Alby's Latest Posts
Song of the Day 3/19: Michael Jackson, “Black or White”
As long as everybody is arguing about racism, let’s listen to what was intended as a condemnation of it. Here’s the song alone, stripped down to just the music — no controversial video segments, just a mid-tempo dance tune with catchy riff and a social message. Of course, that’s not how anyone remembers the song. […]
Calls for a Global War on White Nationalism Begin
Christopher Dickey, foreign editor of the Daily Beast, is out with a column that calls the devil by his name. The New Zealand killer, Dickey writes, may have been a lone shooter when he slaughtered 50 people at two mosques in New Zealand on Friday, but he was not a “lone wolf.” He was part […]
Why Capitalism Sucks, in One Paragraph
Mark Sumner, who writes the Daily Kos Abbreviated Pundit Roundup on Sundays, made this comment after one of his links, and it’s hard to make it simpler: I live in a capitalist system, yes, but if we really believe there’s nothing better than a system in which 90+ percent of people spend the bulk of […]
Song of the Day 3/17: Dropkick Murphys, “The Wild Rover”
If you’re reading this before your first green-dyed beer of the day, you probably know this tune, or at least its “no, nay, never” refrain, by heart. It’s among the most widely known and performed Irish folk songs, even though it’s not originally Irish. The lyrics have been traced to a 17th-century broadside from England, […]
Dumbfuck ‘New’ Democrats Oppose Green New Deal
The “New Democrats,” the organization Lisa Blunt Rochester has joined, has made clear it disapproves of the Green New Deal. The “new” in the name apparently means lobbyists should send their donations to a new address. “The energy industry is replete with bad unintended consequences of well intentioned regulation. The aspirations of the Green New […]
Song of the Day 3/16: Yusuf Islam, “Don’t Let Me Be Understood”
When Cat Stevens converted to Islam in 1977, he changed his name and dropped out of the music industry for almost 30 years. He made headlines in 1989 when he was quoted supporting the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and his music was promptly dropped by most U.S. radio stations. When he finally recorded another pop […]
Biden, Stacey Abrams Hold Private Meeting
The Associated Press reported that Stacey Abrams, who lost the Georgia governor’s office in a race tainted by voter suppression, and Joe Biden held a private meeting in Washington on Thursday. Spokesmen on both sides were close-mouthed, but it’s not too hard to guess that the 2020 presidential race was on the agenda. According to […]
White Nationalists Now World’s No. 1 Terrorism Threat
That’s not just my opinion. It’s what anti-terrorism expert Brian Levin, Director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, told MSNBC this morning. “There’s an international network of Islamophobes, and sometimes they visit different places, but most of it’s on the Internet. What we’re seeing here just generally […]
Song of the Day 3/15: The Who, “Pictures of Lily”
I’ve been talking a lot about power pop recently, mainly because it seems Jason330 is a fan of the genre even if he didn’t realize what it was called. So let’s look into the history of the only genre of rock and roll that shunned being cool in favor of commercial appeal, only to be […]
Song of the Day 3/14: Van Morrison, “In the Days Before Rock and Roll”
Everybody is familiar with the Van Morrison canon from his classic period in the ’60s and ’70s, but he’s been turning out often-inspired music without a break ever since leaving Them, even if classic rock radio thinks his career peaked with “Brown Eyed Girl.” “Enlightenment,” released in 1990, was Morrison’s 20th LP, and it contains […]
If Two Years Wasn’t Such a Long Time
My wife and I have a friend in Lebanon — the country, not the Pennsylvania town — whom we’ve known since the 1970s, when Lebanon’s civil war was still being fought with frequent rocket and mortar attacks. Tony lived in Beirut, once one of the most beautiful cities in the Middle East, where rocket attacks […]
Song of the Day 3/13: Minus the Bear, “Absinthe Party at the Fly Honey Warehouse”
I’m not an absinthe drinker, but the lyrics of this song from Minus the Bear’s first album speak directly to my present situation: Hey, let’s cross the sea and get some culture Red wine with every meal and absinthe after dinner… Sitting on a park bench that’s older than my country The video is by […]
Song of the Day 3/12: Sugar Stems, “We Only Come Out at Night”
I’m invoking our new Earworm Warning for this one, which I first heard when it was released in 2014 and not much since. Yet it popped into my head unbidden a few days ago and it’s still there. So consider yourself warned. Sugar Stems formed in Milwaukee in 2007 and released two albums before “Only […]
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