CRY ME A RIVER

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

CRY ME A RIVER

Penny Valentine

Baby it's an arms race...

(The Attractions)

Let's drop the big one and see what happens...

(Randy Newman)

Woke up this morning, Ronald Reagan on my mind. By and large it hadn't been a good night. Before the States turned blue before our eyes, and Ronnie and the Bible bashers had their way landsliding Jimmy the Jogger out of the race, The Bomb hit our TV screens.

Even two ex-hawks from the Nixon days who'd been gung-ho for the massive arms build-up in the face of the r^d peril were beginning to have their doubts that—urgh—this game was really in hand. The Bomb was a documentary that sent us off into the U.S. elections with the fear of God clutching our bowels. Winners and losers? Not on this board, kids—we were all going to be obliterated. Survivors of Hiroshima told how relatives were skinned alive when that little parcel went off. The new inventions of fnankind (distinctly mankind even if you only have a passing knowledge of male anatomy) are of course far more progressive: hundreds of times more deadly than the Hiroshima bomb. Of course we British will not panic—The Bomb explained how we'd hear of an imminent nuclear attack: enter government commercial on building your own fall-out shelter. This consisted of three doors up against a wall, surrounded by suitcases and filled with tinned food. 'Most important things to remember:' said the voice-over. 'One: a tin opener. Two: do not leave your home.' Government arrogance is such these days that they think this kindergarten stuff will go down piecemeal. In the darkest hours before dawn they may, I think, even be right.

Do you still say your prayers little darlin'/Do you still go to bed at night/Prayin' that tomorrow everything will be alright... ('Point Blank', The River)

Out in the streets the right grows stronger but a few weeks back 100,000 of us marched against the bomb. Like the Mods and the soul boys and ska it's Revival of the 60's of a kind, and the CND marches then didn't look different—brown rice babies in pushchairs and their duffle-coated parents, the Trade Unions, the Left, the vicars and the Marxist elbow-to-elbow. But now there's already a few punks and NME readers in between and the Pop Group and Killing Joke replacing the folkies. In six months CND 1980-style has grown from a handful of ex-60's philosophers and sociologists to a mass movement. In the fury against man's greatest folly the reaction amongst friends moves from impotence to anguish...the feminists among us say maybe we must take it on board both as possible mothers but—more importantly—because it's such an obvjbus result of male thinking, male power. It's men who indulge in war games, who seek to dominate and crush.. .the world. Even-while we march there are worries about CND leader, the great guru of the Left E.P. Thompson, and his fine speeches.that suggest putting the class war on ice—after all if the Big Qne goes off there won't be any class to think about...

And out on the streets the right grows stronger. What to do? The Anti-Nazi League is all quiet on the Western Front. But in Babylon, Franco Rossi's film based around black youth in South London, oppression abounds. The guys round the Hal Lion sound systems are up against it on celluloid as they are every day. Fighting the system where white racists smash up their lives, cops pull them for 'Sus,' even their own family make it hard to survive in righteous anger.

The Au Pairs, an all-woman rock band, are working on d series of free concerts for unemployed lads. Against this backdrop of recession and gloom the beat is subdued. The NME staff fly to New York these days for their main features and Mick Farren rails against contemporary rock 'n' roll being merely the out-, pourings of 'looters.' In one sense, he's right of course. History, as a well known historian once remarked, repeats itself 'the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.' And so all the 'revivals' are exactly that, interesting to sociologists for the packs and divisions and looks they inspire, musically bankrupt in a way they have to ;be. Only reggae—which he doesn't mention—came through the 70's and into the 80's unmarred, tied inexorably to a live culture, having to sustain itself from its roots against an alien culture. Yet from Farren's piece emerges an unspoken desire for something quite simple, something that has been a contentious issue in rock 'n' roll almost from the start, the need for heroes. New heroes for sure, not electronic whiz kids or half baked look-alikes.

'James Dean in that Mercury '49/Junior Johnson running through the woods of Caroline/Even Burt Reynolds in that black Trans Am/ All gonna meet down at Cadillac Ranch...' ('Cadillac Ranch,' The River)

Bruce Springsteen's pricey, inconsistent set The River bounded up the chart in a week. Why does Bruce Springsteen represent the essence of rock 'n' roll in the same way Aretha Franklin does soul? Why is he a hero? Do we turn to Springsteen in the same way that, at parties, people scream to 'I Will Survive' in some exaggerated, maudlin and totally untrue identification? Because it's only partially a lie after all. It's the hidden part allowed to be made public because, in a mass of high people having a good time, it becomes euphorically OK. And Springsteen encompasses that same vicariousness, representing the grandiose image that America

has always sold us through film and literature. For all his major essays on 'Jungleland,' for all his mourning for love and loss on 'Independence Day,' for all that—his characters, be they men or women, are victims. Most of the time he looks inward, drawing on a great tradition of covering his canvas with 'little' people. We may never escape, but Springsteen is always re-charging his engine towards the middle break. On The River, after all, his escape, like ours, turns out to be merely ' dreams (and 'Wreck On The Highway' for all its dreadful impotence may just turn out to be a sneaky metaphor). We all need a movie to watch and a romance of reality to take from what we will. Minimalistic music is edgy. It looks out over the precipice, prods the warhead and comes back to report. Paul Burstein of Yale University has pronounced that from his long studies on the subject demonstrations do work to change society, with two provisos: If there's enough of them, and if you can wait for them to have their effect on public opinion.

Somehow in that scenario you, the marcher, are not the public. You can 'become' the public if there's enough of you. What hundreds of thousands of protesting marchers do is affect government because government looks and thinks of lost votes. Not of moral issues because government is immoral, but of lost power. Springsteen may in real terms represent only the manipulations of a greedy record industry on a buying audience. But his lyrics of suffering and loss cannot be classed—eber—as truly impotent because he places them over a music that by its form represents an energy level as much as an escape. You have to go somewhere to re-fuel and even if he eventually becomes a caricature of his own hero right now, seeing him do 'Rosalita' or hearing Aretha throw herself up to 'United Together' represents the still intangible force of rock 'n' roll in its most potent—though not uncorruptible-form.