Social Studies

Loud’s been around the block a couple a times. He’s supped of the pleasure and pain of the music circuit/treadmill; he’s washed his dirty linen in public with perverted glee; in essence he’s managed, like Woody Allen, to transform his personal neuroses into a lucrative earner that’s as likely to bring a grimace as a smile.

Cutting, incisive lyricism has always been Wainwright’s stock-in-trade. Whether it’s levelled at the idiocies of US foreign policy or at his own family, he’s usually opted for the scalpel over the sponge. And, it has to be said, ever since his bitter lambasting of Kate McGarrigle, his long suffering ex-wife, ("Who knows, maybe some day you’ll find a cure for menstruation") way back in the ’70s, you could tell that beneath all that whimsical banter lurks a bitter worldview.

Social Studies is just that. a compendium of topical tales, all of them commissioned over the last 10 years by National Public Radio and ABC’s ‘Nightline’. Wainwright has an uncanny facility for penning sharp and highly entertaining sideswipes at all manner of contemporary matters. Naturally there’s a distinctive American twist, which might render some of the material barren this side of the water. After all Senator Jesse Helms doesn’t preoccupy the minds of too many punters round these parts, and stories of O.J. and Tonya Harding are just a tad jaded, at least to these ears.

But there’s no denying the sheer perspicacity of the man’s observations elsewhere on the great white canvas of the American way. ‘New Street People’ is a hilarious take on the way that smokers have become social outcasts in this age of health promotion, and ‘Y2K’ skewers the self-righteous and apocalyptic declarations of Gatesworld clones with gleeful ease.

Lyrical considerations aside, musical themes are scattered wide. Echoes of previous songs pepper the material, sometimes to irritating effect. ‘What Gives’ smacks disconcertingly of ‘Unhappy Anniversary’ in its opening chords, while ‘Leap Of Faith’ merges ‘When I’m At Your House’ and ‘I’d Rather Be Lonely’ in one fell swoop. Still, with Wainwright’s faithful in-law, Chaim Tannenbaum, on banjo, harmonica and backing vocals, and John Scofied’s funky guitar on ‘Y2K’, there’s enough pickles in the jar to sate the appetite – at least for a while.

Social Studies makes for interesting listening if it’s sling shots and side swipes on American life and politics you’re looking for. This kind of material works marvellously on the live arena. But committed to the sterile environs of a CD, it quickly wears thin, its relentless wisecracking an aggravation rather than a clever amusement.

Wainwright has matured as a songwriter so much over the past decade. (History and Grown Man are both testimony to that). And that’s where he mines his richest seams these days. Social Studies is but a flimsy shadow of what he’s really capable of.