The incompetence of the Trump Administration has been staggering...
Keep in mind as our brutal national media glosses over the utter incompetence of the Trump administration over their first 100 days that the sole accomplishment they have--the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court--was accomplished only because they changed rules in the Senate that have stood the test of time for this nation for nearly 230 years.
Everything else they've tried has been either an utter failure or little more than another in a long line of sops to the wealthy.
What we have seen, though, is what we knew before The Idiot was elected: Donald Trump is a pig who is an embarrassment to everything America stands for.
When you think about the subjects of hit singles, it's unlikely that you'd imagine one with worrying (and with it, insomnia) as its theme. But that's just what this week's tune delves into, and in so doing created a mini masterpiece about the overwhelming nature of angst.
Men at Work are an abject lesson in Musical Success Cometh And Musical Success Goeth. Formed in 1978 in Melbourne, they released their first album (Business as Usual) at the end of 1981 and it went on to become an international success, reaching #1 on several countries' pop charts, spawning two #1 singles "Who Can It Be Now?" and "Down Under"--perhaps the best song written about a nation, ever), and winning them a Grammy for Best New Artist. Their second album was another international success garnering two more top ten singles. And then their third album...was a stiff and for all intents and purposes, other than the obligatory We Need Money Reunion Tours, Men at Work were finished. Still, they sold over thirty million records, Business as Usual was voted one of the 100 best Australian albums of all-time, "Down Under" is #4 on a list of Australia's greatest hits, and they made the American music industry take notice of bands coming out of Australia. Plenty of bands have done worse....
Released on their Cargoalbum, "Overkill" would reach #3 (with a bullet!) on the Billboard Hot 100 which is really kind of impressive considering its subject matter isn't the stuff hit singles are made of. The song does, though, capture well the way the worried mind races at night, especially when suffering the misery that is imsomnia: the walking around in the dark, the desperation of seeking some sort of relief, the exasperation when nothing works. Lead singer Colin Hay's (who is the one remaining constant in Men at Work--and can be called, without any negative connotations, a poor man's Sting) vocals perfectly embody the anguish of the fretful (especially after the instrumental break), and with a sinister sax, a heartbeat drum rhythm and matching guitar, "Overkill" becomes an ode to despair without sinking into despair itself. I have to admit that this is a song that grew on me over time (and even more so after a years long bout of insomnia)--it is a song of some intelligence and self-awareness and while not a ticket into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, certainly puts what could have been a One Hit Wonder band into the Could Have Been A Contender annals of Rock and Roll.
Lyric Sheet: "Day after day it reappears/Night after night my heartbeat shows the fear/Ghosts appear and fade away/Come back another day...."
There isn't much to laugh about politically these days, but news this week that Donald Trump's racist hotline, VOICE (which was set up so that people could document the virtually non-existent crimes committed by illegal aliens), was overwhelmed by so many very clever people documenting cases of crimes committed by space aliens brought a throaty chuckle from me.
Say what you will about the foibles of us Liberals, but we have a wicked sense of humor--and that might be the one thing that keeps us all sane for the next three and three quarters years.
This week's tune is part of what I had in mind when I started Friday Night Jukebox--a chance to feature songs that weren't hit singles, or may have been overlooked on albums both best selling and those that reached a smaller audience. And let's face it: as most albums only have a couple of hit singles (if that), we music fans spend an awful lot of time listening to and enjoying songs that no one (be it the artist or the record company or the producer, et al) thought had much of a chance at commercial success.
While The Decemberists (another in a long line of artists introduced to me by my daughter, via their song "July, July!") have been around for just north of sixteen years they are still comparatively new to many of the previous bands featured here. Named for an 1825 civilian insurrection in Russia, the Decemberists formed in 2000 and have been going strong since. They've released seven studio albums, 9 EPs, had a #1 album, earned a Grammy nomination, and have quite the reputation as live peformers, most notably for their stage show encores which act out historical events (usually with local roots) or the songs themselves, all with audience participation. They also get bonus points for being early supporters of one Barack Obama, who we miss as President more and more with each passing day.
Fun Fact: In 2004. the Decemberists released an EP called The Tain, which was an eighteen minute song divided into five parts which was loosely influenced by an Irish epic, Tain Bo Cualinge. Near as I can tell the Irish prose work had something to do with the stealing of cows, which may help to explain why there isn't much of an audience for epic mythology anymore. While definitely worth a listen, it's also not a song you want to listen to when you're in your happy place....
