“Like there’s nothing going wrong”

I first heard Hurray for the Riff Raff’s “The Body Electric” through a National Public Radio article by Ann Powers last month: “The Political Folk Song of the Year.”  I appear to be rather late to the game on this song. If you’ve spent any time with us, though, you know that we don’t really seek out timeliness; nor do we seek out politics. Critics have hailed the song and praised its writer singer, Alynda Lee Segarra, as an authentic interpreter and creative artist in the folk tradition – rightly so, in my judgment.

Off of HftRR’s deeply rewarding album, Small Town Heroes, “The Body Electric” aims for the heart of the murder ballad tradition with both a lament and a challenge. It’s rare for us to take up a song this recent, but Segarra says things through this song and about this song that are well worth considering, even if we might not wholly agree. We’re going to explore “The Body Electric” this week, and discuss what the song says about the murder ballad, and about the individual and social “functions” of the genre.

Although it will be an unusual post for us in some respects, it will also be a good introduction to Murder Ballad Monday for our new readers as we join the Sing Out! family of blogs. Segarra makes a terrific artistic statement and has a valid point. It’s not the whole of the story, though, and engaging her challenge will help us find our path again through this dangerous, meandering, and sometimes beautiful tradition.

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Listen on Spotify or on Myspace.

(See below for an image with the complete lyrics. For a different video for the song, see the Coda.)

Segarra explains the song’s origins in this account:

“It had been an idea in my mind for months. I was out at a club one night and I heard somebody sing a murder ballad, it was a new song – very rock ‘n’ roll, a song about killing his girlfriend for cheating on him. There was just something that popped into me at that moment when I was listening to the song, where I suddenly realized, this person is so disconnected from what they’re saying. It was one of those moments when you’re like, the whole world has gone crazy! And now he can sing about killing his girlfriend and everybody just shrugs it off.” (She elaborates further here.)

What got my attention at first about “The Body Electric” was not the song itself or its evocative video, but the spin on it in the NPR article. Echoing the episode above, Powers writes, “[Segarra] noticed that her own people – music makers and music lovers – would regularly sing along with choruses about killing women, comfortably accepting gender-based violence as part of the ballad tradition. No more, she said. “The Body Electric” was her intervention.”

She echoes this in the lyrics:

“While the whole world sings,
Sing it like a song,
While the whole world sings
like there’s nothing going wrong.”

I want to focus today on whether and how “The Body Electric” can function as the kind of intervention Segarra and Powers describe. That is, does the song present a successful challenge to the murder ballad tradition as such, and not just to violence and misogyny more broadly? In some ways, almost any murder ballad can do the latter, depending on the context. Does “The Body Electric” do so in a way that is fundamentally new or different?

I was struck most by the claim that singers and listeners were “comfortably accepting” gender-based violence as part of the murder ballad tradition. Is Segarra telling us that murder ballads are part of the problem and not just part of the coping mechanism we’ve developed for those problems? If so, is she right?

They may be more Powers’s words than Segarra’s, but that statement about what’s going on for singers and listeners is stronger and more sweeping than I would make. I’ve encountered a wide range of reasons why people tap into this tradition–worthwhile reasons, more often than not. I’d be more inclined to say people are often “uncomfortably accepting,” as I think living in creative tension with the darker themes of this music is a good bit of what it is important about it. We’ve found that there are many more ways than one to skin a murder ballad.

Segarra’s lyrics and comments often fuse together matters that it will be helpful to distinguish–even if they can’t be fully separated. She talks about the song as a response to a culture of violence and as a response to how murder ballads participate in or reflect that culture. It’s worth distinguishing the two responses, as the moral worthiness of the first gets in the way of clarity about the second. I have no dispute with her feelings about the culture of violence in which we live, or her use of the song to raise awareness (described in the Coda below). We should listen carefully to Segarra, however, and explore the indictment of murder ballads and their relationship to that culture more thoroughly. The questions arise for me there.

 “You’re gonna shoot me down”

Segarra’s first-person opening matters a great deal. That she starts out the song “Said you’re gonna shoot me down…” gets right to the heart of how what we understand about what happens in these songs depends on who is singing what to whom. We immediately confront the differences between how (most) men and (most) women may hear a murder ballad. An ironic stance or disinterested distance to the gender dynamics of a song’s story is likely more available to men than women. It’s a vital point, elegantly and simply made by Segarra’s choice of pronoun. I hope I never forget it. I expect Segarra’s rock ‘n’ roll singer and other murder ballad singers would be well served by keeping it in mind. Roughly half the audience is likely to perceive a threat at some level not as directed at some third party, but at themselves.

