The South Atlantic Company Store

(I will finish up NAHBS eventually...)

There's a song by Martin Carthy called Company Policy. Here's the audio:

Company Policy

(Sorry, it's a myspace link, I know, I know! But it's an obscure song by an obscure singer. So there.)

If you don't know, Martin Carthy is a uniquely nasal singer who was active with Steeleye Span in the early 70s. He does mostly older folk songs, in an bizarely compelling drone. This song struck me because it is about Falklands war, which I know very little about, and because I'm a sucker for overwrought lyrics:

'But it was not death that bawled in the alley
'Came skittering up to my love's door
'It was not death that cried and howled
'In the teeth of a south Atlantic roar'

If you were wondering, it was a 'Bomb that plucked the face from my love/ Spread it wide on the face of a swell.' No subtlety here.

So next time I went to Last Word Bookshop (which is one of my favorites because the owner is nice and the cat can jump about four feet straight up despite being spherical) I did a bit of reading on the subject. Unsurprisingly, the older books focussed on strategy and the newer ones on the human toll. None of them gave a very good reason for the war, also unsurprisingly. I felt disgusted with humanity and bought Origin of the Species instead.

But the song kept rolling though my head, and I thought about how so much of my sense of history is gathered from songs and stories. My interest in history meandered along in the wake of whatever band I happened to like, whatever books I was reading. A Rudyard Kipling kick made me read up on India, and then read A Passage to India, which I liked, and then A Room with a View, which I didn't, though it did get me into Isabella Bird (who was kind of amazing). I read Demons by Dostoevsky and it suddenly became imperative to understand late 19th century Russian politics. I don't suppose this fiction-to-fact approach gave me the most linear or accurate view of history, but at least it stuck.

I think art is too often set on a pedestal as something too impractical and difficult for common consumption. But a simple heavy handed protest song gets positively Lermontovian:

'In my dream I stand at Bluff
'I've an empty shell up to my ear
'The only sound is the sound of cash
'Being wrung from the snows of Antarctica.'

And I wonder.

Martin Carthy is still kicking, by the way. Here's a pretty terrible video of the same song performed in 2011:

And he sounds exactly the same. You have to hand it to him. 

What songs will tell future generations about this year? Wait, I started thinking about it and then I stopped because it was depressing.

Someone prove me wrong.

---Isis