I don’t know if folks remember the hard rock/soul/prog/funk act King’s X – this clip is from their 1989 album “Gretchen Goes to Nebraska”:
The band is still together and, in fact, have a new album coming out next month. (They were also, perhaps unfairly, dogged by the “Christian rock” label for much of their career. The first track on “Gretchen…” is called “Out of the Silent Planet,” indicating an affinity for C.S. Lewis.)
Lest you think all I do is listen to bone-crunching heavy metal, I do enjoy other kinds of music (my love of Johnnny Cash, Elvis, and Public Enemy has been documented on this blog, for instance.)
Lately I’ve been enjoying the newish album by a group called Band of Horses. I belive it’s what the kids call “indie rock,” though definitely with a country inflection.
Here’s a clip:
Jesse Walker reviews a new study of the lyrics of the great Ray Davies and his unique political outlook:
this outlook translates into an intense distrust both for large corporations and for the state. Like many rock stars, Davies has written songs attacking venal Big Business. Unlike most rock stars, he has written songs attacking domestic government bureaucracies (“I was born in a welfare state/Ruled by bureaucracy/Controlled by civil servants/And people dressed in gray”). And he may, depending on how you interpret Neil Young’s “Union Man,” be the only rocker ever to devote a song to attacking unions. Davies doesn’t dislike organized labor per se, but he had a bad experience with a printers’ union in his teens, and in the mid-’60s his band was barred from touring America for several years because the musicians’ union refused to issue the required work permits. He retaliated with 1970’s “Get Back in Line”: “But that union man’s got such a hold on me/He’s the man who decides if I live or I die, if I starve or I eat/Then he walks up to me and the sun begins to shine/And he walks right back and I know that I’ve got to get back in the line.”
A Thinking Reed 