Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Walking by a church – it’s amazing how many houses of worship this little town sports – I thought, “The devil went down to Ashland, he was looking for a soul to steal.” Of course, he didn’t go to Ashland, but Georgia.
Here’s another of my favorite songs, streaming all the way from 1979, CDB with “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”
From out of the dreams came some streams, and from the streams came some songs….
This one grew more forcefully shaped and remembered as the lyrics echoed through memories’ canyons and flew over plains of time.
I…I will begin again
I…I will begin again
Sometimes, when events took me down, I took strength from music, and lyrics like these. I take strength wherever, however I find it, as it seems like life drains my strength so quickly. It’s good to remember that at the rate that our bodies replace our cells, we’re always being reborn.
From 1983, U2 with “New Year’s Day.”
This is one of those songs that I asked of myself, “What the fuck are they singing?” when it was first released.
It came out in 1987, before the Internet became the familiar household pet it now is. That meant learning what was being sung wasn’t easy. I listened to the song and discussed it without others. Beer was involved. You’d think that with beer involved, a solution would be found, but nobody knew the words.
Hell, it’s no wonder, now that I can use the Intertubes to find the lyrics:
I cry wolf give her mouth to mouth
Like a movin’ heartbeat in the witchin’ hour
I’m runnin’ with the wind a shadow in the dusk
And like the drivin’ rain yeah like the restless rust
I never sleep
Hmmm? Yet the song works as FM rock fodder, delivering that need for a chorus, something that everyone understands and can sing with them:
I got ta feel it in my blood wo oh
I need your touch don’t need your love wo oh
And I want and I need
And I lust animal
And I want and I need
And I lust animal
n/t lyricsfreak.com
Electric guitars and lots of pounding drums and thumping bass go a long way to making the song memorable. It’s definitely modern rock.
I must have heard this somewhere recently. As is my norm, my stream picked it up and added it to the mental jukebox and it randomly popped up today.
Fiona Apple’s “Shadowboxer” is lazy, slurred, and haunting to me. I attribute my impression to the beat, lyrics (and material), and the volume’s slow rise, as if she’s been thinking aloud about a relationship and is reaching a conclusion. It’s a song that goes well with dimly lit rooms and a glass of wine at a weary day’s end.
Here she is, from way back in the last century (1996).
A fraction of this song got trapped in an eddy of my mind stream. “Who is this?” I kept asking myself, but could only remember some words, and none of it seemed connected to a place and time in my life.
Not fully recalling it bugged me so I did searched until it was resolved. (I’m peculiar that way.) The song is “Ordinary World,” performed by Duran Duran. That’s what kept me confused. As a Duran Duran song, it’s not associated with anything else of their music that I’ve heard. It came out in 1992, so I was back in America, stationed at Onizuka Air Station and living in Mountain View.
The lines that kept going through my head this morning were,
And I don’t cry for yesterday
There’s an ordinary world
Somehow I have to find
And as I try to make my way
To the ordinary world
I will learn to survive
I was walking this morning when this one streamed out of the ether.
“Mississippi Queen” by Mountain was one of our art class staples in high school in my senior year, 1974. Scott had a large rock vinyl collection, and brought in a huge number of albums. I don’t recall how other students reacted to it, but Scott and I really enjoyed it.
My wife and I were driving home when John Mellencamp’s “Authority Song” played on the radio. We knew the song and sang along. It’s from his Uh-huh album. It came out in 1983, when he was John Cougar. We saw him perform a few years later, in Germany.
As the song wound toward its end, my wife said, “This song doesn’t have many words to it, does it?” No, but that’s how a lot of pop songs are, to me. I was thinking more about these lines:
“I said, “Growing up leads to growing old and then to dying
“And dying to me don’t sound like all that much fun.”
The idea that death is bad — or not fun — has been weaponized, something to use keep us in check. “You might get hurt if you do that. You might even die.” Yes, as if we’re all living forever on this world, in these bodies.
I thought, Heaven as a concept must have been invented to comfort people who are dying or has lost someone. I always liked that idea of Heaven, that another place is beyond death where we live on. Maybe it’s like living in this sense in that mythical next existence, but suppose it’s not? Yet, we’re coached and socialized to fear death because this is life.
Come on, we’re all going to die. Life might be a spectrum, and this slice of life is just another frequency band. Thank of how wonderful it could be in the next band.
