After all of these years, these specific performances still hit me right in the feels.
A collection of random artists and songs from my youth and first in a series of posts like this where I maybe touch on a few performances you may have forgotten about. Staying away from the iconic here; that is to say, these are not posts where you’ll see Freddie Mercury at Live Aid or Nirvana on MTV. 🙂
Cyndi Lauper – All Through The Night
I love this performance so much. Ever the showwoman, Cyndi Lauper starts off low and slow, lying down on the stage before showing us her rock and roll, complete with some sort of half windmill motion and a bit of an Irish jig during the instrumental break before bringing it home with the delicate finish. It all comes together in a way that is so weirdly her and you just know that she had the whole audience in the palm of her hand.
Peter Gabriel – In Your Eyes – Live In Athens
Out of all the live performances of this song, it’s this one I crown king. The vibrancy of the dancing, the genuine joy during the duet and a killer ending with the lights. This is one I wish I was in the audience for.
Accept no substitutes, there are a few versions of this on YouTube but this one brings you right to the end.
Foreigner – Hot Blooded
This is in the 1978 time capsule for sure. Every note killed, every riff slayed. So much energy poured into this performance.
Phil Collins – In The Air Tonight
You know it’s coming, which is why it’s so exciting to see him sitting down at the start of the song. The intimacy in front of such a large crowd and over four minutes of anticipation as he slowly gets up and works the stage and makes his way to his drums.
4:26 if you want to fast forward, but I recommend that you don’t. The anticipation is all the fun in the one.
Harry Belafonte – Day-O
And maybe it’s because I’ve had Harry Belafonte on the turntable for the last little while, but this performance is not only amazing from Belafonte, but the Fozzie just cracks me up in it, especially during the call and response.
Any performance pieces you’d recommend? Let me know in the comments!
I am watching America disappear before my eyes, as are you. The progress the country has made in the last 50 years is slowly disappearing pen stroke after pen stroke. Lie after Lie after Lie. Salon has a great recap here: “9 Terrible Things “President” Trump Has Done In Just One Week” (Presidential quotation marks mine).
The only thing that lifts my spirits about the next 6 months are the ideas suggested in this piece by Elizabeth Linder who writes about the opportunity this “presidency” (again, mine) will provide for new heroes and new storylines to emerge.
In the arc of President Trump’s story, the station of hero – to use Dickens’ phrase – will not be held by Donald Trump. It will be held by someone else – or even more powerfully, by many others. After all, the hero in The Wizard of Oz isn’t actually the Wizard. It is Dorothy Gale, from Kansas. And a rather clever Scarecrow, a splendidly compassionate Tin Man, and a considerably brave Lion. But without the Wizard around whom to frame the story, our Dorothies, our scarecrows, our tin men, and our lions do not spring to life. The absence of a President-hero does not necessarily spell the absence of Presidential-style heroism.
The whole piece is well worth a read, especially if you have been struggling to find the positive in all of this.
In “President” Trump (seriously, can someone help me make these quotations a thing?) we have someone who is so easily provoked, so thin-skinned, that the mechanism that will cause his undoing is staring us right in the face.
If the popular vote started showing up online, offline, wherever we can – and I’m talking the global popular vote here as well, which is an even more overwhelming a majority than that found in the “U”SA alone (too much? yeah, too much…) – then it cannot be long before we push him into the final downward spiral that will eventually undo his presidency.
“But what about Pence?” the people say. “He’s no better.”
Yes, yes he is. Whatever his personal beliefs are he holds nowhere near the swagger or audacity to inflict as much harm as Trump. He has the personality of a tree stump and would be infinitely better warming the seat of the presidency for the next three and a half years.
“But what if we push him too far?” the people say. “He can launch nukes within four minutes.”
I say, first of all, why am I pretending there are people saying things just to make my points, but more importantly, all the more reason to act with haste. A Trump in power for a year may only hold more sway, may only be more powerful and more difficult to take down. He is showing signs of weakness… he is a weak, weak, pathetic man who is so ignorant as to what the history books will write of him that he actually thinks he is currently beyond reproach and out of our reach.
He isn’t.
And every voice matters.
If he can lose sleep over a tweet or an SNL skit, imagine what 3 million halves of onions can do.
* * * * *
And now we have reached the part where I remind myself that this is a music blog…
Last August I wrote about the power of Protest Songs and about how so many were lacking in my regular, every day engagement with US politics. In that piece I asked why I don’t see contemporary protest songs filling my newsfeed and wondered why people weren’t sharing their political beliefs through a medium that has withstood the test of time.
