HystericallyBored
Anne, what on earth are you doing in this picture? Look at it!
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Yes, that is Canada’s own beloved, virginal, Anne Murray carousing with John Lennon, Harry Nilson, Alice Cooper(!), and Mickey Dolenz of the Monkeys.
Well, good heavens– Mickey Dolenz in the same frame as Alice Cooper? And John Lennon?!
Leroy got a better job, so we moved
Kevin lost a tooth, now he’s started school
I got a brand new 8-month old baby girl,
I sound like a housewife,
Hey ‘Chell, I think I’m a housewife
Michelle Shocked wrote Anchorage in 1988. It’s an upbeat country tune with a friendly old solo violin meandering around. The friendly backbeat is deceptive– it’s a sneaky little unsentimental but affecting update on friendship and the passage of time. Breaks your heart with those tiny unremarked details of everyday life– Leroy gets a better job, they move, Kevin loses a tooth. Then that remarkable line– “I think I am a housewife”. That’s what I mean by “sneaky”. There is a web of deep connections implied in that line, long discussions about roles in life, about marriage and love, and destiny, and the devotion of young friendships– all exploded with one little phrase: “I think I am a housewife”. It’s not angry or bitter, but maybe a little wistful. Is there a hint of regret? It doesn’t sound like it, in the cheery tone of Michelle Shock’s voice.
In a later verse, the narrator is impressed that “‘Chel” is living in New York City — “imagine that”. As if they both had those dreams but the narrator never once really imagined that either of them would fulfill those dreams. Imagine that. New York. Then:
Leroy says, send a picture
Leroy says ‘Hello’,
Leroy says, “keep on rockin’ girl…”
That’s a stroke of genius. Leroy is not the enemy, the male oppressor, or even a rival for her affections. Leroy is interested– he says “Hello”. He wants to see what Michelle, the skate-board punk-rocker, looks like now. Send a picture.
Other Great Michelle Shocked Songs:
Michelle Shocked: One of the Longest Strangest Trips You Will Read About
“In the role-playing activity Starving Artist, for example, groups of students are encouraged to come up with an idea for a musical act, write lyrics and design a CD cover only to be told by a volunteer teacher their work can be downloaded free. According to the lesson, the volunteer would then “ask them how they felt when they realized that their work was stolen and that they would not get anything for their efforts.” NY Times, Sep 25, 2003
What is hilarious about this little scenario, of course, is that it is a complete fantasy. It is a comic fantasy. The most hilarious part is where they convince the students that they would actually have received any of the money that should have been paid for the CDs.
A real world scenario would run thusly: the students come up with an idea for a musical act, write lyrics and music and create a CD cover, and get signed by a major record label.
While in the recording studio, the producer, assigned by the record label, makes some suggestions for the arrangement of their best songs. Then, of course, he convinces them to give him a co-writing credit.
Their CD sells very well because it is played on the radio– for free– and they perform on television promoting the CD– for free. They have a big advance from the record company and sign a complicated contract they don’t understand. They spend all their money in one year.
The next year, their accountants –played by a volunteer teacher, if you will– tell them they are broke.
They find out that the record company has been deducting all the expenses of recording, packaging, shipping, and promoting their CD against all their royalties. They find out that a whopping bill came from an image consultant hired by the record company on their behalf and at their expense. Then they find out that the image consultant actually works for the record company for a pittance. They find out that the image consultant, sound engineer, label designer, photographer, and graphic artist all did the same work for several other artists signed to the same record label but who didn’t sell very many CDs at all.
They find out that they owe the record company millions of dollars. They find out that the producer has collected a huge chunk of their song-writing royalties.
They write and compose a follow-up CD. This time, the producer brings in a “rhythm consultant” who also takes a co-writing credit. A record company executive doesn’t like it and demands changes. He wants it to be more pop, less art. The students don’t like the changes at all and demand artistic freedom. The record company tells them that they must change their music or they will not be allowed to release the record. Nor will they be released from their contract and allowed to switch labels to work with a producer who understands what they are trying to do.
Their CD is released on Spotify. It is downloaded 100,000 times. They receive a payment from Spotify of $12.53.
They find out that their work was stolen and they would not get anything for their efforts.
Now they know what it feels like to have their hard work stolen from them.
