</a> from the rockier The Next Day. Yet by looking back over his career in this material, Bowie’s many reinventions were also one more thing he reappraised. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152182/original/image-20170109-23473-oz0ask.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152182/original/image-20170109-23473-oz0ask.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152182/original/image-20170109-23473-oz0ask.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152182/original/image-20170109-23473-oz0ask.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152182/original/image-20170109-23473-oz0ask.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152182/original/image-20170109-23473-oz0ask.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152182/original/image-20170109-23473-oz0ask.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152182/original/image-20170109-23473-oz0ask.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">2013 album cover.</span>
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<p>Whately’s film showed Bowie and his design partner experimenting with subverting various iconic pictures of the singer for the cover of The Next Day – including a black star obscuring the Aladdin Sane cover – before settling on the Heroes lead image from 1977. </p>
<p>The strongly jazz-influenced Blackstar followed in 2016 and was <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/16/david-bowies-last-release-lazarus-was-parting-gift-for-fans-in-c/">viewed by many</a> as a final poetic gesture and parting gift when he died two days later. The Whately film suggested Bowie did not know his illness was terminal when he made the record, though the pattern of reckoning with mortality and life lived was clear enough. The voice emerges from the spectral, quasi-devotional title track, but its range is restricted – producer Tony Visconti talks in the Whately film about a shared desire to “mangle the voice”. </p>
<p>But it is the third track, Lazarus, that provides the greatest insight into Bowie’s vision. The song’s lyrical content seems to speak from beyond the grave: “Look up here, I’m in heaven”, he sings. The video shows a hospitalised Bowie bandaged and with button eyes. </p>
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<p>It toys with the very possibility of closure, as Bowie retreats into a wardrobe – dressed in the diagonally striped black body suit seen on the <a href="https://www.discogs.com/David-Bowie-Station-To-Station/release/1033850">1991 CD reissue</a> of Station to Station. But then it stops with the door ajar, speaking to the permanence of art. </p>
<h2>Changes</h2>
<p>The same motif continues in the final track of the album, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZscv36UUHo">I Can’t Give Everything Away</a>. It reads as a summary of Bowie’s artistic principles, indicating his need to retain something of himself behind his personas. The track reuses the harmonica from the sinister yet optimistic instrumental <a href="https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/a-new-career-in-a-new-town/">A New Career in a New Town</a>, which concludes side one of his seminal 1977 album Low. </p>
<p>This returns us to his creative peak, while suggesting the apprehension that accompanies new experiences. And despite being one of the smoothest tracks on the album, it avoids the conventional stability of the chord resolution of the title track in favour of Lazarus’s more unsettled tonality, concluding with a minor sixth. This suggests a trailing off; something to be continued.</p>
<p>With this immense final statement, David Bowie has set the tone for a period in which major rock artists are conspicuously and consciously producing late works. In death as in life he set a benchmark. As many other contemporary artists reach the end of their lives, it is to Bowie’s works that their own late output will be compared.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71031/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The great polymath’s late output reads like a manual for artists saying goodbye.Andrew Frayn, Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature and Culture, Edinburgh Napier UniversityRachael Durkin, Lecturer in Music, Edinburgh Napier UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/335342014-10-29T03:29:55Z2014-10-29T03:29:55ZThe Parramatta Folsom Prison Blues: what’s wrong with that?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62980/original/dhmw4fxj-1414469566.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Johnny Cash’s pertinent social commentary is likely to be lost in Tex Perkins’ translation Far From Folsom.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Dean Lewins</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Last week, Sydney Festival launched its 2015 program – under Belgium born director Lieven Bertels – and it was revealed that Australian rocker Tex Perkins will <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/tex-perkins-recreates-johnny-cashs-at-folsom-prison-concert-for-sydney-festival-20141022-117rp7.html">recreate Johnny Cash’s 1968 Folsom Prison concert</a> at Parramatta Gaol in January. </p>
<p>I see this as a sad whitewash of local carceral history – and here’s why.</p>
<p>Johnny Cash wrote the song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yivw0ZQgXk">Folsom Prison Blues</a> in 1955 after watching Carne Wilbur’s film about Folsom Prison. The track was popular with Folsom inmates, prompting them to write letters seeking Cash to perform for them. Cash performed at several US prisons culminating in the live recording <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxrRTz7046A">At Folsom Prison</a> in 1968.</p>
