Republican Party Dance-Mix

John Miller is a friggin tool.

I’ve always thought “Like a Rolling Stone” is a viciously conservative song. Like an angry parent railing against an errant child who has experimented on their own and then fucked up badly, much to the satisfaction of the I-told-you-so parent.

Among the ironies: “I Fought the Law” held up as a law-and-order classic, while “Janie’s Got a Gun” celebrates the right to bear arms and “I Can’t Drive 55” is a principled objection to the nanny state. (Don’t even get me started on “My City Was Gone” and “Cult of Personality.)

hey sean, mind help getting the pieces of my head back together since you helped make it explode?

Talk about trying too hard. I think they must not have listened to the whole song. And some of them are really from, ah, left field: Iron Maiden doing “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is conservative? Because Colerige is dead?

Anybody who invokes without irony as a conservative anthem the lyric “I exploit you, still you love me / I tell you one and one makes three / I’m the cult of personality,” with *this* administration running the show is fully gonzo.

To which one can only reply, Matthew 10:34.

To which one can only reply, Matthew 5:9. Or Matthew 5:44. Or John 18:36. Or Matthew 19:24. Or Matthew 22:21. Surprise, surprise – the Bible contradicts itself! Yes, conservatives can cherrypick verses and use dubious interpretations to justify a set of conservative beliefs, and liberals can ignore those same verses and use different interpretations to justify a set of liberal beliefs. This suggests that not even Christianity – much less the whole of religion – represents an “unambiguously conservative value.” Religion is a justification for what one already believes, not the source of that belief.

He forgot “God Save The Queen” by the Sex Pistols (after all, it’s about the Queen)

Oh, those damn right-wing post-modernist relativists, with their hifalutin’ ‘death of the author’ theories and their hip, smug irony. I tell you.
It’s a strange, strange alternative universe these guys inhabit…

The Clash. Conservative. The corpse of irony is raped in the public square, roasted hats are going like hot cakes, arctic conditions reported from hell.

Definitely a conservative anthem. The proper title is (Fool Me Once Shame on You Fool Me) Won’t Get Fooled Again.

Kieran, I’ve always heard the speaker in “Like a Rolling Stone” as being somebody who had been hurt by the addressee (call him RS) in RS’s profligate days and now that RS was knocked down, is refusing to lend him a helping hand back up. Sort of like “Positively 4th Street” except the romantic rejection angle not played up as much, RS may be male or female. (Though I think more likely, the latter.)

For a really excellent take on sexism in Dylan check out Richard Goldstein’s article in the latest The Nation.

bruce, as long as you’re including religion as a conservative value, I would think “They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore” ought to make your cut.

Some odd choices, certainly. The idea that religious topics in songs are inherently conservative is risible.

Guess the NR types aren’t much for originalism when it comes to songwriter’s intent.

I wonder where Leonard Cohen’s ‘The Future’ fits on the Bartlett scale of lyrical conservativsm. If religion is an unambiguously conservative value, I take it “crack and anal sex” are unambiguously liberal.

Incidentally, Bartlett bizarrely leaves The Beatles ‘Taxman’, which is about as conservative (and especially Republican-conservative) as they come, off his list, apparently on the grounds that it was “buried on some obscure album”, ie Revolver. What the hell’s that about? According to the esoteric journal Rolling Stone, Revolver the third greatest album of all time and sold 5m copies. In what universe is that obscure?

I think the most absurd of these is “Rock the Casbah.” I’ve spent the last 18 hours trying like mad to wrap my head around it, but I just can’t do it. The song lampoons repressive social structures and Middle Eastern oil barrons. You know, the Bush family BFFs and the number one allies of conservative American foreign policy. They must have missed every part except the part where the Middle East gets bombed.

Not to mention that it’s, ummm, THE CLASH.

I think Mike Jones put it perfectly: irony-proof, context-free, and totally unencumbered by the thought process.

Since today’s American conservatives, pumped up on ressentiment, like to imagine themselves are outsiders rebelling against the librul establishment, just about any generic revolt-against-authority song can be recyled in their imagination as “conservative”. Come to think of it, didn’t Carly Simon write a song about them?

I think the conservatives are on to something here. It really doesn’t matter what the author of the song privately intended, but what the effect is on the audience. “Rock the Casbah”, whatever the intentions of its Marxist authors, has been used repeatedly as the theme song for various acts of violence against the Muslim world. How many bombs dropped when it was blaring in the cockpit? How many Shi’ite widows strip searched to it?

Whether hostility to the traditional social structures of the Muslim world is genuinely conservative is arguable, of course, but it is the conservative movement (in the Western sense) that is violently pulling those structures apart. (At least until Hillary gets in.)

