News of Osama bin Laden’s death had barely sunk in before I got an email about someone’s “new single” about said demise. They say Rome wasn’t built in a day, but this gentleman’s new single was—the video got posted May 2, the day after the raid in Pakistan. In that short span, he’d apparently written the song, filmed a video, composed a press release, and begun a publicity campaign.
Of course, in the world of the arts, it’s often true that any excuse will do to get one’s name in front of people. The old saw “all publicity is good publicity” is demonstrably true—offend someone, and your name is plastered in headlines just as readily as any do-gooder.
The arrival of this new single, the winner, at least in my crowded inbox, of the race to birth artistic responses to news of bin Laden’s death, prompted mixed reactions. My kneejerk response was to say that anything so hastily conceived was bound to be bad. But in the interest of a fair shake, I clicked through to the video, hoping for a pleasant surprise.
What then unspooled was hardly a Hollywood production. The gentleman in question looked and sounded like a fourth rate Willie Nelson. He was seated and squinting through his reading glasses at his lyrics, strumming a guitar whose mother-of-pearl adornment was the most dramatic thing on screen.
The lyrics were a mix of plainspoken reportage and half-sensical metaphor-making: “One weapon of mass destruction is dead/ this Monday morning this headline read/ found in a compound surrounded by guards/ killed in a firefight when his deck of cards/ exploded from the lead of a bullet that entered his head.”
That half-spoken verse echoed narrative tunes past, its words tumbling out in a race with the tempo and coming out a neck in front. But something about the head-turned relish with which the word “head” was held out felt especially weird. This was, after all, a graphic description of a gunshot wound. Before I had time to fully gauge my own reaction, the line that is the song’s refrain arrived: “the demon bin Laden is dead.”
The rest played out in the same fashion, reaching for the kind of triumphalism that makes a tune feel truly dramatic. There were lines about al Qaeda knowing that “aimed at them is a rocket’s red glare,” a line about “the children of 9/11.”
Like many of us, I felt a sense of relief knowing that bin Laden was no more. I possess a wide streak of pacifist thinking, and I believe that the right way to handle terrorism is what has worked in places like the U.K.—treating terrorists as criminals, not warriors. To treat them as warriors is to lend them a legitimacy they do not deserve. Trials and sentences are the proper tools, not wars against emotions like “terror.” Still, what happened in that compound in Pakistan is unlikely to ever be known except to those who were there, so arguments about what should have been done are moot. Bin Laden is gone, and his primitive and ugly way of looking at the world is, one hopes, that much nearer eradication. He was no “demon,” just a human criminal whose weapon of choice did widespread psychological harm in addition to its deadly results.
I don’t know exactly what’s the right artistic response to something like bin Laden’s death. I know songs dubbing him a demon stir that same variety of dehumanizing bloodlust that keeps cycles of violence churning, and should be shunned. But I suspect that one Valley music teacher has a good answer to how art can respond.
As the Advocate‘s editor Tom Vannah shared with me, at a performance of elementary school string and band players last week at Frontier Regional High School, music teacher Denise Gendron, visibly moved, introduced “Ode to Joy” by sharing the remarkable story of a man who made headlines and inspired a novel. During the siege of Sarajevo in 1992, cellist Vedran Smailovic played Albinoni’s Adagio in the rubble on 22 days to commemorate the deaths of 22 people who’d been in line to buy bread when a shell hit.
Such a powerful effort rises above the coarseness of hastily crafted words. A single instrument offering up a melody is perhaps the nearest thing there can be to expressing the tangle of emotions that arises in response to moments of violence, even necessary violence. It is uncomplicated, powerful.
The enormity of bin Laden’s crimes caused widespread trauma a decade ago. The arts offer an extraordinary and necessary way to accomplish the turning of the page, the leaving behind of the fevered emotions of a difficult era. Vedran Smailovic seemed to know his cello could do that. It’s a good time to listen to his strings again.
