Gil Hates Everything

Laurie Anderson has a song called “Difficult Listening Hour”. That phrase kept surfacing in my mind like a bad (three)penny while I was listening to this.

This show dates from 1928 and was written by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, lifting the plot from an 18th century English show called “The Beggar’s Opera”. It’s about as close as you’ll get to “Marxism – The Musical”, being, in fact, a dramatization of Marxism presented on stage in the form of a musical. I was listening to the only-just-released 1976 Lincoln Centre version, which is apparently a better translation than the 1956 Broadway version (although the soundtrack has its problems, as I will swear about later).

The theme is: rich people fuck up poor people, and poor people fuck up even poorer people – and so ad infinitum. The plot is to do with London’s beggars being forced to pay protection money for the right to beg, the refusal of a father to let his daughter get involved with a known bandit, and a threat to disrupt Queen Victoria’s victory parade. But the plot, it must be said, does not come through in the songs, and my vagueness in this matter is aided by Wikipedia’s somewhat disjointed and emotionless description. Hmph.

Take it from me, though, the songs are plenty blunt and confrontational enough for you to draw your conclusions about whether you’d like to see this. They are uncompromisingly in your face about the way in which people are forced to live by others with power, and sometimes they’re quite horrific: in “Ballad Of Immoral Earnings”, a couple reminisces about how he pimped her out, talking of adjusting their sexual positions to avoid putting undue weight on the pregnant women, “but in the end we flushed it down the sewer”. There’s a declamatory finale to each act, featuring such sentiments as “What Keeps Mankind Alive” and “don’t punish wrongdoing too harshly, as life is harsh enough”. I have to tell you, some listeners will experience a faint sensation of being lectured. And although the lecturing is pretty potent, it’s kinda clunky if you’re used to hearing social commentary woven subtly into lyrical theatre songs. But then, Michael Moore and Naomi Woolf are clunky in the same way; they want to make damn sure you understand their point, because to them it’s very important, and their audiences have demonstrated in the past that they’re slightly thick…

You wouldn’t exactly dance to this show, nor would you “bump” these songs in your “ride”. Mind you, I can see why it has lasting appeal. For example, there’s a song called “Pirate Jenny” – although it was inexplicably missing from this soundtrack – in which a put-upon maid imagines a black pirate ship entering the harbour and blowing the miserable place to hell so that she can sail away with them to freedom. It’s been the source material for plenty of variations – Alan Moore loves using it in his comics – and it’s a hugely powerful image, but (a) obviously I don’t know how it fucking goes, thanks Mr Soundtrack Editor, and (b) if it’s anything like the rest of the songs here, it’s not exactly going to cheer you up. And like Moore and Woolf – like much art about social injustice in fact – it feels like it succeeds in preaching to one choir of minds and repelling the other, meaning that its only genuine targets are innocents and children. As a Marxist statement, it sounds good and has plenty of sharply-phrased ideas, but they’re buried in monotonous tunes and incongruous jazz music, and I imagine most people wouldn’t want to listen to it more than once, if that.

I’ve managed to get almost to the end without mentioning that this show sourced the well-known hit “Mack The Knife”. The reason is, it’s shit. Apparently it was written at the last moment because the actor playing Macheath threatened to bail if he didn’t get a song – god, tenors are such fucking divos. Anyway, Brecht and Weill duly turfed out this song, and although it functionally introduces the character, it’s as unremittingly tedious as a song can get without involving Andrew Lloyd Webber, and I have less than no idea how it went viral and became a jazz standard. I have ghastly recollections of Frank Sinatra singing it late in his one-octave-range period and randomly inserting names of band members and friends. What Keeps Crap Songs Alive: jazz singers…

Anyway. Random Panda awards “The Threepenny Opera” five out of ten pieces of bamboo. For social injustice done more interestingly, watch “Parade”, but pay respect to Brecht and Weill’s building.

(originally published in 2009)