John Mellencamp
The Lonesome Jubilee
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In dedicating his last album, Scarecrow, to his grandfather, who had recently died, John Mellencamp wrote, "There is nothing more sad or glorious than generations changing hands." That idea suffused the songs on Scarecrow, which was released in 1985, and it comes to the fore once again on Mellencamp's complex, moving new album, The Lonesome Jubilee. To state his theme this time, Mellencamp prints a passage from Ecclesiastes on the record jacket, one of many Biblical references that run through The Lonesome Jubilee. "Generations come and go but it makes no difference," the passage goes. "Everything is unutterably weary and tiresome. No matter how much we see,
Read More we are never satisfied. ... So I saw that there is nothing better for men than that they should be happy in their work, for that is what they are here for, and no one can bring them back to life to enjoy what will be in the future, so let them enjoy it now." The blending of fatalism and celebration, of the pleasures of life and the specter of death, evident in those verses makes The Lonesome Jubilee something like Mellencamp's Nebraska. The rhythms are more exuberant and the arrangements are fuller on these ten songs than on Spring-steen's grim masterpiece, but the chilling fear that some unknown, inexorable force in human affairs makes contentment impossible haunts both records. And just as Springsteen chose the directness of folk music for Nebraska, Mellencamp has laced his songs with Celtic and Appalachian folk instruments – hammer dulcimer, mandolin, penny whistle, Dobro and accordion. These evocative musical touches make the dilemmas of The Lonesome Jubilee seem that much more ancient and unchanging. For this reason, the songs on The Lonesome Jubilee that address troubling social issues paradoxically provide the most reassuring moments on the record. The harsh, angular "Down and Out in Paradise" – with its desperate pleas to "dear Mr. President" from an unemployed worker, a homeless woman and an unhappy child – at least assumes a comprehensible system in which uncaring governmental figures can be held accountable for the suffering chronicled in the song. The prayerlike "We Are the People" – despite its foolishly misplaced sympathy for the "fortunate ones" (because "it's lonely up there" and "nobody's got it made") – revives Sixties-style political rhetoric and warns manipulative leaders, "If you try to divide and conquer/We'll rise up against you." But other songs on The Lonesome Jubilee suggest that the sources of people's unhappiness reside at least partly within themselves or, more disturbingly, in the fabric of life itself. In the R&B-driven "Hard Times for an Honest Man," Mellencamp blames bad economic conditions for the anger that causes a frustrated worker to abuse his family and for a woman's emotional isolation. But the song also appears to imply that th
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