Following up on yesterday's post, a song about how everything goes away.
It does seem that in the face of an imminent and ongoing environmental catastrophe "Killing Joke" is the perfect soundtrack.
Okay, okay, it's part of my formative years 80's soundtrack but that doesn't detract from the song's continued relevance.
I don't know of any band that has captured the idea that a certain amount of righteous rage is required to live fully. And I don't know of any of their songs that sum up that idea better than "Love like blood."
It doesn't bear much resemblance to the band that produced their self-titled debut or the follow up "What's This For...!" but it is one of their best singles. Thundering, insistent drums and bass, alongside Jeremy Coleman's alternately punishing and pleading voice and a guitar which moves between industrial chugging and angelic reverb/chorus fueled riffs make this a perfect embodiment of Killing Joke during the band's midlife.
If you want to really get a feel for what they were like download their self-titled debut on Amazon (I hate itunes but more on that later) and also check out 'Night time" for some of the band's most radio friendly singles.
I have always found their videos a bit creepy. They are chock full of communist/fascist imagery, but lyrically the ideas don't quite match with the visuals. Other videos put Campbell in Kabuki like clown makeup and so I take that as a none too subtle message to not take any of the imagery seriously, that true to their title like itself is a big joke.
I know the band took a bit of heat for these images during the day but it is clear from a simple viewing that Coleman makes a habit of co-opting the commie/fascist look to make some kind of greater point about the power of individuals, or about the fight against death. But dang they sound good.
Enough from me, here's the Youtube link (I don't know how to embed yet).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnpwuRlXbhk
Thursday, May 20, 2010
The Single Sentence Critic
Why would the aggressively moronic Mark Levin spend hours railing against the US government in his radio show then shill for a company that sells US Postage?
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
The Alabama Gulf Coast
May 19, 2010-
(Seems fitting somehow that my first post should have nothing to do with Music or Journalism... but there you go.)
There are times when my ability to have any impact at all on the world beyond my door is intensely frustrating.
The Gulf Coast spill has now moved into that category for me.
Beyond the obvious, part of the reason why is because I learned all I know about the water in a small cove at the Alabama/Florida border called Cotton Bayou.
When I was a child (in the 70's) we would visit my the grandparents stilted wooden cottage that sat about 20 yards off the sea. The backyard was all sea oats (they were protected even then) with a raised wooden boardwalk that led to a pier and boathouse. Back then, my grandmother always had a crab trap off the end of the pier filled with chicken/fish/ bones. Once a week during summer those traps yielded enough crabs to feed 4 adults and 3 children (maybe 2 dozen? I can't really remember). We could net shrimp off the sandy bottom, and see the occasional alligator in the brackish marshes. There were hermit crabs, stingrays and catch and release croakers off the pier when there was nothing else to do but fish.
Every morning we would take Grand pop's boat (Hoddy Toddy ((google it)) under the bridge that marked the Florida/Alabama border and head out to the Gulf Coast. Out there we caught Spanish and King Mackerel, Red snapper and the occasional Redfish. The kids (us) scaled, gutted and fileted everything and we ate it all, generally that evening. What we didn't eat went into my Grandmother's freezer dated and labeled for future cooking.
It won't come as any surprise to anyone when I tell you that place doesn't exist anymore. I'm not particularly nostalgic (honestly), and I'm no Luddite, but I am rendered continually speechless by the inability or unwillingness to fix the Deep Horizon oil leak. After days of reasonable reporting and a fair bit of top notch investigative journalism I have learned these things.
1. Offshore US oil rigs are not required to have an important failsafe measure called an acoustic trigger that could have simply and inexpensively stopped this leak (500K per switch is not much in oil company terms).
2. There are ways to stop this leak (namely through the use of explosives) that EVERYONE involved seems unwilling to try because it would entail abandoning the oil field.
So here I am feeling very alone in the fact that no one with the ability to truly effect this situation seems to recognize the severity of the spill, or feel compelled to take drastic action to stop it.
And so I am watching the slow motion destruction of the place where I grew up, that I was really hoping to one day share with my children.
That is incredibly sad, for all of us.
(Seems fitting somehow that my first post should have nothing to do with Music or Journalism... but there you go.)
There are times when my ability to have any impact at all on the world beyond my door is intensely frustrating.
The Gulf Coast spill has now moved into that category for me.
Beyond the obvious, part of the reason why is because I learned all I know about the water in a small cove at the Alabama/Florida border called Cotton Bayou.
When I was a child (in the 70's) we would visit my the grandparents stilted wooden cottage that sat about 20 yards off the sea. The backyard was all sea oats (they were protected even then) with a raised wooden boardwalk that led to a pier and boathouse. Back then, my grandmother always had a crab trap off the end of the pier filled with chicken/fish/ bones. Once a week during summer those traps yielded enough crabs to feed 4 adults and 3 children (maybe 2 dozen? I can't really remember). We could net shrimp off the sandy bottom, and see the occasional alligator in the brackish marshes. There were hermit crabs, stingrays and catch and release croakers off the pier when there was nothing else to do but fish.
Every morning we would take Grand pop's boat (Hoddy Toddy ((google it)) under the bridge that marked the Florida/Alabama border and head out to the Gulf Coast. Out there we caught Spanish and King Mackerel, Red snapper and the occasional Redfish. The kids (us) scaled, gutted and fileted everything and we ate it all, generally that evening. What we didn't eat went into my Grandmother's freezer dated and labeled for future cooking.
It won't come as any surprise to anyone when I tell you that place doesn't exist anymore. I'm not particularly nostalgic (honestly), and I'm no Luddite, but I am rendered continually speechless by the inability or unwillingness to fix the Deep Horizon oil leak. After days of reasonable reporting and a fair bit of top notch investigative journalism I have learned these things.
1. Offshore US oil rigs are not required to have an important failsafe measure called an acoustic trigger that could have simply and inexpensively stopped this leak (500K per switch is not much in oil company terms).
2. There are ways to stop this leak (namely through the use of explosives) that EVERYONE involved seems unwilling to try because it would entail abandoning the oil field.
So here I am feeling very alone in the fact that no one with the ability to truly effect this situation seems to recognize the severity of the spill, or feel compelled to take drastic action to stop it.
And so I am watching the slow motion destruction of the place where I grew up, that I was really hoping to one day share with my children.
That is incredibly sad, for all of us.
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