When I was a kid, in those days before streaming services, my dad would insist on playing the oldies station every time we were in the car. At the time, it drove me nuts, but later I realized he had given me a great gift: an effortless and intimate knowledge of every foundational hit of the rock-and-roll canon.

So when I became a dad myself—belatedly, one might say, at age 45—I spent some time thinking about what kinds of music I could inflict on my daughter. They say the songs you introduce to a child as a baby stay with them for the rest of their lives, so it felt like an important choice.

Being half-crazy, I chose two prickly, angry rebel songs to include among the more customary bedtime tunes: Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and the Pogues’ “Navigator.” You already know all about the former, I assume, so I won’t say much about it except to mention that it still gives me a contrarian thrill to sing lines like “Come, mothers and fathers throughout the land / And don’t criticize what you can’t understand / Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command / Your old road is rapidly aging” to a child who will turn 25 the year I turn 70.

But you may not be familiar with the song “Navigator,” and since Shane MacGowan, the Pogues front man, has just died at age 65 after a life overflowing with terrible beauty, I think this might be my only chance to sneak a discussion of it into the public sphere.

MacGowan didn’t write the song—it’s the handiwork of Philip Gaston, who managed MacGowan’s first band, the Nips—but his vocals infuse it with a potent blend of elegiac sorrow, righteous rage, and triumphant vindication, with maybe a dash of how-did-we-miss-this envy. It’s a song about navigators, or “navvies” for short: itinerant laborers, many of them Irish, who did the brutal, bruising, sometimes fatal hands-on work of building Great Britain’s celebrated railroads in the 19th century.

Here’s the first verse:

The canals and the bridges, the embankments and cuts
They blasted and dug with their sweat and their guts
They never drank water but whisky by pints
And the shanty towns rang with their songs and their fights

You can see right away what a weird dad I am. Who sings this to a baby? But I had my reasons. At a time when way too many Irish Americans have signed up for the MAGA crusade against immigrants, and even Ireland itself is being convulsed by riots against transplants from elsewhere in the EU, I wanted my kid to know, deep in her bones, that our ancestors were the nameless people doing thankless, unforgiving work for an empire that was indifferent at best to their welfare, and that such people, whatever their background, wherever they may be, will always be our people.

And if those people don’t always observe the finer points of decorum, well, neither did we.

In the second verse, we learn more about the hell these workers went through:

They died in their hundreds with no sign to mark where
Save the brass in the pocket of the entrepreneur
By landslide and rock blast, they got buried so deep
That in death if not life they’ll have peace while they sleep

Now this is really getting grim. We’ve got people being killed—in explosions, for heaven’s sake. And for what? To enrich some distant “entrepreneurs”? Remind me: Why am I singing this to a child again?

The third verse, though, brings the point home:

Their mark on this land is still seen and still laid
The way for a commerce where vast fortunes were made
The supply of an empire where the sun never set
Which is now deep in darkness, but the railway’s there yet

I won’t belabor it. You see how this ends. The entrepreneur is long forgotten. The empire itself, built on the cheap transport of goods to far-flung places, has been overthrown by popular revolutions in every corner of the world. But the thing those nameless laborers built—the railroads themselves—endure. And so it’s up to us to remember who built them, and how, and at what cost, and to consider what else in this crazy world is being built today, by whom, under what ungodly circumstances, that nevertheless has true beauty and value and a real chance of surviving past our current circumstances. I think those of us with Irish backgrounds are well-positioned to remind people of stuff like this from time to time. The least we can do is remind ourselves.

Anyway, you might still want to call Child Protective Services on me, and if so, so be it. But let’s talk a bit more about the late, great Shane MacGowan.

In a way, it’s amazing he lived this long. It was 20 years ago when a documentary film crew captured his father saying of him, “He had a brilliant brain. Still has—a few million brain cells later.” I remembered the quote as “a few billion” and, frankly, by the end, that was probably a more accurate tally. But he also cleaned up in recent years, and it was illness that claimed his life, not any ongoing substance abuse.

What’s funny, given the way I’m banging on about his Irishness, is that MacGowan was born in England—in Kent, on Christmas Day 1957. But his parents were Irish and he leaned into his heritage as a musician, injecting trad music with a vitalizing dose of punk energy. At his worst, he was falling-down drunk, strung out on heroin (a drug Sinéad O’Connor apparently helped him kick), so incorrigible that the Pogues, which he had founded in 1982, kicked him out a decade later. (He rejoined the band in 2001 and performed with them until 2014.)

At his best, though…well, what can you say? What would Irish music today be without him? Tributes have poured in today, but pay special attention to John Francis Flynn, whose superb new album Look Over the Wall, See the Sky pushes the boundaries of what trad can be. On Instagram, Flynn called MacGowan “an absolute hero” and said, “My own music owes so much to him.”

As a songwriter, MacGowan made music that shot right up your veins to your heart. But before things ever tipped over into maudlin territory, he’d toss a drink in your face. The band’s name, after all, comes from the Irish phrase póg mo thóin, meaning “kiss my ass.”

There’s nothing more Pogues, more Shane MacGowan, than the opening lines of their improbably massive holiday hit “Fairytale of New York”: “It was Christmas Eve, babe, in the drunk tank.” MacGowan’s list of legendary compositions goes on: “A Rainy Night in Soho,” “Sally MacLennane,” “If I Should Fall From Grace With God.” And who can forget the detectives’ wakes in The Wire set to “The Body of an American”? Like so much of his music, the song—and each scene—is sad, and stirring, and kind of hilarious, and more than a little bit disturbing.

MacGowan was arguably just as accomplished as an interpreter. “Dirty Old Town” was written in 1949, but let’s face it: the Pogues have owned it ever since they recorded it in 1985. And once you’ve heard him sing “Whiskey in the Jar” with the Dubliners, it’s hard to go back to any other version.

Five years ago, Irish president Michael Higgins gave MacGowan a lifetime achievement award in Dublin. They both probably figured there was no time to waste, and in a way they were right.

Like the navvies he sang so movingly about, Shane MacGowan created a body of work that’s lasting and awe-inspiring and deeply valuable, at great personal cost. I hope that too is something my daughter will someday be glad to know.