More generally, you cannot seriously listen to the Clash without acknowledging their fascination with tribe and war. As leftists, their nostalgia tends towards the Popular Front period, but you can’t help but here an echo of St. Crispin in the lines from the Card Cheat, “From the Hundred Years’ War to the Crimea/With a lance and a musket and a Roman spear/To all of the men who stood without fear/In the service of the King.”

Sure, it is ironic in the broader context of the song. But it calls up emotions of British patriotism in their most feudal form.

As for “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” it is quite obviously a counter-revolutionary song, and was intended to be.

What pithlord said. Also, Rock the Casbah lampoons the Prophet, an activity which is condemned here, and praised at Instapundit and Volokh, and is therefore demonstrably conservative.

didn’t Carly Simon write a song about them?

I don’t know, but Nirvana did.

He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs
And he likes to sing along
And he likes to shoot his gun
But he don’t know what it means…

y81 and pithlord – feel free to sing along.

vanya, that’s in the same vein as saying the dead kennedy’s “kill the poor” was used by racists and supremacists as a theme song. the song is exaggerating a position to make it look stupid, not endorsing a position.

what people do with RTC or KTP is their business but i’m off to set up a turbine attached to Joe Strummer’s grave to see if i can;t solve the world’s energy problems.

I am Muslim, and my kids are Muslim Egyptians raisedi n the Middle East, and we love that song Rock the Casbah and think the video is hilarious. Who told you guys Muslims have no sense of humor, anyhow?

But, we definitely would not call the song “conservative.” That’s just idiotic. In what sense of the term?

And, most people understand ironic shock value type songs like “Kill teh Poor” or “Killing an Arab” or other such things, you have to be completely stupid to miss it and think the song’s actually in favor of those things.

And, most people understand ironic shock value type songs like “Kill the Poor” or “Killing an Arab” or other such things..

Um… “Killing an Arab” is actually about the central scene from Albert Camus’ “L’Etranger” – existentialism, not shock value. I remember a couple of my schoolmates making that mistake back when Libya was the Designated Enemy. Are there people on the American Right who think it’s about killing Arabs? If so, that’s even funnier than thinking “Born in the USA” is patriotic.

Actually, now that I reread this thread, poster #34 (pithlord) refers to Killing an Arab being played by US military in Ira. Maybe he can tell us if this is just a metaphor or if it’s based on some sort of fact.

Almostinfamous,
Sorry, I gotta disagree. “Rock the Casbah” is not exaggerating a position to make it look stupid,, it’s a straight forward anthem about people refusing to bow down to an autocratic anti-fun regime. It has nothing in common with songs like “kill the poor” which is plainly meant to be ironic. For a punk group the Clash were pretty irony free. I do believe that Strummer probably meant the song to be symbolic, I don’t think it was meant to really be about the Middle East, it’s an allegory about kids telling their elders to bugger off, and the inability of authority to control people’s lives. In that sense you could argue it’s not a conservative song. Still, it’s certainly one of Strummer’s weaker efforts.

Unfortuantely I can’t source it, but I remember watching some footage of some Marines humiliating Iraqi teenagers with “Rock the Casbah” in the background a few years ago. I remebered it because of the irony. I do think that “rock and roll rebellion” is totally bogus, and that rock and rap are both the soundtrack of American imperialism worldwide. That’s not to say that there isn’t some good stuff, or that people are bad to like it. But it is worth being more critical than just accepting the artists’ own leftist politics as the sum of the effect of the music.

In response to “engels”, Cobain was obsessed with this problem.

Anna, et.al., no idea whether the kids in Iraq are singing the Cure, but I know that when I received my M16 in USMC boot camp the first thing I and the guy next to me (a kid from Berkeley) did was sing–very much under our breaths after exchanging a sly grin–“Killing an Arab.” Of course, that was 1986 and was done with all ironic intent. And for all that, as compared to “Napalm Sticks to Little Children” (sung to “Jesus Loves the Little Children”) and some of the other shit these sick bastards sing, Robert Smith’s Stranger tribute is a lark.

Of course, I’m sure there are plenty of young Marines smart and ironic and nihilistic enough to know & sing the Cure song in Iraq–as well as all-too-painfully aware that the most relevent words in the tune might well be “I’m alive–and dead. I’m a stranger…”

So–don’t be too righteously outraged.

As to the rest of this: agree w/majority of the posters–it’s something of a head exploder to see some of these as “conservative” ditties. What next, Woody Guthrie’s guitar on NeoCon rally poster in cause against “Islamo-Fascism?”

W/r/t Dylan–there is, no doubt, a free and early sense of mocking the petty and utopian. But you know, Woody Guthrie had his own problems with the Communists (and his own women problems). What can one say other than that they were both artists and looking to be free before all else & also that a certain class of leftist does need a swift kick in the ass now & again (or at least a really good verbal tweaking).

I find Aphex Twin to be perfectly expressive of conservative values. Prove me wrong, why don’t you. Can you?