Boat Train

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The Pogues, "Boat Train," (download until 1/22/09), from "Peace and Love."

Joe Strummer generously called Shane MacGowan the best songwriter of his generation, meaning Joe Strummer's generation. Labeling anyone the best of anything is not really a useful exercise, and while I have no doubt that Strummer's sentiments were genuine—because as we all know this was a man who seemingly could never be anything but—I also have a feeling that he knew that saying so publicly would help Shane's reputation and therefore assist his, and the Pogues', career. It would assure Shane at least a minor spot in the pantheon.

This is by no means Shane's pre-eminent achievement, but it is one of the three or four tunes of his that archetypify his approach. Shane is a social songwriter, one might say, and in this he more than nearly anyone I know of from his place, time, and tradition, can rightly be called a real part of traditional music. He sustains and departs from his musical inheritance, which is what tradition is. If it's static, it's not tradition. It's ancient history. This is much more true with Shane than with a guy like Bob Dylan, who of course is the one people talk about, and whose self-conception seems to be (insofar as anyone, anyone at all including Bob Dylan has any sense of what he actually thinks) that he's the bigshot heir of traditional music extending it into the present. Bob keeps the musical, formal aspects of traditional song but drops almost entirely the social aspects of traditional song. Not that this is a bad thing, it just is.

This is to be sure a generalization, and by no means is what I'll next describe uniquely Irish, but there's a lot of Irish traditional song, my favorite among them “The Galway Races,” which takes as its subject a social situation rather than an individual protagonist. Of course many Irish songs have individual protagonists and are written from a single perspective. That kind of subjectivity—while in no way standing in the way of the making of great song—is the fundamental trait of the modern pop song. There's an individual looking out at the world in most song today. So it's not particular interesting to find that kind of subjectivity, individual subjectivity, in a song in 2009, or in 1989, when Shane's “Boat Train” was released.

Quickly recall the aforementioned “Galway Races.” The song reads basically as a long list of all the parties present at the races on a particular day. None of us modern types, myself included, read lists for fun, and despite having insisted that he'd be glad to hear Joao Gilberto sing the telephone book I'm quite sure that Miles would only do so out of stubbornness, gritting his teeth, pretending he was digging it only to prove wrong the naysayers who called him on his nonsense. Yet here at the Galway races we are presented with the most compelling list I know of in traditional song, acknowledging my admittedly thin knowledge of traditional song. I'm no Lomax, or Dylan—because though Bob discarded tradition more than extending it he certainly knew it.

The list of attendance is one of the most important literary forms there is, but in the sickness of capitalism we've completely denigrated it. Why? Because under capitalism things are more important than people, except for the individual consuming and occasionally producing subject. But I can't overstate how often, when reading this or that book about some sort of ancient history, I come across some reference to an inscription that lists who was present at the inscribing. We modern folk think of this as graffiti, but in fact it's an act in the formation of people as a people. We are essentially a social organism, and all of our social neuroses arise in the United States because we've forgotten this. Cheikh Anta Diop made this comment in Civilization and Barbarism somewhere, that all the West's social neuroses derive from an excess of privacy, where all of Africa's social neuroses derive from a lack of it. Not an exact quote, but that's the sense of it.

Yes, there's an “I” in “Boat Train.” Make of this what you will. The I, however, is a very dissociated subject, drunk as hell, one imagines slightly drunk at the start (not completely clear) but increasingly and intensely so as the song progresses. The first word is I, and then progressively the subject re-enters the social environment and though the I remains it becomes increasingly peripheral. The bulk of the happenings in the songs are simultaneously events and sensations. “Some bastard started slagging off the Pakis and the Jews.” “Some bastard started singing 'The Little Cottage by the Lee.'”

This is typical Shane—a brief beginning in which we are introduced to the “I,” who then enters some social occasion, the various and intersecting happenings of which are listed, with the impression that the list is incomplete, after which the song ends. “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” “The Body of an American,” “Fairytale of New York.” It's a brilliant technique. I wouldn't want to overstate it, to be sure—it's not that in any of these songs the narrative subject completely dissipates. Nor is the the only technique he uses, because he structures “Fairytale of New York” and to a lesser extent “A Pair of Brown Eyes” like a film as much as a song. Actually, the narrative subject is a stronger and more linear presence in “Boat Train” than in any of the other songs I've mentioned, which makes me wonder why I picked it as a starting point for this digression. Probably just because it's the funniest thing Shane's yet written. Funny goes a long way with me.

The only other writer that comes to mind immediately that puts forth song as social situation rather than—a pox on Lou Reed—character study, and does it so naturally, unpretentiously, and masterfully, is Chuck Berry. “Ring, ring goes the bell!”