I love Talkin Bout a Revolution, but “we’re going to rise up and overthrow the system” was not exactly a novel musical theme by the late 1980s. https://t.co/QHYivpHvGL
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) February 7, 2024
February 7, 2024
About that revolution....
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
61 comments:
Grow a fucking pair.
The revolution will not be televised. It will be beamed into your Apple Vision Pro. $3499 not including taxes or fees. Free shipping to lower 48.
I give Dave credit. Now that the like minded ‘transgressives’ are the cultural equivalent of the Roman Empire and a swarm of locusts it can be very difficult to articulate a position of upstart underdogs…
Having experienced that era at the tip of the spear I don’t recall anything more than a gee wiz nostalgia of Chapman’s rendition. I suppose that’s because being a run of the mill revolutionary was so popular then…
Everything is new when you are , say, 12 to 25. Mentally or in years.
Revolution wasn't exactly a new theme by the the 1880s, too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848
Many of the German "Forty-Eighters" that immigrated to America and had a huge impact here, including the Abolishionist movement.
Pre 1848 German American generations were called Grau (grey), while post 1848 generations were called Gruen (green).
the left forget that Reagan won in a landslide and he was a very popular president.
as is usual with the whiny communist left. Oh they were so oppressed! Of course to this day leftists buy the lie that Reagan spread Aids.
Revolution has historically been a recycled musical theme.
after the revolution.. there won't be no fast cars
More contemporary and more-than-transgressive talk about Revolution, from South Africa's EFF party leader Julius Malema:
"must never be scared to kill. A revolution demands that at some point there must be killing, because the killing is part of a revolutionary act"
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1755266935703617613?s=20
The Revolution has proven to be complete bullshit anyway. Corrupt fascist reactionaries looting the public purse with an abandon that would have shamed the people they replaced. Which would be just typical self-interest if they weren’t trying to control everyone as well.
Writing that, I realize I’m being naive. The control is necessary to enable the looting.
Written when she was 16 ar prep school on scholarship. “Across the Lines” on the same album. Two great protest songs, both warnings.
I love Fast Car but always liked Talkin’ About a Revolution better, even though I strongly disagree with the politics behind it. And yes, “revolution” was a major trope of rock music in the 60’s, 70’s and no doubt up to today (where I’ve lost the plot). Just think about the Beatles with “Revolution,” although that is a rather conservative call for revolution (“but if you talk about destruction, then don’t you know that you can count me out” and “but if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow”). The Who said it best—“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” Won’t get fooled again (I wish!)!
They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
If Trump is criminally convicted in DC Court, America will have its Bastille moment.
The MSNBC clowns need to think about that.
Let's see....that song came out in 1988, which was just about the time MTV/Kurt Loder started hard selling pre-canned Radical Chic.....so, yeah!
Fast Car is a great song. I'm sorry it wasn't around when I was young. When I was young, I liked "Dirty Old Town" by the Pogues. There's any underlying message of hope in Chapman's song. She was probably influenced by Reagan's sunny optimism. Not so much with "Dirty Old Town". It was probably written when there was a Labor government in Britain.
I'm not a popular music fan. I just listened to Fast Cars for the first time and concluded
- it tells quite a sad story
- the lyrics don't rhyme very well
- the melody is close to a monotone
Both Sides Now otoh is quite beautiful.
Sports editor at The Nation. I bet he covers soccer most of he time.
Grow a fucking pair.
Or, you know, "remodel" a pair.
The song peaked at No. 75 in the United States as opposed to its predecessor, "Fast Car" which reached No. 6. It also charted in several other countries, reaching the top 40 in Austria, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and New Zealand.
Not exactly a "going global, here comes the revolution" kind of success (also note that the revolution did not, in fact, come (although it seems to be upon us now, much to our detriment)).
Jesus. If she could sing and play a guitar, and wasn't so butt ugly, she could probably have a career as a popular entertainer. Didn't she go to Harvard or something?
Mister, we could use a man like Ronald Reagan again!
Don't worry be happy, provoked violent reactions in Bloom County,
i never even realized that Tracy ever even Tried to have another hit.
I spent the morning trying to remember what line in Fast Car talked about a revolution..
Since we're talking One Hit Wonders of the '80's and '90's, let's compare and contrast:
Walkin' on Sunshine; with My Future's So Bright, I've Gotta Wear Shades
Seriously.. let's!
Isn't the lyric 'talkin' about a revolution sounds like a whisper'? I have the CD and haven't listened for a long long time.
People who talk really don't get very far cause nobody hears them.
Jupiter said...
“Jesus. If she could sing and play a guitar, and wasn't so butt ugly, she could probably have a career as a popular entertainer. Didn't she go to Harvard or something?”
But enough about Bob Dylan.
