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Outsider Joins In

By John M. Miller

The Outsider
By Rodney Crowell
Columbia Records, 2005

PUSH THE POLLS aside. The way to chart the body politic and fortunes of the current President Bush and his war is to listen to pop music. Protest songs seemed everywhere in the Vietnam era. Since then, a few artists can be counted on to regularly speak their political mind, but most— either out of excess caution or lack of inspiration—seem to lay low until they sense things have gotten “really bad.” Thatcher’s Britain was one such era for British music. Now seems another.

Rock dinosaurs The Rolling Stones get their licks in against Bush and Halliburton on their 2005 album with the song “Sweet Neo Con.” When the National Football League made them their halftime spokesband, there was little protest. But only a few short years ago, the Dixie Chicks got into deep trouble for “dissing” Bush in the leadup to the war in Iraq when they expressed their embarrassment that the president hailed from their home state. Perhaps the times they are achangin’.

Rodney Crowell is an altcountry icon (recently named Best Male Singer-Songwriter by his hometown alternative weekly, Nashville Scene) who has joined the ranks of artists using their music as the message, with his new album The Outsider. In the 1970s and 1980s, Crowell wrote and produced country hits for others and had a few of his own. His previous albums, The Houston Kid and Fate’s Right Hand, contained more spare autobiographical songs than political ones.

On The Outsider, Crowell—backed by a full band—tackles the current state of affairs with wit and passion. “The Obscenity Prayer” sarcastically channels what he has called in interviews “the greedy mindset that creates the Enrons of the world.” He sings, “Give to me my tax cut outsource, build me my own private golf course. The Dixie Chicks can kiss my ass, but I still need that backstage pass.”

Crowell speaks more of his own mind in “Don’t Get Me Started,” a catchy rant about current policies, domestic and foreign:

“The rich corporations have turned a deaf ear
They don’t care who goes hungry they’ve made that much clear
You see the trouble with people is that we want to believe
But they can’t turn a profit without tricks up their sleeve...

“I had a dream last night I was the Secretary of Defense
And I came to the conclusion war doesn’t make any sense
But nobody heard me when I tried to rescind it
There’s a whole lot of people who don’t want to end it.”

The album draws to a close with the anthem- like “We Can’t Turn Back Now,” is the album’s finale—a call to “keep pressing on,” because “democracy won’t work if we’re asleep.”