All of Us Flames, takes us on a tour of the warped American Dream and weaponizes the decaying landmarks of sex, cars, and God.

Ever since the likes of Alan Freed and Elvis Presley merged the white and the black musical cultures of 1950s America, we’ve had mainstream rock and roll. Which became, for better or worse, the most popular exhaust pipe to huff the American Dream. The American Dream has been there since the Europeans, hopped up on puritanical beliefs, arrived on the continent bringing smallpox and Elizabethan melodies — escape from somewhere (and later stolen from somewhere) etched into the American DNA from the start. This morphed into manifest destiny and the project that we now recognise as The United States of America —ratified by the famous words from The Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. Rock and roll rewrote that declaration, and with it, a new set of symbols were born, along with a naivety that this time it was different. This time, the American Dream would be for all.  

Two songs that contend for the first rock and roll song (before it was repackaged in that kid from Tupelo) are the infamous “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats —Ike Turner’s dropped amp creating the first distorted guitar on record — and Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s, “Strange Things Happen Every day”. Both have good arguments for the title. Take the two together and you merge two blood lines. The mommy and daddy of rock and roll —“Rocket 88’s” thinly disguised euphemism about a car as his owner’s dick, and Sister Rosetta’s rocking and rolling spiritual inquiring into the mysteries of life. Here on out, cars, sex, and God would scrawled on the bathroom wall of rock and roll.

I don’t need to tell you the rest of the story. These images are second nature to us now and has been beaten to a bloody pulp; and in whatever iteration of a post-modern world we live in, it’s hard to outrun some of the problematic people who have picked up the baton along the way. They cast a long shadow. As someone who has wholeheartedly drunk the rock and roll cool aid, even I see it crumbling under the weight of the constant nostalgia factory that lives to suck the soul out of anything good and sell it back to us as some vacuous hologram, now mostly redundant of feeling.  And yet that world and language of rock and roll became a sanctuary for many of us misfits and outsiders. Where can I go now if I can’t trust that anymore? Ezra Furman’s new album, All of Us Flames, takes us on a tour of that warped American Dream and weaponizes the decaying landmarks of sex, cars, and God —coming at us with the spiritual fervour of a preacher on Judgement Day. With this album, she has hammered a signpost in the ground that points “toward the real,” and I’m grateful as it has helped me to see clearly again.