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In some ways, nuclear power is an odd choice as the populist issue of the decade. Nuclear power is certainly dangerous enough, but thousands aren't dropping dead from radiation the way they were falling dead from bullets in Vietnam. Furthermore, there are more immediate destructive issues to choose from: union-busting, corporate profiteering, chemical wastes, foreign dictatorships, wage devaluation, etc.
But nuclear power has one clear advantage over these other issues: great images and great drama. Mushroom clouds. Colossal cooling towers. Misshapen limbs. Karen Silkwood's car. Metropolitan Edison's press conferences.
Which is to say, it's perfectly suited for art. And anyone who doubts the influence of art in political organizing should consider that nuclear power's importance as a public issue has closely correlated to its emphasis as a subject in the arts.
Musicians have responded to nuclear power as they have to past issues: with anthems, dramas, fables, preaching, humor and rhetoric. One of the best known songs is John Hall's new single, "Power" from his album, Power (Arc JC 35790). With a campfire singalong melody over simple acoustic guitar chord changes, Hall reduces nuclear power to a simple slogan: "Just give me the restless power of the wind. / Give me the comforting glow of the woodfire. / But please take all your atomic poison power away." The song reveals nothing new about nuclear power and can only comfort the convinced.
I didn't recognize the song's virtues till I stood in the crowd of 125,000 which blanketed the U.S. Capitol grounds during the May 6 march against nuclear power. Twisting my neck to pick out the stage through the heads in front of me, I saw Hall just as he came to the familiar chorus. Then, all around me, came that peculiar wind sound of tens of thousands whispering the same words.
The song that had sounded trite on the radio suddenly made sense. It was an anthem. The singalong melody and simplistic lyrics were assets, not liabilities. You need something easy to learn for masses of people to sing along. You don't need analysis to inspire the already committed. Anthems are not meant for listening, but for singing along.
There were other anthems that afternoon. Dan Fogelberg's "Let It Shine" was less effective than "Power" because it lacked a perky tune and oozed mellowness. Hardly inspiring.
But Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" was far better than either of them, because it's catchy enough to sing with on one hand, but also witty and insightful enough to listen to alone by the stereo. The original version perceptively connected environmental destruction to the American habit of transience. May 6 she connected both those themes to nuclear power by changing the chorus to: "They paved paradise / And put up a nuclear hot spot." Hall, Graham Nash and Jackson Browne bounced out the harmony vocal: "DOOOO-wop!-wop!-wop!"
Unless they transcend their basic purpose, however, as "Big Yellow Taxi" does and as "Blowing in the Wind" once did, anthems are probably the least important kind of political song. Their usefulness is limited to gatherings of the faithful. They don't change anybody's feelings, and change is the real aim of progressive politics.
Songs aren't going to change anyone with a carefully argued set of ideas. Complex ideas don't fit easily into the rhyme and meter of lyrics. Nor do abstractions coexist comfortably with melodies and harmonies.
What songs can do is describe the emotional impact of political issues on particular individuals so well that the listener reacts emotionally too. Having been seduced into empathy, listeners often have to reconcile their beliefs to their reactions.
The master of this, of course, was Bob Dylan. When everyone else was writing vague civil rights hymns about freedom and equality, Dylan was drawing the precise portraits of the poor white Southerner who shot Medger Evers or the elderly black woman who was killed by William Zanzinger.
Dylan drew you in with his casual delivery and crackling word play. Then he forced you into the shoes of the dumb, exploited red neck or that confused black maid. He didn't talk about the class issues beneath the race issues; he made you feel them.
Even Dylan's later songs such as "Like a Rolling Stone" have clear political content. All the put-downs aimed at the society girl in "Like a Rolling Stone" are based on class and cultural differences (none are based on gender.) Dylan's delight in the bourgeoisie getting its just desserts is obvious.
Elvis Costello is Dylan's direct heir. Just as Dylan rejoiced at the come-down of a spoiled brat in "Like a Rolling Stone," so Costello gloats in "Welcome to the Working Week." Just as Dylan described the untenable position of the poor Klansman in "Only a Pawn in Their Game," so Costello depicts the pressures on the poor British enlistee in "Oliver's Army."
