Carl's Rock Songbook, No. 126: Durand Jones and the Indications, "Love Will Work It Out"
Soul, Rock, Morrisey, Woods, and the Idea of Fraternal Love
Colder days now, but do you remember that early June 2021 moment, that warm little window when it seemed like the pandemic and the overdone reaction to it, might be largely over? The vaccinations had been widely rolled out in the U.S., and at that point even many of those who had declined from taking them, such as myself, expected them to prove largely safe and effective. The lockdown policies had either already ended, or appeared to be winding down. Masks were coming off. Despite the continued edict-issuing by many of the usual Covid-19 overlords, they were increasingly being ignored; and in many red states, they (finally!) faced new laws that limited their power. Across the world, concerts, sports events, and similar gatherings were resuming. So the time was seeming just about right for dancing in the streets, but sure, in a more subdued mode given all we had been through…and just then, the stellar soul-revival group Durand Jones and the Indications dropped “Love Will Work Out.”1
This was the second song released from the album Private Space, which in terms of their own development, features a turn into classic disco. I have no categorical objection to that sound, as my recent chapter on “Social Dance in the Films of Whit Stillman” indicates, but I do think Private Space is not quite up to the standard they set with their first two releases, their delightfully rough-sounding eponymous debut E.P, and their epic chill soul L.P. American Love Call.
Still, I’ve enjoyed Private Space, and “Love Will Work It Out” feels like a song that could have been a classic, maybe even could have been the song of summer ’21.
It did not become a hit, though, and one reason is that the song’s lyrics were running against deeper societal currents. Time-tested cliches about the healing power of Love, such as those deployed by the O’ Jays in their great 1973 hit “Love Train,” just could not click in the year 2021. Too many of us knew that the state of pandemic division might be not over—our elites had not yet nodded “yes”--and too many of us knew that the more general run of events in 2020/21 had ruined civic trust.
Sure enough, by mid-July, a summer surge was underway, and worst of all, a coordinated media-backed campaign of rules-reimposition—and escalation--was launched by our elites amid the uncertainty. The rules now centered on the segregationist and natural-rights-renouncing policy of vaccine mandates. It was all too clear what kinds of shameful actions it would all lead to, and so in early August I wrote what may be my most depressing essay ever, “A Vile Week.”
But let’s go back, back to that tentatively hopeful June moment of the song’s release. Jones begins by recalling his group’s extensive touring in 2019:
As I roamed across this land,
and felt the pulse of every heart of every man,
I sang some songs to heal some souls--
lookin’ back--it felt so very long ago.
Folks overtaken by disease--
all the people lost made me fall right down to my knees.
All I could do is cry and shout,
I knew I had to trust the faith that love would work it out.
Joy will set us free--
if you do believe.
So don’t you ever doubt--
that love will work it out.
I got so down being alone,
watching modern-day lynchings in the streets that I called home.
I felt so helpless in the strife,
but I knew I had to trust the faith that love would make it right.
The first stanza echoes the sense of an earlier Durand Jones song, “Morning in America,” that this band--perhaps because it is an interracial one, and its music has appealed to whites, blacks and Mexican-Americans--feels a duty to speak now and then to the state of the nation. The band generally writes songs about dancin’, romancin’, break-ups, etc., but that song was a call for greater economic justice for working-class folks across the land.
“Love Will Work It Out” is a similar attempt to bring us together, and most all of us will appreciate its line about people falling to disease, the one about the toll of being alone, and especially, the one recognizing that pre-March-2020 times felt so long ago.
Most conservatives will not, however, like the modern-day lynchings line, and some will be tempted to dismiss the song as woke propaganda due to it. I do think that one phrase is a tendentious way to describe what I believe we should basically regard as police foul-ups, and ones which, even when they involve extreme carelessness, which in the case George Floyd was extreme enough for a jury to agree that it rose to the level of manslaughter, we should not rush to judge them as instances of racism, or as clear evidence of systemic racism. The correct view of the larger debate about the frequency of unjust police treatment of blacks, I believe, is the kind articulated by Heather MacDonald or John McWhorter. I do suspect that there is a good deal of anecdotal evidence shared among blacks that a pattern of anti-black police prejudice is still in play, and vivid memories from the 70s-and-earlier when it certainly was at work in most American police departments are added to those anecdotes; but as far what as the statistical evidence in our day tells us, support for a conclusion of systematic police prejudice against blacks simply isn’t there. BLM and its enablers are flat-out wrong about that--they slander, they incite, and they try to bypass standard democratic debate, when they make such claims with all confidence.
