Confessions

Despite horns that could have 2

been lifted from a Two-tone ska anthem, Pokey Lafarge’s “Riot in the Streets” is not exactly a call to arms. Written in the tempestuous days that followed the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown—a black teenager from Ferguson, Missouri—by a white police officer, the last track on Lafarge’s new Manic Revelations is more of a sorrowful meditation on strife than pointed political commentary.

“Right or wrong, battle lines are drawn/like the difference ’tween dusk and dawn,” Lafarge sings. “Black and white in the light of day/but at night there’s only shades of grey.”

Lafarge is clearly willing to consider all sides of an ugly scene—but if he wrote that song today, with open-carry fascists marching in the streets of America, it might tell a different story.

“Of course it would, because it’s a different time—but I couldn’t say how, exactly,” the St. Louis–based songwriter says, talking to the Straight from a tour bus somewhere in rural California. “Perhaps I would take more of a stance. I would have been more harshly critical of the institutionalized racism, and of police brutality as a whole.”

There’s a sense, though, that the musically peripatetic Lafarge—whose sound has evolved from westernswing-inflected Americana to a more diverse mix of jazz, rock, country, and Caribbean influences—finds the role of protest singer both necessary and an uncomfortable fit. He readily admits that he’s torn between the need to say something and the desire to escape politics altogether—a dichotomy that plays out across Manic Revelations’ 10 songs. For every ode to the simpler life, like the self-explanatory “Going to the Country”, there’s a lyric rooted in Lafarge’s gritty experiences in the days before tour buses, when he was a hitchhiking, street-corner-busking modern-day hobo.

Finding a balance between addressing and escaping reality, Lafarge says, isn’t easy.

“Living in St. Louis, living in the Midwest, living in America, being alive today in the world, you’re just inundated with information,” he contends. “There’s just so much fucking stimulation all the time, and I don’t think that’s always a good thing. It is if you need it and you crave it, but you can’t possibly need it and crave it all the time. Yet we’re just pouring this digital cocaine into our brains all the time, right? So, for me, I need to get away from time to time. All I need is a guitar, a book, a notebook, and a pen. But you also have to go out and experience life. You have to go out and open your mind up to new things.”

And what Lafarge is finding when he’s out on the road is that maybe he was right to paint things in shades of grey, no matter how black-andwhite Michael Brown’s killing might seem today.

“In terms of inspiration in this country, there’s never been less— and there’s never been more,” he says. “The one thing I would tell Canadians is that there’s a lot of people here who are very separated from the regime, from the current institutions. They’re creating beautiful music, they’re raising great families, they’re renovating beautiful old buildings, they’re making great food, they’re helping the community. There are still a lot of great things happening here, and it’s still a beautiful country.

“I mean, I’m not Billy Bragg; I’m not trying to beat people over the head with any message,” he adds. “I would rather be a little bit more subversive—and to be subversive, poetry is the best medicine.”

> ALEXANDER VARTY

Pokey Lafarge plays the Imperial on Thursday (August 24).

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