You may now resume downloading.
In spite of the fact that many American auditoriums in the 19th Century were based on European designs and traditions, there was never any conscious attempt to develop a “science” of building acoustics until 1898 when Wallace Sabine was commissioned by Financier Henry Higgenson of Boston to design a new symphony hall.
Until Mr. Sabine made a conscious effort to discover the objective properties of “good acoustics”, most American builders either modeled their designs on successful European buildings, or went with their instincts.
Carnegie Hall in New York was designed without reference to any acoustical science whatsoever. Apparently, it is quite good.
Many buildings are designed with reference to good acoustic principles. Then the buildings’ owners make a last minute change– add a balcony, or increase the width or something– and don’t go back to the architect for a re-reckoning of the acoustics. The results: disaster. The main auditorium at Redeemer College in Hamilton, for example, looks fabulous, but the sound is horrible. Choirs howl, instruments screech. (You don’t believe me? In all fairness, I must say that many people think the hall sounds just fine. I confirmed my impression with a music professor who led the choir that performed most often in that hall. I think we’re right.)
Sabine came up with a formula: the reverberation time multiplied by the quantity of absorbent material equals a constant that is proportional to the room’s volume.
Sabine then measured the reverberation time of some classic European halls, including Leipzig’s Gwandhaus and the Music Hall in Boston, and applied it to the design of the Symphony Hall. Symphony Hall is still around today and it is reputed to still have excellent acoustics.
Avery Fisher Hall (Lincoln Centre) had poor acoustics. The acoustical engineers tried and failed. They spent millions trying to fix it.
By the 1930’s, with the development of electronic amplification systems, the marriage of acoustics and structure began to fall apart. Today, whether you are watching a movie in a theatre or a live production at the Pantages Theatre, you will not hear the sound of the building. Everything you hear will be electronically processed and manipulated. That’s why singers can now project their affections for each other with breathless intimacy. That’s why people who can’t project at all– but can hold pitch– can now star in a musical production.
That’s probably a good thing. Why should only big people with voluminous chests get to sing? And I like the breathy, intimate sound of the quiet human voice. But don’t go away thinking that the building has “great acoustics”. The acoustics of the building are now largely irrelevant, as long as it doesn’t have vast hard surfaces to create feedback. What you are hearing is the result of electronic engineering.
Unfortunately, some shows now use taped or synthetic music to accompany the singers. Sometimes they use part of a real orchestra and a keyboard with synthesizer or digital recordings. People don’t like it a lot, so there is a bit of flimflam there– the producers want to keep their costs down by employing as few actual musicians as possible, but audiences want to feel that they had an “authentic” theatrical experience for their $75 a seat, so they put up a show of an orchestra.
In 1906, Julia Barnett Rice, who was married to the publisher of Forum Magazine, organized “The Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise”. New York had a “Noise Abatement Commission” in 1929. See? There was a time when people cared about ambient sound. I don’t think we care today. Maybe we’ve just given up on trying to control it. Until you’ve camped in the wilderness, you probably have no idea of how much constant, ambient sound you are inundated with. And I doubt that anybody fully understands how much stress this creates in the human nervous system.
One of these days, I believe we will find out that regular periods of silence are more effective than Prozac.
Did you know that “jazz” comes from the word “jass”, which was slang for “jasmine”, the smell of the perfume worn by prostitutes in the Storyville District in New Orleans? I didn’t know that.
There are two ways to cheat consumers. One is to simply lie to them. This method is fraught with peril, however. After all, there are still a few laws around that protect consumers from something called “fraud”, which is a fancy word for “lies”. And nobody likes to be called a liar.
And nobody needs to lie. The second method is safer, and just as effective.
Make it so difficult and annoying to exercise your rights as a consumer (or patient, or citizen) that most people will just give up and go away.
Complexity is your friend. Complexity is your ally. Complexity is a blunt force instrument of such potency that entire industries and professions have sprung up from it’s forehead like the children of Zeus: lawyers.
We see it in everything from operating manuals to software to insurance policies to health care agreements to employment contracts to amusement park disclaimers. We see it in the forms you fill out to claim the “benefits” you are entitled to under insurance policies or government funded entitlements. You even see it on every piece of software you run on your computer– the EULA (End User Legal Agreement) which means nothing to almost every person who clicks on “yes, I agree”. They don’t know what they are agreeing to. It doesn’t matter that they don’t know what they are agreeing to. The point is that there is a lot verbiage in there can be roughly translated as “you have no rights whatsoever”.
