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WHERE
ARE THE ELEPHANTS?
Leon Rosselson
ISBN 978-1-62963-973-4
PM Press
The title is of one of Rosselson’s songs, a redundant phrase learnt
from Lesson 3 of a BBC Kontakte course (somewhat reminiscent of
Ionesco), and applied when he needed inspiration to write about the
fall of the Berlin Wall. Three years before, he’d sung at a festival
in East Berlin and had found the formulation coming into his head.
This is recounted in the long first chapter, more than fifty pages
of a hundred and sixty-two, about Rosselson’s relation to communism.
Millions were bitterly disillusioned, something they might have
avoided by reading Bakunin. Long before the Soviet experiment and
its transparent false prophets, the anarchists had worked out the
essence: replacing capitalists by the State was a mere switch of
tyrannies. Bakunin was dead before the significant extension of the
franchise. Though there were many experiments across the globe, it
wasn’t until into the twentieth century that most countries had
granted the vote to all adults. Kropotkin too was dead before most
countries had implemented, though he lived to see the UK’s 1918 Act.
Had they lived to see it, they might well have concluded capitalism
with the vote is better than “communism” without it. What was
wrongly termed “communism”, however, was State capitalism. Bakunin
was prescient: autonomous, worker-owned and controlled enterprises
and self-government were the way to avoid new forms of exploitation
and control.
Like many millions, Rosselson was attracted by the promise of
communism. It’s probable the attraction for most people was
primarily emotional. How many communists ploughed through Capital
from start to finish? There might have been disastrous mistake in
there, but the vision of the Communist Manifesto was enough:
no more classes, no more exploitation, no more poverty side by side
with lavish wealth, no more war. Who wouldn’t rally to it except the
rich? Yet feeling something is right doesn’t imply intellectual
coherence. The Christian injunction to love your neighbour as
yourself may appeal, but is doesn’t imply there is a god or and
after-life or that the gospels are to trusted. The vision of a
classless democracy doesn’t imply Marx’s theory is watertight. His
call to violent revolution was scuppered by universal suffrage. Only
a fool will risk their life on the barricades when can they oust the
government by going to a polling booth. It may be not much more than
ôte-toi que je m’y mette, but people will always try to make
the best of their circumstances and small secure gains in the
present tend to have greater pull than promises of thoroughgoing
change which might come to nothing. Maybe Bevan’s comment that those
who want to do everything at once end up doing nothing at all (or
worse) is pertinent. He distrusted parliamentary democracy but
managed to use it to realise the NHS, arguably the greatest
achievement of socialism.
In 1954 he was part of a delegation to the Soviet Union and resolved
to defend it against the obvious criticisms. He visited members of
his father’s family. In the 1980s one of them emigrated to the USA
where Rosselson once again paid a visit when on tour in the 1990’s.
he discovered the emigrant’s teenage daughters were staunch for
Reagan. Perhaps a nice example of how advantageous circumstances can
restrict people’s vision and diminish their moral responses.
Rosselson is an anti-capitalist, like many more. What makes him
worth particular attention is his song-writing. As a teenager he was
sent for piano lessons under protest because they clashed with his
chance to play football for his school. No doubt he later thanked
his parents (he was never likely to play for Arsenal). In 1953 he
joined the London Youth Choir which sang radical songs culled from
Sing. He played accordion on the 1958 Aldermaston march. In
1960 he sang with the Galliards at the Daily Worker rally in
the Albert Hall. In 1968 he recorded an LP with Adrian Mitchell. In
1989 he was a founder of the Political Song Network and the Red and
Green Umbrella Club. His song-writing and his radicalism have always
melded. In a sense, his songs are seldom about anything other than
the need to transform the way we live. He has written love songs
such as Let Your Hair Hang Down (not at all like the
saccharine products that fill the airwaves), but his focus has been
the potential for social change.
