The Legendary K.O., "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People"

This weekend saw the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, an ugly storm that revealed an ugly side of America. Our nation's slothful indifference to the needs of the people trapped in the region was nothing short of shocking, and Kanye West was right to call it as he saw it.

But the Legendary K.O. made one error in transferring Kanye's loaded soundbite to the song "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People": they rendered the refrain as "George Bush don't like black people. That's not the case. I'm sure there was no personal animus from W toward African Americans. What Kanye meant - and what I agree to be the case - was that black people in the Deep South, being on the whole poor and uninfluential, were simply off George's radar; dull man that he was, he just couldn't conceptualize that there were actual people down there in actual suffering. Their economic and social status defined their humanity in his and his administration's eyes. Like most Republicans in 2000s America, the only people George Bush was able to recognize as people were people who were a lot like him.

Alas for George and his GOP cronies, it's a different world: Your neighbor may well not be at all like you anymore. Your sister-in-law may well not be at all like you. Your boss may well not be at all like you. And, yes, your president may well not be at all like you. For those reactionaries and John Birch-inspired fearmongers, I have but one word in response: Deal.

And the comic tragedy, of course, is that "not at all like you" is a fallacy anyway. Not that you could tell a modern-day right-winger that.

Friday Funtime: Philly Soul!

While on a much-needed vacation, I stopped at a record store (yes! physical record stores still exist!) with the tasteful name of the Electric Fetus. (Well, at least there was no risk that the URL was already taken.) There, I got a marvy deal on a marvy box set: Love Train: The Sound of Philadelphia. Highly recommended for anyone who wants 4 discs of some of the '70s' very best orchestrations, melodies, and harmonies. For today's Friday Funtime, a sampling of some highlights:

1. The Delfonics, "Ready or Not, Here I Come"
2. Jerry Butler, "Only the Strong Survive"
3. Joe Simon, "Drowning in the Sea of Love"
4. MFSB, "Family Affair"
5. Billy Paul, "Thanks for Saving My Life"
6. The Trammps, "Where Do We Go From Here"
7. Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, "Wake Up Everybody"
8. The O'Jays, "I Love Music" (the L-O-N-G version!)
9. The Manhattans, "Kiss and Say Goodbye"
10. Dee Dee Sharp, "I'm Not in Love"

Steely Dan, "Pretzel Logic"

Yours truly is going off the grid for several days, so no updates until this time next week. Until then, here's one dedicated to Brother Argot, who celebrates a birthday today: his favorite song, Steely Dan's "Pretzel Logic." "They say the times are changing, but I just don't know."

Diana Ross, "Last Time I Saw Him"

My friend Mike has long suggested that the song was tailor-made for Helen Reddy - and Dottie West offered this minute-long tantalizing taste of what it would have sounded like in her honky-tonk hands - but the quaintly vaudevillian "Last Time I Saw Him" belongs to Diana Ross.

Well, her and the Electric Mayhem.

Friday Funtime: Woodstock at 40

What does Woodstock mean to me, as someone who was not yet alive when it happened and who has never attended a music festival of remotely similar scope? Simple: Proof that such a gathering can be done. When we find ourselves isolated from our neighbors, our families, our cow orkers, we can remind ourselves that occasionally there are moments when more than a few - say, a hundred-thousand-plus - find themselves not isolated, not alone at all, for three days of peace and music.

It can happen.

PS: My gratitude to the kind people who made these clips available for us.

1. Richie Havens, "Freedom / Motherless Child"
2. Arlo Guthrie, "Coming Into Los Angeles"
3. Santana, "Soul Sacrifice"
4. Jimi Hendrix, "Purple Haze"
5. Joe Cocker, "With a Little Help From My Friends"
6. Sly & the Family Stone, "I Want to Take You Higher"
7. Jefferson Airplane, "Won't You Try / Saturday Afternoon"
8. Crosby, Stills & Nash, "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes"
9. John Sebastian, "Darling Be Home Soon"
10. Country Joe and the Fish, "Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag"

Toby Keith, "American Ride"

Where the idiotic guy who advocated lynchings a few years ago (and I still haven't fully forgiven Willie Nelson for his involvement with that, though I guess going Top 40 with "Beer for My Horses" paid his bills for the decade well enough) returns with coded language about a "tidal wave come across the Mexican border" (oh noes! the immigrants are invading!) and cautions "don't get busted singing Christmas carols" (oh noes! the ACLU atheists are invading!) to play on some of Christofascist America's deepest fears. I suppose for racist Middle Americans, disbelief in diversity would indeed be cause for sarcastic appreciation of "this American ride." At least Toby left the President and other African-Americans out of this one.

