Saturday 1 October 2011

a dinosaur victrola listening to buck owens

I can distinctly recall being informed that all Creedence Clearwater Revival songs were references to the Vietnam War, years and years while listening to Looking Out My Back Door on the radio while visiting some friends in Reardon, Virginia. This already sounds like a bit of dialogue from The Big Lebowski or someone trying to pass an urban legend off as his own. I do not know if that association is the absolute truth but I remember it being quite a revelation to start to peer through the lyrics and suddenly understand that a lot of music is about drugs, protest, Nixon and Watergate-gate. Folk and protest music has sometimes, I think, gone underground, and I never really thought about it beforehand, but I suppose that the rap genre is the legal successor in some ways to the anti-war movement and all the artists who used their talent to weave an allegory that was more subtle. Rap is excused, of course, and can be more direct.
In between-time, there was Don Henley’s (the Eagles--there’s Big Lebowski) All She Wants To Do Is Dance that was apparently in protest to America’s 1984 counter-revolutionary support and occupation of Nicaragua about the hedonists CIA spooks stationed there who could not see the bigger political picture. Maybe that level of allegory and deference was too subtle, too polite, but good music always surpasses its immediate context.