Featured Drone: Michael Friedman '97

I remember every Christmas at The Signet. We would sing Christmas carols—every last verse—as two or three of us would butcher the songs at the piano. I think at the time it never occurred to me to explore the origins or continuing appeal of these songs, but over the last decade I have been fascinated by the politics of popular song. The catchiest song in the show Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (I wrote the music and lyrics, Alex Timbers wrote and directed) was actually written in 1824, to commemorate a battle fought in 1814. For our curtain call, we sang a pseudo-punk cover of “The Hunters of Kentucky,” which describes (in mostly hagiographic terms) Jackson’s great victory in the Battle of New Orleans, and which was in no small part responsible for Jackson’s presidential victory in 1828. Inaccurate in most details and full of questionable lines (“For ev’ry man was half a horse/And half an alligator”; “Just send for us Kentucky boys/And we’ll protect your ladies.” For the record, Jackson was from Tennessee, not Kentucky). It was a great big hit. It was also America’s first campaign theme song. 

“The Hunters of Kentucky”’s transformation from inaccurate-but-catchy pop tune to political anthem shows the weird and hard-to-exactly-pin-down relationship between politics and pop culture. I think that, unintentionally and certainly unsystematically, I’ve been exploring what that relationship can look like in a lot of recent shows.  Paris Commune traces the downfall of a popular uprising using popular songs, written by its leaders, that document the events almost journalistically, and some of which later took on new and unexpected lives in popular culture; This Beautiful City uses the cheesy, wildly seductive power of Christian pop to help understand the power of the evangelical church in American life; and in Fortress of Solitude, a changing neighborhood in Brooklyn is reflected in the changing pop music influencing the lives of the characters.

Lately, I’ve been turning people into songs, and wondering about the ethics of doing that. I work with a theater company called the Civilians, which develops projects through investigation—usually interviews—and part of the process usually has me turning these interviews or investigations into songs. I’ve interviewed environmental scientists (“The News from Copenhagen”), pornographers (resulting in the songs “Squirting 101” and “Waiting For Wood”— more information on request), evangelical Christians in Colorado, Brooklyn politicians, and most recently, the Occupy Wall Street protestors in Zuccotti Park. (As I write this the New York City Police are kicking them out of the park.) The OWS interviews, which became an evening at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theatre, made me begin to wonder to what extent I am taking advantage of people when I turn their words into songs. If you take someone—a Paris Communard, a porn star, a jobless protestor—and turn his or her stories, words, even speech rhythms, and make them your own, is that a way of giving them a new platform to express themselves, or are you dissolving them into pop culture? Lately, I have no idea at all.

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Michael Friedman wrote the music and lyrics for Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which recently completed runs at the Public Theater and on Broadway. He is a founding Associate Artist of The Civilians, and has been the Composer/lyricist for the company’s In the Footprint, This Beautiful City, [I Am] Nobody’s Lunch, Gone Missing, and Canard, Canard, Goose? He also wrote music and lyrics for Saved and The Brand New Kid. Upcoming projects include Pretty Filthy, a musical about the adult film industry with the Civilians, an adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s novel, Fortress of Solitude, and commissions from Playwrights Horizons, the Huntington Theatre, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. With Steve Cosson, he is the co-author of Paris Commune.  He was also the dramaturg for the recent Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun, directed by Kenny Leon. A 2009-2010 Barron Visiting Professor at the Princeton Environmental Institute, he is an Artistic Associate at New York Theatre Workshop, and a recipient of a MacDowell fellowship, a Meet the Composer Fellowship, and a Princeton University Hodder Fellowship. He received a 2007 Obie award for sustained excellence.