This song came about in response to an informal competition in an online songwriter’s workshop.
Contestants are to submit a newly written song along with a one line description of the subject of the song.
The winner gets his song in rotation in the stereo of the family car of the guy who conceived the competition. This is primarily for the amusement of his children, who like to get one line summaries of what each song they hear is about. (Example per Dad: “Warren Zevon, ‘Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner’- This song is about a soldier who gets killed and comes back without his head.”)
The title of this song, of course, is disingenuous.
This song is actually about… this song.
And, of course, the songwriter. The songwriter in the song. The fictional songwriter.
lyrics This Song’s About My Baby
This song’s about my baby This song’s about how I feel This song’s not some fairy tale This song’s about something real
This song is about
3 minutes long
It took twice that long
to write
This song is pretty
much a waste of time
and that pretty much sums up tonight
Hell that pretty much sums up my life
I’ve been writing the same song
since you said good bye
and I wrote it again tonight
This song’s about my baby This song’s about how I feel This song’s not some fairy tale This song’s about something real
This song won’t
end no wars
this song won’t save the world
This song’s just
another song
about some guy who lost some girl
From the moment I cut my hair at the end of the summer in 1973, I’d felt something was coming. Where long hair had once been a sign that the person under it might be nice or might be weird or crazy — but at least they’d be interesting — it had by then become a badge of mindless conformity.
Then, one day in late 1974 or maybe ’75, I heard an advance copy of Patty Smith’s harrowing story of a school hallway murder, Horses. It was electrifying: a visceral, stream of consciousness puzzle, shattered images of a sudden violent crime seen from the vicitim’s point of view, weaving The Land of a Thousand Dances into the ending with deadpan irony.
Music like that was hard to come at the time. We waited. We hung on rumors. A single. A poem printed in a minor magazine. In time a few more bands emerged, Television, some quirky bands in LA. And then, the Sex Pistols. Bam. A badly recorded single. Another. And a name for it all that had been hanging around as a rock crit term for at least a few years, usually reserved for post-hippie bands like Iggy and the Stooges: punk rock.
I bought my first electric guitar and amp ($20 and $15 respectively from the pastor of a church near the gas station I was working at) the week the Sex Pistols album came out on import in the US. I brought the amp home the same day a buddy and I picked up the import. After listening to the album all the way through — loud — I turned the guitar and amp up all the way and achieved a level of freedom and exultation I’ve rarely known and never recaptured in the same way. The sheer exultation of pure, raw, noise. A great feeling. Everyone should do it once.
Flash forward a few years and I have a punk band called Machine Dog. I’m going to every punk or no wave show I can get to in LA. Only a year or so before, in 1979, I’d declared punk rock officially dead — reminding my friends that the hippies had held a none-too-celebretory ceremony called The Funeral for the Hippie in 1968, just a year after the fabled Summer of Love. And, as I pointed out to my younger punk rock pals — they were pretty much smack on. From there on out it was the downhill slide to flower decals and polyester flares.
In ’79 it was feeling grim. Venues were disappearing. The 50 core punks and the maybe 150 or so sympathizers that comprised the regular audience (we’d see each other everywhere) were dispirited.
And then something odd happened. New people showed up out of nowhere. A lot of them still had long hair but within months it was typically cut off to a mohawk or buzz. The pogo pit was quickly taken over by jocks and surfers turned punk. The LA Times christened the new, super-agro moshing favored by the newcomers as The Slam, aka slam dancing.
Shows that would have drawn 50 people in ’78 or ’79 were suddenly drawing hundreds — and drawing the less-than-amused attention of the cops, as well. The punk paradigm had shifted and a lot of the original punks and fellow travelers had moved on. Where a few years before you rarely saw someone at a show you hadn’t seen before — by 1980 and ’81, it was becoming unusual to see a familiar face.
At that point I realized that I’d watched the same thing happen in the discotheque scene from around ’74 and ’75 — there was a burst of wildness and a sense of freedom — and then the scene seemed to all but die by ’76. When I heard there was a movie set in the disco milieu due for release in 1978 all I could think was — wow, how could your timing be so bad. Disco’s are dead.
Uh huh.
A decade later, I’d watch — this time from a safe distance — as house/rave culture in Europe and grunge in America would go through a similar germination and blossom cycle.
But, of course, what was really happening was parallel to the beats, the hippies, any hipster scene. For a few golden moments, an enthusiastic culture of creativity, experimentation, and exploration grows in pockets/geodemographic nodules, cross pollinating with others. But bright lights burn quickly. Relentlessly creative, restless types get bored, die, evolve, move on… but usually not without leaving behind the spores of that subculture that take root once again.
And it is usually that second wave that “puts it on the map,” economically and demographically. I used to call it the K-Mart Phase of Cultural Paradigm Shift. Today, of course, we’d have to change that to Walmart.
Went to the whiskey just the other night
did a little dance that I learned in the Times
Beach punk made a grab for my date
smashed by beer bottle right in his face
La La La La La La
Aint it great how the media
regulate your culture — tell you just who you are
10,000 kids and they just found themselves
cause they saw the punk report on the Evening News
La La La La La La
They threw me out on my face but that didn’t phase me
cause The Dance is Art and Art ain’t free
Well, I’m proud to be a Punk and I proved that’s true
when I pogo’ed through the window of the Emergency Room
Just a quick heads up… I posted this song back in October — and I was a little embarrassed by how preachy and, perhaps, over-earnest it is. But, based on positive feedback and comments from colleagues, I decided to move it (at least for the time being) to my band’s official download page.
You can hear it on the TK Major page at Soundclick.
lyrics This Used to Be America
This used to be America This used to be the land of the free This used to be the United States but nothin’s like it used to be
we put ourselves in the hands of fools
threw our birthrights away
put the bottom line at the top of our world
let the god of greed hold sway
it takes 200,000 bullets
to kill one enemy
that what the DoD numbers say**
if you don’t count peripheral casualties
Americans don’t torture
We don’t kill recklessly
thats what the man in the white house says
that’s how we want it to be
but it’s gettin’ pretty hard to believe
blowback’s a bitch
but how could we know?
though our experts kept telling us so
we fed the tiger we got by the tail
and now we just can’t bear to let him go
This used to be America This used to be the land of the free but I swear it’s not too late for the United states we can still be who we know we should be
** DOD – Department of Defense; this figure of 200,000 bullets for every enemy death in Afghanistan and Iraq is based on US Department of Defense estimates of enemy soldiers killed and the amount of ordnance used in training and combat. Yes… one FIFTH OF A MILLION BULLETS for every enemy soldier killed. Of course, this does not count “peripheral casualties” — for which estimates range from about 25,000- 30,000 (more than the number of enemy killed — this is the US government’s estimate) to as many as a 100,000. Of course, that does not include those who died unnecessarly from malnutrition, privation, and other war-related causes which some well-grounded studies have suggested range from 500,000 to one million extra deaths.
When I saw the article on MSNBC’s website, yesterday, I knew I had to write this song.
Of course, teen pregnancy is no joking matter.
And I’d like to think that the young people at the heart of the gossip blog post above do take their lives and the creation of a third life seriously.
But I gotta tell you — I had to laugh when I saw that Lynn Spears — Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears’ mom — was putting aside her book project indefinitely to address this latest Spears family crisis. The subject of her book? Tips on parenting…