Released on their The King Is Dead(the title is said to be an homage to The Smiths' The Queen is Dead) LP in 2011, "June Hymn" is about the beauty of Mother Nature on an early summer day in the small town town of Springville Hill. It's a portrait of the little things--ivy growing, thrushes and wrens singing, the surprise and wonder of seeing a cardinal--all with an underlying question of whether the hymn is for the day or for a special someone (or both) who may (or may not) be in an emotionally stable place. It's as peaceful of a song as I can ever remember hearing--the lyrics are really stunning for a pop song in the way it captures the natural surroundings and beauty of individual moments, especially in reminding you of summer day in June. The music is, like the song, simple: a guitar, a harmonica (emaycee fave!), and a lightly strummed cello (I think). In the end it's a paean to the beauty of a simple world that isn't always so simple...and it gets extra props for being the only song I know of that uses the word "panoply"...
Lyric Sheet: "And you were waking/And day was breaking/A panoply of song/And summer comes to Springville Hill..."
What a day for Michigan--the two worst musicians to ever come out of the Wolverine state got their picture taken with the two worst leaders in the history of American politics!
Though if ever you wanted tips on how to be talentless and dim-witted, the Oval Office was the place to be today--four experts were on hand to share their expertise....
Once again, I don't want to take anything away from yesterday's results in GA-06--Jon Ossoff took a commanding percentage of the vote, he's running a spirited campaign, and Democrats seem genuinely enamored of both the man and his politics. And considering that republicans have held this seat since 1980, the percentage of the vote he had looks even better in retrospect.
But any way you slice it, Democrats once again did not win a House seat in a special election. And while we will have a runoff in June, the final tally shows that Democrats, even with Ossoff winning 48% (give or take) of the vote, did not rule the day in the election (while it was close, the final tally was R's 50, D's 49). Republicans will also have two months to collect and use tons of Koch Brothers money to crucify Ossoff while trying to win this seat yet again.
On the bright side, it's also two months for Donald Trump to keep fucking up. And Ossoff's opponent, Karen Handel, is notorious for a) losing elections, and b) being a sworn enemy of Planned Parenthood who would love nothing more than to energize lots and lots of women to keep Handel in Georgia.
But in the end, it's the South, and republicans will play their usual hand and make this race about God, gays, and guns.
And if I were a betting man, I'd wager that it's going to be enough in a state like Georgia to chalk up another loss for the Dems.
Let's see...can't repeal Obamacare, his tax reform (which wouldn't have helped his supporters much anyway) is already in the shitter, wall project going nowhere fast, Muslim ban failed miserably in the courts, lots of clueless billionaires appointed to administration position, and now it looks as if Trump is going to fill many positions with veterans of the George W. Bush administration, one of the most colossal failures in Presidential history.
So much for draining that swamp...
Have to give Trump credit, though, for capitalizing on that old P.T. Barnum adage (which he likely never said, but what the hell) about a sucker being born every minute.
Because it's beginning to look like his supporters are going to go down as the biggest political suckers in American history.
Earlier this week, CNN conservative commentator Jeffrey Lord compared Donald Trump to Martin Luther King (cue much deserved outrage). Now I used to think conservatives/republicans made these comparisons out of some sad need to have a modern American icon to compare themselves to, since unlike Liberals/Democrats who have Harry Truman or the Kennedy's or Martin Luther King or Franklin Roosevelt (you know, politicians who have actual accomplishments that help ordinary folks), conservatives have no one. I mean, outside of republicans, most Americans think Reagan was little more than a doddering old fool, and republicans are so far removed from Abraham Lincoln's legacy that he might as well have been a (modern day) Democrat.
But the older I get, the more I believe it's just stupidity--conservatives/republicans have no fucking clue what MLK or JFK or Truman did, but they know that most folks have positive opinions of them and so they throw the names out there hoping it will stick.
And good fucking luck with that.
It also illustrates a major difference between the two parties--republicans talk the talk but they can't walk the walk . Could you ever imagine a Liberal/Democrat commentator saying that Bill Clinton was the Virgin Mary of economic recoveries? Fuck no, because we don't have to--we actually fix problems and make the world a better place, unlike conservatives/republicans who have nothing to offer other than bullshit.
After last week's uplifting narrative, we come crashing back to earth with a song about the worst of the best....
Much like Steve Wynn from a couple of weeks back, David + David have made careers out of making music despite only having a modicum of commercial success. They released exactly one album together, which reached #39 on the Billboard 200, before parting ways for unexplained reasons. David Baerwald (amazingly enough, the first name of the two gentlemen responsible for David + David is "David") has released a handful of solo efforts (I was a big fan of his first, Bedtime Stories) and done a lot of songwriting for others as well as working on movie scores. David Ricketts has had success producing albums for others, notably Toni Childs and Meredith Brooks (of "Bitch" fame). Rumor had them collaborating on a second LP in 2016, but near as I can tell that only resulted in another solo effort from Baerwald. Still, they've managed to eat and pay the rent from their talents, which has to beat the hell out of slaving away for some corporation. Just guessing....
