Shane MacGowan and the Sadness of Diaspora

Last week brought the sad news of Shane MacGowan’s death. It has hit me particularly hard, something that has come as a bit of a surprise. I have always liked The Pogues, but they have never been in my pantheon of great bands. MacGowan’s hard living had become a legend, he was lucky to make it to 65. It’s not as if this came as a great shock.

After thinking about it, I realized I was reeling because it’s especially hard when people who are truly bursting with life leave us. Even their bright flame must eventually be snuffed because all of us mortals live under death’s dominion. We try to avoid that hard fact but a death like his makes it impossible to forget.

Accomplished songwriters like Bono, Tom Waits, and Bruce Springsteen have written appreciations of MacGowan’s abilities as a songsmith, high endorsements indeed. While I do love his songs, MacGowan also had the same talent possessed by traditional performers from Ella Fitzgerland to Frank Sinatra to Elvis to take another person’s song and make his own through a masterful interpretation.

For that reason, I have been listening to the Pogues’ cover of “Dirty Old Town” on repeat this week. “Dirty Old Town” was the signature song of folkie Ewan MacColl. He sings of his industrial hometown of Salford, spinning a tale of love, longing and buried anger. There are kisses, but also old canals, a gasworks, and factory wall. After the sentimental words about stolen kisses, the narrator bitterly says that he is going to “make me a good sharp axe” and chop down his hometown like “a dead old tree.” In the factory’s oppressive shadow, he longs to destroy the place that made him.

Anyone who is from an obscure, economically struggling small town and who has left it behind with mixed feelings will understand this song and its paradox of sentiment and hate. I heard it Sunday on the radio and felt tears welling up in my eyes. It was partly sadness over death, but mostly my complicated emotions about my own hometown. MacGowan’s bedraggled growl provides a fitting grit for a song about a grimy industrial town. The Pogues add some country flavor to their Irish sound, keying into that genre’s own long history of songs longing for home. You don’t have to cross a border to have a feeling of displacement. You can hear it in the voice of Bobby Bare’s “Detroit City” when he pleads “I wanna go home.” (This is another song that makes me misty-eyed, thinking about the world I left behind on the Great Plains.)

MacGowan was a product of diaspora, growing up in England with Irish immigrant parents who took him back to Ireland in the summers. His music is especially popular in the Irish diaspora, from London to New York to Boston. That experience is foregrounded in his songs. “Thousands Are Sailing,” for example, speaks to the joy of making connections with people in a foreign land who are displaced from the same homeland as you.

A lot of the sadness over his passing that I’ve heard online and in person is rooted in the longing baked into diasporas. Being in a diaspora means never being totally rooted where you are because an important part of your soul lies across the sea. The sadness of diaspora is a dull ache, not enough to overpower the soul but always reminding you of its presence. It will never go away, even if you are happy with your adopted homeland. (Ask me how I know.) So many people experience the diasporic ache but so few could articulate like Shane MacGowan. Pour one out for a poet.

[Note: this is expanded from a post on my personal blog.]