Talking Musical Revolutions

The world’s changing rapidly, and so is this business of writing about music. It’s not what it was when my first musical mentor, James McGraw, introduced this Oklahoma kid to underground music and Rolling Stone, and it’s not what it was when my first music writing mentor, Dave Marsh, started schooling me with record reviews and American Grandstand. It’s not what it was when I first discovered Trouser Press, Maximum Rock & Roll, Guitar Player, Musician, The Source and Vibe. It’s not what it was when my friends and I started our first rock & politics newsletter.

In some of its academic tendencies, it’s certainly become more thoroughly informed, and it’s probably more broadly populist than ever. So there’s an upside. 

But what I don’t see vividly enough is rock and rap writing as a completion of the circuit of the music itself. When I started, I saw it as an art form that played a role in the culture—as breaking was to graffiti was to hip hop. I never got very good at that guitar, but I wanted to make my own kind of answer records with words.

In 2018, of course words are more prevalent than ever, but they don’t seem to be read, enough. This has something to do with why Marsh’s greatest critical output the past ten years has been through his SiriusXM radio show Kick out the Jams. And it’s why my brother, Lee Ballinger, has so inspired me with his Love and War podcast. It’s also why I’m inspired by Daniel Wolff’s continuous community conversations in the wake of Grown-Up Anger.

And it’s why I feel I have to take three paragraphs to even begin to give context to what journalist/poet Gavin Martin’s new album, Talking Musical Revolutions, means to me.

Born out of a series of musical/spoken word events, Martin’s album is cultural criticism as music. It teaches its lessons phrase-by-phrase with each listen, it sweetens those lessons with driving bass and drums, shimmering guitar and keys.

Many of Martin’s songs are poetic essays on musical icons—Wilko Johnson, David Bowie, Rory Gallagher, The Sex Pistols and Marvin Gaye—while others deal with the seedy relationship between DJ and pedophile Jimmy Savile and Margaret Thatcher and a fantasy derived from an environmentally damaged seagull that overturns Irish Protestant delusion. Perhaps my favorite, for all kinds of personal and musical reasons, is album closer, “Time Spills,” the tale of the destruction of a beloved friend. All of it is urgently about why music matters.

The accompaniment is remarkable throughout. This is poetic rock in the tradition of The Last Poets, Patti Smith, Jim Carroll and John Trudell. By that I mean the music doesn’t just add atmosphere, it carries things home.

Often, it works as a sort of juxtaposition. While “The Pistols of Sex” has a wall of guitars that calls to mind the band, the epic tribute to David Bowie, “Talking David Bowie” has a hip hop sensibility and the tale of Marvin Gaye, “Long Hard Road to Be Free (For Marvin)” takes the form of gothic rock, though the guitar is indeed soulful. These mixed sensibilities broaden the tent in ways words in a magazine once promised.

I’ve learned to listen to all of these artists with different ears, Gallagher and Johnson, essentially, for the first time. I’ve gained a deepened sense of the political dimensions of everything at play here, even the most personal aspects of our lives. As much as anything I’ve gained a sense of possibility, and it starts at a dead end.  Here's the opener: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwi7lwrRnUc

The quasi-Martin character that starts the album with “I Want to Tell You Something” is the danger all around—the drunken old-timer at the bar, telling you what it all meant when it really meant something, reminding you of your inadequacy having never been from a certain place and time. He speaks directly for the 16 year old me in the 55 year old body. 

But Martin shifts point of view to cast doubt on the old punk. He's doesn't want to believe it's all over. He sees the danger (and the delusion) there.  (In an added verse on the lyric sheet, Martin makes it plain.) The past wasn’t everything we think it was any more than the present is everything we think it isn’t. The truth is we gotta roll with where we are, and there’s no time to waste. The world is changing so fast we constantly need to be rethinking our jobs.

Not that we should waste time second guessing every glimpse of the truth. The appeal of "I Want to Tell You Something" is that the character is talking about real salvation. Everything was, in fact, there in the past, but it only means what it could if we reconcile it with today. With Talking Musical Revolutions, Gavin Martin finds a way forward. The clear call to the rest of us is to find ours.