In a time of chimpanzees, I was a penguin.
The religious right is motivated by the suspicion that someone, somewhere,
is having fun -- and that this must be stopped.
The sad thing about recent history is that you can take the protest songs from 40 years ago, dust them off, and they're still as valid today.
Eric Burdon and the Animals sing Sky Pilot. Of course, today the pilot is often some geek in Phoenix flying a drone with a joystick from a cubicle...
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
Ground rules: Comments that consist solely of insults, fact-free talking points, are off-topic, or simply spam the same argument over and over will be deleted. The penguin is the only one allowed to be an ass here. All viewpoints, however, are welcomed, even if I disagree vehemently with you.
WARNING: You are entitled to create your own arguments, but you are NOT entitled to create your own facts. If you spew scientific denialism, or insist that the sky is purple, or otherwise insist that your made-up universe of pink unicorns and cotton candy trees is "real", well -- expect the banhammer.
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I was just thinking that one of the differences between then and now is that now there are no protest songs.
ReplyDeleteThen, there was left wing populism. Now it's right wing. Right wingers have very little art about them. Or comedy for that matter.
Their dull world view does not accommodate subversion nor irony.
Lo siento,
JzB
And as I've pointed out, there *are* protest songs today, you just don't hear them because they don't show up on the radio -- or because they're more complex than the old simplistic ones, as befits a more complex world. And now that I tell you this, I'll have to load up some of the new ones into my music video queue. Look for them sometime around the beginning of August...
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Music Penguin
I always thought this to be an anti-religion protest song...... and as you said it's as appropriate today as it was 40 years ago .....
ReplyDeleteHmm, checking my queue, looks like I already had a modern-day protest song queued up for Friday. Tomorrow you're going to get another one of the classics. Enjoy ;).
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Music Penguin
Not to pick nits but this is an anti-war song about the chaplains a/k/a sky pilots, who bless the troops that they may kill a lot of the other guys and later try to convince them that god has a plan which was why their buddy got waxed today. After all these years, the contempt still flows from every stanza.
ReplyDeletePick nits? Where? I'm not seeing a nit to pick :). My throwaway comment about drone operators in Phoenix was just that, a throwaway comment intended to segue into a different anti-war statement (i.e., "war as video game", which Friday's song also mentions). I basically queued up a trio of anti-war protest songs at one time, each one to a certain extent leading to the next (tomorrow's song has religion in it too, you'll have to wait to see which one it is ;).
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Music Penguin
CSN&Y delivered some of the best protest songs ever written. 'Ohio' about Kent State (Look it up, kids.) and the lyrics from 'Chicago' resonate with rage.
ReplyDeleteSatire isn't the right word for Country Joe Mc'Donald's 'Feel like I'm fixin' to die."
Now my age is showing...