Today’s Theme Music

This protest song, from the nineteen eighties, counters what’s normal for rock, at least as it’s experienced in America. Sure, we have some invasion hits from the Brits, Germans, Dutch, etc., and more than a few from Australia, too.

This one came from Australia with a strong rhetoric against taking the Earth from the people who already inhabited it, along with choice rails against global warm and environmental destruction. Featuring a heavy base line, it also has a fat horn section, pretty unexpected in a rock hit in nineteen eighty-seven. But the lead vocalist’s voice and enunciation will never challenge anyone for smooth delivery.

Know the song? It made news again during the opening of the Olympics in Sidney in two thousand. Sure, it’s “Beds Are Burning,” by Midnight Oil, perfect for a walkabout on an unusually hot spring day – in North America.

Today’s Theme Music

My CD collection is a decent size. It’s amusing to talk about these things in the days of iPods and streaming music via iPhones and smartphones. I have two CD players; one is a Sony turntable style that houses two hundred CDs. It’s full. It plugs into a six CD Bose speaker that’s part of my home theater. Then I have another couple hundred CDs stacked and shelved inside the cabinets. The CDs replaced the cassettes, eight tracks, reels, and thirty-three and forty-five RPM records. Being an organized person, the CD collection on the is alphabetized, although blues, Christmas and symphony collections have their own sections. I have a print out of an Excel spreadsheet that tells me where a particular CD is located in the Sony turntable.

Today’s music comes from an album over thirty years old. It came out while I was stationed in Europe. I developed an immediate and long-lasting infatuation with it. It ended up joining albums from Who, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder and Bob Dylan, among many others, as one I can listen to again and again. It’s part of the Sony CD turntable. It’s CD number 98, part of section four. The album is not for everyone but that’s the nature of music, isn’t it? One person’s joy revolts and disgusts another.

Here is ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’, from ‘The Joshua Tree’ album by U2, 1987.

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