Again: No good reason, beyond my sheer love of the song. Sometimes Billy is an angry prophet — sometimes he’s just a man in love.
It’s bad timing and me We find a lot of things out this way And there’s you A little black cloud in a dress The temptation To take the precious things we have apart To see how they work Must be resisted for they never fit together again If this is rain let it fall on me and drown me If these are tears let them fall
Hearing these words, I remember this feeling so sharply it hurts all over again.
A random Billy song, just because it’s really nice! Here he sings the Rod Stewart classic “Reason to Believe” with Lisa Miller (an Australian singer of whom I’ve never heard, but doesn’t she have a lovely voice?). This was recorded in 2003 for the Australian show The Panel, and apparently the two artists met for the first time just a couple of hours before performing together live.
Even the most casual reader of this blog will know that I am a great admirer of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s work, and am very active in the community that has grown up among his readers — and though lately I don’t have as much time to hang out there as I have done in the past, I’m still taking it all in.
Yesterday, for instance, Ta-Nehisi wrote not once but twice about the essential cruelty of America’s right-wing. In the first post, he wrote:
[An] embrace of cruelty is arguably the dominant feature of the present conservative movement. It has been repeatedly expressed in alleged “humor.” The assertion of a right of judgement over the First Lady’s physical person, for instance. Or watermelon patches on the front lawn. Or Obama waffles. There is little distance from that kind of cruelty to aspirin between one’s legs and from aspirin between one’s legs to transvaginal probes.
In the second, he discussed Rush Limbaugh’s execrable treatment of a law student who had wanted to testify before the House of Representatives on the issue of insurance coverage for birth control, writing:
[I]t is worth calling this what is is–the normalization of cruelty–and asserting, no matter how redundant, that is wrong and evidence of the lowest aspects of humanity.
It’s very hard to escape the same conclusion, in light of the racism, misogyny, homophobia, and anti-poor animus that the GOP and its hangers-on have been spewing with convincing vehemence ever since the 2008 elections, and I think that was part of what I was getting at (if in a round-about way) in this post: “Liberals, Conservatives, and human nature.”
But of course, Billy Bragg has had a thing or two to say about these same notions. Because he gets it, Billy does. And so today I bring you “Between The Wars” — and as is so often true with Billy, this song is both very specific to time and place, and shockingly universal.
I kept the faith and I kept voting
Not for the iron fist but for the helping hand
For theirs is a land with a wall around it
And mine is a faith in my fellow man
Theirs is a land with a wall around it, and mine is a faith in my fellow man. Yep.
Back in the 1990s, Woody Guthrie’s daughter Nora got in touch with our man Billy, and asked him to write music for a whole treasure-trove of lyrics that Guthrie himself had never had a chance to set to music.
Which is to say: The torch was passed.
Bragg recorded these songs with Chicago-based band Wilco in the Mermaid Avenue project, and they’re probably the best known of his work in the US — but as they’re not “his” songs, I don’t really much associate them with him. Which is madness, really, and I’m sure he’d tell me so.
Be that as it may, there is one song that emerged from those recordings that I particularly love: “Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key.” The other day I commenced to look for a video — only to stumble upon the following, a truly random and delightful slice of Canadian pop culture: Billy Bragg performing on the (apparently) defunct kids show “Peggy’s Cove” (or, possibly, “The Peggy Show.” I’ll have to ask one of my Canadians to clarify this matter for me).
Did I say “performing”? I meant: Singing to a dancing lobster (ok, it’s really more of a rhythmic swaying that the lobster does, rather than a dance — he’s a puppet, after all), who eventually offers to row our Billy back to England. The visual quality isn’t quite HD, but the clip is really quite outstanding, nonetheless.
And the song, as ever, lovely.
Enjoy!
I lived in a place called Okfuskee and I had a little girl in a holler tree I said, little girl, it’s plain to see, there ain’t nobody that can sing like me
She said it’s hard for me to see how one little boy got so ugly Yes, my little girly, that might be, But there ain’t nobody that can sing like me Ain’t nobody that can sing like me way over yonder in the minor key Way over yonder in the minor key there ain’t nobody that can sing like me.
It was my father’s 82nd birthday on Wednesday, but he wasn’t here to celebrate: He died of cancer when he was 35 and I was 10 months old.
