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Three decades of Bruce Cockburn's music
Somewhere between pure pop music-music that succeeds or fails on the basis of music lies a kind of music that critic Robert Christgau defined many years ago as semipopular: music with a smaller, more sustainable audience than pop, though its strategems and aesthetics are essentially the same. An analogy would be the movie that lies somewhere between a blockbuster and the art house; the little movie that probably won't but may become the next My Big Fat 4Greek Wedding.
Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn has been producing such music for more than thirty years. His new CD, You've Never Seen Everything, arrives after last year's career-spanning singles compilation Anything, Anytime, Anywhere, and in the middle of a reissue series on Rounder Records that stretches all the way back to 1971. A semipopular musical creative output over that many years is unusual, but not unique. What is unique is the way he's done it: by combining Christian spirituality with a global political critique. Why that's so unusual requires a quick and admittedly simplified tour of the past fifty years.
Around 1955, an older urban-based pop gave way to a new music, rock 'n' roll, that borrowed much of its explosive energy from Southern religion. This wasn't the first time that the North looked south for music (don't forget Stephen Foster and Al Jolson), but it was the first time so much of the borrowing was from religion. If the secular fervor of rock 'n' roll was inclusive-you didn't have to be a Baptist to attend this revival meeting-it still contained a problem. The music inherited a cultural split between secular and sacred.
Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Al Green-the number of African-American singers who came out of the church is beyond measure. Yet even those who broke from the sacred, became secular, and then went back again could never be both. This Pentecostal schizophrenia was shared with...