Farm Report Repo

There was a time when America was a sturdy nation of yeoman farmers, when giants like Jefferson and Thoreau bestrode the East Coast like intellectual colossi. That time is past, and now we are a sort of dirty imitation of contemporary Denmark, in which we live in abject devotion to bureaucracy, in which individuality and deviance are synonymous, in which we love nothing so much as to be buried in the middle of a huge hierarchy.

All this by way of saying that the bank done repoed the farm. Twenty-seven generations of semi-literate yet arrogant Sartwells have worked this land, since before hiphop. So what’s a 300-pound Bubba in overalls supposed to do? Huh? Answer me that. Well, with my family, I’ve taken to the hills. I’m squatting, but I’m unbowed. The 18 of us have started a study group working on Debord and Clastres. We raided the National Guard armory, and now we’re all about the automatic weapons. We’re pissed-off peons, Pennsylvania Zapatistas, chubby whitebread anarchist motherfuckers bent on annihilation of the existing order. We have turned decisively against Dick Cheney. Join us.

Now, you might be wondering how these developments have affected my taste in music. Well, to be honest, I’ve kinda gone off the country. When you’re trying to motivate yourself for the insurrection, Faith Hill seems kinda lame. Actually, whatever you may be doing, Faith Hill seems kinda lame. So I’ve been soaking in Anti-Flag, Rise Against, and Against All Authority: anarchist punks who share our violent hatred for Cheney. I’ve been checking out a bunch of reggae and railing against Babylon. I’ve been listening to old-time American rock ’n’ rollers who have not yet been totally sucked dry by the vampiric Cheney-types.

Voodoo Glow Skulls are an interesting band. They record in Spanish as well as English, and they’ve explored strange intersections of Latin, ska and punk for a decade or more. Steady As She Goes (Victory) is maybe their most furious disc: the ska is triple-speed, and merges into hardcore, but there’s always a melody back there. The horns rock in astonishing precision. In a way, the horns are more about texture than tune, and at this speed, they’re like a swarm of furious bees.

Chrissie Hynde and Elvis Costello are, obviously, two of the greatest singers and songwriters of the rock era, and though there are a lot of differences (they’ve diverged musically, with Costello drifting toward classic pop and pure eclecticism, while Chrissie develops more systematically in the idiom of her own invention), there’s a lot in common too: for one thing, those big, lovely voices with their huge vibratos. Now maybe it’s just because I’m out here in the woods, running my boombox on Sterno, but Chrissie and Elvis seem to me to have lost something.

The Pretenders’ Loose Screw (Artemis) has a lot of Chrissie’s weaknesses without the strengths. It’s downtempo and reggae-inflected, but the melodies seem fairly unimaginative, and the instrumentation is quite a bit smoother and more processed-sounding than on any previous Pretenders album. Chrissie’s lyrics have always been uneven, but at their best they’re kind of surprising, or at least idiosyncratic. Here, though, they are infested with cliche, and Chrissie actually tries to put over stuff like, "I’m a very very complex person," or "nothing breaks like a heart" with a straight face.

Such is my veneration for Costello that I figure the fact that I don’t love When I Was Cruel (Island) is probably my fault. Nevertheless, I’ve been listening to it on and off for months, waiting for it to grow on me. This album is billed as Costello’s return to rock ’n’ roll; my package came with a sticker that said it was his first "fast" album in a decade or something. That’s all bullshit. I bet the tempo is no faster overall than on his last original solo album, All This Useless Beauty. And as for the idea that this is his best album in years? Ridiculous too, because All This Useless Beauty was incomparably wonderful. I don’t think that When I Was Cruel is a failure on the scale of Loose Screw; there is obviously some great writing, tunes and words. But I also feel like something is missing, or like maybe he actually did try to make a rock album, and his heart or focus wasn’t quite in it or something.

Anyway, I hear songs like "45" as pale imitations of, say, "Radio, Radio," or "Doll Revolution," and I keep hearing him want to revert to a jazzier, gentler style, a la "Useless Beauty."

On the other hand, there is Peter Wolf, who has never been better than on Sleepless (Artemis). When I saw Pete in the mid-70s, he was wearing a tux with a dollar sign on the front. He was singing "First I Look at the Purse" and "Give It to Me." He was strutting around the stage as one of the great cock-rock singers of all times: comparable to Jagger or Tyler. He led the world’s greatest party band: J. Geils. It has got to be hard for a person like that to age gracefully. But Wolf unexpectedly has done that over the course of a great and undervalued solo career. Sleepless continues the melancholy soul of 1998’s excellent Fool’s Parade, but adds a touch of country and folk that you wouldn’t expect from a Bronx/Boston boy whose hero is Don Covay. He’s still capable of uptempo blues rock (as shown by "Too Close Together," an old Sonny Boy tune featuring Geils harp player Magic Dick). But the real delights here are quieter and sweeter and sadder. And Wolf duets with Jagger on a breathtaking version of "Nothing But the Wheel," and with Steve Earle on "Some Things You Don’t Want to Know."

