Ken Burns – Rock Salted

Ken Burn’s Country Music | Review

Country Music (2019)

PBS

Kan Burns is an awful filmmaker. Just awful. Jeffrey St. Clair long ago wrote (Serpents in the Garden) that “[Burns’] films all construct a pantheon of heroes and anti-heroes, little manufactured dramas of good and evil.” He added that a Burns film is “a fantasy meant for the white suburban audiences who watch his movies[,]” presenting “a feel-good narrative of white patronage and understanding.” (see also “History Blinded by Anti-Socialism”).

Country Music is a documentary mini-series based on the book Country Music U.S.A., and its author Bill Malone seems to be the only academic featured in the series. There is plenty of good music of course, but it suffers from all the usual problems of a Ken Burns production. It revisits Johnny Cash in just about every episode (which is fine, at one level, but like the “jazz” series this comes across as pandering and exploiting a popular figure at the expense of an evenhanded treatment with more space for later-arriving and less famous acts). There is a lot of glowing praise for trite stuff, especially from the 80s, and criticisms (e.g., racism, sexism) are mentioned, if at all, only in a highly compartmentalized and apologetic way — certainly not as lingering and still deeply pervasive structural problems in the genre and society writ large. In short, it presents the standard “progressive neoliberal” view that if a mere handful of people (Charley Pride, Dolly Parton, etc.) overcame racism and sexism then those problems no longer really exist except as individual failings. There is also a clear predilection for commentary from celebrity performer talking heads over academics, etc. But in case you are wondering, yes, Wynton Marsalis is indeed a featured commentator. Can’t have a country music documentary without him, right? It could have used some input from Peter Guralnick (author of Lost Highway), but does not feature any input from him.

The episode that dealt with the mid-80s really starkly reveals the limitations of the series. You can really pinpoint that the acts featured in that episode (Ricky Skaggs, Randy Travis, Reba McEntire, George Strait, Roseanne Cash, etc.) constitute the tipping point when country music started to really suck. The episode repeats over and over the claim that these artists were returning to their “roots” (the episode is titled “Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’ “). But this proves to be false, or at least extremely misleading. Featured commentators do accurately state that in this period mainstream country acts moved away from the strings and backing singers that characterized earlier “countrypolitan” music. But the falsehood is that they did this to return to some mythical musical “roots”. Countrypolitan (or the “Nashville Sound”) was mostly about middlebrow, southern, white, working class-focused music appropriating the trappings of urban pop music of the 40s (like Frank Sinatra’s work with Axel Stordahl) to lend an air of sophistication to match rising post-WWII socioeconomic expectations that extended down the socioeconomic hierarchy in an unprecedented way. In a review of Willie Nelson‘s The Party’s Over (And Other Great Willie Nelson Songs) (1967) I previously wrote that countrypolitan music

“epitomized the (still racist and sexist) ‘golden age”’of post-WWII American prosperity in which ordinary, uneducated workers saw rising living standards and could see themselves as part of a newly emerging middle class with its own self-styled sophistication — something that might be described as attempting to project an aura of sophistication beyond class boundaries via ideas about ‘proper’ diction and enunciation cribbed from upper classes and merged with lower-class folk/country musical forms. Looked at another way, the temporary willingness of elite classes to permit rising working and middle classes was fostered by inculcating country music listeners with upper-class values as well as the speech patterns and more urban culture that went along with those values (when elites withdrew their permissive and benevolent attitude starting in the 1970s, the countrypolitan style faded almost in lockstep and is now commonly derided as low-class and unsophisticated).”

Johnny Cash’s The Baron (1981) is sort of a perfect example to illustrate the turn away from what countrypolitan music represented. Drawing on the work of Historian Jefferson Cowie about the sorts of socioeconomic changes that took place in the 1970s, as evidenced through music and film (Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class [2010]), I wrote that “given a close examination, there is is something to be admired in Cash’s intransigent support of his old New Deal style social optimism against the great weight of the Carter-Thatcher-Reagan era’s neoliberal onslaught against it.” Cowie has pointed to a dominant narrative of the lone individual failing or having a bittersweet ending trying to break away from the claustrophobic confines of social structures during the early neoliberal era, whereas on The Baron Cash took a kind of Spielbergian view of bringing a family back together, lamenting the loss of solidarity, family, community — that is, anomie.

