That one earned Bruce Cockburn a certified hit in 1984, airplay on MTV, and the kind of notoriety that he would probably like to forget: as a form of psychological warfare, the U.S. military played that song in 1989, quite loudly, outside the Vatican Embassy in Panama City during its attempt to oust Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. Having seen his song twisted into a perverse patriotic anthem, he expresses a certain ambivalence about it these days. He hasn't performed “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” for several years now, and won't sing it even if it's requested, as it inevitably is at his concerts. He's fearful of the current emotional climate, especially in the United States; he's worried that people will hear it the wrong way, that they won’t understand, and he doesn't want to run the risk of feeding a body of emotion that he'd rather not arouse.
“We’re confronted with great darkness as a species right now, as spiritual creatures on this planet,” says Cockburn. “I don’t think it’s hopeless, and I don’t want You’ve Never Seen Everything to make people feel hopeless. But I think we’ve got to call a spade a spade.”
No problem there. Cockburn has never shied away from big pronouncements, and he doesn’t on his latest album either. Beginning his new song “All Our Dark Tomorrows” with the line “The village idiot takes the throne” probably won’t win him an invitation to the White House, but then, he’s probably not fishing for one in the first place. The usual targets—greed, hypocrisy, multinational corporations, the systematic destruction of the environment—come in for their biennial skewering. It would all sound very familiar if Bruce Cockburn wasn’t so creative at finding new ways to spout invective. Then again, there’s this:
The grinding devolution
of the democratic dream
Brings
us men in gas masks dancing
while the shells burst
The trouble
with normal is
it always gets worse
Bruce Cockburn wrote that 20 years ago. I watch CNN too, hoping not to hear words like “anthrax” and “smallpox.” Maybe he was on to something.
Normal certainly doesn’t seem to be getting any better. The title track on You’ve Never Seen Everything is like an updated version of “Rocket Launcher” with its litany of horrific inhumanity and exploitation, and it will raise the hairs on the back of your neck. It’s a spectacular dirge for humankind and the awful things we do to one another. Among the recounted horrors are a massacre at a child’s birthday party, a self-immolation, a mass poisoning caused by a baker who cut his flour with pesticide and murder by pitchfork. Don’t bring the kids to this show, although children are the unwitting victims of many of these atrocities—atrocities taken, Cockburn claims, right from the pages of the newspaper.
Emmylou Harris joins Bruce on the chorus, and her plaintive harmonies only highlight the mournfulness. It’s a remarkable anthem for a world whose real hard currency is tears and blood, where people butcher one another casually, where the light goes unseen and unrecognized. “You thought Guatemala was bad,” Cockburn seems to be telling us. “Normal still prevails, and you’ve never seen everything.”
And then there’s love.
A spiritually searching folkie, Cockburn found Jesus in the early ’70s and recorded a handful of albums full of yearning and praise and faith and doubt, all without a whiff of dogma or cliché.
Albums like Joy Will Find a Way and In the Falling Dark won him a sizable following among self-described Christians searching for a hero to break out of the “loss/cross, grace/face” songwriting mold of the then-fledgling Christian music industry. Cockburn fit the bill, with his poetry, his mysticism and his unabashed love for Jesus. He could play a mean guitar, too, as early instrumentals such as “Water Into Wine” showed. But instead of trying to fit within any stereotypes or expectations, Cockburn simply lived his life and wrote and sang about it.
“I’m not a very good role model, I’m afraid,” he said. “And I really have no desire to be a Christian poster child. There are a lot of people on the Christian scene who are not satisfied with the limitations of the art that’s offered. It’s been a long time since the Church supported artists like Heironymous Bosch. You get this blandness, and people get fed up with the blandness, and I was, I guess, a little breath of fresh air for some of those people. But then when I became less overtly Christian in my songs and started dealing with the world more, some of them got upset and dropped by the wayside. I remember getting an angry letter from somebody because I put the word ‘shit’ in a song. How could I be a Christian and use that language? Well, sorry, but you have some thinking to do, honey.”
