Photo by Jefferson Santos on Unsplash
It is a warm, sticky October afternoon in Darwin (as if there were any other kind), and I am sitting in the waiting room of the local ABC Radio, about to do a short interview about a music performance series I have just taken part in. Having timed my bus ride into the city with a little too much caution, I have arrived a few minutes early. I am still the only one in the room. Sitting opposite me is a gaudy vintage amplifier, appropriately tuned to ABC Radio. I’m trying not to pay too much attention to the interview playing on the radio in spite of its volume (after all, I have an essay on nuclear armageddon to finish), but after a few minutes I can no longer ignore what is being said on air.
The interview features a composer who has written a piece using data from the covid-19 pandemic. This year has been defined by tragedy for which it is difficult to ascribe meaning or purpose, says the composer, and consequently we should turn to music to express what words cannot. More precisely, we should reflect upon the statistics this year has given us, which when converted into music yield a sort of transcendental beauty which cannot be achieved through more conventional methods of composition. Whether or not such an idea is entirely in good taste I have not yet decided.
As the interview ends and the piece itself starts playing – a sort of slow-moving post-minimalist work for a keyboard instrument I can’t quite recognise, enticingly experimental for the casual listener but at the same time still safely consonant in its harmonies – I can’t help but be struck by the thought that I haven’t heard much music about the whole covid situation. It’s not that I haven’t come across pieces of music and music journalism that suggestively point at this looming elephant in the discursive space of music culture – I’ve seen too many of those to remember. It’s more that I haven’t heard any music about covid. Not about it in the way that this piece on the radio is, vaguely gesturing towards what is supposedly its central thematic concern while relying mostly on some obscure generative algorithm that I suspect could have spat out more or less the same sort of piece by being fed just about any data that would suit its parameters. I haven’t heard music that was genuinely about this pandemic – music with lyrics and a sole, identifiable theme. There’s no song that I can point to and say, “Yes, that’s my favourite (or perhaps least favourite) track that’s been written this year about covid.”
Naturally, this strikes me as a little odd, considering how much airtime this virus has taken up outside of the artistic mediums. Covid has been on the news every day of the year since February. Nothing has garnered quite as much undivided attention from the press for such a long time in the history of the modern world. Even as I’m listening to the radio, the TV I can see through the window in the next room over is playing one of Dan Andrews’ press conferences. I suspect it played much the same thing at the same time yesterday. And yet, as much as I rack my brain for examples, I can’t come up with a single song I’ve heard this year on the topic.
Fast forward to today, and, after a little research, I’ve found a few. However, there seem to be many more that subtly flirt with the topic rather than attacking it directly. That’s not to say that nobody has tried. Pitbull has come out with a raucous quarantine banger that predictably misses the mark tonally, and Randy Newman has come out of retirement with a short piano tune that is in better taste but which still leaves me cold, while the latest drab rockabilly track from Mike Love has done little other than to further cement his position as my least favourite Beach Boy. All of these tracks try to take something that is inherently tragic and turn into music that is upbeat, or at least optimistic. This is hardly surprising – radio hits tend to be happy songs by and large – and at first glance it might seem like the most appropriate approach to the situation.
But there’s something awfully suspect in doing this. I imagine that’s at least part of why none of the cheery tunes I mention about the pandemic have gone on to become hits, at least not in any significant way. It’s hard to sell an optimistic song when there’s so little to be optimistic about. While Pitbull sings “I Believe That We Will Win,” speaking specifically of New York in the music video, overwhelming evidence suggests the contrary, at least in the short term. As the United States continues to break its own records for new infections on an almost daily basis, optimism and jubilance of the kind typically exemplified by Mr. 305 seem at best naïve and at worst vulgar and hubristic. While the message that the world, or in the case of many of the biggest covid tunes, the United States, will triumph over the virus is a good one to be spreading, there’s no ignoring the fact that making immediate promises of victory over covid right now is dangerously close to outright denialism.
Conversely, wallowing in misery is scarcely a better approach. While I can’t cite examples of miserable songs about covid that have been made by popular artists – largely, I presume, because songs advocating abject pessimism rarely hit the charts – it’s hard to imagine any track about accepting the misery of the post-virus world being anything other than counterproductive and irritating. The best example of a more ‘doomer’-inclined pandemic song is King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s Superbug, which takes a more speculative approach to imagining a disease-ridden dystopic world. However, this one was penned long before the coronavirus came into existence at all, and listening to the lyrics in 2020 (“likely killed humanity” being a line featured in the bridge), it’s hard to imagine anybody writing a song quite like it this year. What was fun as an imaginative adventure in August of 2019 is now less amusing and more real.
All of this is not to say that good songs have never been written about tragic events, quite the opposite. Under the right circumstances, reflections on tragedy become the bread and butter of some of the most powerful musics of all; musics that challenge the social circumstances against which the authors write. This is the bedrock of folk musics the world over. When Bonga wrote about the brutality of colonial and civil wars in Angola and when Egor Letov sung about famine and summary executions in the Soviet Union, they were making genuinely good art out of what was undeniably tragic, and mass tragedy as opposed to personal tragedy at that. But these were all songs of protest, songs where there was an identifiable enemy whose evil deeds had created the tragedy. In a situation like the one we are now faced with, it is harder to identify a single guilty party who is at fault. There seems to be two options for writing a song about the covid-19 pandemic: either write a tone-deaf motivation anthem about how nothing is going wrong and victory will come soon or scream into the abyss about an apocalypse for which you can offer no solution or relief. Neither of these templates is a recipe for particularly good songwriting.
I think there is a particular kind of tragedy about which it is hard to write a compelling song. Tragedies which not only create suffering on a massive scale, but for which there is no immediate solution. Examples of this sort of tragedy include natural disasters, terrorist attacks by the deranged and apolitical, famines, and, of course, plagues. Tragedies that seem more to be either the work of a malicious god or another example of the pure amorality of the anarchic universe, depending on your system of belief. It is under these circumstances that the futility of artistic practice is laid most bare. Put simply, there is nothing left for the musician or poet or author to do. Oscar Wilde once said that “all art is immoral” – every piece of artistic expression represents effort taken away from the cause of materially changing the conditions under which the piece was made. In times without tragedy, we can easily ignore this fact – Western society in peacetime is built on the back of various inefficiencies which we justify as giving meaning to life, and music is by no means the most egregious of these. In times of tragedy where there is a definite enemy or cause, the artist can take the role of polemicist or activist, and artistic expression can be rationalised through the paradigm of raising public awareness or anger against the whatever is causing the people to suffer. In times of tragedy where there is no enemy, no cause for the suffering, and nothing to rally against, there are no more roles for the artist to occupy.
At the end of the day, no song, or book, or poem, will make covid understandable. We can never really ascribe meaning to tragedy that occurs without explanation and without reason. When so much of the impact of covid-19 has been felt across national borders and behind hospital walls, it can be hard to grasp the impact of the virus in the same way as a more personal form of tragedy. The human mind isn’t built to understand statistics of mass death in the same way it understands individual stories of tragedy that have a victim, an enemy, and most of all a reason for them to happen in the first place. Perhaps, faced with such a horrible predicament, the best we can do is listen to hackneyed contemporary classical pieces based on the very data we still can’t properly process and wait for someone else to write the great covid masterpiece. I, for one, know I’m not going to try and do it.
Evan Keith is a musician and writer from Melbourne, Australia. He writes about contemporary issues in music and the relationship between music and politics.