Hank Williams Jr.: ‘President Obama Hates America’

11 Jul 2012 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags:

(Reprinted from Rolling Stone)

I reprint this interview without additional editorial comment on my part. I think it speaks for itself. I will say only that my mouth hung open while reading it, and the taste of vomit still lingers…

Hank Williams Jr. received some of the biggest publicity of his career last  October, when he appeared on Fox & Friends criticizing a golf game  between President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner. “It’d be like Hitler  playing golf with Netanyahu,” he said. The clip went viral, and ESPN  permanently dropped Williams’ “Monday Night Football” theme from its  programming after 22 years. In a new interview with Rolling Stone,  Williams doubles down on the analogy. “I was right,” he says. “ESPN might have  done me the biggest favor in the world. It has snowballed since October.”

More than half the songs on Williams’ newly-released LP, Old School, New  Rules, are raging political commentaries, from the Obama-blasting “Keep the  Change” to “Takin’ Back Our Country,” which samples his father’s vocals while  railing against everything from ESPN to social media. 

“Old School“ is my favorite new  song of yours. What does being from the old school stand for in your  mind? Who else can say, “I remember a young Johnny Cash waiting in  the wings because he’d hand me his cigarette when he’d go out to sing?” How many  can say that, buddy? Not many.

And I’m playing like four or five instruments on here myself. I’m a pretty  much hands-on guy. Even the engineers said, “Nobody in this town does this! They  don’t come in here and play five instruments. Are you crazy?” I said, “Well, I’m  not them.” It’s really fun, getting rid of Curb [Records] and saving some of  those good songs and all the new stuff. I don’t know. Mickey Mouse and ESPN  might have done me the biggest favor in the world because it has snowballed  since October. Oh, it has. It has snowballed. [Laughs]

How so? Well, how about $200,000 in T-shirts in cities  like Evansville [Indiana] and Wichita, Kansas and Dayton, Ohio. That tell you  something?  That get your attention, Patrick? Two-hundred thousand  dollars in this economy? I said, “I don’t get this, why is this?” They said,  “Because you’re their mouthpiece, that’s why. Because they’ve had it. You’re  their mouthpiece, and you say what they want to say.” And they have made me feel  real special. I’ve never had so many e-mails and letters. That’s what makes  those songs easier to write.

A lot of these songs seem to have come out of that Fox &  Friends experience. About three of them, I  think.

On “Keep the Change,“ you say, “Fox & Friends want to put me down / Ask for my  opinion and twist it around.” Oh, absolutely. I tell it right on the  face. And what happens on that song? Uh, fastest downloaded song in country  history. Number one streaming, boom. Number one on Amazon.com, boom. A pretty  good beginning.

How do you think Fox twisted your words around? Uh,  number one, it’s 6:30 in the morning, and you’re sitting there to talk about  your daddy’s CD that’s out. You know, come on. There, again, I think they did a  great favor. If you can’t make an analogy of something like that … my daughter  said, “Daddy are you in trouble?’ and I told her, “Let me tell you something,  baby girl, if I’m in trouble, we’re all in trouble.” And guess what? I  was right. There have been a lot of articles about, “My God, this world today,  you can’t say anything.” Although, if you’re a pretty radical left-wing  democrat, you can say anything you want to – “Death to George Bush!” and start  stabbing a steak with a knife like Rahm Emmanuel – which is on record, by the  way. Oh yeah. It’s been a breath of fresh air. There is a word called  motivation. And believe me, they motivated this one.

Who motivated it? The American public. That 90-10 poll in  my favor? That one did it. All those emails, all those letters. It’s basically,  “He said exactly the truth, what we’re all thinking. These yo-yos are out there  playing golf and high-fiving each other?”

