Jerusalem
Steve Earle
Artemis Records
Available form <http://www.artemisrecords.com>
REVIEW BY BILL NEVINS
Steve Earle is unrepentant, as one of his toughest songs declares. He makes no apologies for his past dissent and rebellion, and he does not back down from saying what he sees in America now. It's no pretty picture.
While Bruce Springsteen's latest album, The Rising, teases shimmering, half-comforting pieties from his vision of the fallen World Trade Center towers, Earle in the opening song of his new album, Jerusalem, chants "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust" and reminds us: "That every tower ever built tumbles/No matter how strong no matter how tall... And every idol ever raised falls".
Earle lets loose a jeremiad in this CD, propelled by an astute rocker's fury at the greed, ineptitude and murderous chicanery he sees as constituting the true rising tide in the USA today. Earle's vision of what is coming into being is closer to Yeats' "Second Coming" nightmare of a "rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born" than of a stricken nation rallying together to make a noble stand against evil.
In his liner notes to Jerusalem, Earle confides that the US flag stickers now plastered all over this land fill him with chilling memories of the years when the US flag was wielded as a threat by Vietnam War "hawks" who demanded "unity" in a time of national crisis — "America, love it or leave it" — and how the US then descended into bitter, violent internal strife. Earle's American "dream" is less of shining towers of light than of the places of imprisonment and execution he has so often visited.
It is a bleak prophecy Earle puts forward (though set in some of his most lovely music, augmented by Emmy Lou Harris) and he surely will be criticised for it.
He already has been in the reactionary wail of objection to "John Walker's Blues", a stunning cut on Jerusalem which slips inside the imagined mind of the idealistic, religiously devout American youth who went to fight a failed war far from home: "As death filled the air we all offered up prayers/And prepared for our martyrdom... Now they're draggin' me back with my head in a sack/To the land of the infidel."
Earle has always sketched bitter warriors well: mercenaries, Confederate grunts, Irish Fenians and the gun-toting pot-farming Vietnam vet in his signature song, "Copperhead Road". His Jerusalem portrait of young John Walker Lindh is counterposed to another band of fighting brothers, the Americans killed in Vietnam: "Half a million soldiers fly across the water/One in 10 are never comin' back again/50,000 sons who never grew to fathers/Don't you ever wonder who they might have been."
Earle's setting of this lesson from recent US history in the present tense gives it a chilling cautionary tone — the prophet looks at the past and sees a possible future.
Clearly, Earle intends Jerusalem as a warning, and just as clearly sees himself as a defiant patriot, clear-eyed enough to see the PATRIOT ACT as the dire threat to the US constitution that it is. Just as Oliver Stone was labelled "Hollywood's house paranoid", so Earle is sure to be accused of wild-eyed delusions or worse.
After all, this is a time when smug, rich, Stetson-crowned country stars have revived Merle Haggard's corny chestnut, "Fightin' Side of Me" as a singalong anthem for the new US war fever. And when sincere, skilled songsters like Neal Young and Springsteen can do little more than offer wan prayers for peace.
Steve Earle, on the other hand, continues to show his fighting side. He's picked a fight worth fighting. A battle for the soul of his country, and perhaps the future of the world. Jerusalem is a rousing opening salvo.
From Green Left Weekly, September 4, 2002.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.