Slash and Burn: the music of Stephan Smith

Progressive, The, Feb, 2005 by Natasha Saulnier

Stephan Smith is one of the most promising protest singers in America. The thirty-six-year-old Smith has been hailed as the Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan for this generation by The New York Times and The Village Voice.

On the first anniversary of 9/11, Smith released his anti-war song "The Bell," recorded with Pete Seeger, as a free MP3 over the Internet. "The Bell" was one of the first anti-war statements to make national press:

"Oh I'm sounding the drums of war, "said the man at his desk.

"Oh I will not fight your war," said the child and he stood.

"Oh but don't you love your country?" said the man at his desk.

"Yes, I do, but you don't," said the child and he stood.

"Oh but don't you know the truth?" said the man at his desk.

"Yes, you lie and call it truth, "said the child and he stood.

Despite the fact that no major industry company ever promoted it, "The Bell" was covered by artists ranging from Dave Matthews to DJ Spooky and printed more than 200,000 times on various compilations worldwide. "While the publishing and film industries have bankrolled and profited from dissent in the past year, the music industry, once the scion of protest, remains timid," says Smith.

Smith sings in nine languages, including Yiddish and Arabic, befitting his eclectic roots. "I grew up in Virginia, steeped in the American musical tradition, but my mother is Austrian, my father Iraqi with Kurdish origins, and I have a Jewish great grandfather," he says. "So if I can sing harmoniously, I'm sure the whole world can sing in a beautiful chorus."

His father's family lives in Mosul and Baghdad, where four of his aunts and uncles work as doctors in the main hospitals and occasionally report on their daily lives and struggles. They lament the fact that the U.S. media do not relate the level of suffering placed on ordinary citizens. Smith's uncle, Ghazi Kamil, former director of the nation's electrical services, told Smith, "Innocent people, women and children, have been killed and are dying of cancer because of depleted uranium, and for what? For a few individuals to control our oil. But I'm not angry at Americans because I know they don't know."

His new album, Slash and Burn, on the independent Artemis Records started by Danny Goldberg, touches not only on Bush and the war in Iraq, but on unethical globalization and its trail of iniquities. Slash and Burn's twelve songs mix political content and pop music. Smith has called it "popolitical." He explains: "While I am drawing on the ballad legacy of writers like Dylan and Guthrie, I'm inspired by people like Bob Marley and John Lennon who used the sounds of their times to make protest accessible. Protest music can be pop. It must be both infectious and pro-found to have widespread social impact." The album fuses rap, rock, folk, and country music. It advocates global justice and ethical globalization as the only way to stop the current world violence and inequality that breed social division.

The rap, rock, and folk-tinged single "Taking Aim" is, according to Smith, a "hymn to altermondialisme," the French term inspired by the Porto Alegre slogan "Another world is possible."

"In the Air" is a dance song with a heavy samba beat and rapid-fire lyrics delivered in a Jamaican MC style. Linking economic imperialism with military oppression, Smith gives shout-outs to Radical Cheerleaders and the Landless Workers Movement in a powerful rendering of our current situation:

While the trees come down in the Amazon

Young kids getting killed fighting tanks with stones

By soldiers like drones. Look out here come the clones ...

But in Brazil they got people takin' over private land,

And in India they go to stop another dam.

Kablam! The bombs drop in the Sahara Sand

While the Clear Channel Radio plays another Boy Band?

Smith's musical satire "You Ain't a Cowboy," which addresses an unnamed but obvious American Tartuffe, was pre-released over the Internet on Audiolunchbox.com in what was billed as the first such large-scale MP3 release to benefit a non-profit. It was also one of the first major anti-Bush songs released widely in the U.S. With all proceeds going to the political action group TrueMajority.org, the hilarious song was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. With a flawless Southern drawl, Smith depicts Bush as an imposter and ridicules him as a PR creation:

You ain't nothin' but an oil tycoon.

You ate yer whole life from a silver spoon,

The whole country knows you're an aristocrat goon,

But you still ain't got the sense to know when it's high noon.

Other songs on the album include "World to Come," a hauntingly beautiful appeal to the "next world." The album's title track, "Slash and Burn," with its rebellious lyrics, decries corruption in the music industry. "Bitter Happiness," featuring former Gil Evans trumpeter Leif Arntzen, is a jazzy elegy to our ravaged environment:

   Something odd blows in the breeze,
   Poison waves the eye can't see,
   Permeating every tree,
   Apple blossoms without bees.
   The Matterhorn has lost its freeze,
   There's a shiny layer on the sea,
   Tell me, what paradise is this,
   This bitter happiness?