[This past June, Bruce Springsteen released Tracks 2, a stunning collection featuring 7 previously unreleased full albums (totaling 9 LPs) from the early 80s through the late 2010s. It’s full of great music, but our favorite was Inyo, an album that connects to so many American histories. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy four songs & the album overall!]
On two
ways the stunning title track added to my sense of LA histories.
Way back
in February 2012, I dedicated
a blog post to one of my favorite films, Chinatown (1974), and how it
can help us analyze the history and identity of Los Angeles. In lieu of a full
first paragraph here I’ll ask you to check out that post and then come on back
for a couple thoughts on how “Inyo” reflects and extends some significant
shifts in my thinking since then.
Obviously
I’m aware—as anyone who’s seen Chinatown has to be—that the white
men who built modern Los Angeles in the early 20th century were not always
beacons of goodness (to put
it very mildly). But in that post, I still referred to William Mulholland
as simply a “particularly visionary city planner,” and at least implied that his
aqueduct project was a straightforward public good. So I really appreciate
that Springsteen’s song “Inyo,”
the speaker of which first works on the aqueduct and then helps bomb it as part
of the 1910s-20s “California
water wars,” highlights how that aqueduct and its vital resources were
consistently shaped by wealth and power. Moreover, that speaker includes not
just class but race and ethnicity in his story, narrating, “My uncle pushed the Paiute from their valley/Cut
out his homestead in blood.” Chinatown includes one young Native American kid
(probably—it’s hard to say for sure) in its vision of LA, but this moment in
Springsteen’s song really adds to those histories.
All of those
histories have very much continued into our 21st century moment, and
as my wife and I listened along to “Inyo” I was delighted to find that
Springsteen’s speaker brings us up to the present in the song’s stunning final verse:
“Tonight the Santa Ana’s drawing west across the Mojave/Blowing fire and dust
onto L.A. County windowsills/Bill Mulholland and Fred Eaton are dead in their
graves/The Queen of Angels, she remains thirsty still.” Back in this
October 2021 post I connected California wildfires to Chinatown through
the lens of David Wyatt’s excellent book Five
Fires, and of course that unfolding contemporary history has only
become more potent and destructive in the four years since. And I really love
how Springsteen’s song connects our current crises back to the histories of and
battles over water in Los Angeles, one more layer to how fully and beautifully
this opening title song sets the stage for the whole of Inyo.
Next
InyoStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Favorites from Tracks 2 you’d share?
No comments:
Post a Comment