Rocking the Free World; Freeing The World To Rock

 I cannot disagree in good faith with Kevin D. Williamson's We Are America, and We Play Rock ’n’ Roll. He says it all started with Elvis.

 I can quibble with that a little. Someone had to write the songs. It took a black man to write America onto the world.

 

Americans are experiencing a great deal of social and political trouble right now because we do not know what we want, cannot agree about what we should want, and know only that what the other side wants must be the wrong thing. But if you travel around the rest of the world, it is easy to see what they want. The éminences grises of Western Europe, the Boomer welfare-staters,  want to be Portland, “the place where people in their 20s go to retire,” or, even better, to be Austin in the 1990s, where young people went to retire for a bit and then start tech companies that would make them billionaires. (The Europeans are really feeling the great missed opportunity of the turn of the century.) The elderly men who run China want to take over the American role as the world’s big dog. A bunch of graybeards in the Muslim world dream of a new caliphate or maybe some form of state-capitalist techno-monarchy that will give the Gulf states the dynamism and energy to finally do something interesting with all that oil money instead of building the seventh Louis Vuitton boutique in Dubai. But the young and the hungry around the world, from India to Ukraine, want something different: They want choices and agency and fun and freedom that may not look exactly like our version of it but that is freedom nonetheless. They want to rock. 

 

It is the soundtrack you want when you do cool stuff and invent things and make things and pile up insane stacks of money, and there are a lot of billionaires who started off sleeping on someone’s floor and a few billionaires who will go back to it before the end. It all goes together: the Sony tech-bro nerd who served as vice president of technical standards responsible for “interoperability norms” of products such as the Blu-ray disc? That guy, James Williamson (no relation), was the guitarist in the Stooges. Not some weekends-and-summers dad-rock cover band—the Stooges, with Iggy Pop, playing on Raw Power, no less. How did that happen? “My sister was bringing home Elvis records,” he told Clash magazine, “and so I thought, ‘I gotta have a guitar.’” He heard Elvis, and he never looked back. Or how about a tugboat captain, of all unlikely things, who got a doctorate in medieval literature at the University of Texas at Austin, writing a dissertation on the poems of Cynewulf? Sterling Morrison had a job before all that: He was a guitarist in the Velvet Underground. My friend Charles C.W. Cooke, the erudite, Oxford-educated National Review writer and all-purpose Florida man? A touring rock musician as a youngster, and a pretty good one. Charlie is as English an Englishman as Lemmy was—he lived for a time in a house that had once belonged to Oliver Cromwell—but he will tell you that he has always been, for as long as he can remember, a kind of American-in-waiting. The world is full of them. It is a big glorious mess, as freedom must be—even well-ordered freedom of the Anglo-Protestant variety that we have goaded into so many mutations over the past 250 years. 

“We are America, and we play rock ’n’ roll.”

 

 

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