Now a man in command of a band, Dancin' Bobby Conn is convinced your sins are
beyond redemption, and now the littlest red engine of a rock 'n' roll
preacher is teaching you not about the glories of Himself, but of the
damnation of his Americkn nation, his texta-scrawled forehead bearing
the devilish mark of a denizen dwelling in the Home of the SLAVE. In
casting an eye on his Homeland, Conn has made an unexpected protest record
(even singing "it's hard to protest when you're so confused"), an explicitly
political disc on par with Trans Am's Liberation as a comic rock
'n' roll vehicle swerving deep into something serious. Which, surely,
must be representative of the dire state of the USA today, it having
reached a point where obscure indie-rockers, content for so long to indulge
in in-jokes and rip off their record collections, suddenly come out with
commentaries on the damn'd nation. This disc's central song, "Home Sweet
Home," offers "you know, ironic distance isn't very far" amidst its evocation
of a land of "concentration camp beauty queens" where the populace has "a
gun by every door," and is thus "free to live (their) life in constant
fear." Of course, you know all this because Conn's reprinted the lyric
sheet, something he didn't do on his last longplayer, The Golden Age,
a cutesy concept record ironically living out the glory-days glory-daze
fantasies synonymous with '70s AM-radio hits. Perhaps feeling
he has something more salient to say here, Conn spells out his sentiments
inside the booklet, something he also did on 1998's Rise Up!,
a record that equated social revolt with buying into the upwardly-mobile
myth of Christ-like antichrist Bobby Conn, even if it did break stride
to take a broadsides at Americkn politickal clout, with the "United nations
under the rule of Satan" and all. Here, whilst he's still mounting an
earnest crack at creating a musical persona on par with Bowie's Thin
White Duke era, Conn is no longer content with draping himself in Jim
O'Rourke string sections and striking disco poses; even The Homeland's
most disco-ish pirouette, "Relax," offers a chorus attacking governments
for pacifying the populace with tax breaks whilst undertaiking revenge
killings in their name. Elsewhere, well, he hardly holds back, with "We're
Taking Over the World" offering a crotch-grabbing falsetto chorus condemning
corporate radio in so many words ("Franchised Jesus Christ/ Organized
paradise/ Clear Channel, bargain priced"), and the disc's spacey flute-fluttering
white-funk closer "Ordinary Violence" firing the final salvo: "Stupid
people, that's most of us/ Got to find somebody else to place our trust/
Tell us the difference between wrong and right/ Good and evil, keep it
black and white/ But if you're willing to die for what you believe/ Then
we're happy to kill you all... for the homeland." |
