Re: Does your knowledge of an artists politics affect your appreciation of thier musi
I seem to recall something about a wall up yonder in the North...
Ah, so he's alluding to Roman Britain? Actually, that'd work a lot better.
The song touches on first principles. The song is effective precisely because they're so self-evident as to escape our attention. I humbly submit to you, Qvist, that your line of reasoning ("That's all very nice, Billy, but there's a little thing called reality you may want to watch out for...") is exactly what Bragg wants to start. It's the same line of reasoning Morrissey tries to initiate with ""Meat Is Murder". Both songs force you to rehearse the reasons for going to war, or for eating meat, thereby-- so the hope might be-- forcing a change in perspective. Evidently you've followed your own chain of reasoning and reached the same conclusions, which is fine. But (and this is my only point here) I don't think that makes "Between The Wars" silly or stupid.
Okay, perhaps I am too committed to the way I've been listeniing to that song for 25 years.
I agree, but neither is your explanation. That's because we both know there's no point in rehashing, step by step, what caused the two World Wars. I will stand by the assertion that if you go back far enough in any conflict you are going to find elites squabbling over power and money.
My dear Worm, you are going to find elites squabbling over power and money everywhere and at all times. That's how and why they're elites.
As you say, that is to agree with you in a sense. But the point here is that exactly that fact makes it rather weak as a historical explanation. Since it's always part of the picture, it doesn't explain why one thing happened rather than another. At the very least, you'd have to go further into it.
The origins of World War I are complex, it's true, but the war's byzantine complexity is a key to understanding why the war had so little to do with the common man, i.e. Mr. Bragg's mythologized factory worker.
Oh, the war had a great deal indeed to the with the common man. As a war, it was virtually unprecedented in the level of popular involvement it engendered - and it would not have been possible to sustain otherwise. Ordinary men signed up by the million, enthusiastically.
But, again, the important thing is to revisit the basic questions: why do we fight wars? Who leads the charge? Who does the dying? Who benefits? What are the conflicts really about?
The answer to that is as simple as it's unsatisfactory; for all sorts of reasons - some good, some bad. Point is, it doesn't do to generalise it down to some simple and singular factor.
There is something naive about saying "Let's tear down the walls and live by faith in our fellow man", yes, but there's an equal amount of cynicism in saying "That's just the way it's always been". I appreciate songwriters like Bragg and Morrissey who nudge us to look at familiar subjects in a new way.
It depends on whether the point is being made in general, or in some specific context. I assumed the latter, and in that specific context I think there is nothing cynical in rejecting it. Not sure I'd agree that the way Bragg looks at it is in any way or sense new - on the contrary, it's rather staple British leftism as we've known it for the past 150 years or so, wouldn't you say?
I happen to agree that the argument for appeasement was a bad one, and there's no doubt the fight against the Axis powers in World War II was fully justified. From your post above you have either read George Orwell's essays from the Thirties and early Forties or you are doing a fine job channeling him. Either way, I think there's room for a point of view which might lead us to look at the situation differently and explore the roots of the conflict. Sure, Hitler's rise to power was based on a confluence of factors, not any one reason, but unquestionably the depressed German economy played a major role, as did the disarray of the German left. The Nazis began as a small minority and rose to power exploiting the weakness of the state.
We're seeing this in the United States right now. Look at the recent fight over the debt ceiling, which very nearly caused a catastrophic default. There is a direct correlation between the bad economy and a minority of elected representatives who are dictating the governance of the entire nation. A minority pushed a majority to the brink. There are multiple reasons for why that happened, but ultimately it comes down to, yes, elites fighting elites for money and power.
Mythology, politicization, crudeness...let's not forget we are addressing these matters in the context of art. I don't expect Billy Bragg or Morrissey to give me an accurate, book-length dissertation on the causes of war. I expect their positions to be crude, even childlike. Those positions have immense value when we find ourselves too embedded in the dominant ideology of our time. There are always good reasons to go to war. There were good reasons to invade Iraq, good reasons to invade Afghanistan, good reasons to conduct drone strikes in Yemen, good reasons to open black sites around the globe, sound reasons to torture people, excellent reasons to kill U.S. citizens without a trial...
Not accusing you of herd-think, Qvist, just illustrating that a topic is sometimes best viewed in all its full complexity, and sometimes it helps to stand apart for a moment and re-evaluate its basic premises and assumptions.
Well, this is a serious issue. All in all, I don't find the German analogy suited to the US situation. The differences are far too many and a bit too fundamental. The nazi phenomenon rested, among other things, on centuries of central european authoritarian politics. Remember, Germany became a democracy in 1918. The Weimar republic that Hitler overturned was not, from the German perspective, normality - it was an enforced aberration. The United states have a democratic tradition that stretches back to the beginning of the country. There is no tradition of authoritarian government in the US to fall back on. I'm far more worried about certain places in Europe (to say nothing of Russia) where such traditions do exist, in recent history, and where the dynamics repeat themselves under certain circumstances. The key thing is always, always the effect of successive blows to the system that erodes public confidence and trust. It takes a lot - even the unwanted and fledgling German Weimar democracy needed a series of catclysmic disasters before its powers of resistance were reduced to the point where Hitler could take over peacefully. I'm not saying bad things can't happen in the States, but not so much that particular bad thing, I think.
Mythology, politicization, crudeness...let's not forget we are addressing these matters in the context of art. I don't expect Billy Bragg or Morrissey to give me an accurate, book-length dissertation on the causes of war. I expect their positions to be crude, even childlike. Those positions have immense value when we find ourselves too embedded in the dominant ideology of our time. There are always good reasons to go to war. There were good reasons to invade Iraq, good reasons to invade Afghanistan, good reasons to conduct drone strikes in Yemen, good reasons to open black sites around the globe, sound reasons to torture people, excellent reasons to kill U.S. citizens without a trial...
Well, no.
There aren't sound reasons to torture people. And there weren't good reasons to invade Iraq, at least not the actual reasons given. There frequently aren't good reasons to go to war. And I'm not giving Billy Bragg or anybody else special license to be silly. Unless it's in a way that is amusing enough or outrageous enough to make it worthwhile.
That being said, the song is in any event a favorite and perhaps I have judged the lyrics on the wrong terms.
Anyway, to move beyond songs one like despite the political content - more should be said about songs that have political content but which somehow manages to transcend the very issue of agreeing with it or not.
I'm thinking of a song like Bright Eyes'
I must belong somewhere, which to me exemplifies a really successful way for a pop song to be political. You can't miss Oberst's approximate position as an angry left liberal-something, but the effect of the points he makes doesn't depend wholly on sharing that platform (though of course it helps). He just builds the whole song as a sort of devastating critique of knee-jerk conservatism and inertia by ridiculing our inherent sense of
location, the concept is so elegant and forceful it almost makes you want to weep while roaring with laughter. Another remarkable thing about it is that it's not every day you hear a lyric that manages to sound nearly despairing in its enumeration of the seemingly endless ways in which human life deadens itself by clinging to static form (which I suppose is effectively what he employs
belonging as a metaphor for), but which nevertheless feels like an accusation that demands action of some sort.
Leave the ocean's roar in the turquoise shell/Leave the widower in his private hell/Leave the liberty in that broken bell today. And who can best this as a one-line critique of religion's irrelevance:
They locked the Devil in the basement, threw God up into the air.
Oberst is underrated, I find. He is in my opinion, at his best, a quite remarkable lyricist - up there with the best, including St. Steven himself. A sort of Tom Lehrer put through the mincer of the age of irony and thrown out the other side, a wounded but wiser man?