is it really so strange

On the heels of Mitt Romney's and Rudy Giuliani's ugly "more nativist than thou" showdown comes this news article (pointed out to me by pal Dorian) where the Prince of Morose Pop channels the spirit of Enoch Powell. I'd point out the quasi-hypocrisy of a child of immigrants bitching about immigration, but it's a fairly common phenomenon.

"They come over here and don't bother to learn the language or culture!"

"Oh, you mean like your great-gran, who has picked up maybe a dozen words of English since she stepped off the boat from Palermo seventy years ago?"

"Well that's different."

The unspoken difference being that the current wave of immigrants has a different skin tone than their predecessors who left their native lands in search of a better life. Just like draconian welfare reform and urban policing policies, just like the notion of the "sanctity of traditional marriage," the immigration debate is just another means of dollying up old school bigotry with euphemistic policy-speak. (I don't recommend this, but try reading the comments on any immigration-related news article or commentary for a first-hand glimpse at the twisted pathologies at work in the anti-immigration crowd.)

The same people who argue about the diversion of tax revenue and educational funds toward services for undocumenteds and their families tend to have acute myopia over the trillions of dollars being pissed away in the quixotic efforts to bring "democracy" to the Middle East. Meanwhile, the punitive approach toward dealing with immigration involves all sorts of cash-intensive and ludicrous schemes with the net effect of exacerbating the problem by creating a permanentally marginalized shadow population. Hey, but it plays well to the lumpen-ignoramuses, and that's what really matters. Plus, becoming a permanent problem means that it can also be a reliable means to rally support for decades to come!

The whining about cultural integrity is obnoxious in the extreme. The bottom line is that things change, with or without an influx of the foreign-born. The North Woburn I grew up in is gone, as is the Woburn High I attended, and so are most of the places I hung out in during my college and immediate-post college years. That the local convenience store I'm a regular at is now run by South Asians doesn't bother me one bit. (Davis and Central Squares going unrecognizably yuppified and upscale? That's another matter.)

If one's sense of identity -- cultural, social, or national -- is so fragile that it can't bear the presence of new accents, new sounds, new cuisines, then it wasn't worth having in the first place. If the new is that threatening and unbearable, the problem isn't with them, however you define the other, the problem is with you.

(It's not like the situation Moz is whining about is anything new. Colin MacInnes documented it in his "London" novels fifty years ago. Elements of it weave through the early UK punk scene Morrissey sprung out of. Christopher Priest wrote of an England overrun by non-natives in the disturbing 1973 sci-fi novel Fugue for a Darkening Island.)

Oh well, Moz. Maybe your fan David Cameron and his cronies will take power in a couple years, and restore the Thatcherite paradise you seem to miss so much.

Dread Zeppelin - Immigrant Song (from Un-Led-Ed, 1990) - Oooh-ahhh-ah-AH! I really don't hear the "reggae" part of the "reggae Led Zeppelin cover band fronted by an Elvis impersonator" conceit here. I recall them being pretty hot stuff for a while back in the early 1990's, though the buzz turned out to be very short-lived.

Manic Hispanic - Get Them Immigrated (from The Recline of Mexican Civilization, 2001) - A topical revision (and vast improvement) of Offspring's "Come Out and Play," courtesy of Orange County's tongue-in-cheek Latino punk supergroup. Blast it at the next neighborhood meeting of the Minutemen. Or not. Racist yokels with guns and poor senses of humor can be unpredictable.

we don't pull the strings

It's good to know that a man who once mocked a death row inmate's plea for clemency and who oversaw the creation of an internment camp with the deliberate purpose of sidestepping constitutional protections is now concerned with the concept of mercy...providing it's for a well-connected, well-off former associate who might spill his guts should he be forced to do time in the big house.

Congratulations, Mr. President. There is no bar for venality set so low that you can't find a way to slither underneath it.

The Brains - Money Changes Everything (from The Brains, 1980) - It helps if you're rich, but it helps more if you happen to know where all the bodies are buried.

Bobby Marchan - You Won't Do Right (from The Complete Stax Volt Singles: 1959-1968, 1991) - Doing stuff for The Right is a different matter, however.

poetic justice will come in time

I had another post planned for today, but after spending the better part of this morning swearing at the TV, the local paper, and various internet newsfeeds, I decided to work out my anger here instead.

What’s got me all riled up? The results of the gay marriage vote in the Massachusetts legislature, which means that a constitutional ban on gay marriage in the Commonwealth is one step closer to becoming a reality. The issue will now be voted on in the next legislative session, and should it pass again, it will be decided by ballot question in 2008.

It appalls me that a question of basic human rights and equal protection by law is subject to a referendum by lumpenproletariat, most of whose members I wouldn’t trust to know how to wipe their own asses. Rights are rights. They are not “earned,” they are not “given,” they should not be subject to the whims of popular opinion…unless we open up the whole shebang to that process. If the government is going to get into the business of legislating relationships between two consenting adults, then I want to be able to weigh in on every pending union, gay or straight. “Sorry. You have a beak nose, and she has beady eyes. Your children will be hideous-looking. Petition denied. And you two? He’s a bore and you drink too much. Denied. Next!”

As committed as I am to the idea of participatory governance, the initiative process of legislating via referendum has been corrupted by the basest, ugliest sort of populism. Originally intended as a way to bypass the graft-ridden political machines and their self-serving patrons of ages past, it has long since become a tool of the same special interest groups it was designed to thwart. The public interest takes a back seat to demagoguery and hidden ulterior motives, and even on the rare occasions when a nobly intended progressive measure passes, it ends its life as an ignored, unfunded mandate or gets reshaped as a post-dated Trojan Horse on behalf of some moneyed concern, at the expense of those it was posited to supposedly benefit.

So a coalition of out-of-state groups working alongside their Bay State counterparts wants to use the initiative process to strip a group of their rights, and for what? To “preserve the sanctity of marriage”? Because heterosexual marriages are special and wonderful and doesn’t crash and burn more than half of the time? What kind of insecure idiot bases the worth of his or her marriage on those of others? I’m a straight, white male who married his partner of thirteen years in 2004. The only parties that matter in our marriage are my wife and I, and rightly so. If the rest of the world doesn’t like it, they can fuck off. There is no just reason why that “club of two” status shouldn’t be enjoyed by same-sex couples.

It’s not about the “sanctity of marriage,” it’s about sanctioning bigotry by enshrining it in the state constitution, and there is no religious sleight of hand that can hide that ugly truth. If people were really serious about “saving marriage,” then maybe they need to start looking into legislation to criminalize divorce, or to rescind tax benefits for anyone who remarries...

…or we as a society could put these useless distractions behind us and get on with living our lives without feeling the need to persecute others. Seriously, this culture war bullshit has gotten tiresome.

In lieu of footnotes, please accept this little sampler of relevant tracks which span several decades and multiple genres. Diversity matters.

Neal Ford and the Fanatics – Shame On You (from Garage Beat ’66, Vol. 1: Like What, Me Worry?! 2004) – This one’s dedicated to all the state reps who voted in favor of the gay marriage ban, including that one asshole from the next town over who was the only rep from this area who cast a “yes” vote.

L7 – The Masses Are Asses (from The Beauty Process: Triple Platinum, 1997) – Indeed they are, ladies. Indeed they are.

Dead Kennedys – Religious Vomit (from In God We Trust, Inc. 1981) – It's a mix of cheap red wine, stale crackers, bile, and half-digested lumps of hypocrisy.

Screamin’ Jay Hawkins – Ain’t Nobody’s Business (from Feast of the Mau Mau, 1988) - Damn right. It ain’t.

The Caravans – Know Your Rights (from This Is Rockabilly Clash, 2003) – It started off as just three, but the list keeps getting longer and longer as time passes.

c-c-c-cucumber, c-c-c-cabbage

I was struggling to find a suitable topic for today when the Boston Globe’s webpage dropped this gem into my lap. I don’t really get the point of these “worst song” lists as they’re executed at the above link and in places like Blender. Apart from the same targets being hit over and over again (I hear airline food is horrible, by the way) by the various listmakers, there is something else at work that irritates the fuck out of me.

My maternal grandfather served with the occupation forces in post-war Germany, and my grandmother went with overseas with him to live in what was left of Frankfurt. Every German male my grandmother came across -- the postman, the butcher, and so forth – admitted that they served in Hitler’s armed forces but never fired a shot at the Americans. Honestly. One wonders where all those white crosses in Normandy came from.

I get that same sense of guilty personal revisionism from the folks who put together the “worst song” lists. “I was listening to My Aim Is True in 1985! I never lip-synched along to the video of ‘We Built This City’!” Most of the songs listed were huge hits. Someone must have been buying the records. Just not them, unless they were being ironic. Irony: the guilty conscience spackle for the po-mo generation.

Even worse than the folks who insist on hiding pop skeletons in their closets are the 20/20 hindsight hipper-than-thou crowd who have permanent residencies on VH-1’s unending torrent of nostalgia and list shows. Exhibiting toxic levels of smugness, they pass marginally witty judgments on the follies of previous decades. It takes a very ballsy man to mock eighties fashions while wearing a faux-retro, artificially distressed t-shirt with an Alpo dog food label on the front. You said it, one guy who was on two episodes of the final season of Caroline in the City, big shoulder pads are indeed “whack,” but you’d better hurry if you don’t want to miss the DVD release party for Snakes on a Plane.

