The Pogues' Rum, Sodomy and the Lash

33⅓ Main Series #60

by Jeffrey T. Roesgen

To absorb Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash is to be taken on a wild voyage with a cast of downtrodden revolutionaries. Despite this notion, the epic themes of the Pogues' second full length record have been overlooked by both critics and biographers in favor of two the band's penchant for combining Celtic folk with punk rhythms ("the sound") and the excesses of Shane MacGowan ("the creator"). Instead of reiterating these aspects, this book discusses, in the form of a sea-faring narrative, the record's articulation of what it is found to be magnificently trodden. Through epic imagery gracing the cover of the album and reverberating throughout the lyrics, Roesgen's book shows that what the Pogues created is far more than pub-room music created by drunken men wallowing in Irish nostalgia and pining for something subversive.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

128 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 19, 2008

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 1 out of 5]

Update :

Alas, it's a miss. Two thirds of it is some half-assed fantasy about the events leading up to the tragedy of the Medusa in 1816 with the Pogues all stirred into the story as their phizzogs are photoshopped onto Gericault's masterpiece on the cover - what a yawn. The third that's left is pretty interesting but a third of a very short book to begin with is nought but a tiny spoonful.

***

Blimey, who the hell is Jeffrey T Roesgen? For his shoulders bear the heavy weight of writing the definitive account of one of the great albums of all time. I really hope it's a good one. These 33 and a third books are really hit or miss. Some are neat little piles of entrails which should have been sent directly to a recycling bin, bypassing all the charity shops they will end up in; and others are living proof that it's possible to write about music like Blake wrote about the marriage of heaven and hell, like John wrote about The Word, and like Joyce wrote about Molly Bloom's arse. Anyway, I have ordered my copy and until then we can but spin side one track one...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rQyAv...

McCormack and Richard Tauber are singing by the bed
There's a glass of punch below your feet and an angel at your head
There's devils on each side of you with bottles in their hands
You need one more drop of poison and you'll dream of foreign lands
When you pissed yourself in Frankfurt and got syph down in Cologne
And you heard the rattling death trains as you lay there all alone
Frank Ryan bought you whiskey in a brothel in Madrid
And you decked some fucking blackshirt who was cursing all the Yids
At the sick bed of Cuchulainn we'll kneel and say a prayer
And the ghosts are rattling at the door and the devil's in the chair
And in the Euston Tavern you screamed it was your shout
But they wouldn't give you service so you kicked the windows out
They took you out into the street and kicked you in the brains
So you walked back in through a bolted door and did it all again
At the sick bed of Cuchulainn we'll kneel and say a prayer
And the ghosts are rattling at the door and the devil's in the chair
You remember that foul evening when you heard the banshees howl
There was lousy drunken bastards singing "Billy In The Bowl"
They took you up to midnight mass and left you in the lurch
So you dropped a button in the plate and spewed up in the church
Now you'll sing a song of liberty for blacks and paks and jocks
And they'll take you from this dump you're in and stick you in a box
Then they'll take you to Cloughprior and shove you in the ground
But you'll stick your head back out and shout "We'll have another round"
At the graveside of Cuchulainn we'll kneel around and pray
And God is in His heaven, and Billy's down by the bay

[matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

In its efforts to branch out beyond the routine idol worship of rock criticism, 33 1/3 continues to supply the field with its smartest and most creative expositions on popular music. Taking chances has its fair share of causalities however, one of its most recent being Tiny Mix Tapes writer Jeff Roesgen’s interpretation of The Pogues’ 1985 classic Rum, Sodomy and The Lash. A fictional narrative built around the album’s iconic cover, that of which features the band’s faces superimposed on Théodore Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa, Roesgen re-imagines The Pogues as 19th century musicians aboard the doomed vessel. It’s an inspired device that allows for a romantic embellishment of the band’s colorful roots and legacy. It also requires a lot of exposition Roesgen’s doesn’t allow himself in this already slim novella, opting to intersperse unnecessary biography that doesn’t benefit the story’s development nor provides any substantive insight into the creation of the album (especially since many of Rum’s songs were traditional). The clunky formatting ruins any building momentum and leaves the prose feeling wooden and rushed. In applying a mixed methods approach, Roesgen’s bold vision is hindered by his inability to fully commit to both the story that exists and the one he wishes to tell.