The verse I quoted above about the whole world singing “like there’s nothing going wrong” is where I hit rockier footing. People create and tap into these songs for complex and various reasons. The genre itself is quite varied. Engaging in art formed around these themes of violence does important work–across genres of music, literature, theater, and visual art. This impulse shouldn’t quickly be mistaken for acceptance of what’s being depicted, and the engagement with themes of violence should not simply be conflated with accepting misogyny, for example.

The singer or the song?

“Poor Ellen Smith” gives us one example to show how the story of artist and audience may be more complex.. “Poor Ellen Smith” has an isolated, hyper-misogynistic variant, traceable primarily to the late folk singer Frank Proffitt. Hearing Proffitt harangue the victim in this version is grating to our sense of propriety because of its overtly misogynistic condemnation of Ellen Smith’s character. This is all the more galling in light of the story behind the song, in that Smith was thought to be somewhat simple-minded and her lover/killer a known womanizer.

The only cover of Proffitt’s version that I’ve heard, however, comes from Crooked Still, where the exact same words from Aoife O’Donovan’s mouth cast the song in a whole new light. O’Donovan takes the harangue, sings it straight, and in the process gives the listener a great deal more to think about than Proffit, or perhaps any male singer, ever could. I certainly don’t assume that O’Donovan or Crooked Still are accepting misogyny or violence when I hear it. Although I’m  less sure of this when I hear Proffitt’s version, that may also not be entirely fair.

Coincidentally, NPR’s Ann Powers discussed this artistic dynamic in conversation with recording artist Ruth Gerson several years ago. Gerson’s comments, regarding her exceptional album of murder ballads, Deceived, address the power of contrast–between a sweet, female voice and a story of a woman’s murder. (Gerson’s album is available now only through her web site.)The contrast, the dissonance between form and content, creates the potential to hear new things, and to think and feel in new ways. Something similar takes place in the infectious pop hooks of Foster the People’s lyrically troubling “Pumped Up Kicks” (YouTube).  Foster the People gets people dancing first, listening second, and thinking third. The order matters and it does artistic good work.

Segarra’s murder ballad singer didn’t provide that contrast, at least for her. This is not to say there wasn’t something else important going on for the singer or his listeners, but it’s certainly harder to see. Clearly, he failed to connect to at least some of his audience. Perhaps Segarra singing the same song would have been more meaningful – certainly more interesting. Perhaps if his song had involved contrition, like “Down in the Willow Garden” or “Banks of the Ohio,” Segarra would have seen him as connected to what he was singing.

American Songwriter named “The Body Electric” its top song of 2014, saying that it “is a bold reminder of the misogyny latent in [songs like “Delia’s Gone,” “Knoxville Girl,” and “Banks of the Ohio”], which typically get a pass because they represent the prejudices of an earlier time.” First of all, I’m inclined to wonder if their reviewer understands the term “latent” in the same way I do. More importantly, though, I think it’s worth considering whether these songs really do get such a “pass.” These are the reviewer’s words, and not Segarra’s, but they echo what she has said, and understanding this point informs whether we should believe that people are really singing like “there’s nothing going wrong.”

My fellow blogger, Pat, has found that songs like “Matty Groves” or “Cold Rain and Snow,” for example, appear to resonate with women singers and listeners, despite their outer appearances of misogyny. Similarly, Shaleane expanded my understanding of “Fair Ellender” in our first week of the blog by thinking of the song from the perspective of the back-story of  “The Brown Girl” character in that song. These songs often contain more than meets the ear as they carry forward through time. Rejecting them for embodying “prejudices of an earlier time” threatens to ignore the fact that these songs provided resources for many to resist those very prejudices, perhaps under a cover of “signifying” and coded meaning. Sometimes they contained resources for survival.

Some of the ones we might single out for mention, like “Omie Wise,” “Down in the Willow Garden,” or “Banks of the Ohio” likely did some important work in their day – serving as cautionary tales to protect young women in a very different day. We might not think much of the context of women’s freedom in that day, but the songs didn’t make that context and they helped people survive within it. Although it’s a murder ballad only in our deliberately generous sense of the term, part of me wonders whether people two hundred years from now will think of Bruce Springsteen’s “American Skin (41 Shots)” the way we now consider “Omie Wise.” Will his song be thought to embody the prejudices of an earlier age, despite the fact that it seeks to heal and shine a light on the problem of race?

Murder ballads can touch a deep and existential dimension of human experience. The songs can give voice to the feelings within us that we don’t like or don’t want. They may tap into a potential for violence within us, or they may just create a way to give vent to sadness, shock, or grief. They certainly provide a means for coping with tragedy that touch us in ways deeper than our moral principles will ever get to.