I enjoyed Bowie and his music, and lament his passing. Fortunately, technology and memories serve well to keep the music playing.
Today found my mind shuffling and streaming old Bowie songs like “Diamond Dogs,” “Suffragette City,” and today’s offering, “Rebel, Rebel.” No particular reason for singing it today, except I like the song for its laid-back approach and the amused, disdainful sense of observation and discovery heard in the lyrics.
You’ve got your mother in a whirl
She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl
Hey babe, your hair’s alright
Hey babe, let’s go out tonight
You like me, and I like it all
We like dancing and we look divine
You love bands when they’re playing hard
You want more and you want it fast
They put you down, they say I’m wrong
You tacky thing, you put them on
The opening words to this song streamed through my thoughts last Saturday, when I participated in a women’s march in Medford.
Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy
‘Cause summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy
Hey! think the time is right for a palace revolution, but where I live the game to play is compromise solution
Hey, said my name is called Disturbance; I’ll shout and scream, I’ll kill the King, I’ll rail at all his servants
h/t to Wikipedia.org for lyric and historic context
Of course, when I thought of this song, it was winter, and I was in a women’s march, organized by women to remind the POTUS and America that they’re here and displeased, and want to continue the agenda of change in America that’s been going on, an agenda that includes equality regardless of gender, age, sexual orientation or preference, religion, ethnicity, skin color, and many other things that America claims to be free and equal about.
It was ironic, and a little disappointing when thinking of protest songs, that “Street Fighting Man” came to mind. Where’s the street fighting women? I was surrounded by them.
Mick Jagger said that events in the United States and France inspired the song when he wrote it. It seems like an indictment of the pervasive male oriented society that only men were mentioned from that era of protests in the 1960s. Despite its inherent sexism, the song, with its driven rocking beat and discordant sitar and guitars, is a powerful protest anthem, powerful enough that Chicago radio stations didn’t play it in the summer of 1968, fearful that it would incite more rebellion and violence in a city that was already struggling with the violence emerging in the shadow of Democratic National Convention as anti-war protesters and police clashed.
Stream forward through time a few years, and the publication of the Pentagon Papers display the American Government’s hypocrisy and cynicism, a reminder that emerges through the recent film, “The Post.” Watching that film, the calls for change and to shake up business as usual sharpen with understanding, along with the bitter taste arising from the belief that our government, no matter which party dominants, is failing us. Those parties apply lip-service to our demands, but their actions often sustain the status quo and business as usual. Most Americans want change, but often split about the shape of change desired. It’s the struggle of democracy. The path seems clear, but it’s messy an slippery.
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
~ Frederick Douglass
That’s why I joined those women and marched to demand change. I want change. I served in the American military to forward the ideals of freedom, democracy, and equality, with the simple truth that all people are created equal. I slowly learned how those words and sentiments are often more of a propaganda slogan and less of a governing ideal, and that many people, including our leaders, lack the principles and moral courage to fully embrace the ideals behind these words.
In the song, Mick asks, “What else can a poor boy do,” and adds, “There’s no place for a street fighting man,” a suggestion about the frustrations of limited options.
What a wheel of history we ride.
1973 wasn’t the best of years for me.
I became seventeen that year. I’d moved in with my father the year before, 1972. He retired from the Air Force, and we moved to West Virginia. We bought a place, and it burned down. Just about all the few possessions I had when I quit living with Mom were gone. We didn’t have insurance. The paperwork and payment were on the dining room table, and burned.
I was hoping for better with 1973. It went great for a while, but then I cut off the end of my big toe while cutting the grass with a gas-powered lawn mower. That took me out of sports and doing many things. Frequently a loner, I retreated into art, music, and reading, which were always my natural sanctuaries.
Fortunately, ’73 was a good year for music. This song, “Drift Away” performed and released by Dobie Gray, summed up the year for me.
Beginnin’ to think that I’m wastin’ time
I don’t understand the things I do
The world outside looks so unkind
Now I’m countin’ on you to carry me through
Oh, give me the beat boys and free my soul
I wanna get lost in your rock ‘n’ roll and drift away
Yeah, give me the beat boys and free my soul
I wanna get lost in your rock ‘n’ roll and drift away
And when my mind is free
You know a melody can move me
And when I’m feelin’ blue
The guitar’s comin’ through to soothe me