And now for the reggae portion of our program. Eek-a-Mouse (Ripton Hylton) is a bit of an acquired taste. Half toaster, half singer, he’s got the most eccentric voice you can imagine, and a penchant for the invention and extreme repetition of nonsense syllables. But listen a bit to The Very Best of Eek-a-Mouse, Volume 2 (Shanachie) and you realize that the grooves are lethal–the best coming out of Jamaica–and that actually the lyrics are deep and revolutionary. The nonsense is wildly creative too, for that matter.

"Border Patrol" is probably the best song, period, I heard in 2002, and as Eek says, "I walk and I talk but I not crawl on my belly like a reptile." Thus I make common cause with my Rasta breddrin, and invite them to join my insurrection up here in PA, though it’s cold out here, and so I also invite myself to join theirs in the Blue Mountains.

To be honest, Jamaican and African roots reggae has disappointed me lately (I mention 2002 releases by Michael Rose, Everton Blender, Alpha Blondy). On the other hand, Americans are still getting better, as demonstrated by John Brown’s Body’s Spirits All Around Us (Shanachie).

When it comes to race issues, white people don’t have a whole lot of credibility. We can’t really get what it means to be black, and we’re usually content to reap the benefits of white skin privilege without even being aware of it. But if there’s one white boy with street cred, it’s got to be John Brown, who, after all, gave his life trying to free black folks. That’s why "John Brown’s Body" is a good name for this two-tone American roots reggae group. They’ve always been a good band, but this album is the shit. One problem with roots reggae is that Jamaican music itself has left it so far behind that it sounds like some kind of nostalgia trip. That’s often the case with the African reggae that’s so popular and vital, but so stuck with Bob Marley back in ’79. Spirits All Around Us manages to be a serious nasty roots album and sound contemporary, with hints of electronica everywhere but rhythms that are still organic. This might just be the best American reggae album ever made.

I bought Augustus Pablo’s East of the River Nile as an import LP around when it came out, maybe 1978. I probably didn’t listen to it more than a few times, but it has pursued me, waiting, for a quarter century. The melodies are simple, serene, meditative, profound with just a touch of half-speed klezmer (?!). Now the thing has been reissued on CD by Shanachie, which has got me listening to the LP again also.

Pablo was a melodica player–the melodica being a keyboard wind instrument with harmonica reeds–that was used in the 1960s when he used to teach music to Jamaican schoolchildren. In fact, Augustus Pablo is perhaps the only professional melodica player I’ve ever heard, or heard of. He was a deceptively basic sort of player, and there were never any technical fireworks, only a studied simplicity and naivete. I’d compare Pablo’s melodica work with the trumpet of Miles Davis or the voice of Billie Holiday, in which the point is not technical facility but expressive intensity achieved by constriction of means.

Pablo was an important record producer and innovator of dub in the 70s, and though there are hints of dub effects on East of the River Nile, it is basically played through by a band. Or at least that’s how it sounds, though certainly most Jamaican music of the era was assembled in the studio, often using preexisting rhythms to which one would add the soprano and tenor voices of persons or instruments.

If you don’t think instrumental music is capable of stating a spiritual message or creating a spiritual context, go back and listen to Bach. East of the River Nile, like the other best Pablo records (notably Original Rockers), is so quiet in its intensity, so still at its heart, that it obviously constitutes a Rastafarian religious discipline. Pablo plays and produces without a trace of ego; the point is never to impress you, only–quietly–to affect you. And that makes you realize how rare egolessness is in music, or among professional musicians.

This is an ascetic and beautiful music. Each song seems somehow to have begun at an arbitrary place in an infinite progression, and to stop just as arbitrarily. That’s the stillness at the music’s heart: every song sounds like a sample of eternity. And if there’s one criticism worth making of this album, it’s that each song should occupy a whole CD. Pablo, an ethereal-looking, haunted, dignified Rastaman, died in 1999 of a nerve disorder.

Anyway, after huffing the ganj and listening to Augustus, I’m not so ticked off. I’m thinking that maybe Babylon can be left to destroy itself. But it’ll still be fun to watch.

[www.crispinsartwell.com](http://www.crispinsartwell.com)