The Mynabirds, Generals, 2012

Sunday Run Album Review

The U.S. has been actively enmeshed in several wars for more than a decade.  We've seen the effects of this fact on popular culture with television series like Lost and 24 and in movies like the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy.  Surprisingly, it doesn't feel like we've heard much from popular music about the wars or, for that matter, the economic malaise of the last five or so years.  Springsteen did Magic and Wrecking Ball; Neil Young did Living with War;  and we got Iraq from Black 47.  Those guys, though, are really part of pop music's "old guard."  To my knowledge, there's been a real scarcity of music tackling our current situation from newer acts.

I'd heard that Laura Burhenn's Mynabirds project did take on these issues, and -- I guess this explains a lot -- I kind of avoided it for a while.  Having been stirred up by Woody Guthrie and Billy Bragg in recent weeks, though, I decided to take The Mynabirds' latest, Generals, out on a run with me today.

It's a tricky thing, getting political in music.  Generals strikes an excellent balance.  The martial beats and calls to arms are countered by pop hooks and Burhenn's soulful singing voice.  The album opens with "Karma Debt" in which Burhenn has us watching passively as we "hold our homes like credit cards" and let events play out between our political parties.  The refrain of, "I'd give it all for a legacy of love," which repeats on album-closer "Greatest Revenge," indicates that some biblical lessons may be at play in informing Burhenn's philosophy.  The title track is a rollicking, rock/soul, "We're Not Gonna Take It" for 2012 that I'm sure caused me to up my pace just a little as I ran.  "Radiator Sister" comes across as 1980's pop, complete with "ooh-ooh's," polluting corporations, and people "dying in the breadlines."  The electro-pop "Disarm" takes the Springsteen angle of using a relationship as a metaphor for bigger issues.  The album closes with the 1960's girl-group sounds of "Greatest Revenge," on which Burhenn sings "Love me won't you love me like it's our greatest revenge."

I hope I haven't made this album sound preachy, because it doesn't really come across that way.  Thematically, it centers around a pretty common idea in pop music:  that we should love each other.  In this case, Burhenn suggests that simple idea as a necessary condition for starting to fix the problems we all face.  Generals gets that message across through a strong collection of songs, peppered with some hard-hitting lyrics, that are deeply rooted in the sounds of American popular music.

Whatever your own political philosophy, there's plenty on Generals to make you think and to make you move your feet.