When you actually listen to the music featured in the Burns episode about mid-80s acts, it is pretty apparent that what was happening was a modernizing effect as the most popular acts substituted sterile, highly compressed/gated, and synthetic 80s productions values from rock/pop music for the old countrypolitan strings and vocal choruses, and they were now utilizing a more highly affected country yodel/twang style of singing that had seemingly little precedent (it wasn’t at all a return to Jimmie Rodgers’ style of blue yodel singing). They were mostly just appropriating more recent rock/pop fads, with a few entirely new vocal affectations meant to distinguish it from the music of “urban elites” (now constructed as an enemy). And there is no explicit discussion of the (right-wing populist and reactionary and “Southern Strategy”) politics that go along with this. Though there were some photos/videos of acts posing with the Reagans and Ed Koch. What jumped to mind was Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas? (2004) thesis, and maybe Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers’s Right Turn (1987) thesis as well. Anyway, in the Burns series episode, what is not clearly explained is that the invocation of a return to “roots” is not a reference to musical qualities but is more a coded statement about constructing (through musical culture) an identity as a distinct social group opposed to certain (unstated) enemies. The way that the Burns series takes these statements at face value and refuses to unpack the coded implications is irksome (as Georg Lukács wrote in 1938, “It is an old truth of Marxism that every human activity should be judged according to the objective meaning in the total context, and not according to what the agent believes the importance of his activity to be.”). And, my my, most of the music in this episode is dreadful. When they showed some old Ricky Skaggs music video clips my spouse (appropriately) made vomiting sounds. Oh, and they talk to Roseanne Cash a lot through the series and in this episode she talks about her own career. My spouse was guffawing at everything she said because it was so transparently false. The series lets her get away with it (by airing the statements at all, as well as by omitting any critique of her statements). She claims she was not riding her father’s coattails but this is just completely contradicted by her actions (“I even thought about changing my name” … but she didn’t; she claimed to come to Nashville from LA, but she grew up in the south and had Nashville music business ties; etc.). As irksome as the episode is, some of the raw material in it at least allows a viewer to compare how earlier era country music was a more honest reflection of rural peasant/working class values (which is not to say all those values were admirable) whereas in the 80s it became more highly disingenuous and cynical and more prone to use coded language to obscure unappealing motivations. I guess an appraisal of mainstream country music in the 80s calls for an analysis out of Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason (1983).

The series does mention media consolidation in the 1990s. It is discussed for approximately 2 minutes (in a series with eight roughly 2-hour episodes!). Although some excellent points are raised in those two minutes, the problem is that they are given short shrift when the bulk of the series promotes winner-take-all frameworks, through incessant invocation of rags-to-riches motifs and an unrelenting focus on best-selling artists that presumes sales/profitability is the exclusive yardstick for merit. As part of those two minutes, the film makes a bizarre claim that the (Billboard?) “Americana” chart was created to capture alternative country in the face of media consolidation. The way it is discussed in the narrative conflates the “Americana” chart with “alt country” in a misleading way. They also briefly show a still photograph of the Dixie Chicks in a closing montage, but nothing after 1996 is discussed. Johnny Cash gets extensive time (yet again) in the final episode. It wouldn’t surprise me if 1-2 hours of the entire series is devoted to Johnny Cash (at the high end of that range if screen time by Roseanne Cash counts too). Hugely popular acts from the period like kd lang and Lyle Lovett are not mentioned at all. Garth Brooks gets a lot of time and much of the commentary by or about him is highly suspect (untenable assertions are taken at face value with no critique or contrasting perspective; my spouse once again guffawed when someone in the film says Garth Brooks refused to let his record label promote him outside the “country” market, as if a musician is willing and able to do that [whatever that really means anyway — does a highway billboard qualify as promotion outside the country market?]).

I guess in the end this makes me wonder if someone has written a good book-length treatment of country music from an interesting critical perspective–the sort of book that does not take self-serving statements at face value and that is willing to question industry motives and apply a kind of “objective” sociological or political science type of analysis (i.e., along the lines of Bourdieu’s Distinction).

