Billy Bragg - Must I Paint You a Picture: Essential Billy Bragg
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Billy BraggBrand: BRAGG,BILLY
Edition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2003-10-28
Music Label: Elektra / Wea
Soundtracks:
Music CD 1
- A New England
- The Man in the Iron Mask
- The Milkman of Human Kindness
- To Have and to Have Not
- A Lover Sings
- St. Swithin's Day
- The Saturday Boy
- Between the Wars
- The World Turned Upside Down
- Levi Stubbs' Tears
- Walk Away Renee
- Greetings to the New Brunette
- There Is Power in a Union
- Help Save the Youth of America
- The Warmest Room
- Must I Paint You a Picture?
- She's Got a New Spell
- The Price I Pay
- Valentine's Day Is Over
- Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards
- Sexuality
- Cindy of a Thousand Lives
- Moving the Goalposts
- Tank Park Salute
- You Woke Up My Neighbourhood
- Accident Waiting to Happen (Red Stars Version)
- Sulk
- Upfield
- The Fourteenth of February
- Brickbat
- The Space Race Is Over
- The Boy Done Good
- Ingrid Bergman
- Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key
- My Flying Saucer
- All You Fascists Bound to Lose (Blokes Version)
- NPWA
- St. Monday
- Some Days I See the Point
- Take Down the Union Jack (Band Version)
Free Music Notes for Must I Paint You a Picture: Essential Billy Bragg
Free Music Review: Essential in deed - a truly great English songwriter
Hit: 5 Stars
Listening to Billy Bragg is a very English thing to do. Perhaps British, but definitely English. His Essex consonants, largely unreconstructed by the passing years, his wonderfully vernacular use of the language (he even mentions Marmite, food of the gods, on "England, Half English"), songs about God-bothering footballers, unrequited boyhood lust at the school disco, and best of all, his withering political polemics laced with laugh out loud humour ("trapped in a hairstyle he no longer believes in").
Politics is what most people associate Billy with, and for sure he did his share in the eighties ("I was doing about 300 gigs a year and only got paid for half of them - why should I be nostalgic for the eighties?") and still cares now. He still backs fair unions against bad bosses, supports hospices and fair trade campaigns, and believes that a better world is actually possible - only some kind of idiot thinks that is a bad thing, surely.
But let's not forget that Billy has written some great songs about love and life as real people live it. "St Swithins" day is one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard, aching in its sense of loss and grimy ordinariness. "Tank Park Salute" is a gorgeous and brave song about Billy's relationship with his father. There are many more in his canon. Like Dylan, like Guthrie, Bragg is not a "protest" singer to the exclusion of all else.
Perhaps "New England", written early in his career, still sums up a lot of what Billy is about. It's a cracking tune, with a great chorus, which cheerfully pokes gentle English fun at his own political interests ("I'm not looking for a new England, I'm just looking for another girl") whilst being ostensibly a break-up song, and still manages to deliver one of the funniest lines in rock music - "I saw two shooting stars last night / I wished on them, but they were only satellites / Is it wrong to wish on space hardware?".
A great English songwriter, who is increasingly a great contributor to modern debates on the nature of Englishness and the future of our nation. A national treasure in fact.
Long may he reign.
And another thing: in concert he is very good and very, very funny. He has an apparently bottomless fund of great stories and witty one-liners, fuelled by his ever present cup of tea, and even manages to make political discourses a laugh.
Must I Paint You a Picture: Essential Billy Bragg Poster
No Description AvailableNo Track Information Available
Media Type: CD
Artist: BRAGG,BILLY
Title: MUST I PAINT YOU A PICTURE? ESSENTIAL BILLY BRAGG
Street Release Date: 10/28/2003
Genre: ROCK/POP
Must I Paint You a Picture is a generous, two-disc, 40-track survey of Bragg's career to date. The tracklisting was apparently assembled with the help of Bragg's fans, who were asked to vote for their favourites on Bragg's website, but this democratic initiative has only been taken so far: while "Little Time Bomb", for example, was a more popular choice than, say, "The Boy Done Good", the latter is included and the former isn't. It would, of course, be uncharitable to suggest that this is reflective of the authoritarian instincts that lurk inside most socialists.
At any rate, though Bragg has always been chiefly characterised as a political songwriter, his best work has always been that which deals with the politics of the personal: there are few more acute summations of the eternal failure of the male and female to make sense to each other than his "How can you lie there and think of England when you don't even know who's in the team?" Bragg's superb love songs and love-gone-wrong songs are well represented here, from the angry, naive scratchings of "The Milkman of Human Kindness" to such older, if no wiser, musings as "Moving the Goalposts" and "Sulk". Curiously, his older, politically motivated songs now feel like they've reacquired an urgency they lacked during a 1990s largely devoid of stark ideological boundaries, when they sounded rather like quaint period pieces. The so-called war on terror and the increasing discomfort about global trade both have ready made soundtracks in "Between the Wars" and "There is Power in a Union". --Andrew Mueller
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