5 Songs About America

Hmmmm, I was browsing around on the web (for images of Christmas trees, but that's another story...) and I saw this challenge on someone's blog:

"Name five songs that capture something great about America."

There was a time when I would have thought this was a ridiculous question, seeing as how I come from a crowd of cynical American Ameriphobes with whom, in my youth, we sat around just bashing our own nationality.

But somehow I've gone around a bend. I'm not so cynical anymore. Being a foreigner abroad during the Bush years kinda made me realize that not EVERYTHING was bad about America. Funny huh.... quite ironic, this happening right during some of our worst years. I can see the point of most things that people say about the US. But there's also a point where I finally had to say there's a limit. We're not COMPLETELY evil. I mean, people were coming up to me and blaming the US for the next flu pandemic (huh?), for the commercialization of travel caused by Lonely Planet guidebooks (they're Australian!), for being slobs because we often wear tennis shoes around town (wtf!). These kind of petty complaints just got silly sometimes and finally I reached an epiphany, where, for the first time in my life, I said to myself that sometimes in the US we're not all bad.

So anyway, that's the reason I thought that the question above was interesting.

What five songs do I propose? What songs, for me, evoke something great about America?

Hmmmm....hard to think in the span of just a couple minutes here. But here's a try...

1. Pretty much the whole album of Californication by the Red Hot Chili Peppers -- there's something this album that captures both a hot masculine energy and also a melancholy disenchantment with society that is distinctly American, and so perfectly conveyed. It also evokes, for me, the American west, the landscapes. Of course maybe that's because I was listening to this album while driving through the West. Dust, surf, desire and disenchantment.

2. "All Along the Watchtower" by Jimi Hendrix -- the soaring and ripping American guitar, lyrics by Bob Dylan. The cultural blend that is America exemplified by a black American man rising to top of a genre that had once been defined by whites. That doesn't always work like we want it to in America, but for once, in this man, it did. Just a great song....

3. "Nightswimming" by REM -- no song can evoke life growing up in a semi-rural America for me more than this. Everytime I ever heard this song in France, Singapore, Australia I was transported back to the warm humid evenings along the St. Croix, crickets chirping, the river, my friends. This IS my life put to music, it seems. The best of American adolescence.

4. "Tonight Tonight" by the Smashing Pumpkins (or several other of their songs). Maybe this is kinda the same era as Nightswimming, but again I think there's something that Smashing Pumpkins captured about the surging longing of American youth, a battle against the waves of cynicism and disenchantment that come from our life saturated in commercialism, and their brief and glorious glimpses of a world that is real and true.

5. "Rebel Yell" by Billy Idol. For me, Billy Idol has the swagger of a cowboy, the glam of the 1980s, the curling lip of Elvis, and the dirty mind of Hugh Hefner. That's like a recipe for good all-American fun. I love this song!

Well, I'm sure I could come up with other songs, probably even better songs. But in the span of a few minutes this is what pops into my mind. Anyone got anything to add?

PS....It's a few minutes later and I'm still thinking about this. I also add
Tom Petty (pretty much all his songs),
Prince (most of his songs, which I've come to like a lot more since returning to MN. They're so badass and clever...),
"Stacey's Mom" by Fountains of Wayne for capturing something so deliciously likeable about American suburbia.
"Milk and Cereal" by G Love and Special Sauce -- I'm not a fan of G Love but what's more American than Milk and Cereal?
And finally ('cause I gotta stop somewhere) "Proud Mary", especially the rockin' version by Ike and Tina Turner.