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Music

The National Are Beefing with Karl Rove

Rove thinks that the band sound like "Euro Tech Pop."
L: Matt Berninger on Instagram; R: Wikimedia Commons

The National's new album, Sleep Well Beast, was released on Friday and almost everyone has heaped praise on it. The record has the grown-up indie-rock band meandering into the political, not least on "Walk It Back," the album's third song. It includes a long spoken-word segment, mostly lifted from a quote in a piece written by journalist Ron Suskind at the New York Times Magazine in 2004. Here's how it's read on Sleep Well Beast:

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People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will —we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Contrary to the end of the segment on "Walk It Back," the quote was not "written on a whiteboard with a red sharpie in the Roosevelt bedroom, sometime around Christmas 2007." Matt Berninger said as much to the Rolling Stone. In fact, the quote was originally attributed to a "senior Bush advisor," long been believed to have been possible incarnation of Lucifer, Karl Rove. That's why, when The National agreed to give Suskind a small cut of the song's royalties, the band jokingly encouraged the journalist to split the money with Rove himself.

Now, Zach Schonfeld at Newsweek has reached out to Rove, presumably by lighting a series of candles, muttering Latin curses, and sacrificing a rodent of some sort. Rove responded via email with a small quote which, of course, puts the word reporter in inverted commas. "Not familiar with the band and the quote is fictitious," Rove wrote to Newsweek. "The only person in the room who supposedly heard this quote was the "reporter"—none of the other people in the room heard anything like it, including its supposed author (me)."

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As Schonfeld points out, Suskind never attributed the quote to Rove in the first place, and still won't do so now. But, whatever, Karl Rove doesn't like the National.

Off the record: starts with a Euro Tech Pop thing and transition into a more peppy tune that's easier to dance to and has a sound track that on YouTube is impossible to heard. Suspect it won't make Casey Kasem's Top 40.

There are a couple of good things here. The first is that Schonfeld never agreed to keep the email exchange off the record, thus giving us all the joys of Karl Rove's music criticism. The second is that Suskind will donate whatever money he gets from the song to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Unquestionably the worst thing about all this is having to think about Karl Rove dancing.

Follow Alex Robert Ross on Twitter.