Fun Fact: Both Davids were part of the Tuesday Night Music Club, which spawned the first album for one Sheryl Crow, who would go on to have much more success than all of the other Club members combined. Ricketts also had a songwriting credit for Crow's best song, "Leaving Las Vegas." Fascinating, my God.
Released on their BoomtownLP in 1986, "Welcome to the Boomtown" reached #37 (with a bullet!) on The Billboard Hot 100, and was a blast of fresh sounding music chronicling the excesses of those who benefited most from the economic recovery of the 80's. The song opens with a screeching guitar from David Ricketts that's one part noble craftmanship and one part eastern mysticism. It leads into the first vignette, sang by Baerwald with a world weary rasp, of a young woman who seemingly has it all...including a coke habit and the paranoia that comes with it, before he bursts into the worldly wise chorus. He belts it out with an all-knowing and all-seeing fervor that says, Yes, times are golden but look where the hell it got us. The song alternates between the wicked guitar playing of Ricketts and the omniscient vocals of Baerwald, both encased with a driving rhythm that encapsulates both the excitement of new found wealth and the disgust of it wastes. As I listened to it this week in the lead up to this post, I was actually surprised that "Welcome to the Boomtown" was even better than I had originally thought, both as an indictment of the Reagan devolution and as a warning for the Gilded Age that we live in now.
Liner notes: "Welcome, welcome to the boomtown/All that money makes such a succulent sound/Welcome to the boomtown..."
The United States dropped the most powerful non-nuclear bomb ever built on Afghanistan today. Known also as the "Mother of All Bombs" (Massive Ordinance Air Blast bomb, or MOAB), the force of the blast of said bomb is the equivalent of 11 tons of TNT.
Apparently this is quite a big deal, as it has been one of the top stories of the day.
However, when you consider that for the billions that was spent to create and deploy an implement that's sole purpose is to blow shit up we could have furthered cancer research, or fixed thousands of crumbling bridges, or put thousands of people through college, or fed millions of hungry people, or built thousands of apartments for the homeless...the fact that we dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb ever built seems about as consequential as a fart in the midst of a hurricane.
I don't want to take anything away from what Democrat James Thompson did in Kansas-04 yesterday--Trump won this heavily red district by 27 points and the previous Congressional Rep, Mike Pompeo, won it three straight times by just north of thirty points, so for Thompson to lose to republican Ron Estes by only 7 points says volumes.
And it may very well be that Markos Moulitsas is right and if we can continue this trend of gaining twenty points in each district it will put 123 districts into play and give us a superb chance to take the House back in 2018.
But, boy, wouldn't it be nice to win one of these for once? For the sake of Democratic morale? And how about getting an extra Democratic vote in the House?
I'd be willing to wager that republicans don't give a rat's ass if they won by 7 or by 30--they're just happy they'll have another reliably red vote for all the bullshit legislation they can't pass.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but moral victories really just don't cut it anymore, especially in the age of Donald Trump.
Because it's never too early to jump on a bandwagon....
I know what you're thinking...female Senator from New York...running for President...EGADS!
To which I scientifically reply: horseshit.
New York Magazine recently ran a nice profile of rumored 2020 candidate for the Presidency, New York's junior Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and after reading it I'm ready to begin campaigning for her. She's smart, savvy, evolving, and she can use the "F" word with the best of them (I've read the article twice, and I'm certain her usage of the work "fuck" is a tactic to break down stereotypes of female candidates).
Women are leading the resistance and it makes sense that a woman will lead us back into the White House and to Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. I think Kirsten Gillibrand can be that woman.
She'll take the fight right to republicans' front door.
This week's tune is an abject lesson in the fact that nobody writes songs commemorating political assholes. There are no celebratory songs about Reagan or Nixon or Bush the Elder or Bush the Lesser because in the end, people don't like and won't buy records about assholes who don't give a shit about people.
There endeth the lesson....
Dion DiMucci began recording in 1957 and by 1960 he had (along with neighborhood friends The Belmonts) eight singles that had reached the Billboard Hot 100. He went solo in 1960 (after a stint in rehab for heroin addiction, a problem he'd had since his mid teens), and over the course of the next eight years had 19 more singles hit the Hot 100. Dion is most noted for his singles "Runaround Sue" (his only #1) and "The Wanderer" (#2--and originally released as a B-Side). He was among the first inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (in 1989) and is/was cited as an influence by Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, and Lou Reed (who gave the speech inducting Dion into the Hall). For all intents and purposes, though he continues to tour and record, Dion's commercial success was over by 1968. He did another stint in rehab, finally cleaned himself up, and now does outreach work with prison addicts. In a nutshell, he had a hell of a career.
Fun Fact: Dion was on the ill-fated "The Winter Dance Party" tour with Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper and was invited to take the plane that eventually crashed killing all three, but turned it down because it cost $36 which was what his parents had paid per month for the apartment Dion lived in as a child--and he thought, in comparison to a month's rent, it was just a bit too much money to pay for a plane ride.
