Anti-Climacus

QUOTE:

"Every pop singer reacted to Sept. 11 a little differently. Alan Jackson felt confused, maybe a bit weepy, so he wrote "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)?" Toby Keith, on the other hand, went with angry and jingoistic in "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue." Bruce Springsteen offered comfort and reassurance. Now comes the singer-songwriter Steve Earle, and if you don't mind, he'd like to jam his thumb in your eye.

At least that's the impression you get right off the bat from his new CD, Jerusalem (Artemis). And it's not because of "John Walker's Blues," the song that got so much attention for its sympathetic take on John Lindh. The unsettling lead-off track is called "Ashes to Ashes," and it's a bizarrely fatalistic number that compares the collapse of the World Trade Center towers to the meteor that killed off the dinosaurs. "It's always best to keep it in mind," Earle sings, "that every tower ever built tumbles … And someday even man's best-laid plans/ Will lie twisted and covered in rust/ When we've done all we can but it slipped through our hands."

In a way, this should not come as a surprise. After all, Earle likes to cast himself as a lefty maverick who speaks unpopular truths. (He publicly pines for the days when the anarchist Emma Goldman was denouncing World War I as imperialist oppression.) And Artemis owner Danny Goldberg did ask him for an "overtly political" record, according to Earle, because "there were some things that needed to be said, especially now, in the world after 9/11." But surely what needed to be said, especially now, was not: Hey, shit happens. Those building were bound to come down eventually, so quit your bellyaching.

Other tracks on Jerusalem are nearly as grim. There's "Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)," a tiresome rant about an aging radical who's been reduced to firing off letters to the editor, cheating on his taxes, and kvetching about his HMO. And "Conspiracy Theory" dredges up the hackneyed notion that things could be set right, if only the heroes of the 1960s were still around: "What if you could've been there on that day in Dallas … Maybe something could've been done in Memphis/ We wouldn't be living in a dream that's died.""

-Josh Daniel, writing on Slate