I base all my voting choices on the Grannys.
i never even realized that Tracy ever even Tried to have another hit.
"Give Me One Reason" is her biggest US hit. Released in 1995, it reached #3 on the Billboard Hot 100.
In DR Spanish If you want to put something way off into the future you say “cuando venga la revolución”.
It’s a joke.
Another one was “la semana de los tres jueves” translates as “the week with three Thursdays”.
Certainly lots of revolution talk in those days. Billy Bragg put out a successful record in 1986. Luckily, most of the revolution (at least in the US) was just "talkin'" in those days.
My friend bought the CD when it came out. He listened to it on the way to the mall, parked, shopped, came out, and his car had been broken-into. His stuff, including the CD, was stolen. He took it as a sign.
Chapman was revolting against the Reagan Amnesty of 1986.
She was MAGA before Trump
An example of the use of “cuando venga la revolución”. I lent one of my cousins some money back in 2011. If a family member asks, has so and so payed you back? When do you think he’s going to pay you back? My answer would be, “cuando venga la revolución” and we would have a good laugh.
No, joe Biden is corrupt, the left has not forgotten that Reagan was re-elected in a landslide... The right seems to forget the days when being a Reagan Republican actually meant something.... which it does not now. No morals, no scruples, no decency anymore. The proliferation of the MTG's the Matt Gaetz's of the world would have horrified Ronald Reagan. Trashy mouths, non-existent morals, just low life people would have given him and his supporters agita. Are the Dems any better, heck no. But that was and is not the issue.
you should aspire to be more like Reagan and less like DJT
Vicki from Pasadena
---If Trump is criminally convicted in DC Court, America will have its Bastille moment. [DaveB]
The Bastille, now that would be something. Using our own history, it seems to me we're in the Bleeding Kansas years. Not sure which one. Another theft of the election would definitely be a Ft. Sumter moment.
"...Bastille moment." Overdue if you ask me, Dave.
Convicting Trump would just add him to the list of J-6 prisoners. We are all J-6 prisoners. Justice is just a dream.
Our votes were stolen in the dark of night and our courts looked away
Sentence first - Verdict afterwards.
In some cases, three years and counting without bail or trial
Off with their heads!
RIP, Azhli Babbitt
Curiouser and curiouser...
If the news media had gone down the Rabbit Hole with Alice, they would't have asked a single question - just praised the wack jobs running the place.
Dylan did not go to Harvard.
But I have been thinking I may have been a little harsh on Chapman. Her guitar-playing is primitive, her melodies are almost non-existent and her lyrics are uninspiring and uninspired. But she doesn't sing about being a prostitute, and I gather that her performances do not include twerking. So there's that.
More impotent threats of violence from the Obesity Army of the Confederate States of America.
They gonna drown soy boys in their blub ber (Jim Gaffigan pronunciation)
Blogger Dave Begley said...
If Trump is criminally convicted in DC Court, America will have its Bastille moment.
The MSNBC clowns need to think about that.
Was what happened in 1776 an insurrection or a revolution?
What is the difference?
Laying awake last night thinking about it, I wonder if the difference is point of view? "Our revolution" (Good) but "their insurrection" (Bad)
John Henry
victoria said...
"...The proliferation of the MTG's the Matt Gaetz's of the world would have horrified Ronald Reagan. Trashy mouths, non-existent morals, just low life people would have given him and his supporters agita... [Y]ou should aspire to be more like Reagan and less like DJT"
Ronald Reagan replied...
"The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so."
--- The right seems to forget the days when being a Reagan Republican actually meant something.... which it does not now. ...you should aspire to be more like Reagan and less like DJT [LaBelleVictoria]
Oh, thank you! That was good!!
Vicki from Pasadena reminds us of Reagan's virtues and quality. And our deficiencies, compared to him. It's true what they say... they start them off at Hitler, and eventually bring them up to Jesus of Nazareth. After they are dead 20 years.
Do you have Rich's number? You and "Rich" should be doing a podcast. I smell mucho dinero there.
I don’t get it.
you should aspire to be more like Reagan and less like DJT
LOL. Who wants to bet Vicki was trashing Reagan back then just as much as she bashes other Republicans today.
Still got the signs from your Sane/Freeze protests?
More impotent threats of violence from the Obesity Army of the Confederate States of America.
It's the ones who aren't talking that you need to worry about, Howie.
Ever think of that?
If Dementia Ronnie was President, he would get those hostages out of Gaza luckily split by selling advanced weapon systems to the Mad Mullahs.
They need to see themselves as heroes fightin' 'gainst The Man. It wasn't in the least transgressive. It was normal NPR stuff. I apologize for the length, but this was from Eugene Volokh years ago.
