After September 11, 2001, I began noticing another change in America. The music.
I had been living in the United States for only a few months. I was still getting to know the country through television, radio, and everyday life. After the attacks, even familiar parts of that life seemed different.
The change was particularly noticeable on the radio. In the aftermath of the attacks, Clear Channel Communications, now known as iHeartMedia, circulated an internal memo identifying 165 songs it considered “lyrically questionable” to play. Reports at the time described nearly 200 songs as being pulled from or discouraged on American radio stations.
The list included songs that, under different circumstances, would have seemed completely ordinary. Some suddenly disappeared from the radio. Songs like “Walk Like an Egyptian,” “Harvester of Sorrow,” “Killing in the Name,” “Jump,” “Burning Down the House,” and “Free Fallin’” had taken on a different meaning in the aftermath of what had happened.
And then there was one song I seemed to hear everywhere:
I remember hearing “Overcome” by LIVE on the radio and feeling unsettled by it. LIVE had been one of my favorite bands during my college years in the mid-’90s. I couldn't have explained exactly why the song affected me that way at the time. I was still trying to understand what had happened, while also trying to understand my place in a country experiencing something I had never witnessed before.
A few weeks later, I saw the song on MTV. The video included images of the aftermath of September 11 and of people responding to it—first responders, families, crowds, and ordinary people trying to make sense of what had happened. That was when the song became connected to September 11 for me.
“Even now the world is bleedin' but feelin' just fine. All numb in our castle, where we're always free to choose, never free enough to find. I wish somethin' would break 'cos we're runnin' out of time...”
The song itself had not been written about the attacks. But in the weeks and months that followed, it came to be associated with that period for many people. For me, it became part of the experience of arriving in America at a moment when the country itself was trying to figure out what came next.
What I remember most is not only the fear or the sadness. It was the way people seemed to recognize that, for a while, individual differences mattered less than what everyone had just experienced. People helped each other. They mourned together. They searched for missing family members and friends. They stood outside hospitals and firehouses. They tried to make sense of something that, in many ways, made no sense.
I remember how much everyday life changed. The news was everywhere. People talked about the attacks constantly. There was fear, uncertainty, and also a sense that people were looking out for one another. As a newcomer, I was seeing all of this while still trying to understand the country itself.
Twenty-five years later, I still can't hear “Overcome” without thinking about that time. It's simply one of the songs I remember from those first months in America, when everything I was learning about this country suddenly had to be understood in a very different context.
“So drive me out, out to that open field. Turn the ignition off and spin around. Your help is here, but I'm parked in this open space, blockin' the gates of love”