Don't Erase These (Lefty) Memories
Some Words About Billy Bragg

By Gavin Clancy
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January 4, 2000 | Page 1

Let's start by admitting this: American Folk, for all its mid-century potential, is dead. Its sense of topical immediacy and deep roots is merely an academic question today. Most moderns would have better luck intuitively understanding Medieval Christianity than the idea that a song (properly sung) could improve working conditions. Unions are at the far-end of their grim decline and Liberalism equals Pro-Choice, Anti-Death Penalty, etc.--all issue-oriented political stances that lack one unifying thread of Depression-era Progressivism, writ large by Woody Guthrie, et al: THERE IS NO CAUSE BUT COMPASSION. Our cultural environment has no use for Folk. As Republicans are fond of saying, Liberalism has become it's own elite, its causes to be easily viewed as fetishes, as insincere and weirdly displaced as the overwhelming interest in a free Tibet when home is bad enough (thank you very much).

English folk singer Billy Bragg would probably disagree with just about all of the preceding viewpoint (although I've no idea what his opinions are on Tibet) and after his three-hour tirade-as-concert I'd almost have to be swayed to his point of view: Folk is alive and well, and (according to the brochures) is living at Jobs with Justice, the hyper-active grassroots organization who sponsored Bragg's most recent tour. Only now, Folk sounds like The Clash with banjoes. Bragg himself, touted by Mae Guthrie as her husband's spiritual successor, spent an entire fifteen minute running joke explaining the strange titles with which music journalists have dubbed both his music and his place in Folk history. He's been called "over-studied" (read: over-steeped in a history too remote for modern man to sincerely embrace), "snarky" (you've got me), and a "lefty, ex-punk, cockney, soul-boy" (a minor avalanche of post-WWII pop music signifiers which seems fantastically appropriate). The search for the perfect modifier for Bragg is telling. What could a bird-like punk from Essex know about American Progressive politics and its earthy mouthpiece, Folk? It all seems somewhat suspicious, like the Beastie Boys' theories on post-colonialism in Central Asia. What does the man gain by this? Who the hell does he think he is?

Billy Bragg is a difficult character. His songs cross political stridency with lilting melodic beauty, a combination that the brain has a hard time deciphering. I'm quick to attempt the above-mentioned stew of adjectives, out of the same-mean-old-jaded-weariness that's killed Folk for the time being.

It speaks to Bragg's genuine charm and talent that all of my distrust evaporated mid-set. His music, ranging from blustery rave-ups to heartfelt love ballads to a sound momentarily his own (described by the British music press as "working-class Morrissey") actually comes off brave in its half-assed flirtation with 'poppiness.' It fails to attain to any single genre, not even Folk, which it approaches with far less reverence than did the work of, say, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, or Bruce Springsteen. This quality has won Bragg the admiration of Mrs. Guthrie, who chose him to record a passel of Woody's unreleased songs; Bragg and No Depression/Alternative Country group Wilco wrote the music for two albums worth of Guthrie's lyrics, resulting in a disc called Mermaid Avenue that sounds nothing like Guthrie, Wilco, Bragg, or anyone else, but stands alone as a very (tear) lovely record. Bragg drew heavily from this work to fill his three-hour show, a highlight being Guthrie's kiddy song "Hoodoo-Voodoo" stretched to ten dub-ska minutes in a show-closing explosion of outright Britishness.

With a backing band that included former Small Faces keyboardist Ian MacClagan, Bragg moved through his most "presentable" material, with "New England", "Sulk", and "Socialism of the Heart" providing key sing-along moments for the Harvard students in attendance. Proximity to said institution was made more atmospherically concrete by a tortuous performer/audience exchange regarding 'living wage' legislation and the ur-hipness of Boston's politically motivated-BRIEF OUTLINE IN DIALOGUE FORM:

BRAGG: There's a very important issue called the 'living wage' that...

HIGH-PITCHED CONCERTGOER #1: Boston has the 'living wage!'

HIGH-PITCHED CONCERTGOER #2: So does Cambridge!

HIGH-PITCHED CONCERTGOER #3: Somerville has the 'living wage!'

ETC.: I go potty by myself!

Incidentally, this dialogue didn't sound so celebratory as it does here, but more divisive and snot-nosed, leaving Bragg to squirm uneasily into the next topic when he was only trying to help.

His inability to respond to the sophistication of his audience was dead charming. There was no posturing here, no fancy theorizing or any of the other nonsense that's reduced the Left to a dismissible afterthought. Billy Bragg has no back-up plan. As he stated in another of his entertaining asides: "The world really is divided into two types of people, there are those who care, care about their families, community, care about their environment, and I mean that in every sense. And then there are other people who don't give a fuck about anything except themselves and their own greed." There's little to be won in a statement like this. Rage Against the Machine would have a difficult time Wagnerizing it, and it would make a terrible Grand Royal T-shirt. It's the statement of a true Folkie, simple and to the point and not polished in any sense. It's DIY morality, even less developed than the old school punk scene from which Bragg emerged at the start of the eighties. And its Woody Guthrie's real legacy.

One of Billy Bragg's more humorous song titles is the wordy "Scholarship is the Enemy of Romance." In its Wire-esque strangeness, the title actually conveys the heart of Bragg's message: the Left, through its showy vocabulary and limp disunion, has complicated itself out of existence. While other acts (Fugazi and Earth Crisis, for example) have moved to the theory fringes of Radicalism Bragg remains centered in the homey worldview that fuels all grassroots activism: good is achieved through compassion, compassion always being preferable to systematized politics. Socialism of the heart, as he says, is the Romance of the Left, and should serve to connect performer and audience. It's as old as Christ or Pete Seeger, and it's just about the only antidote to political cynicism and social alienation. Compassion is a weird dynamo, but as Woody Guthrie scrawled famously on his second-hand guitar, "This Machine Kills Fascists."

Well then, to reverse my own pitiful position, Folk isn't really dead, it's merely hobbled for the moment. Believability remains a huge issue, as is the sincerity with which entertainers undertake their globe-redeeming efforts. Maybe the problem with today's artists is how far outside the everyday they've gone: I can believe Woody Guthrie knew a thing or two about worker's rights and needs, but what do I really know about the Beastie Boys' foreign policy strategies? Why should I trust them? They've made a career in and through irony, no way to achieve philosophical credibility. Billy Bragg, on the other hand, along with Jobs with Justice, still buys the exuberance of the Left, and applies it to causes of a personal rather than global scope. Folky, that is. The fact that they're making meaningful gains in the name of union history and fair wages is a credit to the insanity of Romance. And that isn't a putdown.

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