Carl is our man on the music beat, but today is an exception. A friend shared the song below on twitter, a kind of summary of the conservative complaints about our increasingly despotic gov’t, set to spare music & sung in a soft pop-country voice, with a video giving you about two images per second, to the beat of the music, with the miserable events of 2020-1.
Apparently, the song came out last summer, a quarter million people listened to it—I’d never heard of it, nor the artist, but my friend attracted my attention to an important issue about art & its relation to the public & to politics. Carl has asked this question over the last couple of years in various forms: Where are the protest songs against an overbearing, bullying gov’t? Where’s rock music’s love of freedom? Carl has written at length about Van Morrsion’s new protest songs, but there’s just about no one else; musicians & other artists have been nothing but quiet or submissive. We lack the ability to come together through shared pleasure in the arts, to say nothing of music’s inspiriting & inspiring power.
So this is about the best we have got. Five Times August also has a song about Fauci, which has caught on even more, almost half a million views on youtube alone.
The last video I’ll recommend here is a pastiche of Dylan’s Subterranean homesick blues. That song, released today, would be branded as reactionary, of course, & denounced in every precinct of the elite media as white privilege, a backlash against progressive achievements, dangerous disinformation, & an assault on our democracy. Five Times August doesn’t have Dylan’s talent, but he has the necessary guitar skills for his singing & his heart is in the right place, the songs sound good & you want them to be more powerful musically… I think it’s a good sign that he has persuaded a large audience to get angry rather than become resigned or sink into obliviousness. He does speak for lots of people & hopefully will encourage others to speak up.
Impressive! I had heard and liked "Sad Little Man," but this is more powerful yet.
Gotta mention Tommy Coyle's "Stasi State" here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ_KEgV_8qs&ab_channel=TommyCoyle