Songs About History.

Here’s another comp CD for you, based on a premise I’ve been knocking about for a while. Basically, it occurred to me one day that, to the extent that I can be bothered to listen to ol’ fashioned narrative song-writing at all these days, what I really like is SONGS ABOUT HISTORY. I like history – I studied it at uni and everything – but in subsequent years my lifestyle has afforded me little time to really pursue this interest, or to have read half as widely on the subject as I feel like I should have done. Thus it’s always nice when, in the course exploring my rather more active interest in popular music, I find some unkempt balladeer or other dropping some real bad-ass historical shit on us in the course of some epic ballad or rock n’ roll fuckaround. Educational AND entertaining, that’s what I’m looking for.

I don’t mean simply earnest, fictional folky number set in some non-specific period setting, I mean songs that actually centre on historical events – names, dates, places! And DOUBLE POINTS if they actually manage to specify the year in which the song is set in the first verse – that’s the kind of attention to detail I really appreciate. (Check out Fotheringay’s ‘Ballad of Ned Kelly’ for a definitive example.)

In assembling the following playlist therefore, I’ve found myself enforcing some pretty strict rules:

1. Featured songs must include some kind of verifiable historical information, however propagandist or melodramatic in presentation. The time and place in which the song takes place must be made clear.

2. Songs must concern history AS history – eg, they must have been recorded when the events referred to were already part of the past – history, rather than contemporary reportage. (It pained me somewhat to enforce this rule, as it meant that a lot of great stuff in my collection – two superb compilations of soul records inspired by the Vietnam war, innumerable folk/blues songs about local crimes and disasters etc. - couldn’t be included, but otherwise I think things would have just become too nebulous.)

3. NO BOB DYLAN.

Despite of the rigorous application of rule # 3 however, you’ll no doubt notice that the compilation that eventually emerged presents a somewhat… ‘classicist’.. selection of artists. This was in no way deliberate. I guess it just seems that the gnarly old gentlemen of singer-songwriter type rock have been far more liable to take a historical perspective in their work than subsequent generations – all that cowboy-hatted drama and battles and outlaws and stuff, y’know? - and finding appropriate songs written/performed by women proved particularly challenging.

Crass helped shift the balance somewhat, but still, if anyone knows of any female-fronted punk bands who have something to say about the Constitutional Crisis of 1902 or whatever, please let me know – I’d love to be able to put together some more varied and high octane stuff for volume # 2.

In the meantime though, I can at least confirm that I think all the songs I’ve included are GREAT, regardless of their demographic bias, and I hope you enjoy their expressions of despair and futility at the human race’s eternal capacity for destruction and stupidity just as much as I do.

1.Aldous Huxley – ‘time must have a stop’
2.Thee Headcoatees – Louis Riel
3.Fotheringay – The Ballad of Ned Kelly
4.The Mountain Goats – The Anglo-Saxons
5.Japanther – Seventy Nine
6.New Race – November 22, 1963
7.Reuben Ware – The Fate of Mary Jo Kopechne
8.Warren Zevon – Vera Cruz
9.The Mekons – (Sometimes I Feel Like) Fletcher Christian
10.The Animals – the Story of Bo Diddley
11.Woody Guthrie – Pretty Boy Floyd
12.Serge Gainsbourg – Bonnie & Clyde
13.Robert Wyatt – Stalin Wasn’t Stallin’
14.Party of One – 6 Million Anonymous Deceased
15.Sarah Webster Fabio – Glimpses
16.Lee Hazlewood – The Nights
17.The Velvet Underground – Sad Song (demo)
18.Crass – Where Next Columbus?
19.Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Cortez the Killer
20.Billy Bragg – the World Turned upside Down
21.John Cale – Buffalo Ballet

Link.

Labels: history, mixtapes