Back in 2003, there were a couple of things I thought I’d never get tired of: one of them was listening to Steve Earle. The other was hating George W. Bush. But that was before Earle’s music got increasingly, stridently political and musically sort of dull, and before Bush got re-elected and spent another four seemingly endless years doing his best to destroy America.
Bush is gone now, and I haven’t paid more than slight attention to Steve Earle since his Jerusalem album, a record I loved at the time but haven’t listened to in probably five years. I was pleasantly surprised by his newest effort, I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive, which, despite its faults, is seemingly his best effort in some time.
“Little Emperor” then, strikes a weird sort of double-nostalgia for me: the first for a time when I listened to a lot of rootsy singer-songwriter type music, the sort of stuff that Paste magazine seemed designed to cover: not quite country enough for No Depression, not indie enough for Magnet, and not really pop enough to appeal to a mass audience—a weird kind of no-man’s land; and secondly for that period of time when America was really ramping up to go into Iraq, when it was squandering every bit of goodwill the rest of the world extended to it in the wake of 9/11, when we as a nation were at the absolute height of our arrogance, and scared shitless, and determined to root out and decry any dissenting viewpoints.
The song is a pretty straightforward kiss-off to the former President that, in spite of its fairly venomous lyrics, comes off as loose and gleeful: the Little Emperor is gone, and we’re giving him a final fuck you as he shuffles off into the sunset. And it makes me remember how much focus I had back then. All I had to do was look at what the White House was saying, and I knew where I stood—in direct opposition. The Bush administration was my North Star: I always knew my destination based on their position. And it was fun, frankly, back then, to have such an obvious enemy, such an easy target, and songs like this, which let me know I had allies out there in the world.
