\ AAAS: WI RAR NW A seins — ON AGNES TA ye SEN ueitaem we so paras A Tk Reviews effect. Members of the Projectionists Union of B.C. are joined on the picket line at the Stanley theatre in Vancouver by members of the Vancouver and New Westmins- ter Newspaper Guild. The guild, and other unions, are helping the projectionists and the B-C. Government Employees Union in their strike-lockout dispute with the major theatre chains, Famous Players and Cineplex Odeon — but more sup- port is needed for the Christmas film-going. The situation is crucial for the projectionists union, which with less than 100 members in B.C. faces a tough fight in maintaining pickets at all the outlets in the province. They face an out and out attempt at union-busting, being locked out after working four years without a collective agreement and with the companies demanding 40 per cent rollbacks. The striking ticket-takers, ushers and conces- sion workers in the BCGEU face similar conditions. The Pacific Tribune, whose employees are members of The Newspaper Guild, respects the picket line. For this reason we have not reviewed any films featured at cinemas owned by the two corporations. The B.C. Federation of Labour has launched a boycott of all Cineplex Odeon and Famous Players outlets, and we ask all our readers not to patronize those theatres while the strike-lockout remains in Tracy Chapman 89: solid rock-and-roll with honest lyrics CROSSROADS. Tracy Chapman. Elektra Entertainment Records, 1989. The pop love song has to be one the most trite cliches produced by ‘ civilization. ““What’s wrong with those silly love songs?” ‘sang Paul McCartney, presumably in response to John Lennon’s angry line: “The sound you make is muzak to my ears.” What’s wrong with those silly love songs is their ideological content. They are almost always a mystification of human relations, reducing human aspirations to empty abstractions of romance, often in a sexist formula. Pop love songs usually project young women as not-very-obscure objects of desire, youthful sexual affairs as anthems, emotional needs as entirely individual affairs without connection to society. The logic of pop love songs is that suf- fered by teenage women for whom preg- nancy is the prime cause of dropping out of school in the U.S. Such juvenile relation- ships and the infantile ideology of pop love songs do nothing to prepare young lovers to face the negative odds arrayed against their happiness. Young people are the primary market for pop music and in its most blatant form the bourgeois ideology of the pop love song would have each, as an individual, face a world organized for their ‘oppression and exploitation with nothing more than the thought, “Love is all you need, all you need is love.” Melissa Etheridge is at home with the idealization of love. One of the hardest pounding rock and roll numbers on the album, Melissa Etheridge (Island Records, 1987), goes: Tell me, does she love you like the way I love you/ Does she stimulate you, attract and captivate you/ Tell me, does she miss you, existing just to kiss you/ Like the way I do. The chorus of another song, “I Want You,” simply repeats the line four times with a passable guitar hook providing the main impetus. Etheridge’s voice, husky and full in the manner of Rod Stewart or Tina Turner, got her a Grammy nomination in 1987. Some people had a hard time waiting a year for Tracy Chapman’s new record, Crossroads (Elektra Entertainment, 1989). For those of you with the question in mind, it is as good as her first. Stylistically, it’s pretty much the same sound, with the arrangements treating Chapman as a somewhat fragile flower, showcasing her voice and words in subtle and understated accompaniment. This time, her notoriety after the first LP, Tracy Chapman (Elektra/Asylum, 1988), has attracted backup musicians like Neil 28 « Pacific Tribune, December 18, 1989 Young, Danny Kortchmar, Scarlet Rivera and Russ Kunkel. Someone told me Tracy Chapman’ first album was amazing with its honest feeling and directness, and I think those touched by Chapman’s music before will be touched again. Her occasionally wistful or sorrowful or angry edge to her singing infuses her direct urban lyrics with passion and com- passion. Chapman’s love songs are not the cliched and cloying empty catch-phrases and mot- tos of pop, but rather the soul-searching and honest personal expression traditionally found in folk music. Consider, for example, Chapman’s “A Hundred Years,” which states: We get in a fight/ You stay out late/ You have no idea/ How much you make me worry baby/ Called everyone in town/ I think you know/ So come on now/ Come on now/ Back home. Compare it to Melissa Etheridge’s “No Souvenirs:” But if you want me you can call me/ In the night you know where I'll be/ Broken lover you can touch me/ In the dark the innocent can’t see/ You lock it up now hide the key/ It would mean surrender to let me see/ Oh brave, brave soldier keep it under cover/ You fell alone like no other lover. Chapman’s contains less idealization of human relations, less romantic mystifica- tion, as well as more direct feeling. It is unlike Etheridge’s sentiment couched in ‘attempted sophisticated language. Also, Chapman’s songs about love of a personal kind are accompanied by songs which provide a clear social and political environment. Her songs are part of a reflec- tion of the world, while Etheridge’s effort at poetics comes off as more derivative theat- ricality, an attempt at pathos. Chapman’s songs speak of collective experience in the first person as in “Sub- city:” Here in subcity life is hard/ We can’t receive any government relief/ I d like to give Mr. President my honest regards/ For disre- garding me/ They say there's too much crime in these city streets/ My sentiments exactly/ Government and big business hold the purse strings/ When I worked in the factories/ !'m at the mercy of the world/ I guess I'm lucky to be alive. In this way, Chapman can sing with real emotion, whereas Etheridge has to work a lot harder to evoke any kind of lasting impression the farther she strays into rewrit- ing lines of love that were already old when Catallus and Sappho made them memora- ble. Chapman, yet unadorned with electric lead guitars, continues to deliver direct. It ain’t fancy, and it ain’t just rock & roll. — Sesshu Foster People’s Daily World WORKERS THEATRE WORKERS" RENT A IDES 5 PEACE ON EARTH Kamloops-Shuswap Peace Council