Well, what‘s wrong with going out, playing golf and  trying to have a conversation and trying to understand each  other? Well, I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it. The other side  forgot they won the election. Come on. This president? Give me a break. Give me  a break. I notice there hasn’t been not one of those [golf games] since that  day. They kind of forgot, “Oh boy, we’re all big buddies.” They kind of forgot  that after that game. That was a huge boo-boo. Huge boo-boo. That’s why I’m out.  I’m not going with anybody. That’s right. If you see me campaigning, it will be  for me, brother, cause I’m the only one with the balls that’s going to go  through with it. I had a lot to do with [Ohio Republican Governor John] Kasich  in Ohio, by the way. Do your homework. No more, I ain’t doing none of them.

What don‘t you like about Romney? Oh,  I’m just not going to do that. He’s the guy I’m behind. You know, he’s the guy  we need, but I’m not going to go out there and do his shows or anything. I mean,  we’ve got the worst in history. We’ve got to have something. We’ve got to have a  change, that’s for sure. They kind of turned me off. I’m not doing any of them.  And, you know, they better remember like [Richard] Mourdock, the Tea Party, the  guy that just won in Indiana. They better take note of that guy, too. And Marco  Rubio. I’m firmly behind Marco Rubio. I really like that guy.

On “Keep the Change,“ you sing, “I‘ll keep my freedom / I‘ll  keep my guns /  I‘ll keep my money / and my religion too … I will keep my Christian name and you all can keep the change.“  What did you mean by that? Exactly what I said, cousin.

Yeah, but when you talk about your Christian name … You  know, we’ve got a President that does a call to the Koran or Mecca or whatever.  That’s what I meant. That’s exactly what I meant. I won’t be changing my name to  whatever. That’s exactly what I meant.

How has your opinion of Obama changed from when he got elected until  now? Worse.

Why? I mean, it’s a zero. If I was at my office and I  could get to my Internet and list the things like where our economy is – you  don’t want to go there with me. I mean, the guy is the worst. Giveaway programs,  hates America in the first place, forget about the flag. [Imitates  Obama] “That’s one of those big rich fat cats that makes  $35,000 a year,” you know what I mean? Oh yeah.

Why do you think he hates America? We have borrowed  ourselves into our poor grandchildren. Now my opinion has gone down. It was  pretty low to start with. It’s really gone down since then. I mean, there’s a  whole lot of us out here, we flip the tube off when that guy comes on. We’re not  listening and we ain’t watching.

Yeah but, why do you think he hates America? Oh, you know  I don’t know. I don’t know about that but it’s kind of obvious. I guess when you  take a tour, a world tour, to apologize for America. He did that, you know?

Which tour was that? You know, “We’re  sorry.” Going on a world tour saying, “We’re going to  be be even with everyone else, we only have 6 percent of the population.”  Yeah. I wouldn’t be going to the duck blinds with any of those guys. It was some  of the greatest inspiration I ever had that because that song of mine, “We Don’t  Apologize for America,” there’s a guy named Marcus Luttrell that was a lone  survivor of the Navy Seals, and he said, “I want to thank you for writing that  because every military person in this country is going to buy that song.” That’s  the ones that I care about. Barack and his? I could care less. I’m writing for  the ones that mean something to me. Oh, we’re pulling in here. Adios,  cousin!

 

 

 

 

The Politics of the Beach Boys

07 Jul 2012 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags:

The Beach Boys at the Grammy Awards in February 2012.

(Reprinted from The New York Times)

Be True To Your School

By DANIEL NESTER
In May, James Werrell, a syndicated columnist for McClatchy, speculated that the real reason behind the incident at the Cranbrook school in the spring of 1965, in which Mitt Romney, then 18, held down another student, John Lauber, and cut his long bleached hair, wasn’t that Lauber was gay, but because he looked like a surfer. It was too radical to have a “bushy bushy blond hairdo,” as the Beach Boys sang in “Surfin’ U.S.A.”

More than four decades later, Romney included “Good Vibrations,” the band’s most psychedelic hit, on one of his Spotify playlists. And at a recent stop in Cincinnati, the Romney campaign played the song not once, but four times before the candidate came to the podium for his stump speech.

