The Private Canon: The Heart Burst of 'Forty Years'

Joe Jackson never rose as high in my pantheon as his contemporary Elvis Costello did, but he loomed plenty large in my formative years, from the prickly pop of "Is She Really Going Out With Him" to the champagne spritz of "Stepping Out," from the beguiling Big Band role-play of Jumpin' Jive record to the tetchy theatrics of Mike's Murder.

The album of his that really landed for me back in the day, though, was Big World, a concept album of sorts on cosmopolitan themes, recorded entirely live at the Roundabout Theatre (in its old Union Square location), sans audience noise or applause, and released as a double album with three sides (the fourth side had no grooves, just a note stating, "There is no music on this side"). It all holds up quite well as a whole, even though no singles emerged.

The track I keep coming back to is the Side 2 closer, "Forty Years," a sweet-and-sour waltz skating across the cracking ice of the late Cold War. Adorned with prim, music-box piano trills in an entrancing I - bVI progression (E and C), the song depicts former WWII Allies who once "cried and cheered" together but now distrust and seethe at each other, because, after all, that "was forty years ago." The song's opening—about gathering in Berlin to "wait for the end"—feels prescient for a song released in 1986, three years before the Wall's fall, though Jackson sounds more queasy than celebratory about that prospect: Where once "rivers ran red, now it's the sky that turns black." He goes on to cite strained transatlantic diplomacy:

Motions are passed in Brussels but no one agrees
And no one walks tall but no one gets down on their knees 

His last verse, a seeming diss of the anti-American snobbery of his British compatriots, has a nice extra twist of the knife: He ramps up his own signature vocal scowl as he decries his countrymen's "stiff upper lips, curled into permanent sneers."

If the song were all snark and bite, it wouldn't interest me much. As always, the music is telling the real story. The E - C alternation I noted above gives the verses a seesawing angularity, pivoting off a dissonant appoggiatura, the F sharp over the C:

And in the chorus, the upward swell of chords under the title phrase conveys the song's overriding emotion: a heart bursting open at the dissolution of this embrace in the sands of time. Jackson drops his sneer for full-throated sincerity here, in something that sounds like the memory of fireworks. And it's as elemental as A, B, C:

I don't know about you, but I find it hard not to feel this song ever more acutely as the years go on, not least as alliances among those same Allies have frayed to tatters in the intervening three decades, and "Forty Years" edges that much closer to its title age. You wouldn't think a heart could burst anymore; but, to revise the old saw about those who don't learn history being condemned to repeat it, perhaps songs about history, though literally repeated or replayed, are destined to take on new—and if they're great, as this one is—deeper meanings.