Pay Attention, Liberalism: Billy Bragg is the Hero We Need
The political Left without its Billy Braggs would be utterly intolerable.
On September 26, I had the great privilege to see Bragg in concert for the fourth time, this time teamed up with the great Joe Henry. The duo were promoting their new album, Shine a Light: Field Recordings from the Great American Railroad. The venue was the historic and gorgeous Byham Theater in Pittsburgh, and the occasion was a recording for the vital NPR musical variety show Mountain Stage. Bragg and Henry headlined a magnificent evening of music that also featured Chris Smither, LAU, Kaia Kater, and Robert Ellis. Each act was excellent and provided evidence that American music, despite the impression that American Radio might give, is not in decline, but remains a vibrant, diverse field of talented and thoughtful artists.
The album that Bragg and Henry were promoting is wonderful in two distinct ways: first, it’s a powerful and beautiful document of American music’s persistent fascination with trains and railroads. More than just shorthand for a romantic freedom, songwriters have long drawn on the deep metaphoric image of trains and used it to help define the American imagination itself. In American music, trains capture our desire for freedom, our loss, our desperation, and our longing for connection.
The second great achievement of the album is what I’ll focus on here: the concept of the production is brilliant and it precisely captures the ways in which Billy Bragg solves political liberalism’s many faults. The title’s use of the term “Field Recordings” indicates just that: in the spirit of Leadbelly himself, Bragg and Henry recorded the album while traveling portions of the American passenger rail system. At various stops, the two musicians would exit their train with guitars and recording equipment in tow, and quickly set up and record a song in one of the nation’s decaying train stations. During their Mountain Stage performance, Bragg joked about the rush involved in the process; to miss re-boarding meant waiting two more days for the next train. Such is the sad state of our passenger rail system, I suppose. As a society and culture, we’ve either entrenched ourselves in our private vehicles or opted for the cold speed of air travel.
This privatization of travel mirrors a larger retreat from the shared, the slow, and the communal in our society. Ostensibly, these are some of the values that liberalism have traditionally upheld, and in one sphere it still does. When it comes to issues of inclusion and diversity in personal identity (ethnic, gender, sexual) the American Left still fights valiantly for shared communal values. Hillary Clinton’s DNC pageant brilliantly displayed this noble goal.
Even so, too much of the Left postures itself with what Emmett Rensin has famously called a “Smug Style.” Rensin’s account of contemporary liberalism’s distancing itself from its historical working-class roots is not without its detractors, but we should not gloss over the fact that progressives have lost their ability to connect with labor unions, working class voters, and much of the America that exists between the coasts. Too many on the Left operate from a seat of judgement that hovers above the day-to-day lives of the folk it claims to fight for. It is a humanism without humanity.
Billy Bragg, to my mind, offers an appealing alternative to Left politics of this sort.
First, Bragg’s musical career is indistinguishable from his political activism. Dating back to his instrumental involvement in British “Red Wedge” musical activism of the Thatcher years, Bragg has not only expressed Left political ideas in verse, he has attempted to realize those ideas through political practice. Yet naming musicians who take up liberal causes is not difficult at all. For most, it is an easy posture that conveniently mimics the rhetoric of social rebellion that is the driving convention of Rock and Roll.
What makes Billy Bragg a worthy hero of the Left is the (forgive me) style of his political art.
Never in his work is his political idealism far from a genuine sensitivity and soft-hearted humanity. Back to Basics, an album that combines Bragg’s early EPs, balances left-leaning political ballads (“Between the Wars”) with hard-core socialist anthems (“The World Turned Upside Down”). Yet the songs that provide the heart of the record are tales of unrequited teenage love (“The Saturday Boy”) and professions of true devotion (“The Milkman of Human Kindness”).
In fact, the song from that collection that resonates most with his fans these long years later must be “A New England.” The song’s title strongly suggests a political anthem, yet the chorus rejects the political for the personal:
I don’t want to change the world
I’m not looking for a New England
I’m just looking for another girl
Bragg’s music suggests that the political must serve the human, not the other way around. Otherwise, even the best political intentions become simply another machine of authoritarian domination.
Further, this humanistic approach is not only confined to the singer’s early work. “Upfield,” from 1996’s William Bloke described Bragg’s politics as “a socialism of the heart.” And Bragg’s recent work maintains a similar grounding, with the singer going so far as to name his 2008 album Mr. Love and Justice.
Don’t assume that the soft-heartedness that characterizes Bragg’s music equates to a corollary soft-headedness, however. Bragg was just awarded an Americana Awards free speech prize. The singer earned this honor with a lifetime of bold, aggressive politicking. Having seen him in concert several times, I can attest that the stump-speeches Bragg delivers between songs are every bit as entertaining and electrifying as anything in his music. Bragg is an educated activist and he couples his knowledge with a boldness in speaking his mind. No comedian handles hecklers as deftly as Bragg, for instance, and witnessing his command of such situations is hilarious and awe-inspiring. Still, he does not allow this tough-mindedness to overwhelm his humanity; this is the point.
Of course work of this type is messy and uncertain, a fact which is at odds with the dogmas and absolutes demanded by much of the contemporary Left. Too often, our first reaction to our political enemies or even dissenting friends is quick categorization and convenient demonization. Lost in this mechanical process is the recognition that being human is difficult and uncertain. Subsequently, we cannot arrive at the pity and sympathy that follows such insight, and which should drive our liberalism in the first place. Bragg’s insistence on melding the personal with the political allows us to recognize our common humanity, but it also forces us to experience the uncertainty of the process. In Bragg’s great anthem “Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards,” the protest singer confronts the difficulty of his task. Being interviewed by the “fanzine writer,” the singer finds himself under cross-examination:
Mixing pop and politics,
He asks me what the use is.
I offer him embarrassment,
and my usual excuses.
Bragg’s career, however, offers more than embarrassment and excuses. It demonstrates that the values of liberalism must flow from a humanism that needs and prizes human connection. In this way, he bears more than a passing ideological resemblance to Woody Guthrie, an artist with whom Bragg is intimately aware and connected to.
Bragg and Henry’s Shine a Light is, in many ways, Bragg’s art and politics embodied. In making the album, the two men of the Left literally climbed aboard the forgotten railways that once connected America, human to human. Bringing the songs that spoke of our common human experience into this dark, present moment of alienation, the artists offer us a vision of how Left politics might reclaim some of its humanity.
Hear more from Sectarian Review at www.sectarianreviewpodcast.com and at our Facebook page.
