Adam Asher '15, the organizer of "Us Against Them," this weekend's Civil War-themed punk music production, does not seem like your typical punk rocker. Soft-spoken, cheerful and friendly, he embodies the dichotomy his production tried to demonstrate. But behind the microphone, all semblances of timidness faded away and another side of him was revealed — that natural instinct to be thrown around and beaten by your friends in a giant mosh pit as some fantastic music shatters your eardrums.
Asher and his band performed "The Monitor," the Titus Andronicus album that uses the Civil War as a mechanism for describing contemporary emotions. To increase the connection to the Civil War, Asher interspersed readings of speeches and poems from the time period between songs. The album name comes from the Civil War-era ship the USS Monitor — the first ironclad battleship of the United States Navy which revolutionized naval warfare.
In "The Monitor," many songs start and end with quotations from President Abraham Lincoln and others such as William Lloyd Garrison and Walt Whitman, but Asher made an effort to include the likes of President of the Confederate States of America Jefferson Davis and General of the Army of Northern Virginia Robert E. Lee.
"You hear about the south as a crazy group of rebels, but they had very clear reasons for what they were doing," Asher said. "Robert E. Lee was not an evil man, he just had very close ties to his state."
During the Civil War, a nation almost destroyed itself because it could not figure out what it was — pro-slavery or anti-slavery, a nation with a strong federal government or sovereign states, northern and southern or American. In various ways, every person has to deal with that conflict within himself or herself — figuring out just who they are.
Asher decided to do a concert featuring Titus Andronicus and the Civil War, not only because "It's just awesome music," but also because he said he saw a lot of themes of the Civil War in politics today. He mentioned the debate over the debt ceiling and current low expectations for the Congressional Super Committee's resolution on deficit reduction plans as particularly disenchanting. "Maybe there won't be an armed conflict, but there are these two different sides with different ideas for America," Asher said. He paused and then added the line from "Four Score and Seven," a song from "The Monitor" that gave Asher the title of his show — "It's still us against them."
"The Monitor" has received almost universally positive reviews and has made Titus Andronicus a household name among the indie-punk crowd, but in many ways Asher and his group outperformed these seasoned punk rockers. Unfortunately, the Brown students in the crowd refused to do their part and dance like they were soldiers in McClellan's army about to fight at Antietam — the way the crowd handles itself at a normal Titus performance. Despite a brief mosh session by five freshman boys, who seemed more lost than anything, and a few illicit beers during Saturday's show, the crowd underperformed. With a better audience, the combination of Cody Fitzgerald '15 and Nicholas Ebisu '15 on guitar, Phillipe Roberts '15 on drums, Adam Green '14 on the crowd-favorite bagpipes and Asher himself on bass and vocals, could give Titus Andonicus a run for their money.
Asher was surprised when Production Workshop's Upspace accepted his application for this performance in early October, but after a month of weekly practices, he said he knew the group was ready. For most of their seven-song set the group stayed pretty close to the original Titus recording, but Asher's voice added a unique flair to the songs. Patrick Stickles, the lead singer and songwriter of Titus Andronicus is known for his perpetual scream, but Asher preferred to sing instead of yell. Stickles would be hard-pressed to say this difference in any way diminished the essence of the album.
