This is the third post in a series on Bruce Springsteen’s “American Skin (41 Shots)” and related songs. Read the first post here, and the second one here.

“We don’t want to bring our politics to ya…”

Remember that quote from Sam Cooke on our post about Bob Dylan’s voice? Cooke says, after hearing Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” for the first time: “From now on it’s not going to be about how pretty the voice is. It’s going to be about believing that the voice is telling the truth.”

I’m not saying his voice isn’t pretty, but I am saying that Corey Glover is telling the truth in Living Colour‘s cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “American Skin (41 Shots).”

I find this performance overwhelmingly powerful. Glover did too, it appears. This clip is from Montreux in 2001. Glover’s investment in the song is obvious. He gets “inside” it in a meaningful way. I also encourage you to pay attention to the percussion throughout the song–from the African beats beneath several sections to Will Calhoun’s sonic bursts of gunfire from the drum set.

I mentioned in the first post on this song that Police Lieutenant Eric Adams of 100 Blacks of Law Enforcement Who Care praised Bruce Springsteen for interpreting the Diallo incident in song. The other piece of his comment was that he found African American artists a little slow on that score. Today, we’re going to see how some artists made up that perceived deficit. We’re listening to a few covers of Springsteen’s original song to get us started, and then we’ll listen to other artists take on the Diallo story in its particular tragedy and its broader implications.

The result, I hope, will add further inflection to our understanding of Springsteen’s approach in his own song–specifically around the dynamics of art and protest. As today’s musicians pursue their art, we’ll hear some that are willing to be far more pointed than Springsteen with regard to the Diallo shooting and the issues it involves.

Living Colour’s performance of Springsteen’s song is a tribute to his artistic achievement, and in my estimation only Springsteen’s 2013 performance in Limerick (inspired by the verdict in the killing of Trayvon Martin) rivals it in emotional power.

More recently, Jen Chapin and Rosetta Trio recorded the song on their 2008 album Light of Mine. Chapin comes by her musical, New York, and social justice credentials honestly. She’s the daughter of the late, great Harry Chapin, and niece of Tom Chapin. Rosetta Trio is headed by her husband, bassist Stephan Crump.

Chapin and company shorten the arrangement significantly, relying mostly on the narrative of the verses to carry the weight of the song, and eschewing the indicting refrains of “41 Shots” and “you get killed just for living…” more prevalent in the Springsteen versions. It’s a somber and serious take. I find it credible, but more a nightclub version than the original or Living Colour’s. Here’s an even more recent live performance.

Can you dig it?

Wyclef Jean (with Youssou N’Dour) took up the charge of giving words and music to Diallo’s plight not too long after Springsteen debuted his song. Although born in Haiti, Jean moved to northern New Jersey in his youth. He knew only Haitian French when he arrived in America, and learned English from rap music. Recognizing his musical talents, his family gave him a guitar. The first song he learned to play was Steve Martin’s “King Tut”–“buried with a donkey, he’s my favorite honky.” (My kingdom for a video of that!) Later, as a teen, northern New Jersey was a good place for Jean to learn some of Springsteen’s music, as he describes below.

“[Bruce] was the first one that stepped up and did a joint about it.”

Jean’s own musical take on the Diallo shooting is a complex one, opening with putting words to why Diallo ran when first confronted by the plain-clothes police officers.

“Diallo” Lyrics

The range of symbols, from the biblical (“so what is for Caesar, let it be for Caesar”) to the supernatural (vampires), to global human justice causes (the analogy to Steven Biko), are rather thickly layered through the song. I don’t intend the analogy to be flippant, but it’s a cross-fire of indictments. What really caught my attention was at the end, when Jean samples a monologue from my favorite B-movie of all-time. The Warriors (1979) is sub-par in a few respects, but it is a cult classic, and deservedly so, for its translation of an ancient Greek warrior narrative onto the streets of a fictionalized, and perhaps futuristic gangland New York.

The segment that Jean samples from the movie is from a speech given by the character Cyrus, leader of the Gramercy Riffs, as he attempts to organize the assembled gang leaders from across all five boroughs of New York City into one, unified force against the police, who will be hopelessly outnumbered. Here’s the scene:

I won’t tell you what happens next, but my suspicion is that you (and anybody else who recognized the reference) can probably “dig” what Jean’s evoking here. It would be simplistic and foolish to suggest it’s a direct call for violence, but it is a call for organization, perhaps, and it is a claim of power for those who feel powerless.

