Why Let's Roll Doesn't Rock
by Yancey Strickler

Perhaps pop music's greatest strength is its ability to depict the torments of personal crises through lyrical ambiguities. By emphasizing emotion and skimping on the details, a songwriter lets listeners interpret the words until they resonate with their own lives. But when an artist attempts to write a song about a specific, communal moment, it rarely connects. Neil Young and Paul McCartney's respective songs following the World Trade Center disaster illustrate this by attempting to capture emotional duress on a global level and failing miserably.

Young's "Let's Roll" (listen here) expands upon the conversation between Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer and an Airfone operator before he and several others overtook the plane, crashing it into the Pennsylvania countryside. Young sings from Beamer's perspective, which he imagines as frightened, but resolute, at the task ahead. The first verse ends:

One's standing in the aisle way, two more at the door/ We got to get inside there before they kill some more/ Time is running out/ Let's roll

While it has received plenty of airplay (for the week of Jan. 10, it was the 25th-most-played song on rock radio), "Let's Roll" hasn't connected on the universal, unavoidable scale that a reaction song by Young's first substantial band, Buffalo Springfield, did. "For What It's Worth" was written after a 1966 flare-up on Los Angeles' Sunset Strip between hippies and police. Rather than deciding beforehand how the song would be interpreted, songwriter Stephen Stills left the lyrics vague, conveying a basic sense of fear and distrust instead of detailing actual events, allowing its re-appropriation as the quintessential Vietnam anthem.

Paul McCartney's "Freedom," which he unveiled at the Concert for New York City Sept. 11 benefit, is less harrowing and explicit than "Let's Roll," but it possesses a similarly direct focus. Putting aside the mediocre melody (listen here), McCartney's intent can only be singularly interpreted. The childishly simplistic lyrics include the word "freedom" 19 times, "right" 10 times and "fight" six times.

Both songs arrived quickly after Sept. 11, "Freedom" in October and "Let's Roll" in November, revealing that they were immediate reactions to the events, not the calculated examinations that likely will begin surfacing on albums this year. For those familiar with Young, the rapid recording and release of "Let's Roll" should remind them of "Ohio," the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song about the Kent State shootings that entered the Billboard chart only two months after the event.

"Ohio" is as specific as "Let's Roll" with its fierce "Four dead in Ohio" chant, but the community that it appealed to — alienated, leftist youths — was much smaller than the national scope Young is currently tackling. Most importantly, there is more at work in "Ohio" than lyricism. The guitar riff buzzes just as ominously as Young's terse voice, allowing the song to seem angry even if it were instrumental. Contrasting that with "Let's Roll," whose guitar line rips off David Bowie's "Fame," and "Freedom," whose vocals are mixed so loudly it sounds like karaoke, it becomes apparent that, unlike the new songs, the inspiration for "Ohio" runs deeper than just lyrics.

The World Trade Center attacks, as many have stated, were not just against America, but against humanity. Yet there is a significant distance between those events and Young and McCartney. The Kent State shootings were against a specific group, those involved in the anti-war effort, that in many ways Neil Young epitomized, making "Ohio" an extremely personal song even though he wasn't there that May afternoon. "Let's Roll" and "Freedom," however, are detached, hollow reactions that try too hard to represent the imagined defiance and woe of the globe, not the palpable emotions of an individual.

E-mail Yancey Strickler at ystrickler at yahoo dot-com.