Today we offer music and commentary from pop music legend (and LARB Contributing Editor) Van Dyke Parks, best known for his collaboration with the Beach Boys’s Brian Wilson on the long-delayed Smile album. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg: VDP has worked as an arranger and producer for everyone from Harry Nilsson and Ry Cooder to Bonnie Raitt to Joanna Newsom, a range amply illustrated by his new compilation CD Arrangements Vol. 1. And he’s been a consistently brilliant songwriter and solo artist in his own right, releasing irregularly timed but infallibly excellent records under his name since 1967.
Parks, who opened his debut long-player Song Cycle with a Randy Newman-penned ode to L.A.’s “Vine Street,” switches coasts — and iconic centers of industry — with “Wall Street,” a track from his new series of original 7" singles released through his own label, Bananastan Records. Before we go any further, here’s the song:

Audio courtesy of Van Dyke Parks and Bananastan Records
Written well before the financial crisis and current Occupy Wall Street protests as an immediate, impassioned response to 9/11, “Wall Street,” which finally emerged in an official recorded version this year, nevertheless resonates with the concerns of the present moment. The sprightly, show-tune-ish opening verses could equally well be spoken by an aggrieved protestor or a resentful banker: “I don’t feel like laughin’ now / I could use a laugh and how … Gotta lotta nerve alright / Not what I deserve tonight / Thought I ought to get together, tell that so and so.” “Shakin’ the Big Apple tree” — shaking it down? shaking its foundations? — is the order of the day.
This gives way to a gentler, more lyrical section — it’s not quite right to call it a chorus — which tells of “ash in the air / Confetti all colored with blood”: a gruesome ticker-tape parade in which the confetti could equally well be shredded currency as decimated office products, or the “love letters lost in space” the song’s narrator imagines. Similarly, a reference in the second verse to “a falling man in grey,” an obvious 9/11 reference, now additionally suggests the slow-motion downfall of the American financial system, particularly when followed by the grim punchline: “Why wait for speculation?”
To avoid imposing our hare-brained interpretations any further, we asked Van Dyke to offer an explanatory statement of his own. To wit:
The lyrics to “Wall Street” were fashioned within a week of the Twin Towers’ collapse. At that time, there was a spasm of jingoistic chest-thumping enthusiasm in song form urging retaliation (viz. “Let’s Roll,” by Canadian ex-pat Neil Young).
I had grave misgivings about retaliation, acutely aware of the frictive tectonics between Islam and Christianity (viz. the Crusades). Yet I was even more concerned with the ethics of publishing a song at the expense of the deceased. So, I retired the 9/11 field.
On that very morning, my NYU student-daughter was 5 blocks away from Ground Zero, being chased by a serpentine wall of ash and debris. She was on the phone to me in L.A. (just out of the shower, watching the live event on television). She asked what she should do. I asked her what she was doing. She said “…..running as fast as I can, northward!” Good thinking, I thought, relieved that she found shelter on 24th Street at Diane Von Furstenberg’s apartment.
At that very moment, a short four blocks away, my friend Art Spiegelman waspicking up his daughter Nadia from elementary school. She greeted her frantic fatherat the door, pointing up to the sky. “Look dad, those birds are on fire.”
Mr. Spiegelman and I have commiserated about all this, and he agreed to donate his perspective (a man and a woman on their descent from one of the towers) as sleeve art for the 45 r.p.m. hi-fi stereo virgin vinyl single I’ve just released at bananastan.com and on iTunes.
My song was an attempt to raise questions. Why are we so despised by the undeveloped world? Why do Islamists believe that American cultural exportation has contaminated the globe? What can we do to avoid such enmity, without resorting to the insufficiency of militarism in a guerrilla theater (visit Vietnam)?
Today, the pressing questions are economic ones. Inequalities between the rich and poor could not be more entrenched anywhere than they are in the United States. That fact is largely overlooked by foreign observers, blessed by national healthcare safety nets and other civil services. MacWorld now views the U.S.A. primarily through its music and movies, which paint a picture of vapid sitcom jollity. T'aint so.
The “Wall Street” flip-side “Money is King,” written by Calypso great The Growling Tiger, underscores this sudden spate of public outrage at the bank and corporate bail-outs, with a simultaneous reduction of services for the poor. This toxic mix has created a spontaneous combustion reminiscent of Tsarist times.
The Creed Is Greed, in a nation dominated by stone-age fundamentalism — despite the fact that Christ admonished against greed and usurious interests repeatedly, raising valid questions about how Capitalism-run-amok can square with Christian precepts.
The “Occupy” movement, while indistinct and lacking a theme song, is emboldening an all-too patient middle-to-underclass seeking a higher moral ground. It’s about ethics.
Some of us who live now in the Arts were alive when FDR meted out inclusionary aid programs, forging a national attitude capable of a positive GNP. That man, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, still had it in him to accommodate the disenfranchised. I’m but a handshake from that prescient President.
Naturally, I, like those encamped in tents on Wall Street and at L.A.’s City Hall and elsewhere, want my country back. It’s been wrested from us by the shareholders, as unconcerned as landlords in absentia, aloof from any principles of fair play or reasonable return.

Revolting as it would be to “Eat the Rich,” as we used to say, it’s time to include “the least of these,” and give them a place at the groaning table.
I view 9/11 as a harbinger, a ghost of Christmas Future. Say it ain’t so, Joe.
— Van Dyke Parks, Pasadena, October 2011
To purchase “Wall Street” b/w “Money Is King” and the other singles in Van Dyke Parks’s series, visit Bananastan.com. Van Dyke Parks and Inara George perform at the Getty Center in Los Angeles on November 5th (but, sadly, it’s sold out).