The Empire Strikes Back
What is on Condoleezza Rice’s iPod? Not Country Teasers’ eighth and self-proclaimed ‘mature’ album The Empire Strikes Back. Full of moral outrage, scything black humour and joyful Garage-Punk invention, it is also a provocative assault on the hypocritical uses and abuses of language. All eleven songs are underpinned by the idea that a defining feature of bigotry and stupidity is allowing words to become ideological shorthand (‘terrorist’, for instance) rather than discussing their meaning in context. Country Teasers’ counter-attack kicks off with ‘Spiderman in the Flesh’, an exaggerated Country ballad listing ego-shaping moments from the singer-character’s childhood, veering midway into a rousing cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘In The Flesh’ (1979), Roger Waters’ evocation of a power-crazed rock star in contempt of his audience (‘Are there any queers in the audience tonight? Get ‘em up against the wall …’).
The band (Ben R. Wallers, Sophie Politowicz, Alastair MacKinven, Robert McNeil and Leighton Crook) has evolved through artist Wallers’ prolific home recording activities (30 albums since 1989 under his alternative moniker, The Rebel). Their latest release is presented as a concept album, appropriating the title, cover and dust-jacket notes of a 1970s’ cultural studies reader entitled The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in ‘70s’ Britain. It depicts a group of union jack-waving skinheads led along a street by a police officer. The associations – racism, cultural misunderstanding, the charred memory of Empire in a dementedly insecure British psyche, the Star Wars films – can all be found in the album’s scathing lyrical invective.
Country Teasers are commonly compared to The Fall; however, the influence is neither stylistic nor superficial. Like Mark E. Smith’s Mancunian iconoclasts, the band exists within post-Punk’s liberated framework, not the marketing-led styling of recent ‘post-Punk’. Operating outside genres, their fellow travellers include not only The Fall but musicians such as Butthole Surfers and Rap innovator Kool Keith. The heroic Keith himself is the subject of ‘White Patches’, which questions racial demographics and tokenism in the world of music fandom, asking ‘Why don’t I see any black people at my gigs?’ when ‘I love Kool Keith, you love cool Keith, everybody loves Kool Keith … but how do you think Kool Keith feels?’
Wallers’ most vicious tirade, ‘Your English’, blasts English sanctimony. ‘The posture of your sports teams exemplifies your tendency to cover up your weakness with hysterical defence strategies, “We will definitely win we cannot lose!”’ Though often referred to as Scottish, his self-penned ‘biography containing half-truths’ has St Albans down as his place of birth. The track, like any successful attack, appears to be the product of inside knowledge.
Several reviews of this album have railed against Wallers’ lyrics, describing them as ‘misanthropic’, ‘difficult’ and in one case ‘race-baiting, quasi-political nonsense’. ‘Misanthropic’ must be the pejorative term most lazily applied to artists satirizing human behaviour, from Jonathan Swift to Lenny Bruce and Chris Morris. It is a particularly tough charge given Wallers’ pains to clarify the language issue within the lyrics themselves – ‘Please tell it like it is, don’t fuck around with words. When you fuck around with words, you make the situation worse. That’s a bomb on the ground, those are limbs flying through the air. These are bullets all around, that’s cum in your hair.’ Ironically such emotional and politically correct dismissals of The Empire Strikes Back only confirm this album’s relevance.
