Come the black spring of 2003, it looked like all the pop stars had their agitprop balls cut off. Bono had too much debt relief money riding on the Republicans to bite the feeding hand; the hip-hop acts quelled their social consciences with yet more self-congratulatory rap telegrams about scaling the summit of the American Dream, and as for the nu-punks and pop-goths, well, peek into the MTV crib of any Good Charlatan and you’ll find a middle class SUV-driving consumerist who’d shuck those piercings for Ivy League in a second if it meant dodging the draft.
So as the Republican plots thickened into prisoner abuse scandals and 9/11 commission hearings, it was up to those with memories long enough to remember Kent State University and Vietnam to revive rock ‘n’ roll’s journalistic conscience, among them Rickie Lee Jones, Patti Smith and REM.
To his credit, Steve Earle was first out of the trenches on his 2002 album Jerusalem, taking flak for daring to write from the POV of John Walker Lindh, the American who fought for the Taliban in Afghanistan. This new record, as you might guess from the title, is a full-blown middle finger extended towards Homelands security policies and patriot acts, revelling in foul-mouthed free speech (“Fuck the FBI, fuck the CIA . . . (we’re) livin’ in the motherfuckin’ USA,” he exults at one point, like Tom Petty backed by Country Joe and The Fish). In other words, The Revolution reinvigorates the term ‘outlaw country’.
Earle commands protest chops that go back to Guthrie, but he also has the smarts to examine the allure of war, both as boys’ own glamour and last-ditch career option. Most of the songs study the anatomy of soldiery. ‘Rich Man’s War’ and ‘Home To Houston’ are told from the perspective of good ol’ boys with guns hauled from the southern hotbeds of poverty and fundamentalism, fertile harvest ground for recruiting men combing white trash malls but not gated estates. Then there’s the extraordinary ‘Warrior’, narrated by an ancient, decrepit god of war made incarnate in the military industrial complex. Over a backing track that lumbers like Crazy Horse, the singer spews arcane chunks of devil’s rhetoric somewhere between Homer and Beat extemporisation.
But it’s not all hot air. There’s also a brace of patented Earle heartbreakers, including a weathered duet with Emmylou Harris entitled ‘Comin’ Around’ (and those voices are a shotgun wedding in heaven), and ‘I Thought You Should Know’ an embittered but blue-eyed I-bin-around-the-block ballad as good as anything he’s ever written (and by that I mean the catch-your-breath beauty of ‘Goodbye’).
These songs were recorded almost as they were written, so the playing has that cardio-vascular glow of players still buzzing on new meat. Earle’s melodies have that old leather smell of familiarity, but his facility with roots music tempers and is tempered by a guilt free appetite for full-bore heartlands rock ‘n’ roll.
This revolution will not be televised and it won’t get played on the radio. But this revolution’s in the head, and from the heart.