In Denys Arcand’s film Decline of the American Empire, one character describes getting a hand job while discussing the millennium with his masseur. This, he pinpoints, was the moment he knew he was in love. This is a remarkably apt metaphor for my love of a great pop song. Not just good, great. Good you can dance to. Great sends shivers down from your spine through your fingertips. It makes you cock an eyebrow and say, “Damn.” It shows up on the mix CD’s you give to the girl you’re trying to impress. Great will not necessarily get played at your wedding, but will help you through your divorce. And the point extrapolated from a near twenty-year-old movie is that it’s the perfect combination of sex, emotion and intellect that will ever have me devoted to and championing pop music, that hooker with the heart of gold.
“Pop music” is a big fat vague term that means entirely different things to different people. Sadly, for most folks these days, the term conjures up Brittney, Justin, and Celine, just as I’m sure it once conjured Pat Boone, David Cassidy, and Right Said Fred. For me, however, it’s about an art and a craft by poets and musicians who know that catchy tunes aren’t any less hummable for having insightful, revelatory or provocative lyrics, but in fact are often better for it. They know that sometime, somewhere, someone is waking up hung over from last night’s party, with the stereo still on “shuffle” re-playing the song they were rocking out to mere hours before and having some turn of phrase or guitar lick assert itself upon them, as if for the first time, like a double-double chasing the Beefeater out of their system. These artists are innumerable, but for the sake of context, a few of them I might include could be Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, Prince, U2, Johnny Cash, Public Enemy, Nirvana… a very obvious and mainstream list I grant you, but it’s important to realize that these artists all have had a huge impact on many people, without ever having compromised their work. It seems to me that in the current pop climate, artists with both gravity and a knack for sexy hooks are almost entirely relegated to the sidelines of college radio and critical darlinghood. There are a few exceptions that seem to sneak through: to be au courant I’ll mention Franz Ferdinand and Kanye West, but it’s still too early in their courtship with the fickle public to know if they’ll stick around.
So why the vacuum? Blame the consolidation of media outlets, record companies who favour the quick money made off singles over long-term artist development, and maybe even listeners who don’t want to hear anything that resembles their parent’s music. The Why’s are perhaps best left to economists and cultural studies majors, but I can saunter out to the other end of the street with a couple of solid Why Not’s. It’s not because the artists aren’t out there, and it’s certainly not because the world we live in doesn’t provide enough fuel for an Iraqi oilfield sized fire. Goddamnit, people, we have amongst us some of the finest songsmiths the world has ever known, and political tumult up the asshole every day.
So who’s gonna do it? Who’s gonna whup the stale status quo and bring some life and credibility back to the three-and-a-half minute pop sucker punch? Any songwriter worth his salt reading this should be saying, “Me”. But until that day arrives, maybe we can deal a few blows with the help of Steve Earle and Morrissey.
“Strange Bedfellows” is the phrase I think you’re looking for. Yes, Steve Earle and Morrissey, who have little in common, except that each is a man of distinct vision, and they’re both consistently very good at what they do. Both released new albums in 2004: in August, Mr. Earle offered us his most boisterous and impassioned album yet, The Revolution Starts Now, and in May, the reliably miserable Mr. Morrissey swaggered back to action with the rapier-sharp You are the Quarry. Worlds apart stylistically, yet not as disparate as you may assume, both of these artists know and respect their audience, and are established enough that a good swing at the flabby mainstream could actually yield some new fans and mobilize normally passive listeners into full-on flag wavers for their respective causes.
Steve Earle is someone that has always made my top-five list for “guys you’d feel best about having on your side in a bar fight.” Like Merle Haggard or Glen Danzig, you know that Steve’s not gonna fuck around, and indeed, when he sets his musical sights on you, he’s leaping straight for your jugular with brass knuckles and a broken Sam Adams bottle. So if I were George W. Bush, I’d be pissing in my pants right about now. The dude opens his record with an incitement to revolution, so you know you’re off to a good start, and the rest of the album follows suit. Every track is somehow related to all post 9/11 American governmental policy, which if I had to guess, Steve’s a little bothered by. He’s never been shy about his self-described “pinko-ism,” therefore in the face of the most abhorrent US administration since… the last one; his strength and clarity of purpose should come as no surprise.
The impressive thing about his writing though, is that he never takes the obvious slant. Jokes about brawling aside, Steve Earle’s greatest weapons are his poetry, his compassion and his sense of humour. Combined with some nasty, snarling guitars and a never-failing sense of melody, this is sonic pamphleteering at it’s finest. After we’ve shaken our fists and booties to “The Revolution Starts Now”, track two, “Home To Houston” checks in with a soldier whose gung-ho has been quickly replaced with a prayer for survival in the field of battle. “If I ever get home to Houston alive, then I won’t drive a truck anymore,” he promises. Perfectly followed by “Rich Man’s War” that reminds us that no matter what God and country bullshit leaders trumpet, war is just as much a domestic issue as a foreign one, spilling the blood of a nation’s poor, for whom military service is one of their best, if most Faustian bargains. Join the army, get a degree, see the world, and shoot some people you’ve never met. “A stack of overdue bills and off to save the world/Been a year now and he’s still there/Chasin’ ghosts in the thin dry air”, mirrored by his foe, who “…answered when he got the call/Wrapped himself in death and praised Allah/A fat man in a new Mercedes drove him to the door/Just another poor boy off to fight a rich man’s war.”
