Steve Earle Hits Hard
REVIEW BY BILL NEVINS
The Revolution Starts . . . Now!
Steve Earle
Artemis Records
Available from or most CD stores
Steve Earle doesn't pull punches. With a rebel red star blazing from the front cover of his new cd, The Revolution Starts . . . Now!, and new songs like "Fuck the FCC (and the FBI and the CIA)" , Earle calls his shots loud and clear. At a recent Santa Fe concert, fellow anti-war songsmith Kris Kristofferson introduced Earle as "a force of nature", and that's an apt description. Steve Earle has the energy of a hurricane these days, and that wind is blowing hard from the left!
A "country outlaw rocker" from way back, Steve Earle has always had his politics clear. He taunted then US president Ronald Reagan as a "snake oil" salesman on his 1980s breakthrough album Copperhead Road, and he was on the anti-Vietnam War protest lines as a teenager while he was writing Guitar Town. But the big time music lifestyle sometimes got in Earle's way. "We used to sing at a protest, then jump in the limo and goof off", he admits. No more. Nowadays, clean and sober and as sharp-witted as the reborn spirit of Woody Guthrie, Earle is taking no prisoners.
"I've got two draft-age sons now", he declares, "I've definitely got a dog in this hunt!" Since catching plenty of conservative talk-radio flak for the razor-edged progressive politics of his last studio album, Jerusalem, Earle has not flinched. If anything, he has turned the heat up on injustice, reaction, imperialism and the regime led by President George Bush in his new songs and in his stage performances, both solo and with his hard-sweat rock and bluegrass band, The Dukes. A long-time foe of the death penalty, Earle wondered aloud from the Santa Fe stage, "If we were not a country that is killing people in our prisons, would we have invaded Iraq for no reason?"
Based in Nashville, deep in the American "heartland", Earle stands his ground and takes the fight to the right-wing enemy. He sang and marched with the huge United for Peace and Justice demonstration against Bush policies on August 29 in New York City and a few days earlier he spoke and performed at the Refuse and Resist Courageous Resisters award ceremony at New York University, debuting his great new song, "Rich Man's War".
"Rich Man's War" and most of the other songs on The Revolution Starts . . . Now! bring the pain and anguish of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and related Bush-imperialist outrages front and centre in a very personalised way. Disoriented, dismayed US troops in Asia and desperate freedom fighters in Palestine are linked in Earle's songs not just by immediate despair but also by a form of human faith that somehow, sometime this mess may just turn for the better.
There's a big "if" there, of course, and Steve Earle in his astute story-songs focuses on the possibility of faith — real human faith, not the flakey "pie in the sky" type — in victory for the oppressed, for the exploited, for the murdered and wrongly used in this world.
Steve Earle is singing his rebel heart out for the people these days. It's great music, good words to hear. And, damn, but you can dance to it! Not a dull song on the record. The Revolution Starts . . . Now! is the clearest, most fearless political record and the strongest blast of fresh air to come out of the US in years.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, October 27, 2004.
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