worst protest song/political song to place in the Pazz & Jop singles poll

for the past week any time i post shit whiney starts in w/ ad homs & distortions & shit talking everyone immediately jumps in like OH SHIT DEEJ WHINEY BEEF stfu already

like how is this shit not stale at this pt

american skin prob in my springsteen POX

the whirlwind of beef, i drown whiney in it

have fun ruining al's thread, you two

we should use this thread to talk about how good american skin is

i do like that song pretty well

This thread is incomplete without all the year-end write-in blurbs defending these awful songs.

croooooss this bloody river

deej accusing people of "distortions" makes you sound like a cable news pundit fyi

how many rock artists released songs about oscar grant this year? its in the area of zero right

deej accusing people of "distortions" makes you sound like a cable news pundit fyi

― trv kvnt (some dude), Monday, January 24, 2011 9:28 PM (35 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

whiney trying to force running jokes about how im always talking about the Tunnel is on some fox new shit its true

idk yo -- he was pretty much calling you a rap elitist, which, i mean shit, it's a message board idk

you take whiney's bait EVERY TIME. just like you take my bait EVERY TIME. that, and your lack of sense of humor about it all, is what makes you the chump. EVERY. TIME.

i take him seriously because hes certainly not funny

is it a gun?

is it a knife?

is it a wallet?

this is your life

jesus is this you trying to 'use' people's 'words' against them 'cleverly'? please just stop.

if u want me to not take it at face value try bringing lols? idk what to tell you

xpost to deej, not iatee.

although "Land Of Hope And Dreams" >>>> "American Skin" imo

"Sun City" is a horrible song with horrible guest spots.

the ramones song is so fucking awesome. neg polls generally get negative and are shitty in my limited experience of not really paying attention to neg polls bc they suck

"We Are The World" is "A Change is Gonna Come" by comparison.

"Bonzo" is terrific, especially in the last verse.

zvookster negging a neg is NAGL

you take whiney's bait... LOSS. just like you take my bait... LOSS. your lack of sense of humor about it all, is what makes you the chump... LOSS

^^^im gonna neg your neg of his neg of your neg xp

okay i don't know what's going on there

I write in vote for Student Demonstration Time even tho it never placed in Pazz and Jop. why because it sound interesting

whiney do u feel like youve gotten something out of inanely baiting me in a way that ends up annoying the rest of the board? what are u getting from it exactly? its not like you're being at all clever or funny

meanwhile, back at the ranch...

and i mean, fine, im supposed to roll my eyes & take it like a joke, but its still dumb

anyone who votes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm7p-RLFg2I gets the gasface

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXGgWf2lacM

deej my point is that if his baiting wasn't so successful, people would only be annoyed at him and never you. that is clearly not the case, and constantly being stubbornly in denial of that just makes you look way more ridiculous than him.

^should have been included in poll/wry commentary on thread xp

i'm a board hero, i don't know what you guys are on

in one of the many times i've seen School of Rock i watched the part where bonzo plays thru a montage of dewey finn giving various AV rock images to the class pointing out specifics with a pointer and almost teared up for his vision of rock as an exciting world changing beauty.

i guess its my fault for assuming that hes a dude who wants to actually talk about & take this stuff seriously

who, the Legendary KO?

what's beef?
beef is when deej makes whiney start his jeep

if the legendary ko is trolling im certainly not the one who responded lol

bonzo goes to bitsburg then he goes for a cup of teaaeeaeea and as i watched it on tv somehow it really bothered me baaaaaahbahbahbah my brain is hangin, upsidedowhowhowwwwn

i guess its my fault for assuming that hes a dude who wants to actually talk about & take this stuff seriously

― challopian youtubes (deej), Monday, January 24, 2011 10:42 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

FYI, you're the one who never answered my legitimate question about your dislike of the song over "When The President Talks To God" and fucking "Mosh"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ4LJebvtB4

this is either Sun City or Bright Eyes

deej u have been noising up ILX lately w/ your 300 post argumentative idgi bullshit, cio

pretty sure the bright eyes song is actually the worst song of the last decade

n/j school of rock is one of my favourite movies of all time

in one of the many times i've seen School of Rock i watched the part where bonzo plays thru a montage of dewey finn giving various AV rock images to the class pointing out specifics with a pointer and almost teared up for his vision of rock as an exciting world changing beauty.