Costello's Armed Forces (Columbia JC 35709) stands as one of the best political albums of the '70s for much the same reasons that Dylan's Highway 61 and John Wesley Harding were among the best political albums of the '60s. They work first of all as art. The listener gets involved with the witty wordplay and sharply focused music before the political implications dawn. Which is why these are such subversive records; they put across political points to people who normally wouldn't get within a frisbee's toss of politics.
Another secret of these records is the tone of Dylan's and Costello's vocals. Neither sing as if they're pleading or demanding acceptance or as if they even care. They sing as if they have to; they lay out what they've seen around them with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. Ironically, listeners are more attracted to this kind of understatement than to singers who reach out to the audience.
The importance of this understatement is emphasized by its absence on Dylan's new two record live album, Bob Dylan at Budokan (Columbia PC2 36067). Dylan sings some of his best political anthems — "Blowin' in the Wind," "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "I Shall Be Released" — and some of his best political dramas — "Maggie's Farm," "Like a Rolling Stone" and "All Along the Watchtower." But he sings them without the confident subtlety of the studio originals.
Instead a doubtful Dylan tries to force attention with melodramatic emphasis on key syllables. To make matters worse he has three female vocalists cooing sentimentally at the end of "Blowin' in the Wind" and whooping on the chorus of "Maggie's Farm" like a Broadway finale.
Further sabotaging the effort are the eight musicians behind Dylan, probably the worst band he's ever hired. Guitarist Billy Cross and keyboardist Alan Pasqua deliver the weakest possible imitations of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper. Though there are some fine musicians included — notably picker David Mansfield and horn player Steve Douglas — the sheer size of the ensemble demands clockwork charts. On songs that were once seductive, the band slams out the mood like a sledgehammer.
"There aren't very many good protest songs," Joan Baez once said. "They're usually overdone. The beauty of Bobby's stuff is its understatement. Anything that's brilliant is an understatement like that." But when Baez sang Dylan's songs herself, she never realized that the understatement was in the delivery as much as in the writing. Now Dylan has apparently forgotten himself.
The worst political songs are those that float out newspaper headline abstractions far removed from anyone's day-to-day life. "Politics isn't party broadcasts and general elections,' wrote Tom Robinson on his first American album, Power in The Darkness. "It's yer kid sister who can't get an abortion, yer best mate getting paki-bashed, or sent down for possessing one joint of marijuana, the GLC deciding which bands we can't see . . . it's everyday life for rock fans, for everyone who hasn't got a cushy job or rich parents."
"I don't like the word message," Robinson told the Unicorn Times last year, "it sounds too preachy, and as soon as rock 'n' roll gets self-conscious about the fact that it can change thins then it loses its power. I mean, who changed the United States more, Elvis Presley or Joan Baez?"
On his second American release, TRB TWO (Harvest ST-11930), Robinson sounds more like Baez than Presley. There's nothing wrong with the music; Robinson composes boisterous Kinks-like rock 'n' roll and the second Tom Robinson Band (Ian Parker replaces Mark Ambler on keyboards; Preston Heyman replaces Dolphin Taylor on drums; both improvements) pushes the songs home with authority. Producer Todd Rundgren gives a frothier top and deeper curl to those waves of music.
The problem is Robinson's lyrics and singing. Too often the band sounds like the Kinks on a night that Ray Davies has a bad cold. As a vocalist, Robinson simply lacks the range and power to bring an angry rock 'n' roll song to a climax. The band sets up the climax on several songs only to have the vocals fall short.
Furthermore, Robinson violates his own good advice about party broadcasts and preaching. On "Let My People Be," Robinson sings about political prisoners around the world, which is hardly his home territory. Forced to write at wire service distances, he ends up editorializing. "Blue Murder" is more detailed as it describes the police killing of Liddle Towers. But the narrator takes sides so early and so clearly that all sense of drama is lost.
