Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Back to the future

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

7 comments:

  1. I was just thinking that one of the differences between then and now is that now there are no protest songs.

    Then, 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

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  2. 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...

    - Badtux the Music Penguin

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  3. 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 .....

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  4. Hmm, 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 ;).

    - Badtux the Music Penguin

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  5. 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.

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  6. Pick 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 ;).

    - Badtux the Music Penguin

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  7. 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.

    Satire isn't the right word for Country Joe Mc'Donald's 'Feel like I'm fixin' to die."

    Now my age is showing...

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