The folk tradition is to sing about the way the world is; that is,
it isn’t a form of escapism, which rock and pop essentially are. If
you were a folkie in the twentieth century, you were bound to sing
about capitalism and the workers’ movement because they have defined
our shared life for the past two centuries. Are there any right-wing
folk singers, people, that is, who sing in praise of capitalism? The
form doesn’t lend itself. Pop music is the reactionary form. It
directs people’s attention from the public, political realm and
focuses it, narcissistically, on their own emotions; an essentially
neurotic procedure. Its message is, if only you can get your
intimate life adjusted, all will be blissful. Of course, erotic love
is no small matter, but the notion happiness can be found in the
intensely personal in spite of poverty, exploitation, prejudice,
violence, absence of liberty is vacuous. Interestingly, most
marriages in the UK founder because of money problems. When did you
last hear a pop song about that?
Rosselson’s orientation is healthy, a robust opposition to the
sickly nature of what he calls “mashed-potato music”. In a society
divided by property and power what could be more natural than for
the common folk to sing about their condition? It’s because that is
natural, the pop world had to be created. Rosselson’s songs are
genuine responses to outrage at injustice; pop music is a phoney
product and part of the propaganda system. When The Beatles
sang “I don’t care too much for money” they were lying.
Rosselson mentions Tariq Ali’s interview with John Lennon in
Black Dwarf in connection to the events of 1968 in Paris. Ali
was of the view that when the French government was paralysed, the
workers should have seized power. Easy to say, remarks the
songwriter. Quite. Which workers, the real ones or those of Ali’s
imagination? Lennon was a multi-millionaire pop icon who made
himself rich by peddling pap to children (the link between pop and
paedophilia is more obvious than people recognise) and Ali has made
a handsome career by claiming to stand for the working people he has
never lived or worked amongst. Why did Ali interview Lennon and not
Rosselson, or Martin Carthy or Pete Seeger? Rosselson is right that
the 1960s produced some genuine radicalism (Abbie Hoffman for
example, though Peter Coyote is right about his mistakes), but also
plenty of flummery. Lennon and Ali were both attention-seekers. The
Haight-Ashbury Diggers were right about authenticity and
compulsive pursuit of the limelight isn’t part of it.
The Wobblies sang as they organised. Rosselson regrets that the
English left hasn’t made song part of its basic culture: song makes
people feel less alone, tells stories and should be full of wit,
verve and irreverence. He mentions Aunt Molly Jackson and her
relatives Sarah Ogan Gunning and Jim Garland (who co-wrote the
excellent The Death of Harry Simms with Aunt Molly). Hardly
household names, but not even names know and cherished by the labour
movement in the UK. A movement that has no songs is already defeated
says Rosselson, which sums up pretty well the Labour Party for most
of its existence and certainly today.
Rosselson is serious about song. He sees it as an art form in its
own right, not a poor relation of poetry. Some great poetry has been
set to music, of course (think of Fauré) but he’s right to tick off
Simon Armitage for his view that lyrics can be clichéd and cheesy,
as if poetry is the real thing and song a cheap product for
consumption by the
undiscriminating masses. Armitage, of course, is a rock-pop fan, and
it shows not only in his opinion of song but in his poetry.
Rosselson is very good too on the pretentiousness of Leonard Cohen
whose vague lyrics flow from his lack of imagination. Cohen has
nothing to say and says it over and over. He was popular among
students who liked to get stoned listening to his morbid melodies
and what’s-this-supposed-to-mean lyrics because he tapped into a
mood of fashionable but phoney disaffection. It was an indulgence to
grow long hair, roll joints and listen to his stuff for a few years
before donning the smart suit and entering the corporate world.
Cohen fought for Israel during the Yom Kippur War, a fact which
belies his
I’m-too-depressed-to-get-out-of-bed-and-believe-in-nothing persona.
