Tony Frissore and AXIOM tackle the very uncomfortable issues of military service, personal identity and institutional loyalty in “Stolen Valor’ (a collaboration which looks at the emotional toll of watching your most deeply held beliefs come into conflict with the reality of the present). It’s a dark trip-hop piece, really looking at the sense of personal loss that goes beyond the service itself. It doesn’t so much use the title in the literal sense as it does look at the feeling of having lost the meaning of the service you’ve performed.
AXIOM’s spoken word performance forms the narrative bedrock of the piece, a raw and personal expression of hurt, anger, shame and disappointment. It’s a piece which examines the inherent difficulty of the relationship between the past and the present, a piece which brings the tensions of service to the fore. It’s a piece which allows you to experience the contradictions of service through the prism of the individual’s own memories of purpose, of friendship, of identity, alongside the feelings of disillusionment. It’s a very human piece, without any pretence of being a generic representation of the veteran experience. The perspective is entirely personal and it’s that which allows you to engage with the subject matter.
Frissore’s production provides a very appropriate backdrop with a slow funky groove, atmospheric synths and distant sirens. It’s a very cinematic soundscape which works perfectly with the gravitas of AXIOM’s story. The downtempo nature of it allows the spoken word to sit and breathe and the darker textures really underpin the sense of unease around the subject of the song. It doesn’t at all go for a easy answer, it just leaves you with the sense that you can’t quite work out what’s going on.
“Stolen Valor” is in essence a piece about the fraught nature of the relationship between personal conviction and institutional change. Its power is in the fact that you can love something immensely, have a great deal of respect for it and still be left with anger, sadness and disillusionment when the circumstances around it change. Neither the piece nor the production is in any way trying to resolve those tensions. It’s simply there to provoke thought. It’s a piece that is very much about reflection rather than agreement. It’s a piece that is quite simply a very honest account of disillusionment and the difficulty of holding on to the meaning of things you once believed in. It’s a piece that works through the medium of introspective spoken word and cinematic trip-hop.