Shamus Cooke – History Blinded by Anti Socialism

It never ceases to amuse me how the insight of philosophy and psychoanalysis that ideology determines what is or is not a “fact” is proven again and again. As Rex Butler put it,

“in the analysis of ideology, it is not simply a matter of seeing which account of reality best matches the ‘facts’, with the one that is closest being the least biased and therefore the best. As soon as the facts are determined, we have already — whether we know it or not — made our choice; we are already within one ideological system or another. The real dispute has already taken place over what is to count as the facts, which facts are relevant, and so on.”

Lenin also wrote (in What Is to be Done?):

“the only choice is — either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a ‘third’ ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology).”

Along these lines, Shamus Cooke has reviewed Ken Burns & Lynn Novick‘s mini-series The Vietnam War (2017):

“History Blinded by Anti Socialism: Ken Burns’ Vietnam”

The general tone of Cooke’s criticism reflects this statement by Malcolm X:

“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

Bonus quote:

“How close we could look into a bright future should two, three or many Vietnams flourish throughout the world with their share of deaths and their immense tragedies, their everyday heroism and their repeated blows against imperialism, impelled to disperse its forces under the sudden attack and the increasing hatred of all peoples of the world!”

Che Guevara, “Message to the Tricontinental,” April 16, 1967

Bonus links: The Battle of Chile and “A Victory for Historical Accuracy and the Peace Movement: Not One Emmy for Ken Burns and ‘The Vietnam War'” and “It’s a Fact: Supreme Court Errors Aren’t Hard to Find” (this article engages in a certain kind of criticism that is largely blind to the issue Butler described)

The Roosevelts: An Intimate History

The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014)

PBS

Director: Ken Burns

Main Cast: Meryl Streep, Paul Giamatti, Edward Herrmann, Peter Coyote

Ken Burns’ documentary of the Roosevelt family, focusing on Teddy, Franklin Delano, and Eleanor, is for the most part the same sort of pablum found in almost all of his films. It posits the Roosevelts as the greatest political family America has ever seen, and probably ever will see, and the protectors and masters of liberal politics. If you want a film that questions political dynasties at a fundamental level, or any such critiques, you are watching the wrong sort of film. As Mason Williams has written, the documentary focuses on the personal somewhat to the detriment on the public aspects of the Roosevelts. In that sense, it is a film built on a very reductionist, essentialist worldview, not far off from biological determinism.

The film is organized chronologically, beginning with the family’s move to America and their success in business, and then leads into Teddy Roosevelt’s political ascent. This is followed by Franklin’s political ascent, and then Eleanor’s widow years.

Commentary on Burns’ Jazz still applies:

“By now his technique is as predictable as the plot of an episode of ‘Friends’: the zoom shot on a still photo, followed by a slow pan, a pull back, then a portentous pause — all the while a monotonous narration explains the obvious at length.” Serpents in the Garden

One quirk in this film is the casting for voice actors. Paul Giamatti portrays Teddy, and he’s a hilariously poor choice. Nick Offerman seems more apropos. It may seem like a minor issue, but it sheds light on a problem with the entire project. The film seems like it fits the facts to the people working on it, rather than the other way around.

We are to believe that the Roosevelts were great due to the individual greatness of people like Teddy, a favored son of a wealthy family with opportunities most would never dream of. As a portrait of his personality, largely irrelevant to his public legacy, it probably is fair. There is some treatment of his activism against business — this was the only president to give a speech railing against the “malefactors of great wealth” and back it up with some action. Though Burns’ stops well short of adopting historian Gabriel Kolko‘s position that Teddy’s administration actual helped big business (to achieve stability) rather than constrain it. His hubris following his presidency is his undoing, and the film does thankfully look askance at Teddy’s racism and imperialism.

The story of FDR’s life is most interesting in describing the time before he contracted polio. He was a dandy and a mamma’s boy. And he was insufferable. After contracting polio, the narrative shifts to his overcoming the effects of the disease to forge his political career. It certainly was an achievement. There is discussion of how his medical condition was concealed from the public with the assistance of the media. There is, however, a clear bias in favor of FDR, in that the filmmakers clearly see FDR as knowing what is best for the public more than the public does for itself, thereby justifying this media complicity. One historian after another lines up to emphasize how the media of today wouldn’t do that, and someone like FDR, or Teddy even, would never win a major office as a result. But they don’t talk about a media “propaganda” model, or campaign financing. Instead, it is a matter as simple as tabloid journalism focusing on personal ailments and the like rather than the “real issues”.

