Life during wartime
By Carl Prine
Saturday, April 9th, 2011 2:09 pm
My fellow Americans, imagine if you can this: A pop star producing with maturity and a high degree of competence the best music of her life decides to retreat to a church by the sea.
She is firmly ensconced in middle age, fully four decades of life on this earth, and for nearly a quarter of it her nation has been fighting two wars within the lands of Islam.
That’s not unusual. It’s a country that has known little but war — both hot and cold — for much of its modern existence, just as she has known stardom for much of her own.
She abandons the stage to read, the sort of hard, critical scholarship that recovers the memories of earlier generations at war and compares them to the spectacle of battle in Iraq and Afghanistan — televised conflicts she sees from a distance, but also up close the stark aftermath of combat on those who mourn the dead and maimed as they return home.
She studies the paintings of Goya and the poetry of Ted Hughes, Harold Pinter, James Joyce.
She inhales dust from long remaindered tomes about faraway battles and long gone men. She wants to understand history. She tries to put facts into a relevant context.
She consumes oral stories told by those in Kandahar or Baghdad, both by soldiers and the people amidst whom they kill.
From this comes the composition of songs. From songs, an album recorded in that chapel by the sea. And this work is so moving, so vital to a nation’s debate about the wars and its future, that her work is treated like a serious, adult study of a complex moment in time.
Name for me one American musical artist who might do that.
While you’re stumbling for one, let me introduce Polly “PJ” Harvey, the Brit who released “Let England Shake” in February.
She performs Monday at 11 p.m. on Conan O’Brien’s TBS-TV show. I’ve never watched it, but I guess that evening I shall. And you should, too.
I’m not a music reviewer. I have no competence in that quirky craft and I likely will err early and often in this effort.
But I most certainly enjoy the work of Ms Harvey and I’ve always known what it would become and how it eventually would inform these wars.
Because, you see, as a young Marine infantryman I bought her debut 1992 cassette, “Dry,” at the Camp Hansen PX, and for some odd reason its screams of violence and betrayal and cruelty and sex seemed to become the soundtrack of the Corps, which is as odd a thing to say now as it was to discover then.
Harvey and I are about the same age. And we’re still immersed in the study of violence and loss two decades and seven albums later.
As a top hatch gunner, I played several of her albums on patrol in Anbar in 2006, something that didn’t always impress either the Iraqis or my fellow soldiers, but which nevertheless seemed to make sense to everyone within earshot of the stark, unsettling “Man-size” and the nearly liturgical nightmare she vamps in “Down by the Water.”
This shouldn’t be seen as unduly unusual.
As humans, we try to fit everything into a narrative. We have an insatiable need to explain everything, to determine causation, to analyze.
The problem is that there are certain ineffable things my mere mind can’t reconcile and yours probably can’t, too – the justice of surviving when a buddy is torn into meat; the grasping hands of children who want Hot Wheels that shall be shot back as shrapnel packed into IEDs; the anger seething up in the man outside the wire when he imagines the flabby frauds inside; the recriminations felt by those who bury friends and feelings during long deployments in some pointless, dusty place on an earth that itself seems increasingly pointless to inhabit.
When we can’t put that psychic mess into an analysis that makes any sense, we turn to religion or art, which is probably about the same thing.
For much of the past four decades of pop music, one encountered “war” as a topic either through the saccharin humbuggery of the militarist anthem or the equally saccharin idiocy of the earnest, sappy protest song.
Few artists transcended the limitations of these rival genres. Off the top of my mind – and this is merely a question of taste, mind you – I would offer as worthwhile, lasting pop works about war Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?,” Merle Haggard’s “Soldier’s Last Letter,” Glenn Campbell’s “Galveston,” “Wild Irish Rose” by George Jones, “Streets of Sorrow” by the Pogues, Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road,” John Cash’s “Ballad of Ira Hayes” and “Drive On,” and probably several pieces from Bob Marley and Bob Dylan.
It was originally a distressing love ballad, but because it’s been so smartly reworked by “Apocalypse Now” we should pin “The End” by The Doors to the list, too. The fact that Jim Morrison shouts about the draft board’s “Blue Bus” and exhorts everyone to “Kill! Kill!” probably allows us that liberty, too.
Mix and match all you want, add or subtract a few of your own, but we’re still dealing with a tiny galaxy of pop stars in a vast universe of hot gas.
And of these handfuls of artists, I can’t think of any who assembled a lasting, almost literary, album that explored in a sophisticated way solely the subject of war and its aftermath, which is what Harvey has done for us.
That’s probably why London’s stolid Imperial War Museum — of all places! — has sought to commission her to write songs overseas with troops in battle.
It’s something akin to what bards once did, which was to follow in the train of a prince’s army to glorify in music his exploits and those of his men at arms. Only Harvey has no interest in polishing what’s really tarted-up slaughter. Her focus remains on those outside the wire and the war they bring home to their families.
I did an experiment on Friday. I listened to Harvey’s album over and over while sifting through an investigation I’m working on concerning the U.S. military.
The idea was to see if the studious work of the detective trying to make sense of things could get some aural aid from the mythological, artistic and the harmonic.
No. It was an abject failure. But I sure got to hear some great songs!
I liked most of all the title track “Let England Shake,” an unheimlich pairing of the contagious 1953 novelty swing tune “Istanbul (not Constantinople)” with her own lilting, child-like voice; “Hanging in the Wire,” a Clannad-like dirge that becomes an eerily beautiful air about the ghastliness of carcasses strung along No Man’s Land; and “The Last Living Rose,” a staccato, unrelenting stacking of one angry crate of irony atop another.
Here are some of the Blakean lyrics:
Goddamn Europeans!/Take me back to beautiful England/And the grey damp filthiness of ages/And battered books/And fog rolling down behind the mountains/On the graveyards and dead sea-captains./Let me walk through the stinking alleys/To the music of drunken beatings/Past the Thames river glistening/Like gold hastily sold/For nothing
Unlike most American (or British) war correspondents, she actually listens to those populations subjected to population-centric counter-insurgency operations. She begins “Written on the Forehead” with probably more Arabic than most American audiences will hear in a lifetime.
It’s taken from the Washington Post journalism of Anthony Shadid, her homage to smart writing.
She borrows sounds – the bugle in “The Glorious Land” – and even styles from earlier English, Australian and Kiwi folk traditions, like “The Colour of the Earth,” her study of Gallipoli at its worst in 1915.
The effect is disconcerting, which seems to be her goal through much of the album.
It all adds up to a nation consumed by war, to the point that even Harvey’s Dorset countryside is a land “ploughed by tanks and feet marching,” as she put it in “The Glorious Land.”
“The Words That Maketh Murder” was the album’s most obviously political song, and the first single Island cut for commercial release. Despite some very powerful lyrics, it’s not the strongest piece she offers and it likely won’t survive its brief critical acclaim.
Her better songs will win out, just as the deeper sediments of British culture she mined gave her the hottest coals to burn.
I’m not good at this sort of thing, so I’ll stop now.
Greece was always the reflective, contemplative repository of art to Rome’s power, so I suppose we should expect the UK to play the role for us, too, just as Dublin was once the Athens of Imperial London.
But damn it, we gave the world jazz, the blues, Hank Williams, Howling Wolf, Public Enemy and John Cash.
Isn’t there some American artist who can scaffold the skyscraper of loss a decade of war has built with adult, complex, important lyrics and sounds?
Not one?
Until he, she and they come, let us praise Britain’s PJ Harvey, the best composer of America’s song of war.
http://www.lineofdeparture.com/2011/04/ ... g-wartime/
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) & the kids and said