And then, I did absolutely nothing.
Like many, maybe I thought there was no way Trump could win so maybe I didn’t have to use my voice for anything except for that blog post encouraging others to act.
And then he won.
And I was one of the many who, while fearful of the worst, wanted to wait and see what he would actually do once the power and enormity of what he’d gotten himself into settled in.
And I did absolutely nothing again.
It is not much… in the grand scheme of things what I am doing now is small, but it is something.
Dave Eggers is one of my favourite authors of all-time and you can read his very entertaining account of a day spent at a Trump rally here. In it he notes, among many things, that Trump’s apparent theme song is Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” and that the rally had more in tune with a Garth Brooks concert than any serious political event. While Trump blasted out Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stone, Eggers muses that those artists support for Trump would be “unlikely”.
It was this experience that motivated him to orchestrate a brilliant movement in October last year – “30 Days, 30 Songs” – in which famous musicians would release new protest songs they had written – one a day for – the last 30 days of the election campaign.
This small something has caught on and now the site is dedicated to 1000 songs in 1000 days; it will publish “original tracks, unreleased live versions, remixes, covers, and previously released but relevant songs that will inspire and amuse and channel the outrage of a nation.”
And I have found the musical mecca from which I will now share and pass on through my own social media efforts.
I’ll be posting a different song every day for the next thirty days across my own social media channels, encouraging people to listen and doing my part in passing on a message from those with much larger microphones than my own.
It’s only the start of what one person can do.
In this day and age you can either sit back and read the news or stand up and be part of it.
In late September and early October I did something I didn’t think I would ever do again in my life.
I spent three weeks in Japan.
Having lived in Japan for two years, 15 years ago, and working in the travel industry, I honestly never thought I would take an extended trip there again. Don’t get me wrong – I LOVE Japan – but just, having lived there and having so many other countries on my list, it just didn’t seem like it would ever be a top travel priority again.
Well, call it serendipity, luck or a combination of the two, I found myself with an option to do the country again that I could not turn down.
The trip was incredible – Tokyo, Takayama, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Koyasan, Nara, Kobe and my adopted hometown of Osaka. It was a combination of everything you want from Japan.
Weird robots:
(Not my video but this was posted just two months before we were there and the show was the same.)
Temples and cultural centres:
History:
And some of the most peaceful, tranquil places you would ever want to be:
It was a fantastic trip filled with new places, new experiences and an overwhelming sense of nostalgia I haven’t felt in a very long time.
But this is a music blog, not a travel blog, so let’s move past the pictures and trip review and get to the heart of the matter – Japanese music from the early 2000’s.
In documenting the soundtrack to my life, my years spent in Japan deserve more than just this one post and so I will just touch on a few key songs that still make their way onto random playlists to this day.
First of all, we were lucky enough to have made quick friends upon arrival with a group of musicians who ran their own recording studio and who had their own band, Death Pizza. Death Pizza then became World Defense Lovers and they existed on the cool outer edge of Osaka’s alternative music scene. Heavily inspired by, and not sounding entirely unlike, The Cranberries, World Defense Lovers could rock hard and then almost make you cry at how beautifully they blended celtic sounds with modern rock.
I have the signed CD here in my house, but online there is not much to find save their official website, circa 2004. Download and listen to February for a taste of what this band offered.
http://wdl.fc2web.com/framepage2.htm
In more mainstream fare, Hip-Hop was only just in its infancy in Japan and yet it was everywhere. Blending Western sounds, classic alternative rock samples and mixing Japanese and English fluidly, Dragon Ash was at the top of this scene.
In one of their most popular tunes, Grateful Days, the band sampled and looped the guitar opening from Today by Smashing Pumpkins to awesome effect. This was just one of many Pumpkins’ links the band had in their repertoire and to hear those licks blended with Japanese rap is not as sacrilegious as you might at first think. Give it a listen.
By far their biggest, inescapable hit at the time was Life Goes On. This song played on TV commercials, in shopping centres… this is the title track to my Japanese soundtrack of the time. I called them the Japanese Sugar Ray as the parallels between Life Goes On and Fly are numerous.
It’s amazing that after all these years singing along as best as I can, today is the first time I’ve ever watched this video with the lyrics embedded.
I have been singing so many words wrong all these years. Still though, a fantastic song that brings me right back to 2002.
Rip Slyme was another big player in the burgeoning Japanese hip-hop culture at the time and what I liked best about them was their use of horns and funk. Less English than Dragon Ash but some awesome instrumentals. Have a listen to Funkastic for the best example of this.
