Welcome to the dance. Bar's to your left, bathrooms are up the stairs, dance floor's just over there. :)
I decided to set this blog up as a side project to A Quiet Storm after discovering that I had well over a CD's worth of politically-relevant songs for the mix CD I was planning. As many people trying to counter the neo-con power expansion have remarked, it can be very easy to become disheartened and feel powerless. When nothing you say or do seems to make any difference it can be very difficult to remain motivated to fighting the good fight.
Which is where this list comes in. (and yes, the name of this blog comes from the fantastic Boom Crash Opera song of the same name - "I will not give in" seems an appropriate refrain!). I'm going to write a little about songs that keep me going. Some are heavy, serious songs about important issues. Some are light-hearted mockery. Some are difficult to categorise. And some aren't traditional political songs at all, but songs that I've re-interpreted with political meaning.
Which brings me to the immortal Johnny Cash. I didn't become familiar with the genius of Cash until shortly before his death, but what I heard blew me away. And my favourite song to this day is still Man In Black. Why do I think this counts as a political song? And why on earth would I be idolising Johnny Cash's political messages when I'm a bleeding-heart lefty and he wasn't even close?
If you take a look at the lyrics, it's pretty clear that Cash believed in giving a helping hand to the less fortunate. In effect, he says "Until we start fixing these problems, I'm not going to let anybody forget about them". And what were those problems? Poverty. Lack of education. The abuse of judicial power for political reasons. People dying needlessly in the name of their country. No help being offered for people suffering as a result of drug use.
More importantly, Cash also says that just because some of us are doing well, it doesn't mean we no longer have no obligation to help the disadvantaged or less fortunate. Forget Republicans, freakin' Obama couldn't run on that platform today. And this from a performer who was on friendly terms with every US president from the early 70s until his death.
I think the current US and Australian administrations could learn a bit from listening to this song again. Particularly the bit about "the prisoner who has long paid for his crime / But is there because he's a victim of the times" ... guys, Johnny told you not to misuse the judicial branch for political maneuvering.
(Thanks to the amazingly brainy and funny Shakespeare's Sister and her post about what makes a progressive or a conservative - that second last paragraph in particular is just jaw-droppingly well-written and perfectly articulates what's wrong with right-wing radical control freaks calling themselves "conservatives" when they want to rip up the rules and re-write their own. It reminded me that I've been meaning to write about Cash for ages.)
Cheers,
QS.
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