Is This A Relief, Or Something Else To Worry About?
Uncle Andrew
Many years ago I heard an interview with musician Ray Charles in which he was asked his opinion of rap music. His reply went something like this: “It’ll never survive, because there’s no way you can imagine a seventy-year-old married couple hearing a rap song come on the radio and have one say to the other, ‘oh, listen, honey. they’re playing our song!'”
I happen to like a lot of rap—and dislike a lot more—but I had to admit that ol’ Ray might have a point there. I continued to agree right up until last night.
Picture if you will, a thirty-eight-year-old creative/technology worker, standing in the kitchen of his three-hundred-thousand-dollar house, wearing fuzzy socks, preparing kalbi ribs for dinner….while singing The Dead Kennedys’ “Too Drunk To Fuck“.
I don’t think rap is going anywhere any time soon; there seems to be nothing in this world that people can’t get all nostalgic over.
7 Responses to “Is This A Relief, Or Something Else To Worry About?”
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November 30th, 2006 at 1:11 pm
Hmm, loses a lot just reading the lyrics. It does remind me that there is nothing new. Just when I think it is safe to say “The world is going to hell these days” I am reminded that it has been that way for a while. The difference is, when I was in high school I thought that was really funny. Kinda like Letterman or Saturday Night Live.
November 30th, 2006 at 1:38 pm
Actually, Too Drunk to Fuck is still really funny. You need to bear in mind that, like most punk songs—and pretty much all of DK’s songs—the song isn’t about what Jello Biafra, lead signer of the band, does or wants to do. Like Chemical Warfare, The Prey or Bleed For Me, the song is a satirical look at what someone else does or wants to do; in this case, it’s an ape on someone overindulging at a big frat party.
However, I will back you up on Letterman and Saturday Night Live. 😉
November 30th, 2006 at 1:53 pm
Related note: I can still remember Pastor Gary Greenwald of the Eagle’s Nest Church raving against The Dead Kennedys’ I Kill Children, reading the lyrics aloud on his weekly TV program, totally missing the point of the song, which he might have actually agreed with: that modern society makes for fucked-up people who take out their aggression and frustration in unusual ways. I wanted to scream through the television at him, “It’s SATIRE, you idiot!”
November 30th, 2006 at 8:36 pm
FRED MEYER!!!!!
December 1st, 2006 at 7:46 am
Which is why it was and still is funny. Like some Oingo Boingo stuff it’s social conscience stuff from a sarcastic, satirical point of view. Satire, I fear, has become a lost art, succumbing to the whining social conscience stuff of the 90’s and finally to the “vomit-in-technicolor” of current MTV where social conscience has no conscience. But again, nothing new there. As Paul Stanley said in the late 70’s, “We write F*ck me, S*ck me songs”. Now those songs are sung by guys who can’t play guitar who put on gold teeth instead of make-up. Let me know if you find any bands who do think in satire, I miss lyrics that don’t suck.
December 1st, 2006 at 10:29 pm
Well, at least there will always be a moon over Marin.
December 2nd, 2006 at 1:48 pm
God, I love that song. 🙂