Van Morrison :: Into the Mystic
A couple of years ago, I started making a playlist. At first, it was called “for nostalgia” As it grew, though, I renamed it “for feeling like a White American.” I realized that was what it was really for.
I’ve done more than a little bit of thinking about what this kind of playlist means. There’s the uncomfortable truth that the music on the list — the music that makes my guts feel nostalgic, melancholic warmth — is less linked to my actual past than to some cliché of a racial-national one. How did something that started with nostalgia end up as a kind of scary white patriotism? Then there’s the fact that I am a White American, and that needing a playlist to feel like what you are says something about White America (and about me). There’s the somewhat embarrassing actuality of what kind of musicians are on the list — Van Morrison, Petty, Springsteen, Mellencamp — all husky-voiced, dirty-shirted dudes (not a woman in the bunch). Plus, I’ve got to face it: these are the very musicians being used in creepy, calculating ways to pump up crowds at political rallies; they’re the musicians that get used to sell America to me. Am I sitting around propagandizing myself with my playlists?
A friend of mine has been bouncing around an idea for a Guilty Pleasures party for years — a celebration of the music that makes us feel bad to feel good about. I figure I’ll appear at the door with a cd-r of my ‘white’ guilty pleasures. I’ll burn the White American playlist; I’ll own up to the songs that make me feel comforted in the involuntary way that only something so deeply inculcated could. And Van Morrsion will feature prominently in that collection.
(side note — for years, I thought his line was: “into the MISTAKE” — not “into the MYSTIC.” Maybe telling on a whole other level.)
Into the Mystic (4MB MP3)
Van Morrison (homepage)
Katy said on friday, may 30th, 2008
Rob said on tuesday, june 10th, 2008
Wait. You’re white?
Tina said on thursday, june 12th, 2008
My white half wants to come dance to Come On Eileen too! My black half does not know whether to mock me or kick my ass for this, but while that half is confused there is a moment of opportunity.
I refer you to my own blog from St. Patrick’s Day, because I am an ass. The thing is, Van Morrison is from Ireland, his songs are on the jukebox in every pseudo-Irish pub in the US I have ever visited, which is all of them. The Irish in America and their weird move from freedom fighters and class warriors to, um…American bastards, really, is the sad part of my own internal song list of nationalist pride. You can fight it, or you and I can have a “Come On Eileen” and “Proud to be an American” dance party at my house. If we must live in the age of the Nation-State, can we not also rock?