Has there ever been a more boringly literal-minded songwriter than Billy Bragg?

Yes, a lot of Bragg's material is boring and literal, but I still like one or two of his early songs such as "Lovers Town Revisited".

"I saw a nation in decay but also a solution: permanent cultural revolution" (Momus)

"People are beginning to think of themselves as specifically English, not simply British, but for far too long this agenda has belonged to the right." (Bragg)

My Maoist intellectual lives in a 'hinterland between dissolution and self-discipline'. Bragg's persona is 'looking for a new England'. My Maoist ends up an outsider, a hotel doorman. Bragg's becomes 'Sir Billiam, champion of the people', Enterist extraordinaire, playing watery and populist 'protest songs' on TOTP and addressing committees in the House of Commons.

Spot this pattern in all Bragg's thinking: 'Since I am a man of the left, my nationalist feelings are totally exempt from accusations of conservatism. If I, a man of the left, appear on TOTP, it's clearly the institution being swung left rather than me being swung right. If I, a man of the left, make pop records in a deeply conservative musical vein (dry guitar), that's not because I am conservative but because 'the common man' likes things straight and direct. (What do you mean, the basic musical vocabulary for the common man is now electronic?)'

Hey, wait! Bono in miniature vis-a-vis the WTO, or so it is alleged. ;-)

I wasn't entirely being serious about the reference, Momus, but I was always curious. Keep in mind on these shores I think I read only one interview and two record reviews about Bragg up through 1991, so some of the specifics of his stance probably got lost along the way.

BUT I saw Bragg play a few songs last night and thanks to this (rather than my general assessment of Bragg's career) I *can* actually go some way to agreeing with the lad Carmody. The new things he played were bursting with words, ill-assembled, not rhyming, not melodic - they barely qualified as 'songs' at all. I don't often groan at Bragg's work - I love much of it - but this felt like a strange new nadir.

BUT I think the LP itself might be a different matter and might even appeal to the boy C.

I was also sitting amongst a large crowd of ties and suits and leather jackets and wondering why people paid 40 bucks to see seomone give their undbridled opinion ofr two and a half hours - nobody at concerts really has the chance to join in the discussion, everybody at Billy Bragg concerts claps and cheers along...although he got less claps and cheers hwen he criticised Oz's refugee policy, no surprise considering that Sydney is one of Oz's most conservatice and rtacist cities there...

BUt back to the point, why pay a 40 yr old white man lots of money to hear him speak for 3 hours, it didn't make sense, it made me question again what's the point of live music and indeed what's Billy's point and so for the first itme in 14 years I'm not excited about the new Billy album...it's sad, a shame really...but a sign of growing up, whereas I'mnot sure Billy has...I'm not sure his understanding, as expresed through his music, of political/social/cultural situaitons has improved...and I think he needs to read some foucault...but that goes for everyone I guess

The only smart thing I ever heard Bragg say was that they should open up the US presidential election to people in other countries, since the choice of president impacts on them as much as on Americans. But it wasn't as interesting as Laurie Anderson dreaming they gave voting rights to the dead.

Well maybe, though where he lives now shutting up about foxhunting is arguably even more important.

Mark S: that's sort of what I was getting at, yes, though I'm prepared to admit that he had a spark, once. But even then, Bragg seems to have been immersed in that air that if you were of the left you had to be *plain*, *direct*, and distrust the very idea of image- making: a doomed and misleading "honesty" of mind, as though only the right connive and cheat (v. far from the truth). To its credit, the NME in ultra-politicised phase in early '84 was prepared to take Labour to task over their resentment for their nostalgic vision of working-class community and disinterest in updating means of communication, even as it put Bragg enthusiastically on the cover.

Bragg would tell the NME that it was a scandal that the Tories had won the first-time voters in '83 (true) yet seemingly fail to grasp that it was the fact that the radicalised pop-right made people excited about their future (whereas he just forced the dread further down) that did it. Most of my own lyrics are political in some way but are at the same time impressionistic, and that's something that Bragg has only v. rarely mastered, perhaps a couple of times in the early days.

Reynard: I've *heard* the title song from his new record (answer to your question: I'm interested in the idea behind it but not the way he puts it over / I am not interested in the record itself), performed live in a field, two years ago - why I was there is a long story. Incredibly unsubtle and booming nonsense, like he was explaining politics to a five-year-old. There may have been other new songs that day but I've brushed them from my mind. That was the moment that strengthened my opposition to him, actually, the relentless *directness* of it all, the one-influence, one-sound tunnel vision (and annoying me more than others of that ilk because some on my political "side", if I still have one, still see so much in him).

Momus, another entry to your list, maybe the most out-of-character thing I've ever said: "If I, a man of the white urban working class, move to the countryside it's not because I want to escape the cut and thrust of the pop culture created by the modern proletariat, or because I want the old rulers to accept me, it is because the countryside is where the heart of the British working people lies."

(actually I admit that I don't doubt his motivations for relocation at all, but it just seemed so easy)

Anyone else in favor ?

"Do you want some chips?" That's what she said to me. But in the language of the ghetto, it meant "help me, I'm a woman in chains!"

I have about as much desire to listen to one as I do the other (that is to say, none). Bragg's appeal to me would be strictly for cultural anthropology and nothing else.

Also, unlike boarding-school survivor Nick, Billy Bragg is clearly * not* from the Class What Governs - which is why he believes that shift- left bollocks and would like to be some kind of politician.

So here we have it, obvious once again: the dichotomy between a certain kind of puritan socialist's idea of what working-class people "should" listen to and what they actually listen to.

Well, you know, those kids who have their hands on the latest digital box from the Roland or Yamaha factories = musical and (quite obviously) social radicals who'll lead us into a shining new future. Kinda like when Gary Numan changed the world by virtue of using the then-latest synth technology from some electronics factory or other....

Oh, wait a minute. Gary Numan didn't change shit. And Momus is still a pretentious wanker bereft of a cursory knowledge of formal logic. I really don't know what I find more tedious: Billy Bragg's low-rent Little England Springsteen cabaret, or Momus's idiot aesthete's tiresome equivocation of consumerism with radical social evolution.

On second thought, Momus IS more tedious than the hapless Mr. Bragg. At least I don't see Billy Bragg endlessly fetishizing/shilling on his blog for people to recognize the inherent "radical" and "empowering" nature of consuming the latest wares from Global Multinational Consumer Electronics, Inc., i.e. digital cameras, MIDI gear, Apple computers, and so forth. (Along with other "indispensable" junk such as glossy boutique design magazines from Japan.) So even if I find Billy Bragg's music to be boring as fuck, he doesn't bug me in the sense that Momus does. One more thing in Bragg's favor: I've never heard him prattle on about "cute fascism".

Bragg may (consciously or not) aspire to aldermaster, but what does Momus aspire to? Dancing in a Gap ad with Lenny Kravitz and what's-her-anorexic-face from tee vee's "Sex in the City"? I fail to see the essential difference between the Madison Avenue equivocation of consumerism = identity and Momus's version of same.

http://ravishu.com/forums/index.php?PHPSESSID=e39ccc8cd6e71f68719c89cf883d2f63&topic=8925.0

Rape fetishists approve of Billy Bragg

SOCIALIST Bragg tells MySpace SPONGING FREELOADERS: "Give me all your money NOW!"

MAN OF THE PEOPLE TELL IT LIKE IT IS Bragg reduced to Autotune for hot new single.

Quipped JAMES BLUNT: "This town ain't big enough for two singing squaddies haha MAGGIE RULES!"

Interspersed ROBSON and JEROME: "don't try it."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/18/withholding-tax-rbs-bonuses

well --