Pitchfork

In America, working-class poetry sounds like an oxymoron. Poetry is typically viewed around these parts as a luxury pursuit for academics and effete upper classes, and anything written in free verse is considered at least weird and possibly wrong. We are, after all, the country that produced Rod McKuen, the poetic equivalent of Thomas Kinkade. So, to these ears and perhaps many others, early 1980s Billy Bragg songs like "Milkman of Human Kindness" and "Ideology" sound a little like kitsch, despite their relevance in this post-Enron climate. "I am the milkman of human kindness", he sings, completely sincere, but then the next line sounds like a punchline: "I will leave an extra pint for you". There was a time when combining ambitiously poetic lyrics and stripped-down post-Clash pub rock seemed not just natural, but caustically rebellious. It's as if folk music had been tensing for 10 years-- through the British depression, the growing political rifts, the punk and post-punk movements-- until it boiled over in 1983, with Bragg's debut EP, Life's a Riot with Spy vs. Spy.

That is, at least, a conflicted American's understanding of Bragg and his place and time, 20 years later. Just as I can't imagine the sort of impact he had in the early 80s without referring to secondary sources, I can't imagine how present-day England, especially the generation currently in their serious twenties, views Bragg and his early releases. So Yep Roc's lavish reissue set, which includes five albums available separately or together with a bonus DVD in one set called Volume 1, plays much differently on this side of the Atlantic. England was Bragg's home, his stomping ground, his audience, and his one subject.

For Bragg, being working class gave his words more power than if he'd been a professional, and his words in turn freed him from working-class drudgery. Then there are the musical elements-- his voice, whose passionate delivery often exceeded its range, and his guitar, stoically shouldering the burden of accompaniment. The Spartan sound-- so stark and pure on Life's a Riot... but increasingly diluted with handclaps and trumpets on subsequent releases-- promised two things: an unrelenting intimacy (which it delivered) and more honesty than your typical full band (jury's still out). But the effect is nevertheless powerful, and it reinforces the painful conflicts in Bragg's lyrics and the unstudied yowl in his vocals. Those who discovered Life's a Riot... 23 years ago must have felt like he was speaking both for and to them personally.

Judging from these releases, as a purely political artist, Bragg was insufferable: he's overly earnest, blunt, and humorless, essentially a pamphlet set to rudimentary music. Fortunately, he wrote and sang about personal and political issues as if they were the same thing-- and to him they probably were. A composite portrait arises of a man torn between the security of home and the need to change the world, caught between his uncertainties (Can one man really make a difference?) and his transparent suspicions of marriage and disgust with sex. On 1984's Brewing Up with Billy Bragg, his confusion rankles into misogyny, as his view of women begins to focus either on their emasculating powers or their cheating ways. "In the end it took me a dictionary to find out the meaning of unrequited", he sings on "The Saturday Boy", "While she was giving herself for free at a party to which I was never invited".

But on the apologetic "A New England" (from Life's a Riot...) and the absolutely devastating "Levi Stubbs' Tears" (from 1986's Talking with the Taxman About Poetry), his youthful conflict-- between politics and romance, between society's terms and his own-- is painfully genuine. It's the sound of a man maturing as he works through each life crisis in song, either unaware or comforted by the idea that most people go through the same trials. There's nothing special about feeling this pain and confusion, but Bragg was able to put those problems into words and those words into songs. That never goes out of style.