It’s a good turf on which to choose your battle. You will always have allies among those who believe the common folk should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, take a course or two in American law, or lay out $15,000 for lawyers. And you have many other allies among similarly interested corporations and government functionaries who know very well that they might be in the wrong but count on the numbing effect to make you go away.
Some companies even ask you to sign employment agreements that are absolutely illegal because they abridge rights that are guaranteed to every employee under state or provincial law. For example, the organization I work for, Christian Horizons, asks employees to agree that any “wrongful dismissal” issues will be settled by an arbitrator appointed by— guess who?– Christian Horizons. In reality, if you were “wrongfully” dismissed, you retain every right to bring your case to the Labour Relations Board of Ontario, no matter what you signed. I’m not worried because I happen to work for a good, ethical organization, but I still disagree with that provision of the employment agreement.
In this province, you cannot sign an agreement giving your employer a right to cheat you.
Why is there no Greenpeace or World Wildlife Federation or Amnesty International for understandability? We are trying to preserve the environment, unusual species, and the ozone. Why doesn’t someone form an organization to protect language from similar exploitation and abuse?
Complexity is more than a strategy to diminish our rights. It is an assault. To be human is to use language. The highest achievements of humanity, of nation, of history, of culture, is expressed in language. The most intimate human feelings, the great principles of morality and ethics, and even our spiritual aspirations are expressed in language. To pervert, twist, and abuse language, is to abuse humanity.
The strategy of these corporate lawyer hucksters is not really to express complex legal and contractual details. The real purpose is to express nothing, and thus, everything. You might have a right, you might not. The agreement might stand up in court, but more likely, it won’t.
Judges are not entirely stupid. Sometimes they say what everyone thinks: nobody reads those things and nobody understands them. Sometimes, however, they will say, “You should have read the agreement carefully.”
Yes, yes: here on page 59, paragraph 113c, section iii, it says that you accept liability for all damage caused by misuse intentional or not, or actions construed as misuse for the purposes of this agreement as specified in section ii, paragraph 78, notwithstanding any non-specified damages resulting from uses construed to be within specified actionable exceptions deemed applicable”.
But most people don’t know that judges will sometimes rule against these agreements. They assume that if they sign some kind of complex agreement, they are bound to observe the terms. Sometimes they are. It doesn’t matter. The lawyers enter the picture, like a long row of fat, disease-ridden can-can dancers, and the performance begins.
You don’t have to get to court, or to any kind of judgment or agreement. You just have to realize that it will cost you enormous sums of money to even make a contest of it.
The solution is quite simple. There should be a law that specifies that all contractual agreements, warranties, and conditions must be written in plain and understandable English. A panel of grade six teachers should be set up to review any questionable documents. This panel should be empowered to declare null and void any agreement that is not understandable by a reasonable person with a reasonable degree of effort. A consideration will be the fact that the average person is inundated with dozens or hundreds of these agreements every year, and can’t possibly spend every waking hour reviewing them all to see if he or she is in full compliance.
The RIAA recently sued four students for facilitating the sharing of pirated music files on their university networks. However, as usual, it is reported that they plan to settle out of court. So they are using the potential complexity and inconvenience of court action to club the students into submission, without actually having to prove their case in court.
Wise decision on their part: they might not win. I have yet to read or hear of a single court case like this in which the RIAA actually won a judicial decision saying that copying of music for personal use is illegal.
I thought, at first, that this would be one– but of course! The inevitable out-of-court settlement!
Here it is– another great solution to the movie and music piracy problem!
It’s so mind-numbingly simple, why didn’t George W. Bush think of it?
The music industry and film industry should get together and create new recording medium. It wouldn’t be very hard at all– the technology is there. There are dozens of modifications they can make to existing technologies in order to create a new medium that belongs only to them. A special type of DVD with special coding at the start that prevents it from being played in any existing DVD player. You heard me right– but hang on. I’m not crazy. They can call it the “Super Media Content Diskie” or “SMCD”.
