This Is Your Song For....March 13th, 2014: Break Them Down by Graham Parker

Hiding behind a not very good album....

Welcome back.  Hopefully I can get up enough energy to submit these entries more than monthly soon.  Today...the Angry Young Man of New Wave most people forgot.

....which is a shame because if you consider Joe Jackson The Beatles, and Elvis Costello The Stones, then Graham Parker is The Kinks, the one that helped shape the genre while not getting the credit his peers deserved.  And let’s be honest; like The Kinks, Parker had a tendency towards inconsistency and an annoying habit of trying to chase the American market instead of being true to himself.

This is from a later phase in his career, after he broke ties with his most famous collaborators The Rumor, and was recording as Graham Parker And The Shot (this being the only album he records under that name).  This is a very transparent song about converting native cultures to Christianity and, while it’s not as unsubtle as ‘Green Monkeys,’ a song off the otherwise excellent,return-to-form album Struck By Lightning, it’s pretty obvious what Parker is getting at.  It’s sort of a sad period of his career, when he was flailing about trying to keep an audience that was growing bored with him.  It’s not for nothing that Parker never quite found another sympatico set of collaborators thoughout the late 80‘s onward until he recently reunited with The Rumor for the rather good Three Chords Good.

As you can no doubt tell, I don’t have much to say about this song.  If Graham Parker is The Kinks, then this is from the period in his career analogous to the late 70‘s era that saw Ray Davies produce Low Budget and Celluloid Heroes.

Here’s the song.

30 Songs, 30 Days (2009 Edition), Day Ten: Oliver's Army by Elvis Costello

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you one Declan Patrick MacManus.

This is not from his best album--I still insist that Imperial Bedroom holds that status, which I have been devoted to ever since I found a tape of it in a Quarter Bin during the twilight days of the Queens Boulevard Alexander's Department Store--but this is one of the first songs of his that blew open my mind to his greatness. It still ranks as one of my favorite songs he ever penned, a position it held very, very quickly after I first heard it. Heck, it had such an impact on me that I named a villain group of mercenaries after this song in my Villains and Vigilantes campaign (But, to be fair, I also had another villain named after an Echo and The Bunnymen song...).

A pretty important song, given it almost was cut from the album it appeared on, Armed Forces.

A song about class distinctions being played out in the military, its has the typical Costello word salad gamboling all through it, from the titular reference to Oliver Cromwell to the way the hot spot keeps hoping from Belfast to Hong Kong to Palestine to Johanessburg--and yet its message stays clear. If you're poor, Costello's POV character tells us, you'll fight for us. And if you die fighting for us, you'll just be 'one less white nigger.'

Incidentally--this song is maybe unique in that radio stations usually play it without censoring the word 'nigger.'

I owned a tape of Armed Forces that I wore out, then bought a second hand CD. One of these days I'll buy the Rhino version with the extra disc of outtakes. I'll keep all version, much like I've kept both the Rhino CD and that quarter bin tape of Imperial Bedroom....and I'm sure that Oliver's Army will keep marching through the back of my head.

Here's the video. Incidentally, I'm pretty positive the beach he's singing on at one point is the same that he uses as a setting for his video for "(What's So Funny About) Peace, Love and Understanding?"