Jackson Browne
If the early 80s will be remembered for the advent of the Material Girl, that decade’s latter half will surely be known for the opposite: after 1985’s Live Aid and the rash of relief records that followed, social work had never looked so glamorous. Suddenly, artists who never before fashioned their music around grand themes were now recording albums that invoked at least one terrible global disease and came wrapped in social-justice address books instead of liner notes.
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It was as if Oliver Stone had just joined ASCAP. Subtlety was out, name-dropping was in. Bands that had previously displayed political leanings had to turn bombastic to keep up. U2 topped its comparatively subtle 1984 ode to Martin Luther King Jr., “(Pride) In the Name of Love,” with the live version on 1988’s Rattle and Hum, in which the Edge allowed Bono a few hundred bars to extol the late leader’s accomplishments and, while he was at it, rail against Charles Manson, apartheid, TV preachers, and Albert Goldman, who once wrote nasty things about John Lennon. In between rain forest tours, Sting took on Chilean dictator Pinochet on …Nothing Like the Sun (1987), while Lou Reed blasted non-Manhattanites from the Pope to Jesse Jackson to Kurt Waldheim on New York (1989). Jackson Browne turned his albums Lives in the Balance (1986) and World in Motion (1989) into melodramatic slaps at the U.S. government for its secret wars in Central America. Even Phil Collins entered the fray and scored with a hit single about homeless people from his 1989 solo album, named …But Seriously–if you didn’t get the hint already.
And nary a freedom fighter can be found on either of Jackson Browne’s last two albums, I’m Alive and Looking East. Both find him returning to familiar ground: the tortured love songs that brought him to prominence in the early 70s.
