This is an article I wrote for the
Barbelith zine that was, for one reason or another, never published: had it been, it would've looked something like this...
The Trouble With Normal: Bruce Cockburn's Political Pop
He's had his moments in the limelight, but he's always had more on his mind than fame. Bruce Cockburn spent the Reagan Era singing about Liberation Theology, dirty wars, and the perils of globalization. Jack Fear gives a fresh listen to the finest political pop you've never heard.
The small fact that he's refused to alter his surname to the homophonic "Coburn" evidences a certain unwillingness to compromise: but musician and world traveler Bruce Cockburn's contrarian integrity goes beyond a willingness to repeat oneself for the benefit of hotel clerks and lazy journalists. In his thirty-year, 25-album career, Bruce Cockburn has laid bare his heart—and his politics—in songs of shivery tenderness and searing anger.
Emerging from Toronto in the singer-songwriter boom of the early 1970s, Cockburn gained some small renown for his drawling, unaffected vocals and virtuosic guitar-playing. But as the 1980s approached and the institutionalized wimpery of Dan Fogelberg and Jesse Winchester was ground beneath the boot-heels of Punk, Cockburn plugged in, allied himself with producer/keyboardist Jon Goldsmith, and set about reinventing himself as a pop star.
He tried his best, even though he cut an admittedly odd figure on American Bandstand—a snaggletoothed, bespectacled hulk, his many earrings bristling out like a peacock's fan. But, with typical contrary stubbornness, Cockburn spent the height of the Reagan Eighties composing paeans to the Sandinistas and vilifying the "big, bad scary" United States—and reaped the whirlwind for it: somebody forgot to tell Bruce Cockburn that pop stars are supposed to be, well... popular. The relative obscurity that resulted is undeserved. In driving folk-rock songs splashed with jazz, funk, and (occasionally) C&W, Cockburn has delivered his lyrical broadsides with passion and—rarer still—wit.
Most of Cockburn's work falls into four broad songwriting voices (although the lines, as we'll see, often blur):
Travelogue Bruce: Pop music is generally brusque when it comes to atmosphere, but Cockburn will spend a verse or two talking about the birds, or the moon, or light reflected on water. At first you wonder when he's going to get to the point: then you realize that the atmosphere is the point. An avid traveller since dropping out of high school and busking around Europe in the mid-1960s, Cockburn has developed into pop's foremost scene-painter, with a journalist's eye for the telling detail—finding small moments that speak volumes in songs like "Tibetan Side of Town," (from the album Big Circumstance) or this verse from "Berlin Tonight" (1986's World of Wonders), written when the divided city was still at "the front line of the last gasp," when perestroika was just starting to ring the death knells for the USSR...
From the top of a solitary tree like the one on the flag of Lebanon
Unblinking eye of hawk follows traffic on the autobahn
Tank convoy winds down smokestack valley
Proud chemical pennants wave against the sky
Turret gunner laughs when I throw up my hands
I'm all glasses and grins under my "commie" fur hat
Cockburn isn't just narrating his vacation slides here: ramble though he may, he never, ever wanders.
Mystic Bruce: Underpinning nearly everything Cockburn writes, in varying degrees of explicitness, is a sense of immanence, of greater meaning behind mundane events. Though occasionally given to bald pronouncements like "God won't be reduced to an ideology," ("Gospel of Bondage," from Big Circumstance) he's more likely to find the divine in his city scenes, as an extension of Transcendentalist nature writing, as in the title cut from World of Wonders:
There's a rainbow shining in a bead of spittle
Falling diamonds in rattling rain
Light flexed on moving muscle
I stand here dazzled with my heart in flames
That's Blake's "world in a grain of sand" with horn charts and a funky bass.
Romantic Bruce: Cockburn's songs of lust and loneliness tend towards the ecstatic, tinged with pungently sensuous imagery: "There are nine billion mysteries in the naked body," he sings on "One Of The Best Ones" (1991's Nothing But a Burning Light), or these lines from the brooding "Sahara Gold" (1984's Stealing Fire):
Wet limbs striped with silver light
locked together at the center of the night
And your hair tumbles down like Sahara goldNight bloom filling up the room
With the salt and musk of lovers' rich perfume
And your hair tumbles down like Sahara gold
Political Bruce: From the start, Cockburn (like many folkies) dabbled in a fashionable soft-focus leftism, from the vague antiwar sentiment of the 1979 single "Wondering Where The Lions Are" through early songs like "Stolen Land," which decried the treatment of Native Americans (a subject he's revisited, notably on ...Burning Light's "Indian Wars"). But as he travelled more widely, his causes grew more specific and his anger acquired a keener edge. Mid-80s sojourns to Central America fueled his outrage over US foreign policy, inspiring a string of blistering songs like "People See Through You" (World Of Wonders) and the ferocious "If I Had A Rocket Launcher" (Stealing Fire). Cockburn never peddles easy answers, though: though the climactic final chorus of "Rocket Launcher" ("...some son-of-a-bitch would die!") caused some controversy on its release, the song is largely a comment on how senseless violence simply begets more of the same.
Cockburn's politics have proved prescient: he was writing dispatches from Chiapas as early as 1983, and in 1986, when anti-globalization barely registered as an organized movement, his vitriolic masterpiece "Call It Democracy" (with its "IMF, dirty MF" hook) was the first single for World Of Wonders: poignant, funny (the "MF" is for "motherfucker," of course), and catchy as hell, it deserves to be an anthem.
Cockburn has recorded prolifically, and with mixed results. The production on many of his records sounds rather dated (the synth-heavy World Of Wonders, in particular, has not aged well); the righteousness occasionally grows shrill, and the mysticism woolly; the travel journals sometimes cry out for an editor. But as Cockburn settles into middle age, the missteps have grown fewer: recent records have shaded razor-sharp couplets with a pensive, acoustic sound, as on the exquisite "Pacing The Cage," from 1996's Charity Of Night:
I've proven who I am so many times
The magnetic strip's worn thin
And each time I was someone else
And every one was taken in
And so Bruce Cockburn has come full circle: the one-time would-be pop star has reinvented himself as a troubadour. With the zeitgeist calling out for the grand gesture—and pop radio crammed with songs painted in crude strokes—Bruce Cockburn, contrarian that he is, is sketching intimate moments, integrating his themes into a singular voice that speaks of both the inner and outer life.
All song lyrics written by Bruce Cockburn and published and copyrighted by Golden Mountain Music (SOCAN). Lyrics reproduced here for purposes of review and study only.
Links
The Cockburn Project (lyrics, biography, annotations and more)
Information on Liberation Theology
Buy the CD Stealing Fire Amazon US | Amazon UK
Buy the CD Anything Anytime Anywhere: Singles 1979-2002 Amazon US | Amazon UK
Buy the CD Live Amazon US | Amazon UK
