After all these years, John Prine’s song “Hello in There” still gives me chills. In fact, it can bring me to tears if I’m feeling a little bit down. It was off his first album, John Prine, which is still my favorite of his albums, although I’ll admit that maybe it isn’t his best album. It’s hard to say. Every song is great. He does have a tendency to break momentum between chorus and verse. But it is a smaller problem with “Hello in There.”

The issue of old people being forgotten in our society is an important one. It is the result of our economic problems — the devaluation of work and expertise. I’ve seen it a lot in high tech and I have to admit to being very pleased to be out of it. If you look at old coders — people who cut their teeth of COBOL and FORTRAN — they know everything. Unlike the 20-somethings who can code the most recent fad programming language for little money, the old ones understand the whole context. They understand that it still all comes down to putting bits on silicon and pushing them through a CPU.

But who cares?! I’m the youngest person I know whose coded assembly language. In the modern world, we create systems so we don’t need people who understand the big picture. We need people who are “human resources” so that one “human resource” can be plugged into where another “human resource” used to be. And in that world, we sure don’t care about old people. It isn’t that we are cruel. We don’t know there is anyone worthwhile to say “hello in there” to.

Of course, there is another side of this. I go out of my way to talk to old people. But sometimes, they are so starved for conversation, that they don’t know how to have a conversation — they just perform a repetitive monologue. I don’t blame them — it’s our fault. But it’s frustrating. Still, I think Prine is right:

So if you’re walking down the street sometime
And spot some hollow ancient eyes
Please don’t just pass them by and stare
As if you didn’t care, say, “Hello in there, hello.”

Today, we listen to “Life on Mars.” My favorite David Bowie album by far is Hunky Dory. I’m not even sure why. It’s probably just that there seems to be too much going on in his other albums. And despite the fact that he spent much of his early career dressing like a clown, he seemed always to be taking himself far too seriously. That’s not the ultimate killer, though. I like Aladdin Sane. But there’s something to it. If you want to be taken seriously, don’t be a pop star. And don’t dress up like a clown.

I would have more to say if I weren’t having all kinds of computer problems. So I better get this out. Today, we are listening to “Life on Mars.” I don’t really know what it’s about. I always thought vaguely that it was about those wonderful science fiction films from the 1950s. But I guess it is just a love song. Or something. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. And that’s fine. It’s pleasant to listen to.

Afterword

This was supposed to go up yesterday, but I screwed up the time. So here it is.

I think I’ve been pretty open about my belief that Jello Biafra’s singing kind of ruins the otherwise great Dead Kennedys. But he was also the soul of the band. And his writing was great. And don’t get me wrong: I understand that Biafra’s voice was meant to be annoying. But that doesn’t change much. Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables is a great album despite his vocals. But if those vocals work anywhere, it is on “California Über Alles.”

It’s funny to listen to California Über Alles now. It is an attack on Jerry Brown from the left — extreme left. It calls him a fascist. And based upon its content, you would well imagine Biafra growing into some kind of libertarian freak later in life. But that didn’t happen. Biafra has only become more serious and thoughtful throughout his life. The song was meant more to be a joke anyway. The point, more than anything, was that Jerry Brown was power hungry and that everything he did was in the service of becoming President of the United States. And there is something to be said for that interpretation of the Jerry Brown of the 1970s, just as it is of Gavin Newsom today.

Not California Über Alles, but America…

But what’s really amazing is that we now live in a nation in which we have actual big name politicians who are the modern day equivalent of fascists. California Über Alles? Well, there are a whole lot of Americans who would proudly sing, “United States Über Alles.” I’ve gotten to be tired of people claiming that politicians like Cruz and Rubio and Trump are not fascists. I don’t think you can base modern politicians by the details of old politicians. All the Republican candidates are in favor of the same kind of government supported business system — a kind of modern feudalism. And does anyone question that if Pakistan went to war with us that all of these men would be eager to round up all Muslims and put them in camps? (Cheered on by Sam Harris, no doubt.)

Today, Jerry Brown is the ultimate technocrat. He’s been a great governor for the state. And there is no doubt that he is liberal. But he’s never been a radical. But our country’s politics is so out of balance that he is seen as an extremist today. All liberals are. When the old and unhealthy Antonin Scalia died, millions of them spent days talking about how he must have been murdered. This is projection, pure and simple. Even as conservatives have been highly successful over the last 40 years accomplishing their stated goals, they are unhappy. Because what they really want — what they always wanted, was fascism in America. They want a nation where it is just accepted that patriotism means cheering every act of state belligerence.

