In light of Donald Trump's declaring a national emergency to get his worthless wall built with our tax dollars (and not Mexico's, I might add), I think every single Democratic candidate for President should begin announcing and listing on their web sites every issue for which they plan to declare a national emergency after assuming the Presidency in January of 2021.
Green New Deal? Check.
Gun control? Check.
Increase in the minimum wage? Check.
Between catastrophic climate change, the untold deaths from gun violence, and the alarmingly high poverty rate in America, a much better case could be made for a national emergency on these issues than the fact that our neighbors from countries south of our border are crossing said border in search of a better life.
We have to make republicans pay for their stupidity.
If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit...
There is very little on this earth right now more tiresome than listening to republicans lecture Democrats on the racism of Ralph Northan (blackface), the perversity of Justin Fairfax (now has two accusers of sexual assault), and the antisemitism of Ilhan Omar (had the audacity to question U.S. policy on Israel).
Fucking spare me--republicans are a political party that prides itself on hating anyone that's not white and Christian, and they've bent over backwards to excuse the pervert in chief, Donald Trump, who is lapping the field when it comes to sexual deviants in the White House. This is not to excuse the Democrats' behavior (pathetic, except for Omar, who again merely didn't kowtow to Israel)--but republicans really need to take a good look in the mirror before they let their tongues wag.
So please do us all a favor and sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up. Your fifteen minutes are circling down the toilet as the Democratic train keeps rolling right over your worthless asses.
This week's tune is another in a much shorter list than I had originally hoped those many moons ago when I began Friday Night Jukebox--album tracks that all too often get overlooked when the Greatest Hits packages are released...but are just as worthy of a shout out as the big time Billboard chart hits.
While Randy Newman might not quite be a household name, a lot more people are familiar with his music than they realize. Newman has made quite the career since the 1980's as a film composer, and his credits include some blockbusters: all three Toy Story movies, the first and third Cars movies, and both Monsters (Inc. and University) movies, as well as some non-kids fare like The Natural, Seabiscuit, and Meet the Parents. But Newman cut his chops as a pop songwriter (though his biggest hits were more novelty songs--"Short People" and "I Love L.A.") and had a critically acclaimed if not hugely commercially successful run through the seventies. Throughout his career (not counting soundtracks) Newman has released 11 albums, won seven Grammy Awards, three Emmy Awards, and two Academy Awards (both for best song, though he's been nominated twenty times, mostly for film scores). Newman has also been inducted into the Songwriting Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And in a personal aside, Norah Jones' cover of Newman's "I Think It's Going to Rain Today" would easily make my top five cover versions of all-time. My reflections aside, though, Newman has had a hell of a career.
Fun Fact: Newman's "Sigmund Freud's Impersonation of Albert Einstein in America" (Newman's songwriting is nothing if not quirky) contains the lines "America, America/Step out into the light/You're the best dream man has ever dreamed"...which observant readers (both of you) will note emaycee has borrowed a time or two (or three) in various incarnations for regular blog posts over the years...
"Jolly Coppers on Parade" was released in 1977 on Newman's Little CriminalsLP. While "Jolly Coppers on Parade" was not released as a single (though it should have been), Little Criminals was the highest charting album of Newman's career, reaching #9 (with a bullet!) on the Billboard 200. And in another personal aside that's worth about two cents (if that), Little Criminals would easily be one of my ten favorite albums from the 70's--it's a stellar piece of work.
"Jolly Coppers on Parade" tells the tale of a young boy watching police officers march down the street as part of a parade--and while it's from a different time in America's history (when the media wasn't quite as quick to show black Americans being gunned down in the street or twelve-year-olds carrying fishing rods shot forty-two times by their local police force), Newman does an exceptional job of capturing the boy's fascination as the men in blue strut down the street. No one is ever going to confuse Randy Newman's vocals with Rod Stewart, but he does a nice job of capturing the boy's
exhilaration. There's some nice guitar from Waddy Wachtel (one of the great names in rock and roll history) and a smooth rhythm section, but the it's Newman's piano which gives the song a majesty and infuses it with a young boy's joy at watching the scene unfold before him. As I noted in the intro, it won't make Newman's greatest hits LP, but it's a great album track from a great album.