I wanted to get the source for the "dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe," so I tracked it down to Tom Wolfe's "The Intelligent Coed's Guide to America," republished in Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (1976). In the process, I found a more extended discussion that struck me as worth repeating. Here's the relevant excerpt, from pp. 115-17 of the hardcover edition; it reports on a panel discussion at Princeton in 1965, in which the participants included Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist magazine, Günter Grass, and Wolfe:
The next thing I knew, the discussion was onto the subject of fascism in America. Everybody was talking about police repression and the anxiety and paranoia as good folks waited for the knock on the door and the descent of the knout on the nape of the neck. I couldn't make any sense out of it. . . . This was the mid-1960's. . . . [T]he folks were running wilder and freer than any people in history. For that matter, Krassner himself, in one of the strokes of exuberance for which he was well known, was soon to publish a slight hoax: an account of how Lyndon Johnson was so overjoyed about becoming President that he had buggered a wound in the neck of John F. Kennedy on Air Force One as Kennedy's body was being flown back from Dallas. Krassner presented this as a suppressed chapter from William Manchester's book Death of a President. Johnson, of course, was still President when it came out. Yet the merciless gestapo dragnet missed Krassner, who cleverly hid out onstage at Princeton on Saturday nights. . . .
Support [for Wolfe's view that fascism wasn't coming to America] came from a quarter I hadn't counted on. It was Grass, speaking in English.
"For the past hour, I have my eyes fixed on the doors here," he said. "You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow."
Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, "You really don't have so much to worry about." He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: "You American intellectuals — you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!"
He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.
"If Trump is criminally convicted in DC Court, America will have its Bastille moment."
No it won't. Collectively, we don't have the backbone any more. We'll lay down and take it while our betters tell us, "Good, it's the right thing to do."
you should aspire to be more like Reagan and less like DJT
Look everyone! “Strange new respect”. Sure to be wildly discordant with what Vicki was saying about Reagan in 1988.
Am I the only one who notices that Chapman stole the signature riff in "Fast Car" from John Mellencamp's "Jack and Diane?"
I just read the lyrics to Fast Car. I see it as an intensely personal story about a woman who couldn’t deal
With her drunken dad any longer, took off with her lover to get away from that life but sadly ended up married to a drunk just like her dad. What is so societally transgressive about that. It seems rather pedestrian to me.
Howard said...
“If Dementia Ronnie was President, he would get those hostages out of Gaza luckily split by selling advanced weapon systems to the Mad Mullahs.”
Since Dementia Joey is President, he ignored those hostages in Gaza luckily split and gave billions to the Mad Mullahs no strings attached.
Jim at: you mean like those few hundred cosplay insurrection tourists who are recanting their core beliefs and crying like babies because actions have consequences? Nothing to fear but fear itself, Jim. I'll leave the paranoid conspiracy ideation to you guys living in a world created by AI bots and social media algorithms.
Nobody was planning a revolution in 1988 but that's what Boomer music execs wanted to hear.
Guy Clark wrote and released "L. A. Freeway" about twenty years prior to Chapman's "Fast Car". They're pretty much the same song. And, they are both great songs. As a matter of fact, they're pretty much American songs. One by one kind o person - a bit older than me. And, one by another kind of person, a little younger than me.
Dave Begley said...
If Trump is criminally convicted in DC Court, America will have its Bastille moment.
The MSNBC clowns need to think about that.
Well, that makes sense. After all, the Bastille was a prison and a place of detention for important people and I suppose folks who considered themselves so important that the rule of law just doesn't apply.
Sadly it appears that our friend Dave the lawyer has never attached any significance to Trump's January 6 coup attempt.
Howard said...
If Dementia Ronnie was President, he would get those hostages out of Gaza luckily split by selling advanced weapon systems to the Mad Mullahs.
Howard didn't know Ronaldus Magnus at all. Dutch's single military action was the invasion of Grenada, which wasn't fighting, just occupying. But he ended the Soviet Union by inventing SDI Star Wars. The Iran-Contra sale of arms scandal did not involve Reagan directly. Ollie North, now NRA President, was involved up to his ears in that fiasco.
Grenada was a distraction from the Marine Barracks bombing in Beirut. It was a much larger version of Clinton bombing an aspirin factory after Lewinsky.
I think we can conclude, judging by by Howards timely insights, that Jan.6 was definitely NOT an insurrection.
I find her rather dull myself. Pop fluff isn't really my thing.
There is a delight in the pedestrian whether it be a walk or a poem.
Howard's mad about something.
But I have been thinking I may have been a little harsh on Chapman. Her guitar-playing is primitive, her melodies are almost non-existent and her lyrics are uninspiring and uninspired.
That's part of her appeal, though. Her songs are sing-along-able for the average person.
Post a Comment