Remember that time after September 11th when there didn’t seem to be that much artistic reaction to the tragedy? (Musical reaction, anyway.) True or not, even WNYC’s Soundcheck did a show about it, so it at least felt true. Evidently we all expected an outpouring of outrage and sense-making and groundbreaking folk epics, but instead we all had to stuff our 1st-gen iPods with Blu Cantrell’s apparently accidental “Hit ‘Em Up Style (Oops!),” JLo and Ja Rule’s “I’m Real,” and Ja Rule’s “Livin’ it Up.” The Ja Rule computes – he was in effect our acting president back then – but Blu Cantrell?!

There were at least a few attempts to acknowledge that Twin Towers business, though, and the best ones seemed to be the ones that were microscopic. Think Springsteen’s “You’re Missing,” for example, where we’re in somebody’s apartment instead of looking down on the global politic. Another was from Elvis Perkins, well-known to be the son of Anthony Perkins and Berry Berenson, a photographer who died in the September 11th attack. In the sad, sadly-resolved, carefully-paced elegy “Ash Wednesday,” Perkins draws images of “a black and white of the bride and groom” that smash hard against “the colorized bad dream” that ultimately, finally, empty out their home forever (Perkins’ father died in 1992): “its king and queen sleep, both now, in the arms of Ash Wednesday.”

MAPPING IT

It maps, obviously, to lower Manhattan, where the very thought of that hole in the ground was still making everybody spontaneously puke from sadness by the time this was released.

HEARING IT

There’s a very good Daytrotter Session performance of this, but here’s the official release: