Category Archives: Media

All Hail the King of Late Night Talk Shows ► Throwback Thursday

, , , , , , ,

The undisputed King of Late Night is — and forever will be — Johnny Carson. On this day in 1962, Carson took the helm of The Tonight Show, and nothing was ever the same again.

Carson didn’t invent the modern talk show. That honour goes to Steve Allen. However, Carson reinvented the talk show and kept reinventing it night after night for 30 years, racking up nearly 5,000 shows. But it wasn’t his endurance that made Johnny Carson a star. According to Biography:

Audiences found comfort in Carson’s calm and steady presence in their living rooms each evening. Revered for his affable personality, quick wit and crisp interviews, he guided viewers into the late night hours with a familiarity they grew to rely on year after year. Featuring interviews with the stars of the latest Hollywood movies or the hottest bands, Carson kept Americans up-to-date on popular culture, and reflected some of the most distinct personalities of his era through impersonations, including his classic take on President Ronald Reagan. Carson created several recurring comedic characters that popped up regularly on his show, including Carnac the Magnificent, an Eastern psychic who was said to know the answers to all kinds of baffling questions. In these skits, Carson would wear a colorful cape and featured turban and attempt to answer questions on cards before even opening their sealed envelopes. Carson, as Carmac, would demand silence before answering questions such as “Answer: Flypaper.” “Question: What do you use to gift wrap a zipper?”

In August I was thrilled when Variety announced Johnny Carson Returns: Antenna TV to Air Full ‘Tonight Show’ Episodes starting January 1st:

Antenna TV has struck a multi-year deal with Carson Entertainment Group to license hundreds of hours of the NBC late-night institution. Antenna will run episodes that aired from 1972 through the end of Carson’s 30-year reign in in 1992. Because NBC owns the rights to “The Tonight Show” moniker, Antenna TV’s episodes will be billed simply as “Johnny Carson.”

“This is not a clip show. This is full episodes of Johnny Carson, the man that everyone in late-night agrees was the greatest host of all time, airing in real time as he did back in the day,” Sean Compton, Tribune’s president of strategic programming and acquisitions, told Variety. “Tuning in to ‘The Tonight Show’ is like taking a walk down Main Street in Disneyland. The minute you step in there, you feel good and you know it’s a place you want to stay. We cannot wait to bring this show to fans who remember Carson and to a new generation of viewers who have never had the chance to see Johnny in his prime.”

Starting January 1st we’ll see more comedy brilliance like this:









Tuli Kupferberg ► Monday Musical Appreciation

, , , , , , ,

Today we celebrate the life, poetry, and music of counter-culture icon Tuli Kupferberg, born on this day in 1923. He was a ground-breaking New York City Bohemian in the right place, at the right time, to find his claim to fame in the Hippie era.

According to his obituary in the New York Times:
The Fugs were, in the view of the longtime Village Voice critic Robert Christgau,
“the Lower East Side’s first true underground band.” They were also
perhaps the most puerile and yet the most literary rock group of the
1960s, with songs suitable for the locker room as well as the graduate
seminar (“Ah, Sunflower, Weary of Time,” based on a poem by William
Blake); all were played with a ramshackle glee that anticipated punk
rock.

With
songs like “Kill for Peace,” the Fugs also established themselves as
aggressively antiwar, with a touch of absurdist theater. The band became
“the U.S.O. of the left,” Mr. Kupferberg once said, and it played
innumerable peace rallies, including the “exorcism” of the Pentagon in
1967 that Norman Mailer chronicled in his book “The Armies of the Night.” (The band took its name from a usage in Mailer’s “Naked and the Dead.”)

When I was growing up The Fugs and Frank Zappa were my introduction to the counter-culture. While the ’60s was filled with psychedelic bands, the fact that their records appeared on mainstream corporate record companies took them down a notch in my opinion. But, not The Fugs. They were as real as real could be.
Rolling Stone’s obit reads in part:

The Fugs formed in 1964 when bookstore owner Sanders and poet
Kupferberg, both barely musicians, teamed up to play an unpolished rock
& roll combined with lyrics stocked with political satire and
profanity. Because of their anti-war imagery — “Who can train guerillas
by the dozens? Send them out to kill their untrained cousins?” asks
frontman Kupferberg in “CIA Man” — and rambunctious live shows in the
mid-’60s, the FBI reportedly investigated the Fugs. The band ultimately
recorded six albums between 1964 and 1969, with Tupferberg contributing
some of the band’s most renowned tracks: “Nothing,” “Kill for Peace,”
“The Ten Commandments” and “CIA Man.” After a 15-year hiatus, Kupferberg
and Sanders reformed the Fugs with a new lineup.

Kupferberg earned a reputation as one of New York’s foremost
bohemians, and even served as the inspiration for the man who jumped off
the Brooklyn Bridge and survived in Allen Ginsberg’s epic poem “Howl.”
Kupferberg “jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and
walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown,”
Ginsberg wrote. Kupferberg later admitted he was the jumper of
Ginsberg’s poem.

Whenever things get too real for me, I remember The Fugs Gospel-inspired tune Wide, Wide River, which, in a perfect world, should have been Number One on the Hit Parade longer than Carole King’s reign on the top of the charts. Crank it up!!!

PSF:What did think of the Beat movement when it first started happening?

I remember being shocked by it. I guess I was still in some sort of
traditional mode. Shocked, jealousy and then adaptation. It was
liberating. I was shocked by Ed Sander’s freedom of sexual expression.
I’m sure people were shocked by mine when I started. Ginsberg is your
best example of a liberating force. It’s not just the language or the
freedom of the language because that just reflects character structure.
A person who drops dead or wants to kill someone would use all those
words you’re not supposed to use. It’s more than language. It’s
attitude towards sexuality and human relations along with domination and
love. It’s not that people who shout about sexual freedom understand
everything that’s involved. In order to have good sex, you have to have
good human relationships and vice versa. When I grew up, in my
community, you weren’t going to have sex until you got married- this was
a middle-class Jewish community. Maybe you went to a prostitute…
But that gradually broke down. That was all for the good and not just
for me but also for most of America.

PSF: So you got to be part of the Beats yourself then?

Everyone was. But I felt that they had a heritage with the
bohemians. The term comes from 12th century University of Paris. The
craziest students came from Bohemia and they gave them this name.
There’s this old tradition of living outside of the mores of society.
Until the burgeouis revolution, most artists lived on the patronage of
the ruling class. LA VIE DE BOHEME, the libetto for that opera, tells
you what was happening then in the 18th century. So that’s a 150 year
old tradition that’s still going on. It used to be linked to geography
with places like New York, San Francisco, Munich, Paris. But now, with
the Internet, you could be crazy, wild, free and self-destructive
anywhere you want. But hopefully, there’s still communities of people
out there. Utopian colonies who are just friends.

It was always about the poetry. Here’s Tuli in recitation:

Tuli died in 2010 at the age of 86, but his poetry and music live on forever.

U-Roy ► Monday Musical Appreciation

, , , , , , , , ,

Let’s get right to it. Had it not been for Reggae “toasting,” or “dancehall,” there would have been no Rap or Hip Hop. U-Roy, was not only one of the firsts in the genre, but one of the best.

Born Ewart Beckford on this day in 1942, U-Roy got his nickname from a family member who couldn’t pronounce his real name.

According to the WikiWackyWoo:

As a young man Beckford listened to the music of Louis Prima, James Brown, Ruth Brown, Fats Domino, Rufus Thomas, Smiley Lewis and was especially influenced by the vocal phrasing of Louis Jordan.


U-Roy’s first single
U-Roy began as a DJ in 1961 toasting over the records at live events. In Jamaica there was no access to radio, so the toasting was done at live shows in front of a “sound system.” Moving from one sound system to another, it took almost a decade before his career took off, but when it did U-Roy changed the face of Reggae music.
U-Roy has worked with the great producers of Dub Reggae, from King Tubby to Lee “Scratch” Perry, going from height to height.

According to All Music: 
His toasts were utterly relaxed
and conversational, yet always in perfect synchronicity with the
rhythms. The DJ had now gained a significant following in the U.K., as
well, and in August 1976, visited Britain for the first time. He
performed at the London Lyceum, backed by the always excellent
Revolutionaries, and the 1978 Live EP was drawn from this phenomenal
show. Back in Jamaica, U-Roy began recording his new album, Rasta Ambassador,
filling the studio with musicians and singers, 15 strong in all. The
Gladiators provided particularly sonorous backing vocals, while the
band, led by the rhythm team of Sly & Robbie,
created a deep roots sound appropriate to the album’s title and
accentuated by Robinson’s deeply dubby production. 
U-Roy is still toasting and we are still listening. As always the proof is in the record grooves and in the beat. Listen to U-Roy and you’ll see why he was awarded Jamaica’s Order of Distinction. A fitting distinction for a man who changed the face of Reggae music.

Bill “The Falafel King” O’Reilly Born ► Throwback Thursday

, , , , , , , , , , ,
Yes, he actually said this without a hint of irony

If there’s any single person that I wish we could throw back, it’s Fox “News” fabulist and serial exaggerator Bill O’Reilly. 

Loofah Lad is a Fox “News” anchor, both literally and figuratively, because he’s the highest rated liar on Fox, just not the only liar.

O’Reilly calls himself a cultural warrior battling all those forces of evil that most of us accept as part of a multiracial, pluralistic society. Entire books and websites have been written about this man, so I won’t bother. However, the reason he’s perfect for this rubric is he wants to throwback the country to the lily White suburbs of of his ’50s Levittown, where he grew up; a man so uncomfortable around Black folk, that every time he brings up the issue of race, he embarrasses himself.

Bill is a Catholic, who is getting a divorce. He’s now engaged in an ugly battle with his ex-wife, where he’s been accused of domestic violence:

The transcript includes testimony from Larry Cohen, a psychologist appointed to interview and make assessments about each member of the family during the dispute. (Note that “M.” refers to O’Reilly’s daughter.)

“M. [his daughter] reported — having seeing an incident where I believe she said her dad was choking her mom or had his hands around her neck and dragged her down some stairs.”  

 Meanwhile, The Falafel King lectures and hectors ‘Merka to live exemplary lives.

Can we throw him back already?

As is traditional in his falsely titled No Spin Zone, we’ll give Bill the last word:

A Message to Facebookers

, , , , ,

Dear Facefolkers: 

Do you wander over to other people’s personal timelines to insult or take issue with what they post? If so, this post is for you.

WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?

When sitting on a person’s front porch, would you start calling them names? Would you tell them their opinions are wrong? Worse yet, would you refuse to offer any facts to bolster your side of the argument? Especially when you’re not even a friend to the person you’re attacking?

I’m really growing tired of people who show up on my personal wall with the sole purpose of shitting all over it.

Look: There are plenty of places on the facebookery where you can debate opinions to your heart’s content. That’s what they’re there for. However, that’s not what my wall is for.

My wall is for me and my friends to get together and shoot the breeze.

It’s like the neighbourhoods of old, when people would sit on their front porch and greet everybody who passed. The difference is we are all simultaneously sitting on our front porch and walking past all the other porches.

If you honestly and truly believed that Mr. Smith is a drooling fool, would you walk past his porch and yell, “I heard what you said to Mr. Jones and you’re nothing but an idiot”? Or would you just walk past?

When I see crap I don’t like on another person’s wall — sometimes it’s very good face-to-facefriends, sometimes it’s family, and sometimes it’s just facefriends I’ll never meet — I just keep on walking. What good comes from starting that kind of debate?

But, I really want to talk about a far more egregious form of this problem:

Attacking people who are not even your facefriends. You’ve seen what they posted ONLY because one of your facefriends liked it or shared it. So you wander over to that timeline to give the original poster a piece of your mind. This is akin to helicoptering over a neighbourhood you don’t even belong to and hectoring those people with a megawatt PA system.

Give your head a shake. Don’t be an asshole on my threads, and I won’t be an asshole back to you.

I’m ALWAYS willing to discuss things. But, if you start with an accusatory or defensive attack, I’m gonna BLOCK your ass. And, if you quote Fox “News” memes, I’m going to BLOCK your ass and make sure everybody laughs at you.

A Peruvian Princess Sings ► Monday Musical Appreciation

, , , ,

She’s now considered the Queen of Exotica, the musical genre that encompasses a previous era’s Kitch, but at one time Yma Súmac was considered to be a Peruvian princess.

I discovered Yma Súmac in the early ’60s. Among my mother’s LPs were a couple by Yma Sumac. As a kid I was attracted to crazy colours and costumes on the covers, but once I dropped the needle on the record, I WAS HOOKED!!! That voice! Those songs! I had never heard anything like it before and have been a fan ever since.

There has never been anything else like her. Listen:

Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo, was born on September 13, 1922 in Callao, Peru, but took the name Yma Súmac, which had various spellings until she signed with Capital Records in 1950.

According to the WikiWackyWoo:

Stories published in the 1950s claimed that she was an Incan princess, directly descended from Atahualpa. The government of Peru in 1946 formally supported her claim to be descended from Atahualpa, the last Incan emperor”.[7]
She was the subject of a series of publicity campaigns designed to
shroud her origins in mystery: was she an Inca princess, one of the
chosen ‘Golden Virgins’? Whatever her heritage, what was abundantly
genuine was Sumac’s four octave range, ascending from ‘female baritone,
through lyric soprano, to high coloratura’.

According to her obituary in the LA Times:

Bursting onto the U.S. music scene after signing with Capitol Records in 1950, the raven-haired Sumac was known as the “Nightingale of the Andes,” the “Peruvian Songbird” and a “singing marvel” with a 4 1/2 -octave (she said five-octave) voice.

“She is five singers in one,” boasted her then-husband Moises Vivanco, a composer-arranger, in a 1951 interview with the Associated Press. “Never in 2,000 years has there been another voice like hers.”

After Sumac performed at the Shrine Auditorium with a company of dancers, drummers and musicians in 1955, a Los Angeles Times writer observed:

“She warbles like a bird in the uppermost regions, hoots like an owl in the lowest registers, produces bell-like coloratura passages one minute, and exotic, dusky contralto tones the next.”

Yma Súmac died in a Los Angeles assisted living facility in 1988. You can read all about her amazing life on the internet, but, as always, it’s really about the music. Take a listen:

Arthur Godfrey ► A Monday Musical Appreciation

, , ,

Celebrating a birthday today is Arthur Godfrey, born in 1903. Godfrey rose from a lowly radio announcer to being one of ‘Merka’s biggest celebrities.

Godfrey served in the Navy as a radio operator. Later he joined the Coast Guard, where he appeared on a local Baltimore radio show. When he left the Coast Guard in 1930, he got a job as a radio announcer at a Baltimore station, followed by a stint in Washington, D.C.

While laid up after a car crash, Godfrey listened to his competition. According to the WikiWackyWoo:

[H]e decided to listen closely to the radio and realized that the stiff, formal style then used by announcers could not connect with the average radio listener. The announcers spoke in stentorian tones, as if giving a formal speech to a crowd and not communicating on a personal level. Godfrey vowed that when he returned to the airwaves, he would affect a relaxed, informal style as if he were talking to just one person. He also used that style to do his own commercials and became a regional star.

He kicked around in radio until:

Godfrey became nationally known in April 1945 when, as CBS’s
morning-radio man in Washington, he took the microphone for a live,
firsthand account of President Roosevelt’s funeral procession. The
entire CBS network picked up the broadcast, later preserved in the Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly record series, I Can Hear it Now.
Unlike the tight-lipped news reporters and commentators of the day, who
delivered news in an earnest, businesslike manner, Godfrey’s tone was
sympathetic and neighborly, lending immediacy and intimacy to his words.
When describing new President Harry S. Truman‘s
car in the procession, Godfrey fervently said, in a choked voice, “God
bless him, President Truman.” Godfrey broke down in tears and cued the
listeners back to the studio. The entire nation was moved by his
emotional outburst.

In the meantime, he released songs that could never be played on the radio in today’s manufactured outrage society.

Godfrey kept moving up. It was far simpler times and Godfrey’s folksy charm was just perfect for the times, where he eventually became one of tee vee’s biggest stars. It started in 1948 with Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, the precursor to today’s reality talent shows. It was simulcast on both radio and that new invention called television. By 1952 Arthur Godfrey Time was also running on radio and tee vee. Also according to the Woo:

Godfrey’s
skills as a commercial pitchman brought him a large number of loyal
sponsors, including Lipton Tea, Frigidaire, Pillsbury cake mixes and Liggett & Myers‘s Chesterfield cigarettes.

He found that one way to enhance his pitches was to extemporize his
commercials, poking fun at the sponsors (while never showing disrespect
for the products themselves), the sponsors’ company executives, and
advertising agency types who wrote the scripted commercials that he
regularly ignored. (If he read them at all, he ridiculed them or even
threw aside the scripts in front of the cameras.) To the surprise of the
advertising agencies and sponsors, Godfrey’s kidding of the commercials
and products frequently enhanced the sales of those products. His
popularity and ability to sell brought a windfall to CBS, accounting for a significant percentage of their corporate profits.

Here is sample of his television work:

And, Godfrey continued to pump out music that the public bought by the barrel full.

Miami renamed 41st Street Arthur Godfrey Road after him

While Godfrey came across as everyone’s favourite avuncular uncle, behind the scenes he was a control freak and abusive to the “Little Godfreys,” which is what he called his supporting company.

Then came the Julius LaRosa incident, which burst Godfrey’s carefully cultivated personality. According to many reports, jealousy was partially to blame. Godfrey had hired LaRosa as a nobody, after he wowed the audience of Talent Scouts. Eventually LaRose became one of the most popular performers on the show, his fan mail outpacing Godfrey’s. Watch:

The public turned against him and that was the beginning of the end for Godfrey. “No humility,” the phony excuse Godfrey made after-the-fact for firing LaRosa, became a national punchline. Comedians from coast to coast made fun of Godfrey.

While Godfrey remained in show biz for several decades after that, he never again held the huge audience he had during the height of his career.

Murder and Morning Television

, , , , , , , , , , ,
299 Queen Street West became the CHUM/City Building.

There are some news stories that hit harder than others. That describes yesterday, which left me bereft.

Back in the ’90s, as many of you know, I was a News Writer for BreakfastTelevision on Toronto’s Citytv. In many ways BT was, and still is, the template for almost every newsy, happy talk, morning show since.

However, not many people know that before I started writing news for CityPulse, I was hired at Citytv as a Security Guard. For several years I worked at the front desk in the lobby for 12 hour shifts. It was 2 weeks of days followed by 2 weeks of nights, both 9-9. Night shifts were easy. Once an hour I would walk around inside the locked 5-story building, rattling doorknobs and taking note of who was still working.

Day shifts were a whole ‘nothing thing. One could be called upon to do anything and everything, from guarding talent live on the air on the sidewalk to finding a way to sneak mega-stars in and out of the building (which is why there is video footage of me and George Harrison doing a Walk & Talk; a story still to be written).

Any number of things could go wrong while doing live segments, all of them out of my control. Luckily nothing ever happened on one of my shifts. However, while setting up for live segments, I witnessed first-hand how people had a strange, proprietary interest in our on air personalities. Maybe because they came into everybody’s living room, people felt they were approachable in ways that, say, Hollywood celebrities are not.

Whenever we were out in the field, the hard part was getting rid of all the people wanting to talk to the talent as we were about to go live. The potential for someone stumbling into the shot was always great. I stopped more than one person from walking up to David Onley while he was delivering the weather.

The Now Now Silly Newsroom chooses not to post the videos of this heinous act. If you absolutely have to see it, it can be found at: Vester Lee Flanagan: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know, which has some other good info.

One thing I never considered were guns. Because there are far fewer guns in circulation in Canada, it would never have entered my mind.

A screen cap from the gunman’s perspective

When the news flashed across the Not Now Silly Breaking News Desk yesterday, I did as most people: started channel flipping to learn as much as I could. What was this? Domestic Terrorism? Foreign Terrorism? A grudge against a news department? A grudge against a tee vee station? Domestic violence? A Right Wing whack job? Left Wing whack job? Plain old whack job?

None of the above. It was Workplace Violence by a whack job, a very narrow category. A disgruntled employee held a grudge for 2 years before he finally went off yesterday. The gunman’s rambling manifesto mentions grievances against the station and the 2 employees killed. He claimed to have been radicalized by the murder of 9 Black folk in a Charlestown church in June and described himself as a “human powder keg” … “just waiting to go BOOM!!!!”

For maximum effect, the murders were timed to occur when the reporter was live, and for a while the footage was played on a loop on CNN before cooler heads prevailed and they yanked it off the air.

However, there were greater horrors to come. The assassin posted his own version of the murders on Facebook from his point of view. While both Twitter and Facebook suspended his accounts almost immediately, the video had already escaped into the wild and there is no pulling it back. Ever.

I have viewed all the video there is to see, so you don’t have to. It’s not a macho thing. It’s a newsman thing. While it is the most chilling video I’ve ever seen, because you know what’s coming but it takes almost 30 seconds for it to happen, it’s not the worst video I’ve ever watched. That would be a tie between footage of the massacres in Rwanda and brains all over Highway 427 after a car crash, which the cameraman kept shooting and framing artistically and lovingly, even though he knew there was no way the footage would ever make it to air. I had to watch it to see what we could put on the air.

So, I watched the footage made by the gunman, knowing it would not be the worst thing I’ve ever seen. However, I had no idea how close to home it would hit.

I only watched it once (because once is enough), but can describe the entire thing. Vester Flanagan made Rookie Mistake #1: The camera is tilted to portrait, not landscape. As he moves closer to his targets, he adjusts the zoom, in and then out again. Then you see his hand holding the gun enter the frame. It moves from one person to another, as if he can’t believe no one’s paid any attention to him yet. Cameraman Adam Ward has panned off to the right and has his back turned to Flanagan. Alison Parker is so focused on interviewing Vicki Gardner, of the Smith Mountain Lake Regional Chamber of Commerce, that she doesn’t even notice the danger as Flanagan waves the gun back and forth in what may have been her peripheral vision. Then the shooting begins.

I’ve been there! I’ve guarded live shots!! I have stood right there!!!

I spent the rest of the day shivering and reliving that footage in my head. This one hit a lot closer to home and a lot closer than I expected when I started following the story.

►►► R.I.P. ◄◄◄
Alison Parker and Adam Ward
both described as having a very bright future. 

Linton Kwesi Johnson ► A Monday Musical Appreciation

, , , , , ,

Celebrating a birthday today is Linton Kwesi Johnson, the first Dub Poet. I first became aware of him through Island Records Canada, which I worked for in the ’70s, and he was already a force in Britain. In 2012, according to the The Guardian:

Father of dub poetry Linton Kwesi Johnson will join names including Harold Pinter, JG Ballard and Doris Lessing as winner of the Golden PEN award, for a lifetime’s distinguished service to literature.

Known for his controversial poem “Inglan Is A Bitch“, and for “Di Great Insohreckshan“,
a response to the 1981 Brixton riots in which he stated “It is noh
mistri / we mekkin histri”, Johnson writes what he calls “dub poetry”, a
blend of reggae music and verse written in a Jamaican-London
vernacular. Often performing with the Dennis Bovell Dub Band, he has
been writing and performing since the mid-1970s. In 2002, he was the
second living poet, and the only black poet, to be included in the
Penguin Modern Classic Series.


Linton Kwesi Johnson accepting his Golden PEN award

Johnson was chosen by the trustees of English PEN to receive the
honour. President and author Gillian Slovo described him as “an artistic
innovator, a ground-breaker who has used poetry to talk politics and
who first gave voice to, and who continues to give voice to, the
experience of moving country and of living in this one”.

Johnson himself said he was “surprised and humbled” to win the prize,
because his poetry is from the “little tradition” of Caribbean verse.
“I hope that by conferring on me this award, English PEN will involve
more black writers in its important work and that more black writers
will support English PEN,” he said.