Such reasoning is why I was so tough on the song “Give Us Justice” released by another top soul-revival group Thee Sacred Souls, and why I am no fan of “Fight On,” done by the young, and Eli “Paperboy” Reed-trained, group The Harlem Gospel Travelers. I accuse both groups of a poorly-thought-through attempt to win “BLM points,” and of being irresponsibly ignorant of the evidence, much of it available prior to 2020, about that organization’s true character.
Are the Indications guilty in this song of a similar failing? I don’t think so, for there is another way to interpret the modern-day-lynchings line. The definition of “lynching” has never been limited to the instances when it was done to blacks, but includes any instance of non-judicial mob-inflicted death-sentence. Now, around 30-40 persons lost their lives in the course of the riot-protests of 2020, sometimes by chaos-enabled accident, as in the case of Summer Taylor, but in some instances, due to direct attack by looters or rioters. For songwriting purposes, if not for journalistic ones, it would not be much of stretch to use the term “lynching” to describe what was done to David Dorn or Aaron Danielson, nor what many in the mob that chased Kyle Rittenhouse intended to do to him.
So why shouldn’t watching modern-day lynchings in the streets, which is immediately followed by pained reference to the general strife, be interpreted as an attempt to lament both A) police atrocities, and B) mob atrocities? As a poetic attempt, albeit a somewhat botched one, to acknowledge the wounds of both sides? I strongly suspect the Indications were trying to find some middle-ground here.
My Carl’s Rock Songbook has at times featured thematic groupings of song-posts, and one of these was a series that considered rock’s “counter-cultural” championship of fraternal Love. There was a moment in the mid-to-late 60s where that championship was quite fresh, which is why my series of posts focused on that era. The posts were the following—I only provide links for those numbers which remain functional:
72. The Beatles, “It’s Only Love”
73. The Beatles, “All You Need Is Love”
88. Jefferson Airplane, “Let’s Get Together”
89. The Love World of Jefferson Airplane’s First LP
92. Brotherly Love Came to Woodstock
94. Jefferson Airplane, “We Can Be Together” (“An Enemy Will Bring Us Together”)
107. The Zombies, “Hung up on a Dream”
The key ones are probably numbers 88-89 and 92-94. I established, first, that the 60s counter-culture sought to conflate love as eros, love as lust, and love as fraternal love, and illustrated what was deluding about that. I showed, second, that the brotherly love was practiced with some seriousness at Woodstock and in the communes. I reasoned, third, influenced by the great theorist of fraternity Wilson Carey McWilliams, that as this hippie “Love” had little basis in a shared religion, and none in an actual political community, it was bound to fail over the long haul. And fourth, I confirmed this by showing that it rather quickly curdled, as in the 1969 song “We Can Be Together,” into an “us v. them” effort to secure solidarity via a common hatred.
So I concluded, as underlined in 107, that “Love” turned out to be an attractive dream that failed, even if songs seeking to return us to the ideal, such as Elvis Costello’s (originally Nick Lowe’s) “What’s So Funny about Peace, Love, and Understanding?” would often prove admirable and moving.
But we have entered wholly different era. “Love Will Work It Out,” while doing everything musically as fine as can be, and while appealing to same thing as those older songs, didn’t work.
Another recent example of the diminishing ability of the rock/pop scenes to invoke the power of fraternal Love, and one which suggests why, was seen in the immediate wake of Trump’s 2016 victory, in some songs released by Woods, including “Love Is Love” and “Bleeding Blue.” The former called for all good leftists to say the word “love” repeatedly, as it if were an incantation, and latter featured this shameful line:
Have you heard the news? Hate can’t lose.
Trump voters = Hate. Woods should have known better, as they had always evinced some awareness of the darknesses lurking in every human heart, and had penned one song, “Moving to the Left,” that expressed ambivalent feelings about the increasing signs that the Left would win over the millennials. But post-November-2016, there they were, with lyrics that pointed to a Party of Hate, and a Party of Love. Compare and contrast the much-better lick-your-2016-wounds-my-fellow-leftist song, “If You Need to, Keep Time on Me” released around the same time by Fleet Foxes.
Durand Jones and the Indications are a far more down-to-earth group than Woods, and I think a wiser one, but alas, there are quite a few “Captain Obvious” things any non-progressivist might say today about “Love Will Work It Out.”
“How was Love going to work it out with vaccine passports and mandates?”
“How is Love going to work it out for many thousands of nurses and medical staff who served us during the pandemic, who have now been, or face being, fired?”
“Any explanation for the 18,000 refuse-to-vax-or-to-disclose-their-vax-status marines and sailors who face career-ruination, about how Love will work it out for them?”
