OFF: Salman Rushdie column BOSTON GLOBE 9 apr. '99

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YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION...
<<<<Salman Rushdie BOSTON GLOBE 9 apr. '99>>>

 i recently asked vaclav havel about his admiration for the rock icon lou
reed. he replied that it was impossible to overstate the importance of rock
music for the czech resistance during the years of darkness between the
prague spring and the collapse of communism.
 i was just relishing the mental image of the leaders of the czech grooving
to the sound of the velvet underground playing "waiting for the man", "i'll
be your mirror, or "all tomorrow's parties" when havel spoke again. "why", he
asked me, with a straight face, "do you think we called it the Velvet
Revolution?"
 i took this to be an instance of havel's deadpan humor, but it was a joke of
the sort that reveals another, less literal truth, a generational truth,
perhaps,because for popular music fans of a certain age the ideas of rock and
revolution are inseparably linked.
 "you say you want a revolution", john lennon had sneered at us."well, you
know/we all want to change the world"
 and indeed with the passage of the years i had come to think of this linkage
as little more than youthful romanticism. so the discovery that a real
revolution had been in part inspired by rock music's glamorous snarl was
pretty moving. it felt like a sort of validation.
 because now that nobody smashes guitars or protests about much any more, now
that rock n' roll is middle-aged of and corporate and the turnover of the
leading mega-groups exceeds that of small nation states, now that it's music
for older people remembering their salad days while the kids listen to gansta
rap, trance music, or hip-hop, and bob dylan and aretha franklin get ivited
to sing at presidential inaugurals, it's easy to forget the form's
oppositional origins, its antiestablishment heyday.
 yet rock n' roll's rough, confident spirit of rebellion may be one reason
why this strange, simple, overwhelming noise conquered the world nearly half
a century ago, crossing all frontiers and barriers of language and culture to
become only the third globalized phenomenon in history after the two world
wars. it was the sound of liberation, so it spoke to the free spirits of
young people everywhere, and so also, of course, our mothers didnt like it.
 after she became aware of my fondness for bill haley, elvis, and jerry lee
lewis, my own alarmed mother began eagerly to advocate the virtues of pat
boone, a man who once sang a treacly ballad addressed to a mule.
 but i was trying to imitate the curl of presley's lips and the
swoon-inducing rotation of his hips, and i suspect boys everywhere, from
siberia to patagonia, were doing the same.
 what sounded and felt to us like freedom loooked to the adult world like bad
behavior, and in a way both things are true. pelvis-wiggling and
guitar-smashing are indeed librty's childish fringe; but it's also true, in
all sorts of ways we have learned much more about as adults, that freedom is
dangerous.
 Freedom, that ancient foot-tapping anarchy, the dionysiac antithesis of pat
boone: a higher and wilder virtue than good behavior, and, for all its spirit
of hairy late-night rebellion, far less likely than than blind obedience and
line-toeing convention to do serious damage. better a few trashed hotel
suites than a trashed world.
 but there is that in us which doesnt want to be free: which prefers
discipline and acceptance and patriotic local tunes to the wild, loose-limbed
love -music of the world. there is that in us which wishes simply to go along
with the crowd, and to blame all nay-sayers and pelvis-wigglers for rocking
our comfortable boat.
 "don't follow leaders" bob dylan warned in "subterranean homesick blues",
"watch the parking meters". yet we continue to want to be led, to follow
petty warlords and murderous ayatollahs and nationalist brutes, or to suck
our thumbs and listen quiescently to nanny states which insist they know
what's best for us. so tyrants abound from belgrade to mumbai, and even those
of us who are notionally free peoples are no longer, for the most part, very
rock and roll.
 the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of
conservative defense mechanisms. as long as orpheus could raise his voice in
song, the maenada could not kill him. then they screamed, and their shrill
cacophony drowned his music, and then their weapons found their mark, and he
fell, and they tore him limb from limb.
 screaming against orpheus, we too become capable of murder. the collapse of
communism was supposed to usher in a new era of liberty. instead, the
post-cold war world, suddenly formless and full of possibility, scared many
of us stiff. we retreated behind smaller iron curtains, built smaller
stockades, imprisoned ourselves in narrower, ever more fanatical definitions
of ourselves --religious, regional, ethnic-- and readied ourselves for war.
 today, as the thunder of one such war drowns out the sweet singing of our
better selves, i find myself nostalgic for the old spirit of independence and
idealism which once, set infectiously to music, helped bring another war (in
vietnam) to an end. but at present the only music in the air is a dead march.

all the commas are his
any typos are mine
"<>"
larry b