Destroy your safe and
happy lives before it is too late / The battles we fought were long and hard /
Just not to be consumed by rock’n’roll
The opening lines of today’s song, sung by today’s birthday
boy, Jon Langford, put the case quite succinctly. By 1989 one might well ask
what the point of rock’n’roll, in the present, was. It had a grand tradition by
then, but, as with most great traditions, it was a case of—as Macbeth says—“the
greatest is behind.” The heroes had lived, and some of them had died, and those
who didn’t—per Neil Young’s question a decade before “Memphis, Egypt”—suggested
“it’s better to burn out than it is to rust.” So even the burnouts could look
far more glorious than those who stayed the course through the decades that
turned rock’n’roll into rock and then into something even more processed and
market-driven. A good ol’ rock’n’roll band wasn’t likely to be making the cover
of Rolling Stone very often by 1989.
One of the best that could advance in that category was Tom Petty & The
Heartbreakers—and they were hardly at their best by 1989. Things were looking
for a revitalization or a “good night, sweet prince.”
The Mekons song jumps out at you and goes for your throat—“just
like rock’n’roll.” The album is called “rock’n’roll” or “The Mekons rock’n’roll”—to
indicate, ironically, that they’re going to do it this time—rock! The band’s best previous album
was 1987’s Honkytonkin’ which owed
much to the Chicago bluegrass they had spent some time engaged with. It’s a
strong alternative to the ersatz rock of the airwaves, to say nothing of the
ersatz Country. The following year brought what is perhaps their best album,
sonically speaking. So Good It Hurts
shows better than usual recording chops and boasts a collection of real songs,
fully fleshed-out, so to speak. "The
Mekons rock’n’roll" is even better, and is on a major label (A&M) and
looks like it’s going to break them into the big time. Which didn’t happen. No,
we might say, with Joe Strummer of The Clash: “if you been trying for years, we
already heard your song.”
That might be true, but if we heard the Mekons already it
was as the acolytes of The Clash and as the band that kept that particular
home-fire burning—sometimes, as in “Learning to Live on Your Own,” by “throw[ing]
another rock’n’roll song on the fire.” The point of all this was that The Clash
and their ilk had reformulated the challenge of rock’n’roll in the late
Seventies, and by the late Eighties who still believed? The Mekons.
So the battle not to be consumed by rock’n’roll is to not
succumb to the popularized, sanitized, digitized version—all you wimps who want
your MTV (cf. egregious, but not unironic, video for today's song)—and to not succumb to the
fabulous museumed Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame tradition, with its potted history
for assorted wankers (i.e., music critics) to crow about what the what of rock
is. The Mekons see it differently. Rock, in their view, was never about having
a “safe and happy life”—feted, televised, turned into pablum for the people.
And so the line “Capitalismus’ favorite boychild” puts it out there. Rock can’t
be revolutionary if it’s an industry. Rock makes money, rock is for Fat Cats of
all persuasions. It’s always been a story of managers and agents and record
deals, hasn’t it? It’s always been about “product.” How can you save the kids’
souls unless you sell yours?
Then there’s the great lines, so very apropos, while we’re
on the subject of what was called—unironically—“late capitalism” in the late
Eighties: “East Berlin can’t buy a thing / There’s nothing they can sell me / I
walk through the Wall / No pain at all / I’m born inside the belly / Of rock’n’roll.”
The Wall came down in 1989, and it was capitalismus über alles thereafter,
where the buying and selling is what makes the world go ’round. This little
glance at the “socialist experiment” before it hits the dustbin of history is
the sort of thing no rockers had their eye on—except the Mekons.
But all’s not dark: “It’s something to sell your labour for
/ When hair sprouts out below.” The point of rock’n’roll, what fed its charge,
was precisely that: the great hormonal surge of the early teens. The moment at
which sex becomes “a thing.” The moment at which image becomes “a thing.” The
moment at which choosing the bandwagon to jump on becomes a life or death
matter. To buy the latest from your mostest, you’ll sell your labor, you’ll
join the queue, you’ll be there where the sound is going down—“that secret
place were we all want to go—it’s rock’n’roll.”
So, ultimately, “Memphis, Egypt” (it’s title cleverly
winking at Memphis—“home of Elvis”—and the one in Egypt, where Alexander the
Great was first buried), is beating the bushes to stir up some of the spirit of
rock’n’roll in the era of the apotheosis of Reagan and Thatcher and the business
of business is business Steinian logic of the times. If you can’t beat ’em, if
you don’t join ’em, then you remain the eternal outcasts—the Mekons.
And how’s this for a little “sympathy for the devil” (spoken
lines in the bridge with harmonica behind): We know the devil
and we have shaken him by the hand, embraced him, and thought his foul,
stinking breath was fine perfume—just like rock’n’roll.
Happy birthday, Jon.
God save the Mekons.
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