"The BAND has their myths. I have mine," TA-NEHISI COATES wrote in 2009 about a then-40-year-old song by one of the most critically acclaimed and literate bands of the classic-rock era. It's one of the most devastating reviews I've ever read of a pop song, in this case an ambiguous, well-researched yet historically inaccurate story song set in Tennessee in the aftermath of the Civil War, told from the point of view of a defeated but proud Confederate farmer, and empathetic to his plight in the way that poems and books and films tend to be empathetic toward their subjects. Coates' review is not at all empathetic toward its subject, and there's no reason why it should be. We live in a divided world. It was divided in the 1860s, it was divided in the 1960s, it was divided in 2009, it's divided now, and Coates does not want to sing along with the "na na na na na na" chorus of "THE NIGHT THEY DROVE OLD DIXIE DOWN," as both the Band and JOAN BAEZ, who turned it into a major pop hit a couple years later, all but beg you to do. What, then, are we to do with this song in 2020, in this year of toppling Confederate statues and jettisoning words like Dixie and antebellum from polite culture and facing up to those centuries-old divisions in so many other ways? Can you still sing along with those na-na-nas? Can you—must you—change the words? Can you defend an anti-war song written in 1969 as an allegory that might not be about the Civil War at all? Does it matter if ROBBIE ROBERTSON, the Canadian songwriter who was inspired to write it by his drummer/singer's Arkansan father, has always been a little vague about what he was getting at? Is that even a songwriter's job? Does it matter that "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" is fiction? What does the fact that this has come up for discussion this summer say about 2020, or any year that came before? MusicSET: "The Classic Rock Song That Whistles 'Dixie'"... When is a stream not a stream?... TIKTOK sues the US government... Peripatetic streaming brand NAPSTER sold to virtual reality company MELODYVR in a $70m deal (the seller is my old employer REALNETWORKS)... Two very different approaches to soundtracking two of the best HBO series of the past year, one with underscore and one with hip-hop and R&B needle drops... You can't dance in Ibiza anymore.
