Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 29-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
Last week I learned that some sea shanties were navigational tools; directions away from the rocks on the Atlantic coast of Canada were built into the lyrics. Folk songs, in my mind, are purposeful in the same way. I grew up looking at the overt simplicity of a Pete Seeger record album, wondering what delighted my father about “ticky-tacky” when his real passion was jazz.
My childhood memory of jazz on the hi-fi is one of not trusting that my parents knew enough about the symbolic gesture field to love it, to really love it the way they seemed to want to.
I only just recently learned about slaves hanging out quilts as navigational tools for those heading north to freedom, knowing their masters weren’t looking at bedding for clues.
I am white
and therefore the oppressor.
That I am rattled by jazz
trumpets a flock of arrowheads
pointing north towards success.
Punk—and its edgy-enough contemporaries, including 2-Tone—came up, full voice from the throats Margaret Thatcher had her iron grip on, to rasp and roll from the U.K. and collide with outcroppings of culturally motivated configurations in the USA with such a force that subsequent musical stylists must navigate—to this day—the same way a sailor singing in falsetto spies a bit of land in the second chorus. “How close to the rocks has my fragile wooden hull drifted?” a contestant on American Idol should, but likely won’t, be asking themselves as they soar away from including anything important in their copy-cat renditions, preferring to fly up the scale like Icarus on waxy chords of fame.
And there are those few and rare and far between like Bob Wiseman who make taking on the world look easy, while, at the same time, I’m wondering how the hell he does it? Not why.
“Breathing In The Dark,” from The Eagle & The Poodle (Matador, 1996; Smarten UP!, 2009) (download):