The music and film industries will own this standard and will not license it to anybody but themselves. They will contract out with factories to produce a new SMCD Player. The codes required for playing a SMCD will be hard- coded into a special chip, and thus almost impossible to copy or hack.
Then the music and film industries will start releasing all of their “content” only on these special disks. You won’t be able to buy a SMCD version of “Titanic” or “A Few Good Men” or a CD version of Bruce Springsteen or Britney Spears. You will only be able to buy it on SMCD, for which you will have to buy or lease the SMCD player.
And thus piracy will end. No digital copying will be possible. No digital quality copies of songs or movies on the internet, though, of course, some people might be able to make passable copies by recording, with microphones or video cameras, right off the SMCD player screen. (The music and film industries have made it plain that while they’ve always been concerned about copying in general, from any source, it is really the digital copying that gets their goats.)
Problem solved.
It will never happen.
It will never happen because the music and film industries know damn well that they don’t really want a world in which they have absolute ownership and control over their product because in a world like that they won’t make any money.
The reason is very simple and obvious. The consumer would never accept such a system. And some smart musicians and independent movie makers would immediately realize this and start to offer their products on popular media like DVDs and CD’s. And the music and film industries would lose their power and control over the entertainment market and quickly capitulate and that would be end of that.
No, wait— there’s a better solution! The music and film industries can try to seize control of the existing technologies– VCRs, computers, CD recorders– and try to shove their copy-protection schemes down our throats.
And that is what is happening. No one is required to issue movies or music on DVDs or CDs. They do it because they know damned well that the public adopted those media because they were widely accepted standards. They were widely accepted standards because they were broadly licensed to many manufacturers and PC makers. They were broadly licensed because they were sold to us as media, not content. The music and film industries benefit enormously from those widely accepted standards. And that is why, if they don’t like the consequences of a broad, open standard, they should get the hell off it and start producing their own proprietary media that nobody can copy. If they don’t like the SMCD idea, they can go back to vinyl. If they don’t like the internet, they go back to AM radio.
It would be the best thing that could ever happen to the entertainment industry. You would get loads of Third World bands and movie-makers who would be more than happy to give up some protections of their materials in exchange for wide distribution and exposure. They would issue their stuff on popular media formats and would soon blow Hollywood out of the mass market. You would see Demi Moore and Bruce Willis traveling to Bombay to make a new action flick, in English.
This is why Apple is tiny compared to Microsoft. This is why Betamax never caught on. This is why the Laser Disk never made it. This is why Advantix film by Kodak will never succeed. This is why rock’n’roll succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations (the AM battery-powered radio).
The truth is that music and film industries don’t really compete with each other anymore, and don’t want to have to compete with anyone else. They price their products in lock-step with each other, and hate having to actually produce and develop new talent while they can still pimp off their old established stars.
And when their control starts to diminish, because of computers and the internet, instead of becoming leaner or meaner or more competitive– which requires work and talent– they start stuffing your congressman’s pockets full of cash and get the DMCA passed. Now they want congress to require all electronic recording devices to give control over what and when something can be copied to these pimps at the RIAA and MPAA (Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Pictures Association of America).
This is an outrage. It’s one of the five or six biggest scandals of the last twenty years. The Music Industry has every right to negotiate contracts with radio stations and hardware makers about how and when they can put their content on their media. Why the hell should the government step in and make laws to govern– and penalize offenders– an arrangement that should absolutely be a contractual agreement between the record companies and radio stations?
Their control of the world-wide entertainment industry is threatened by any technology that gives more power and control and choice to the consumer. Most consumers wouldn’t give a damn about Britney Spears if it weren’t for the monopolistic control the music industry has over radio, print, and television, but most consumers don’t know that.
They would find out in a hurry if something prompted them to start looking elsewhere.
Yes, I know it’s a symbiotic relationship. New technologies are often created by content companies (or at least companies that have a content division, like Sony and Phillips) at least partly for the purpose of creating new markets for their products. Sort of what I described here as “SMCD”. But Phillips also licensed their technology to many companies to make recorders, players, and car decks. So it benefitted by the very open standard that most content providers now want to kill.
