The Sound of 9/11

 

In my diary entry of 9/11/2011 I wrote:

Beautiful morning, as it was 10 years ago. [Watched the commemoration]. Things I liked: The power of names and how musically they are recited. Music performed at ceremonies is always immediately powerful and resonant: The sound of an airplane, the sound of memory...

On the morning of 9/11/2001 I was on the El on the way to work. I recall that I was reading a review of Love and Theft, Bob Dylan's new album that was released on that day. I was probably reading it when the first plane hit. 

Greg Kot's review:

[Perhaps obliquely prophetic, as Dylan always seems to be]: "Rumbling drums and moaning backing vocals suggest that things are going from bad to worse. ‘It’s tough out there,’ Dylan rasps. ‘High water everywhere.’

Everything happens when most people are unaware that it's happening. Just like the Danish Businessman in my post Photography Trauma, who was stuck in a traffic jam and saw a firefighter running through the tunnel, then other people running. Eventually you feel the blast of reality. 

There were several hundred people on that El train that were going to arrive at a place where they would hear the news (feel the shock wave).

Traumatic events create memory scars. For me, it's always being scored like a movie. In the weeks and months after 9/11 all the music I listened to and the music I wrote was like a soundtrack to that memory.

The playlist post-9/11 (not a reaction, just what was in the rotation, songs and albums which haunt me to this day). They seem arbitrary, and they are, but it's my mixtape of emotion.

• Mutations, Beck
• All That You Can't Leave Behind, U2
• Time Out of Mind, Bob Dylan
• Outside, Bowie
• Earthling, Bowie
• Various world music (Mostly North African/Turkish)

 

Postscript:

Bush 9/11/2021 on sound metaphors:

 "The world was loud with carnage and sirens, then quiet with missing voices that would never be heard again."