Rakuen Baby was another inescapable song of theirs.
There are so many other bands and songs to look at, but I’ll leave you with just one more.
First of all, the band’s name is just awesome in its ability to be just close enough to an English saying to evoke some meaning but still retain some Japanese oddness.
Kick The Can Crew have a song called Sayonara Sayonara that has had the most staying power on my playlists over the last 15 years. Put simply, the switch from the minor key in the verses to the major key in the chorus makes me just about as happy as any song can make me.
* * * * *
Japan gave me so much creatively while I was there… it was in Japan that I first started blogging, where I wrote my first novel and where I branched out musically and went to some of the craziest shows and concerts of my life.
And now I say it again, it’s unlikely I’ll ever spend an extended time in the country again in my life. There’s a lot of world to see.
Or, in 15 years, the things I love most about the country might just pull me back again.
* * * * *
Further Reading – An Intro to Japanese Hip Hop
These songs above were based on my time and my experience in Japan and the one thing I am loving about this blog is that as I write from my own history, memory and experience I find that I start asking the Internet questions to get a broader picture on the topics I touch on.
This article gives a ton of new perspective to me as well as a number of artists and songs I haven’t even heard of.
This isn’t just further reading for you; I’m going to just leave this link here as a reminder to myself that there is a heck of a lot more good stuff to uncover.
We watch the news to see what Trump said today, to see where got bombed and how many died and to witness another shooting of a black man by police.
We watch the news to see racial tensions higher than we’ve ever seen in my lifetime.  We watch the news to see society take two steps backwards for every one step forward in the LGBT rights movement.
We watch the news to see corporations swallowing democracy whole and shitting out tiny bricks of gold.
We watch it for other things, but these are the things we are seeing.
And I don’t know if it’s because what my eyes are seeing has stopped my ears from hearing, but I’ve been feeling a void.  In this age of the inter-noise the protest song has disappeared, replaced by the sound bite and 24 hour news.
Oh, it’s still there – as I discovered tonight after actively searching it out – but the dominance of music as the prevalent form to speak out against injustice has given away to the late night comedian skewering the establishment which, while entertaining, is hardly affecting people’s hearts and minds past the initial viewing.  It’s fantastic, brilliant stuff, but it is single serving outrage; the kind of commentary that lasts only as long as the time it takes for another brilliant comedian to skewer someone or something new.
The enduring power of the protest song is missing from our culture. Â It is showing up in pockets, but it is not making the mainstream and, as such, the most effective call to arms we have at our disposal is being wasted.
A song you listen to again and again and again… layers of meaning set in; you sing it to yourself, you attach yourself to it, it helps shape and prescribe your ideologies.  Slave songs in the south, folk songs of the 60’s, punk, reggae, hip hop… hell, even good old rock and roll… during every major movement and social crisis we have been through in the last century has been accompanied by a soundtrack.
Think about what you have been listening to over the last six months… what has the soundtrack been? Â I’m not judging here, I know exactly what mine has been: a dollop of Katy Perry and One D for my daughter (yes, I use the term “One D” and if that doesn’t automatically make you stop reading, thank you, because there is some good music ahead) and a mix of Twenty One Pilots, AWOLNATION and some good old fashioned early 2000’s Emo. Â My point? Â My soundtrack has not reflected the environment I am living in… reading about… watching on the news.
But maybe that is starting to change…
If there was ever a night I wanted to be at Molson Amphitheatre, it was last night.  Don’t get me wrong, number one on my list of places to be was exactly where I was – singing happy birthday to my now six-year old daughter at The Old Spaghetti Factory – but damn if I didn’t want to see AWOLNATION, one of my favourite bands, open for Prophets Of Rage.
Wait, seriously, if you didn’t click on the link, read that article and then come back to me… it was, from all reports, an incredible show.
Meanwhile, Chuck D had many turns at the mic as well, although he was at his best when he was delivering U.S. election messages to the throngs.
“I don’t know what’s going on America, but stay as smart as you are and stay put. Stay the f— awake, Canada,” the veteran rapper implored, before busting out Public Enemy’s Miuzi Weighs A Ton.
The tour is called “Make America Rage Again” and it started just last Friday and seems to be picking up steam. Â Maybe that’s what we need! Â A music supergroup to come out, blast us with nostalgia and get us raging again!
I mean… COME ON…
What better way to stir up rage against the establishment than make us remember the rage we felt before?