It doesn’t always work that way– few people buy a minidisc to listen to pre-recorded minidiscs– but Phillips certainly intended the cassette as a mass market music media. But the relationship is ambiguous. For example, the recording industry needs radio and television media exposure in order to sell their products. Yet they now want to charge Internet Radio broadcasters for playing their music! Here we have the RIAA acting like a bullying monopoly. Why, for heaven’s sake, won’t some competing independent producers come along and offer their goods for free play on the internet? They would, but the RIAA of America is doing everything it can to not let them. They want their policy wishes to be the law, instead of a contract between themselves and the radio stations, which is what it should be. Because if it was only a contractual arrangement, then competing music producers could offer a better deal!
Yeah, I know. Kind of blunt instrument, that title. Sometimes, though, you want to call a spade a spade.
The music industry, fresh from their legal victory over Napster (although, true to copyright tradition, they settled out of court rather than wait for an actual finding), have decided to offer their own alternative to peer-to-peer file-sharing programs..
Logically, you would think that they would put all of their music on one site and allow people to sign up, and pay, so they could download the music they wanted when they wanted. You would think that they would be sensitive to the persistent charges that they rip off artists by making sure that everyone knew that they were paying the artists a fair share of these fees. See? It’s not about us. It’s about making sure the artist gets paid…..
You would think that. Well, maybe you wouldn’t.
The Dixie Chicks and many other performers are hopping mad. Seems that, firstly, the music industry isn’t asking permission of the artists to put their music up on the web site. They are acting as if that permission is already included in all the other egregious rights that they have extorted out of their artists. We’ll see you in court. (They now specifically include these rights in new contracts young, naïve artists are forced to sign if want industry support. If they had to add this clause, they obviously didn’t really think it was implied in their existing contracts, did they?).
Secondly, it turns out that the artists will be getting a mere fraction of a cent for every download. A big fat nothing. The music industry claims that it is just SO EXPENSIVE to distribute music over the internet. By golly, it’s so expensive that about 20 million people have been doing it for free for five years.
The music industry is also, apparently, including charges for CD covers, promotional copies, and distribution in their calculations. Of course, with downloading, there are no physical CDs, or promotional copies, or art work, or anything.
This is going to kill Morpheus? Ha ha ha.
The line-ups:
Pressplay: Universal and Sony
MusicNet: BMG, EMI, and AOL Time Warner with Real Network.
I am not sure, at the moment, if these companies will even be giving each other access to each other’s catalogues. If they don’t, they might as well fold their tents up right now. People are not going to be lining up to pay $20 a month to two or three or more different on-line services just so they can hear the music they want to hear.
The music industry is stupid. We know that. It took them years and years to respond to Napster. It will take bankruptcies and court rulings to finish the job.
I’m talking about songs that might or might not be sound, otherwise, but which contain at least one clunker, one dud, that mars an otherwise charming experience.
I always liked Billy Joel’s “Piano Man”, for example, but one line always grated on my nerves. “They sit at the bar and put bread in my jar and say, ‘man, what are you doing here?'”. What does he mean? He has just described the brief, pathetic lives of several bar patrons, all of whom seem to be deluding themselves. But even they know that that the narrator, Billy Joel himself, presumably, doesn’t belong in this seedy little joint. It’s an embarrassing line. I hope Joel deletes it when he releases the tenth edition of his greatest bestest collected gold hits, director’s cut.
I also liked “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her” by Mary Chapin Carpenter. It’s about a woman who lives the traditional life, marrying, having kids, keeping house, until she is 37. Then she decides to leave her husband. The song doesn’t tell you what the husband did wrong. It just keep repeating the chorus, “he thinks he’ll keep her”. That obviously comes from a phrase some men might use to describe a fish they did not throw back because it was too skinny or young or tasteless. It’s a patronizing phrase of course. He deserves her contempt. But she’s a strong, independent woman: she leaves him.
But wait a minute– she doesn’t leave him. I had always misunderstood the last line. She doesn’t pack her suitcases and wait at the door! She packs his suitcases.
In other words, he’s worked for 17 years paying the mortgage and all the bills just so she can scam him out of the house, and probably the car, and probably some nice juicy support payments too. Then she joins the typing pool at minimum wage, proud, one supposes, of the fact that she is no longer a “kept” woman.
Does Carpenter even realize how utterly hypocritical this line is? She packs his bags. I’m keeping the community property. Go sleep in a hotel. But don’t forget to pay the mortgage.
