Barbed Wire Love. Stiff Little Fingers. 1979. Rough Trade.

 For his 1979 record Armed Forces Elvis Costello applied metaphors then associated with machinations from the worlds of politics, big business, and the military—institutions where authoritative control is practiced ruthlessly—to the working dynamics of personal relationships for a series of songs that became one of the most dazzling LPs of his—or anyone else’s—career. That same year Belfast’s Stiff Little Fingers employed a similar method to Barbed Wire Love from their debut record Inflammable Material, only in their case the metaphors were lifted directly from their experience of neighborhood warfare, Northern Ireland’s The Troubles, and its real world life during wartime. No Man’s Land, rubble, bomb site, barbed wire, Armalite, booby traps, device…the lyric reads like a terrorist’s shopping list, and the resulting effect is a harrowing microscoping of the conflicts’ myriad, clashing realities. Attempting to bring events from The Troubles into clarifying focus, I try imagining my childhood barrio forced to endure a similar besieged environment but can’t wrap my mind around daily shocks of mass violence; the best I manage is a serious appreciation for the damage caused by enforced tribal allegiance. Children are ambivalent about having to choose sides because it goes against human nature. Our instincts tell us to emulate the mineral and vegetative calm of the clock face but intellect has disrupted us with the spark of rebellion, which we’ve attempted with the inaccuracies of history and logic to shape into a western absolute, elevated to the status of a value. “All caught up in barbed wire love,” the song tell us; “all tangled up in barbed wire love.” And we are in no position to disbelieve it. As our wheel of government grinds to a sclerotic halt, we’re wracked not by fantasies of liberty and freedom for all, but by an obsession with the law of armament, the goon with the assault rifle taking hostages as the rest of us attempt to shop for eggs and floor wax. We are refugees at home in a nest of fanatics smeared in red.

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