Cynicism is For Sheep

Paul Weller and The Jam and the problem with "Running on the Spot"

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The Novel Project Playlist #2. For more context, click here.

I've given myself an impossible task: doing my homework before seeing Paul Weller this Wednesday in Washington D.C.

What qualifies the endeavor as Herculean is not only the length of Weller's career, but it's depth. He is the rare artist to not only achieve longevity, but nearly perpetual vitality. His personal inclination to follow his “Every Changing Moods” has served his art well.

In fact, one could plausibly argue that the work Weller has produced in his 50's and 60's is more creative and better crafted, sung, and produced than the monumental early work he produced with The Jam and The Style Council. To test my thesis, my advice is to begin with 22 Dreams and work your way to his current release, 66. Though I know taste is subjective, I think you'll see the case for my argument.

My point is, Weller's career is Dylanesque in its scope and quality. He should stand as an aspirational model for all artists.

So in readying myself for the concert (a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity), I've been trying to wade into the deep tracks of his long career.

This weekend, I took a train to New York City and back and spent a lot of the time with tracks from The Jam. I decided to dive back into The Gift, the final Jam album, and one that critics are often lukewarm about. After listening to it a couple of times straight through, I am prepared to submit a potentially heretical take for the record: I think it may be the Jam album that has aged best.

By this point in their career, the band had fully escaped the confines of their association with the punk movement. The music here is lilting, complex, inspirational, and Weller's vocals had fully matured, preparing him for the soul-singer phase of his Style Council years. And the songs are not only catchy and more timeless (freed of the limitations of late-seventies punk), the record’s concerns are entirely modern (insert arcane inside joke about All Mod Cons).

Weller's songwriting caught wind of a nihilistic spirit brewing in the age that we feel the full force of now, it both thrills and saddens me to say.

"Town Called Malice" is the big hit from the album and I don't need to convince anyone of that song's greatness. So let me focus just a moment on an under-appreciated, yet incredible, number, "Running on the Spot."

The song is clearly the inspiration for the album's cover art, which features the band, Rick Buckler, Bruce Foxton, and Weller, in somewhat awkward running-in-place motions. The song also falls directly in the middle of the album, which suggests to me that its concerns are central to those of the album.

Before touching on the insightfulness of the lyrics, I want to point to the brilliance of the composition itself. The melody somehow communicates multiple, conflicting emotions and holds the tension of the mixture together, creating something beautiful out of what should be chaos. Hope, desperation, exasperation, anger, and melancholy all vibrate through the song's melody, which should be studied closely by aspiring songwriters.

Then there's that insane, arrhythmic combination of syllabus that bark the song's title into existence. "We're running on the spot, always have, always will." I dare you to listen to the song and not be bowled over by the rage Weller injects into that moment by cramming that many words into such a small sonic space. It is a transcendent moment of music.

The song's melody and rhythm also work seamlessly with the lyrical content, which laments the failed promises of the ideologies of Progress.

"I was hoping we'd make real progress, but it seems we have lost the power."

The song begins with that bleakly honest assessment and keeps turning the screws from there. The second line adds to the anxiety created by the first:

"Any tiny step of advancement, it's like a rain drop falling into the ocean."

With this opening, the risk of pure nihilism is real. What can be done in the face of such bleak hope?

But hopeless nihilism is the very attitude the song attacks, which is what makes it still so relevant today. Ultimately, what Weller and company are arguing for is an honest assessment of reality and a long-deferred assumption of personal responsibility in making things better. In other words to STOP "running on the step."

When Weller complains that:

"Though we keep piling on the building blocks, the structure never seems to get any higher,"

he follows with a solution:

"Cause we keep kicking out the foundations and stand useless while our lives fall down."

What's so remarkable about lines like that is their utter break with left-leaning punk orthodoxy. The go-to posture of the punk movement was one of a rather systemic critique of systems that were vast and oppressive, leaving individuals precious little power over their own fates. Here, Weller suggests that simply kicking things down is a poor strategy for rebuilding a better world. The sentiment echoes one expressed in “Town Called Malice:”

“Time is short and life is cruel, but it’s up to us to change this town called Malice.”

If a shining gleam of hope isn't apparent in those lines, the following line from “Running on the Step” should make it clearer:

"I believe in life, I believe in love, but the world in which I'm living keeps trying to prove me wrong."

Weller comes across as neither an optimist nor a pessimist here, but rather as a hopeful realist willing to do the work.

Later in the song, Weller aims his critique of the world’s problems not only at the oppressors, but also at the lazy and cynical oppressed, who he equates with sheep:

"Out in the pastures we call society, you can't see further than the bottom of your glass."

The line draws attention to the self-centered dead end of too much self-interest. And Weller's mixed experiences with the 77 punk movement leads him to place the blame for destructive complacency with the so-called radicals as well:

"Only young but easily shocked; you get all violent when the boat gets rocked."

Punk was a youth movement and, like the Hippy movement it obliterated, it rather mechanically valorized “Youth” as a natural antidote to “The Old,” which the movement usually characterized as the source of all the world’s problems. But Weller, even early on, refused to ignore the failures of the young when he saw self-aggrandizing snottiness passing itself off as virtue. He includes The Youth in his indictment here, declaring:

“We’re just the next generation of emotionally crippled.”

Like so much of The Jam's catalog, the focus is intensely British, which is part of the reason their American appeal was limited. In this, they have much in common with the Kinks of the late 60's, an obvious influence on Weller and the band, which manifested in fashion as well as lyrical content.

The Jam frequently betray a deep debt to Ray Davies and the Kinks, and not only in their cover of "David Watts." But, The Gift is perhaps their most Kink-like album (perhaps another reason it left punk-enthralled critics a bit cold). Songs like "Just who is the 5 o'clock Hero" and especially "The Planner's Dream Goes Wrong" sound lyrically and compositionally like they could have been on Something Else by The Kinks or Face to Face.

And the Kinks' influence is deeply felt in "Running on the Spot" as well: Weller's sheep sounders ("ba ba ba ba ba....") are nearly synonymous with Davies’ "fa fa fa fa fa fa fa" from "David Watts."

And just as the Kinks' politics could be somewhat murky and incomprehensible to rock fans of the 1960s, so could Weller's be to his punk audience. This is why he could include them in his assessment of the world's dreary, hopeless state. The youthful drive to “keep kicking out the foundations” turns out to be a real problem.

Perhaps this is why The Gift, and particularly "Running On the Spot," are speaking to me so strongly right now.

I no longer believe that our world is so neatly divided into the oppressors and the oppressed. Yes, bad people are doing bad things, but no small amount of the blame for that can be put down to the cynical posturing of the so-called resistance to the monsters. At some point, Weller's conclusion should be our own:

"Intelligence should be our first weapon; stop reveling in rejection; and follow yourselves, not some ageing drain brain who's quite content to go on feeding you garbage."

But to follow one’s own path requires taking responsibility for the consequences of doing so. It is a difficult decision to make, particularly in a pasture-society of sheep such as ours, where nothing is so seductively safe as mechanical conformity.