[Curmudgeon · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've read a number of books in the 33 1/3 series, partially because I'm interested in many of the bands and albums the series has covered, and partially because I have a dream 33 1/3 book of my own that will, with any luck, reach a point in development where I would feel comfortable pitching it in the publisher's periodic calls for submissions to the series. Each author takes a slightly different approach to organization and emphasis, but there seem to be two larger categories that most 33 1/3s can be split into--fiction and nonfiction. This book attempts to have it both ways, by including a small amount of album/band history, and a large amount of fiction about a real-life naval disaster that incorporates band members into the narrative, but winds up all the weaker for it. The fiction is agonizingly boring to read, and contrary to the author's assumptions, doesn't actually help narratively link the songs on the album, which are interspersed between chapters almost as afterthoughts. The book is one of the shorter entries in the 33 1/3 series, but I had to force myself to plough through it because I was so uninterested and uninvested in what was happening. Probably tied with the book on The Suburbs as the worst book in the series I've read so far.

[Mkb · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read the Bruce Springsteen book in this series and it was good. This book was a present from a friend who knew that this was one of my top three albums for my entire adolescence. Great present, but this book is meh! (Can something be “meh” emphatically?) The problem is that there is someone’s creative writing exercise going on here. Not a winner for me!

[Matt Rabski · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I enjoyed this really experimental book. The fiction and biographical sections are kind of mediocre but the whole ends up being greater than the sum of the parts and the source material is quite interesting.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

some interesting analysis and background but half the book is a fever dream of a band of marauding musicians in Napoleonic times, on the Medusa - that part does not work so well.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love the album, love the book. Roesgen's inventiveness brings out the story of the album in unexpected and poignant ways.

[Ted Gurley · Rating 2 out of 5]

This one was hard to get into. The story about the shipwreck felt contrived. I learned a bit more about the album but found this 33 1/3 played way too slow.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The 33 1/3 series has taken on the classic Pogues album Rum, Sodomy & The Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen. There have been many different approaches in this series-some that are traditional critical discussions others are more artistic. For example, Joe Pernice wrote a very entertaining novella about The Smith’s album Meat Is Murder. Colin Meloy, of the Decemberists, wrote a compelling personal memoir about The Replacements’ seminal album Let It Be. Roesgen tried to combine the two styles by writing a short story using historical references form sources of the painting used as the cover art about a disastrous sea voyage to Africa that ended in cannibalism and tragedy. I found myself skipping the narrative and reading the discussions of the songs from the album that were referenced by a number of sources and gave a lot of insight into the conception of the album. I think it would have been better if the author had focused on that and left the story of the ship, The Medusa out of it completely.

[Hans · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the fourth 33 1/3 book that I have read. I'm not sure that any other volume will fall perfectly into place like Kim Cooper's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, but each volume has still had it's moments.

Jeffrey Roesgen's exploration of Rum, Sodomy & the Lash is divided between a song-by-song exploration and a fictional narrative about the album's cover art, where our players board and survive the wreck of the Medusa. I enjoy a good sea tale now and then, so didn't mind the Medusa sections, though I was here for the other parts.

Ultimately, this slim volume is more of an appetizer than the full meal. It's enjoyable, but it seems to point to other sources for a more thorough understanding of the phenomenon of the Pogues.

[AJ Dehany · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not as bad as "Waiting for Kate Bush" by John Mendelssohn, which shares the same failed format; two thirds of the book made up of a nautical narrative set in 1816 featuring the Pogues and many of the characters populating the songs of the classic album, to learn more about which was the reason you bought this book, and the dearth of text about which is the reason why you regret doing so. Gradually more interminable stretches of this narrative are punctuated by a brief sections devoted to each of the songs that constitute the album; these sections are cribbed from a couple of source texts by MacGowan and Chevron, which you'd be much better off reading.

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book lost me at the beginning, and I had a difficult time finding a point of insertion, mentally. Alas, the story itself took hold, and I was gripped, oddly. Albeit, the fictional accounts garnered much more interest than the actual information on the Pogues, but I felt they both came together fittingly, wrapped up nicely at the end.

[Ian Mathers · Rating 3 out of 5]

I admit, I preferred the fictional narrative to the music criticism (I would absolutely read another, longer novel about anachronistic Pogues by Roesgen, for sure), but the latter isn't bad, just a little pro forma and the former takes up most of this slim volume anyway.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the idea of incorporating a fictional narrative into the behind-the-scenes information on a particularly great record.

But I ended up skipping over it to get the real story of making the record instead.

So maybe I didn't, not really...

[Mike · Rating 1 out of 5]

The opposite of what you’d want. Literally 2/3 is the imagined “story”’ weaving together the songs of the album, as developed by the author. Narcissistic and unnecessary. Not even framed well. The rest of the book is scattered.