Shane MacGowan (1957-2023)

Shane MacGowan, Moscow, 2010 (Image: Redageg, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Shane MacGowan, genius bard of Éire, has died at the age of 65. When my daughter was an undergrad at U-M, I took her to see the Pogues. MacGowan passed out after the third song and the band carried on nonetheless. Not long after that show, the band got together and kicked MacGowan out. He later did a couple of solo records, the first of which, The Snake, I reviewed for New Art Examiner. Below is the text of that review, published in the November 1995 issue. Go raibh suaimhneas síoraí air ("Eternal peace be upon him.")

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The Snake

Shane MacGowan and the Popes

ZTT/Warner Bros Records, 1994

 

Reviewed by: Vincent Carducci

New Art Examiner, November 1995 

 

On a tour of North America several years back, Dublin poet Michael O'Siadhail spoke of what he termed the "mythic homeland" of the Irish. Drawn in images from the western provinces—craggy, windswept coast­lines and dewy, bucolic farmlands—this pastoral dissimulates the harsher realities of present-day Ireland: a nation struggling to maintain its identity in the face of the hegemony of the European Economic Community; a place of political "troubles" in its war-­torn north and economic impover­ishment in its urbanized east.

Both at home and abroad, the Irish have served for centuries as the orig­inal Other of the Anglo-Saxon; and the stereotypes with (dis)respect to them—profligacy, drunkenness, bel­ligerence, etc.—have permeated the master narrative of the English-speaking peoples. Following a logic similar to that of critic Brian O'Doherty, who as an artist assumed the identity Patrick Ireland to rebuke WASP prejudice and protest British occupation in Ulster, several musicians of Irish descent formed a group they called Pogue Mahone (Gaelic for "kiss my arse"), which embraced a semiotics born of prejudice as their political riposte. The Pogues, as they came to be known, and in particular frontman Shane MacGowan, spliced elements of the Gaelic tradition onto the present in order to deconstruct the banality of bourgeois refinement and register a counterhistory of life at the margins of the Empire.

 

With this new disc, MacGowan indisputably establishes who was the driving force of the Pogues' project. Finally given the boot by other members of the band because of his inability to adapt to the stric­tures of the concert-hall grind, MacGowan returns—not in recovery, never having been in denial, which is to say about as close to existential authenticity as it gets—with a new motley crew (including Sinead O'Con­nor and Johnny Depp) to continue reconfiguring the mythic homeland of the Gael in the Postmodern world.

 

As with his previous recordings, MacGowan eclectically fashions old and new, original and appropriated, into a palimpsest of sound. Selections on The Snake from the Irish folk tradition include the paean to drink "Nancy Whiskey" and rebel songs "Roddy McCorley" and "The Rising of the Moon." The originals and a cover of "Her Father Didn't Like Me Anyway" further reveal what Jean-Francois Lyotard terms the "minor narratives" of the disenfranchised and the demimonde. 

 

With a rockier feel than earlier efforts, brought about by a more prominent use of electric guitar and full drum kit, The Snake celebrates MacGowan as an exemplary "autochthon" (defined by Deleuze and Guattari as "the native who can speak to the experience as lived"), cussing and fighting, guzzling poitín, and clinging firmly to the Auld Sod against the impending tide of deracination of the self, threatened by an increasingly mobile and elusive global elite, which administers its new power from nodes on the Information Superhighway.

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