As a child, I think I believed that grown ups stop missing people who died long ago. I think it seemed a little odd to me when a grandmother would start talking about her own grandmother with sorrow.
I’ve realized, of course, that loss never really ends. We live differently with it over time, but it’s always there. I am always, and will always be, a little girl wanting to hold her dad’s hand.
82 years ago, in the very hospital and on the very floor on which my daughter was born (coincidentally on the anniversary of his death), my father was born, a tiny, wrinkled thing, a baby — a promise. Not anyone’s dead dad yet, not anyone’s dead husband. Just a promise. I wish he could have lived more of that promise out before he was taken from us.
Billy Bragg wrote a lovely, aching song of sorrow and missing for his own father, and while it seems odd to sing it for my dad — the lyrics show that Billy has very clear memories, and I have not a one — the grief in his words feels like the grief in my own heart. So: This is for you Daddy. I love you.
Some photographs of a summer’s day
A little boy’s lifetime away
Is all I’ve left of everything we’ve done
Like a pale moon in a sunny sky
Death gazes down as I pass by
To remind me that I’m but my father’s son
I offer up to you
This tribute
I offer up to you
This tank park salute
And I worked real hard ’til that company closed down They gave my job to another man On half my wages in some foreign land And when I asked how could this be Any good for our economy? I was told nobody cares So long as they make money when they sell their shares
Can you hear us? Are you listening? No power without accountability!
Later on Billy says “I guess its true, nobody cares/’Til those petrol bombs come spinning through the air” and I’m not sure I agree with that, but when he says “The ballot box is no guarantee that we achieve democracy/Our leaders claim their victory when only half the people have spoken” what I hear is: Get.Out.The.Vote.
Are unions perfect vessels of workers’ better angels? No. Nothing humanity does is. But I figure unions are an awful lot like democracy: A terrible mess that is immeasurably better than anything else on offer.
My great-grandfather Carl (married to great-grandma Emily) was a union organizer in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and I have never felt anything but deepest pride in that fact. It breaks my heart that working men and women are having to fight so hard to hold on to, or entirely re-establish, the kinds of rights that I’m sure he wanted to see made permanent — such as the simple right to organize, as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 23, sec 4).
And so, given the ongoing assault on workers’ rights (Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, anyone?), it’s time to allow my beloved Billy Bragg to be his most rabble-rousing socialist self, and remind us that there is, indeed, power in a union.
Which is precisely why the right doesn’t want unions to survive.
Now I long for the morning that they realise
Brutality and unjust laws can not defeat us
But who’ll defend the workers who cannot organise
When the bosses send their lackies out to cheat us?
Money speaks for money, the Devil for his own
Who comes to speak for the skin and the bone
What a comfort to the widow, a light to the child
There is power in a Union.
Billy pretty much re-writes this one on an as-needed basis — this is the 2011 version, performed this past November at Keele University in the UK. Verily, he is the wisest of men!
Sample lyric:
Things have not been this bad
since the days of Margaret Thatcher
So stay calm, carry on
and watch X Factor
…
The World Wide Web is wonderful
if you’ve got something to sell
but opinions often summon up
a focus group from hell.
It’s best not to get distracted
and stay focused on your goals
and take my advice, don’t feed the trolls
(their mum’ll bring them, you know, milk and biscuits before they have to go to bed).
And some of you wonder why I love this man so much. How could I not?
Readers may feel free to dedicate this song to whomsoever they feel it best dedicated to.
There you are standing in the bar
And you’re giving me grief about the DDR*
And that chip on your shoulder gets bigger as you
get older
One of these nights you’re gonna get caught,
It’ll give you a pregnant pause for thought
You’re a dedicated swallower of fascism
Time up and time out
For all the liberties you’ve taken
Time up and time out for all the friends that
you’ve forsaken
And if you choose to waste away like death is back in fashion
You’re an accident waiting to happen
*I’m pretty sure the reference here is to the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, aka East Germany. In the clip below, Billy swaps out “DDR” for “USSR.”
Again: No good reason, beyond my sheer love of the song. Sometimes Billy is an angry prophet — sometimes he’s just a man in love.
Emily L. Hauser - In My Head 