God, pretty much everything about this album is a guilty pleasure. This album is basically a greatest hits collection, with a few rarities sprinkled on for good measure. An angrily political bunch of Irish Republicans, Black 47 are probably the only band that can combine traditional Irish music, punk rock, Reggae, and rap. Are they musically successful? Not always. Do they come off as huge nerds? Absolutely. Is a lot of their music cringingly dated? Yes. Does this album include a cover of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What Its Worth?” Yup. For a huge music nerd/ hipster like me, this album is completely retarded and embarrassing.
But fuck it, I love this album and I love Black 47. Formed in the late 80s by an off-the-boat Irishman and an ex-NYC cop, the band rapidly gained a reputation for refusing to compromise any aspect of their sound, for better or worse. Larry Kirwan, the Irishman, was mad for punk and had played in a number of very early NYC punk acts, but wanted to push his range. Chris Bryne, the cop, played the Irish Pipes but had come to love early rap during his days in the force. In a story very reminiscent of the Blues Brothers these two gathered a group of equally ner-do-well musicians with equally diverse backgrounds including a drummer with classical African training and a full-on fucking horn section.
In a bunch of really weird ways the band worked, and they never get credit for some of the ground they broke. I spoke a few entries ago about the duality of middle class punk acts so into rebellion that they try to represent the proletariat. This has gradually died away in many circles, but it continues to be prevalent in Irish Punk circles. The Irish experience in America basically requires it, despite the fact that most Irish Americans have long since moved on from the five-points. Kirwan and Bryne were smart enough to realize that the African American community was the new working class, and even though theirs was an Irish style, they still wanted to speak to the working class experience. As time has gone on, I must say, I have now seen more Irish guys start rapping as they absorbed African American culture than one might have expected in the pre-House of Pain days. I can’t say that I’ve seen very many black dudes at Flogging Molly shows, however.
Black 47 has two song writing modes: political declaration, and ner-do-well musician. Write what you know, I guess. Both are equally fun. The a-political songs tend to be pretty funny, to the point of describing getting drunk and crashing an ex’s wedding. The political songs tend to focus on important, often tragic, events. In that classically Irish way, the story is given primacy of place, the music gives it importance, while the anger of the story drives the music along with energy, authenticity, and passion.
I got into the band in middle school. The fading of punk from the radio left me with a deep emotional need for powerful music and not much to tie me to popular culture. I ran upon Black 47 by mistake in a history channel special, of all things, and got their songs stuck in my head. It turned out my mom had their debut album and what followed was a nearly ten year obsession with Celtic music that basically only faded when I went to college and discovered indie. In between the band was there for a number of key moments in my life, including being the location of one of my first dates and spawning my love of small, smokey clubs. My love of punk smoldered on below, after all Black 47 is kind of a punk band, but when I made my monthly pilgrimage to CD world I would graze the rock music section, and obsess over the Irish section.
Over the years since a lot of the band’s classic sound has started to be really dated. Hip Hop has moved on a bit since 1989, and white dudes rapping in the old style has gotten a bit goofy. More damningly, the horn section draws a lot of influence from Springstein, which is not aging well. Politically, for those who understood the situation, fervent Irish Republicanism needed some effort to defend in 1990, and has only gotten harder. Given the specter of Irish American fraternal organizations buying arms for the IRA until startlingly recently, a lot of the anger expressed by Black 47 has become suspect. That Black 47 has always espoused a pacifist socialism and condemned the actions of the Irish American community makes me feel better but might not convince the casual listener. More importantly, however, the increasing success of the Good Friday Accords, signed in 1997, has constrained violence in Northern Ireland to an increasingly safe history. The country is not out of the woods yet, but now that all parties are represented in the government, the people of Belfast and Londonderry seem to have unified around a desire not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Chris Bryne left the band in 2000, and the band didn’t release any new albums until 2004. Kirwan has retooled the band since the hiatus, and I am not sure they have found their way so much as they couldn’t keep quiet anymore. 2004’s “New York Town” was a discussion of the ramifications of 9/11 on their hometown of New York City. 2008’s “Iraq” was a violently anti-war album. Two albums are expected to drop this year, one of which is called “Bankers and Gangsters,” So I think we can guess what that one will be about. The band seems to have largely shifted focus from the historic Irish experience of Anglo oppression to the modern reality of the lower middle classes and their victimization by the wider forces of American society.
And I still fucking love them. Larry Kirwan looks more like an expired redheaded mushroom every year, while Geoffrey Blythe, the sax player, looks more like a fish, but god love them I hope they never stop. With all the Green Parties and Tea Parties and the centrism of all Parties and the fall of the wall and the dissolution of the Left and the death of the old socialists it is completely necessary to have voices like theirs in the world. They may not always write the best music, but their music is fucking fun even when it’s goofy.
I rarely say this for greatest hits albums but this one really does have some of their best moments, spanning their entire career from the first EP they put out with Rick Ocasec to their latest albums, warts and all. As with everything the band does, it is worth noting the warts as well as the and all. I have to say the singles from the newer albums are weaker, managing to preserve the embarrassing rapping while leaving behind the traditional sound that often made the music so fun. But there is more than enough of the old stuff to make up for this and the newest stuff is hardly all bad. The liner notes are constructed in exactly the way I would expect them to. Kirwan, that Irish bastard, spends pages and pages rambling on and on about his songs and I love every word. Old tours, history, girls he really should call back some time, long, long stories. For any fan of the band this is a wonderful album to hit up. For anyone who is not a fan I really would recommend starting at the first album, “Fire of Freedom,” but hey, if you find this for cheap half the album is on here so why not.
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