Pitchfork

Maybe when I'm pushing 40, and I've survived heroin addiction and plowed through six wives (as this artist, pushing 50, has), I'll "get" Steve Earle, or be able to get excited by him, because from where I'm sitting, his albums consistently sound like the kind of stuff that folks over 35 find "edgy" or "raw." Lucinda Williams, 50 this year, would be his female counterpart. Having heard the best moments of, say, Will Oldham and Cat Power (for all their melodrama and actorly distance), I am loathe to describe the Earle/Williams catalog as "haunting" or "intimate." Though some of their work is stunning (2-3 songs per album), one has to adjust to the borderline overproduction and to the straightjacket of trad-songcraft. I'm willing to bet you an illiterate folk artist's lucky paintstick that some of the Earle/Williams praise comes by default, because they use elements of country in ways that are exponentially more interesting than their competition (the committee-written popaganda leaking from the bowels of whatever lunkhead cowboy or smiley slutloaf got corralled into sing-slinging it), the same way the dithering, blah Democrats can seem noble next to Ashcroft's Army.

That political analogy is apt, too, if one compares, say, Ford truck pitchman Alan Jackson's (complete with requisite parenthetical) "Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)" to Earle's "John Walker's Blues". Jackson's 9/11 song is a predictable piece of vaguely Christian know-nothingism, with the very telling line, "I watch CNN but I'm not sure I can tell you/ The difference in Iraq and Iran." (I immediately thought of an acquaintance who has lectured me on the Bible, but who asked, when the U.S. started bombing Afghanistan, "Is Israel Islam?") Earle's song is an agenda-less character study of a confused everyteen with a martyr complex on a search for meaning beyond "MTV" and "the soda pop ads." Where Jackson's gesture required only Nashville greed-sap gumption, Earle's song took cojones, especially if you remember the climate into which the song was released, a phase of kneejerk "No Muslims Allowed" nationalism that some of us in 2003 look back on laughingly, like unfortunate bangs captured in a yearbook photo or a Stevie B. cassingle under the bed, as if our flaggery was an odd fad in which we goofily got caught up. For all the bluster over "John Walker's Blues", the song merely aims to humanize an enemy/unpopular perspective, down to its chant fade-out.

But we Americans often just want to perceive our enemies as they're presented in Independence Day, as alien and cultureless insect-like villains, just black circles to shoot out of the sky (see WWII portrayals of the Japanese, etc). So Earle risked bristling the reactionary segment of his audience, an audience he has fostered over the course of a slew of albums on which he has been a "progressive," but Nascar-twangy version of the Midwest's Mellencamp, the Northeast's Springsteen, or the South's-but-he-doesn't-flaunt-it Tom Petty. His audience expanded particularly after The Mountain, his all-bluegrass album (only hinted at by the sinister banjo of this record's song "for" the wrongly-convicted West Memphis 3, "The Truth"). Webboard damnations of Jerusalem aren't hard to find, and even Amazon customer reviews contain someone spooked by "Satanic" and "demonic" vocal effects ("Ashes to Ashes" is tuff-Earle, sounding campier than Vincent Price) and someone abandoning Earle due to the "liberal agenda fest" of his "social commentary."

Yes, seven of this album's eleven tracks qualify as commentary, but except for bassline-driven "America v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)", which is a kind of "Like a Rolling Stone" account of complacent former activists, most of the critiquin' is done so allegorically or abstractly that it could qualify as storytelling. That means four of the songs are standard singer/songwriter fare, catchy love-ditties (such as the duet with Emmylou Harris, "I Remember You") or fuzzy mythmaking (such as "Shadowland"). The closer, and title track is an ambitiously optimistic but ultimately frustrating song that tries to apply the ain't-we-all-god's-chilluns syncretism of "John Walker's Blues" to the Middle East. The song also borrows "I may be a dreamer" logic from John Lennon's blues, "Imagine". But "Imagine" was an atheist utopian fantasy, whereas Earle's "Jerusalem" pines for a peace that will come from "the children of Abraham" on "the ground where Jesus stood." Though Earle admits he sounds like a "fool" and sings of "looking into his heart" instead of subscribing to the defeatist attitude of the "man on TV," the song is dang hard to take seriously because, even when you strip away the situation's socioeconomic muck and the occupation debate, you get, fundamentally: groups of racists chosen specially by their respective gods, murdering each other over the gods' specially chosen dirt. Earle's "peace together" is just too long a shot.

You may have noticed how this review has been yammering almost exclusively about Earle's lyrics. That's not just because his narratives are abubble with big ideas, or because I assume you know his gruff-to-nasal voice, but because, aside from the occasional Eastern touch, or smoking blues-harp solo, or Gary Numan-esque keyboard trill, the album's music is what you'd expect: Three minutes of radio-ready guitar-and-drum arrangements. Of the tone experiments, one really works (the Doug Sahm-ish zydecali-texmex immigrant's plea "What's a Simple Man to Do?") and one fails horribly (the female call-and-responders of "Conspiracy Theory"). While Earle could be commended for his tireless examination of the death-penalty or for distributing, on his label, the great what-if-Costello-led-a-cowpunk-bar-band Six String Drag, I can only say that his new album is "good, for what it is," and that is still a great concession for ears honed to more expansive sonic approaches.

So if you ever had a fusion snob successfully argue to you that The Replacements were just overrated bash-n-pop (I mean, look at Westerberg now, and Tommy Stinson's next band was even called Bash & Pop), you won't find anything of value in Jerusalem's music. These tried-and-true structures can seem fried-and-false. Though Earle comes off as more a son of Dylan than Jakob, Bob at 60 writes much fresher songs, songs that one doesn't have to be weathered to enjoy.