Each song is unfailingly persuasive and moving, filled with urgency and eloquence. “Warrior” is an eerie, churning spoken word piece about the tarnished mythology of bravery. “Condi, Condi” is a hilarious calypso love song for the Ms. Thang lurking within Condoliza Rice, and “F the CC” is a rather direct bonjour to the FCC. (Fish in a barrel there I suppose, but it’s raucous fun.) Earle seems determined not to let the Bush gang off the hook for their inhumanity or any fellow American off the hook for ignorance or blind patriotism. If you love your country, he challenges, prove it with love and concern for your friends and family and some actual participation in your democracy. He is a romantic, seeking out the true heart of his nation, appealing to their capacity for building instead of destroying.
Morrissey’s “You are the Quarry” is not as focused on a specific political agenda, but it is his blend of the deeply personal with the political that that makes it feel whole. He writes of politics in the way that any intelligent, reasonable person who casts an eye to the world around them says to themselves, “Why are things so fucked up out there?” He knows the intrinsic link between self-loathing and the need to lash out that can make people not just sad but cruel, and how unfortunately attractive that is to most of us. He’s been refining this thematic combination from day one with The Smiths, and all his subsequent solo work. Ugly/sexy, weak/strong, want/need—I don’t think Morrissey would ever want to write of the heads without the tails. He seems the perfect vessel for these kinds of songs. A Brit living in LA, a famous recluse, ambiguously gay, the man knows dialectics.
Now, for having said he’s not that political, he does open up his album telling America how much he loves them, but also where they can shove their hamburger. “And don’t you wonder, why in Estonia they say, ‘hey you, you big fat pig…” He then takes a shot at his homeland in “Irish Blood/English Heart”. “I’ve been dreaming of a time when to be English is not to be baneful/To be standing by the flag not feeling shameful, racist or partial.” But like Earle, the point here is their knowing how great these families that they’re a part of could be, and feeling frustrated by the current state of affairs. He’s surprisingly often more direct than Earle, singing mostly from the first person, with laconic intimacy, so even if he were only portraying a character, you feel that “you really know him”. I suspect this plays a large part in his fans’ strong devotion.
Honestly, I never gave a damn about the Smiths, and was only a casual fan of his solo work until now. Perhaps it’s simply the right time and place for his potent heartache. He lays bare desire (“This World is Full Of Crashing Bores”, “Let Me Kiss You”) struggles with faith (“I Have Forgiven Jesus”) and admiration versus self-loathing (“How Can Anybody Know How I Feel?”, “I Like You”, “You Know I Couldn’t Last”) which seems to be a long-time favourite indulgence. Interestingly, in “First Of The Gang To Die”, Morrissey essentially gives a shout out to his sizable young, straight, male Latino following (see Chuck Klosterman’s “Viva Morrissey” in Da Capo press’s Best Music Writing 2003). There, with a dark flourish, he speaks for a violent soul: “You have never been in love until you’ve seen sunlight thrown over smashed human bone.” Perhaps in each other, Morrissey and the gang bangers recognize hurt and struggle, for love, for respect. But most often, I have to say that Morrissey mostly comes off like your quiet, “fancy” uncle who lets loose at a family function when he’s had a few too many glasses of wine… bitchy and hilarious. Did I mention that all these songs are also catchy as fuck? You should see me at work, dancing around singing, “You fat pig, you fat pig…”
I sing (and dance) the praises of these two men because I feel aligned with their ideas and musical sensibilities, and perhaps I’m not the most objective judge. Maybe these albums won’t convert the casual listener: it could be that these artists are too old and unmarketable to be fully embraced by the mainstream. Maybe their appeal is too selective and they won’t turn the tables on the tacky shit that reigns in iPodville. But I remain optimistic. Politically, more and more people feel disenfranchised by their institutions, unsettled by witnessing how the world can steamroll right on over them (or someone really no different from them continents away) and no matter where you live, that ain’t cool. Socially, it gets harder and harder to connect when so much of our culture encourages hiding away with our toys. Music has always run in cycles from pap to inspirational, but I think we’re coming back to a time when shaking it “in da club” just isn’t going to cut it. People will want theme songs for their return to humanity, folk songs, slave songs, blues, country, punk, and hip-hop calls to arms. Arm yourself with intelligence and melody; they can carry you a long way. Maybe it won’t be Steve Earle or Morrissey. But just like one hippie at Woodstock who may have campaigned to end the Vietnam war, or one Midnight Oil fan who devoted themselves to aboriginal rights, or one Rage Against The Machine fan who boycotted Esso, there will be one person who hears either of these records and decides they can be more than just a call to “Much On Demand”. Hell, Green Day just put out an anti-war record, so what does that tell you about where things are headed? Perhaps soon we can all look forward to Justin’s new Pete Seeger tribute album, sure to score another three-and-a-half minute victory for the real pop music.