James Taylor Flag Albums, CDs, Vinyl Records and LPs

James Taylor - Flag

James Taylor
Flag

The James Taylor who gazes out from the gatefold of Flag is an emaciated, jaundiced Yankee eccentric glaring at us with cold, eagleeyed skepticism. The picture is almost the negative of the movie-star-glamorous photo on the cover of JT, the album that marked Taylor's corporate switch from Warner Bros. to Columbia in 1978. But the aesthetic shift from last year's debonair to this year's dour isn't just a gimmick. Whereas the material and tone of JT suggested a similar mellowing of Taylor's personality, Flag's thorny songs and hard, tense arrangements bear witness to the stark and piercing artwork.

If JT presented the kind of urbane, sexy, humorous person
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that we'd all like to know, Flag peels away the glamour to expose the flinty marrow of a hostile stranger. None of the new cuts has the tantalizing wit of "Handy Man" or the delicious ironic glee of "Secret of Life." Instead, Flag offers the grim self-portrait of a chronically depressed man with a monkey on his back, as Taylor relentlessly accumulates correlatives to his own despair.

One of Flag's strategies is the disparagement, from the viewpoint of the common man, of the American ideals of freedom and work. Taylor obsessively goes all the way with this idea, reiterating in track after track that such freedom never really existed because life itself is a cruel imprisonment. The crux of the LP comes in four dramatic monologues, one of which, "Company Man," is obviously autobiographical. "Company Man" is Taylor's unsparing condemnation of the corporate rock & roll star system. "So if there's something you do well/Something you're proud of/Better to save some for yourself/If that's allowed," he advises an up-and-coming musician.

The other three monologues also examine work, but find only boredom and exploitation. Taylor sees little difference between the life of a rock star—even one as successful as himself—and the more common forms of labor. (A dangerous notion, but he pulls it off.) They're all just jobs whose twin functions are to kill time and make someone else rich at one's own huge psychic expense. "Millworker," Flag's most eloquent song, portrays a widow looking back miserably on a bad marriage and ahead toward nothingness. The narrator of "Brother Trucker" is so hopped up on pills that he literally sees double. "I'm a driving fool/I make my own rules," he proclaims, knowing full well he's lying. Convicted of murder and rotting in an Alabama jail, the protagonist of "Sleep Come Free Me" is a prisoner of the state. Not even allowed the distraction of drudgery, he prays for unconsciousness.

Desolation and rage abound in the compositions that aren't concerned with work. In "I Will Not Lie for You," the artist administers a savage tongue-lashing to a close friend's wife for coming on to him. "Johnnie Comes Back" cryptically describes a man's desperate game of hide-and-seek with his own drug h

James Taylor - Flag CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

James Taylor - Flag