Lyric Sheet: "Oh, Mama/That's the life for me/When I'm grown/That's what I want to be..."
How many Americans, do you suppose, after watching Donald Trump deliver his State of the Union address and then Stacey Abrams deliver the Democratic response, wished that Stacey Abrams were President and not Donald Trump?
My guess would be more than enough to put the first African-American woman into the Presidency of the United States.
Whenever I find myself getting too down about Donald Trump's Presidency, I think back to the last time republicans managed to elect an incompetent celebrity--specifically, Arnold Schwarzenegger in California. While it's true that Schwarzenegger won two terms (heaven forbid it taking America that long to wake up to Trump's ineptitude), his tenure was so disastrous that Californians elected a Democratic governor and gave him a supermajority in the state legislature upon his leaving...and have elected a Democratic governor three consecutive terms now with what continues to be a supermajority in the legislature. And the state has prospered like few others.
In the end, I believe what happened in California is that the bulk of its citizenry awoke to the fact that government serves a greater good and is best run by people who both care about the state and its citizens--virtues that would describe zero republicans.
Here's hoping the bulk of Americans wakes up to this fact by 2020 and sends Trump and his minions in Congress packing.
One of the pitfalls, for my wife and youngest son, of me writing a weekly post about a particular song is that I listen to said song several times before writing the post and usually have the song running through my head most of that week--and I'm one of those people who if he's got a song in his head, he's gonna be singing it. Only this week, it's an instrumental...so I've spent the last few days just humming the hell out of it...
Pat Metheny grew up in Lee's Summit, Missouri in a musical family. He saw the Beatles on TV in 1964 and shortly thereafter bought his first guitar. He discovered Miles Davis and Wes Montgomery over the next couple of years and began to devote himself full time to playing the guitar, specializing in Jazz. He first appeared on a record (Jaco Pastorius) in 1974 at the ripe age of 20, and released his first album in 1976. Since then, he's released 46 (you read that right, 46) more LPs, had three of them go gold, had a number of #1 albums on the Jazz charts, and won 20 Grammys. Metheny is the only artist in the history of the Grammys to win in ten different categories. He's also appeared on numerous recordings by other Jazz artists as well as quite a few pop ones (James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Hornsby, to name a few). Metheny has toured the world over, has many guitarist of the year nods from numerous guitar magazines, and been elected into the Missouri Music Hall of Fame.
Fun Fact: Metheny plays a custom made Pikasso 1-which is a forty-two string guitar. It was made by master Canadian luthier (fancy term for guitar maker) Linda Manzer...and how many of you were expecting the Canadian master to be a man?
In something of an oddity in what used to be a pop-centric music culture, "Last Train Home" was released as a single in 1987 (with a video, which is what led me to the song on another in a long line of late night VH-1 viewings). Unfortunately it never cracked the Billboard Hot 100. The album it was released on, Still Life (Talking), was the first of Metheny's career to go gold.
In an effort to keep my coolness quotient well below freezing, I'll have to admit that I've never been much of a Jazz fan--for whatever reason it's just never captured my fancy. But as in every other genre of music, whether a fan or not, every now and again one finds a diamond in the rough--and "Last Train Home" is just such a gem. It's a bit hard to write about an instrumental--obviously I can note Metheny's guitar playing, and there's Lyle Mays piano, or the wordless backing vocals. In the end, though, what really makes the song great is the fact that it sounds like the last train home. And it's not just the chugging sound Paul Wertico elicits from his drums and cymbals--there's a resignation to it, to a time when not everyone owned a car and would take a train home at the end of the day and stare blankly into the scenery as it passed with one's briefcase an arm's length away. Or at least as I imagine it might--I've never ridden a train in my life, other than the kiddie one at the zoo. Anyhoo, it's a lovely piece of music that I'll be hum, hum, humming for the next few days.
Lyric Sheet: Not happening...unless you count the "yea-ahs" in the thirty seconds or so of wordless backing vocals.
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.
