A Spiritual Manifesto for the Dispossessed
The late Pogues singer Shane MacGowan understood the depths of human despair, a feeling he plumbed on his song “The Old Main Drag.”
It starts where it finishes, in a dead-end drone: a single accordion note that seems to refine itself, thin itself out, even as it goes nowhere and lasts forever. That the song was recorded in 1985 is a mere accident of history: It could have been written at any point in the past 200 years. It could have been written by nobody at all—by Anonymous or by some mystery of collective authorship. Acid like a ballad by Brecht and Weill, blunter than all but the most sawn-off punk rock, the is as undeceived a statement of human despair as anything in the canon of folk music.
