Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
NIA: Hi, Aughie.
Aughie: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
NIA: Well, I'd be fine if I could tell time, I have time problems these days.
Aughie: Do we need to go back?
NIA: I'm struggling seasonally I think, a good way to put it. Not so much with hours on the clock but so much with seasons.
Aughie: We need to go back to maybe kindergarten or first grade where we were we learned the seasons.
NIA: We learn to put the podcast episodes out in order of the season. Yes. Go ahead, Aughie.
Aughie: You're about to listen to or read the transcript for a podcast episode that we recorded a couple of months ago. Our intention was to have a sum or a favorites, where each episode would be a discussion of some of our favorite things related to government and politics. They weren't our normal fare of government documents or political science or facts.
NIA: They were facts, they were pretty much fact-free in most instances in terms of how the government runs or based in government documents which are generally what we do.
Aughie: Yes, and our intention was to record a number of these episodes and then release them during the summer.
NIA: For a get to know you summary of our summer favorites so that you can get to know us a little more personally of what we think of when we think of favorites. All good plans.
Aughie: The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray, right?
NIA: Yeah, and in this instance one of us man, no one of us is a mouse. I didn't want to take away your manhood by saying we were mice, we're both mice.
Aughie: The quote though is from Dickens, right?
NIA: Right.
Aughie: Anyways, so were recorded these episodes, our intention was to go ahead and release them during the summer. However, we received a bunch of emails from faithful listeners who wanted to know if and or when we were going to have podcast episodes, about the recently completed Supreme Court term that finished up the last week of June.
NIA: The reasonably non-controversial, completely boring nothing else after in the whole thing US Supreme Court.
Aughie: Yes.
NIA: That's so when you mean, right?
Aughie: Yes, exactly.
NIA: Several of our readers slash listeners were on fire basically it were like, oh my God you have to address this.
Aughie: What we did listeners is we scrapped or summer of favorites. But we didn't scrap it we delayed release of those episodes so what follows is one of those episodes.
NIA: Thank you for your patience for us with our timing, and let's work through our fall of favorites.
Aughie: Yes.
NIA: We'll come back with regularly scheduled episodes of normal list.
Aughie: Yes, where are we focused on government documents, government processes, things in the news.
NIA: Facts and figures and all the things that are true.
Aughie: Yes.
Aughie: Instead of all the things that are our opinions which you may or may not be true.
Aughie: True
NIA: Thanks, Aughie.
Aughie: Thank you, Nia.
Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning Nia.
N. Rodgers: How are you doing?
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm good. I awoke singing the lyrics of the Beatles Revolution.
N. Rodgers: Oh my gosh, I love that song.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That's a great song.
J. Aughenbaugh: But there's a reason why I was thinking about that because today's podcast episode is.
N. Rodgers: Favorite political songs or favorite songs that has been used by politicians. They're not always political, although I think all of ours are political in some way. Political protest, we broadened our view of political a little, and then listeners, Aughie and I are old, our musical tastes are somewhat old so keep that in mind. Every other thing we're doing this summer, these are favorites of two older folks. If you're looking for things that were published last year or that were sung last year, probably I have one in the '20s and everything else is before that. I'm just being free and open at the beginning.
J. Aughenbaugh: My most recent one was recorded in the late 1980s, I believe.
N. Rodgers: Yeah. It's two geezers up in here talking about music. But what we're hoping is to lead you to things you may not have heard if you're of the younger generation. These may be things you haven't listened to and you can Spotify these bad boys and find out what we're talking about. A little disclaimer, along with all the other disclaimers we're making this summer about our favorites being favorites, we're not talking about the quality of the music or the quality of the whatever the sound editing and that's not how we judge.
J. Aughenbaugh: No. These are songs that for the most part resonated with us as we were having our political awakening plus maturity and in the connective tissue here with all these songs is that they do talk about politics and or protest songs. Another disclaimer here. Though Nia and I are by all accounts political nerds, not all of the music that we listen to is "political". You need to do an entire episode where we go ahead and acknowledge that a lot of our songs, like most popular music in the United States, is not necessarily about politics.
N. Rodgers: My favorite song in the world is Shake It Off and that has nothing to do with politics, that it's just Taylor Swift and me in the car yelling, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake it off at the top of our lungs. Her doing a much better job by the way, than me. But I'm just saying. Yes. I agree with you that these are part of our. Aughie if you can see his background on Zoom which you can, which is probably good because then you'd see my background on Zoom, he is one-half of his study at home is CDs so if he only limited himself to protest, that would be like three shelves and he'd be done. But there's a metric ton of music behind him. I have a metric ton of MP3s on every device I own. Let me go first.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Again, listeners, the only condition that Nia and I put on ourselves is that we would try to limit to three or four songs.
N. Rodgers: Then I went over.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia went over, and I didn't put this in the research notes that I was going to spring it on Nia. There is an entire genre of music that I love that if one thinks about it in terms of its view of structures and institutions, is an archivist in nature. I will get to that later. But Nia, your first up.
N. Rodgers: My first step, the one whenever somebody says a political song, I swear to you the first thing that comes to my mind is Bruce Springsteen Born in the USA, 1984. Ronald Reagan used it in political ads and political rallies and it's like he didn't listen to the words of the song. Because Born in the USA is very much about a bleak return from Vietnam and not being able to get a job, it's telling the story of Vietnam vets and what actually happened to them coming home, being spit on, he doesn't mention that in the song, but that's the styling of the song.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because the narrator and the song basically grows up in a town that's not doing well.
N. Rodgers: Because nobody in any town that Bruce Springsteen sings about is doing well.
J. Aughenbaugh: He's struggling, he gets into trouble, more than likely illegal. You've got a quote here from the song lyrics, got in a little hometown Jan so they put a rifle on my hands, sent me off to a foreign land to go and kill the yellow man. He gets into Vietnam.
N. Rodgers: He doesn't understand, he's not going there for purpose. He's going there to avoid going to jail. There's some really powerful indictment of how you send people to war and their commitment to it, which is very different than we see in other wars where people commit themselves. People had to be forced to go to Vietnam. Vietnam is not a, hey, let's go join. Some people did obviously, but the vast majority of people it was draft. They didn't want to go. They were made to go versus some other wars we've had where people were more inclined to go. I think like many Bruce Springsteen songs, I think the work be used oblique. Keep in mind please that Bruce Springsteen may not be the best vocalist in the world. I used to think that he sounded like he was getting punched in the chest when he was singing. But his lyrics are worth listening to.
J. Aughenbaugh: Sure. Quite obviously, even if you're not a Springsteen fan, you're aware of this song, but the song on the album, which is entitled Born in the USA, is a full E-Street Band performance. Nia, I don't know if you even noticed, he wrote that song as part of the collection of songs that he wrote for his previous album, which I'm going to touch upon on my favorites list, Nebraska. I've seen him live by himself where he does the song solo.
N. Rodgers: Oh, that would be different.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's much more in the vein of one of the other artists on your favorites list and it's more of a folk song with a harmonica instead of guitars and keyboards but it's more in the genre of Woody
Guthrie than it actually is in the version that became very popular and was used by not only Ronald Reagan but other politicians.
N. Rodgers: I don't understand why they don't. Anybody who knows the song. By the way, infuriated Springsteen because he was not a fan of Ronald Reagan.
J. Aughenbaugh: As we will discuss another podcast episode, unfortunately for Springsteen.
N. Rodgers: What she can do about that?
J. Aughenbaugh: He couldn't do very much about it because the publishing company for him of his songs saw this as an opportunity to go ahead and make extra money and it was extra money for him and to his credit, he donated those royalties to various Vietnam vet groups. But it's a very powerful song and it was in all cases, a stinging indictment of why we went to the war, who went to the war, and then how we treated them when they came back home. Because that's the punchline of the song. He comes back home.