<p>Critics praised the album’s emotion and gritty realism. In 1971 he premiered his song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t51MHUENlAQ">Man in Black</a> days after visiting students at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University. Cash sang for “the poor and beaten down” and the “prisoner who has long paid for his crime”. One line – “each week we lose a hundred fine young men” – was a clear protest against the Vietnam War. </p>
<p>The audience responded with a standing ovation. Cash later confronted President Nixon about prison reform and also performed benefit shows on Native American reservations.</p>
<p>The targeted localism of Cash’s pertinent social commentary is likely to be lost in Tex Perkins’ translation <a href="http://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2015/far-from-folsom">Far From Folsom</a>, almost 50 years after the original event, on the site of the former Parramatta Correctional Facility, closed in 2011. </p>
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<span class="caption">Parramatta Correctional Centre.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>The former prison yard is now seemingly treated by Lieven Bertels as a mere hall for hire, a site for a disembodied spectacle in a bid to ensure bums on seats. What is likely to be glossed over, by what I see as an act of American imperialism, is a rich and significant local history.</p>
<p>Parramatta has been a continuous site of confinement since 1821 and includes the history of convict women, the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/stolen-generations">Stolen Generations</a>, <a href="http://forgottenaustralianshistory.gov.au/">Forgotten Australians</a>, and those living with mental illness. </p>
<p>Parramatta represents the struggle for those Australians trapped by the systemic abuse in Australia’s punitive welfare regime. </p>
<p>Former Parramatta Gaol inmate and journalist Bernie Matthews has <a href="http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=5639">described the institutionalised violence</a> inherent in Australian child welfare policy. In addition, <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/national/inmates-at-parramatta-girls-home-subjected-to-statesanctioned-rape-20140225-33fou.html">the testimonies</a> of survivors of Parramatta Girls’ Training School were heard this year by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. </p>
<p>The difficult lessons of such commentary will not be learned so long as arts programming deflects attention away from these narratives, rendering the associated historical sites as mere empty vessels for the imposition of more palatable events.</p>
<p>Sociologist Jacqueline Z. Wilson, in <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10314610508682914?queryID=%24%7BresultBean.queryID%7D#.VEx43b7EPdl">her analysis</a> of the redevelopment of the decommissioned Pentridge Prison in Melbourne, notes the damage to a shared history when it is misappropriated for profit. </p>
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<span class="caption">Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Columbia Records</span></span>
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<p>Bertels’ displacement of Cash’s 1968 Folsom Prison concert onto the site of the former Parramatta Gaol demonstrates that insensitive historical takeovers are neither limited to architectural renovation nor to private enterprise.</p>
<p>It is possible to programme artistic events that resonate directly and creatively with Australia’s carceral history. This year, the Brisbane Festival included <a href="http://www.brisbanefestival.com.au/whats-on/the-painted-ladies">The Painted Ladies</a>, a collaboration between Aboriginal music pioneer Vic Simms and other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who performed Simms’ country soul album The Loner, comprised of black protest songs and first recorded in Bathurst Gaol in 1973. </p>
<p>In Sydney, <a href="http://www.parragirls.org.au/">Parragirls</a>, a support network of the Forgotten Australians of the Parramatta Girls’ Training School was established in 2006 to promote the conservation and history of the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct in Western Sydney. </p>
<p>The result is their <a href="http://www.pffpmemoryproject.org">Memory Project</a>, a social history and contemporary art initiative which aims to increase awareness of the institutionalisation of women and children. There is a rich practice of focused artistic engagement with history, place and memory that could have informed Bertels’ invigoration of Parramatta Gaol.</p>
<p>Instead Bertel chose a politically safe performance to suit audiences in “streak o’ lightning cars and fancy clothes”, as the original man-in-black sang, and attract corporate sponsorship. </p>
<p>But arts festivals that accept public funding have a moral obligation to include events that do what Johnny Cash’s work exemplified, to appropriately acknowledge local culture and to make a positive social impact on “the ones who are held back”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/33534/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adele Chynoweth was previously funded as a project advisor to the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project.</span></em></p>Last week, Sydney Festival launched its 2015 program – under Belgium born director Lieven Bertels – and it was revealed that Australian rocker Tex Perkins will recreate Johnny Cash’s 1968 Folsom Prison…Adele Chynoweth OAM, Visitor, School of Archaeology and Anthropology , Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.