History is subjective; tales of the past and the figures that lived through it are always shaped by the teller. There was great debate on the blog as to whether this week's theme was even appropriate; whether focusing on individuals makes the interpretation of the past even more unbalanced. Some argued that a truer history would be one told from the bottom up, an Alltagsgeschichte.
Thank goodness for Steeleye Span. The Victory tells a tale that entwines both icon and ordinary man – the subject is the battle of Trafalgar and the hero is the singer's lover, a poor man press-ganged into action. He dies in the battle, like his heroic captain, and the song seeks to remember them both, but while it is a lament, there is not a hint of bitterness and ends with a salute to the boss class as Maddy Prior sings: "Glory to the captain/ Bold Nelson was his name".
Such deference wouldn't have played well at Woodstock. Thus Joan Baez instead took the stage with a song that paid tribute to an iconic campaigner for workers' rights. Joe Hill was written in the 30s and tells of meeting the great activist in a dream, before claiming his spirit for the modern age, too – "Where working men defend their rights/ It's there you'll find Joe Hill." The similarities between Baez's entry and Dave Gaughan's are striking; Gaughan meets Tom Paine in a dream, and he pledges to "Dance in the oldest boots I own/ To the rhythm of Tom Paine's bones."
These songs can also tell us as much about the performer as the subject. Hernán Cortés subjugated the Aztecs and helped bring about the colonisation of Latin America, but while Neil Young castigates him, he also sees the Aztec empire as a prelapsarian place where "Hate was just a legend/ And war was never known". Moreover, they could build "with their bare hands/ What we still can't do today". Does Young's Cortés stand for modern society itself?
Enough polemic – unless you see Simon and Garfunkel's So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright as an architectural critique. Which it might be, although it seems just as likely to have been written as a dare. There is also mischief at work in Ryan Adams's effort, the Sylvia Plath of his imaginings ("she'd get me pretty loaded on gin/ And maybe she'd give me a bath") bearing pretty much no resemblance to the Plath of record. The Magnetic Fields, meanwhile, summon the ghost of the man who invented literary semiotics and all the absence of meaning that followed, to remind us that no one knows anything about love.
Tori Amos and Al Stewart choose not to blur meaning, just their timelines. Amos takes the disappearance of the Russian tsarina and melds it to a tale of modern anxieties. Stewart describes a view of the Palace of Versailles in the age of Robespierre and that of the traffic jam, detecting the same spirit in both. Again, the songwriter extracts their own meaning. As for OMD, so impassioned is their portrait of Joan of Arc ("She cared so much/ She offered up her body to the grave") you're grateful they're pretty much drowned out by the synths.
This week's playlist
1. The Victory Steeleye Span
2. Joe Hill Joan Baez
3. Tom Paine's Bones Dick Gaughan
4. Cortez the Killer Neil Young
5. So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright Simon and Garfunkel
6. Sylvia Plath Ryan Adams
7. The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure Magnetic Fields
8. Yes, Anastasia Tori Amos
9. The Palace of Versailles Al Stewart
10. Maid of Orleans OMD
• Next week: Songs about forgetting.