― zvookster, Tuesday, January 25, 2011 3:42 AM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

man

I'm pretty sure most rap fans are more likely to rep for "The Message" than "Superrappin'".

the premise of the poll samples is basically a question of whether all these particular tracks suited 40+ white rock critics, the KO is just one of them, and is one particular rap song. it seems like a very big error (to me) to extrapolate from that that some dude & deej are close to disparaging any kind of political thought in rap? & surely it's another one to separate ghetto reportage from the political in any case.

I meant deej, not some dude, but OK, maybe I read him wrong. deej's arguments can be hard to follow.

Good point about distinction between ghetto reportage and politics though The Message is more political, as in aware of the broader social context for the narrator's problems, than most examples.

I can only speak for myself

This is the forest.

Also, deej, I think your argument that the Legendary KO were kowtowing to "respectable" norms is bullshit. It may have been warmly received by generalist critics but it was made for a hip hop audience at a racially charged moment in US history in an ad hoc mixtape style with a sense of humour. A record that kowtowed would have been far more worthy and solemn. You come dangerously close to suggesting that any kind of political thought in rap is insufficiently "ghetto" and only designed to appeal to 40+ white rock critics. I can understand the trend you object to, but you're backlashing against it so hard that you end up disparaging the motives of a whole bunch of MCs.

― I've been dancing since 9 and I'm tired and hungry (Dorianlynskey), Wednesday, January 26, 2011 4:51 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

im not talking about the artist im talking about the critics' reception of the song

clemenza, seems like you should put Kanye's outburst (hate to call it that) somewhere in yr timeline? Only reason I bring it up is that any kind of timeline involving Katrina is necessarily tricky imo. I seem to remember that the fed gov't took meaningful action five days after the shit hit the fan, but I think it actually took the general public about three days to come to full awareness of the magnitude of the disaster.

Katrina was real creeper, and when things went bad, I think the only person who was talking about it was my grandmother, whom I lived with and who was a real news junkie. Everybody else where I was didn't really register until 3 or 4 days later...

or "it didn't really register with anyone else I knew at the time (including me) until the third or fourth day after the flood..."

Might be useful vis a vis relating the song to the timeline - part of an interview I did with Legendary KO:

The news coverage started to get a lot of people. A couple of days after the storm we started seeing a lot of coverage about the extent of the damange but then the story started to focus on the people who didn’t leave. Basically saying that they were idiots for staying around, when a lot of people had legitimate reasons for why they couldn’t get out of the path of the storm. In the US the news cycle goes on 24 hours a day and you start to see the same images over and over and they used a lot of images that showed “poor people” stuck in their houses. One thing that got to me a few days into this was a lot of us started to realise that these people who are still stuck in New Orleans have no idea how they’re being portrayed in the news, and while they have cameras in their face they’re not even getting any help and a lot of them were cyring out for help.

Two or three days prior to doing the song each of us had done volunteer work at the shelters. When you talk to the people these are normal people like you or I – normal tax-paying citizens who unfortunately had a huge storm level their city. What they didn’t know was the media was portraying them like refugees – they’re nomadic people now, they’re poor. They don’t even have a chance to rebut what’s being said about them because they don’t have an outlet to tell their side of the story. Noone really granted them their own say in the matter. So I was at work one day and Mike called me and he said I’ve got an idea for a song. And I’m like OK. And he said, I think this one might hit close to home. So I said OK, just email it to me. I’ll be home in 15 minutes. And when I got home in my inbox was the first half of the song and I was like, wow, this is pretty interesting. We didn’t understand what type of impact it would make, we just thought it was a cool song because it actually discusses the events of the past week or so from the viewpoint of people who were affected by it. We threw in the Kanye reference because we’d been talking about it the entire weekend before. A lot of what we were saying on the verses was stuff we’d already been saying amongst ourselves. It was just a matter of putting into song format. When we did that song it was so easy to do because those feelings and what we needed to say were already on the surface.