In that context, “California Über Alles” is not as funny a song as it ought to be. But it’s still pretty great.

I think I should apologize. I’ve been so angry for the last day! All I’ve been writing about is that anger. I don’t even know what’s going on in the world. And I do want to get past it. But it’s hard when people think they can just yell at you and call you names. All I feel I can do is get through this as quickly as possible. There are awful people in the world. And those awful people are usually the people with the most power. It made me think of the great Gang of Four song “Not Great Men.”

It’s about how the books of history are filled with strong men, but not great men. Although I would take exception to even the idea that the history books are filled with strong men. Sure, there are strong men, but mostly history is made by the people who were born to it. But they are certainly “Not Great Men.”

If you looked at humans the way you look at an ant colony, you would see all the wars and such as cut off from what’s really going on. Ever since the Neolithic Revolution, the real action has been going on in the farms. The great men were the ones who inch by inch improved how agriculture was done. The people fighting wars or involved in “business” were just living off the efforts of the true heroes. So history is not made by great men. It is defined by men who had the power to define it as something that ought to be written down and revered.

“Not Great Men” is a great song. I love listening to it. But more than the song itself, it is just knowing that other people get it — they understand that all the hero worship is nonsense.

The phrase “Burn, baby! Burn!” has been associated with the 1965 Watts Riots. As a result, I’ve always found it fascinating that it would find its way into The Trammps’ mega-hit “Disco Inferno.” It is, I suppose, what Thomas Frank wrote about in his first book, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. It isn’t that those ad men were just trying to co-opt what was cool. It was what they thought was cool and they were simply using it.

It’s certainly the case that the songwriters, Leroy Green and Ron Kersey, were not making a political statement. The song came from a scene in The Towering Inferno, where a disco is burned down. “Disco Inferno” is pure fun, the way that the very best Disco music was. But it must certainly be that the writers had the phrase in their mind because they had heard it associated with the Watts Riots. And there is something kind of sad that just one decade after a riot that took the lives of 34 people should be so vague that the phrase could be co-opted to mean nothing more than burning up the dance floor.

But that’s the nature of our modern society. The Watts Riots started over the police stopping an African American man. The reasonableness of the whole thing is not the question, however. The issue is that we had then, as we have today, a racist system. People denied justice will hold in their resentment and anger for only so long. And to nitpick over the exact timing or cause of their anger is to miss the whole point.

Disco Inferno: Burn That Mother Down

When I see white people like those who took over the Malheur wildlife sanctuary, it makes me think of all the people who have real grievances. Throughout its brief history, the Black Lives Matter movement has been nitpicked to death. A twelve year old African American boy with a toy gun is driven up on and murdered by police within seconds. But when armed white men take over a public building because some rich people are being held accountable for their acts of arson, we get a month-long negotiation to see that no one is harmed. Yet it is the Black Lives Matter protesters who are condemned because they aren’t doing it right. They aren’t courteous enough. They don’t wait their turn. They somehow never know the exact right words that would make their problems all just go away.

African Americans, like all minority groups, are just supposed to shut up — unless they are providing us with entertainment as delightful as “Disco Inferno.”

I’ve told you all the story of the barber who corrected me when I mentioned that legend that Robert Johnson met the Devil at the crossroads and sold his soul to the devil for his musical skills. I thought today, I would go over very briefly why it is that the story is more associated with Robert Johnson, even though maybe it was first told about Tommy Johnson.

Really, it comes down to two songs. The first is “Cross Road Blues,” which really doesn’t have anything to do with the Devil. The second is “Me and the Devil Blues.” Now at least it has to do with the Devil. But it is just about the Devil who has come to take him away. Anyway, I’ve put the two songs together as a playlist. Like all Robert Johnson songs, they are short. They are worth listening to if only as a nice introduction to the very peak of Mississippi Delta Blues.

Memory is a hard thing. You never know if its real. Or I don’t anyway. It seems that most people I know think their memories are video files stored on a micro-SD card in their brains. To me, they are more like creations of random event generators that our consciousness tricks us into thinking are real. Still, I have this memory of being at the San Francisco Zoo when I was perhaps six years old. And there was this panther in a small enclosure, walking back and forth — pacing the cage.

