Starting to get out from being under the weather — thanks to all and sundry for the emails regarding the Tom Waits Road to Peace controversy (previous posts here and here). I don’t want to beat the subject to death, but here’s a bit of an interview from Britain’s Observer magazine where Waits addresses the subject, in a manner of speaking:

And one song stands out. Called ‘Road to Peace’, it concerns the Middle East conflict. It’s not the kind of song he usually sings, though his last album also contained an anti-war song called ‘The Day after Tomorrow’. This one is angrier. ‘I was pissed off,’ he sighs, rubbing his eyes. ‘Started with a line I read in the paper one day: “He studied so hard it was as if he had a future.” It was about this kid who got blown up in a suicide bomb on a bus in Israel. They say God doesn’t give you anything he knows you can’t handle. Well, I don’t know if I believe that.’

He’ll probably get his ass kicked, I say, for the line ‘… why are we arming the Israeli Army with guns and tanks and bullets?’ He nods. ‘Maybe. Maybe. But, we are. That’s just a fact.

I guess any time anyone from outside a situation voices an opinion, it’s going to be, “Who the f**k are you?” Don’t matter what side you’re on. But this song ain’t about taking sides, it’s an indictment of both sides. I tried to be as equitable as possible.’

The places and the incidents referred to in the song are all real, and the names of the people, too. He’s well aware, he says, of the risk of making a song carry that kind of weight. ‘I don’t really know what a song like that can achieve, but I was compelled to write it. I don’t know if any genuine meaningful change could ever result from a song. It’s kind of like throwing peanuts at a gorilla.’

The above doesn’t exactly support the notion that Waits has any clarity regarding the subject he’s writing about. He refers to “this kid who got blown up in a suicide bomb on a bus in Israel.” As his own song makes perfectly clear, the kid “who got blown up” was doing the blowing up. He was not a bystander: he was the suicide bomber.

He says it’s “just a fact” that the U.S. sells arms to Israel, as if the factualness of it is the issue. The issue is that his song is implicitly trying to make the case that we shouldn’t sell arms to Israel. I don’t imagine he’d be capable of explaining how a bloodbath many times worse could be avoided in a Middle East where Israel was perceived by its enemies as weak and vulnerable, due to an arms embargo. His song isn’t about dealing with reality; it’s about wallowing in tragic scenes of violence and reaching for platitudinous and irresponsible “solutions.”

He says “I tried to be as equitable as possible,” as if the proper point-of-view regarding any conflict is always that of being “equitable,” instead of making any judgments as to who is worthy of support and why. Nazis? Britain? It’s a pity America wasn’t more equitable in its approach to World War II.

Anyway, enough of my throwing darts at Waits. I received an interesting email from Zdenek in the Czech Republic. Some of his insights:

Firstly, as it sounds so disparately cheap an agit prop, it does neither belong on this, nor any other Waits-idiom album thematically and, even if he means it as a (sick) joke or provocation, it still is chutzpah. You know, I´ve been listening to Waits since 1976. I´ve published a lot of words about him and even had a two-volume songbook released with all of his lyrics translated into Czech language (try to imagine that…) up to the Bone Machine album (1992). You wouldn‘t believe how difficult it sometimes was to get his final approval (through his impressarios/lawyers in Germany and California) with the final Czech version of almost every line he had ever written in terms of its comprehensive semantic exactness and compliance with the original English meaning of the artist´s imagination and his poetic license. Having thus been able to analyze his songwriter´s thinking in detail, I noted that, from a certain moment in the 1980s, Kathleen Brennan´s influence on him, as far as the tone and the vocabulary of his writing as well as the unexpected themes he suddenly started to deal with in his songs are concerned, began to prevail over his original artist-as-voyeur concept. I don´t mean to say that she was sort of “civilizing” him or something, but definitely, he´s begun to be different, less of his own‘s. Therefore, I am inclined to believe that, rather than having some lapse of mind or, any Mel Gibson´s moment, as you put it, I think that he was just “artistically” ill-advised to include the above line. Perhaps, as a mere marketing gimmick. After all, he´s of some age, he doesn´t sell millions copies of his albums, has always cared for money (I mean his imitators-related lawsuits) and, also notable is his rather funny affiliation with the Anti-Records label which, in fact is viewed as a punkish one here in Europe, with all of the attributes that it takes. To mind also comes an unfortunate today‘s tendency of certain, often on-the-edge American artists, to naively take it on the U.S. Administration …

So, that’s an interesting and different angle from someone who has considered Waits’ lyrical styles in far greater depth than I have.

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