Records
New songs for new worlds
Michael Horovitz finds poetry in pop music
Most of the 1960s young who berated their parents for presuming to 'criticise What you can't understand' are fathers and mothers themselves now. On History (Vir- gin 2703), Loudon Wainwright III, one of Bob Dylan's most talented disciples, only Just retains his defiant shout and absurdist Panache in exploring the mid-life crannies of memory, mortality, bereavement, loneli- ness, difficulties of relating to his siblings, parents and children (with a poignant glare at the irrevocable, terrible moment of 'Hit- ting you') — and marital breakdown. These highly contemporary blues cut a merciless swathe through the romanticising haloes with which the pop music industry labours to gild its icons. Beginning poet or songsmith invoking your sweetheart, god-
dess or muse, be warned: `. . . It's taken so long /to finally see/my songs about you/are all about me.'
Another spring of hardheaded folk lyri- cism is replenished in Us (Real World PG7), Peter Gabriel's first song-cycle release since So in 1986. Like Wain- wright's, it articulates the pains and enlightenments of withdrawal from routine, broken relationships, solitary reflection: 'Seduced by the noise and bright things that glisten/I knew all the time I should shut up and listen/And I'm finding my way home from the great escape..
For all their psycho-political, rhythmic and melodic drive, Gabriel's previous recordings have often struck me as instru- mentally over-amplified and sometimes over-produced, so that more or less inspired lyrics got drowned in the welter of sound. Now the lines of pared thought and diction come through with plangent clarity, every syllable reinforced in settings of the most sympathetic interpersonal sophistica- tion.
Some of the concerted power chords and delicious harmonic ensembles (including the voices and improvisations of Sinead O'Connor, Peter Hammill, Manu Katche, David Rhodes, Shankar, Ayub Ogada, Eno et al) remind me of The Band in its rollick- ing heyday. But songs like 'The Weight', though richly enjoyable, were a hiply obscure come-on compared to Gabriel's
determined stripping down of ploys and masks: 'I stood in this unsheltered place/ Till I could see the face behind the face.'
His soft, husky, yet forthright voice, mod- ulating at appropriate points without strain into falsetto, has never felt more natural. At the outset, like Dylan when he began by trying to impersonate the inimitable Woody Guthrie — and like many another inexperienced performer — Gabriel seemed to be pretending to sound like a man of twice his years. On this album he's singing from the gut, without self-pity or attitudinising, about the most chastening period and secret scenes of his life. When D.H. Lawrence published Look, We Have Come Through!, Bertrand Russell sneered: 'They may have come through, but why should I look?' Gabriel writes from a standpoint of failure rather than break- through, but he does communicate reveal- ing traces of the way he's reconstructing. He sees the key words as 'dig, help, and heal'. Anyone interested or involved in war or peace between the sexes — from the Germaine Greer and Neil Lyndon sides alike — should find useful listening here: 'I caught sight of my reflection/I saw the darkness in my heart/I saw the signs of my undoing/They had been there from the start/And the darkness still has work to do/—The knotted cord's untying/The heat- ed and the holy/Oh, they're sitting there on high/So secure with everything they're buy
ing//... In the blood of Eden/Lie the woman and the man/With the man in the woman/And the woman in the man/We wanted the union/Of the woman and the man.. .. '
These are intelligent songs of and for real people, with a longer view than the mill-run of pop — emblematic, perhaps, of one branch of pop music's coming of age. And it's projected from supra-national groupings towards a worldwide audience, rather than the old transatlantic rock 'n' roll pipeline or the relative ghettoes of self- consciously ethnic or purist 'folk' game- reserves. Gabriel has devoted the past decade to building the multi-cultural arts movement WOMAD, the Real World recordings and festivals, a Music for Peace
programme, Amnesty International's 'Human Rights Now' concerts, etc, etc, as well as penning punchy hits like 'Sledge- hammer' and `Biko' and the Passion sound- track for Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ. The coincidence of his initials with those of Parent and Guardian would seem to have struck a chord deep in his soul. But for all the intricacy of his designs on the planet, he has remained an endearingly humble legislator: 'What we're seeing now is reminiscent of the Sixties, but it's a lot more practical. We can't change the world as directly as we'd hoped, but we can pro- vide practical and emotional information.'
Throughout these (r)evolutions, Gabriel has encouraged and proselytised non-white and female artists — an inevitable part and parcel of any serious aesthetic and global aspiration (as distinct from the fashionably disparaged semantics of political correct- ness). Another shaker and mover of paral- lel developments by means of his many broadcasts and publications, his outspoken oral verse and collaborations in perfor- mance with reggae music is the Jamaica- born, Brixton-based bard Linton Kwesi Johnson. His record label has produced the only album to date by Jean Binta Breeze, Tracks (LKJ 007 — LP only, £6.50 from LKJ Records, PO Box 623, Herne Hill, London SE24 OLS), with warm, sensitive backing from Dennis Bovell's illustrious Dub Band. Breeze's beautiful voicings can also be experienced along with her beauti- ful person at the Cochrane Theatre, WC1 until 31 October, starring in The Love Space Demands by her sister-poet Ntozake Shange.
The title poem of Breeze's record typi- cally etches the minutiae of race memory upon the air, a new world poetry joining forces with the new world music and strengthening the momentum, awareness and resolve of our common pursuit — cre- ation for liberation: 'the walk across the island/was not sponsored//it took years//sun was there/and moonlight/with its crablike stare //canes wore arrows/pointing/to a mountain's/caustic sores//shores/impris- oned/from our restful gaze//squatting/for survival//screwing up//for smiles//the lines/ on our faces//tightened//with the times'.
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