His British Council Literature page says, in part:

He joined the Black Panther movement in 1970, organising a poetry workshop and working with Rasta Love, a group of poets and percussionists. He joined the Brixton-based Race Today Collective in 1974. His first book of poems, Voices of the Living and the Dead, was published by the Race Today imprint in 1974. His second book, Dread, Beat An’ Blood (1975) includes poems written in Jamaican dialect, and was released as a record in 1978. He is widely regarded as the father of ‘dub poetry’, a term he coined to describe the way a number of reggae DJs blended music and verse. Johnson maintains that his starting point and focus is poetry, composed before the music, and for this reason he considers the term ‘dub poetry’ misleading when applied to his own work. He recorded several albums on the Island label, including Forces of Victory (1979), Bass Culture (1980), LKJ In dub (1980) and Making History (1984) and founded his own record label – LKJ – in the mid-1980s, selling over two million records worldwide. 

According to John Dougan’s Artist Biography at All Music:

Although he has only released one album of new material in the last ten
years, and virtually retired from the live stage after his 1985 tour, Linton Kwesi Johnson remains a towering figure in reggae music. Born in Kingston, Jamaica and raised in the Brixton section of London, Johnson invented dub poetry, a type of toasting descended from the DJ stylings of U-Roy and I-Roy. But whereas toasting tended to be hyperkinetic and given to fits of braggadocio, Johnson‘s
poetry (which is what it was — he was a published poet and journalist
before he performed with a band) was more scripted and delivered in a
more languid, slangy, streetwise style.

But, as always, it’s all about The Music:




The Monday Musical Appreciation is a brand new Not Now Silly feature, bringing insight into the music that turns me on.

Celebrating Independence Day on Bizarro World

, , , ,

One of the most curious aspects of the Religious Right is its ability to turn around every controversy in order to play the victim. This despite being the dominating force of all public life for the last several millennia. The Phony War on Christmas has now morphed into the Phony War on Christians.

After the Supreme Court’s recent decision granting Marriage Equality to the LBGT communities, the Religious Right lost its collective mind. Several GOP candidates for president have denounced the Supreme Court, forgetting the Founding Fathers designed the government in such to provide the Checks and Balances needed for the Republic to survive.

Senator Ted Cruz called the decision “the darkest 24 hours in our nation’s history,” clearly topping such events as the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the Civil War, and 9/11, to name just a few. For his part, Mike Huckleberry Hound says, if he were president (an absurd notion in the first place) he would use Executive Orders to roll back the Supreme Court ruling (an absurd notion in the second place). As PoliticusUSA quotes him:

America didn’t fight a revolution against the tyranny of one unelected monarch so we could surrender our religious liberty to the tyranny of five unelected lawyers. The Supreme Court is not the Supreme Being, and the Court can no more repeal the laws of nature and nature’s God on marriage than they can the laws of gravity.

Had the media not been following the shiny object called Donald J. Trump and his bigoted comments on Mexicans, we might have heard more about this GOP insanity.

However, the Religious Right have been taking notes from the GOP. They don’t like this Marriage Equality dealie. They don’t like this Marriage Equality dealie ONE BIT!!! That’s why these butt hurt Christians — whose churches pay no taxes, of course — have made a video portraying their victimization at the hands of people who believe love should triumph over hate. In Anti-gay marriage video by US pressure group CatholicVote plays victim card, by Damien Gayle (a spawn of Satan if I ever pigeonholed someone based on merely their name) wrote:

Over a soundtrack of soft ambient music, the first woman to speak says: “I am a little bit nervous about people, kind of, hearing that I am this way and then thinking, well, she’s not welcome here.”

“I have tried to change this before,” begins another woman, who is close to tears. “But it’s too important to me.”

“I believe marriage is between a man and a woman,” continues the first, her view repeated by the rest.

Some speakers emphasise [sic] that they have gay friends, and insist their position is based on their religious conviction rather than bigotry. “I have gay friends. I don’t fear them,” one young man says. But he goes on to suggest that, as gay marriage grows in acceptance, his conviction is beginning to attract the stigma once attached to gay men and lesbians.

WATCH:

And, as day follows night, naturally there is already a parody version:

WATCH:

If it were not so frightening, it would be highly amusing that Christians feel they are under attack. Equality is NOT a zero sum game. Giving equal rights to LGBT folk takes nothing away from churchgoers.

Only when, and if, the Religious Right truly understands that, can they celebrate a true Independence Day for all, including themselves.