Jean layered in more and more political content in later performances of the song, perhaps no more so than through the bully pulpit provided by the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize concert honoring U.S. President and Peace Prize Laureate Barack Obama.

We probably could do a whole week of posts about Jean’s “Diallo.” A lot to unpack here, particularly in this performance. As he explains in this clip, his sets are always improvisational. This performance was probably one of a kind, but represents a fascinating musical trajectory connecting violence at the extremely local and extremely global levels. (Watch the conclusion of the clip here. Wow! The man knows how to work a crowd.)

You Don’t Care About Me

In the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, Ahmir-Kalib Questlove Thompson, the leader of the band The Roots, which serves as Jimmy Fallon’s house band published a moving personal reflection entitled “Trayvon Martin and I Ain’t Shit.” Springsteen has already drawn ties between the Diallo case and Martin’s, and lamented the tendency to view people of certain races through a “veil of criminality,” or at least as part of a separate community. This issue of separation and pernicious disregard is at the heart of Questlove’s piece. It’s also, I think, at the heart of the song, “I Know You Don’t Care About Me,” by Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers. Appearing on the band’s 2000 live album, and written by David Marley, the song is a group effort–with a variety of live voices and a sampled speech from the late Malcolm X. Like Springsteen’s piece and Jean’s, this song is about so much more, but it takes bearings from the Diallo case.

Lyrics

Just the facts, ma’am

Those two musical responses followed rather closely on the heels of the case itself, although after Springsteen’s song. Gina Loring  (“Poet, Vocalist, Songwriter, Mermaid”) adopted “41 Shots” as the title for her song about the Diallo case in 2008, almost a decade after the shooting. Her song compares the Diallo case to the judicial fortunes of Mumia Abu Jamal and Leonard Peltier–surprising connections, perhaps, in several ways. Both of those men were charged and convicted of killing agents of law enforcement. Guilty or not, they were not innocent bystanders like Diallo. It wasn’t an obvious connection to me at first.

Loring, unlike Springsteen, isn’t as hesitant to blame, or rather literally demonize the officers–“NYPDiablo.” In a spoken word intro to the song, Loring’s newsman/narrator tells the story of Diallo’s shooting, concluding with the line that all charges against the officers were dropped. This is simply inaccurate, as we reviewed in last week’s post. You can say that the jury got it wrong, if that’s indeed what you think, but the officers faced charges of second degree murder.

The most charitable read I can give to this alteration of the facts, linking it back to the Abu Jamal and Peltier cases, has to do with unfair trials. The trials skew against Abu Jamal and Peltier cases and skewing in favor of the officers in the Diallo incident, despite the multi-racial jury in that case. Nevertheless, the misrepresentation of that fact bugs me. Perhaps it’s poetic license, but the error doesn’t make it a better story or a better protest song. Who knows? Perhaps it’s mermaid license.

(Sorry, I haven’t had much luck yet in finding a link to the lyrics).

There are a few other songs that invoke the Diallo tragedy, either as their centerpiece or as one installment in an ongoing kind of serial tragedy. There’s not room for them all here, but you’re welcome to check out this Spotify playlist for our weeks with the Springsteen song.

Lament for the Late A.D.

The last song I will add in full is the one that inspired this post’s title, Terry Callier‘s “Lament for the Late A.D.” A jazz ballad, Callier’s song mourns not only Diallo’s lost life, but the loss of so much more. The lyrics are here, but as you’ll hear, they tell only a small part of the story.

After all the protest and controversy, I don’t mean to suggest by ending with Callier’s sad meditation that resignation is the end of the story.  It ends our time with this tragic episode and its still troubling legacy. It suggests that, despite the presence of many important causes for which to fight, tragedy is an inevitable characteristic of existence, but that’s not all it suggests. Callier’s accounting of a comprehensive civic or communal failure is a kind of spiritual bottoming out, a deep lament, from which one can start again. It explores the depths of despair, which deserves its moment before the fighting back begins. I’ll return, therefore, to the statement from Meena Alexander I included in the first “American Skin” post.

“The poem is an invention that exists in spite of history… In a time of violence, the task of poetry is in some way to reconcile us to our world and to allow us a measure of tenderness and grace with which to exist… Poetry’s task is to reconcile us to the world — not to accept it at face value or to assent to things that are wrong, but to reconcile one in a larger sense, to return us in love, the province of the imagination, to the scope of our mortal lives.”