Independence Day
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| Martina McBride |
Prologue – “Hell is for Children”
Pat Benatar gave my sister and me a pass, so to speak, on the normal rules of appropriate language for children–at least the rules in our house, or more specifically, our car. Singing along with the radio in the car was a common thing for us as kids. As Benatar’s “Hell is for Children” played on FM radio in the late 70s and early 80s, I remember minor debates with my parents as to whether the old “H-E-double hockeysticks” was in-bounds for our use in singing. Concerns about proper language for kids, artistic license, and most certainly the moral of the song were the contending elements of these debates. “Hell is for Children” is a consciousness-raising song about child abuse.
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| Pat Benatar |
“Hell is for Children” on Spotify and live performance on YouTube. (Lyrics)
To be clear, I didn’t particularly revel in using the word “hell.” I wasn’t much of a rebel then, or now, but I was committed to singing along with songs that I liked. I’m sure I also gained some vicarious sense of worthiness out of singing a song about such an important issue. In any event, it would have felt ridiculous for me to have to bowdlerize it when it wasn’t even bleeped out on the radio. I had standards, even then.
In reviewing performances of today’s song, I wondered whether Martina McBride had similar debates with her parents. I’ll get to that a little later. Stick with me, folks. I promise some spine-tingling by the end, and more Pat Benatar.
God and Country…and Country
Martina McBride released “Independence Day” as a single twenty years ago. It was the third single from her album The Way That I Am. The album was released in 1993, and the single from it released in late April/early May 1994. Gretchen Peters wrote the song, and it’s a power ballad that is murder ballad, patriotic hymn, and proclamation of a kind of resurrection all in one. The song raises awareness about domestic violence and, perhaps more subtly, about the indifference of bystanders. As we’ll see and hear today, “Independence Day” has provided catharsis for survivors of domestic abuse and served an old-fashioned purpose of murder ballads–warning children about abusive relationships.
The narrative of the song is easy to follow, but artfully done. Told from the perspective of a young girl, the song gives us the story of a battered wife bringing her abuse to an end through a violent confrontation with her husband. Although it’s not explicitly said, the abusive husband’s death is not in doubt. Whether the narrator’s mother survives is another question, and part of what made the song controversial in some quarters.
If the song’s performance or lyrics left any gaps in understanding, the video for the song makes things clearer.
Peters’s song weaves together personal, patriotic, and religious imagery; and the video expands upon this. The mixed imagery of the chorus, blending the patriotic “let freedom ring” with the reference to Jesus’ resurrection in “roll the stone away” is buttressed further by a number of aesthetic choices in the video–from the “Amazing Grace” prelude of the video to McBride’s choice of earrings. The song and the video surround consciousness-raising about domestic violence with the trappings of God and country. As we’ll see shortly, this feature grows even more intense later on in the song’s life.
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| Gretchen Peters |
Some found the song to be an “instant classic.” Indeed, the emotional impact of this song alone occupies almost the entirety of Thom Jurek’s review of the album on Allmusic.com. McBride’s single peaked at number 12 on the country music charts, in part, it seems, because some radio stations declined to give it airplay. They objected to the mother’s fiery resolution to her desperate situation. “Independence Day” won the Country Music Association’s Video of the Year Award in 1994 and Song of the Year Award in 1995.
The Country music establishment’s ambivalent embrace of this song may have had something to do with the lingering effects of a phenomenon we’ve discussed here earlier. Country music, at least mainstream Country music, has been reluctant over the years to embrace the violent or Southern Gothic portions of its folk heritage–and this reluctance is most obvious in the case of women performers. As I mentioned in my post a few weeks ago on Norah Jones’s “Miriam,” forebears like Loretta Lynn’s “Fist City,” or Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” are songs that may contain some violent themes, but don’t go so far as to be murder ballads. In Parton’s work, violence by female protagonists is usually self-inflicted.
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| Garth Brooks |
Literature scholar Theresa Goddu charted this phenomenon in her 1995 article “Bloody Daggers and Lonesome Graveyards: The Gothic and Country Music.” Goddu argues that Country music has been reluctant to embrace some of the darker themes and stories because of a wish to distance the music from a particular view of the American South. Content to let the Gothic strains remain within the Bluegrass or Folk branches of music, Country music has “participated in the regional redefinition of the South.” Despite being popular all over the United States, and elsewhere, the American South is Country music’s spiritual home. The result is largely just Rock’n’Roll with a Southern accent and a particular repertoire of acceptable themes.
At the conclusion of her article, Goddu illustrates her point by discussing the Country music establishment’s backlash against Garth Brooks’s video for “The Thunder Rolls” in 1991. Brooks’s song is a depiction of a man returning to his home from being with another woman after his love for his wife has grown cold. The video for the song adds a domestic violence aspect to the narrative, with a scenario much like that of “Independence Day.”
