Phil Ochs (1940-1976)

Bystanders

If you’ve taken a Psych 101 class in the last 40 or 50 years, you’ve probably heard of the Kitty Genovese murder, and the “bystander effect.” The bystander effect theory says that the greater the number of witnesses to a crime, the less likely people are to intervene.

Kitty Genovese was murdered outside her apartment building in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens in New York City in 1964. The newspaper accounts of her death have provided Social Psychology professors with a supposedly paradigmatic case of this phenomenon, as initial reports of the crime said 38 witnesses heard her cry for help, and no one called the police.

The truth is more complex, as it always is, but at least some witnesses who could have helped didn’t, because they assumed that somebody else would do it. Some people didn’t get involved out of fear; others because they thought it was a relationship dispute. It’s also possible that other obstacles discouraged people from calling the police for help. This was the pre-911 era, and the NYC Police department had a reputation for an antagonistic and inefficient emergency response phone system. A few people did, in fact, intervene–although obviously none sufficiently or in time.

The case generated a great deal of analysis and collective social self-flagellation. You can find many print accounts of her murder and analyses of the bystander response. The initial ones, which draw attention to the apparent passivity of the witnesses, are surely overdrawn and apocryphal. One of the more extensive, thorough, and nuanced accounts on-line is here. At the time, the press and public viewed Genovese’s death as a tragedy of urban apathy and the breakdown of community bonds.

I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody…

Kitty Genovese (1935-1964)

We’re going to focus, as we always try to, primarily on the music arising from this incident–specifically on Phil Ochs‘s “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends.” Ochs’s song is an artistic engagement with the lessons and themes of the Genovese murder. Oddly, especially in light of its era, the story did not generate a lot of music. We’ll get to that a little later. But, as we’ll also see, Ochs uses the song to tell an important story, but a story that is different in how it functions and engages its audience than many if not most of the more typical murder ballads we discuss here.

A self-described “topical singer,” Phil Ochs drew the phrase “outside of a small circle of friends” from a chance coffeehouse conversation about the Genovese case with a new acquaintance. Ochs took his interlocutor’s line and ran with it, developing a song that extrapolated out the broader social pathology that he saw in the Genovese case. Only one verse invokes the Genovese case, and not by name.

Probably 15 years ago or so, I read a biography of Ochs. At that time, I hadn’t heard the song. In my imagination was a somber and remorseful ballad on how the witnesses failed in their moral responsibility to help someone in need. I assumed that it was as earnest and serious as “Bracero,” “Santo Domingo,” or “When I’m Gone.” I don’t know exactly how I formed this impression, but it’s quite at odds with the actual song, which I don’t think I actually heard until researching it for this post. I was surprised by what I found–both in its tone and in how little it discusses the Genovese incident.

Lyrics in the YouTube video or here.

The Wikipedia entry on “Outside..” helpfully lays out the contrast between the tone of the music and the content of the lyrics. Both are deliberately ironic–rather than mourn and admonish in a straightforward way, he mocks the carelessness he finds among the bystanders–which is, after all, the real moral of the story.

“Outside…” popped into my head again because of last week’s song, “Independence Day.” Underneath the theme of the abused spouse’s fiery self-defense is that song’s earlier statement that “Some folks whispered and some folks talked, but everybody looked the other way. When time ran out there was no one about on Independence Day.” That lyric also presents us with a kind of bystander effect, or at least a reluctance to get involved, that is the primary focus “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends.”

When we discussed “Stone Cold Dead in the Market” last year, we learned that people are less likely to intervene in relationship violence than they are in violence between strangers. Steven Pinker discusses this phenomenon inBetter Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. As it turns out, many of the witnesses to the Genovese rationalized their inaction by interpreting what they were witnessing as a couple squabbling.

The music and lyrics of “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends” focus specifically on this issue of not letting the crises faced by others interfere with our “normal lives.” As we’ve mentioned, this happens in the Genovese case for a number of reasons–the diluted sense of accountability of the bystander effect, reluctance to get involved in a dispute between spouses, fear of personal danger, and simply just the wish to stay within some presumed realm of normalcy or our own business. It’s this latter impulse that probably most accounts for the examples Ochs explores in the other verses of the song.

Topical Music

“The most passionate voice of his generation Could be the most relevant voice of today”

I referred to Ochs as a “topical singer” at the outset of the post, as that’s how he preferred to describe himself–rather than as a folk or protest singer. Ochs was almost literally the poster boy for that element of the 60s folk revival. He was singularly focused on politics. Dylan developed a reputation as a protest singer as well, but then moved on from. Ochs mostly stayed there, for better or worse–a dedicated musical polemicist and true to his principles.

