Category: Music

Another Shocking Republican Scandal! ‘Redneck Romeo’ Jason Aldean Goes Wild

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While we were at Mitt Romney’s rally in Toledo last week, I remarked to Ali Akbar that the warm-up music for the Republican’s events includes some country-rock songs that aren’t quite what you’d usually associate with GOP family values, for example Luke Bryan’s “Country Girl (Shake It for Me)“:

Get up on the hood of my daddy’s tractor,
Up on the toolbox it don’t matter,
Down on the tailgate, girl, I can’t wait
To watch you do your thing.
Shake it for the young bucks sittin’ in the honky-tonks,
For the rednecks rockin’ ’till the break of dawn
For the DJ spinning that country song
C’mon c’mon c’mon . . .

Well, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s just slightly incongruous to hear it while nice Republican folks are assembling for a presidential campaign event.

Another of the country rock tunes on the Romney warm-up soundtrack is Jason Aldean’s “My Kinda Party“:

Oh baby, you can find me
In the back of a jacked up tailgate,
Sittin’ ’round watchin’ all these pretty things
Get down in that Georgia clay.
And I’ll find peace
In the bottom of a real tall cold drink,
Chillin’ with some Skynyrd and some old Hank.
Let’s get this thing started.
It’s my kind of party.

Again — not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s upbeat downhome music, and if it helps get the good old boys fired up, great. But the media loves to make wild guilt-by-association charges and you’ve got to be careful. Today, while I was looking at updates for the story about the GOP staffer partying down with Lindsay Lohan (the staffer once had his photo taken with Paul Ryan), I saw another story about a shocking celebrity scandal:

Country music superstar Jason Aldean says his very open public display of affection with a former “American Idol” contestant — who is NOT his wife — was a huge, drunken mistake.
Jason released a statement today, apologizing for his indiscretion, after TMZ posted pictures early this morning of the country singer and “A.I.” castoff Brittany Kerr getting up close and personal — hugging, touching, and flirting at a very popular, crowded bar on the Sunset Strip.
Jason — who has been married since 2001 — says, “The truth is that I screwed up. I had too much to drink, let the party get out of hand and acted inappropriately at a bar.”
He says, “I ultimately ended up embarrassing my family and myself.” And then adds, “I left alone and that’s the end of the story.”

See there? One of these hillbilly yodelers gets rowdy and starts making out with some floozy in a bar, and next thing you know, BuzzFeed and Politico will be all over it, demanding that the Romney campaign comment on the incident. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure Mitt would get a 2-point bump in the Ohio polls if he began his next speech by saying, “You can find me in the back of a jacked-up tailgate . . .”

 

@hicaliber75 — Who Knew Conservative Rap Existed?

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by Smitty

I really don’t get much out of hip-hop. But even the non-aficionado can appreciate this, and you may know some hipsters who are best reached through material like this:

The artist has apparently fallen on harder times than most, via email from Chris Cassone:

Hi Caliber (Cal) needs a lift. We met when he followed us at 9-12 and at several other big events. You can hear him on Jason Mattera’s radio show every week.
A young strapping guy with a ten year old daughter who performs with him, Cal developed MS last year and is debilitating so badly that he can’t work. So his album sales are his only hope.

More goodness:

new album-free download http://www.enemyofthestate.bandcamp.com
donations for album via paypal [email protected]

Clockwork Angels

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— by Wombat-socho


Back in February, Smitty mentioned that Kevin J. Anderson would be writing a novel to accompany the new Rush* album Clockwork Angels. Well, thanks to a librarian friend, I got hold of an advance reader copy. It’s not bad.


It’s an odd little book, much less Randian than I would have thought it would be, given that Neil Peart was quite the Objectivist back in the day. Anderson does a very good job of spinning a bildungsroman out of Rush’s album without making it seem like a disconnected string of songfics, and while some of the characters may be not much more than thick cardboard, at least there is something more to them than a bare description and a few lines of dialogue. This may sound odd, but I think this wouldn’t be a bad YA novel; there’s a good philosophical argument in there about avoiding extremes and going off to tend to your own affairs, but you’re not being beaten over the head with it. I liked it and would recommend it, especially for the younger folks.


As for the album, well, it’s no 2112; I haven’t been following Rush closely for the past dozen years or so, but they seem to be not wearing their Objectivism on their sleeves so much as they used to. They’ve lost nothing on the technical side, and artistically – well, it’s a nice little rock opera about finding one’s pace in the world. You could do worse, and others have.


(A shorter version of this was originally published here.)

Investing Yourself

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by Smitty

An item in the blogs yesterday talked about snooty eating.

After viewing a few organic foods, comfort foods, or control foods, participants who were exposed to organic foods volunteered significantly less time to help a needy stranger, and they judged moral transgressions significantly harsher than those who viewed nonorganic foods. These results suggest that exposure to organic foods may lead people to affirm their moral identities, which attenuates their desire to be altruistic.

Wasn’t A Diabolical, Oldworld, Legendary Fascist also vegetarian? Not that there is any meat on the connecting bone between our Lefty friends and that monster, mind you.

The more interesting point I’ve noted in life is that the more of yourself you invest in, well, anything, the more tedious you can become. I went to a two-week school, years ago, on highland bagpipe. Jimmy McIntosh was instructing on the topic of Pìobaireachd (note how I opted for the most anal-retentive spelling, replete with snooty ‘i’). The musical form is strictly solo. Spitball thrower that I am, I inquired if two world-class pipers such as himself could do a duet. His head ‘sploded. There are less than 200 or so canonical examples of Ceòl Mór. Sure, it’s still written today, but it’s far cooler to decry the loss of the Noble Savage air breathed by the MacCrimmons, know ye not?

Done correctly, it constitutes performance art. You really have to have the instrument and the piper in top shape to rattle off one correctly. Done sloppily (e.g. by me) it’s a dog’s breakfast. Here is Dave Mason working out on The Massacre of Glecoe
You really have to commit to the full tune to understand how, acoustically, it’s like a blurry image that is slowly brought into focus as the variations get gnarlier. By the time it climaxes, the piper is truly getting the most out that instrument.

The thing is that these pieces take years to get any good at playing. Or at least it would me.

But the point of this post is that one of life’s challenges is to pick enjoyable things like the pipe, do them well, but not become insufferable about them. Writing software is another example I could have chosen, but which uses fewer Unicode vowels than Gaelic, proving software’s inferiority. 🙂