Goddu says that The Nashville Network (TNN), for example, found that “the violence in the video was excessive and lacked acceptable resolution.” Goddu argues that the reason “The Thunder Rolls” was rejected, when songs like Johnny Cash’s “Delia’s Gone” didn’t lead to similar condemnation, has to do with whether or not the songs challenged the patriarchy. That violence was directed against the man seems to her to be the defining issue.
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| Still image from the video for “The Thunder Rolls” |
This episode in Brooks’s history suggests one possible answer to a small question I had. That is, why is Brooks a particularly enthusiastic back-up singer for McBride’s performance on her 1996 “Full Speed Ahead” special on TNN? The clip below includes a brief interview between McBride and Peters about the background and impact of the song. In the performance, Brooks gives full-throated support to the pleas embedded in the chorus.
Let the whole world know that today is a day of reckoning.
Let the weak be strong, let the right be wrong.
Roll the stone away, let the guilty pay.
It’s Independence Day.”
Perhaps the phenomenon that Goddu describes waned in the few years between Brooks’s “The Thunder Rolls” and “Independence Day.” Perhaps she was a more acceptable messenger. Perhaps the burning house was less graphic than a shooting. McBride’s diminished radio play may have been a relatively paltry echo of the backlash that Brooks faced. Perhaps he blazed the trail a little bit.
That there was negative backlash to the song because of the way the story ends is both surprising and unsurprising. At one level, the negative reaction may be borne of how people conceive of the moral of the story. Is the moral of the story to resolve domestic violence through murder-suicide by arson? Not a very sophisticated reading. The 8-year old girl mentioned by McBride in the interview above does a better job–interpreting the song as a warning to get out of bad relationships before people get hurt.
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| Martina McBride |
A recent article in The Atlantic discusses the research of musicologist Elizabeth Margulis on why songs have choruses. The reason, she says, is that music plays on the mind’s appetite for repetition. As a result, listening to music is an active process: “[Repetition] captures sequencing circuitry that makes music feel like something you do rather than something you perceive.” Throughout our discussion in the blog of how murder ballads “function,” we’ve never seen a good reason to draw a dividing line between singing murder ballads and listening to them. Margulis gives us some justification for our instincts here. Perhaps she also gives us reason to understand why some people might have found the story of “Independence Day” so objectionable, as it inherently draws us into complicity, or at least empathy with its subject. Our ability to distance ourselves from the protagonist and view the song merely as just a story, and one that doesn’t involve us in affirming her choices, is diminished.
Peters has commented that the song has drawn survivors of domestic abuse to her who are grateful for what the song has done. I’m sure McBride has had the same experience. The importance of this particular function of the song shouldn’t be dismissed or diminished. (See below for more on that.)
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| Miranda Lambert |
Last year, we discussed “Stone Cold Dead in the Market,” a Calypso song in which a woman kills her abusive husband with a frying pan. We saw that that song’s lighthearted, humorous take on the episode served to entertain a post-World War II society where family gender relationships were being renegotiated. “Independence Day” is more serious in tone, but perhaps represents a moment where Country music starts to shake off some of its fear of the Gothic and the patriarchal dynamics of the music culture fade further away. It’s fair in this light to see The Dixie Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl” (Spotify and YouTube) and Miranda Lambert’s “Gunpowder & Lead” (Spotify and YouTube) as Country music successors to Peters and McBride’s “Independence Day.”
“Independence Day” gives us, much like Adrian Roye’s “Josephine,” a moment when a story’s character has to make a decision. In both the case of “Independence Day” and [spoiler alert] “Josephine,” it’s a decision for self-defense. In “Independence Day,” that self-defense is also self-sacrificial in that it ends in either the death or the imprisonment of the mother. The pleas embedded in the chorus of the song simultaneously provide deliverance, forgiveness, and absolution to her. They place her liberation within several overlapping frames of reference–including patriotic and religious ones–with which the song’s audience can readily identify
Violence Foreign and Domestic
The patriotic aspects of the song took another turn in its post-9/11 performance history. In the weeks and months following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, McBride was inclined to deliver a different context to the song, or more particularly the chorus, in live performance. She rather clearly, if implicitly, identifies the battered wife with the United States. Here is her performance of the song from Farm Aid on September 29, 2001.
She opens the song with the chorus, rather than the typical arrangement of building the musical tension through the first two verses. Each line of the chorus takes on a new meaning in conversation with the audience.
In the performance below, which she suggests is about a month after the attacks, McBride intensifies the sense of connection between the lines of the chorus and America’s situation post-9/11. Again, she starts with the chorus, and gives ample time for the audience members to plug their feelings into each line–most especially “let the guilty pay.”