Dylan too rightly comes in for criticism. Rosselson praises his
early songs such as Ballad of Hollis Brown, but Dylan
always was inauthentic. He adopted the name of a poet who wrote a
lot of fairly incomprehensible pieces and who enjoyed deliberately
adding meaningless words for the sake of rhythm or resonance. From
the start, Dylan was striving to be the poet he wasn’t, the best
efforts of Christopher Ricks notwithstanding. Dave Van Ronk, who
helped him get started in Greenwich Village, criticised his
senseless later lyrics. Dylan was for a time a supporter of Meir
Kahane. It’s hard to imagine how anyone with a genuine sense of
justice could give even a moment’s comfort to such a vicious man.
Neighbourhood Bully rehearses the usual myths about Israel. It
might be argued Dylan was authentic in his opposition to the Vietnam
War and his general support for liberal causes, but his lapse into
support for oppression in the case of Israel/Palestine indicates an
essential superficiality. Dylan lacked the authenticity of Brassens,
who loved poetry (Kenneth Rexroth thought him the best poet of
twentieth-century France) but knew he was a songwriter. Brassens has
no conscious political ideology, apart from a broad orientation to
anarchism. His reference is his sensibility.
Rosselson was introduced to Brassens by Betty Knut, Scriabin’s
granddaughter and a Zionist who planted a bomb in the Foreign and
Colonial Office in London, gratefully discovered by a cleaner. That
she rallied to the Frenchman’s songs is indicative of his capacity
to touch fundamental feelings. Rosselson has been compared to
Brassens by more than one critic. They are both good songwriters,
but slightly different. Brassens is subversive without being
political, in the sense that he didn’t lend his art to a political
movement. His sympathies would have been with the workers, because
he was anti-authoritarian, cared little for money and despised
les braves gens; but he kept a distance between himself and all
political movements. Le Gorille may be a protest against the
death penalty, but it is without earnestness or worthiness. Rather,
it’s irreverent, bawdy, witty, faux-naïf. Brassens’s
technique is iconoclastic. He demolishes pomposity, snobbery, les
bons apôtres, the self-regarding, tyrants, hypocrites,
control-freaks; but he refuses to take on board any ready-made view
of the world.
Rosselson too has all these qualities, but he has aligned himself
with the left, was for a time at least sympathetic to the Soviet
Union and has written songs closely tied to political campaigns
That’s Not The Way It’s Got Be for example, a fine song, which
skewers the developers who ruin our towns for lucre. Rosselson
points out the danger of being too closely aligned politically: the
Almanac singers, for example, so tightly bound to the Communist
Party that when its line changed, songs had to be discarded.
Sing A Song of Politics,
the fifth chapter, is a discussion of the relationship between the
two. Rock music was proposed in the 1980s as the mass form which
might create the right emotional tenor. Rosselson examines the ideas
of David Widgery and Jesse Lemisch, who both dismiss folk as old hat
and unable to connect to a mass audience. Rosseslon is thinking
about song and politics but what the chapter is really about is the
relationship of art to politics. They never meld because their ways
of thinking and feeling are too far apart. No artist can restrict
his or her vision to the narrowness of the political. If you take
the point of view that everything is political, then nothing is. The
political is a specific realm. It’s the product of societies divided
by wealth and power. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had no politics
but they had dilemmas, joys, despairs, hopes, fears, confusions. The
most subversive dramatist of the twentieth century is Joe Orton, but
he had no politics. He’s far more radical than liberal lefties like
Hare and Brenton. Like Brassens, his reference is his sensibility.
The Catcher In The Rye isn’t a book about politics, but it
sucks the marrow out of middle-class America. The Trial isn’t
a political novel, but it captures the nature of modern society, its
installation of guilt into everyone’s mind, the creation of a
culture where, as Kundera puts it, “the punishment seeks the fault”
better than any political tract. Political thinking lags way behind
artists. In 1857 Flaubert published a novel in which a woman is
destroyed by debt notched up by compulsive consumerism. To this day
there is no political or sociological analysis which has illuminated
the tragedy more vividly.
