Thursday, October 10, 2019

Thursday night talkers

As I write this, Donald Trump is speaking at the Target Center in Minneapolis, and Dick Cheney is speaking at Eaton Chapel at my alma mater, Beloit College. I'm not particularly fond of either of these gentlemen, but their respective enemies are the sort of people who should never have power, either.

Lately I've been listening to a country singer named Sturgill Simpson. Here's a blistering performance of his on, of all places, Saturday Night Live:


You can tell he's country by his proto-Waylon Jennings (about a half-octave higher) voice, but this arrangement gives you a Sprinsteenian raveup and a little Blues Brothers, too. And the lyrics are pure pox on everyone's house:

Well nobody’s looking up to care about a drone
All too busy looking down at our phone
Ego’s begging for food like a dog from a feed
Refreshing obsessively until our eyes start to bleed
They serve up distractions and we eat them with fries
Until the bombs fall out of our fucking skies

But he's not done:

Turn off the TV
Turn off the news
There's nothing to see here
They’re serving the blues
Bullshit on my TV
Bullshit on my radio
Hollywood telling me how to be me
The bullshit’s got to go

Alas, it ain't going anywhere.

2 comments:

Gino said...

The Preseident's speech last night was a barn burner. I hope you caught some of it.

3john2 said...

I turned off my TV a long time ago except for watching sports. The radio is pretty much gone now, too, since I don't commute and I have Pandora, Amazon Music and my iTunes playlists on my phone in my car. I'll leave the radio on for quick trips, but usually turn it off because of all the commercials. The last movie we saw in the theater was the Avengers finale. We have Netflix and Amazon Prime, but I haven't streamed anything in more than two weeks.

Yet somehow I still know that the Portland Trailblazers won't do business with Israel any more, but will with China.