Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

Caught between the devil (Britney Spears) and Gordon Sumner, the idea that an artist can reflect their politics in music has become a largely discredited notion. When putting their minds towards defeating Thatcherism artists like Billy Bragg, Paul Weller, and the Communards produced arguably some of their worst material - they may have won your respect for actually working for change, but they didn’t necessarily make their way onto your mid-’80s turntable or proto-i-pod (walkman).

From the late ’80s onwards affiliation became the watch-word. Bono was committed to changing the world and played concerts left right and centre for organisations like Amnesty international, but after the success of Achtung Baby wouldn’t be caught dead actually singing about social issues (given some of his earlier attempts, it was no loss). Springsteen followed suit - though always slightly prone to falling off the wagon and on to his pedestal.

Springsteen is interesting, given his propensity to drop the big-band sound of the E-street band whenever he feels like getting serious. His rule of thumb being should you wish to tackle social issues head on, you need to don Woody Guthrie’s cap and stool yourself with an acoustic guitar.

Now, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that approach - but it ain’t gonna get you dancing, and we’re firmly with that famous Canadian anarchist Emma Goldman on this: if I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution.

Roy Paci’s Aretuska then is the musical equivalent of the holy grail of the snack industry - a slice of genuinely tasty sugar-free chocolate. It’s political (without shouting about it, a la Skunk Anansie), social, and committed without making your feet yawn.

In Roddy Doyle’s The Committments the theory was proposed that the Irish were the blacks of Europe, and hence the proud possesors of soul. An interesting proposition, and on face-value one that stands up, certainly when comparing the music that’s come out of Dublin compared to that of either London or Berlin. But put your average Irish band - say, for argument’s sake Bell X1 - up against this Sicilian outfit, and there’s no competition. Their ska/rock sound may come from the mediterranean, but it’s roots radical and real.

And what are the politics on display? SImple really. In an increasingly anti-immigration Europe, Paci and his pals remind us that the Southern Italians (and by extension Irish, and others) just a generation or two ago were considered the illegal immigrants that powered the German post-war industrial boom. Gastarbeiter or Guest-Worker was a term used for Italians first, and then later, after the establishment of the EU, for the Turks.

A timely and rythmic way to dance out of the anti-this, anti-that doldrums.

Of course, there’s no video available for this, the best song on the outstanding Parola d’onore album, so to give you a sample we’ll take a hop, skip, and shuffle to the also splendid Todo Joia from the Suonoglobal album (featuring Manu Chao - for whom Paci played trumpet in the Radio Bemba Soundsystem)

It’s one of those ironies, that I was given a collection of Miriam Makeba’s music just last week  - that is to say, a week before the South African artist died, suffering a heart-attack after having sung at a solidarity concert for Italian author Roberto Saviano (who is living under escort, after the Neopolitan mafia issued a fatwa against him). 

News of her death pushed me to listen, with a slight sense of guilt, more attentively. There’s a host of factors at play whenever we discover new music - and guilt isn’t necessarily a bad motivation.  

And what music Makeba made.

A couple of years ago I heard novelist Ian McEwan talking about his novel Saturday, lamenting the fact that work doesn’t crop up in novels these days. Characters do everything in the modern novel, other than work - or if they do, there’s no particular detail paid to the minutiae of their trade, unless, of course, they’re detectives in which case we get to hear too much.

Try looking for mentions of mortgages in the modern pop/rock song and you’ll hit the same brick wall. Foreclosures, or even dissapointing returns on pork bellies from the chicago market - something which one is sure that the investment minded songwriter, like M. Jagger, is probably more than a little aware of - are noticeably absent from the classics, so bear with me as we put together a tenuous play-list with which to confront the credit crunch.

R.E.M. It’s the end of the world as we know it
Best played over your morning coffee as you check to see whether the bank in which your savings are held has gone bust, or as you check to see how much your variable rate mortgage is going to cost you this month.

Jenny Owen Youngs’ What the Fuck was I thinking
With a slight modification, it could work as a soundtrack when you’re trying to think exactly why you signed up to a particular mortgage.

Jimmy Eat World Futures
Perhaps the only song in the list to fit the tag without adjustment, Futures hits a hard-rock nerve on the Bush administration zeitgeist which has helped create the conditions to change to cost of living for millions worldwide

“Hey now, you can’t keeping saying endlessly
My darling, how long until this affects me?
Say hello to good times
Trade up for the fast ride
We close our eyes while the nickel and dime take the streets completely”

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Brother my cup is empty
Let’s get melodramatic, and imagine that things really do go over the edge. Cave’s begging song is no shrinking-violet, but filled with indignation and menace. Best played, at ear-shattering volume, to any banker you may know.

O brother, my cup is empty
And I havent got a penny
For to buy no more whiskey
I have to go home [...]

O my friend, my only brother
Do not let the party grieve
So throw a dollar onto the bar
Now kiss my ass and leave

And finally, for a glimmer of hope, Cake’s version of Gloria Gaynor’s I will Survive, for the main because, unlike Gaynor’s version, there’s no doubt in the cake version that the subject of the song will indeed survive, and is completely over the object of his misplaced affections. Hopefully an anthem to be adopted by economists in their droves abandoning the neo-liberal ship.

In the same year that Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel topped the album charts with Bridge over troubled waters, Gil Scott Heron recorded his debut album A New Black Poet - Small Talk at 125th and Lenox.  The difference couldn’t be more stark, both in terms of outlook and reception.

Simon and Garfunkel were at the height of their career, recording their fifth studio album and tensions were rife. The duo argued during the sessions and, despite being vocal politically at various points of their career, as a result opted not to include the only overtly political song of the recordings Cuba si Nixon no. They were repaid with an album that spawned (though I balk at its use, it seems to me that ’spawned’ is more than appropriate here) a number of huge hit singles that meant everything and nothing to millions of people.

Gil Scott Heron, on the other hand was recording his first album - a live recording in a nightclub with the small group of David Barnes on percussion and vocals, Charlie Suanders and Eddie Knowles on percussion, and Scott Heron himself singing and playing guitar and piano. It’s as intimate as S&G’s album was polished and spacious. It’s also about as political as you’re ever going to get, while still staying on the side of art as opposed to preaching or propoganda.

The album’s most famous track is, justifiably,  The Revolution will not be televised - a template for Scott Heron’s socio-political raps that would influence so heavily african-american music later. I want, though, to recommend to you a different track. One that’s  more traditional in terms of its structure -which probably accounts for its relative obscurity - but one that packs no less powerful a punch.

The song opens with Scott Heron introduction “Who’ll pay reparations on my soul?”, his voice rich and questioning. Thereafter it’s as taut, angry, and beautifully melodic as any protest song can be. The guitar and percussion start off at breakneck speed (for an acoustic song, let’s be clear) and Scott Heron and Barnes singing push and pull each other  through America’s troubled history, chiming together repeatedly ‘but who’ll pay reparations on my soul?’.

Scott Heron has been criminally neglected, and criminally targeted in the intervening years, going in and out of jail on drug possesion charges (and apparently becoming H.I.V. positive in the process) most recently being paroled in 2007.  It would seem that there’s a clear answer to the song for him personally - the only person picking up the tab for Scott Heron has been himself. He is, according to sources on Wikipedia, back recording and writing now - something we should all be grateful for.

On a wider scale, the song remains as relevant, angry, and unanswered as ever - as we head in to an election campaign where Barak Obama’s race is something that needs to be discussed.

“What about the red man
Who met you at the coast?
You never dig sharing;
Always had to have the most.
And what about Mississippi,
The boundary of old? 
Tell me,
Who’ll pay reparations on my soul?”