“How is Love workin’ it out in Australia, whose national, state, and territorial governments have implemented so many oppressive rules that one cannot keep up with them, and debate grows about whether it is still a democracy? (See this video by Bret Weinstein, esp. 18:00-19:00 and 54:00-111:00 ). Are the politicians who enacted all these measures (like this) going to just admit at some point that they went too far?”
“Or in Germany, which has just announced it will ban the unvaxxed from theaters, restaurants, non-essential stores, and other public places, and will begin demanding passports for use of busses and trains? Or in Austria, where the latest rules essentially ban the unvaxxed from going anywhere but the grocery store or the jogging path, nuking their elementary liberty rights, and logically requiring their firing from any job that cannot be done from home?
“How about in NYC? Or in one of the original hippie-headquarters, Santa Cruz, which now requires you to wear a mask indoors, even if at home?”
“Do these insane measures not forecast a long season of political struggle, fought out organization by organization, locality by locality, state by state, and nation by nation?”
“Does not the same thing apply to the more race-essentialist aspects of CRT being foisted on public school children? And to not a few other issues?”
“Even if you disagree with this characterization of the political scene, you see that it has some plausibility, don’t you? You can see why it’s likely that the more popular sort of soul song will be ones like ‘Stand,’ ‘Are You Man Enough?’ and ‘Big Lie,’ right?”
And let’s get a little more personal:
“Would you like to warn me, Durand Jones and the Indications, about the dangers of political anger? Like my pastor does? Would you like in this vein to sing me some songs to heal some souls? Well, I enjoyed seeing you perform in 2019, but most everywhere in the world now, I am forbidden from attending your shows. Due to my not being vaxxed--and precisely the same would apply if I were a vaxxed person who out of objection to mandates/passports refused to declare my status--I am barred, either by law, or by the rules promoters and clubs have themselves imposed, from being a Durand Jones and the Indications fan in the full sense. I now have natural-immunity, but of course in most places that matters not.”
“Sometimes I wonder, should I come anyhow, and stand outside the venue with a placard that reads ‘I AM A MAN’ in bold black-and-white?”
“And I wonder further, would those in line to enter the venue, seeing my protest, flip me off, shout at me to get-vaxxed-already!!!, or perhaps express the hope that I catch the virus and die? Most of your fans are better than that, but plenty of those who support the mandates do act that way. Not that everyone on my side of these debates behaves angelically! But nonetheless, there have been quite a few reports from nurses that many medical staff-workers, including doctors, say they wish they could exclude the unvaxxed from treatment, or at least send them to the back of the line.”
So the winter of our 2021 feels more suited for another song, one Morrissey released back in 2014, “Mountjoy.”
It’s about bad treatment of prisoners over the decades in a Dublin facility called Mountjoy, in operation since 1850, often used to punish those connected to the Irish independence movement, and which seems to still have, even under Irish control, a poor reputation. The song’s killer line is this one:
What those in power do to you,
reminds us at a glance,
how humans hate each others guts,
and show it given a chance.
I bring this bleakest side of Morrisey’s songwriting into this because quite a few of our Love-advocating citizens whose politics are more progressivist, types common in the indie-music scenes that supply a good portion of the Indications’ fan-base, need to face the fact that the vax-crusade has not just descended, since it embraced the mandates, into cavalier disregard for constitutional rights, but into sadistic hatred. Jim Cramer, host of a long popular cable show on investing, recently said aloud what unvaxxed persons like myself have reason to fear many others believe in their heart: that we should be forced to vax, in essence strapped-down to a table. I say it is a form of hatred, and a form of democracy-renunciation, even to entertain the idea of such a “policy.” And there was a time not so long ago where I could assume any minimally-respectable American would agree, and call for Cramer’s immediate firing. But given everything else our elites went along with in 2020-21, can anyone now convincingly say that it would be impossible for them to decide to try to pressure us into accepting Cramer’s “policy?” Very unlikely, sure, but impossible?
Morrisey is more right about who they really are, and yes, who we all really are at bottom, than those classic 60s songs about Love. I’m not saying his is the final word on human nature here, but obviously, it fits the second half of 2021 better than the Indications’ Love-talk.
To review: we not only will face increased political conflict at every level, but we will have hundreds of thousand having to deal with the fact that livelihood-crippling harms were inflicted upon them for what they will regard as insufficient, or hate-driven, reasons. Also, we will have millions who will never let go of the Covid-19 fear narrative, and, millions of populist-conservatives, such as myself, made fearful for the very survival of democracy.
Love, at least as it is sung about by Durand Jones and co., will be irrelevant as we seek to handle all that. Talk of fraternal love without serious discussion of what is required for movement into political reconciliation and forgiveness, is meaningless slogan-chatter from a bygone era, echoed forward to our ears by too-safe songwriting and other forms of inauthentic culture-production.