Well, let’s look a little further: she lists a multitude of tasks that she, as a woman, does for the family, implying, of course, that he doesn’t do anything. Sure, if pressed, Mary Chapin Carpenter will probably admit that he does more than just pay the bills. We could add a verse: he fixes the car, he fixes the stove; he deals with spiders; he investigates strange noises at night; he deals with aggressive sales people; he understands taxes; he assembles bookshelves; he takes the kids fishing, whatever.
I find this little twist annoying. If she has decided that after only seventeen years of patronizing attitudes, she is going to get out from under his paternalistic domination and strike out on her own, she should be the one to pack the bags. Not feminism’s finest moment. Here’s a whole gang of empowered women singing an anthem to the idea of taking a man for everything he’s worth. Oh wait– there’s at least four men in the band, let alone behind the mixer console. Oh shit– and it was “co-written” by a man, Don Schlitz. Just like “I am Woman” and “You Don’t Own Me”, the other great feminist anthems.
Okay. That’s just plain cheesie, girls. Write your own damn songs of liberation from dependence on men. That said– it’s a great song, as is “Passionate Kisses”. written by Lucinda Williams.
Both these cuts are actual live recordings. Here is the original.
My favorite lines:
pens that won’t run out of ink /and cool quiet time to think.
A heart-breaking song by Lucinda Williams. This is a real break-up song written by a woman.
In “Things Have Changed”, Bob Dylan tells you about a woman sitting on his lap who is drinking champagne. She is obviously part of the degraded landscape he find so appalling. She has white skin and “assassin’s eyes”.
My question is, then why is he letting her sit on his lap? Maybe he wants it both ways. Maybe he finds her sexually enticing, but still reserves to right to condemn her moral lassitude. Take a hike, Bob.
Paul Simon’s “Feelin’ Groovy” is one long bad lyric. It is quite possibly the worst lyric ever written by a self-respected singer-songwriter. And it contains the single worst, lamest line ever written: “Life, I love you; all is groovy”.
“all is groovy”
Well, I guess he couldn’t fit “everything is groovy” into that phrase.
Bob Dylan could have. He would have created something interesting out of it too. “Everything is twisted cat slicked back silver sack groovy– everything…”
You wouldn’t want to say, “I am groovy”, would you? And you’ve already said, “Life, I love you”, which makes me picture a fat drooling golden-haired choir-boy running from tree to tree embracing everything and waving his sparkly wand. All is groovy. Not, “it” is groovy, or “life is groovy”, but “all” is groovy.
And as if it isn’t enough to have written and copyrighted the worst line of all time, Simon and Garfunkel give a saccharine little vocal twist to the words, the literary equivalent of dumping four heaps of sugar into your lukewarm tea.
Finally, there is Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love is”.
This mountain I must climb
Feels like the world upon my shoulders.
What we have here is a simile used to give us a metaphorical impression of a metaphor. The rest of the lyric is as lame as you might imagine.
Please note the fake video– this is not the recording of the singers that you see. They are obviously posed and coached to look passionate and inspired but the recording is definitely a studio job dubbed for this stinking video.
Bob Dylan (“Is Your Love in Vain”):
Can you cook and sew/Make flowers grow
Really Bob? Yes, even Bob has a few duds. Very few.
I just saw some kind of tribute to Merle Haggard. Hey, let me get on the bandwagon.
Merle Haggard spent some time in prison before he was 20, for petty theft, passing bad checks, and so on. Haggard married Fiona something, some time in the late fifties. I think she was about 15 at the time. He wasn’t very nice to Fiona.
Merle had an affair with Buck Owen’s wife. Just one more little hypocrisy in the heartland of America: country singers that claim to represent “traditional values” like manliness, family, patriotism, marital fidelity, but actually behave pretty well as badly as anyone else.
Merle Haggard wrote and sang “Okie From Muskogee”, which, besides providing comfort and joy to rednecks like George Wallace, helped him wrangle a pardon from California Governor Ronald Reagan– yes, he of the “tough on crime” reputation. And an invitation to play at Pat’s birthday at the White House.
Did Haggard, espousing bedrock American values, serve in the military?
