BILLY BRAGG

Billy Bragg is an "average" bloke who took to playing guitar and singing Brit working-class folk-pop-rock with plenty of socialist overtones, sometime in the '80s I don't remember when. Can't seem to find his biography, either online or in the bookstores. Let's review some generalities about Bragg songs:

Billy's voice: thick Brit accent, non-BBC (I won't dare place the exact area); gruff delivery, tho' not as stark as Dylan's voice, but not typically the quality that attracts people to Billy Bragg.

Lyrics: Lots of political wit, lots of metaphor (see Don't Try This At  Home,) lots of gooey personal details about romance, failed romance, and embarrassing emotional moments. Lyrics are clearly the attraction of a Bragg song. Bragg is a reservoir of that emotional-authenticity-within-pop that rock critics so often claim to find in Lennon's Plastic Ono Band or Joni Mitchell's Blue or Bob Dylan's Blood On The Tracks. He's doubtless overlooked by these same critics for having so much more of an "ordinary" image (UK version) than those other artists, and the melodic mediocrity to back it up.

Melodies: Often cheesy, sometimes well-crafted (see Talking With The Taxman About Poetry, coming later). They tend to collect agglomerations of British syrupyness.

--Samuel Fassbinder

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DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME (1991)

(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)

This is the most thoroughly produced, the most "commercial," of Bragg's albums, and that's a considerable advantage for Bragg, whose sound could use a touch, if only to avoid being the Brit version of Dylan's rawest early production values. Listen to The Peel Tapes to become thoroughly convinced of the above opinion. Don't also has good string accompaniments here and there, and touches of Peter Buck give parts of this album an REM-ish feel even. Sure, there are also plenty of "slow songs" in this album, but that in itself doesn't make Don't Try This At Home boring. The only songs on this that I really find impossibly glacial are "Trust" and "Dolphins" and "Rumours Of War". "Everywhere" is a bitter pill, too, so that makes four. So that's four difficult songs in an album of sixteen tunes lasting nearly an hour. At any rate, Don't Try This At Home sure isn't Little Richard, so I'd recommend saving this album for moping indoors against a day of inclement weather or a long night of great darkness.

Amusingly enough, more production makes Don't Try This At Home less cheesy, not more. It primes to tolerate Bragg's heavy Britishness and enjoy his melodies more. "Accident Waiting To Happen" is either about politics or about some argument about it at a pub, I can't tell which. The tune rocks hard for Bragg, the drums and electric guitar quite prominent in their posturings. "Moving The Goalposts" is a slooow song about sex, still it's not in the category I mentioned in the above paragraph. The cello adds to its goofy solemnity. "Everywhere" is a really depressing song about World War II, American internment of Japanese immigrants, etc., "Cindy Of A Thousand Lives" rocks, its imagery and string background painting spooky sounds against a meaning vaguely connected to American cinematic paranoia: "Blue velvet America/ Half glimpsed in the headlights between the trees/ Who punctured the beauty/ And invited monsters such as these?". "You Woke Up My Neighborhood" is the funny song with the Michael Stipe guest vocal, the REM feel accentuated by the folky drum accompaniment and the "fiddle" use of a violin. Billy at his most "country-western." This is one of the songs you'll remember best about this album.

"Trust" is an excessive and mopey tune which lends voice to boys who justifiably hate their fathers. Upon repeated listenings its melody becomes tolerable, despite the gluey organ. "God's Footballer" is about a soccer star who doubles as a preacher. The violas and understated guitar give this song a dour charm, sweet and hard like a caramel eaten in the dead of winter. "The Few" is a set of pointed and astute observations about England's tolerance of soccer hooligans. I like the Simon-and-Garfunkel guitar/ organ, and the horn section. "Sexuality" is really more of an offhand observation about sexuality in general, like one would make when making conversation in order to be "social." its melody rocks, the backing vocals are cute. "Mother Of The Bride" rocks like a hoe-down, against a story of a man frustrated to see his prospective girl married away: "She married him and destroyed all my hopes/ Of a two up, two-down, two point five/ and a dish on the roof for the soaps/ I saw them at the hardware store/ He looked boring and she looked bored" Melody a lot like "You Woke Up My Neighborhood" except with rock drumming instead of country.

"Tank Park Salute" is a sentimental piece of schmaltz, its images possibly coming out of Bragg's alleged Army background. "Dolphins" is deathly-slow, sonorous piano, "North Sea Bubble" rocks, its lyrics pointing cheerfully to the instability of the current situation, and "Rumours of War" brings us back to this Orwellian vision of England that pops up now and then in Bragg's lyrics. (I'm not referring to Orwell's 1984, no, that's science fiction. I'm really thinking about the between-the-wars England of novels such as Down And Out In Paris And London" or "Keep The Aspidistra Flying" or "Coming Up For Air," descriptions of a shoddy place getting worse.) "Wish You Were Her" is a confessional love song with too many cutesy strings and keyboards that sound like a xylophone. "Body Of Water" is a metaphor for something, in a song lyrically superthick with metaphor. At least the melody rocks out, though the backing vocals are obnoxious.

