Edges of Town and Their Darknesses

For a number of years now I’ve been listening regularly to Dan Bern. You’ll recall, I live in rural Wisconsin, and do not have much access to progressive radio, and for the most part, I don’t know what the hell is going on in contemporary music. Oh, I listen a lot to folk and acoustic music, and I continue to buy what I know, and even take occasional chances on the unfamiliar, but in general, well, I’m out of the alternative mainstream. But one year, at year’s end, I was at my office (probably reading student papers, sigh), and I was tuned into my favorite radio station, WFUV, which broadcasts from Fordham University, in New York. They had listed the 100 best records (I know, I know) of the year at year’s end. For the bottom seventy five albums or so, they played from each a significant cut or two. Then, for numbers twenty five to eleven, the station played an entire side of the album. Finally, for the top ten, the disc jockeys broadcast the entire album! Number three for the year (I think it was 2000), was Dan Bern’s New American Language. I sat and listened to the entire album, and then immediately went to Amazon.com and ordered it. And for the past five years, I’ve been listening to it, well, almost weekly.

The custom of playing these albums continues, but alas, whole albums are not permitted to be streamed in toto. I’ve fallen back into ignorance, but I am forever grateful to that single year when I sat in my office enthralled by Bern’s still magnificent production. Later, I read that his band is called the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy, and that Bern himself has re-identified himself as Jewish, joining Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen as boychiks in the studios. That’s important to me!

So today, I was running (again and still), listening still to Dan Bern’s New American Language. And for the first time, I heard this line in the song, “God Said No,” a bitter song about human hubris, vanity, incompetence and selfish pettiness. In the song Bern accuses that though we espouse good intentions, our humanity has not enough integrity and vision to accomplish much of anything. It is a bleak and dark song, which ends with the following lines: “God turned away/From the edge of town/I knew I was beaten/And that now was all I had.” But when God turns away from the edge of town, Bern is denied foolish access to a past he can’t (and won’t) change, and is condemned (?) to accomplish something in the present, and even on the edge of town.

And I was reminded of Springsteen’s paean to the darkness at the edge of town:

I'll be on that hill with everything I got
Lives on the line where dreams
are found and lost
I'll be there on time and I'll pay the cost
For wanting
things that can only be found
In the darkness on the edge of town

In Bern’s vision, that darkness is where God leaves humanity to itself. It’s not a comforting moment, but it is all for which one can hope. After all, when God walks away it is humanity which remains. I have learned earlier from Emmanuel Levinas that wht replaces the face of an absent God is the face of the human being. In Springsteen’s world, that darkness at the edge of town is where one confronts ones hopes and dreams, but it is also a place where no one looks too long in your face. It is as if to be in the darkness at the edge of town is the only and worst place to be. Perhaps in the darkness at the edge of town, we are the most vulnerable, and we are respectful of our failures and that of the others. I’ve loved Springsteen’s darkness at the edge of town, and I would add to it not light but human warmth and compassion. Maybe this is what Dan Bern brings to the edges of town.

I know the darkness at the edge of town is a lonely place, where one can meet, though expect nothing from God. But when God walks away, it is only humanity that is left. I would look them in the face, and have them see me face to face.