Have you heard “Okie From Muskogee”? It has lines like:
We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street…
We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy…
… and I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee
No, of course he never served in the military. He’s a Republican. We send other people to die for the cause and then lead the parades, all misty-eyed and such. It’s a bit weird how predictable it all is — Republicans and conservatives extolling the enduring virtues of patriotism and courage and duty and you can’t find a damn one of them that actually served. All right– maybe one. John McCain. [added 2011-03-05]
Merle split from Bonnie Owens in 1975. He had a string of affairs. He did drugs and drank to excess. He had an affair with Liona Williams– a backup singer. But he finally found understanding and encouragement in Theresa Lane, a woman 25 years younger than him.
He neglected his own children, except maybe the ones by Theresa Lane. Now that he’s a little older and less driven, I guess he finally has a little time to spend with the kids.
In the meantime, he squandered and gambled away all of his money and went bankrupt.
What’s really great is seeing Merle Haggard, long hair and beard, standing in front of a group of well-known country musicians, long hair and beards, accepting induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, long hair and beards. Does he still sing “and we don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy…”? Does he say, “nothing personal” when he goes into “Okie”? Does he even sing it anymore? Yes, he does, looking a little sheepish as he warbles those bedrock American values. It’s all about family and true love and being a man and tradition and patriotism. For everyone else, I guess.
Clint Black was among those paying tribute. Rightly so. He has that same kind of non-descript blandness to his voice that is so characteristic of Haggard’s music. There’s really not much to it. Simple, as if simplicity without charm was a virtue.
He’s like someone down the street, that you know, and with whom, Lord knows, you might one day have an affair.
If not Haggard…
Haggard has something of a reputation for a song-writer. Now, I know there are some good country song-writers out there, but the writer of:
They both robbed and killed until both of them died
So goes the Legend of Bonnie and Clyde.
was not a great songwriter.
Consider instead John Prine. Like Haggard, he’s old and weathered-looking. Unlike Haggard, he’s written about fifteen really great songs. John Prine had more great songs in his little finger than Merle Haggard had in his entire body.
So it’s now Lord Black.
I personally find it completely offensive that there still exists, within the British Empire, an institution whose very foundation rests upon assumptions about class and lineage that should be utterly repellent to any democrat. The House of Lords is a bastion of exclusive White Rich Male Privilege (no matter how many token women and blacks are added) and British Upper Class Twittledom. And now, Mr. Twittledom himself, Conrad Black, who started a newspaper (and did a good job of it) just so he could show bad pictures of Jean Chretien and declare the Alliance winners before the election was held, is a Brit and a Lord and gets to wear hysterically funny costumes that remind me of the arch stereo-type of British Lords as, well, er, gay. Shall we say, fops. Precious. Delicate and righteous.
It’s Barbara Amiel who really annoys me, though. She once wrote an interesting article on Leonard Cohen, and I believe admitted that she agreed to strip for him in exchange for the interview. Correct me if my memory fails me, Barbara. She also wrote an article for Chatelaine once– my memory is clearer about this– in which she provided a vigorous defense of the art of gold-digging, which is, of course, the art of offering sex in exchange for position, power, and vast amounts of capital. Other than the prostitution angle, I suppose, not much to quibble with there, but it should suggest to us that perhaps Lord Black wasn’t himself so passionate about the cause of privilege as his wife, who now gets to be known as Lady Golddigger. Perhaps Mr. Cohen, recently descended from Mount Baldy (I kid you not) would consent to strip for the aristocracy.
The only thing that disturbs me is that she was a fan of Leonard Cohen. She should have been a fan of Frank Sinatra instead. Maybe she was. That would have been perfect. Frank was exactly the type of man who could see the value in an expensive Lordship. Perhaps she admired both. That’s possible nowadays. There was a time when any person acquainted with the work of Leonard Cohen could be counted on to be a dissident in some way, and remarkable for independence of thought, and, perhaps, a passionate spirit. Nowadays, it is obligatory to honor Mr. Cohen, which is precisely what is beginning to make Mr. Cohen boring. I say it makes Mr. Cohen boring not because his earlier work has become boring, but because Mr. Cohen has begun to believe in it himself.
Which leads me to the question of how one becomes a Lord. Well, it’s quite simple, really. If you have any doubts about my insinuations above just ask yourself a really easy question: is there any way that you or anyone you know could become a Lord? Yes, there is, of course. You simply have to have enough money.