Bragg 3rd May

I had a sense before the Billy Bragg concert that it would not be an evening well spent. Actually, the concert does provide a case for thinking about what kinds of pitfalls exist for artists in relation to their political commitments, and about what we might regard as errors that disqualify art under the regimes in which we operate.

One of the more striking characteristics of Bragg’s songs, for me, is his apparent allergy towards all forms of  dilemma in his overtly political songs. He may be conflicted in many ways but song-writing as he understands it seems to demand that potential conflicts of meaning, or undecidables, are minimised so that he can present a clear state of affairs for his listeners. Things in the political landscape will, he predicted at one point, become a lot less clear in the near future. But he seems unwilling to see paradoxes as he might embody these, or dramatise these, as fitting problems out of which his work might emerge. (Perhaps there is an exception to this in certain of his love songs – granted, perhaps some kind of distinction has to be drawn in his work along these lines.) Clarity of message is something that we expect from politicians, even if we feel that their imperative for what they see as ‘good communication’ is misguided. This is the source of a very common problem that Billy Bragg does not manage to address: his song-writing is most often subordinated to his politics – politics, he seems to regard as being fundamentally separate from other (aesthetic) fields of endeavor, and always in need of integration or reintegration. His ill-thought (and deeply conventional) process for achieving this is to see the song as an empty form into which the supposedly ‘political’ content can be poured. The result is that form and content separate themselves all the more effectively. The well-proven outcome of such (structuralist) thinking is that one pole of the opposition comes then to represent the whole, while the other, in its diminishing importance, is rendered extraneous.

This problem with the form/content binary, and with the question of what an artist should do with political commitment, has surely been worked through in many rigorous and interesting ways over the last century. It is one of Jacques Ranicere’s concern for sure in Politics of the Aesthetics which we started reading last week. But another good example is The Author as Producer, a talk given by Walter Benjamin, to the Institute for the Study of Fascism, Paris 1934 on the question of art and political commitment. Benjamin patiently argues that the French Communist party should stop pressurising artists to use their supposed skills in communication for the promotion of left-wing political thought, and that the precise political value of art lies in experimentation and technical innovation.

Things got off to a bad start for me as soon as Billy Bragg began to play with that small, green semi-acoustic guitar. The sound seemed immediately to be a fake copy of an idea of rock music guitar. I felt as if I was involved in some kind of interactive museum display. And it’s not coincidental, I think, that problems encountered as a viewer/audience member in this kind of situation come in the form of shame. Having agreed to attend, being unable to find the courage or imagination to dissent, an embarrased audience member is implicated in the event’s disasters. And this is so precisely because of sympathy, in broad terms – in too broad terms – to the politics that are being promoted.

Interestingly, later in the evening, Bragg demonstrated his prowess at mimicry again with a slick and convincing version of Johnny Cash. There was an impression of Bob Dylan too, in the form of the appropriation of a famous heckle from a Dylan concert in the 1960s, which Bragg fed to the audience in the form of a joke. (Swapping his electric guitar for an acoustic, he quipped, ‘This is the moment someone shouts “Judas”‘.) Sadly there were no audience members on Saturday night capable of that quality of wit, which is a pity because some more effective heckling is maybe just what was needed to help retrieve the event. But the point is that this mimicry is further evidence of an already well-instated division between the song-writer/singer’s technical means, and the message to be delivered.

In many ways the support act, with her odd, upside-down guitar playing was much more interesting. I liked the way that her frequent breaking of strings was integrated back into the performance through the swapping of instruments and its re-tuning on the hoof, with the audience taking on the task of maintaining the song’s continuity. I think a less interesting musician would have carried on to the end of the song with five strings. But her refusal to do this exposed a commitment to the technical means. And I think this is something that Billy Bragg doesn’t possess. Bragg is, as you suggested David, artless in his playing – not artless in the sense that one might attribute to Punk for instance: rather he is both too competent and not interested enough in what it might be possible to do with the limited means he chooses.

The more depressing moment in the evening came as I found myself looking out over the sizable audience seated in front of us and saw this mass of people rendered mute, submissive, before the spectacle of Billy Bragg preaching a message so reasonable, so sensible, that no one could quite find a way of disagreeing. Thankfully, one or two brave souls did try to disrupt his delivery on the points of his ’socialist’ diatribe. His responses were revealing. When someone offered an endorsement of the Government’s policy on a 42 day period for the holding of suspected terrorists before trial, Bragg attempted to seize the initiative back from the heckler by adding a qualification. Doing the generous thing – and making himself sound even more like a religious orator – he then affirmed that at his concerts ‘all are welcome’ – even supporters of New Labour policy. Maybe this heckle, and the various others, were not smart enough to remind the audience more generally of the affirmative potential of dissent in the face of a party message. But it is also likely that the crowd was made up in too large a part by people who were resigned already to forgive him for a clumsiness that had its pinnacle in psudo-affirmations such as, ‘I have faith in you’ (Bragg points at the audience), ‘Sexuality – strong and warm and wild and free’.

In Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home Dylan is asked about the trouble he got from fans when he began to play an electric set. His answer is that he sees the ambivalence and the complexity of heckling, and suggests that he is sympathetic: it is also possible, he observes, to kill a performer with kindness. If this is true for the performer, then surely it is the case for an audience, which would reveal Bragg’s claim of ‘faith’ to be naive.

Criticism of Bragg on this level is, I would argue, not a brand of the cynicism that he was adamant to argue against. It comes from a sympathy with some aspect of his politics, and from a sense that if the potential efficacy of the event is going to be realised, then what Billy Bragg thinks he is doing when he stands up in front of an audience has to be, somehow, carefully destroyed. There is hope, I think – not just in the too-few antagonisms of the audience’s response, but also in some of his own remarks. His self-depreciation, if he could actually find a way of listening to his own comments, might provide a way out of the trap of un-thinking that he has found for himself: he concedes that when faced with Labour government supporters, he is in the most difficult position of all due to having been instrumental in bringing them to power. If he could appreciate how the effectiveness of this anecdote that he tells relies on the speed with which he passes over it in the telling of the story, he might be led to contemplate the paradox in an effective way – and to find the paradox as a productive generator for experiment and for technical innovation in the music and song writing.

But by the same token, some responsibility falls on the audience. The responsibility is to work out how one is seduced by a general idea of politics, and trapped by a perceived inability to respond to an art that is in the process of draining all incentive that one might have to formulate and express singular views.