Well, maybe there is a better way… maybe we do need NEW songs that speak to the atrocities we are seeing all around us, even if they were written about just slightly older atrocities from, like, a few months ago…
I am not poison, no I am not poison
Just a boy from the hood that
Got my hands in the air
In despair, don’t shoot
I just wanna do good, ah
Or better yet, put a song out that CANNOT BE CLEARER in its message that Black Lives Matter, and then surround that song with all of the news clips and video that has already been consuming us.  A perfect confluence of form and message.
This is the best protest song I have heard in a LONG time.
Mistah F.A.B. – 6 Shots
So for all you white folks that say we all equal
I bet you wouldn’t trade pigmentation with my people
Drop a song during New York Pride that puts a clear message around the fact that while we celebrate acceptance we cannot forget the fight.
I guess love ain’t free, there’s a fee, they cut your paycheck
It’s a free country, that’s unless you love the same sex
To people with no place to stay, I hope you stay blessed
You ain’t gotta flex that you straight, long as you straight flex
* * * * *
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter which cause we are talking about, which fight we feel is the most important fight.
Why aren’t we sharing THESE songs?
Why does 6 Shots only have 25 000 Views on YouTube?
Where aren’t these videos in my newsfeed, accompanying the commentary everyone I know is putting out there?
The Protest Song is alive, and if we want things to change, let’s seek out the music behind the issues that matter to us and flood social media with them.
John Oliver is brilliant, and sharing his segments does good, makes us feel smart and makes us laugh when we don’t know how else to feel. Â They spark outrage and unite us and justify our own frustrations and feelings of powerlessness to change things.
But I ask you again – how many times have you watched a segment more than once? Â And what have you done with the emotions it made you feel.
Now, have a look around at all of the music being generated on these topics… make a playlist… share it with your friends…
I’m not saying it’s the only answer to fighting back against the injustice in the world, but the echo we can create by filling the inter-noise with meaningful music might be just enough to shift the momentum in our favour.
A social media post from Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson calling on musicians to write protest songs.
“Songs with spirit in them,” the Roots drummer and “Tonight Show” band leader wrote on Instagram. “Songs with solutions. Songs with questions. Protest songs don’t have to be boring or non-danceable or ready made for the next Olympics. They just have to speak truth.”
In the summer of 1999 a song made it’s way onto a mixed tape (yes, I was one of the few still doing those in ’99) that I had only just discovered.
It was haunting, beautiful, sad.
Sinead O’Connor – Black Boys On Mopeds.
The lyrics were obvious, the quiet rage behind them astonishingly clear. Sincere. Real.
And in ’99 the song to me was already from a bygone era. A protest song around issues we have since resolved. It was recorded in 1990 and was about an incident from the year before where police chased a black youth named Nicholas Bramble on a moped they thought was stolen (it wasn’t) and after losing control, Nicholas was victim to a fatal accident.
The song was on an album dedicated to a black man named Colin Roach who died of a gunshot wound inside a police station in London in 1983. You can read the wikipedia entry here adding further to the feeling that we are… we HAVE to be… past this sort of systemic racism in our modern, enlightened society.
The shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile are not new stories. We have sadly seen too many cases like these in recent months and years; however, with these two shootings, followed by the police killings in Dallas, I am starting to feel in my deepest gut that we are at a tipping point.
We do not have these stories filtered through news media; we are seeing it first hand, from people’s cell phones, immediately. I cannot shake the Philando Castille video from my brain. It plays on the backs of my eyelids when I sleep. The lasting effect of the immediacy with which we see these visceral images is yet to be determined, but there is one thing they do better than anything else: they polarize us.
When you see videos on topics like this (as opposed to reading news reports, columns, op-ed pieces) without the ability to discern full context it is so much easier to jump to assumptions and to form an opinion that is rooted in your own bias. I am reminded of the footage we were all glued to in 1990 during the Iraq War – whether we knew it or not at the time, watching war happen in real time, for the first time, was the strongest form of war propaganda we had ever had in the Western World.
“The more ‘news factoids’ you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand.”
This is no more apparent than with the recent hashtag #AllLivesMatter as a response to the #BlackLivesMatter message.
There have been some solid takedowns of this (see here and here for two of my favourites) but here is my simple take on it:
When you read #BlackLivesMatter which option below are you automatically confirming in your head?
#OnlyBlackLivesMatter
OR
#BlackLivesMatterToo
If you chose the first option you are, to put it nicely, simply unaware of the broader context of the message.
(You should see the descriptive sentences I deleted prior to settling on that one. I’ll leave those in my drafts though – won’t win over anyone using insults now, will we?)