Meanwhile, the Beach Boys are enjoying a renaissance. Buoyed by an evergreen songbook and resurgent interest in Brian Wilson, the formerly reclusive genius behind all those glorious harmonies and arrangements, the band is marking its 50th Anniversary by calling a truce.

After the death of Carl Wilson in 1998 (drummer Dennis Wilson died in 1983), the Beach Boys split into two touring factions, with Love and Bruce Johnston touring in one and Al Jardine in the other. Now that Brian Wilson, who had worked solo since 1988, is back in the fold, all three living original members have reunited. There is a new album, a world tour and TV appearances on the Grammys and Jay Leno.

The band’s Independence Day gig, always their largest and highest-profile, will take place on Wednesday at the annual “Stadium of Fire” event on the campus of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. With that part of the country being both a Republican and a Mormon stronghold, and this being an election year, it’s worth remembering that the Beach Boys, like the country itself, have several conflicting legacies to reckon with.

On the one hand, we have our country’s first, and to many ears its best, rock ‘n roll band, our only rival to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Revived interest in Wilson’s artistry and its influence on a new generation has been a large part of this reevaluation. It culminated last year, when the band’s legendary album, “Smile,” shelved in 1967 after squabbles over its radical musical departure, was finally released. Wilson’s “teenage symphony to God” is now rightly hailed as a masterpiece, receiving the Obama generation’s stamp of approval with a perfect 10 from Pitchfork, the indie music aficionado Web site.

On the other, we have “America’s Band,” as Ronald Reagan dubbed the Beach Boys in 1983, willing participants in presidential political theater. For many Republicans, the rags-to-riches story of the band embodies an imaginary time of consensus politics and an American Dream at once white-bread and innocent. The band tapped into this sentiment well before the Reagan era, and it’s this strain of the Beach Boys’ peculiar cultural DNA that has supplied them with steady bookings as political mascots for Republicans and conservative causes.

These twin legacies each have their own protagonist, and the Beach Boys’ mythology naturally pits them against each other. It goes like this: Wilson, the childlike Icarus, had his artistic wings clipped by the lead singer Mike Love, his cocksure cousin, who wanted to stick with the proven formula of singing about girls and cars, fun and surf. Wilson then withdrew, crestfallen, into a self-imposed exile and battles with personal demons and drugs. Love, meanwhile, led an increasingly ersatz Beach Boys on a long strange trip that culminated in playing the private 2008 Romney “campaign reunion” event in Houston that doubled as a John McCain fundraiser. (McCain had the chance that night to sing his own foreign policy faux pas parody of the Beach Boys’ classic “Barbara Ann”—“Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran.”)

Taken further, you might say that the Beach Boys’ long history of feuds, friendships and lawsuits exemplifies two sides of the American character. On the Brian side we have an uncompromising blue-state idealism, and on the Mike side we have red-state utility and sticking with the formula. If you buy into the Beach Boys’ myth, no analogy seems too highfalutin. We’re talking Jefferson versus Hamilton, Buckley versus Vidal, Gore v. Bush, Occupy Wall Street versus Tea Partiers. It should only take a few seconds to contrive your own parallels.

The need to reconcile an artist’s politics with his art depends on one’s own politics, of course. I suppose it’s not impossible to picture someone who could both appreciate the genius of the “Pet Sounds” album from 1966, for example, and applaud the band’s appearance at a $100-a-head fundraiser gala at the 1984 Republican convention that nominated Ronald Reagan. (Oddly, Brian Wilson was arrested at the event for not having proper credentials.) And maybe it didn’t make a difference to young music fans at this year’s Bonnaroo music festival, where the Beach Boys shared a bill with Skrillex, Ludacris and Radiohead, that Mike Love once put up $5,000 seed money for Tipper Gore’s Parent’s Music Resource Center (P.M.R.C.) to censor and label records that had sex, violence or drug-related lyrics.

For the casual fan, this latest tour probably won’t seem much different. The band has been promoting a more or less endless summer and promising “fun, fun, fun” in various incarnations since 1961, when they first sang in the Wilsons’ home in Hawthorne, Calif. The same songs that established the Beach Boys as chart-toppers — “California Girls,” “Surfer Girl,” “God Only Knows,” to name just a few — will be performed amid the usual sea of Hawaiian shirts and huarache sandals.