I know this record isn't perfect, and some of its songs are boring, but Billy Bragg's heart and soul are an open book, tho' his confessional qualities dimmed a bit so he could turn up the social observations. That, combined with the sort of production values that make this album a relatively smooth listen, makes the good parts of this one a bittersweet pleasure. This album became a fetish during a cold Midwestern winter. Maybe it will serve a similar purpose for you. It's not great, but it's good enough. Give it a bare eight; subtract a point if you're not that "into it."

OVERALL RATING: 8

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WILLIAM BLOKE (1996)

(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)

I remember reading somewhere on a link to Bragg's page (http://www.billybragg.co.uk/) that, between the last album and this one, he took time off to pursue fatherly duties. One wonders, then, if between Don't Try This At Home and this album, Bragg has mellowed out. Perhaps there's been a political alteration, tho' the first song, "From Red To Blue," is Bragg's excoriation of those who sold out the socialist cause amidst the triumph of "New Labour" in the UK. Bragg asks, "Should I vote Red for my class, or Green for my children?" Which shows he's thinking, unlike the sectarians who spout the party line regardless of their party. "Upfield" uses the metaphor of the struggle on the soccer field for the struggle in life, where he declares that he's got a "socialism of the heart." I suppose the heart was a good place to deposit one's socialism in the '90s, when socialism seemed so far away and fantastic. "Everybody Loves You Babe" is Billy Bragg registering his disgust at the habits of his sweetheart -- nobody can be cutting like Billy.

"Sugardaddy" is a syrupy song about a sugardaddy -- maybe this song is a metaphor for the subsidized sectors of the global economy, which have a state "sugardaddy" to keep them healthy until, presumably, the whole thing will eventually fall apart someday... Musically, this album really only starts for me with "A Pict Song," which is a piece of radical working class poetry by Rudyard Kipling (!) set to Bragg's voice and electric guitar. After that we have "Brickbat," a song where Bragg dramatizes his domesticity by claiming to have forsaken his radical past for the life of a father. He sings to sweet strings: "I used to want to plant bombs at the Last Night of the Proms But now you'll find me with baby, in the bathroom,/ With that big shell listening for the sound of the sea,/ The baby and me..."

"The Space Race Is Over" is an impressive concept for a song; Billy Bragg sings nostalgically for the era of moon landings, of course the '60s. Bragg reflects upon the '60s moon landings as a psychic space of lost dreams, a space of "going someplace" as opposed to the note of "going nowhere" which ends the song as a reflection upon the present: "It may look like some empty gesture/ To go all that way just to come back/ But don't offer me a place out in cyberspace/ Cos where in the hell's that at?"

Bragg's opinion dovetails with my rant about "Politics and Pop Music" (which  needs a revision to straighten out its too-controversial hotspots), where  the '60s is portrayed as an era of musical populist Keynesianism, an era of  seeming (consumer) optimism and privileged compassion, as opposed to the  crassness (and I mean that literally -- the punk band Crass was its herald)  of money and power which dominated the vibe of the current era, at least  (for me) until the WTO protests in Seattle. It's interesting, tho', that he  hangs this all on the space race, of all things, which  was basically just the show-business end of the Cold War.

"Northern Industrial Town," a bit of gray (or "grey" as they spell it in the UK) humor (or "humour"), sings about the melancholy state of life in industrial towns in the northern UK, where: "there's plenty of artists around/ Painters steal cars, poets nick guitars/ Cos we're out of the black and into the red/ So give us this day our daily bread/ In a northern industrial town." "The Fourteenth of February" is a syrupy love song which wins, of course, on  Billy's heartfelt lyrics and voice. "King James Version" is a song with a  corny melody (schmaltzy mandolin in the background) and cryptic lyrics all of which echo hope in light of sadness. The last lines are an interesting reflection: "Looks like a drift to the Right/ For the world we were born in/ But the horizon is bright Yonder comes the morning"

It's not so much of a "drift to the Right," I'd like to tell Billy, at least  insofar as the Right claims to stand for anything these days, as much as  it's the drift to corporatism and the corporation's claim to an increasing  share of the surplus wealth of global society. "Goalhanger" is a satire upon narcissistic business/ political personalities  who care nothing about anything but trying to rip you off. I could give  examples, but what good would it do -- a more productive task would be to  find people in public life who were not "goalhangers"  as Bragg describes them.

Clearly there are a few gems in this album. But, musically, I feel like I'm slogging through it (even tho' "Upfield" tries to be uptempo) all the up until the blazing guitar of "A Pict Song," and even then we shift gears back to the domesticity of "Brickbat." Sometimes I just fast-forward the CD-player to song #5 to begin the album. I'd like to cut-and-paste Brian Burks' comment about Don't Try This At Home, that it was too slow for his tastes, onto my review of this album. However, I really dig "Northern Industrial Town" for its apt descriptions, same with "Goalhanger," though. And where else are you going to hear lyrics such as are in "The Space Race Is Over" and "A Pict Song"? Or even the lyrics of the first four songs? Give it a solid 7.

OVERALL RATING: 7

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