The third song of Bruce Cockburn’s album The Charity of Night was “Pacing the Cage.” I asked him once about the song — or I reflected on it. Regardless, he said it was about feeling trapped. I hated to hear that because its such a trivialization of the song and the metaphor. As I remember back to that panther, it wasn’t feeling trapped or looking for a way out. It had more been driven mad by living a life it could not understand. And Cockburn knows that. The song starts off:

Sunset is an angel weeping
Holding out a bloody sword
No matter how I squint I cannot
Make out what it’s pointing toward

If he’s trapped, it’s by his own mind. He’s lost. You don’t have to be confined to be at a loss of the way forward. In fact, not being confined can be the problem. And there is a pointlessness of life that causes all human activity to be nothing more than pacing the cage. In such circumstances, death is a release. Because your other choices are to pace inside the cage or pace outside the cage. There is the appearance of freedom only — no actual freedom. Until you die, you will find yourself pacing the cage.

I had warned you that I was just going to wing it. I said that I would present songs that I loved and songs that I hate. Whatever. Well, today I am going to feature a song I despise. It may well be the worst song ever written, Bread’s hit “Diary.”

Like most really bad Bread songs, it is written by David Gates. It tells the story of a guy who finds a diary and starts reading. He becomes convinced that the woman who wrote it is secretly in love with him. But then he realizes that actually, it’s some other guy. Apparently, he isn’t Adam and she isn’t Eve. The song exist in a universe in which there are more than two people.

I’m pretty sure I know how the song was written. “I found her diary underneath a tree” came into Gates’ mind. And so he started thinking. “And then I was stung by a bee”? No. “It wasn’t very hard to see”? No. “The air was salty near the sea”? No. “I didn’t have to pay a fee”? No. “And started reading about her”? Oh, that’s the way, “And started reading about me”! Yeah! That’s a winner. And it just went on like that.

I have obvious questions about the song. For one, if the book said, “Diary of Lynn Anne Edwards,” wouldn’t you go and give it to her and tell her you found it. But no. Our hero just starts reading her personal thoughts. No wonder it turns out she isn’t pining after him. He’s a jerk! And why would he think she was writing about him? So he’s not just a jerk. He’s a narcissistic jerk. I think from now on I’m going to refer to it as Donald Trump’s Song.

Musically, it’s pretty enough. I like the guitar picking throughout. The vocal harmony on the refrain is nice. But I don’t think the strings add to it. They make the maudlin content feel all the more oppressive. But it is a good indication of what a great person I am to make myself listen to it again, just to share it with you.

How a Decent Man Deals With Finding a Diary

I found her diary underneath a stack
And so I found her and gave it right back
I did not even look at the inside
‘Cause I’m not a jerk or other awful guy.

I’m still not feeling 100%. Not to mention, my day job just greatly increased my workflow. I really don’t know what I’m going to do about that. I’m feeling very anxious. And as a result, I can’t come up with a theme for the morning music posts this week. So I’m just going to do some songs I like. Or hate. Or whatever comes into my mind. Today, I’m doing Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe.”

I liked this song well enough when I was a kid. I remember seeing the film based upon it, made by Max Baer Jr, or as you probably know him Jethro Bodine. But the song didn’t really hit me in all its brilliance until I was well into my thirties. There was a magazine, perhaps Harper’s, that had a short story on the last page of every issue. They described it as a novel in a single page — a story that was so powerful that it would have as great an effect on you as a novel. Well, that’s the way I feel about “Ode to Billie Joe.” It’s a novel in five verses.

The beauty of “Ode to Billie Joe” is that we don’t know the backstory. This is why the film fails as a piece of art — and could not have done anything but fail. A novel would do the same thing. But I think a great novel could be written based upon the ending: two women of different generations, living together, having just lost the loves of their lives.

There are dangerous questions in great literature. The most dangerous is, “What happened?” You don’t want to know. It’s the mystery that we love — the not knowing. Once it is concrete, there is nothing special about it. Billie Joe and the narrator could have been dropping anything off that bridge. Billie Joe could have killed himself for any number of reasons. In the film, the answers are: a teddy bear and because of a drunken homosexual encounter. Feel better? Of course not! Those are pathetic answers. I could provide ten better ones for you this evening.