To what degree the Romney campaign co-opts the Beach Boys’ concert on Wednesday remains to be seen. But I’ll be curious to hear what comes out of the band members’ mouths. For longtime Brian fans like me, who prefer to keep images of Ronald Reagan out of our heads as much as possible, the chance to see every living Beach Boy onstage and hear those harmonies sung live leaves me conflicted over which Beach Boy legacy I’m supporting.

Daniel Nester, an associate professor of English at The College of Saint Rose, is the author most recently of “How to Be Inappropriate.”

 

 

 

Video of the Week: Band On the Run–Literally

04 Jul 2012 Leave a comment

(Reprinted from Paste magazine)

People do some crazy things while they’re in traffic; shaving, putting on makeup, reading a book, curling their hair — you get the idea. But a couple of Russians have taken what’s possible to do on the highway to an unprecedented new level with their mobile rock band.

Observe as the guy who took the video, driving down the Russian highway, comes up on a motorcycle with a rather large passenger pod attached to its side. As he moves to pass it, it turns out, lo and behold: There’s a guy playing a full drum set and a guy playing an amplified electric guitar on the platform, rocking out in hardcore fashion as they speed down the freeway.

They don’t sound all that incredible as far as technical chops go, but if what they’re doing isn’t rock ‘n’ roll, I don’t think anything is. (By the way, we’re not sure this is legal, so we don’t necessarily recommend trying it yourself.)

Video by Ed Cyphers

Naturally 7: Live in Paris Subway

04 Jul 2012 Leave a comment

Vocal group Naturally 7 livening up the commute on a Paris subway car. Takes a while but the Parisan commuters eventually warm up…except for that guy in the black jacket.

Video by Ed Cyphers

100 Riffs: A Brief History of Rock ‘n’ Roll

02 Jul 2012 Leave a comment

Alex Chadwick presents a concise (12 minute) history of Rock ‘n’ Roll, including the Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and…St. Vincent? It’s all the riffs that’ll get you kicked out of the guitar store wrapped up in one performance.

The video is sponsored by the Chicago Music Exchange, a store specializing in vintage gear, like the $32,995 1958 Fender Strat played in the clip.

Here’s a full list of the songs:

