My ears are unreliable Oh, they receive sound and transmit the appropriate signals to my brain just fine, but they’re undiscriminating: They don’t filter out unworthy sounds. Unlike my eyes, which at least can close when something ugly appears, my ears let in just about anything. They pick up the bang and rattle of traffic when I’m walking down the street, overhear my colleagues’ phone calls when I’m in the office, listen to the Muzak when I’m shopping. If I’m there, they’re hearing stuff.
It’s frustrating. Highbrow aspirations beckon me to be the kind of person who knows a Bach when he hears one, but my ears won’t go along. Constantly they thwart me. While I was driving in the car the other day, a song came on the radio that seemed not half bad. Imagine my embarrassment when the singer turned out to be none other than Jennifer Lopez, J. Lo, former sidekick to the acquitted Puff Daddy. And as for the music that sticks around for reruns, playing over in my head or being hummed for the express purpose of annoying the people I’m close to, only the worst will do. I can spend Sunday afternoon listening to Mozart, but come Monday morning, my audio track will be a playground for fragments of a soda pop jingle I heard for ten seconds following the traffic report.
Plainly, my ears have a mind of their own. And lately, they’ve thought very highly of music written or performed by lefties. I’m not talking here about people who voted Clinton/Gore. I’m talking verifiable tree huggers, socialists, and Woody Guthrie worshippers. I first noticed the trend after listening to a compact disc of protest music my sister had come up with to tweak me about our longstanding political differences. At first, the album, Don’t Feed the Corporations by Jonny Hahn, had seemed merely funny because it was so bad. Mr. Hahn, I’d imagined, was some un-shampooed vegan who hadn’t gotten around to refilling his Zoloft prescription. Only, he had the last laugh. A week later, I was still humming his anti-lumber panic attack: “Of all the species / to be displaced / one just might be / the human race!”
Come to think of it, it isn’t only lately that my ears have been politically unreliable. Long ago, when I was a teenager, I saw the English socialist folksinger Billy Bragg live at the Beacon Theater. Bragg had been touring to promote his album Workers Playtime, which featured songs like “Tender Comrade” and “Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards.” AIDS awareness being all the rage then, he threw condoms into the audience. (This was way before I’d even heard of progressive types offering them in candy dishes and fish bowls.) At the concert, I bought a cool T-shirt with the Workers Playtime album cover on the front. A few months later, someone broke into my school locker and stole it.
Bragg’s music isn’t all commie agitprop. Much of it is your basic non-revolutionary, pro-labor, protest music. Which, when it doesn’t sound corny, sounds didactic and tedious. Not even the Village Voice’s rock critic defends Bragg’s pro-union hymns on musical grounds: “There’s not enough popular music for lefties as it is; why scare anyone away?”
Needless to say, my ears keep perfect audio files of Bragg classics like “There Is Power In A Union” and “Ideology.” His best songs, however, are sappy-sweet love poems about the working class, of which Bragg, who was once a goatherd, is certainly a member. “Greetings to the New Brunette,” a favorite of mine, contains at least one unimprovable blue-collar couplet: “I celebrate my love for you / with a pint of beer and a new tattoo.” To their credit, my ears keep good copies of this heartfelt ode. It’s a piece that is apt to spring to mind almost full-blown when I’m sitting on a train and have nothing to read.
Quite a bit of commercial and critical success has come Bragg’s way in the last few years. He and an American band called Wilco together were given access to a trove of unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics. Almost all of the music for these songs died with the Okie singer-songwriter and Communist party activist. But from the collaboration of one English socialist, one American rock band, and one dead folksinger came two very fine, and very fun, albums called Mermaid Avenue and Mermaid Avenue Vol. II, named after the street in Brooklyn where Guthrie lived for many years after the war. Needless to say, the songs are aural catnip to my leftish ears.
I just wish I could stop singing the campaign song Guthrie wrote for Stetson Kennedy, a 1950 independent write-in candidate for senator from Florida.
DAVID SKINNER
