Friday, March 28, 2003

Brand New Bag

You read a blog every day for years, and after a while you come to realize that you're still reading only out of habit or personal loyalty—weeks go by without a single item that you care about or even fully understand, as the tech-talk grows ever thicker and more alienating: and then there's a moment of crystalline perfection that makes you remember what you came here for...

...Niels Bohr [once said] "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum mechanics hasn't understood it". I'm not going to be talking about the war much for the foreseeable future, but ... my only piece of advice to people on both sides of this issue is an analogue to Bohr's comments—anyone who is 100% sure of the morality of their position with regard to the war in Iraq probably hasn't understood the issues involved.
Thank you, Tom, for encapsulating what seems to me to be the only sensible position in a world tipped off-axis.

Like Tom, I realize I'm not cut out to be a warblogger, really. I haven't got the necessary certainty, and frankly I'm afraid to acquire it. I cannot allow myself any sureties in this—nothing must be generalized, everything must be examined. God save me from my righteousness.

I really don't want to be a warblogger. But in a sense, maybe I always have been. Because this is a war. It's all a war, in one way or another: this just brings it to the surface. And for a while, I'll be breaking that surface now and then myself.

Thursday, March 27, 2003

Credit Where It's Due

The lyrics below, of course, come from the Skids. I bought Scared To Dance as a youth infatuated with Big Country and looking for the origins of their melodic roar, and it proved to be an important album for me. I spent hours listening to that LP—no mean feat, considering that its fourteen tracks run only about thirty-three minutes total.

I was initially attracted by Stuart Adamson's guitar, naturally, but there was something about Richard Jobson's vocals that held me—perhaps the fact that I couldn't understand a goddam word, so impenetrable was his bellow: because my original LP had no lyrics or liner notes, I had to pretty much make up my own words if I wanted to sing along. And such is the quality of the music that you want to sing along.

It's the template for a certain kind of perfect white rock song—bludgeoning rhythm section, keen guitar hooks, full-throated, footie-chant choruses. It's Pavlovian: I'm hard-wired to respond to it, from Tenpole Tudor on down. There's something martial about it, something wonderful and terrible as the scent of blood on the wind.

Big ups to Matthew for finding me a clean MP3 of "Into The Valley," by the way. Credit where it's due.

Friday, March 21, 2003


Into the Valley
Betrothed and divine
Realisations no virtue
But who can define
Why soldiers go marching
Those masses align
This disease is catching
From victory to stone

Ahoy! Ahoy! Land, sea and sky
Ahoy! Ahoy! Boy, man and soldier
Ahoy! Ahoy! Deceived and then punctured
Ahoy! Ahoy! Long may they die


Monday, March 17, 2003

I Thought I Thaw...

The other night, as I stood in the dark backyard, having a piss against the fence by the compost heap, I became aware of a low rushing sound at some distance away. As I tuned out the sound of nearby traffic, the sound clarified like an image coming into focus. I realized I could hear the sound of water flowing.

Well, obviously.

But this was the sound of the river, a half-mile away. The river was running again, and the pond behind it—across which I had walked in heavy boots just weeks ago, over ice a yard thick. Now there's open water, the waterfall is doing just that, and God help us, it is indeed Spring, or near as dammit.

(Hm? Why was I—? Oh, you know: marking territory. Keeps the coyotes away.)
(What's that? There are no coyotes in this neck of the woods? Well, there you go, then: it's obviously working.)

Friday, March 14, 2003

Singing the Goodbye Song

Actress Lynne Thigpen has died at 54. Cause of death is as yet unknown: she was not known to be in ill health.

She was a veteran of stage, screen, and television. You may not have known her name, but you'd know her if you saw her—a compact, no-nonsense black woman who could use her booming voice to either dramatic or comic effect, always eager for a bit of self-parody.

Lately, she was a regular on CBS's The District. But if you had kids in the late 1990s—if you lived in the States and had cable—you probably know her as the voice of a puppet moon, singing with a guy in a bear suit.

As the voice of Luna on Bear in the Big Blue House, Thigpen went soft, in the best possible way: her tone was wise, gentle, eternally patient. Like a force of nature. Like, well, the Moon. It takes one hell of an actress to be able to not only capture the essence of the Moon in performance, but to be the definitive Moon. If the Moon should ever speak, I have no doubt it will sound just like Lynne Thigpen.

So go to the attic tonight, gaze out at her face, just a few days before she comes on full, and sing one last round of The Goodbye Song.

Sunday, March 09, 2003

The Trouble With Normal


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.

cockburn

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 gold

Night 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

Wednesday, March 05, 2003

20th Century Motherfucker

You'd think this bastard would have no defenders left. You'd be wrong: human beings will let you down every time.

Hope you're frying good, you son of a bitch.