EMAIL
PRINT
4 COMMENTS
Share and save this post:
Got a tip for a post?:
Email us | Anonymous form
Also in Election 2008
Dear Progressives: Stop Slamming Identity Politics
Jill Filipovic AlterNet
Global Warming Will Affect Water Crisis: Some Regions Win and Some Lose
Tara Lohan AlterNet
Glenn Beck: Walking Proof There Is No God
William K. Wolfrum Shakesville
McCain is using two John Mellencamp songs at his rallies, "Our Country" and "Pink Houses." Mellencamp has asked McCain to stop, having never given permission. In other words, they violated Mellencamp's intellectual property. More stupid, the songs are critical and ironic concerning Republican ideals. Shades of Reagan and Springsteen, eh?
Ronald Reagan is realtively infamous for having to be called by a rock star to cease and desist. Reagan's people (supposedly spurred on by a clueless George Will) used Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" as a campaign theme song in 1984 until Springsteen's people asked them to stop. I'm not sure any of Reagan's people understood the ironies of the use of that song, which is about the sourness the Vietnam adventure left in the soul of the working man of America. Yeah, it talks about how working stiffs got screwed by folks like Reagan, who supported that role.
Heck, even John McCain is featuring Reagan's support of the war in Vietnam in his ads. He's also using theme music, and he's also had the artist who recorded the music call and ask him to stop. McCain is using John Mellencamp's "Our Country" and "Pink Houses," also without permission. As it is noted in the Rolling Stone, if only they'd listened to the lyrics, they'd not have made this mistake.
Come on, the Radical Religious Right-wing Christian Clerics are not going to go for lyrics focused on keeping science in the classroom and helping out the poor! From Cowboylyrics.com:
There's room enough here
For science to live
And there's room enough here
For religion to forgive
And try to understand
All the people of this land
This is our country
From the east coast
To the west coast
Down the Dixie Highway
Back home
This is our country
That poverty could be
Just another ugly thing
And bigotry would be
Seen only as obscene
And the ones that run this land
Help the poor and common man
This is our country
Of course, that assumes the McCain people and those radical religious right leaders can understand the printed and sung word. I'm thinking they'd have a harder time figuring out the ironic stance Mellencamp takes towards the American Dream in "Pink Houses." Lyrics again provided by cowboylyrics.com:
Well, there's people and more people
What do they know, know, know
Go to work in some high rise
And vacation down at the Gulf of Mexico
Ooh, yeah
And there's winners and there's losers
But they ain't no big deal
'Cause the simple man, baby
Pays for thrills
The bills the pills that kill
OK, maybe they just need to go to Rush Limbaugh to figure out some of those ironies.
McCain is running on a Reaganesque platform. He's claiming he learned his conservatism and was inspired by Reagan while he was a prisoner in Vietnam. In this case, sure he's following the tradition of Reagan whose people were so incompetent they didn't even listen to the Springsteen lyrics before foisting them off on the American people. To those of us who were progressives at the time, this sealed the notion that Reagan and his people were barely above the level of snake oil salesmen. McCain and his people so incompetent they can't ghet the message of Mellencamp's songs? Incompetence shouldn't surprise us at all given the last seven years of Republican incompetence.
By the way, whatever happened to the "ownership society" the Republicans so often tout? I know that housing bubble they mismanaged is putting the lie to the "ownership society" ideals, but shouldn't they be respecting Mellencamp's ownersip of these songs?
Tagged as: mccain, reagan, mellancamp, springsteen, music
Steven Reynolds is a regular blogger for the All Spin Zone
No comments:
Post a Comment