Album: Billy Bragg, Don't Try This at Home, 1991
Acquired: Purchased at the Record Exchange in Blacksburg in 1991
Best Track: "Accident Waiting to Happen"
Lasting Memory: I could go all Morrissey here and say that the line ,"She married him and destroyed all my hopes," from this album's "Mother of the Bride" was running through my head during a wedding I had no way of not attending back in 1999, but that would make me look like a sap. So I won't mention anything about it.
I do catch myself quoting song lyrics to myself--and others--with what is probably annoying regularity. Growing up with little interest in traditional poetry and lacking the stick-to-itiveness to slog through classic literature, I gravitated to song lyrics as the text of my life's story. Plus, pop music has a good beat. You can dance to it. I give it a 37 years and counting.
This worked because all writers write themselves into their texts to some extent. Even dictionary editors rework definitions to account for how "I know I've seen this word used this way." So it is no great insight to note that songwriters, who are trying to express their own experiences and ideas in ways that others can understand and sing along with, are among the best autobiographers and providers of, often rhyming, ways to perfectly encapsulate a moment.
On Don't Try This at Home, Bragg keeps dropping into the first person, and his songs are almost always the better for it. "Tank Park Salute" is Bragg's tribute to his then-recently deceased father. "The Few," which asks of England's soccer hooligans "What do they know of England?" and answers "Only England knows," expresses his personal anger toward the blokes who can't just enjoy a match.
Bragg is at his most self-examinng and -reproaching in "Accident Waiting to Happen":
I've always been impressed with a girl
Who could sing for her supper and get breakfast as well
That's the way I am, heaven help me
He said, "We don't like peace campaigners 'round here"
As he nailed another one to the wall
And that's what gets me in trouble, heaven help me
Goodbye and good luck to all the promises you've broken
Goodbye and good luck to all
the rubbish that you've spoken
Your life has lost its dignity, its beauty and its passion
You're an accident waiting to happen
There you are standing in the bar
And you're giving me grief about the DDR
And that chip on your shoulder gets bigger as you get older
One of these night you're gonna get caught,
It'll give you a pregnant pause for thought
You're a dedicated swallower of fascism
Time up and time out
For all the liberties you've taken
Time up and time out for all the friends that you've forsaken
And if you choose to waste away like death is back in fashion
You're an accident waiting to happen
My sins are so unoriginal
I have all the self-loathing of a wolf in sheep's clothing
In this carnival of carnivores,
Heaven help me
These are the thoughts a person has at 3 am, complete with a rueful pun on a Kinks lyric. And the answers are all too recognizably unwelcome, especially the realization that while you were squandering your chances to make real differences, breaking relationships, and betraying your ideals, you were doing no more and no less than doing exactly what everyone else around you was doing. And has done. And will continue to do.
Then the real shame of it all hits you that what you now regret most of all is that you are not as unique an individual as you imagined yourself to be.
Then the real shame of it all hits you that what you now regret most of all is that you are not as unique an individual as you imagined yourself to be.
When I have those times, I always think about the Peanuts strip that shows Charlie Brown lying in bed and saying “Sometimes I lie awake at night, and ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'”
Up Next: Greg Brown, Dream Cafe, 1992
Word Count to Date: 14,235
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