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Abstract
Historically, music has provided a voice for protest, solidarity, and hope during and in the aftermath of difficult times. In this paper, I discuss two popular albums which respond to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. At the time of each album's release, Springsteen's The Rising and the Beastie Boys' To the Five Boroughs offered unique opportunities for listeners to engage in a process of mourning and empowerment. As such, these works can and should be viewed as part of a larger context of popular music as a forum for both public grief and collective healing in the wake of tragedy.
Notes
1. The importance of popular music's role is underlined by archives like the Marr Sound Archives of the Miller Nichols Library at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, which maintains an online exhibit called: Citation Voices of World War II: Experiences from the Front and at Home . 27 Aug. 2007 ⟨http://www.umkc.edu/lib/spec‐col/ww2⟩.
2. The original German is “Nach Ausschwitz noch ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch.” The statement appears in Prisms (34). Later, Adorno would say, “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream…hence it may have been wrong to say that no poem could be written after Auschwitz” (Citation Negative Dialectics 362).
3. See the list of songs at music advocate Eric Nuzum's website.