Music Arcades: Kris Kristofferson and the Borderlords: Third World Warrior

Shortly after I got this I remember composing an argument in my head about how Kris Kristofferson was a more sophisticated, and indeed reflexively self-aware, singer of protest songs than someone like Billy Bragg. I can't remember quite how the argument went, but I have a suspicion I wouldn't find it entirely convincing today.

I definitely enjoyed it a lot then, even if I detected more irony in Kristofferson's delivery than there actually is. I certainly enjoyed the unintentional irony of the album's timing. Recorded in 1989, KK sings "until the day we free Mandela, all the world will be in chains" and, among a welter of gestures of Nicaraguan solidarity, "Sandinista, may your spirit never die". By the time the album was released in March 1990 Mandela had been freed and the Sandinistas had been voted out by Nicaraguan people.

Have you noticed how protest songs always have the bad guys doing bad things to children in babies. Thus KK, singing "I heard there was a baby, somebody heard her crying" in El Aguila del Norte and "They're killing babies in the name of freedom" Don't Let the Bastards (Get you Down) follows in a tradition stretching from Woody Guthrie's "Thirteen children died from your guns" (Ludlow Massacre) to Neil Young's "They might have left some babies crying on the ground" (Pocahontas).

But he really takes the postmodern biscuit in Hero:

You see, the good thing is you don't have to be as good as Jesus to start out with
All you got to do is ask yourself, how would Gary Cooper have done it
Or John Kennedy
Or Martin Luther King
Or Malcom X?

Now, hang on, how did Gary Cooper get ahead of MLK? Kris is referring to the fictional persona Cooper projected in his roles (in real life he was a "friendly" witness in Senator McCarthy's commie witch hunt). Image trumps reality. Heroes aren't born, they're role-played.

And Kris quite fancies himself in that role. To be fair, when he sings, "I have served with honor in the Army", well, he has, hasn't he? Maybe that was part of my 'sophistication' argument 19 years ago. I'm not sure I'm quite taken in by him in the way I was then. But I'm still on his side.