1 Mr. Sandman – Chet Atkins
2 Folsom Prison Blues – Johnny Cash
3 Words of Love – Buddy Holly
4 Johnny B Goode – Chuck Berry
5 Rumble – Link Wray
6 Summertime Blues – Eddie Cochran
7 Pipeline – The Chantays
8 Miserlou – Dick Dale
9 Wipeout – Surfaris
10 Daytripper – The Beatles
11 Can’t Explain – The Who
12 Satisfaction – The Rolling Stones
13 Purple Haze – Jimi Hendrix
14 Black Magic Woman – Santana
15 Helter Skelter – The Beatles
16 Oh Well – Fleetwood Mac
17 Crossroads – Cream
18 Communication Breakdown – Led Zeppelin
19 Paranoid – Black Sabbath
20 Fortunate Sun – Creedence Clearwater Revival
21 Funk 49 – James Gang
22 Immigrant Song – Led Zeppelin
23 Bitch – Rolling Stones
24 Layla – Derek and the Dominos
25 School’s Out – Alice Cooper
26 Smoke on the Water – Deep Purple
27 Money – Pink Floyd
28 Jessica – Allman Brothers
29 La Grange – ZZ Top
30 20th Century Boy – T. Rex
31 Scarlet Begonias – Grateful Dead
32 Sweet Home Alabama – Lynyrd Skynyrd
33 Walk This Way – Aerosmith
34 Bohemian Rhapsody – Queen
35 Stranglehold – Ted Nugent
36 Boys Are Back in Town – Thin Lizzy
37 Don’t Fear the Reaper – Blue Oyster Cult
38 Carry on My Wayward Son – Kansas
39 Blitzkreig Bop – The Ramones
40 Barracuda – Heart
41 Runnin’ with the Devil – Van Halen
42 Sultans of Swing – Dire Straits
43 Message in a Bottle – The Police
44 Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black) – Neil Young
45 Back in Black – AC/DC
46 Crazy Train – Ozzy Osbourne
47 Spirit of Radio – Rush
48 Pride and Joy – Stevie Ray Vaughan
49 Owner of a Lonely Heart – Yes
50 Holy Diver – Dio
51 Beat It – Michael Jackson
52 Hot For Teacher – Van Halen
53 What Difference Does It Make – The Smiths
54 Glory Days – Bruce Springsteen
55 Money For Nothing – Dire Straits
56 You Give Love a Bad Name – Bon Jovi
57 The One I Love – REM
58 Where the Streets Have No Name – U2
59 Welcome to the Jungle – Guns N’ Roses
60 Sweet Child ‘O Mine – Guns N’ Roses
61 Girls, Girls, Girls – Motley Crue
62 Cult of Personality -Living Colour
63 Kickstart My Heart – Motley Crue
64 Running Down a Dream – Tom Petty
65 Pictures of Matchstick Men – Camper Van Beethoven
66 Thunderstruck – AC/DC
67 Twice as Hard – Black Crowes
68 Cliffs of Dover – Eric Johnson
69 Enter Sandman – Metallica
70 Man in the Box – Alice in Chains
71 Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana
72 Give it Away – Red Hot Chili Peppers
73 Even Flow – Pearl Jam
74 Outshined – Soundgarden
75 Killing in the Name – Rage Against the Machine
76 Sex Type Thing – Stone Temple Pilots
77 Are You Gonna Go My Way – Lenny Kravitz
78 Welcome to Paradise – Green Day
79 Possum Kingdom – Toadies
80 Say it Ain’t So – Weezer
81 Zero – Smashing Pumpkins
82 Monkey Wrench – Foo Fighters
83 Sex and Candy – Marcy Playground
84 Smooth – Santana
85 Scar Tissue – Red Hot Chili Peppers
86 Short Skirt, Long Jacket – Cake
87 Turn a Square – The Shins
88 Seven Nation Army – White Stripes
89 Hysteria – Muse
90 I Believe in a Thing Called Love – The Darkness
91 Blood and Thunder – Mastadon
92 Are You Gonna Be My Girl – Jet
93 Reptilia – The Strokes
94 Take Me Out – Franz Ferdinand
95 Float On – Modest Mouse
96 Blue Orchid – White Stripes
97 Boulevard of Broken Dreams – Green Day
98 Steady As She Goes – The Raconteurs
99 I Got Mine – Black Keys
100 Cruel – St. Vincent

Video by Ed Cyphers

To Paris Hilton: Don’t Quit Your Day Job (…What IS Your Day Job?)

26 Jun 2012 Leave a comment

(Source: Spinner)

Everyone’s favorite socialite screw-up, Paris Hilton, has conquered reality television, acting and homemade porn — now she’s trying her hand at DJing. And boy, is it going so well! (I kid! I kid!)

In the words of Mixmag, the auditory “car crash” took place at the Pop Music Festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil where Hilton blasted an unsuspecting audience with juiced-up top ten’ers.

Let’s be honest here: Several mistakes were made. To start, during Gotye’s “Somebody I Used to Know,” the DJ-in-training accidentally shifts the pitch of the song, giving the mix a warble like a warped vinyl record.

Secondly, you’ll notice that the show’s smoke machine and pyrotechnics seem louder than the, erm, performer’s set. Despite her onstage “help,” it looks like Hilton could’ve turned up the volume.

But the best part of the evening is Paris’ failed attempt at playing her new single “Last Night.” Instead of blasting Brazil with her Afrojack cut, the “DJ” mistakenly cues Rihanna’s “We Found Love.” To make matters worse, she tries to sing her track over the top.

Video by Ed Cyphers

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