Art has to go out on a limb which is why it is often not embraced by
the masses. Those who think music, or any other art form, can do the
work of politics are acting out of despair at political failure and
ultimately destroy the potential of both politics and art, as in the
disaster of socialist realism. Rosselson has always had enough wit
to realise this, which is why his best songs stand as art, even if
at the same time they carry a subversive charge (We Buy
Everything for example).
There is a chapter devoted to Stand Up For Judas in which
Rosselson looks at the history of the biblical period and
demystifies the Jesus of the school assembly and the routine sermon.
He points out that the most obvious fact of the time and place was
domination by the Roman Empire. The gospels were written long after
by people who didn’t witness the events and contradict one another
so resolutely they can be purloined to defend any position. Jesus,
of course, is presented to us as an unworldly man, belonging to
another realm, a man of super-human capacities because he’s the son
of god. The other-worldliness assists the myths and the fuzzy
thinking. The song is built round a simple point: the Romans were
oppressors and needed to be resisted. Yet it has effectively been
banned from the airwaves in the UK, where we enjoy, so we are told,
freedom of thought, speech and expression.
There are four chapters about Israel and anti-Semitism. Keir Starmer
should read them, though it wouldn’t do any good: once people are
determined to deny the truth no amount of it will change them.
Rosselson knows his way round the subject and cuts through the lies,
manipulations, half-truths, special pleading and downright nastiness
by which the policies of the State of Israel are justified. Much of
what he says has been said many times
but we have to go on saying it until enough people hear it to
change things. He exposes the emptiness of the IHRA non-definition
and its true aim: thought control. He explores the writings of that
most confused man Herzl. He considers the Labour Party’s long and
sordid history of support for Israeli oppression. He rightly calls
Israel “a psychotic state”. Sanely, he pleads for what every
half-way democratic person supports: a single society in
Israel/Palestine where all enjoy equal rights regardless of religion
or ethnic affiliation.
Chapter 11 is about his life as a song-writer, sub-titled “How I
Failed to Become Rich and Famous”. The irony is well-placed. Wealth
and fame are destructive. To achieve them, he would have had to
renounce his artistic integrity. He has written some of the best
British songs of the twentieth century, yet how many have heard them
? He’s played to fair-sized audiences in folk clubs and concert
halls, but the Establishment has ensured he has been kept from the
majority. His art may be
entertaining, but it’s art. All entertainment is debased art. Its
aim is to make money. No one writes a pop song anticipating an
audience of a thousand. Rosselson wrote a few plays and had bits of
success. No one writes a TV drama in anticipation of an audience of
ten thousand. If it isn’t five million, it’s a failure. Art can be
commercially successful but commercial success isn’t the measure of
artistic success. Brassens was a phenomenon in France. These days,
the young don’t know him or if they do disdain him, but a few
decades ago it was virtually impossible to meet a French person who
didn’t know some of his songs. He didn’t compromise his art. No
doubt the success was a surprise to him. It probably owed something
to the relatively relaxed cultural atmosphere in post-war France.
Rosselson would never have been permitted to be the British
Brassens. Our Establishment is too skilled in spotting and silencing
anyone who asks the wrong questions.
One of the joys of this book is the writing. Rosselson has written
for children but he is a good adult writer. Orwell would have
approved of his uncluttered, clear style. As is the writing, so is
the thinking; and throughout his sensibility is unobtrusively
present: charming, pleasant, tolerant, democratic, thoughtful,
generous, witty, self-effacing but also outraged at injustice,
cruelty, greed and stupidity.
It's perhaps a measure of the dismal state of our culture that
Rosselson isn’t nationally cherished. He has been side-lined in his
time because his art clashes with the needs of the rich and
powerful; but this book and most of all his songs will live when
they have long been consigned to the disdain they deserve. In all
likelihood few will read this book, but they are the lucky ones.
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