Yes, I’m writing about Ted Leo again, because I find myself in the position frequently of having to recommend his music to people and explaining why I love it so much. But I think there are two reasons why I love Ted Leo: the quality of his work, and the necessity of his work.
The quality of his work I’ve discussed at length—he makes great rock music, sings with a beautiful tenor, has skills on the guitar most musicians dream of, and has one of the tightest rhythm sections in rock. No wonder he’s so frequently compared to early Elvis Costello—he makes tight, danceable, thrashable rock that stirs together singer-songwriter, ska, pop, new wave, prog and all sorts of other genres.
But why do I say we need Ted Leo? Because Ted Leo is out there making accessable, listenable, awesome political music, and that is rare these days. While the protest song is coming back into vogue (with some highs, like REM’s “Bad Day” and some lows like Jadakiss’ “Why?”) few people infuse their art and their politics as well as Leo, and can do it with such quality as well.
Much of this can be traced to how good and smart a lyricist Leo is. Sample Rage Against the Machine Political Lyrics:
1) Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me
2) Godzilla, but the real killa’s the American Government
Sample Ted Leo Political Lyrics:
1) if there’s a war, another shitty war
To fight for Ba-Ba-Babylon
It’s the Perfect Storm
But in a Tea Cup
And you must Drink it dow-ow-own
Drink it dow-ow-own
And
2) “The distance keeps us safe
From waves
Of subcutaneous problems
That our governments
And our accents
And our parents
Have us swimming in
Until all that sin
Has soaked us through and through and through and through and through”
These two sets of lyrics offer us many clues as to Leo’s appeal. The first one is great poetry—it takes a cliché (the tempest in a tea cup) and slides it around and shatters it and reconfigures it, turning dead language into something new and alive. It’s also clever, and manages to take the bluntness of the first bit (shitty war) and spin it around into an extended prediction of where America’s foreign policy is taking us in a song written before the war in Iraq.
The second one blends the personal and the political. The song (Stove by a Whale) is a love song of sorts, but a love song about foreignness, isolation, the other. The recurrent theme is of accents keeping us apart, and of what it is like to be someone other in the United States. Ultimately, Leo’s character is swept away by the beauty of the Ocean, as he sings “I’m not talking to the people who’ve been in jail/ I’m not talkin’ bout just wanting to belong somewhere/ And let’s not talk about talk about the color of your eyes or your hair/ I’m talkin’ bout talkin’ bout the color of the sea from way up there”. Ultimately a song about how distance will rend us if we let it, it still contains a little bit of politics about how we learn to fear the other.
All of this is couched in a amazingly powerful music. It’s the kind of music that makes you dance around your apartment like an idiot or, as a friend of mine and I once did totally embarssingly at a dinner party, air-guitar spontaneously.
No offense to Zach De La Rocha, but I always found his brand of political rock like taking your medicine… I always wanted it to be something I was interested in dancing around and getting my aggression out to… but it was always so inane it never really grabbed me. Not like the Clash, and not like Ted Leo.
Why this fascinates me so is that we are almost always unable to duplicate this in the theater. People complain of political theater “preaching to the choir” and if you don’t like Leo’s politics, you can still enjoy his music, his lyrical artistry and the get down and dance boogie of his band (on his new album, getting down and dancing seems to be the only solution he can offer to a host of problems). How can we recreate this on the stage? How can a team, working together, present a play that not only contains in it the politics, but also the boogie? This is what Shakespeare did so well, and I wonder if that’s what makes Shakespeare such a unique force in theater. I don’t even know if we know how in today’s theater to match making personal, deeply political art to making theatrical boogie. Or what theatrical boogie would even look like.
We still need Ted Leo!
Even though he looks mad at me in this picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasongrote/3360250916/
Posted by: Jason Grote | July 12, 2009 at 11:40 PM