APOCALYPSE NOW! 

JACKSON BROWNE AND CHUMBAWAMBA

Have T***p derangement syndrome? Don’t worry; be happy! Go with the flow. Things can always get worse, right?

The dual apocalyptic visions featured today may derive from decades past, when anxiety within the zeitgeist was running hot, but they look positively edenic in retrospect. “All Things Must Pass,” as George Harrison prophetically wrote, and if that includes our entire civilization, we best make our peace with it. No bomb shelter can save us.

Chumbawamba’s 1997 hit “Tubthumping” had that ear worm: I Get Knocked Down, but I get up again,” which signified a contagious resiliency.  However, in this, their eerie cover of The BeeGees NY Mining Disaster 1941, the protagonists portrayed will probably never see daylight, or their families again. Jackson Browne’s elegant metaphor of the approaching deluge that will sweep everything under its power has always brought tears to my eyes, even back when I first heard it in college. Now, as an elder, the hopeful innocence of the doomed weighs like an anchor on my heart. 

CHUMBAWAMBA

This group of anarchist-artists from Leeds, U.K., has been hard to pin down because their musicality encompassed so many different genres. Maybe that’s the source of the Trump campaign’s confusion when they tried to use the group’s one hit TubThumping as their campaign rallying cry before Chumbawamba put a stop to that. (Reminiscent of Reagan and his attempted coopting of Springsteen’s Born in the USA). 

Ironic because they are known for having crooned such leftist provocations as “So long, so long, Margaret Thatcher,” and “The Day the Nazi Died,” in their long career of social protest.  Their choice to cover the mid-60s BeeGees hit about a fictional mass grave in the making is intriguing. It sounds like a church hymn sung by an angelic choir. 

JACKSON BROWNE

Before the Deluge, the last song on the 1974, Late For The Sky record - (a perfect album, in my opinion) - is Jackson Browne at his best: with a heart wrenching melody (aided by David Lindley’s keening violin), and a solid poetic metaphor that, in its specificity, encompasses worlds. 

As we follow the travails of the pilgrims who just want to live freely and honestly, apart from the excesses and corruption of the modern world, we watch with trepidation as their annihilation through compromise approaches. The “deluge” may be interpreted widely as a metaphor for whatever impending disaster one chooses. When Jackson sings: “let the music keep our spirits high, let the buildings keep our children dry, Let creation reveal it’s secrets by and by, when the light that’s lost within us reaches the sky,” its a prayer… a prayer that the dark forces within us and surrounding us may somehow be quelled and quieted.