Workers Playtime (CD)

Billy Bragg

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Amoeba Review

John Schacht 06/02/2010

Billy Bragg’s radical political bona fides were well-established by this 1988 release. But every progressive worth their salt should have a strong humanistic streak as well, and it’s Bragg’s love songs that suggest even the most intimate human relations are political in nature. Many of these 11 tracks explore bedroom politics in gritty, unflinching detail, much in the tradition of left-leaning filmmakers like Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. “That brutality and economy are related now I understand,” Bragg sings on the anti-domestic violence ballad “Must I Paint You a Picture” as he chronicles a relationship’s disintegration. Later, he opens “The Short Answer,” a treatise on the thin line between love and obsession, with a classic Bragg line: “Between Marx and marzipan in the dictionary there was Mary.” No matter the setting, Bragg has a gift for getting directly to the heart of the matter, often with devastating honesty. Over a shining Beatles-like melody and warm horns Bragg sympathizes to such an extent with a macho man who’s rendered child-like by falling in love with the wrong person that the line between narrator and subject vanishes: “In public he’s such a man/He’s punching at the walls with his bare and bloody hands/He’s screaming and shouting and acting crazy/But at home he sits alone and he cries like a baby.” Bragg has no problem speaking to power, of course, as he does on the agit-pop classic “Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards.” But he does it in this marvelous set-piece without ever losing sight of the fact that even history’s greatest figures have human failings: “It may have been Camelot for Jack and Jacqueline,” he sings, “But on the Che Guevara highway filling up with gasoline/Fidel Castro’s brother spies a rich lady who’s crying/Over luxury’s disappointment/So he walks over and he’s trying/To sympathize with her but he thinks that he should warn her/That the Third World is right around the corner.” Couched in more sonically sophisticated arrangements by this recording (including strings, horns, organ and double-bass), these songs rank among Bragg’s best.

Track Listing

Disc 1 Titles	Artist	Length
1. She's Got a New Spell	Billy Bragg	03:25
2. Must I Paint You a Picture?	Billy Bragg	05:32
3. Tender Comrade	Billy Bragg	02:50
4. The Price I Pay	Billy Bragg	03:34
5. Little Time Bomb	Billy Bragg	02:17
6. Rotting on Remand	Billy Bragg	03:39
7. Valentine's Day Is Over	Billy Bragg	04:53
8. Life with the Lions	Billy Bragg	03:06
9. The Only One	Billy Bragg	03:26
10. The Short Answer	Billy Bragg	04:59
11. Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards	Billy Bragg	04:36

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