John Legend & The Roots : I Can't Write Left Handed

It's been awhile, mostly due to school work, but after being subjected to some Lady Gaga recently I feel the need to make a couple posts, so here we go.



While my normal listening doesn't normally consist of R&B and Hip-hop, as the artists in the title would suggest, I love old style blues, which is what this song is. This is a cover that John Legend and The Roots did, and it is originally by a blues guitarist named Bill Withers. He wrote it in the wake of the Vietnam War, and it's about an American soldier coming home from the war with a wounded shoulder, making him unable to write with his right hand (and as the title suggests, he can't write with his other hand).

One of the most powerful aspects of this song is the use of volume swells, when the lyrics are docile the music is quiet and minimalistic, and when the soldier remembers getting shot the music picks up with big drum fills and distorted guitar, and it feeds the emotions of the song in a way that I think is somewhat hard to find in modern music. Especially since it isn't very hard to translate this song from Vietnam to Iraq.

Another brilliant addition by the drummer (Questlove) is that whenever the lyrics turn back to Vietnam, he starts playing the snare in a way that you would hear in a military marching band, trying to keep soldiers marching in time. In a way they're sort of the modern drums of war, and whenever the soldier thinks of getting shot he can still hear them, it really throws the listener into the a military state of mind every time the chorus ends, which I think is really clever and powerful.

The lyrics themselves set themselves apart from what most war songs and stories try to do, which is show the battlefield or what the war itself is/was like. What this song does is show the aftermath, what the soldiers do when they return, trying to go back to normal lives. It is a great example of social and political commentary. On the one hand, he can't do simple tasks because of his physical injuries, but that isn't what is the worst thing for him. It's the chorus, where he's talking about the war and the Vietnamese man that he's never seen before who shot him, that's where the music picks up and shows anger and emotion. The normal life doesn't bother him at all, but the thought of shooting strangers and getting shot at by these other people that he doesn't really have any quarrel with at all.

I think that this song is powerful because it provokes many contemporary images of the Iraq war, and I believe that this song will continue (or should continue) to pop up in mainstream music and culture as long as wars continue to be fought.