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The 20,000 Watts R.S.L. is a collection of their best known songs from throughout their music career non-chronologically sequenced. While some have criticized this mode of sequencing I myself like the way the songs are arranged as the band has a continuity of sound that is not damaged by the essentially random ordering of songs from different periods. The album kicks off with the vaguely electronic sounding ‘What Goes On’ (the only song that doesn’t quite fit in with the other songs). Their well known hits like ‘Beds are Burning’, ‘US Forces’, ‘Blue Sky Mining’, ‘Dreamworld’ and others are included as well as lesser known highlights from their earlier albums such as ‘The Power and the Passion’ and ‘Back on the Borderline’. The songs deal with a wide range of issues ranging from a mining disaster in ‘Blue Sky Mining’ to aboriginal rights in ‘Beds are Burning’ and US military interference in foreign affairs in ‘US Forces’.

These are the songs that have stood the test of time. Unlike most other 80’s music their sound does not seem dated. The songs still retain a sense of immediacy and outrage and are as relevant today as when they were first sung. It is perhaps a sad commentary on the state of our world that this relevance will not be lost for many many years to come. Listening to the machinations of the US military as envisioned by Moginie/Garrett in ‘US Forces’ should send a chill down your spine as what they wrote almost a quarter of a century ago is still being repeated today. Or listen to ‘The Dead Heart’ above and see how the immense wrongs done by the white man to native people all over the world have never been properly held to account and the many promises made have never been kept. Yes, these are songs that can make one’s conscience cringe.

However, one great and unique thing about Oil is that you can enjoy their music without belief in the causes their songs espouse. Their songs can be heard without the left wing message, enjoying them for their pure rocking pleasure. You can even groove to some of their songs. Political and protest songs never rocked so hard and good! So even if you are deeply conservative and think left wing idealists are wimps give this album a listen. You might not be converted to the cause but you will definitely be singing along!

(Note: If you love this collection then seek out their ‘Diesel and Dust’ album, considered by many to be their masterpiece, it is also one of the finest rock albums ever made.)

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Transliteration:

i.
Humne dekhe hai laakh khwaab
aapki nigaaho me
magar dekha nahin kabhi unme
pyaar ki hasin muskurahat

ii.
Wo jo awaaz suni thi
humne kal shaam ko
aaj patha chala ki wo
thi aapki dillagi hamari badsurati par

Translation (literal):

i.
I’ve seen a million dreams
in your glances
but never have I seen in them
the beautiful smile of love

ii.
The sound that I heard
yesterday evening
I learnt today
was your amusement over my ugliness

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Years passed and our faces were scarred
by the scattering of our nation in the ill wind.
They came and put a fence around our homes.
Our silent eyes voiced the unspoken question.
“To protect your culture sirs”, they said.
So we took to the false comfort of their moonshine
and burnt our bodies in a drunken rage.
Our young were converted to the religion of the crucifix.

Now, I’m the last of the bards left,
singing this forlorn song of our frustrated history.
Times have changed, promises on paper
have turned to powder, and you are all that is left of a glorious tribe.
So will you remember? Will you remember?
Will you remember to sing this song when the wolves dance and the coyotes cry?”

(Note: Translated by me from a Lushootseed song with kind permission of the Lushootseed Archive of Oral History, Puget Sound, Washington.)

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The premise of the novel is interesting. The attempts of Yambo to get his memory back by surrounding himself with his childhood paraphernalia are intriguing. Up to this point you are eager to see how and if he will be able to regain his memory. But from that point on the novel degenerates into an infinitely long list of names of seemingly all the comics published in Italy (and in the Western world) during the pre-war and war eras. Mandrake, Phantom, Flash Gordon, Sandokan are some of the familiar names I recognized among a multitude of book titles, characters, villains and mysterious women.

The book has its moments, especially the instances where Yambo likens his memory loss to fog and cites various texts in which different writers talked about fog in different ways. But such moments are few and far between. The rest of the book is unfocused and rambles on from description of one obscure comic book/popular song to another interspersed with liberal sprinklings of how ordinary life was under fascist rule in Italy. The latter wherein Yambo lives through important childhood events again are the only parts of the novel that I enjoyed reading.

Perhaps my expectations had been very high as it was an ‘Eco novel’ or perhaps I could not adjust to the seemingly ‘mundane’ setting of the book compared to the fantastic and many layered plots of his earlier novels. Whatever the reason might be, at the end of the day, I just did not care for what happened to Yambo. And that, according to me, is the greatest failing of the novel. When the central character is cold and distant and you lose all concern for his life and actions you lose interest in the book as a whole. By concentrating more on the peripheral components of Yambo’s life Eco distances him from the reader and this results in Yambo coming across as wooden and aloof.

There is of course an abundant amount of intertexuality, which is a characteristic of all Eco novels. Eco quotes liberally from myriad sources and alludes to a thousand other. Trivia hunters can spend hours annotating this novel. However, in the end, it is perhaps an empty pursuit as the text itself offers no immediate pleasures.

According to some reports, apparently Umberto Eco has stated that this will be his last novel. Even though this book has been a disappointment, I hope he will change his mind and come up with a novel befitting his gift for telling fantastic tales. Tis no hyperbole, the world is a lesser place without the magic of Eco’s words to elevate it!

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