A protest song, reloaded

By SARAH BOXER
New York Times News Service

Some songs have all the luck. They lead double, even triple lives, meaning everything to everyone, and meaning it passionately.

Last month, Green Day's Wake Me Up When September Ends was serving both as a protest song against the war in Iraq and as a patriotic ballad. It was (and still is) one of the most requested music videos on MTV. Now, thanks to the Internet, it is a song about the devastation that followed Katrina.

The song's original music video, made by Samuel Bayer (who also filmed the video of Nirvana's classic Smells Like Teen Spirit), is full of pathos and sap. It shows a young couple in love, then quarrelling and finally separated by war. As the young man fights in Iraq thinking about sunnier days, the young woman sits home waiting and fretting.

Although the band intended the music video as an anti-war protest, Kelefa Sanneh, a pop music critic for The New York Times, pointed out that it also "works pretty well as a support-our-troops statement." One blogger recently posted the Green Day video with the tag Great Recruitment Video. Maybe he was being facetious, maybe not.

Today, it's the same old song with a different meaning. Two weeks ago, Karmagrrrl, a blogger also known as Zadi, paired the Green Day ballad with television news coverage of Katrina and posted it at her Web site, www.smashface.com/vlog. Her video fits the lyrics like a glove.

Karmagrrrl's video begins with a view of green trees out the window of a bus. "Summer has come and passed, the innocent can never last," the song goes. "Wake me up when September ends." On the floor of the bus, you see a pair of red sneakers toeing the headline "HELP US" on a folded copy of The New York Post from Sept. 1. The picture in the newspaper shows a pair of feet in cardboard sandals.

From that point on, Wake Me Up is set to images of Katrina seen on MSNBC, CNN and The Oprah Winfrey Show. As the rain rages on MSNBC, the song swells: "Here comes the rain again, falling from the stars." A streetlight falls onto the wet street: "Drenched in my pain again, becoming who we are." Videotape of corpses carried on stretchers goes with this lyric: "As my memory rests, but never forgets what I lost." It's almost too perfect.

In the video the song's lyrics seem weirdly prescient, even though parts of the song make no sense at all. "Like my father's come to pass, 20 years has gone so fast." What could that mean? Perhaps that touch of incoherence is the song's key to universality.

And what about the instrumental interludes? They have been filled with excerpts from President Bush's remarks to hurricane victims hundreds of miles away. In what is either a remarkable stroke of luck, or the vlogger's artistry, the president's halting, I'm-in-this-with-you cadence exactly fits the folksy rhythm and earnest feel of the music.

"I want the folks there on the Gulf Coast to know that the federal government is prepared to help you." It's as if the president were onstage with the band. "Right now the days seem awfully dark to those affected, but I'm confident that with time, you'll get your lives back in order."

Is it possible that Karmagrrrl is empathizing with Bush? Is it possible that this is a romantic video about America in mourning? A few images undo that suggestion. At a certain point in the video, you don't just see families waving for help, infants crying in their mother's arms and children in makeshift carts. You see women shouting obscenities at the camera.

Unlike the original Green Day video, which could be either pro-war or antiwar, this one sends a clear message. Yet what makes the Katrina video work is that it isn't totally obvious from the beginning.

It glides to an end with a long panorama of homeless people sitting on curbs and waiting for help. The song goes, "Wake me up when September ends, Wake me up when September ends, Wake me up when September ends." Rather gratuitously, after the music has stopped, the president's mother, speaking from Houston, gets the last gaffe: "So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, and this is working very well for them." And it's a wrap.

By the way, Karmagrrrl is not alone. Around the same time she was joining Green Day's song to images of Katrina, two Houston rappers who collectively call themselves The Legendary K.O., Damien Randle and Micah Nickerson (who lives near the Houston Astrodome), made their own mash-up. They joined Kanye West's hit song Gold Digger with some of the ad-lib remarks that West made during an NBC telethon for hurricane relief, tossed in some more words, called it George Bush Doesn't Like Black People and posted it on the Internet.

It's now a hit on the radio and the Internet, and can be downloaded from various Web sites, including the rappers' own, www.k-otix.com. Already someone on the Internet named Black Lantern has added video. And there's no guessing about the sentiment.