View from Australia: Welcome to NYC

By Jonathan Bradley

How pop culture helped America survive 9/11

I probably heard about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 earlier than many Americans did. I was watching Australian network Channel 10's late news that evening when anchor Sandra Sully announced that a plane had flown into the North Tower. It was just shy of 11pm on the east coast of Australia, and my parents and I watched as the TV screened the surreal sight of another plane colliding with the South Tower, then announcements that a third plane had struck the Pentagon, and a fourth downed in a field in Pennsylvania. Despite the continuous stream of reporting, little was clear: Who was behind this? Where would it end? As the night wore on, I wondered when and where the next attack would occur. Would they stay on the east coast of the United States, or was this a coordinated global assault?

Further attacks did not manifest themselves however, and I stayed up until three a.m. watching the inflow of news reports settle into a numbing cycle of interviews with experts and replayed footage of the attacks. At school the next day, my classmates and I ignored the task of studying for our impending end-of-year exams, and spent our time trying to make sense of what we had seen on TV the night before. I could not imagine how Americans were coping with an attack of such magnitude on their own soil.

When thinking of how 9/11 affected America and the world, however, it's more instructive to recall the weeks and months after the attacks, rather than the narrative specifics of that day. It was the remainder of 2001 and 2002 when the slow motion confusion that had been set in motion made itself apparent. The towers burned on and were eventually extinguished, but the aire of unreality remained. Letters containing anthrax powder began appearing in media outlets and government offices. We were sure it was the work of Islamic terrorists, though in 2008, the FBI announced that the perpetrator was probably a white American scientist who acted alone. In October 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan, and at the end of that month, Congress passed with bipartisan approval the USA PATRIOT Act, which removed many of the legal hurdles protecting people from having their phone and electronic records searched by law enforcement. The next year gunmen began shooting random citizens in the DC area. Again, Islamic terror was suspected, but again the perpetrators were American. The world had become unstable and chaotic, and the shadow of terror hung over everything, even events that had nothing to do with terror.

Bryan Appleyard asked recently whether there had been a great work of art about 9/11, and found many aspiring examples wanting. The New York Times's Michiko Kakutani concluded of artistic responses to the attacks: "in retrospect, many of them now feel sentimental or heavy-handed." Andrew Sullivan rounds up some candidates, none of which I find compelling. And yet, in spite of this apparent lack of great works devoted to the event, art and pop culture played an enormous part in how America coped with the attacks and nursed itself in their aftermath.

After 9/11, the nation experienced a collective shellshock that took years to fade, but despite the scale of the disruption, life had to go on. So despite the predictions that everything had changed, irony could live no longer, and cynical violent entertainment had passed from the world, people across America could not spend every second of their lives reliving the attacks. Life had to go on. President George W. Bush was right to tell Americans to "go shopping." Shopping was something normal.

Though Kakutani and Appleyard went looking for great artistic responses to 9/11, the worth of pop culture at the time lay in how everyday Americans used it to help return their lives to normal. In 2004, Lynn Speigel of Northwestern University wrote a paper [PDF] examining the television industry's response to the attacks. The attacks, Spiegel wrote, put television "in a world where narrative comes undone and where the 'real' seems to have no sense of meaning beyond repetition of the horrifying event itself." The same might be said of the nation itself at the time, and Spiegel's essay tracks the way television networks framed their response — Rudy Guiliani on "Saturday Night Live," a special terrorism-themed episode of "The West Wing" — as a public service whereby the rituals of mass entertainment helped reassert a landscape of commercial normalcy, and hence, normal life.

A similar re-assertion of mass culture occured in the pop music industry as well. There's a micro genre of songs I think of as "9/11 music," and they hold that status more from what people did with them rather than what their creators intended. Though it was released in 2000 and has all the hallmarks of major label rock of the end of the 20th century, U2's All That You Can't Leave Behind album seemed to be everywhere in late 2001. Songs of indistinct uplift, like "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of," and "Walk On," no longer seemed empty, but were transformed into adaptable vessels capable of uniting large audiences around a common optimism. The latter was originally written for Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi, and the band performed it on the September 21 benefit concert "America: A Tribute to Heroes," recasting the entire nation as victims of political persecution. Bruce Springsteen's 2002 album The Rising was more pointedly inspired by 9/11, but its sentiment echoed the U2 tunes. Take the title track, for instance: these were inspiring but diffuse mass appeal rock songs by established stars; America comforted by the strong and familiar voice of white men. One song from the album, "My City of Ruins," pre-dated the attacks and, like "Walk On" was repurposed for the "Tribute to Heroes" concert. "Rise up," exhorted Springsteen in that song, echoing U2's message. America must carry on.

Country star Alan Jackson's "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)" is probably the best known musical response to the attacks, and went to number one in the national country charts. Like Springsteen's and U2's songs, it's a musical salve, designed to heal a nation through collective catharsis. "Did you shout out in anger or fear for you neighbour," sings Jackson, "Or did you just sit down and cry?" Another country singer, Toby Keith, penned a response that also went number one, but unlike the others, it was furious and militiaristic. "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)" was unusual because it united the country against a common enemy, rather than through common uplift.

Perhaps pop music is the right place to look for great artistic responses to 9/11, however. In 2002, New York rapper Jay-Z appeared on a track with Cam'ron and Juelz Santana, a couple of Harlem upstarts he'd signed to his Rocafella Records label. "Welcome to New York City" begins with Jay-Z introducing the "Empire State: Home of the World Trade," just as a boxing announcer might. On the chorus, Juelz blusters in his boisterous adolescent pitch, "It's the home of 9/11, the place of the lost towers." Cam'ron starts his verse with a grim, "There's a war going on outside; no man is safe." The rest of the lyrics are cocky, pugilistic, and not always on topic, but the message is clear: New York is back. This was post-9/11 art not as uplift but as reawakening. The post-9/11-era had begun. 

8 September 2011