10 ****ling characters
Printable View
10 ****ling characters
Life goes on, my friends. Life is for the living. As far as Tom Petty, I think it was his name, which is analagous to Richard Petty, NASCAR Driver. So it was like you were getting two hits of straight-up Americana for the price of one. Listen to this Tom Petty song, get three free sparkplugs.
Astroturfing, as I'm sure you know, is when a practitioner pretends to be "down-home," local, one of the boys, country, etc. It's often a ploy practiced by corporations or politicians. They pretend to be real Kansans but in fact they're some sh!tfvcks straight from NY's Upper East Side.
Anyway, I must admit I was a bit wrong about Springsteen. I had thought that he spent some time in high school in California. This would have been another form of astroturfing: pretending that one is from blue-collar New Jersey, while actually hanging with the cool kids out in Cali. Now it seems that his *parents relocated to Cali, while Bruce stayed in Jersey. So he is at least from Jersey, and emerged from Jersey. At the same time I do detect a degree of posing there, particularly in the aggressive claiming of the blue-collar mantle. I don't trust it, in fact it annoys me. I grew up close to there, in Maryland, so he's always represented the kind of BS one has to reckon with in one's early days. Fake bards, ad-men, people trying to appropriate whatever is authentic in one's life...
There was an NRA chap on the Today programme this morning. Lord, but their arguments are pisspoor! Pointing out that people die because of things other than guns really isn't an argument for being allowed to own guns.
Ultimately, they just love owning guns and see high rates of gun deaths as an acceptable price to pay for their right to do so. Fair enough, but I wish they'd just be honest.
If it's lack of authenticity you're after, you probably ought to start with Bob Dylan, tbh. A nice, middle-class Jewish boy from Duluth Minnesota who basically spent his early career pretending to have been a boxcar-riding drifter poet a la Woody Guthrie. A complete fraud.
Petty was good, not just OK. He wasn't great and only occasionally very good, but he was good.
I thought he had quite the impact on those Wilbury chaps who had a few excellent songs. And Learning to Fly is awfully foot tappable.
And he never did anything as bad as Cover Me. So there. :-)
I think I understand, although the message I am getting here is that you know you were wrong, as of course you were/are.
The irony with all of this is that his work is hugely auto-biographical. He is simultaneously accused of being boring because of this and fake because, well, he is claiming to be something he is not.
THe Jersey/California thing is pure laziness on the part of people looking for a stick to beat him with.
I am amazed people cant find more in his music to attack him for. When you have to go to the guy and where he grew up it feels like a losing game from the off. Some of his music is **** ;)
That's ok though. Tapping into an american tradition is fine, particularly as he was from the back arse of nowhere. If you are born and raised in the posh part of Manhattan it would be a bit ****ing much.
Also, its Dylan. He can do whatever he likes and we can all go and **** ourselves.
Isn't everything?
His real skill as a writer is his ability to make the universal personal. Which is why a song about a dusty beach road on the Jersey shore rings so true with a chap who grew up in Palmers Green.
The car in a Springsteen song is NEVER actually a car. Its important to remember that.