When the statistics show how much more likely it is for a black man to die at the hands of police than a white man, we NEED to have a dialogue around this and saying Black Lives Matter doesn’t mean that others lives don’t matter. Again, to my point above, when we subject ourselves to getting our news in quick bites on important topics we risk simplifying the issue to the point that it disappears completely and the very nature of the conversation we need to have has changed.
“You can be pro-cop and pro-black, which is what we all should be.”
And this brings me back to Sinead O’Connor. The song and the album were not only anti-police, they were her way of voicing her opinion against the Conservative politics of the time, comparing Margaret Thatcher’s methods to that of the Chinese totalitarian state that caused the massacre on Tiananmen Square.
“These are dangerous days. To say what you feel is to dig your own grave.”
You can either listen to the song and rush into confirming your own biases, using it for whatever purpose suits the message you ultimately want to say anyway, or you can dig a little deeper and understand the context around it.
I feel that in these dangerous days, we should all be digging for a bit more context before spouting off our opinions.
* * * * *
Oh right, this is a MUSIC blog… I’m not supposed to have opinions on other topics here.
Well, here is the music that has been the soundtrack to the news videos that have been playing and replaying themselves in my head.
And the full lyrics to go with it:
Black Boys On Mopeds
Margareth Thatcher on TV
Shocked by the deaths that took place in Beijing
It seems strange that she should be offended
The same orders are given by her
I’ve said this before now
You said I was childish and you’ll say it now
Remember what I told you
If they hated me they will hate you
England’s not the mythical land of Madame George and roses
It’s the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds
And I love my boy and that’s why I’m leaving
I don’t want him to be aware that there’s
Any such thing as grieving
Young mother down at Smithfield
Five a.m., looking for food for her kids
In her arms she holds three cold babies
And the first word that they learned was please
These are dangerous days
To say what you feel is to dig your own grave
Remember what I told you
If you were of the world they would love you
England’s not the mythical land of Madame George and roses
It’s the home of police who kill blacks boys on mopeds
And I love my boy and that’s why I’m leaving
I don’t want him to be aware that there’s
Any such thing as grieving
* * * * *
In trying to make sense of everything over the last few days, I picked up the guitar and tried my hand at updating this amazing song to fit the still-developing narrative in the news today.
I don’t offer this as a piece of good music, just my attempt to interpret some further meaning in the chaos I feel building around us.
* * * * *
Update – June 10th 2020
With the death of George Floyd and the protests happening all over North America, I thought about writing a new post but decided against it, instead choosing to add to my previous thoughts here.
What I thought was the tipping point four years ago when I initially wrote this post was not, in fact, the tipping point at all. The outrage subsided, inaction again ruled the day and there was no significant change. I was complicit in this. When the story moved on from the news cycle, it stuck with me, but did not force me to actually change or grow.
The action, awareness and calls for change we are seeing now eclipse what we saw in 2016. I know I have been profoundly rattled, to my core, and I have been and will be working hard to ensure equality for people of colour.
Is this now, finally, the actual tipping point? Will we see police reform?
Or will I be updating this post again in 2024?
My original post in 2016 had a video of a version of Sinead O’Connor’s song rewritten with the lyrics posted below it.
As the original song had a whopping 9 views on YouTube (8 of which I’m pretty sure were me) I’ve taken the opportunity to update the lyrics and post a new video.
As before, I don’t put this forward as a piece of good music, I put this forward because we are all now SEEING Black lives being taken, with our own eyes, more than we have ever seen them before.
To those who hate, to those who discriminate, to those who kill… the world is watching you now and, finally, it doesn’t look like anyone will be looking the other way anytime soon again.
Black Boys On Camera
Donald Trump on his Twitter feed
Inciting hatred and bigotry
It’s grown stronger since he was elected
#BlackLivesMatter but now they’re more neglected
We’ve seen this before now
We said “There’s been progress,” and you’ll say it now.
Remember what I showed you
If you hate and you kill we will film you.
America’s not the mythical land of apple pie and baseball
It’s the home of police who kill black boys for no reason at all
And I love my girl and that’s why I’m crying
I don’t want her to grow up in a world with
So many black people dying…
George Floyd taken down by police
Laid on the ground, held in place by a knee
In the camera we see a cold body
And his last words were “I can’t breathe…”
These are dangerous days
The darker your skin, the closer your grave.
Remember what I showed you
If you hate and you kill we will film you.
America’s not the mythical land of apple pie and baseball
It’s the home of police who kill black boys for no reason at all
And I love my girl and that’s why I’m crying
I don’t want her to grow up in a world with
So many black people dying…