This is an extraordinary performance, and McBride connects with her audience magnificently. As in the Farm Aid performance, she defiantly throws the microphone stand aside and then goes over to an audience member to take an American flag out of her hand. Despite what must have been significant temptations to pull those strings still further, McBride doesn’t wave the flag too much, but it becomes an accessory to a new inflection for the song.
I won’t venture into a political discussion of whether the analogy she draws here is appropriate, but it is certainly a fascinating artistic expansion of the song’s meaning. In some sense, the ability to make this move was built into the song by the title and central metaphor that Peters introduced. But, it is rather striking to see and hear the song taking a domestic violence murder ballad and turning it into a patriotic anthem for a nation licking its wounds. This move reminds me of Steve Earle changing his mind about whether his song “The Devil’s Right Hand” has political implications.
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| Martina McBride with the Boston Pops |
Ten years later, McBride continued the patriotic setting of the song, but without the same pointedness to the chorus, or implicit references to the September 11 attacks. This performance from July 4, 2011 with the Boston Pops returns the song to the conventional order of lyrics, and adds some symphonic swells to the song’s already soaring, emotional arrangement.
Who’d have thought when McBride released the song that 17 years later shirtless young men with “U,” “S,” and “A” painted on their chests would be dancing to it celebrating their country’s freedom?
Far from the mixed reception of its early days, the song now enjoys a less qualified embrace, and gaining acceptance, perhaps, into the repertoire of American patriotic song. Does this dilute the original awareness raising about domestic violence of the original? Does it become less of a murder ballad? Probably. But, it may just have extended its career as a song that can raise awareness about domestic violence.
Other voices
I’ve read that Reba McIntire passed on the opportunity to record the song, which is how it found its way to McBride initially. To wrap things up and bring them home, I’ll go backwards in time for three other noteworthy live performances of the song.
Peters’s own version appeared on her 1996 release The Secret of Life and then again on 2009’s Circus Girl: The Best of Gretchen Peters.
Peters performs the song as part of her live show repertoire, as in this show in Germany in 2011.
In 2004-5, “Independence Day” was a launching pad for Carrie Underwood‘s leap to stardom via television’s American Idol. She sang the song a cappella to qualify for the show’s semi-finals.
She also performed it on the show’s mainstage. The song is abridged for TV–just one verse and a chorus–but is notable for two things. First, Underwood’s performance decidedly plays to the show’s preference for vocal acrobatics. Secondly, the show’s producers decided to introduce the piece with an interview clip where Underwood tells a story of her dad cleaning his shotguns at her house as she waited for a young man to pick her up for her first date. She says “the guy never asked her out again.”
You know, folks, just when I think that feminist critiques, like Goddu’s above, overstate the media’s attachment to the idea of containing women’s sexuality through violence or the threat of violence, I see something like this.
If you’d like to view a full-length version of Underwood’s performance, you can view her performance on NBC’s Today show here. Ironically, she’s performing it on Flag Day (6/14/05); but who cares. It is, thankfully, a less showy performance than the Idol version.
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| Pat Benatar and Martina McBride |
Finally, we return full-circle to the beginning of today’s post, with a duet performance by Martina McBride and Pat Benatar. Country Music Television’s (CMT) Crossroads brought McBride and Benatar together in 2003 for a powerful rendition of the song. To my mind, this pays tribute not only to the strong voices (literally and figuratively) of these two artists, but to Benatar’s legacy of awareness-raising songs like “Hell is for Children.” McBride acknowledges in an interview portion of the show that she used Benatar’s records to learn how to sing. (I didn’t realize this until the very end of drafting this post, but suspected that something like this kind of influence must have been behind the Crossroads pairing.)
Benatar gives the song her “best shot” here, and it is more than enough to give you the chills.
Odds and Ends
It’s been a long post, but I wanted to add a few items of relevance to our discussion today.
First, Gretchen Peters has had some extended discussions with the folks at Songfacts about “Independence Day” and the rest of her work. Her comments shed light on the decision to bring the story to a fiery end, and how she couldn’t see any way out. She also speaks rather powerfully about how the song has served as a rallying point for survivors of abuse and drawn women from the crowd to speak to her of its personal importance to them. You can check those posts out here and here.
Secondly, as mentioned in those posts and elsewhere, Fox News commentator Sean Hannity has lifted the song’s refrain out of context for use on his own show–as similar kind of appropriation that was made with Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” Apparently, former VP candidate Sarah Palin also used the song for a period of time.
Finally, it’s through “Independence Day” that I realized a while back that we aren’t the only “Murder Ballad Monday” out there. A few weeks or months after starting the blog, I thought it might make sense to Google the phrase “murder ballad monday” to see how it came back. It’s then that I discovered that the phrase was used to designate a sub-series on the blog Reiter’s Block. Although different in scope, it appears we weren’t first to the idea. It turns out the blog’s author, Jendi Reiter, is a friend of a friend. I don’t think the series is an active concern at her blog any more, but you can check out some other takes on our source material there.