Working for the Pharaoh

Recent events in the Middle East had me reaching for Richard Thompson's excellent Amnesia album this morning, specifically to enjoy the last track, Pharaoh, a song I've always admired. Oddly Patrick Humphries, the writer of a fine book on the great singer--songwriter entitled Strange Affair, doesn't have particularly positive things to say about the song, regarding its lyric as somewhat muddled, I think. I find this odd as the lyric strikes me as possessing great clarity and cohesion, being entirely successful in its overall effect.

I wonder if what is getting in the way of Mr Humphries' understanding of the lyric is a lack of grasp of the Islamic frame of ideas here. Although Pharaoh features on an album that comes after the more overtly Islamic-themed songs following Thompson's conversion, like so much of his material it benefits from some insight into the belief system that the writer still adheres to. A grasp of that system can help us appreciate the metaphorical underpinnings of the song. (By the way, lyric apart, the music is gorgeous, featuring a languorous melody that seems to hang somewhere between English folk and a prayer-like chant, and an arrangement subtly evoking some lazy desert ensemble whilst remaining solidly English in its instrumentation.)

The Pharaoh here is a dreadful tyrant, yes, but, and this is the tricky bit, he's ultimately trivial - which makes him all the more dangerous. This is similar to the idea that lies behind the slogan that emerged after the revolution in Iran characterising America as the Great Satan. In a sense this might have been translated as the Great Trivialiser, Satan, or Iblis, being seen as ultimately a trivial, pathetic figure who just doesn't get it. (Think Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost in the later books.) So the Pharaoh in our song is everywhere and we are all Living in Egypt land. We are all aware of the dogs of money, of course, and the song alerts us to their magicians, seen every night on our tv and computer screens, telling us what's true and real. Their images make them men of shadow - but there's a grim possibility that that's what we too have become.

It's easy to think of, indeed to see, the idols that rise into the sky and the pyramids that soar. Those lying sphinxes are more problematic, and by their very nature more enigmatic. To some degree I think its our choice for whom we shoulder the wheel. As another great singer-songwriter pointed out, working in a rather different religious tradition, you've gotta serve somebody.

I'm thinking now of those who've had no choice for the last thirty years of those they've had to serve politically and the powerful sense of exhilaration many of them must now feel and many of us feel for them. I hope they don't simply find themselves blindly kneeling to worship a new pharaoh, of whatever ilk that may be.