© 1987 Musician Magazine
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Which is what you might expect of a man with Bruce Cockburn's background. A former student at Boston's Berklee School of Music, he kicked around in "psychotic rock bands" for a while before releasing an eponymous solo debut in 1971. He was quickly pegged as a folk singer and guitar virtuoso, but his abstract, mystical ../lyrics and eclectic guitar playing didn't really fit the folk purist mold, and he never became popular outside his native Canada. Later when he began to make an issue of his Christianity, his US record company tried to market him through inspirational book and record shops. That didn't work either; turned out he didn't sing about Jesus enough.
The forty-two-year-old singer's last album, "World of Wonders", was a rich fusion of global pop styles that carried forward his absorption in world politics, a theme that also ran through "The Trouble with Normal" (1983) and "Stealing Fire" (1984). The interest grew out of his extensive travels -- especially a 1983 trip to Central America with other Canadian artists, sponsored by the world hunger organization OXFAM.
He visited countries torn by poverty and internal violence. He went to Guatemalan refugee camps in Mexico, and listened to grisly stories of the refugees' homelands. He saw helicopters fly across the border to strafe the victims almost daily. The experience horrified Cockburn; it also produced the closest thing to a hit he's had since 1980's "Wondering Where The Lions Are" -- "If I Had a Rocket Launcher." That song, which even attained the unlikely status of MTV rotation, sounded at first like and ode to impassioned resistance: "I don't believe in guarded borders and I don't believe in hate/ I don't believe in generals or their stinking torture states / And when I talk with the survivors of things too sickening to relate / If I had a rocket launcher, I would retaliate." But it was also a cautionary tale about how easily random violence spawns random violence. Near the end of the song, the narrator hurls a curse: "If I had a rocket launcher, some son of a bitch would die!"
It's not as though they're saints, either. They're still capable of killing each other and doing terrible things just like the rest of us. But there's something very beautiful in their struggle. They may be committed to making serious mistakes, or they may size up their surroundings all wrong and blame the wrong people. It's important to me to try to communicate the humanity of that."
Bruce Cockburn bristles at the suggestion that political concerns are "new" to his music. As far as he's concerned, there was always a political current in his songs. It's pretty clear that something has changed, though; would it be fair to say that compared to the spiritual bent of older songs, the new ones are more firmly grounded in the world?
"Yeah," he says finally. "There is a definite change in that way. It started with the "Humans" album (1980). That came after "Dancing in the Dragon's Jaw", which was the peak of what I had to say about the spiritual side of things -- at that time. It was the best I could do. Then it became a question of looking at what that means in the terms of the world outside."
Of his sixteen albums, "World of Wonders" may be the best encapsulation of what Bruce Cockburn is about. On the one hand, it contains rich, sensuous ballads such as "Lily Of the Midnight Sky," a brooding, mostly-spoken piece filled with poetic imagery and suspended over a lovely melody line. "Berlin Tonight" combines an eye for poetic nuance with a twist of geopolitical menace: "Berlin tonight / Table dancing in black tights / Waving a silver crutch in the blue lights / Shape changing over glass / On the front line of the last gasp."
At the same time, both sides of "World of Wonders" open with songs more angry and didactic than anything he's done before, "People See Through You" is aimed straight at Ronald Reagan, an uncharacteristic move for Cockburn.
"The idea came from meetings with people in the Sanctuary movement, and hearing about the FBI breaking into their churches, " he says. "They'd go in and break into files and leave the ones pertaining to Sanctuary people on the desk. It's what Reagan says the `evil empire' is doing, yet it's exactly what his own people are doing. Plus there's the almost amusing contrast between the incredible power of these covert agencies, and the use of that power to break into places any idiot could get into, and just throw paper around. That had to be a song."
"Call it Democracy," a thumbnail history of U.S. economic exploitation in underdeveloped countries, is remarkable for reasons beyond its ../lyrics or music -- it was one of the first songs to bear the mark of the censor, in accordance with last year's agreement between the recording industry and pro-censorship forces led by the Parents Music Resource Center. On the first pressing of the jacket of the American version of the record, the lyric was surrounded by a black border, and the lines "You don't really give a flying fuck," and "IMF dirty MF" are highlighted in yellow.
"I think it's really stupid, and it's tempting to believe there's a connection (between the political content of recent music and people wanting to censor it)," he says. "But I haven't seen any real evidence of that effect. The connection may go the other way, too. When you get very uptight mentality trying to enforce itself on the rest of the population, people are driven to react."
(Cockburn's record label agreed the yellow highlighting was over the top, and eliminated it from later pressings. Ironically, that half-hearted warning may make early copies of "World of Wonders" collector's items.)
"Personally, I think the whole moral majority, hard-right, virulent anti-communist thinking that's centered around America First is pathological and dangerous. I never sat down and said, "I have to write songs to counter what these other people are saying." But one of the reasons I stopped making such a public issue of being a Christian has to do with not wanting to be identified with that version of fundamentalism."
As his politics go, so goes his music. The sound of recent albums is more global and adventurous, a development that parallels the rise of the "internationalist" pop by artists as different as the Police and Ruben Blades. Backed by an excellent band, Cockburn fuses African and Latin rhythms, Spanish and South American guitar styles ("World of Wonders" features a charango, and Andean stringed instrument he picked up a while back in his travels), and more traditional music, such as gospel-influenced harmony parts.
"I've listened to a lot of African pop, reggae, and third-world music," he says. "Not much salsa. The rhythm section knows more about that than I do. It's true that the new songs have a more consciously internationalist sound, but that has less to do with those particular styles of music than with the fact I come from a country with no musical tradition at all. When you travel around and see all the great stuff, why not use it?"
"The band is another factor. For music to be solicitous with an audience, it has to hit them in the body, make them want to move around. That's easier with a band. It makes the musical ideas more accessible." But he's also quick to point out that cross-cultural fusion isn't new for him.
"If you take the guitar part of 'Joy Will Find A Way' (1975), that was lifted almost not-for-note from an Ethiopian thumb-harp piece. Elements like that were there, but they didn't show up as clearly when it was all just one guitar."
"Drumbeat sends a message to the far starlight / We're doin' okay down here tonight" is the upbeat refrain of "Down Here Tonight," the song that closes "World of Wonders". Cockburn says the gist of the song is that worldly things work themselves out in the end.