Radiohead and Cold Play are two of the biggest rock bands in the world and I can't stand them. The music's dull while it attempts to be grandiose. The singing is whiny and the lyrics try too hard to be obscure. I know I'm in the minority, but somebody has to take a stand against this type of music even if I do get stampeded by all of their fans on their way to buy more merchandise. I've put together some lyrics to demonstrate the barren thought of both bands. Let's play a game called who wrote what lyrics? Radiohead or REO Speedwagon, Cold Play or Journey:
I’ve been trying to make it home
Got to make it before too long I
can’t take this very much longer
I’m stranded in the sleet and rain
Don’t think I’m ever gonna make it home again
The mornin’ sun is risin’
It’s kissing the day
Do not speak as loud as my heart
Tell me you love me, come back and haunt me
Oh and I rush to the start
Running in circles, chasing our tails
Coming back as we are
Nobody said it was easy
Oh it’s such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be so hard
I’m going back to the start
My lady's beside me, she's there to guide me
She says that alone we've finally found home
The wind outside is frightening
But it's kinder than the lightning life in the city
It's a hard life to live but it gives back what you give
It’s the best thing that you’ve ever had, the best thing that you’ve ever, ever had
It’s the best thing that you’ve ever, the best thing you have ever had has gone away
Don’t leave me high, don’t leave me dry
Don’t leave me high, don’t leave me dry
Can you tell who did what? It's all pretty banal when it's stretched out like this, so it probably is a little unfair to pull a Steve Allen trick like this. But what do I care? It's my blog and I can cry if I want to.
Off the subject of music I don't like and onto the subject of bigotry. I grew up here in the South and I heard the "N" word just about every day as a child. I was taught that blacks were not completely human. I was taught to be a hating automaton like others my age. Yet, I escaped such stupid thought and it wasn't just because I'm a bad student. I just never bought such backward ways. I judge people on their actions and words and not upon appearances or money, that's the bottom line. The US has come a dramatically long way since my childhood in racial relations. I rarely hear outright racism among the people I know, but just last week I was reminded of how things used to be.
The office I work in recently fixed the telephone system where we could listen to a local top 40 station through our desk phones. One of my office mates complained about the song playing, it was "Hey Ya" by Outkast and a lady nearby exclaimed, "You don't like that jig music." I was struck dumb having never even thought about what evil lurked in her heart. It makes me wonder about bigotry. How deep would one need to go to scrape off what surely is a thin veneer in some? The backward folks are out there, especially in this small town of Smithville.
Hope still burns though. My mother who is nearing 70 was raised in Mississippi. She grew up as a sharecropper's kid which meant picking cotton from sun up to sun down. This was the Mississippi of segregation and hate crimes. My grandmother once told me the tale of a young black man lynched by a mob on the public square. My mother grew up with institutionalized racism and she used the "N" word during my upbringing, often in the context of using blacks as scapegoats for our own problems.
Recently I drove her down to Mississippi for a family get together. Out of the blue she started talking about black people. I was concerned that some bigoted tirade was brewing, but I was wrong. "I've been reading the Bible for years and I can't find anything in there that says we're better then anybody else. I think blacks are just like us," she said. I agreed with her and inwardly I was so proud of her I'm surprised I kept the car on the road. If my mother could change her views, maybe there's hope for my office mates and maybe hope for the word.
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