N. Rodgers: He can't get a job.
J. Aughenbaugh: There was nothing there for him.
N. Rodgers: There was nothing there for him. Second side mention of Springsteen, and I don't want to spend a whole lot of time talking about it, particularly because it makes me cry, which is American skin, otherwise known as 41 shots. That is a telling of a tribute to. [inaudible] Diablo, who was a Ghanaian man who came to the United States 1999 police officers stopped him, they claimed because they thought he was a rape suspect from a year before. But it was several police officers, like three or four police officers and they told him to put his hands up and he was reaching for a wallet they now know. But they said they thought he was reaching for a gun and they fired 41 shots and hit him 19 times. It was one of the first cases like that and it is a powerful song to listen to you because if it ends with Springsteen's simply repeating 41 shots.
J. Aughenbaugh: In fact, of all the times I've seen Springsteen and he played that song in to of the concerts I saw him in, it's the only two concerts where I heard audience members Bruce Springsteen.
N. Rodgers: It makes me cry. I was in Atlanta when he debuted.
J. Aughenbaugh: Both times. Because again, he doesn't pull any punches in the song I mean, he just comes out and says, this is unacceptable behavior.
N. Rodgers: Cops should not be doing this and what they called it was contagion, police contagion. One person starts to fire, then everybody starts to fire and I think that they've tried to work on that as a skill set. Many police officers, but really 41 shots. You need to fire that many shots. Then, I'm going to go back in time all the way to beginning, which is the beginning of time because I don't know the music at the beginning of the time. But there's Woody Guthrie's, This Land is Your Land. Woody Guthrie, more
people may have heard of his son Arlo. Alice's Restaurant is Arlo Guthrie. But Woody Guthrie wrote a song, This Land is Your Land, because he was hanging around going, traveling the United States and Irving Berlin's God bless America had just been released and everybody was singing it everywhere and he was like, that doesn't really touch on the fact that private land ownership and power and wealth is not equally shared in the United States. There are definite class. He pissed him off and so he wrote, This Land is Your Land, which is basically a, hey, you belong here and we should all have ownership of things, meaning also, there shouldn't be Bill Gates and, and Jeff Bezos and then the rest of us. There should be a little more equal. Again, he was looking for equality in class and in wealth and power.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, you emphasize the lyrics in Springsteen's Born in the USA. This is another song that has some rather powerful lyrics, in part describing the United States to somebody who, and he was traveling the United States in part by hitching rides on railroads and hanging out with, what we used to call hobos, etc. He talks about from California to the New York Island, from the redwood forest.
N. Rodgers: To the stream waters.
J. Aughenbaugh: This land was made for you and you and me.
N. Rodgers: Side note. We used to learn that in school. I got I don't know what grade you learned it in but I learned it in the second grade.
J. Aughenbaugh: In my household, all kinds of music was played so that was a song that would be on. Because again, if you grew up in a small town, radio stations were one of the few ways you can go ahead and connect to other parts of the country.
N. Rodgers: This is folks, when there were three channels on TV, your TV and you had to mess with the rabbit ears to get it to the far one, whatever the far one was.
J. Aughenbaugh: But with radio stations on a clear night.
N. Rodgers: You can hear Cuba on a clear night. Hear all kinds of cool stuff.
J. Aughenbaugh: I remember listening to baseball broadcasts as far away as Cleveland in Cincinnati and I was just like, well.
N. Rodgers: That's for you, that's great.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is cool. But we will get radio stations. Occasionally we'll get upstate New York radio stations. We would get West Virginia radio stations, we would get Maryland radio stations so at any point in time, my mom would be flipped in the tuner and then all of a sudden, you have Woody Guthrie blurring this land is your land. Yeah, that was good stuff.
N. Rodgers: Although that's 1940. Keep in mind Aughie was not born in 1940.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's the great thing about music is that once it got recorded it lives on.
N. Rodgers: Moving forward in time to 1979. I love Pink Floyd for a variety of reasons. But another brick in the wall is one of my all-time favorite songs of any protest or non-protest. But the entire point of the song is conformity. Actually, the entire point of a song is to mark conformity.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: It's not that they want people to conform. It's to mock conformity. It's to say all-in-all, you're just another brick in the wall. That's what the school teachers tell you. That's what the message of the politics and government tells you. You're just another brick in the wall and they're basically saying, no you're not. But the song is a protest of that concept that and education is done the same way for every person.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, for those of you who don't know Pink Floyd, very prominent album-oriented radio rock group. They're British.
N. Rodgers: Side of the moon, one of the best albums ever.
J. Aughenbaugh: They were very critical of the British education system, which were those of us here in the United States who are just confounded by the non-stop incessant battles over what gets taught. I think many Americans, particularly if we transported them to Great Britain in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, would be utterly lost. Because in Great Britain, the educational system was even more regimented and more class-based, so much of the British educational system was to basically go ahead and tell you, if you were not born to wealth, that this was your lot in life and that you should go along to get along. Because that was what you should expect and what was expected of you.
N. Rodgers: Well, and the chorus, we don't need no education, we don't need no thought, control, no dark sarcasm in the classroom. Teachers leave those kids alone.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I love that song.
J. Aughenbaugh: The album version actually starts off with a recorded dialogue between the British school teacher screaming at the kids.
N. Rodgers: Ends that way. I love that song. Then my last song. Well, no, because I've got some other special mentioned. But my last big song that I want to point out is Chris Pierce, American silence, which is 2020.
N. Rodgers: It is such a good song. It's just him with his guitar and his harmonica, which Aughie loves that type of music. He's going to talk to you about it in a moment. What I like about that is that it's
transportable. I love Pink Floyd, but that is a techno-synthesized song. It would be really hard to play that song acoustically by yourself without a protest.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or in a coffee shop.
N. Rodgers: It would be hard to do, hard to get it out there in a way.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's not to disparage Pink Floyd because again,
N. Rodgers: No, it's its own type of thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: They went into the studio and they availed themselves of the technology that was available and they worked at it.
N. Rodgers: They have the weird course where the kids sing and you're like, ooh, that's creepy. But it also requires a lot of production. The Crispiers American silence video, if you get a chance to watch the video on YouTube, is not overproduced. It's very simple because I'm not speaking for him as an artist, but what I believe is that he's trying to keep it simple because he's trying to make sure you hear the message. The message in that song is, will our song arrest you American silence is a crime. He's basically saying, if you don't actually stand up and protest, you might as well say that you go along with what's happening. There's this powerfulness of that. But also he interchanges you and me in the song. He doesn't make it adversarial. He's saying this is an us problem, this is not just a somebody else's problem. This is an us problem. This happens whenever something happens. If I don't stand up, if you don't stand up, if we don't stand up, then we're never going to solve it. We're never going to fix it. It can't just be one group of people standing by themselves. It has to be everybody standing and saying, this is not okay. I just think it's incredibly well done.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's a universal protest message. It's the thing that Martin Luther King Junior spoke about in I have a dream and in many civil rights protesters of the 1950s and 60s, with what they were trying to get across is it's not just about us. If you in positions of privilege, don't also speak out, then things won't change.
N. Rodgers: Well, and you don't know when you will be the victim. It's one of that they came for so and so, and I said nothing, that whole poem, and then when they came for me, nobody was there. You got to be all in.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's a powerful song.
N. Rodgers: It's really good. I love that song. My special mentions, because Aughie knows I can't keep myself to four. I'm already at five with 41 shots, but I have a couple of special mentions because I really think they're universal. I think almost everybody would point to imagine by John Lennon as a protest song. Imagine a world with no war. What would you do if you weren't doing that? Imagine all the things you could do if you weren't at war. I think if change is going to come by Sam Cooke is one of the most powerful, I love that song. I love Sam Cooke's voice anyway. But that song is both sad because in his life,
it's not changing quickly. The man in the song is suffering. But he's got hope a change is going to come. We can turn this around. It's about the civil rights movement. But then, we get to my Queen. I understand for all of you who think Beyonce is the queen, I understand that you're wrong, but it's okay. Because the queen of all time, the GOAT is Aretha Franklin. There is not a bad Aretha Franklin song. There is not a song with Aretha Franklin that doesn't make you go, yeah, and want to get up on your feet. I love Aretha Franklin. But the main one that you would point to for any what I think of as protest, except it's not protest, it's feminism. It's respect. Respect is all about I will give you, I will make you a happy man. She's speaking to her man, I will make you a happy man, but what it's going to cost you is you're going to have to respect me. If you respect me I will give you all the good stuff and you can leave that to you imagine what she means, your imagination. But it's feminism 101. I am willing to be a partner in this, but I demand that you treat me as an equal.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, and it's funny you mentioned that because that was definitely a song that I used to hear all the time in my household.
N. Rodgers: Oh, that's right. Because you were raised by women.
J. Aughenbaugh: Oh, I was raised by women. My mother and my grandmother and my two sisters.
N. Rodgers: R-E-S-P-E-C-T find out what it means to me. She's not playing with him. Like I said, she's willing to give but she has to get that respect from him in order to be willing to give.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's funny you put that on your special mentions list because I always just like there are a lot of women our age.
N. Rodgers: Oh yeah. She's everything to us because, she is a powerful woman who took her own career on at one point like she had been led by men and then she was like, no, you know what, I can do this. She started deciding what she was going to record and when and how and yeah. Then she shows up to concerts wrapped in first and you're like, well, okay lady. You clearly got it going on.
J. Aughenbaugh: She had her own sense of style and as you pointed out she took control of her career at a time when it was very unusual for women to have control of their musical careers.
N. Rodgers: Especially black women. Brief is just, I mean, I do love Beyonce but Aretha is the GOAT.
N. Rodgers: But now we can just talk about your favorite.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm going to go in chronological order. Just like Nia did.
N. Rodgers: I didn't until like one end but yeah.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. But the first one, Marvin Gaye's What's Going On. Marvin Gaye was the crown prince of the Motown record label.
N. Rodgers: Has one of the best singing voices ever, and was killed by his father, I think.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, he was. But in a household incident a domestic.
N. Rodgers: Domestic violence. It's a great loss because yeah.
J. Aughenbaugh: But as the '60s war on, Marvin got increasingly frustrated with Motown wanting him to basically crank out, in his estimation, the same song over and over again.
N. Rodgers: Smooth sexy songs that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. In 1971, he came out with an album entitled what's going on. In the subject of the song was police brutality. Which in many ways, I revisited the album. It's one of my prized albums in my collection. When you had the series of police incidents as the second decade of this millennium occurred. In one of the things that's fascinating to me about this song. You and I generally don't talk all that much about the music that we enjoyed the music is the juxtaposition between the lyrics, which are extremely powerful. But the tone of the song is, is mellow. It's somewhat calming. While the narrator of the song, sings over and over again. What's going on?
N. Rodgers: Well, don't punish me with brutality. Talk to me so you can see what's going on.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Just walking up and punching me. Is it going to solve? It would be so much easier if we could just have a discussion.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I tell you why I'm frustrated and upset and scared.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or why am I even here?
N. Rodgers: You respond in a human way, instead of pulling out your stick and starting to hit people?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. I mean, it's like Sam Cooke's a change is going to come. The voice in the music. Belie, what's really a song with a rather potent message. It's a great album flips. That's my first on my list. The second one, in listeners, I probably should have given you a warning. Because the songs on my list are all over the map in terms of genre. My next song chronologically is.
N. Rodgers: Mine tend to be focused, I think.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. My second song comes from the punk rock band the clash. London Collin it's from 1979. For those of you who are not familiar with punk rock, the class was one of the premier punk rock bands of the late '70s, early 1980s. It's a song that tapped into Cold War nx that was permeating
the West but in particular Western Europe. I mean, this was the era where many in Europe were protesting the fact that there were nuclear weapons put into their countries as a deterrent to the Soviet Union attacking Western Europe. The metaphor of the song is London flooding. That's the phrase that ends a number of the stanzas in the lyrics. It's propulsive. It's got a propulsive beats. It starts off with the [inaudible]. Almost immediately you know, that the band's trying to take you someplace, it's trying to get you fired up. Again, much like Marvin Gaye's What's Going On. The entire album is a tour de force because this is a punk rock band that in one album goes from punk rock to country swaying to Jamaican. To in it closes rather infamously with a song that's not on the album cover.
N. Rodgers: Oh, I didn't know that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Train in vain. They recorded it at the very end. The record label had already begun to produce the album cover. Train in vain is again another metaphor for a romance that's like a train, no going nowhere. It's a great album. But for somebody as I was in the late '70s, just beginning to become politically aware. I was just like, this is just incredible. Lyrics that we're clear. The metaphor was obvious and the band was at its peak. It's like Pink Floyd with another brick in the wall. I mean, Pink Floyd was okay, the band was at its peak at that period of time.
N. Rodgers: Because London is drowning and I live by the river. It's also one of the few songs I know that uses the word truncation. Well done you for doing that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again I didn't note, of course, at that time because I was a mere lag of 12. But nevertheless, my love for words. Oh, he, nice word choice. The class was one of those bands to where it was handy to have a dictionary nearby. Yeah.
N. Rodgers: They spoke British.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Then the next song, we do have a common artist on our favorite political protest song list. We have a common artist, Bruce Springsteen. Both Nia and I are unabashed huge Bruce Springsteen fans. Mine is the song in the album Nebraska. If you are thinking about this chronologically, compared to Born in the USA, Nebraska came out two years before Born in the USA. The song, as Springsteen has said a number of times in interviews, arose after he watched Terrence Malick's movie Badlands, which has Sissy Spacek in it. The narrator of the song is a serial killer who explains his killing spree after he's arrested by bluntly saying, "There's just a meanness in this world." The rest of the album is as dark and as bleak as the title track. There's no E Street Band to pretty it up with keyboards or Clarence. Clarence is saxophone. It was a relentless portrayal of Reagan America. It's a portrayal without hope, redemption, or community to say if many of the narrators of the songs. By the way, almost the entirety of this album was infamously recorded in his bedroom in a rented house in New Jersey. It's Springsteen with a guitar and harmonica and he's using an old tape recording system. He recorded all these songs and then they go into studio he does with E Street Band. The E Street Band work their butts off for months and they just couldn't get them as good as the original recordings. Even the band members were like, "Bruce, we can't do better than your original recordings. We just can't."
N. Rodgers: Right. Well, if you're singing that kind of music, it's probably best alone. It's best simplest.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, you don't want to go ahead-
N. Rodgers: You don't want all that stuff in the background drawing attention. It's not what you're talking. And especially serial killers tend to be loners. All of these bleak situations, one of the problems with all of that is loneliness and being alone and all of those things that come with that. It makes sense to me that those lyrics would sound better by one guy with a guitar and a harmonica, instead of a whole.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. In that album, Nia, it concludes with probably my favorite Springsteen song. The name of the song is Reason to Believe. The song Reason to Believe has four different scenarios of why human beings might lose faith. But the narrator of the song goes ahead and says, "Struck me as kind of funny kind sir to me. How at the end of a hard-earned day, people still find a reason to believe." It's the only note of optimism in the entire album. In the four scenarios, they're heartbreaking, they're reflective. The one scenario is a guy accidentally hits a dog on the side of the road and he's trying to will the dog back to life. Second scenario is a woman whose lover, who more than likely was also her pimp or lover leaves her and she waits for him at the end of a dark road every day hoping that he comes back. The third scenario is the same day that a baby's being baptized, another family is putting to rest an older man who just died. Then the fourth scenario is a guy shows up for his wedding and his bride doesn't show up. But again, the punchline of the song is, but in all these scenarios, people still find a reason to believe. Even though Springsteen throughout the entire album was saying, this is what I see. At the end, he still has got a little bit of hope. It's like the narrator and Sam Cooke's A Change is Gonna Come. I still got hope.