I’m not trying to pull a Klosterman here and posit a passionate defense of crap. I’m perfectly fine with seeing K-Fed get a critical beatdown, and I’ve argued many times that “My Humps” is the actual manifestation of the first trumpet blast from Revelation:

"The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up." - Revelation 8:7

There ought to be more to a “worst songs” than simply dragging out a bunch of vapid pop ditties (preferably recorded by overreaching celebrities) and that one Journey song. Personally, I have a hard time picking either “best” or “worst” songs. My moral objectivism doesn’t extend to my entirely relativistic personal tastes. I acknowledge only two categories: stuff I can listen to and stuff I can’t. There are some songs and bands I enjoy more than others, but the pool is in a constant state of flux, with The Clash being the only constant (and even they have stuff I don’t care for much). My wife, though, is far more sanguine in her musical tastes, and has helped me pick out some painful tracks for today. It’s a little game we call “sacred cow-tipping.”

Shampoo – Trouble (from We Are Shampoo, 1994) – The twisted underbelly of Britpop. I put this track on a recent driving mix CD. Here’s a timeline of my wife’s responses:
Week 1: Bemused “Huh.”
Week 2: “Ugh, I’m going to have this stuck in my head! Their accents are horrible!”
Week 3: Having memorized the CD playlist, she hits the skip button before the song can begin.

Echo and the Bunnymen – Crown of Thorns (from Ocean Rain, 1984) – This one’s a real tragedy, marring an otherwise perfect album. Imagine enjoying the most wonderful hamburger on earth, then getting an undetected human hair tangled on your tongue three bites in – that’s what it feels like when you’re listening to Ocean Rain and this track starts playing. There is a time and a place for vegetable-themed stuttering – no, wait, there isn’t.

Joy Division – Atmosphere (from a 1980 single, collected on Substance, 1988) – I like Joy Division a lot, but I won’t even try and defend Ian Curtis’s vocal stylings. For the most part, his angst-ridden croaking meshed well with the band’s cold, minimalist sound. On this posthumous single, though, his limited abilities fail to the match what the material – a haunting and beautiful synth ballad – requires, and the results are pretty painful to listen to. It’s like attending a drunken karaoke night in some Manchester punk dive. Sacrilegious as it may be to say this, but imagine if The Damned’s Dave Vanian, who has a similar vocal range but better set of pipes, had handled the singing chores.

The Smiths – Girlfriend in a Coma (from The Singles, 1995) – Between this track and the last one, I guarantee I’m going to make some folks’ shit lists. Here’s a question for you: What’s the difference between one teenager sulking to this track and another getting all maudlin over Journey’s “Separate Ways”? Answer: Their parents’ annual incomes.

Some Morrissey-loving friends of mine insist that the whole miserableness thing is a big shtick, a sign of some deep sense of humor that Moz supposedly possesses. But if a joke lands in a forest of creative writing majors, and it’s taken dead seriously, is it still amusing? Not from where my Winnebago is parked, chum.

The Cure – Close to Me (from Staring at the Sea: The Singles, 1986) – As far as my wife is concerned, the Cure’s career ended with The Top, a drug-fueled foray into quasi-psychedelia that pretty much laid the band’s melodic post-punk roots to rest. It was at that point that Robert Smith the musician became Robert Smith the caricature. His hair (and waistline) got bigger, his makeup got thicker, and his melancholy warble became insufferably exaggerated and precious.

“Close to You,” with it’s lazy keyboard noodling and proto-emo lyrics, was the first step on a road that would lead to places I’d rather avoid entirely. It also doesn’t help that I can’t hear the song without confusing it with George Michael’s 1987 hit “Faith.” The two songs are only a half-step removed from each other musically, if you think about it.

I’ve been waiting hours for this/If I could touch your body/I’ve made myself so sick/I know not everybody/I wish I stayed/has a body like you…

So hop to it, mashup maestros, and while you’re at it, could you put together one combining Smashmouth’s “All Star” and the Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week”? I know someone just dying to hear it.

and console you with a big kiss…on the lips

Frank Black: What is going on, Peter? We’ve never backed away from anything. We’ve even faced evil incarnate.

Peter Watts: Evil incarnate can’t sue.

(from Millennium, “Jose Chung’s ‘Doomsday Defense’”)

I was all set with a post celebrating my reasonably successful upgrade to the new beta version of Blogger, when a certain someone lamented that no one was jumping at a recent juicy piece of celebrity gossip. It seems a former 70’s teen heart throb-turned-fading superstar actor was photographed planting a big sloppy mouth kiss on another man. Said heart throb also happens to be a member of a well known religious organization, popular with many celebrities, that is not known for having a progressive stance on homosexuality. Now while the story is ripe with comedic potential, Armagideon Time lacks the extensive legal budgets possessed by the various gossip rags, and so I’ll just let these “randomly selected with no agenda, honest” tracks do the talking.

“Up your nose with a rubber hose,” indeed.