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Two politicians stopped by the Fair on Labor Day; the lesser of these, George Bush, addressed who knows how many over by the United States Pavilion. Out on the river, boats gushed red, white and blue water as the Vice-President spoke of Olympics (the U.S. Invitationals), a value or two, the obvious choice in November, and blind trust. A bit later, across the way at the Amphitheater, Elvis Costello off-handedly remarked, in introducing a new song, that he would change the title of his recent record Goodbye Cruel World to Goodbye Mr. Bush. Few seemed to catch the connection; fewer still seemed to know — or care, if they did know — that Bush had been in their midst.
Sounding one moment like Pere Ubu, the next like the Lovin' Spoonful or studio musicians for one of Aretha Franklin's Atlantic sessions, Costello and the Attractions tore through the evening as though they were trying to frighten George and Barbara away. Two hours after it had begun, the band left the stage; and as the vice-presidential entourage was finishing its bread pudding at Commander's, Costello returned for a solo encore, glared at an audience reeling from a dozen rockers, and sang to it of there being "nothing at the end of the rainbow, nothing to grow up for anymore." This wasn't rock 'n' roll, or good news. He followed up with a performance of Goodbye Cruel World's "Peace in Our Time" that was as weighty as the song's irony, and it settled hard until some perfectly apposite lyric-altering brought the crowd's recognition or approval or edginess. No matter that the Chamberlain allusion flew right by. When Costello has Bush "sit alone in a bar and wonder, 'Oh God, what have we done'" and when he changes the song's last line from "There's already one spaceman in the White House, what do you want another one for?" to "What do you want the same one for?" everybody got the message, whether they agreed with it or not. In making such statements, Costello is, as one writer has said, not simply bringing the bad news, but trying to make sense of it.
This is precisely what Gil Scott-Heron is up to on his new 12' single, "Re-Ron," a hip-hop message that, along with its complement "B-Movie," stands as the cleverest anti-Reagan material yet. This kind of protest-commentary is Scott-Heron's strength, and through the Seventies, when few bothered to listen, he was working out his politics in a succession of sound jazz-protests. With "Re-Ron" global political urgency has finally caught up to the urgency of his message, which doesn't say much for socio-political priorities.
If we can measure just how dangerous and downright embarrassing a president is by pop culture's collective responses to his politics, then perhaps we should thank Reagan for inspiring, among other work, the Clash's Sandinista! (1980), less an attack on the president than on imperialist American foreign policy which Reagan's camp would exacerbate anyway, Springsteen's Nebraska (1983), songs about folks suffering from the kind of social-Darwinism that Reagan and Co. posit, and Costello's "Shipbuilding" and "Pills and Soap" (from 1983's Punch the Clock), two staggering anti-Thatcher/ Falklands songs that translate perfectly into anti-Reagan/ Grenada material.
Like Costello, Scott-Heron in "Re-Ron" makes no distinction between Thatcher's UK and Reagan's U.S. (after all, fascism is fascism); nor is he able to distinguish the talking heads themselves: "In the dead of night, of night, we've seen it all / Boy George in drag or was Maggie Thatcher Ray-Gun in drag? / Maggie and Jiggs, what a gig they got!" No question though that Scott-Heron is less interested in an all-out attack on the man — or woman, as it may be — than on trying to figure out this guy's appeal. But because he understands Reagan as well as, or better than, any political analyst, Scott-Heron realizes that there is, finally, little there to understand. We can no more explain Reagan's popularity than we can that of "Roy Rogers and Buck Rogers / Rutherford B. Hayes and Gabby Hayes / Marlon Perkins and Carl Perkins." We should be, in other words, no more baffled by Reagan's immense appeal as president than by an Air Supply platinum album or an eight-year run of Three's Company.
Scott-Heron makes the technique of theatrical illusion, by now too commonplace in referring to the president, work beautifully, presenting Reagan as the fourth banana of B-moviedom that he was. But if Reagan was a hoot on the big screen, he is a hero of the small one — to the extent that "through it all we close our eyes / to the recent damages, banging on the war drums / Cosmetic set changes, the minimal shuffle of the cast of characters / Attila the Haig transformed into peanuts, called Schultz up on Capitol Hill."
Village Voice television critic Tom Carson writes of Reagan as failed movie actor who moves to television as a final pitch for stardom: "Most of TV's peculiarities after all were developed as ways of providing reassurance. Reagan is the first president to understand that so long as you have the right, comfortable manner, you can say pretty much whatever you want. The most verbally bellicose president in recent memory also speaks with the softest, most easily modulated voice — even when he's calling Russia an evil empire, he doesn't shout, but only takes on the firm regretful tone of Marcus Welby telling a recalcitrant patient to shape up." The Reagan people understand their man is a TV star, and they market him as skillfully as they might a new breath mint. Reagan is the least intimidating of any recent president, and though he commands respect, it is the kind that one might be likely to afford Lee Majors or Forrest Tucker or Christie Brinkley.
When Scott-Heron calls for no "Re-Ron, the late late show / A black and white flick from ages ago," he risks a scathing attack on the masses whose uneasiness with ambiguity and fondness for the absolute, the "black and white," defines the myopic vision of reality that characterizes political mannikins and those who elect them: "It's a Re-Ron, a time machine, stuck in reverse and filming / Those scenes twenty years gone with the point of a gun / The hell with reality places everyone." Scott-Heron knows these words potentially alienate, but the tension between artist and audience that appears inevitable never quite forms. His acerbic satire is masked by the skillful use of cinematic metaphor and the equation (or blurring of) figures from pop culture and politics, an equation that allows the singer to suggest on what level our democratic, electoral process operates. He asks: "Would we take Fritz with our grits? / We'd take Fritz the Cat / Would we take Jesse Jackson? / Hell, we'd take Michael Jackson."
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