Pop Poets: Everything I Needed to Know About Neo-Cons I Learned from Billy Bragg

Earlier today, searching for lyrics to some of my favorite Billy Bragg songs to post a respond to grannyhelen, I began to wax a bit nostalgic.

Billy Bragg (along with the Smiths and REM) was the soundtrack of my teenage years. He was on heavy rotation from the time I first heard him, in 1984, until I graduated from college. Catchy pop sung in a lovely British accent, Bragg's music was penned as two of the darlings of Neo-Conservatism-- Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher-- were at their respective peaks of power.

But what struck me as I took a stroll down memory lane, the songs playing in my mind as surely as they would on my stereo, was how many of the issues that have been exacerbated over the past 25 years were already evident in the early to mid 1980's. It's true: everything I needed to know about neo-cons I learned from Billy Bragg.

Consider the lyrics of It Says Here, his scathing criticism of the English press from his seminal 1984 Brewing Up with Billy Bragg:

It says here that the Unions will never learn
It says here that the economy is on the upturn
And it says here we should be proud
That we are free
And our free press reflects our democracy

Those braying voices on the right of the House
Are echoed down the Street of Shame
Where politics mix with bingo and tits
In a money and numbers game

When I look at the mainstream media today, I sometimes wonder how it got as bad as it is. But the warnings were already sounding in 1984. There was nothing sudden about the shift to MSM mediocrity; there has been a slow slide into irrelevance and Paris Hilton as "news."

Or consider the poignent lyrics of Tender Comrade from 1988's Worker's Playtime

What will you do when the war is over, tender comrade
When we lay down our weary guns
When we return home to our wives and families
And look into the eyes of our sons
What will you say of the bond we had, tender comrade
Will you say that we were brave
As the shells fell all around us
Or that we wept and cried for our mothers
And cursed our fathers
For forgetting that all men are brothers

Does there ever come a time when poems about war cease to be relevant?

Is there ever a time when they are more relevant than when a war is as pointless as the one we are involved in now?

From 1991's Don't Try This At Home, Bragg sounds subtle warnings against the religious right in God's Footballer

God's footballer turns on a sixpence
And brings the Great crowd to their feet in praise of him
God's footballer quotes from the Gospels
While knocking on doors in Black Country back streets
He scores goals on a Saturday
And saves souls on a Sunday
For the Lord says these are the Last Days
Prepare thyself for the Judgement yet to come

and again in Sexuality

Sexuality - Strong and warm and wild and free
Sexuality - Your laws do not apply to me
Sexuality - Don't threaten me with misery
Sexuality - I demand equality

(Emphasis added; in the video, that line is accompanied by a fire-and-brimstone preacher at the pulpit).

I'm not sure I could ever exhaust this topic; I thought mostly I'd share some of my favorite lyrics with those who'd like to reminisce with me, and perhaps introduce Bragg to anyone who doesn't know him already.

So I'll leave you with Bragg's final words from 1991's North Sea Bubble:

War! What is it good for
It's good for business

•  The Revolution

  is just a t-shirt away (those are the original lyrics, by the, grannyhelen, though I like the modified version you quote too!)

  by dedmonds on Mon Dec 03, 2007 at 12:59:49 PM PDT

  •  Here's the vid with the updated ones...

    I like how Billy Bragg changes things around. Great diary!

    by grannyhelen on Mon Dec 03, 2007 at 02:43:54 PM PDT

•  I sing of . . .

  i sing of Olaf glad and big
  whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
  a conscientious object-or

  his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
  westpointer most succinctly bred)
  took erring Olaf soon in hand;
  but--though an host of overjoyed
  noncoms(first knocking on the head
  him)do through icy waters roll
  that helplessness which others stroke
  with brushes recently employed
  anent this muddy toiletbowl,
  while kindred intellects evoke
  allegiance per blunt instruments--
  Olaf(being to all intents
  a corpse and wanting any rag
  upon what God unto him gave)
  responds,without getting annoyed
  "I will not kiss your fucking flag"

  straightway the silver bird looked grave
  (departing hurriedly to shave)

  but--though all kinds of officers
  (a yearning nation's blueeyed pride)
  their passive prey did kick and curse
  until for wear their clarion
  voices and boots were much the worse,
  and egged the firstclassprivates on
  his rectum wickedly to tease
  by means of skilfully applied
  bayonets roasted hot with heat--
  Olaf(upon what were once knees)
  does almost ceaselessly repeat
  "there is some shit I will not eat"

  our president,being of which
  assertions duly notified
  threw the yellowsonofabitch
  into a dungeon,where he died

  Christ(of His mercy infinite)
  i pray to see;and Olaf,too

  preponderatingly because
  unless statistics lie he was
  more brave than me:more blond than you.

  e.e. cummings

  by bobdevo on Mon Dec 03, 2007 at 01:20:10 PM PDT

•  I had a similar experience the other day

  Watching Bob Roberts. A little later vintage, but the same sense that absolutely everything we are dealing with today was completely, 100% in evidence then and pretty much captured in that film from the media mendacity (and the right's push to make it so--he didn't use "fair and balanced" but close, to the useless war, to "blame the a-rabs" to...well just about everything.

  And on the bonus tracks they deal with all the issues of why.

  Really amazing how that has held up. Depressing actually.

  by DemocracyLover in NYC on Mon Dec 03, 2007 at 02:28:42 PM PDT

  •  Loooooved Bob Roberts

    Actually went to see it with a friend of mine who was a staunch Reagan supporter, but was, at the time, in the process of waking up to the fact that the neo-con movement was a nightmare.

    He now describes himself as a liberal, which is just mind-boggling given his worldview 20 years ago.

    by dedmonds on Mon Dec 03, 2007 at 02:36:42 PM PDT

    •  watch it again

      It's uncanny.

      by DemocracyLover in NYC on Mon Dec 03, 2007 at 02:37:56 PM PDT