3rd May 2008
I Keep Faith
Billy Bragg – Live at the Reading Hexagon
After Neil explained the self-inflicted “Judas” heckle, the joke was better, but it was funny without the explanation, as well, for reasons that self-deprecating humor can be endearing, and it’s nice to see our “heros” knock themselves down a peg or two, even or especially by those ones who move away from Barking to a house on the beach in Devon….
For this and other reasons, I’m not sure I agree with Neil’s comments that seeing Billy Bragg live is another way of contextualizing how Rancière speaks about excess in representation — that is, that a Billy Bragg concert is somehow an excess of representation. I don’t want to accuse Neil of snobbery, but I think I might be about to…but I’ll try to be nuanced in the process, less “Braggian” or “Braggesque,” shall we say? [We have since agreed on the term "Braggish"...]
Can we agree that the “staging,” if one can call it that, consisted of a man and his guitar, standing in front of several amps? Where is the excess in that? Perhaps, the excess consists in the “absence” of the kind of presence we have come to be used to? Perhaps. Still, can we agree that the audience responded to what the songster was spouting? Perhaps Neil might be inclined to think that the response was too intense for what was on offer — that people over-reacted to what they were given — that is, they were on a kind of “Billy Bragg concert auto-pilot.” This might be over-stating it. So, then, can we at least agree, that some of his lyrics (not “Sexuality” – you’re scraping the barrel with this one Neil!) spoke to some of the people in the audience? But my sense is that Neil might respond by saying that the audience was, in fact, uncomfortable (or, at least, SHOULD have been). Now, because we would have to assume that not everyone at the Hexagon is familiar with our Rancière, perhaps Neil might suggest that any discomfort felt by those in the audience might not necessarily be articulable by them. That is a possibility. It is conceivable that someone could be experiencing something, such as a film or live music, enjoy it in parts, but on some level find the event cringe-worthy, though not know why, and not know how to express the “cringe-factor” one feels.
This, however, is not what seemed to be going on at the Hexagon from my perspective. There seemed to be NO political excess, let alone any “artistic” excess…. People appeared to be genuinely enjoying themselves on some other terms, so it seems strange, and perhaps “excessive” to me, Mr. Chapman, that you should invoke the words of Mr. Benjamin at this time. Billy Bragg is not “artist.” Or, perhaps I should phrase this in a more nuanced way: In what way is Billy Bragg an artist? And perhaps this IS a problem.
Either way, I’m not sure if one would normally describe a Billy Bragg concert as “enjoyable,” (read: delightful) in the same way that one would not describe a political rally that way, but it was this time…. In fact, my argument would be that, after having seen Billy Bragg in concert 5 times now, there seemed to be an absence of the kind of “excess” Neil might be referring to. Now, I know what Neil might be thinking: “You’re just NUMB to it after all these years! He’s brainwashed you with his boring version of worthy left-wing politics.” Anything is possible, so I wouldn’t eliminate this possibility, though I’d suggest that his politics were what made his shows in the past more engaging, and these politics were more or less absent from the Hexagon, though not without some effort from a few stray heckles from the audience.
Saturday night was, it seemed, more about Billy Bragg’s music and, as he even admitted, nostalgia for the audience. Undoubtedly, there is “excess” in nostalgia, and perhaps that is what nostalgia trades in: fragments of (over)inflated memories that romanticize the past. The Dylan reference, for those who got it, unlike myself, spoke of interesting traces of days gone by: even remembered moments can be relics, and relics are like fossils: mysterious, wonderful things.
What was unfortunate, and I will concede this, is that on the threshold of a “new London” (and he could have made so much more out of this when he sang New England) now fallen into the hands of new Mayor, our Billy fell silent. He mentioned nothing about his hometown of Barking; nothing about the BNP’s position in the UK; nothing about how the Olympics is tearing up the streets of London; nothing about…nothing. Instead he shared a song about England prisoners that ventriloquized the words of the incarcerated and allied himself with the voiceless. Maybe he is trying to say something through this, I thought to myself, but the name of the tour is “I Keep Faith,” so maybe it makes sense…. He’s “keeping positive”? He’s not going to bring us down with heavy political stuff, just the music, ma’am, just the music. But, like anytime, is this the time to play mute or lose one’s political edge. Again, I would suggest that this is the opposite of the kind of “excess” Neil was referring to. Perhaps Neil was reacting to the edgelessness, a kind of absence of representation, and the the smoke and mirrors invoked by the audience for a Billy Bragg of yore.
Still, I am one of the “nostalgics,” I’m not afraid to admit, for whom the music brought back memories to when I first heard the trumpet solo in “Levi Stubb’s Tears” and saw Billy Bragg’s curiously British overbite. For a fifteen year girl old living in North Vancouver, inundated with classic rock, hearing this raw London accent emerging from the simple lyrics of the track was a welcome relief to everything else she had heard up to that point in her life. I don’t care what people say, I think some of that Olympic money should go towards erecting a small commemorative bust of Mr. Bragg’s head to show off that solid hairline, crooked nose, and curiously British overbite. It will be interesting to see what happens to the sculpture when the Chinese take over.