The coverage of FDR’s presidency is mostly fawning, uncritical gushing. Ken Burns has always forged a sort of suburban liberalism in his films. This one is no different. FDR is presented as the president of the people, the most leftist. Anyone to the left of FDR is simply ignored. This is problematic. There is little to no mention of FDR’s “brain trust” and the assortment of advisors who urged more leftist policies than FDR was willing to accept, often to the detriment of lasting outcomes. FDR’s programs are praised, criticized for tactical errors but not for being inadequate at a theoretical level. FDR’s VP Henry Wallace is marginalized, to Eleanor’s chagrin, and Harry Truman is unleashed on the world. Negotiations during WWII are the most curious part of the film. Burns’ view of the war is unreliable, and clings to Cold War paranoia. For instance, there is constant suspicion of Josef Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s concern about Western encroachment is dismissed as paranoia. And yet, history has shown Stalin’s concerns to be entirely justified. As Burns’ film aired on TV, the U.S. was actively involved in fomenting a coup in Ukraine, to move NATO closer to Moscow and implement a financial takeover.

FDR and Winston Churchill are portrayed as the saviors of the world who defeated the Nazis. This, again, isn’t particularly accurate. The Nazis were defeated primarily by the Soviets, in what they called the Great Patriotic War, as the Nazis launched Operation Barbarossa. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, violating a non-aggression pact with the Soviets, with the largest invasion force ever assembled in the history of warfare. Over four million Axis troops participated in the invasion. Over five million Soviet citizens died repelling the invasion. You won’t hear any of this from the Ken Burns film (details are available, for instance, in Harrison Salisbury‘s The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad). Instead, Stalin is a skeptic holding back Churchill and FDR. D-Day turns the tide of the war (really, it barely worked, and then, only because of failures of the Axis powers during Barbarossa).

FDR gets very much a pass on his support for the Manhattan project. Robert Oppenheimer ran the program, and later famously commented that it should have bee shut down “the day after Trinity,” in reference to the test explosion code-named Trinity. Sure, Truman ordered the bombs dropped not FDR, but he was just carrying to conclusion an FDR program created for that purpose.

Burns is yet another of those “liberals” who asserts that politics should go a certain amount to the center-left and not one step further, with no justification whatsoever for where that line in the sand is drawn. There are no leftist critics of FDR featured. The late historian Howard Zinn noted how much of FDR’s presidency can be explained through simple imperialist ambitions. He also wrote “The Limits of the New Deal” in New Deal Thought (1965):

“When the reform energies of the New Deal began to wane around 1939 and the depression was over, the nation was back to its normal state: a permanent army of unemployed; twenty or thirty million poverty-ridden people effectively blocked from public view by a huge, prosperous, and fervently consuming middle class; a tremendously efficient yet wastefully productive apparatus that was efficient because it could produce limitless supplies of what it decided to produce, and wasteful because what it decided to produce was not based on what was most needed by society but on what was most profitable to business.”

Economist Alan Nasser has written about how FDR worked to undermine Social Security and preserve business profit interests. FDR was a committed fiscal conservative. He was not a supporter of social programs. He was forced to adopt them by popular pressure and unrest. Burns’ film makes a particularly egregious mischaracterization of the Bonus Army. These were WWI veterans who protested outside the White house to receive a promised bonus early, in view of the dire circumstances of the Great Depression. The film mentions them being a problem of the Hoover administration. This is true, as far as it goes, but the Bonus Army marched again during FDR’s presidency. The film does not mention this fact. FDR opposed their demands, and congress overrode FDR’s veto to pay the veterans their bonuses early.

Eleanor emerges as the best of the Roosevelts. Not only as the lead author of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but also as a voice of conscience against FDR’s crass political machinations. It is too bad she wasn’t president, or at least that FDR had listened to her and made Henry Wallace his final running mate instead of Truman. Like the others profiled, her public accomplishments take a back seat to personal details of her life.

So, at the end of the many, many hours of this film, one is left knowing rather little about what the Roosevelts accomplished politically, and is instead given more of a portrait of the lifestyles of the rich and famous who like to dabble in politics.