Code of Silence

[jenk]

Bruce won a Grammy for Code of Silence. This song wasn't released til 2004, but it was performed live in the summer of 2000 ... at many of the same Madison Square Garden shows that American Skin, inspired by Amadou Diallo's death, was performed and recorded.

While looking this up I ran across an article Dave Marsh wrote at the time for VH1. Marsh is married to Barbara Carr, one of Bruce's co-managers, and has written several books on Bruce. It makes interesting reading now as well as then. A few quotes...

Maybe what we were supposed to be surprised about was that the cops were attacking a respectable white rocker. That's a way of saying that [...] good white folks are supposed to go along with whatever crimes the police commit against black people.

[W]hat "American Skin" actually says about cops has not yet been discussed. The song mentions the cops only once. Its first verse portrays one of them "kneeling over his body in the vestibule/ Praying for his life." I presume the ambiguity is deliberate: Was the cop praying for his victim's life, or his own? That's the question this society needs to answer, and no matter what, it does not have a comfortable answer. That's why the cops and politicians like Giuliani try to silence it.