Billy Bragg & Son

Where there's a will, there's a way. That Billy Bragg titled his 1996 album William Bloke should not just be regarded as a clever wordplay on his reputation as the people's troubadour. His proletarian touch, his impassioned championing of workers' causes and insight into down-to-earth matters of the heart gives him much in common with such good folk (and Will does love his folk music). But in his vision of a "Northern Industrial Town," where there are two hometeams and you "must follow" one or the other, he sees the world in the same black-and-white "contraries" as Will Blake, who made so much of his own moral wrestle with clashing opposites in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Are these dualities mutually exclusive? Bragg sings Blake's inspirational shout-out, "Jerusalem," on his 1990 live mini-album, The Internationale, which also spans the agit-prop of "Joe Hill," Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," and Curtis Mayfield's elevating " A Change Is Going to Come." Some would have you believe that art and a political conscience should never mingle. Many are the "protest" singers who have been caught on the cuckold horns of this dilemma, most notably Phil Ochs, who wrote a beautiful song about "Changes" and then found, for himself and his audience, that it could be the hardest thing to come to terms with (Beck, perhaps, would negotiate the transformation from anti-folk to pop more successfully). Billy, who couldn't have seemed more a purist at heart than on Life's a Riot w/ Spy vs. Spy, his 1983 debut EP, recorded in an afternoon with just himself banging an electric guitar, had the grace to admit in his most affecting call to arms — "I don't want to change the world/ I'm not looking for a new England/ I'm just looking for another girl" — and realize that this was the greatest politrick of all.

A rousing performer, caught up in the afterglow of punk and the idealism of doing it yerself, mate, he could've continued to be a one-man band. But by 1986, when Talking with the Taxman About Poetry was released, with Johnny Marr and Kirsty MacColl guesting, and John Porter dialing in the slap-back reverb on Billy's guitar, Bragg determined he was going to be a folk-rocker (in the most visceral embellishment of the word) on his own collective-bargaining terms. "Levi Stubbs' Tears" is poignant to the point of ache, an indelible image etched in the soulful Four Tops' singer's giving of himself.

Should you need a little battlement-storming, the same album's version of "There Is Power in a Union" shows Bragg's more activist leanings, something he's never shied from. It's not just rhetoric with Billy: one of his most recent "initiatives" (a good word, that) is providing guitars to prisoners in the UK penal system, inspired by the Clash's 1978 "Jail Guitar Doors." And his acclaimed pairing with Wilco on Mermaid Avenue, which set unpublished lyrics of Woody Guthrie's to modern melodics, shows the true power of a union.

Nearly a quarter of a century of repertoire runs quite a gamut, especially for such a prolific artist, and among the many high spots for me in his body of work is 1991's Don't Try This At Home, a full-band production with Billy embracing strings ("Rumors of War," "God's Footballer"), taking a turn on Fred Neil's aqueous "Dolphins," and featuring cameo appearances by Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, and Kirsty MacColl.

Kirsty herself had a pre-Taxman hit with "A New England," and her chirpy voice and ebullient character can be heard to infectious effect on The Stiff Years. Though her artistic life is usually usurped by back story — daughter of legendary folksinger Ewan MacColl, married to producer Steve Lillywhite, killed in a tragic boating accident in 2000 — she has a chipper-shop flair that sets the pace for a modern gurl like Lily Allen: smart, savvy, sassy. Her song "They Don't Know" is my favorite, introduced to me by Tom Clark, who knows his Rockpiling well, and she is certainly the maid of honor for Stiff's scrappy and provocative vision of pop (see Wreckless Eric's "Take the Cash"). Ira Robbins' Stiff Records Dozen is a grand introduction to a label that took the DIY ethic that is always at the heart of rock's primal impulse, and raised it to a cultural imperative.

Casting a net for who might prove a post-modern equivalent of Bragg's and Stiff's purer-pop consciousness, I was led (though Ted would tell me "Better Dead Than Lead,") to Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. 2004's Shake the Sheets, with its exultant headlong rush of "Me and Mia," might well be about urging on his mirror image when he choruses "Do you believe in something beautiful/ Then get up and be it."

Blending the chop-shop eight note bpms of power-punk, the updrafting exaltation - at times reminiscent of Eddie & the Hot Rods "Do Anything You Wanna Do" or Elvis "Lou" Costello - Shake the Sheets broke Leo out of the indie underground. Having paid his work dues in the '90s on the Washington D.C. hardcore scene with Chisel, striking up a bondship there with Fugazi, it paved the way for Brendan Canty of that band to produce Leo's new album, Living with the Living. "Bomb. Repeat. Bomb." creates a backdrop of insurgent warfare all too familiar. The tremolo slowdance of "Toro and the Toreador" wonders who is the greater victim in a world gone awry. A paean to "Colleen" is all rhyme scheme. The perspective of the songs is hard to pin down, shifting as they do between the private and the public, the personal and the political. Just like you 'n me.