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I usually avoid saying where songs come from.
They arise from somewhere or other. That is all I usually say. Sometimes that is all I really know.
Yet some songs have so obvious a gestation-point, or so obvious a reference to the outer world, that it is to offer no great revelation to say what influences brought them about.
This is especially true of political songs.
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I should say I speak here as both songwriter and as the individual person who is Iguanodon Smile, this nascent music publishing effort.
In other words, I can broach this subject as the writer of occasional songs that have obvious public sources, and also as the publisher who has put some of this material into the world. I wrote "Peaceful Mask," for instance. Then, much later, I published it. More recently I wrote "Mr. War," a song the bands Keg Salad and Mad Melancholy Monkey Mind are both performing.
As in my other essays, I speak for myself, and not for others associated with me, my bands, or this wobbly-legged label.
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"Peaceful Mask" was a clearly political song when I wrote it in the 1980s, but not exactly a protest song in the usual sense. It was a song of identification with the victims of military efforts that had their sources in our own outwardly peaceful country.
We lived in a country whose president was an experienced screen actor at a time when leadership depended upon such screen talents. He seemed almost a fictional character, leading a country whose appearance was often greatly fictional as well. Among his agents was a military officer whose mask of innocence and overemphatic patriotism hid a callow and ill-hearted mass of human immaturity; and this military officer oversaw the administration's efforts to supply thugs who were murdering civilians in a small Central American state. This state had the unfortunate audacity to suggest the United States was not the be-all and end-all political model for Central America's future.
Out of this understanding of the situation my song "Peaceful Mask" arose.
Political songs are supposed to be ephemeral and culturally shallow: they are here for the moment only. Yet in this song I have found personal and musical sustenance. It was one of the songs that kept me musically alive from the Eighties into the Nineties and then into these Aughts, when I recorded it as a rock song. All along it has remained what it began as: a politically motivated song, a song born of disgust with certain fools who rose to power on the shoulders of ignorance, shoulders that are of excessive strength in this country, in many years and in many decades. It was a political song crying against an unjust and tremendous power being wielded by infantile adults. It was a political song sung by one of the quietest voices on the musical scene, being sung by a penniless nobody in the ignored Midwest, in one ignored small city and then in a second ignored small city; and now it is a political song performed by a couple small musical groups who play to small crowds in the darkness of bars and clubs on occasional weekend evenings.
Yet the song continues to live, for me, and its continued life has caused me no distress and no second thoughts. As far as I have been able to determine, in the more than fifteen years since I wrote the words of the song on the back of a torn and used envelope, the song has remained simply a true song.
It does not happen to lie.
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I will say only a few things about the origin of the song now being played by both Keg Salad and Mad Melancholy Monkey Mind. The chorus of "Mr. War" is quite simple: "Say no more, Mr. War." It uses a rhyme that does not look right visually, but which is accurate for our middle-American pronunciation of the words.
The song started out as anything but an anti-war song, or anti-administration song, or even as a "peace" song, whatever that might be. It started out quite otherwise. Yet as I was working on it, something about the music itself opened the song to influences that were looming large in the world -- for instance, to the influence of living and writing in a country being run by a leader who is, in my eyes, politically illegitimate and intellectually vapid. In my eyes, this leader's callous disregard for the larger world around him helped lead his country into disaster, while his distaste for thoughtful deliberation and discourse helped rush his country into an unnecessary military conflict that is, again, bringing senseless death to civilians.
"Mr. War," as I said, started with no particularly political overtones but nevertheless acquired them along the way. The chorus, simple and bland and obvious though it may be, suggested itself to me during the first hour or so of working with the song's materials. At least a few days went by before I accepted those words, however. Since they kept knocking at my door, I let them into the song at last.
Now those words seem utterly natural and sensible, in their place.
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I have been singing "Peaceful Mask" for over fifteen years now.
I have no idea if I will be singing this new song, "Mr. War," in fifteen years, nor if Martha will. She is the one singing it at shows, at this point.
This does not strike me as being outside the realm of possibility, however. "Mr. War" is a song sung in the voice of a quiet, ordinary soul, one who speaks from within the confines of a small room, looking outside and wondering at the fact that others in this large world of ours seem incapable of that act of looking outside -- of truly looking outside.
It is the song of an individual within the U.S., looking at the U.S. from inside.
"Peaceful Mask," on the other hand, was the song of an individual not of the U.S., who was looking at the U.S. from outside.
Although decades have passed and political regimes have changed and changed again, and although the military conflict of "Peaceful Mask" and the military conflict of "Mr. War" are far, far distant from one another around the curved surface of our Earth . . .
Although these things are true . . .
Oddly enough, to me, both voices seem to speak of the same war.
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Mark Rich
31 March '03
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You may still read the May 2002 essay here, the July 2002 essay here, the October 2002 essay here, and the January 2003 essay here.
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