I’ve been trying to figure out the underlying issue of this song and of the Genovese incident, musically speaking–that is, why it doesn’t seem to function exactly like a murder ballad and why Ochs took the approach that he did. I realized when I woke up yesterday morning that the key to resolving that mystery is in the songs that aren’t there. Despite happening in New York at the time the folk revival was transitioning into the early stages of the singer-songwriter era, few artists appear to have attempted to tell the story with any degree of success, and Ochs barely does.

The most plausible reasons for this for me are that the crime itself was both gruesome and not especially unusual. The distinctive lessons it teaches are about bystanders, and aren’t particularly welcome ones, or necessarily useful ones for that matter (if we use the bystander effect to provide ourselves with psychological cover for a moral lapse). They’re not about the murder, they’re about the witnessing of it. The media surely had much of the story and analysis covered, and there was little need for the song to relate the news. The crime was stranger violence in the big city committed by a disturbed and murderous sexual predator. The story contained no romantic betrayal or instructive twist within the crime itself.

Despite constructing the song around a small series of more or less imagined vignettes (less imagined in the case of the Genovese-linked first verse), Ochs tries to teach the audience a lesson more than tell a story. We’ve seen that one of the functions of many murder ballads is to teach such lessons, but they are often more effective the less they appear to be trying, or the more they let the story do the talking for itself. However comic in tone, Ochs’s song suffers from an excess of superego. Perhaps the key is never to let the moral of the story outstrip the story itself.

In one way of thinking, the song doesn’t give Genovese her due. Ochs doesn’t give the audience a tragic figure to pity or with whom we might empathize. This is not to say that the murder itself wasn’t a catastrophe, both personal and interpersonal, and that there aren’t important things to learn from the episode. From a literary perspective, however, Ochs instead calls the audience to a different kind of soul searching–being invited to compare themselves to passive witnesses in a nameless, faceless crowd.

Andrew Jackson Jihad

The songs that are there and the songs that aren’t

It’s difficult to make a case out of an absence of something, but the paucity of other musical takes on the Genovese story perhaps reveals something worth noting. Either it says something about the story itself or the media culture, or both, but you would think that a story that happened so close to the epicenter of the NYC folk scene in the mid 60s might have gained more traction. I’ve thus far found only three songs, all relatively obscure by my lights, that take up the Genovese incident, and only one that is reasonably contemporary with the case itself.

The first is Jet Stream’s “All’s Quiet on West 123rd St” (1967). Jet Stream also abstracts away from the Genovese story and elaborates the theme through fictional episodes.

Lyrics

For the other two examples, I’m indebted to “Jeff with One F” from the Miles-Tones blog of the Houston Press. They both make specific reference to Genovese, but only as the basis for the paradigmatic case of the bystander effect. The first is Flashbulb Memory’s punk piece “All Them Crazies” from 1999.

You can read the lyrics here. As you’ll see, it’s more didactic prose than poetry–a screaming lecture with a driving rhythm and guitars on overload.

The second is folk-punk Andrew Jackson Jihad‘s “Big Bird” from some time in the last decade, released on the 12″ vinyl Knife Man. The reference here is mostly a passing one, among a broader list of the anxieties of the song’s protagonist.

Lyrics

“Jef with One F” also asserts that many believe that Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” is about the Genovese murder in its theme of social disconnection. If the Genovese case was read back into the song by its listeners, I suppose that might be illuminating, but Simon finished penning “Silence” several weeks before Genovese was killed. This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened to Simon.

Comedy and Covers

It’s our normal practice to focus on songs that really get to us at a deep level and lift them up for your enjoyment as well. It’s rare that we pick a song that doesn’t speak to us in that way. With “Outside a Small Circle of Friends,” it’s probably most accurate to say that the song intrigued me. Why and how does it work? Why and how does it not work? In the end, the political and ethical importance of “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends” outstrips its aesthetic success. The song doesn’t pull the deep cords, but it does give us something important to consider and a challenge to how we engage our neighbors and the world.

One further topic that Ochs’s song introduces to our discussion, which we haven’t developed very thoroughly so far, is the role of comedy (musical or verbal) in murder ballads. We have seen Judy Henske, for example, taking serious murder ballads and lightening the mood in a seemingly frivolous way–perhaps, as we’ve speculated, in a spirit of rebellion against the seemingly impending nuclear Armageddon in the 50s.

In “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends,” Ochs instead puts the comic in service of the political or moral point. As we’ll eventually see and hear, this is not uncommon. Sometime in the coming weeks, I hope to take up how some murder ballads and performances of murder ballads assume an intentionally comic aspect, and explore why and how they do this.

Before we go, and for the sake of completeness, we’ll note that Ochs’s original has been covered a few times. Here’s a short playlist. All the versions stick with Ochs’s Gay 90’s barroom bouyancy. Drew Jacobs provides a new verse with an updated frame of reference. You may find some of these or other examples (professional or amateur) on YouTube as well.