"Abraham, Martin, and John" was released in August of 1968 in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. It would be the last hit single of Dion's career (but oh what a song to finish with), reaching #4 (most assuredly with a bullet!) on the Billboard Hot 100. The most surprising aspect of the song, is considering when it was written, that the song easily could have been a soap opera-ish, sappy, overwrought work of drivel, but it isn't, and the reason for that is its simplicity. The lyrics use just slightly north of 60 words to describe what these four men--the aforementioned King and Robert Kennedy, plus Abraham Lincoln and JFK--meant to their country and the tragedy for all of us at their loss. The song at times has a gospelesque feel (it is often sang at churches--not any of the ones I ever went to, mind you, unforunately), with some pop and some easy listening mixed in. Dion's vocals are a wonder--he's one of those lucky men who can actually sing blue-eyed soul and he absolutely nails this one. It's hard to not be inspired by the song, by what it says about the best of America's politicians, and to me seems especially appropriate in this time when we're led by a pseudo-Nazi, if nothing else as a reminder that we are better than this moment, and eventually history will give a big fuck you to one Donald J. Trump.
There endeth lesson two....
Fun Fact #2: The gentleman who wrote the song also co-wrote the novelty hit "Snoopy vs. the Red Baron" which reached #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1966. Fascinating, my God...
Lyric Sheet: "Didn't you love the things that they stood for?/ Didn't they try to find some good for you and me?..."
I have to admit to having been a little lukewarm about new DNC chair Tom Perez (I would have preferred Keith Ellison), but after this weekend he's got me paying just a little more attention to him. Speaking to a group of activists, Perez said he didn't care if Trump and the GOP were bothered by protesters calling Trump's presidency illegitimate because they "...don't give a shit about people." And after the GOP replied with its usual I'm Not the One Who Farted outrage, Perez did not apologize and told another group of activists the very next day exactly the same thing.
Preach it, brother.
Frankly, it should be our slogan for the 2018 elections: "REPUBLICANS: THEY DON'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOU..."
Couldn't do much worse than we did the last couple of mid-term elections.
I'm certainly ready to admit that some of it is politics (payback for Merrick Garland), but still, how historically bad must Neil Gorsuch be if for the first time in the more than 200 year history of our nation one of our political parties is filibustering a nomination for the Supreme Court? Or that it's being done by a political party famous (that would be us Democrats, unfortunately) for running scared from its own shadow?
And because republicans are going to ram him through anyway, it may very well be another generation before we can truly make American great.
Every now and again you come across a song in some fluky way--you get a free download or have a free compilation CD stuffed in some magazine, and for whatever reason, there's one song that turns out to be one that you never forget. Such was the case with this week's tune--back in the day when I was managing a music store for Camelot Music we received some freebie compilation from EMI called I Guess We Didn't Save the LP, and on that compilation was "Carolyn" by Steve Wynn. It was love at first listen.
Steve Wynn is one of those artists that make many of us wonder why we didn't become musicians (other than that whole no musical talent thingie)--Wynn started making music in 1979 and has continued to record and tour since, and has never had a single or an album crack the Billboard Hot 100 or the Billboard 200. He came to some acclaim as a member of The Dream Syndicate , a critically well-received band that had little to no commercial success. before going solo in the early 90's. and having little to no commercial success. Wynn has tried various other bands and The Dream Syndicate is reforming this year for another album, but....
Fun Fact: Together with Peter Buck and Mike Mills ( both of REM fame) and a couple others, Wynn formed a group called The Baseball Project, which surprisingly enough, records songs about baseball. They've released three albums thus far. Fascinating, my God....
Released on his debut solo album Kerosene Man in 1990, "Carolyn" plays on a theme done quite often in movies but not nearly as much in songs: You're dating an asshole and you really should be dating a nice guy like me. Though, as Wynn readily admits in the song, he's really not that great, but he's still a whole hell of a lot better than the jackass she's currently seeing. Wynn conveys his feelings with a roots rock tune, high on the jauntiness and featuring a lot of an emaycee fave, the mandolin. Wynn also has a way with turning a phrase, using a lot of quick rhyming schemes with a bouncing cadence that serves the song well. In the end, it's a diamond in the rough--a little known piece of magic that I've been listening to for better than 25 years...and singing for the past several days.
Lyric Sheet: "In this town there's a joke going around/And everyone says it's you...."
The average American gets paid just enough so he doesn't quit his job, and works just hard enough so he doesn't get fired.
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross." Source unknown
Uncle emaycee Wants You For the Coming Class War! Enlist today....
Capitalism: Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you can exploit his labor, become filthy rich, and keep the poor bastard living paycheck to paycheck for the rest of his life.
