REVIEW: Chumbawamba, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)
(Republic/Universal Records)
- Wilson Neate
Chumbawamba's records have always stressed -- quite rightly -- that music and politics are inseparable. To do it justice then, any discussion of WYSIWYG (an album that "mixes it up musically and politically" according to its press blurb) has to address both of those components as constitutive of the overall package.
Three years have passed since the Leeds collective brought anarchy to the home-makers of America via talk-show performances of "Tubthumpin'," the song that -- as well as finding its way onto the Home Alone III soundtrack -- launched a thousand frat parties and, for a short time, provided background music for segments on the Fox Sports channel. On the heels of that earlier Stateside success, WYSIWYG is an album largely about America, its cultural ills and the many tentacles of its...ahem...corporate capitalist ideology.
Musically, WYSIWYG is brilliantly eclectic and accomplished, incorporating a cappella numbers, country tinged ballads, hip hop beats, melodic folk tunes, and rock. And lyrically, WYSIWYG is very clever. Complete with the now-standard Chumbawamba word plays, puns and acerbic wit, the songs cast a wide, razor-barbed net from which very few people appear to be exempt. Politically, however, when you listen to the content of the lyrics you get the sense that the Chumbas certainly aren't half as radical as they'd like you to think. At times they sound quite reactionary -- especially when it comes to gender and sexuality -- and at other times, they're embarrassingly simplistic, albeit in a charmingly anachronistic way.
From minimal, sampled inter- and intra-song fragments to complete songs, WYSIWYG bashes its listener over the head with the outdated notion that popular culture is a uniquely American enterprise. Since cultural dependency is a target of Chumbawamba's musical cabaret-style critique, how odd then that they should build their album around the musical styles and other cultural materials of the nation they're attacking, thereby simply reinscribing it as the dominant global paradigm.
"Jesus in Vegas" is a punchy song to jump around to and would make a great single. Unfortunately, however, it's a product of the "wow, just think, what if Christ came to capitalist America, let's write one about that!" school of lyrics. Similarly, the beautiful folk/country pastiche "Celebration, Florida" is a musical and vocal success but in the lyrics the Chumbas ever so earnestly tell us all about the Disney community as...you'll never guess...a metaphor for America! "Dumbing Down" serves up more of the same, albeit disguised in a great '60s Petula Clark pop sound.
But it's not just in the realm of popular culture that the Chumbas identify America as the Great Satan. Even militarism, attacked on "Smart Bomb," is coded "in American" with its funky Village People-esque sound and its Pentagon jargon. OK, the US does have a habit of weighing in as Global Cop but there's more to it than that. I guess that British militarism just isn't as sexy as American militarism; we Brits don't have that accent, the wacky characters, the buzz words or the right soundtrack music. In short, our militarism doesn't make for such good pop songs.
"I'm Not Sorry, I Was Having Fun" critiques the debacle of Woodstock 1999, albeit only in terms of its commercialism and lack of politics. Oddly enough, it glosses over the sexual assaults that took place. Still, the song does feature one of the finest lyrical flights of fancy which has Rush Limbaugh squaring off against Britain's finest Marxist actor, Ricky Tomlinson. "Pass It Along" hones in on US corporate culture of the Gates variety, bemoaning the loss of an authentic, face-to-face model of community at the hands of evil communications technologies among other things. With its repeating motif of Madness' "Our House," it seeks to evoke some kind of traditional values and community, but what that means at this historical juncture is left unclear.
While one of the brief interludes, "Moses With a Gun," takes aim at a really worthwhile target, Charlton Heston, the "best title" award goes to "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Jerry Springer." This brings together Giuliani's favorite artist Damien Hirst and the king of trash TV, with the latter ending up in formaldehyde. "Shake Baby Shake" has great horns and exquisite vocals but, unfortunately, opens up the can of sexist worms that gnaw away at Chumbawamba's purported radicalism. Focused on American women, this song has a female vocalist slag off other women without pausing to consider the social and material pressures that might make them "buy into" an inadequate vision of femininity. "She's Got all the Friends" goes after UK female media bores who write society columns as well as slumming US rich girls. This time the vocals even have a catty lilt. But who cares? Is this important? All this song does is re-run the '60s notion of feminism and the militant left being at odds.
But things get particularly tricky with "I'm Coming Out." Having picked on pointless, ineffectual targets, the Chumbas turn their self-righteous critical eye to sexuality and pick on a couple of dead people, namely Freddie Mercury and Rock Hudson. Again this is a fun, catchy song but the rhetoric of "outing" in the lyrics, as well as its "explication" in the liner notes, is indistinguishable from the kind of homophobic rot you find in the English tabloids. This is particularly ironic in view of the sentiments expressed in their earlier song "Homophobia" from Anarchy. Shame on you Chumbawamba.
Having said that, they do knock themselves out with their lovely, a cappella rendition of the Bee Gees' "New York Mining Disaster."
Never trust an album that not only prints the lyrics but then explains them to you at length. It shouldn't take that much work. To revive an old joke, How many anarchists does it take to change a light bulb? Or to slag off pitifully easy targets?
