Dubya And Pop

Fuck all that "heightening-the-contradictions" bullshit. What MM so airily accepts in that premise is that Americans will unwillingly suffer from the consequences of a Bush Jr. presidency and that this ultimately a Good Thing: people die so that art may live. It's a concept so dehumanizing that nowadays not even the most rabid Christian Right Washington insider would voice anything similar.

There have always been the somewhat belabored connections between rock & roll and the repressive fifties; the Kennedy assasination and the Beatles invasion; Vietnam and "the sixties"; punk rock and the collapse of Britain's liberal consensus; Bush's war and the year punk broke eggs rather than just sucking them. But much of this is lazy armchair theorizing. (Kennedy-Beatles? Please.) Good times also prompt confrontational pop as well: it's perhaps more accurate to say that what really set the stage for rock & roll and its unkempt and multi-racial racket wasn't McCarthy or the A-bomb so much as a post-war boom economy that put money into the pockets of teenagers and heightened the expectations of an American black underclass. And in the post-boom seventies, what we Americans got wasn't rage and fear (aside from the pockets of weirdness in Cleveland, LA and NY and -- O.K., big exception -- the relatively brief post-There's A Riot Goin' On moment in black music) but a top 40 of such jaw-dropping banality that it'll bewilder and delight ironized pseudo-bohos like myself for decades to come.

If Dubya fucks up...excuse me, I mean if Dubya's handlers fuck up and actually prompts a confrontational pop moment, I hope it takes a very different form from the Mountain Dew commercial we've been living in the last half-decade. Maybe we'll finally get the terrorist-chic boy-band you hoped for in alt.music.alternative, oh those many years ago.

The next four years, you won't see confrontation because of a US Senate divided 50/50 so he can't pass much laws.

What you'll see is four years of overseas blunders (he's only ever been overseas twice - both times to Mexico).....and maybe someone might release a novelty single in America about a blunder.

However, and contrary to similarly smug liberal press myth, there is a huge difference in the west of England between New Labour (the Basingstokisation of the countryside) and the Lib Dems (past-into- future distilled to perfection). So fuck Billy Bragg.

Ha! If only...

Hmmmm.

And with this, we are happy to declare the polls for World's Most Tragicomic Understatement Ever officially closed. Thank you to all contenders.

-- Forksclovetofu

Well, as I said on the ILE thread that indirectly revived this -- IT PRESAGES "GEORGE W. PUSSY"!!

And with this, we are happy to declare the polls for World's Most Tragicomic Understatement Ever officially closed. Thank you to all contenders.

Haha no kidding