Two great old versions of one great old song. Check it out:
People knew how to sing in those days.
And they knew a thing or to about coiffure, both sexes.
(I can’t get the embed thing to work, but that won’t stop me.)
Music
Johnny Cash Would Have Understood James Webb
Spaced over several months, Netflix has been bringing us a series of Johnny Cash – at Montreaux, in Scotland, in Austin. Tonight we saw him in Ireland. These have been enjoyable and at times riveting. They tend to repeat themselves, but on this tour he clearly moved his audience (silently mouthing the words) with one he didn’t sing in the others, “Forty Shades of Green.”
Leftists always have great songs. Which is a problem.
Tatyana left a comment on this post, linking to a great old communist war song. You cannot tell me that song does not straighten your back and lift your chin.
If you are in the grip of a crazy revolutionary vision, it can be expressed artistically, even if the practical application will be a disaster.
I can sing every word of Billy Bragg’s version of The World Turned Upside Down, and I get a tear in my eye and chill every time I hear it, even though I know it is utter, destructive nonsense.
Nationalism is the other great source of songs, of course, for similar reasons. You can calmly and sanely tell the Irish that being part of the UK would be better for them. But if you sing The Minstrel Boy and have tears in your eyes, and sing O’Donnell Abu, about making the proud Saxon feel Erin’s avenging steel, such sane arguments turn to dust. You join the IRA.
No one can make a great song about how the world is better if there are secure property rights, and people make mutually advantageous contracts, etc., etc. Even the anti-Corn Law League had to sing about the evil lords stealing the people’s bread. There will always be songs about Joe Hill, but there will never be songs about entrepreneurs who take risks and create jobs.
It cannot be done. Why? I think our emotional natures were formed in the millennia before modernity and we still respond to sentiments of solidarity which served us well on the savannah fighting saber-tooth tigers. We are hardwired for Paleolithic conditions.
Good governance cannot be sung about. But people need things to sing about.
This is a real problem for people who love freedom in a sensible, empirical, small-l libertarian kind of way. It has no songs. It does not grab the heart. Our enemies will always be more powerful in this department as a result. Too bad. But I see this as a condition to be worked with, not a problem which can have a solution.
Happy New Year
It has been a bittersweet year for us – but isn’t it always? One more daughter married, two moved farther away, the third becoming a woman so quickly.
In this year, one of my joys has been the companionship with both the Chicagoboyz and the Chicagoboyz readers – somehow we are becoming a community defined by the most abstract and yet important of links. Thanks to you all for this year – and thanks to Jonathan, may he long have the patience to keep this rowdy house party going.
And Youtube, with all its faults, brings us memories before most of us (even me) have many of them. And Burns’ lyrics.
Burns’ verse:
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind ?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne ?
CHORUS:For auld lang syne, my dear,for auld lang syne,we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,for auld lang syne.And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp !
And surely I’ll be mine !
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
CHORUSWe twa hae run about the braes,
and pou’d the gowans fine ;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit,
sin’ auld lang syne.
CHORUSWe twa hae paidl’d in the burn,
frae morning sun till dine ;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
sin’ auld lang syne.
CHORUSAnd there’s a hand, my trusty fiere !
And gies a hand o’ thine !
And we’ll tak a right gude-willie-waught,
for auld lang syne.
CHORUS
Remembering Mancini on the Little Tube
Well, hot women’s groups attract Lex, but here’s a cool note: V. 1, first 8 episodes of Peter Gunn. (Netflix) For those of you of a certain age or a certain temperament, this may reverberate.
In 1989, Blake Edwards tried to revive the series (with Pearl Bailey as “Mother”!); apparently it wasn’t bad, but film noir only worked in a kind of postmodernist way by then. Tonight I forced my youngest daughter to watch episodes from the old series (1958-1961) and she found herself captivated (as I knew she would be) by the music and the poetry reading in smoky bars. This seems like a foreign world to her. I try to convince her that we were cool, then – but she doesn’t believe me. Of course, we weren’t. I was younger than she is now. And she laughs at much of it – the smoking, for instance, seemed so cool and now seems so absurd.