Steve Earle - Jerusalem
A Christmas present from my brother, this is a gritty album. It seemed to cause an afwul lot of controversy in the States when it came out, mainly because of the track, ‘John Walker’s Blues’. In this, Steve Earle tries get inside the mind of John Walker to understand why he turned to terrorism. Perhaps people got so upset because they thought that trying to understand a reason is tantamount to saying that he had a point. But that’s just not the case: everyone has a reason for what they do. It may not be a good reason, or one that makes any logical or moral sense to anyone else, but they do have a reason. It seems to me to be important to try to find the reason, or how can you prevent it happening again?
Regardless of the controversy, it’s a good album, though the political songs work better than the love songs. Earle is at is best when making scathing comments about modern society, as on ‘Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)’ and ‘Conspiracy Theory’:
Half a million soldiers fly across the water One in ten are never comin’ back Fifty thousand sons who never grew to fathers Don’t you ever wonder who they might have been
Topical indeed.