His cabaret parodies of security police in "Sorry, Mr. Harris" and "Law & Order" are so exaggerated that there's nothing to learn about right-wing mentality (in sharp contrast to the characters on Randy Newman's last two albums). "Bully For You" is a collaboration with Peter Gabriel with a riff stolen directly from the Kinks' "All Day and All of the Night." It offers the subtle message of "Cut the crap and make it happen."
Robinson writes best when he writes not from solidarity but from his own experiences: those of a public gay. His "Glad to be Gay" on the first record was a catchy singalong anthem. On this new record, he humorously describes the embarrassed reactions to his exit from the closet in "Crossing the Road." The scenes in each verse are more affecting because they come from closer to home.
Perhaps Robinson's most moving performance ever is "Hold Out." He sings the ballad in a tremblingly hurt but defiant voice over Parker's piano. Describing his early confusion over his own gayness, he sings: "You can't fool all of the people / And it caused me to remember I tried. / Those who the Lord has joined with his soul / Let no man put aside. / A kiss on the lips tasted warmer. / So swing low Iscariot my friend... / I'm going to hold out to the bitterest end."
As many Americans reacted to Dylan in the '60s, many British musicians are now trying to match the new standards set by Costello with Armed Forces. Robinson, Nick Lowe, the Clash and others have reflected Costello's personal/obsessive approach to political issues. Nobody has responded better than Graham Parker, however.
After setting down 22 classic, condensed packages of British R&B on his first two albums, Howlin' Wind and Heat Treatment, Parker tried to reach for broader social concerns. He floundered on Stick to Me, and subsequently withdrew to gather his forces and wait to get out of a bad contract with Mercury Records.
He has returned with the brilliant Squeezing Out Sparks (Arista AB 4223). He includes one anthem, "(Can't Get No) Protection," obviously modeled on the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." But where the Stones complained that society didn't fulfill their desires, Parker takes it one step further. He sees society as a dangerous antagonist to guard against.
Instead of addressing the powers-that-be, who aren't listening anyway, Costello and Parker sing to the potential victims and attack their cooperation in their own oppression. In "Two Little Hitlers," Costello attacked working class lovers who take out their oppression on each other. In "Accidents Will Happen," he mocks those who still believe that layoffs, unwanted pregnancies and street violence are just bad luck, just accidents.
Parker points out that "Nobody Hurts You" more than yourself. He describes the smokescreen of romantic love in "Love Gets You Twisted." With the cutting irony of Costello's "I'm Not Angry," Parker taunts the apathetic with a convulsive performance of "Don't Get Excited."
As Costello does in "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding" and "Accidents Will Happen," Parker refuses the Sex Pistols' easy cynicism. In a masterful ballad, "You Can't Be Too Strong," he addresses a girl friend after an abortion with all the powerful, contradictory feelings such a crisis raises. Parker is honest enough to acknowledge all the personal costs of an abortion, especially in a sexist society.
But he refuses to let those pressures smother their relationship: "Yeah, babe, I know it gets dark down by Luna Park, / But everybody else is squeezing out a spark / That happened in the heat somewhere in the dark... / You can't be too strong, / You decide what's wrong. / You can't be too hard, too tough, too rough, too right..." Never has a call for resistance come across so personally, so powerfully.
Another example OF Parker's newly evolved political skills in "Discovering Japan," the best song yet written about nuclear issues. Parker creates a drama about a Westerner in Tokyo who meets a prostitute scarred by the Hiroshima bomb. "She knows how hard the heart grows / Under the nuclear shadows... / There's nothing to hold onto / When gravity betrays you."
As the band ups the tension, the narrator realizes how easy it is to drop a nuclear bomb on a country on the other side of the world: "The GI's overused her / They always rammed right through her / Giving an Eastern promise / That they could never keep / Seeing a million miles / Between their jokes and smiles."
But as the narrator stands on a Tokyo street, face-to-face with bomb scars, the distance shrinks. The sense of responsibility begins to come home. Parker cries out in shock over and over: "Discovering Japan / Discovering Japan!" With the Three Mile Island incident, America's nuclear birds came home to roost. In Three Mile Island, we all discovered Japan.
Tom Robinson will be at the Bayou June 3. Joan Baez will be at the Merriweather Post Pavilion June 28.
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