The music has rarely been political, even though it sprang from the suffering of blacks under slavery and was a virtual soundtrack to the tumultuous civil rights era of the 1960′s.
Rock and folk have rich traditions of political songs and even R&B and soul spawned memorable hits about serious subjects during the Vietnam War years, like Edwin Starr’s “War (What Is It Good For?) and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?”
Now, less than two years after America was shattered by terrorist attacks and two months after war in Iraq, bluesman Robert Cray introduces those modern-day issues in his latest album, “Time Will Tell.”
“You take a little schoolboy/And tell him who to hate/Then you send him to the desert/For the oil near Kuwait,” he sings in “Survivor.” The song ends with the sound of marching boots and the admonition: “You’ve got to choose.”
On “Distant Shore,” written by the Robert Cray Band’s keyboardist Jim Pugh, he sings of “an ancient battle/in an ancient land,” where “war begat war.”
“‘Survivor’ started out as a song about being happy to still be here,” Cray, who has been recording since 1974, told Reuters recently. “But then it became a reflection of where I am now. The last verse was about the state of what’s going on, which I disagree with.
“Whether or not a lot of people might be upset by it I wanted the sound of marching boots. It’s a statement that you can’t go out and change the world with war.”
It’s true war isn’t the answer to many issues in the world – - but when dealing with a murderous tyrant what would Robert Cray have had the President of our nation do?
Maybe he would have wanted George Bush to send Saddam a sweet little perfume scented note and ask him to please step down from power.
Or maybe he would have had GW send Saddam a calendar marking out another twelve years to do what he wanted.
More likely he would have sent the President a blindfold and asked him to please just ignore the murder of hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Iraqis and to not pay attention to Saddam and the creation of WMD.
There are times war is inevitable – - this was one such time.
I will no longer be crying the blues listening to the tunes of Robert Cray.
–==Discuss This==–
Comments are closed.