I wrote a few years ago about how I found the song “Down in the Willow Garden” immensely helpful when I happened to sing it in the aftermath of serving as a first responder to a sudden death. The song surprised me in giving vent to the grief and the survivor’s guilt that I felt. The difficult emotions from that incident poured out of me through that song. Is it a riverside sweetheart murder ballad? Yes. Is it misogynistic? Good question. Was the song less threatening and more available to me because I’m a man? Perhaps. Might another song have done the same thing? I sure hope so. Should we put the song away because it depicts gender-based violence? I expect the loss would outweigh the gain.

I will keep Segarra’s challenge in mind, and will continue to consider whether the songs themselves exacerbate a culture of violence, but I see an implicit supposition of the perfectibility of  human nature and/or human society in her comments. I can’t quite get there myself. Segarra’s song does some important work, both within it and outside it, in calling us to be better and do better, but I don’t think that it sets for us a fundamentally new course. I think the songs themselves are much more an effect of the violence in our culture than a cause of it, and know them to be effective at healing some of the deepest wounds, both individually and socially. I’d be happy if we didn’t have murder ballads, but only if we didn’t need them. I think we need them.

An intervention

We’ve seen a number of feminist approaches to the murder ballad tradition. Some, like that of Crooked Still, Ruth Gerson, and The Lonesome Sisters, involve singing the songs straight, relying on the power of the contrast between the singer(s) and the song to open up space for reflection. Others, like Rorey Carroll, Eileen, and Gillian Welch write new murder ballads with new kinds of female protagonists–the women become the killers, sometimes in justified self-defense, sometimes not. The latter ones make me think that the need to give voice to the killer musically is not solely a male need. Exploring this aspect is very important to developing full and equal agency for women within our stories. Some artists take the traditional songs and just change the genders or make the pronouns all first and second person (effectively de-gendering both assailant and victim). Others, like Hot Mustard and Eileen (again) take the traditional ballads and write new endings, with novel survivors’ stories. All of these can work, depending on your preferences. The first two approaches are where I hear the most amazing art.

Segarra and Hurray for the Riff Raff take a fifth approach. “The Body Electric” dissects the symbols of the murder ballad to construct a direct indictment of the culture of violence. We hear in the song about the guns, the rivers, and a direct allusion to “Delia’s Gone” with a pledge to settle the score on the long history of gender violence in murder ballads. Segarra said that she “wanted to write a song a woman could sing along to and feel empowered by.” I expect that she’s succeeded, which is good for us all. It’s only one path to success, though.

Reconciling

I was recently reviewing and updating our post from last year on Bruce Springsteen’s “American Skin (41 Shots)” and saw again Meena Alexander’s work on the function of poetry, which also seems apt in regard to “The Body Electric.”

“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.” (from Meena Alexander’s address to the Yale Political Union.)

One of the things that I think is most powerful about murder ballads is the collision of stories about death with an activity that is so closely tied to feeling alive. There may be many things and many different things going on in the hearts of singers and listeners in a murder ballad, but one thing that is usually going on is a claim to life and living implicitly made in the activity of singing. This process reconciles us with the world, and the “whole world” singing contains the potential for addressing, or at least better understanding, everything that’s going wrong–returning us “to the scope of our mortal lives.”

Making, singing, and listening to murder ballads is like playing with fire. They can illuminate and they can burn. They can warm and they can destroy. Something is lost to make them and we can gain something by handling them with care. Segarra’s song is a deft, urgent, and haunting reminder of both their danger and some good principles for tending them.

Coda

Segarra has thoroughly deployed this song to address a variety of causes and concerns, making it relevant in several different ways over the past few years. The song’s title invokes a line from Walt Whitman and alludes to a victim of gender-based violence. She dedicated the song in part to the anonymous victim of a gang rape in Delhi in 2012. The name given to the victim in the press is Damini, which means “lightning,” tying in nicely for Segarra with the Walt Whitman phrase, “the body electric,” and as a symbol for seeing  the body as sacred. She used an online fundraising campaign to raise money simultaneously for the video for the song and for a number of violence prevention initiatives. Art and advocacy are difficult to disentangle for this song, not that we need to do so.

The main video included at the start of this post layers into the song Segarra’s connection between misogyny and other forms of social violence, relating both to race and to the LGBTQ community. Its producer, Joshua Shoemaker, explains the video as follows:

“This video is a meditation on the acceptance of violence and discrimination against people of color, women and the LGBTQ community … We took these frustrations and paired them with classic imagery that would be recognized by most, allowing us to set a tone for the narrative. Replacing the Botticelli’s Venus with a Katey Red, the transgender mother of ‘sissy bounce,’ is something that speaks clearly without having to be salacious or heavy-handed.”

Segarra also developed a video for “The Body Electric” that draws attention to the plight of Marissa Alexander. Alexander was denied the benefit of the Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law in defending herself against assault charges following an incident where she fired a warning shot in a domestic violence incident.