14 CLOSENESS AND DISTANCE Songs about AIDS PAUL ATTINELLO. ‘The most atrociously appropriate, viciously ironic of cultural crises in the West: sex and death bound together as Isolde never could have dreamed, all of it sharply complicated by dichotomies of gay versus straight, using versus clean, sexual freedom versus celibacy, caring for invalids or fleeing from them—women or men, black or white, healthy suburbanites confronted by wasted urban ghosts. Spanning the distance from Europe to Africa, from Washington to Bangkok, from the gated community to the gay ghetto, from the hand to the knee, from one pair of lips to the next, it exploded in 1981: suddenly there was GRID, Gay- Related Immunodeficiency Disease, and panic spread in the gay com- munities of the Castro and Christopher Streets. The first plays in 1983, and novels, stories, and films throughout the years since, grew into what is now a vast collection of narrative responses to AIDS. The visual arts jumped in to establish an antimodernist beachhead of slogans and vis- ceral self-expression, fueled by rage and a race against the clock. Musical works began to appear more stowly, but there were many by the late 1980s—benefits; protest songs; the musicals March of the Falsettos and Zero Positive; a prestigiously publicized symphony by John Corigliano, the new Lieder of the AIDS Song Quilt; a slew of works commissioned by various gay men's choruses; and a rude punk song titled “Rimmin’ at the Baths”222 « Paul Attinello Since this research concerns cultural products, perception and experience are vastly more important than concrete facts, Although statistical curves of infection, mortality, and treatment in different locations have changed variously over the past twenty-five years, the broad perception in the urban West of an inescapable crisis of illness and death ‘was probably at its sharpest peak in 1987-88. The ensuing years saw some softening of this eschatological view, as treatments were found to fend off various opportunistic infections. The biggest change came in 1996 with the appearance of protease inhibitors; since that year, life expectancy and general prognosis have immensely improved, as long as patients can get the newer medications. Of course, the pills don’t work for everyone and, more significantly, many people all over the world have no access to them; but Western journalists and intellectuals have tended to treat the crisis as less threatening than before—even as if, for practical purposes, the crisis is over. This means that the sense that this might be the end of the world—banging shutters on empty buildings in gay neighborhoods, gutters filled with corpses in Bangkok, camps surrounded by barbed wire, masked policemen, closed borders, quarantines—has receded from the public imagination, as have the atomic bomb scenarios of the Cold War. As a result of this retreat from the apocalyptic to the mundane, peo- ple do not seem as compelled to make art about AIDS these days as they did between 1983 and 1996, That period saw the creation of a great ‘deal of AIDS-related work—manifold novels and memoirs, with their detailed, tragic personal narratives; various approaches to theater, emphasizing the confrontative, the didactic, or the fantastic; poetry, much of it narrative, and more immediate than one might expect; and, of course, a vast array of visual artworks, including installations of many kinds, All of these are linked to the rise of political art during the 1980s in America, as discussed by Wendy Steiner.' In fact, I would suggest that the public reaction to AIDS was an important part of that increasingly political nature of American art, as it was also.a central reason for the move toward greatly increased media expression of tolerance and empathy aimed at a wide range of medical conditions and social problems, It also seems plausible that AIDS was a significant source of the boom in New Age musics and softer, more impressionistic musical styles, as linked to the expansion of the realm of “healing” music. However, there does seem to have been less of a musical response to AIDS than from the other arts; it also seems that music, across all its genres, is frequently more oblique and cautious in its presentation of strongly charged material such as political slogans or medical terms. A typical ex- ample is Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager’s “That's What Friends Are For”? a benevolent pop ballad designed for the typical Hollywood star benefit. This song is exceptionally careful not to mention anything specificCloseness and Distance + 223 to AIDS, instead broadcasting a generic message of support that could fit practically any situation. In fact, years ago when I was a member of the Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles and we were singing backup to the songwriters as the climax of a benefit for AIDS Project Los Angeles, I real- ized only during the dress rehearsal that the song was specifically written to support people with AIDS—this despite the overwhelming presence of AIDS in my social circles in the mid-1980s. Of course, many songs and teinterpretations designed for benefit performances tend to avoid specif- ics; this makes sense, as their purpose is to generate the kind of uncontro- versial empathy that encourages people to give money. Reasons why all the genres of music seem less political than compa- rable production in the other arts would certainly include commercially actuated censorship in the music industry, or obedience to the norms of social reserve in the classical sphere. Increasingly, however, I think a more generous explanation can be found—that music often works better as an expression of feeling states than it does as a vehicle for establishing a political stance, or documenting a contemporary situation. I do not, of course, intend for such an explanation to apply to all music—in the long-standing ethnomusicological argument over the existence of music universals, I am firmly on the side of the nays, and in any case there are always musical works and activities operating outside the boundaries of the merely typical. However, we do have a lot of ingrained musical habits in the West, many of them linked to sentiment and the creation of feel- ings—after all, the love song is a more central trope for music than the ro- mance novel is for literature. Therefore, though the typical construction ‘of music related to AIDS often reflects a certain social or political timid- ity, I suggest that might be because it is intended to convey more private or more fragile feelings than the shouting of slogans would allow. My own research has tended to focus on musical works written in response to the crisis, thus bypassing, for instance, repertories by musicians who have died, or reinterpretations and modified stagings of preexisting musical works. I have also tended to concern myself with works that are commercially available—as a result, most of the more than two hundred recordings and scores I have collected were produced in North America, with smaller numbers from Western Europe, Australia, and South Africa. Certainly, there is music about AIDS outside the urban West; however, a useful consideration of, for instance, protest songs in Brazil or educational jingles in Thailand is better served through fieldwork by scholars who know the culture and speak the language. Partly because of this Western bias, most of my materials also refer in some way to the gay subculture; it should come as no surprise that, of the various groups who have been most affected by