The Day the Music Died: The Invisible Republic in Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn

Abstract

Steve Erickson’s novel Shadowbahn, published in the wake of Trump’s election, opens in the near future of 2021, with the dramatic and inexplicable reappearance of the Twin Towers in the Badlands of South Dakota. Not least astonishing is that they appear to emanate music. As people come to see the Towers “some hear the music and some don’t,” while people who hear the music hear different songs. As the Towers seemingly produce music, all over the US music begins disappearing. As we read, we perceive that music is functioning as a shadow narrative in the novel, signifying a desire for meaning that hovers at the edges of the textual narrative. While the soundtrack of the ‘invisible republic’ revisits national trauma, this is not confined to 9/11 but also references multiple violent divisions in the nation and especially those involving racial difference. In Erickson’s telling, American popular music is, like the nation, corrupted at its root, and so he is wary of its redemptive promise. And yet, he values the communal power of music, its ability to connect an imagined community; that music stops across America following the apparition of the Twin Towers, signals a profound loss of history, civic community, and democratic possibility, an ambivalence that is also that of a writer challenged to imagine an alternative American reality in the era of Trump.