A couple of days after the storm we started seeing a lot of coverage about the extent of the damange but then the story started to focus on the people who didn’t leave. Basically saying that they were idiots for staying around, when a lot of people had legitimate reasons for why they couldn’t get out of the path of the storm.

not to be all optics-obsessed, but this is hugely OTM and I think a major reason why the tragedy got such a false start i/r/t national attention. I'm not even sure how many news stories covered it this way, I just think that was the "common sense" public perception, that they were dumbasses who stuck around for a hurricane and now needed our help. It took a few days for those assumptions to be replaced by "oh shit, this is actually not good at all, is it?"

It's why I like the song - it's not from the POV of a concerned outsider, it's trying to put the arguments into the mouths of the people at the heart of the crisis, people who weren't being represented in very many places.

yeah I imagine that actually interviewing KO and getting a lot of his first-person experiences about Katrina would prolley deepen the song's meaning for you quite a bit...quite different than just heaping on the kneejerk acclaim for a rap song bcz of its "political relevance"...

I think a lot of threads are kindof informing each other atm, and I think that "Mosh" would prolley get my vote because to me it marks the end of Em's transformation into what some dude called "constant hectoring, repetitive irritant" on the top 77 tracks thread.

Ha, yes. I respect Eminem for stepping up and saying it but the style is so nagging and jabbing and unpleasurable. He makes it sound sour and dutiful instead of (a la PE) thrilling.

I of course should have added Kanye's original comments to my timeline of Katrina--that fits in between 1) and 2). One thing I pointed out on the Facebook countdown I mentioned earlier: Legendary K.O.'s record would seem to be emblematic of the lightning-fast rapidity in which something like Katrina can go from news event to widely-distributed mp3 in the internet age. But if you check the timeline for "Ohio," the gap between event and song isn't all that much larger--I think "Ohio" was on the radio about four or five weeks after the fact.

that's why it was a single wasn't it? to get it out that fast...

Mark Mothersbaugh was at Kent State at the time (in fact he mentions in a few places how the shootings were very much integral to the inspiration of the Devo concept); I think I remember him saying that the reaction around campus to "Ohio" was v. negative, and that the perception among them was that rich rock stars were trying to cash in on their tragedy...

I actually think I might've read that in Shakey (Neil Young bio) actually...

wow, 'actually' overdose lol

I read that Mothersbaugh quote too, so maybe it was Shakey. I gotta admit, I thought the idea that Neil was trying to cash in on what happened struck me as absurd. CSNY was already a money-making machine; putting out a song like "Ohio" (as opposed to, say, "Our House") would seem to me to put that in jeopardy, not solidify your commercial viability. It made it to #14 on Billboard. Knowing the way recording deals were structured in those days, I wonder what riches Neil cleared from a #14 single in 1970? At a gut level, though, I guess I understand how someone who went to Kent State at the time would resent "Ohio."

Geez--just noticed that "Our House," the follow-up to "Ohio," only made it to #30. So what do I know about commercial viability? Maybe "Ohio" was just a big cash cow after all.

^right, I get the impression that even back when it was released Crosby Stills and Nash kindof represented the hippie movement sticking its head up its own ass, contemplating agrarian idylls (Our House, Teach Your Children)...

Ohio prolley seemed to those sort of close to the tragedy as exploitative, soft-rock sell-outs using their showdown with The Man to bolster their countercultural cred...

prolley belongs in this poll.

(prolley not, i know, just joking...)

x-post yeah, whether it's a cash-in for $$$ or not, it could easily be seen as a co-option of a tragedy. It's not like CSNY were on the frontlines at this point.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

The '00s were awful.

in terms of '00s songs/albums where ppl do self-consciously "political" and "about" Bush + The War On Terror and stuff, I really like The Evening of My Best Day by Rickie Lee Jones, though that angle is pretty low key for the most part, and the song that's most in that vein is "Tell Somebody (Repeal the Patriot Act)" which is maybe my least favourite track on the album

The Specials - "Free Nelson Mandela" (#17, 1984) 3

WTF, 3 of you?!