Don’t get me wrong, I very much want to return to an era where a song like “Love Will Work It Out” makes enough minimal sense for us, such that we’d give it the benefit of the doubt. But far too many on the supposedly Love-loving left, and in the putatively moderate middle, have not even begun to consider what it would take, especially in terms of their own confrontation of the Left-establishment’s many Hate-Stokers and Narrative-Guardians, to get us back to something like those times.
However, if and when America returns to a workable level of basic civility, which at present looks like it could only be the result of unexpected accident or an act of God, there is something about this song that might point to a possible meeting place, not of left and right, but of Bible-believers and secularists. For the song has an interesting relation to Christian Faith.
The first time I casually heard Jones sing of falling to his knees for all the Covid-19 deaths, and that he knew he had to trust the faith that love would work it out, I thought “Whoa, did he just declare a faith in God? Let me look at those lyrics!”
I quickly saw that a clear reference to God wasn’t there, such that Durand Jones and the Indications had either a.) kept the song acceptable for the secular segment of their fans even if some of the band’s members might be religious, or b.) hinted that they don’t themselves believe in the God of the Old and New Testament. The God that 1st John 4:16 tells us is Love. Whatever else we might say about the implications of that verse, those of us who accept it as scripture cannot but notice that in our times, many of those who reject our Faith in this God seem to want to put a faith in Love in its place. The Indications likely took some care to make their song acceptable to such atheists or pantheists who want to believe in Love. Regardless, I do respect it if they wanted to remain private/ambiguous about their own views on religion.
But what I must underline is that my Songbook--see especially no. 88--has shown how doomed a faith in Love simply is. No reason-respecting person can hold to it, and no larger set of people can run with it without it likely morphing, in the longer run, into a kind of hatred, as we saw with Jefferson Airplane in the 60s, and with Woods in our own time. It only begins to work, in my judgment, when channeled into a brotherly love that will primarily function within a particular community, perhaps even a nation, or, into one that makes some love-moves beyond all such communities, by means of a religious faith like Christianity.
A hostile atheist reader might at this point say, “Make your predictable little Christian conclusion, and be done with it!”
To him, I would say, “I assume you lean to the left, so look back upon 2014-2021 and admit what a disaster it has been, even from any sane leftist angle, and then consider what your future options are with respect to religion and modern democratic politics, and with respect to the possibilities present in democracy’s idea of fraternity. But spend some time, before you do, reading my Songbook. The one you might most benefit from is no. 96, which at one point compares the Declaration of Independence’s kind of peacemaking between the secular sort of republican and the Christian one, with John Lennon’s implicit declaration, in his ‘Imagine,’ of a soft yet ultimately to-the-death war between them. And if ‘soft war of extinction’ seems a hyperbolic way to describe Lennon’s call, see my most epic ‘rock and religion’ post, no. 106.”
My final word for the Indications, however predictable it is, is this:
“I take it you know that the source of soul music’s oft-celebrated potential for uplift and positivity, is its root in black gospel music, and I know that at least one of you, Aaron Frazer, knows what it is to co-write a convincing song in that tradition.”
“So maybe, some among you already know that there’s really no way to cultivate a living faith in Love without also seeking one in Jesus, or that there’s really no point in falling to one’s knees during a pandemic unless there’s a personal God who cares about persons. Or to speak of more mundane matters, maybe your Love Song could have worked better had it dared to more obviously invite those who believe in such a God into it, or to more obviously indicate that it didn’t insist on a replacement of their God with rock’s and pop’s faith-idol of Love.”
“It would have been a rather fine line to walk; and sure, your main job is to be a dancin’ and romancin’ band anyhow. But likely you know that no truly-healing American love-call can be made without engaging in bridge-building towards the Bible-believers, and perhaps you also see that that might best happen by being open yourself to walking across that bridge, whatever the other members of your band do, into your own acceptance of the Faith in Him who is, we Christians hold, the only reliable source of the Joy and Love you tried to sing of. May God bless you and your fine group in any case, and my thanks for all the great music.”
I am aware that by my own long-insisted upon Carl’s Rock Songbook distinctions, that this is not a rock song, though Durand Jones and the Indications is an R+B group that many in the rock scene are attuned to.
Carl--liked the disco song!
Here's the link you lost:
https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2014/01/carls-rock-songbook-89-the-love-world-of-jefferson-airplanes-first-lp
Here's another link:
https://www.nationalreview.com/postmodern-conservative/carls-rock-songbook-no-107-zombies-hung-dream-carl-eric-scott/