Black 47

Since the early ’90s, New York’s Black 47 have long been hailed as the American equivalent to The Pogues, similarly mixing the traditional music of their Irish ancestry with punk’s social consciousness and shambling musicianship. Led by singer/guitarist Larry Kirwan, the group has been positively Clash-like in its quest to assimilate as many musical styles as possible into its sound: Stonesy rock and roll, southern jangle rock, reggae, jazz, hip-hop, and even country have all found their way into the group’s melting pot. Though Kirwan’s vocal range is limited in typical punk fashion, his lyrics, though not always ironclad, are about as multi-dimensional as the music; all working class angst, political activism, intricate wordplay, and usually a good helping of black humor.

This time around things are mostly serious. With a title like Iraq, there can be little doubt that the political activism side of Black 47’s music is the dominant one. It’s the record that most Black 47 fans knew was eventually coming. Since 2003, the band’s output has been relatively scant; only a live album and a best of compilation were major releases. Comprised of songs written by Kirwan over the course of the war’s duration and inspired by the stories of Black 47 fans who served overseas, Iraq is the band’s earnest stab at the big protest album. Everyone from Green Day to Neil Young has attempted it, but what makes Iraq stand out in the intense focus on the subject of the war itself that’s implied by the title. Whereas American Idiot was a rock opera meant to appeal to disaffected teen-agers and Living With War dealt with the home front, Iraq puts the listener right into the thick of it with soldiers witnessing their friends getting shot, big battles both heroic and horrific, going through your day with the fear of getting shot at or blown up always in the back of your mind, and the feelings of isolation, loneliness, regret, and despair felt at the front line.

Coupling this approach with the decidedly left wing political statements strewn about the record (yes, George W. Bush is personally addressed in the lyrics and, yes, the band does fall back on incorporating clips of his speeches) points to Iraq being a prime piece of political activism set to music, but how does it measure up artistically? In that area, the results are mixed. Lyrically, Kirwan falls between poetic and ham-fisted, but he succeeds in his overall goal of presenting the details of the war that he knows and fashioning songs out of them with his political views in mind. One could surmise that Iraq will come to be seen as a product of its times in the coming years (when the war is hopefully long done with), much like the plethora of Vietnam-era protest songs and bands that are long forgotten some thirty years later. Like most protest songs, the material here might not survive the war’s end, but that’s not the point. The point is to give voice to a movement that wants the war’s end, the songs only meant to stay relevant as long as American troops still perish on Iraqi soil. (Of course, some of you reading this might’ve just immediately reacted “What movement?” but that’s another story for another day.)

Musically, Iraq starts off with more rock-oriented tracks before settling down into its reggae, jazz, and Celtic informed material. The opening “Stars and Stripes” is the most immediate, making use of the same chord progressions and punky sneer that the New York Dolls used to compose “Personality Crisis” some three and a half decades ago, while “Downtown Baghdad Blues” invokes Exile On Main Street type raunch to match the lyric’s guttural misery.

Once the tempo slows down, the affair gets a little similar sounding, but the highlight of the second half (and perhaps the entire record) is “Battle of Fallujah.” Deeply indebted to traditional Celtic music and sang like an old Irish war ballad, it’s downright eerie to hear a song about U.S. Marines sang in the same manner as musicians probably sang about blood spilled hundreds of years ago, perhaps underlining the point that while mankind advanced technologically and scientifically in wondrous ways, our tragedies and hardships have remained the same.

So while Iraq might not be the second coming of Highway 61 Revisited, it does what it sets out to do; it brings the stories of the war out for nearly 45 minutes and pleads its case for calling the whole thing off. You may not agree with Kirwan’s political views and the leftist presentation of the subject matter might inspire some to call it propaganda, but regardless of that, one must admire a band that devotes an entire album to the ongoing crisis in the Middle East instead of just giving the war brief lip service for the sake of credibility and the concept of “being political.” This record is meant to be the soundtrack to a march, not your life.

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