As I just learned on Steve Kirsch’s stack, the new album Silent War by Five Times August, the important anti-lockdown (and populist-conservative?) folk artist praised recently here by Titus, is now out.
Buy it. Make it a bestseller.
Even if you’re kinda meh about singer-songwriter folk.
And don’t miss the videos, some of which are meticulously-constructed documents of the general ugliness of our days.
Maybe later I’ll write one of my Carl’s Rock Songbook pieces analyzing the lyrics, but the overall thing to say is that they’re pretty impressive, and right on target.
This also seems a good point to promote my own pieces for this substack over the last two years on the response, or lack of it, by rock-music and popular-music artists to the Covid/Vax Disaster, and to related aspects of what I call the 20s’ Great Betrayal.
I’ll pick five of them out of about ten.
For obvious reasons, several of them of focus on Van Morrison, but apparently, artists with the syllable mor in their name have some special power over my attention, as there’s also posts on Morrissey and Kevin Morby.
That’s where I listed several of the few songs available by mid-’21 that had opposed lockdown policy, and said,
“…review in your mind all the rock artists, or rock-like music artists, that you’ve ever respected… Omitting the tiny handful of artists just mentioned, take it from A to Z, say, from Arcade Fire to Frank Zappa, and admit it: in 2020, they all conformed. …Whatever claim they once had to be exemplars of a healthy spirit of rebelliousness has now been forfeited.”
I also had two posts that compared and contrasted how Van Morrison and Kevin Morby were talking about the times:
I had a great deal of praise for Morby’s subtle artistry, but ultimately sided more with Morrison’s straightforward lyrical attack in a time of despotism-establishment:
“…the more [lyrically] elusive sort of artist often becomes tempted, as…with the example of the Georg Dreyman character in… The Lives of Others, to strike an implicit bargain with the emerging masters: ‘Let me continue to keep openly sharing my artistry, which, though it might criticize the way of life you are establishing in an esoteric or sub-textual manner, I will make sure it never directly opposes you, and remains most-obviously interpretable as supportive.’
I also did a post on a song that has not yet been released, because it has been actively suppressed by the music industry:
That’s where I said, “but as for Morrissey, he’s a free man,” and
“…this incident is forcing me to realize…that we need a way of recognizing a new kind of totalitarianism that has been tried with increasing success over the last decade, but especially since Covid—call it: Partial Totalitarianism.”
But I think my favorite Songbook post over the last couple of years was this one:
There I let the young people of today have it, in Poly Styrene’s imagined voice:
“Why are you putting up with this crap? Where are the mass walk-outs from these institutions that mask you, coerce you, jab you, gag you, chain you to the wall?”
So, support Five Times August, read my Songbook pieces, and sing out yourself, in whatever ways you can, against the gathering despotism of our time.
I discovered them this morning via Steve Kirsch. Since then, a couple of others have posted about them, including you!
Thanks for the music recommendations. Somehow music is such a powerful messenger, more powerful than the words alone.