One thing is for certain, Bobbie Gentry didn’t know what the answers to these questions were. There was some kind of relationship. And her family was clueless about it. Except for her mother, who I think the song indicates knows something. But maybe not. Does anyone know our secret thoughts and feelings? Probably not.

I went to see Randy Newman live when I was in college. He was very good. He clearly enjoys performing and he played for a very long time. And he performed another of his prototypical offensive songs: “My Life Is Good.”

I had always liked the song. But he said something that kind of bothered me. He said, “Sadly, this song is autobiographical.” It involves him being taken to his son’s school, because the boy was bullying the other children. And Newman’s response was, “Do you know who who I am?! My life is good!”

I can well imagine how that would happen. People have bad days and it speaks well of him that he’s able to recognize when he’s being a jerk. So that’s good. And I assume that “My Life Is Good” is an exaggeration. But still, it’s pretty wild.

When I started this week of offensive Randy Newman songs, I knew I had a lot to choose from. But I had one song in particular in mind: “Rednecks” off his Good Old Boys album. The narrator is a redneck and he shows himself to be bigoted in the most offensive way. It starts talking about how the segregationist Lester Maddox was on television with “some smart-ass New York Jew.” As he’s discussing his own people, he notes that men go to LSU, “Went in dumb — come out dumb too.” And then there is the refrain, “We are keeping the niggers down.”

Now this is presented in the context of it being the way that northerners think of southerners. But he isn’t saying it’s wrong. He isn’t saying that the south isn’t like that. He’s saying that the north is hypocritical. The bridge is devastating. He says that the north has “set the nigger free.” And he provides a long list of how the African American is free, “Yes he’s free to be put in a cage in Harlem in New York City.” And it goes on that way. The song could be a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement, if the song weren’t such a muddle with every offensive word that was handy.

The Problem Isn’t the Rednecks

“Rednecks” was released in 1974. Since that time, the kind of overt, impolite, racism of the singer exhibits has mostly become a thing of the past. It is so much a thing of the past that even Sean Hannity finds it unacceptable. At the same time, mass incarceration of African Americans has become a far bigger issue. Words do matter. But they only go so far. We’ve created a society that is largely polite to African Americans. But not one that offers them opportunity.

We should have spent less time worrying about the rednecks and more time worrying about the system of racism our society is built upon.

My first introduction to Randy Newman was his album Sail Away. It belonged to the sister of a friend of mine and it was a revelation. It was probably the album that caused me to start writing songs because the second or third song I ever wrote was a clear ripoff of “Old Man” off the album — still a song I greatly admire. But today we are doing offensive songs and so I’m going with “Political Science.”

In general, when Randy Newman does a song in character, he takes it to extremes. But in “Political Science,” I think he’s pretty accurate. He’s presenting a kind of John Birch Society narrative that everyone is against us and we should just bomb them into the stone age. Sadly, what used to be a fringe position is now pretty standard in the Republican Party.

I keep hearing people talking about just bombing ISIS away. There is little understanding that ISIS controls lots of people who are far bigger victims of ISIS than we are. And in the name of our cowards’ being able to rest easy at night, we should kill all these innocent people?! Of course, when it is put like this, people normally backtrack. But still we hear about “carpet bombing” and making the “sands glow.”

In “Political Science” we have a similar cowardly, resentful outlook. It starts, “No one likes us; I don’t know why; we may not be perfect; but heaven knows we try.” Oh, how often I’ve heard that sentiment! In fact, I used to believe that. In the film The Killing Fields, Spalding Gray as the US Consul gives a little speech in which he talks about the noble aspirations of our country and how we have gone against them at every step in southeast Asia. Uh, no. That’s all grammar school propaganda. The noble aspirations are for the folks back home so that they keep the killing machine well funded.

I could easily write 10,000 words going over the song line by line. It is filled with so many conservative myths, it’s like a dissertation on movement conservatism in a two minute song. It’s filled with things like all the money we give to other countries (not true). And then there is what I think of as the Real Bush Doctrine: “Let’s drop the big one and see what happens.” Let’s just give it a try and hope for the best.

But as always when he is at his best, Newman is funny as hell in “Political Science.” That’s especially true in the bridge, “We’ll save Australia…” They got surfing too!

Cover by Source, Fair use, via Wikipedia.