Telethon’s Music Defines a Generation

This is a different war, we’ve heard nightly on television from politicians and talking heads, and Friday’s telethon reminded us this is a different era in popular music as well.

The rock ‘n’ roll descendants of blues and folk artists, who would have been excluded from earlier prime-time showcases as voices of rebellion, have become the ones the country turns to as voices of unity.

The defining moment during a national World War II radio benefit: Bing Crosby singing Irving Berlin. There was still a place for Berlin on Friday, as Celine Dion sang “God Bless America.”

But the telethon’s central moments involved rock artists, including Bruce Springsteen U2 and Neil Young, who drew upon the music and/or spirit of Bob Dylan and John Lennon.

The difference Friday was that the show’s organizers didn’t feel the need to shield us from music that reflects on the full horror and heartache of the terrorist attacks or the severity of the challenges ahead.

There were some concessions in the choice of artists in the name of ratings and cultural diversity, but the emotional core of the show rested on the sort of gripping social realism that rock inherited from folk music and the blues.

The heart of the lineup underscored the organizers’ faith that Americans are tougher emotionally and more demanding philosophically than backers of similar shows might have imagined in earlier decades.

Remember, Dylan was once considered a radical. CBS refused to let him on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1962 because he wanted to sing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” which mocked the right-wing organization. And there were rumblings about deporting Lennon in the ‘70s when the FBI during the Nixon administration considered him an agitator because of such songs as “Imagine.”

Springsteen was a perfect choice to open the telethon because he, like Young and others, is at the intersection of so many of the social forces that run through rock, someone who has drawn from Dylan, Lennon, Guthrie, Hank Williams and Robert Johnson.

Rather than turn cautiously to one of his uplifting anthems, he set a stark, serious tone for the evening by singing “My City of Ruins,” a number he wrote (but hasn’t yet recorded) about hardships surrounding Asbury Park, N.J., where he started his career.

It was a sense of emotional honesty and naked introspection that was carried on with Stevie Wonder’s “Love’s in Need of Love Today,” U2’s mix of “Peace on Earth” and “Walk On,” the Wyclef Jean version of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” and Eddie Vedder’s teaming with Young on the spiritually edged “The Long Road.”

The telethon, too, was an uplifting renunciation of the timidity shown by a major radio group last week in sending its program directors a list of songs that might be inappropriate because of offensive or unsettling lyrics.

Two of the songs on the list proved to be the most moving Friday: Lennon’s “Imagine,” which was sung by Young, and Paul Simon’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” which Simon performed.

In its vulnerability and deeply rooted passion, this wasn’t a telethon about America as someone would like it to be in this time of national mourning and anxiety, but a glimpse of America as it is--and, one senses, this is a generation that will settle for nothing less.