Now, Billy Bragg is a folk musician I do listen to. He wrote a classic tune for Minneapolis in the past few days as well. If you haven’t listened to Billy Bragg before, I recommend you remedy with that below.
When they came for the immigrants I got in their face When they came for the refugees I got in their face When they came for the five-year-olds I got in their face When they came to my neighborhood I just got in their face.
I will bear witness to terror I will bear witness to tyranny I will bear witness to murder I will bear witness to fascism.
For reference, a five-year-old was used for bait by ICE to arrest his father. They wouldn’t let the young boy go into the house, and then they took him to Texas with his father against judge’s orders.
Too scared to join the military Too dumb to be a cop Citizen I.C.E.
This is an old song of theirs, formerly called “Citizen C.I.A”, and lyrically reworked to reflect current events. The rest of the lyrics are in-video.
I have to admit, I should probably listen to more Dropkick Murphys than I do, and that will probably change in the coming weeks. Every time I encounter news about the band, I see them in an increasingly positive light. I don’t have to like every song a band writes to know them to be stand-up folks that deserve my support.
It was a bit of a surprise when an old song I had written way back when the dinosaurs still roamed the earth came into my head yesterday and wouldn’t get out. Much to my amazement, when I pulled out the guitar, the chord progression and rough playing style came back to me almost instantly.
For a bit of perspective, the song, “May Faire” has never been performed. So, it’s not like I spent uncountable hours rehearsing the song. I may have toyed around with it whenever I could not come up with something new for a few years, but it was not on the forefront of my thinking.
I’m probably overlooking quite a few artists, but it sure seems like the vast majority of them these days are very serious about their music.
That’s not to say that I didn’t listen to and work with musicians in the past who were very serious about their music, but it seemed there were more folks in earlier eras who were a lot less serious about it. Or, they were serious musician who leaned into satire instead of saying things like, “We are artistes, not baboons. Go away and baboon elsewhere.”
J.G. Thirlwell, also known as Clint Ruin, Frank Want, and Foetus (multiple variants of the name), among other pseudonyms is an Aussie musician that has been putting out albums of an experimental nature since the early 80s.
The song below is not a new song, but one I posted a short while ago. I am trying to create a reusable set of Gutenberg blocks in-post to borrow from for future audio-oriented posts to make the songs/spoken-word stand out better as an audio file.
I have a few other formatting ideas that I want to play with, but if you have an opinion, please let me know in the comments (on either music or player design). Let me know if you are having problems rendering. If so, let me know the platform (WordPress Reader/web), device class (mobile/laptop/tablet) and browser (default for your device if you use the WP Reader app) .
Thanks!
[07 dec 25 update:]
Yesterday’s attempts didn’t have the intended appearance when it comes to viewing on WordPress Reader,. I can still leverage what I learned, but I’m going to attempt a new approach here and see how it looks dark, (stack on mobile, header large font not H4, copyright no-call):
Yeah, no matter how you tweak it, the appearance is the same on WordPress Reader. A bit broken with “no-stack” on mobile, but looks good stacked. Seeing as it matters not at all for WordPress Reader, I will just decide on a favorite when I set it up later (and avoid using rows on the copyright line, because it breaks in feeds and WP Reader, but I’m just trying to be fancy there and the fancy isn’t required).
I’m leaning towards the dark variant above (using “media and post”), feel free to pipe up if something absolutely does not work in your mind.
For new visitors: I occasionally set myself up with the challenge to write, record and produce a songlet (not a full song) in the space of 120-minutes, starting from scratch. I try to limit the song to about a minute in length.
As a result, quality varies greatly and I don’t promise that there are any hits that will arise of this personal challenge. The quality over time will vary dramatically, depending on how my creativity level is faring for the day.
Happy Thanksgiving, if you’re the kind of folks who celebrate such things. My mother didn’t give an option to decline the festivities and, having grown up in an environment where Catholic Guilt Syndrome was (and is still) employed as the weapon of choice, I’ll be heading out in a bit to do family things.
But, as Arlo Guthrie sang, “Alice — remember Alice?”… [listening to Alice’s Restaurant Massacree on Thanksgiving is about the only personal tradition worth keeping in my mind, but—]… let’s get on with my weird, cheap thoughts for the day. But first:
In my shower moments, maybe in those moments leading up to the shower as well, I was thinking (once again) about the nature of crushes.
It’s been a spell since I added a song to the series of posts that was originally intended to look backwards to look forwards for music discovery.
I was disappointed with the discovery process, which either sent me to bands I already knew full well or directed me to bands that sounded nothing at all like my “seed” music.
Rose Chronicles, copyright status unknown
After yesterday’s post quoting an opinion piece writer who has essentially declared that we have settled for the enshittification of our culture via the monetization of everything artistic thanks to the internet, I was left thinking about the last time I really enjoyed most of the music I was discovering. I can safely say that started to wane at some point near the end of the 90s.
