ELEGANZA
The problem is best described as the Clash Syndrome: how to remain true to one’s socialist and humanitarian instincts in a business where the cost of success is, essentially, the loss of the beliefs that made you start. Thus the Clash, whether or not they still had the edge they had in ’77, were seen as hypocrites.
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ELEGANZA
GOOD SOCIALIST LADS by Iman Lababedi
The problem is best described as the Clash Syndrome: how to remain true to one’s socialist and humanitarian instincts in a business where the cost of success is, essentially, the loss of the beliefs that made you start. Thus the Clash, whether or not they still had the edge they had in ’77, were seen as hypocrites. Nothing they could do or say could bridge the gap between the expression and the reality of their social condition.
Folk music, even as late as Woody Guthrie, didn’t suffer from the problem of perception: he never made any money and stayed close to his roots. But Guthrie fan Bob Dylan left protest for English-style personal politics, country pie and bornagain Christianity. Stop for a moment and think of Dylan’s Saved. I didn’t much care for Saved when it was first released (though Dylan had never been in better voice): he saw Christianity as an anti-political vision. But he also saw Christianity from an extreme. Saved’s first song, “You’ve Got To Serve Somebody”—be it the devil or God—was self-righteously excessive. No way out except acceptance of God.
Which leads me, tentatively, to the first two things I want to say about the good socialist/Christian pop group, the Housemartins. I essentially agree with their politics, despise religion enough to believe their resting said politics on religion is naive, and wonder how they’ll suffer through the Clash Syndrome.
The Housemartins hail from Hull in Humberside, England, and have knocked off several #1 hit singles over there, as well as two of the catchiest, most melodic and astringent LPs in recent memory: London 0, Hull 4 and the superb The People Who Grinned Themselves To Death. What you get is equal parts Woody Guthrie and Dylan circa Saved mixed with the pop sensibility of a Pete Shelley. Consider “Sheep,” off the first LP, wherein cosongwriters P.D. Heaton and Stan Cullimore take a lyric subverting the Biblical meaning of “sheep” to decry the mindlefes following of a population. It’s a very pleasant song; you find yourself humming it before you’ve heard it once. Only later do you think over what you’re singing: “And when you see a cane I see a crook/And when you see a crowd I see a flock/lt’s sheep we’re up against.”
A little obvious, these Housemartins, you’re thinking. Yep. And they couldn’t get away with it if the beauty of P.D. Heaton’s vocals and the intoxicating music didn’t make you side with them before you realized whose door (more often than not,
yours) they were kicking down.
Or claiming to. Sexism, drunken driving, the ubiquitous boss, false media-influenced freedoms—all are grist for the Housemartins’ mill. “Don’t shoot someone tomorrow who you could shoot today,” is their rallying cry; go to Jesus, fight for your right to a job. Serve God, serve yourself. After falling immediately for both LPs, I later began to wonder what precisely the Housemartins were doing with all these verities. In “The World’s On Fire” they find the following people criminals for not going to church on Sunday: “a couple sunbathing on a freshly-mown lawn,” “a couple misbehaving,” and “neighbors stop(ping) to talk for hours.” At times like this I want to shake the bastards and ask them what, exactly, makes them so superior. Because they play in a pop group?
“A working class hero is something to be,” sneered the only man in modern pop music who ever managed to keep his balance in that most precarious of occupations. And it wasn’t John Lennon’s death which makes the above statement true; it wasn’t the universal anti-politics of “Imagine” (although it might have been the angry “Give Me Some Truth”). What made Lennon a working class hero was his turning his back on the position after realizing it was a lie. He searched through (and shared with us) many attempts to understand our society, realized they were all, to some extent, lies—or incomplete at best—and stopped lying.
If Bruce Springsteen could bring himself to knock off his blue collar posturing, perhaps future generations will say the same
about him. As it is, I can’t listen to Springsteen anymore. I can’t reconcile his lyrical and musical temperament with his $17 million mansion and model wife. Somebody, somewhere, is faking it.
Is there a place for politics (or religion) in modern pop music, or have we reached the point where the ambiguities of the business have weighed down the artist with so many layers of presumptions that said artist is unable to clearly address his concerns? Who are the Housemartins? I asked this earlier, but how dare a pop group act morally superior to anyone?
The first time I heard the Housemartins’ “Build” I misunderstood it. I realized they were condemning the conversion of an entire country into a concrete jungle, but I thought in the chorus (when Dave Hemingway sings “Let’s build a house where we can stay”) the Housemartins were appreciating people’s legitimate need to be homed. And that, besides the building industry giving jobs to out-of-work people, some forms of building are important. Nope. They were condemning the avarice of people buying houses.
This usurping of pure pop for an upagainst-the-wall political agenda is very good, maybe great. Maybe an armed revolt is the only way to wrestle control from the powers that be. But if history has taught us anything it’s that power corrupts. I don’t know how old the Housemartins are, but in the final analysis, they’re just another buncha armchair big mouths. The only thing worse than the Housemartins is everybody else in the pop music business.