Richard Marx, "Right Here Waiting"

Twenty years ago this week, I was on my way home from a summer "young scholars" science internship at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. The six-week session represented my first extended period of time on my own - and I quite enjoyed the liberating feeling.

My summer soundtrack consisted of my Monkees cassettes with only a smattering of Top 40 tunes (1989 being one of pop's least vital years): Prince's "Batdance," Simply Red's "If You Don't Know Me by Now," Neneh Cherry's sublime "Buffalo Stance." But the #1 song in the nation that August was the ambitiously coiffed Richard Marx's "Right Here Waiting."

Song's a little corny, to be sure. But a young friend of mine recently told me it was one of the very first songs he remembers from his childhood, one of the first he learned on piano, and that got me thinking: How strange it now seems, in an era when what passes for ballads have refrains like "birthday sex, birthday sex" and "you tha fuckin' shit, you tha fuckin' shit," to have a #1 song that's as appropriate for kids to sing as for adults. Today, music is only so innocent when it's marketed to Radio Disney, and that's a pity for all of us.

Beach Boys, "Never Learn Not to Love"

This weekend marked the 40th anniversary of one of the more unfortunate episodes in the annals of pop culture: the Tate-LaBianca murders, committed at the behest of Charles Manson by his family of followers. Manson was for a time an L.A. outsider, a fringe musician who befriended the Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson and thereby persuaded the band to record his song "Cease to Exist." Retitled "Never Learn Not to Love", the song proved passable at best, salvaged only by the hypnotic monotone hum of Bruce Johnston and Al Jardine's backing vox and the saintly corrupted visage of Dennis himself on the stoned lead.

The murder of Sharon Tate and her friends and the LaBiancas tells us little about Manson himself but much about his Family, whose murderous members took years to develop genuine remorse for their actions. It is well to realize how readily some people will obey, whether the leader is Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Charlie Manson or your figurehead of choice. We're largely a nation of followers, merely in search of someone to lead us on. May we learn to not be so easily led down paths that conflict with our own codes of conduct. It may be too late for Atkins, Van Houten and Krenwinkel to absorb this lesson, but not for the rest of us. Never learn not to trust your internal moral compass.

Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson, "The Man"

Oh, wow. Someone on the ILM board brought up a duet between Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson that not only had I never heard, I'd never heard of it. "The least famous of their three co-writes/duets," the gent argued, "is IMO the best of them all."

And damn if he isn't right. "The Girl Is Mine" and "Say, Say, Say" have gotten a bad rap over the years, and I think it's unfair - particularly in the case of the latter, whose defense I'll save for another day. They're good songs.

But allow me to extoll above them the virtues of "The Man," a tune on Macca's 1983 Pipes of Peace album. (The reason I'd never heard it: McCartney solo has never been an album guy for me. Give me the singles, and that's pretty much all I need.) The songwriting's credited to Paul and Michael both, but I suspect, given the vocal range it calls for, it was almost entirely MJ at work concocting this oblique observation of - a god? A golden child? A man who's found self-awareness and wisdom within?

Or perhaps, more specifically, the one who has the courage to venture out into unknown territory, and come back with experience and tales for those who cannot themselves leave. The heroic journey described by everyone from Joseph Campbell to Sandra Cisneros. Can you be the one to go where others cannot? Can I? Who can? This is the man.

PS: How this was not a single, I'll never understand.

Natalie Merchant, "Wonder"

A very dear friend of mine became a father late last week. With my congratulations to him and his wife on little Zaden's safe arrival, here's a tune of celebration. "Wonder" was Natalie Merchant's finest moment: on its surface, a testimony to a prodigy or golden child, but more broadly and effectively, a sincere expression of adulation for the arrival of any newborn as well as a note to self to always remain appreciative and strong, to help this loved one grow: "Know this child will be gifted / With love, with patience and with faith / She'll make her way."