N. Rodgers: Atlantic City's on that album too.
J. Aughenbaugh: Oh, Atlantic City. Yeah.
N. Rodgers: "I tried to put my money away but I got debts no honest man can pay." So he buys a bus ticket.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm going to go to Atlantic City, can you go, baby? Maybe we will go ahead and get lucky at the gambling tables. By the way, debts no honest man could pay is actually in another song in that album, Johnny 99. He uses that phrase twice in that album, the two different songs. Listeners, if you get the sense that I really know this album, I really know this album.
N. Rodgers: Yeah. And then he ends that song by, "He doesn't get lucky, but he's got a guy he's going to do a little favor for."
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: It's left to your imagination but it's not going to be legal.
J. Aughenbaugh: No, it's not. No.
N. Rodgers: Because he's been looking for a job but he can't find one and he can't get ahead when he does find a job.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, and as somebody who's desperate.
N. Rodgers: The world breaks down into winners and losers in Atlantic City and this guy is clearly losing.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, he's clearly losing. That song, Atlantic City, really resonates with me as a Catholic because the punchline of that song is everybody dies. What's the rest of it, Nia?
N. Rodgers: "But maybe everything that dies someday comes back." So a little bit of hope.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Some of them are slightly hopeful in Nebraska, but for the most part, Nebraska is like, man, life sucks. You're like, well, okay then. Thank you for making an entire album of that. But it's a good album and people should listen to it. We're basically saying when we say songs, what we're suggesting to you too is artists. These people consistently produce music that you would want to listen to or could want to listen to you.
J. Aughenbaugh: By the way, listeners, you will note and I have one more spoiler alert. My last one is not Bob Dylan. You may be wondering why Nia and I don't have Bob Dylan or a Bob Dylan song on our list. Now, he's written a lot of good political protest songs.
N. Rodgers: Yeah.
J. Aughenbaugh: But Nia and I struggle with Bob Dylan because we can't understand his lyrics when he sings them.
N. Rodgers: Right. I admire him as a poet.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I despise him as a singer.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I don't think that's an unusual view to take of Bob Dylan.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: Blowin' in the Wind is Bob Dylan.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That's a brilliant song that is both protest and hopeful. It's both. But it is so hard to listen to his version of it. If we did the you should listen to the cover of a Bob Dylan, we can make a whole episode out of just here's the covers of Bob Dylan's stuff that you should listen to you.
J. Aughenbaugh: I love Dylan's Everything is Broken. But I can only listen to the Sheryl Crow Jason Isbell version. Because when Dylan sang it-
N. Rodgers: It's really hard.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's difficult.
N. Rodgers: People argue that Springsteen is a little bit Dylan-like. Springsteen is a clearer version of Dylan maybe.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, right?
N. Rodgers: But you have one more band for us.
J. Aughenbaugh: I do have one more.
N. Rodgers: I don't know if band is the right word. Is band the right word in this particular genre? People refer to as bands or perform artists?
J. Aughenbaugh: Artists. Yeah, they refer to him as artist and the song is Public Enemy's Fight the Power. Now, some of you might be thinking-
N. Rodgers: What year was that?
J. Aughenbaugh: 1989. But again, I am Gen X.
N. Rodgers: You listen to all things.
J. Aughenbaugh: And rap music arose, at least in the United States in the 1980s, right?
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: In my record collection, I have Public Enemy, I have NWA, I have Run-DMC.
N. Rodgers: You have old school?
J. Aughenbaugh: I have old school. I have the Beastie Boys. But Fight the Power, there was probably, in terms of mainstream commercial success, no more prominent political rap song than this. Public Enemy
was all about the message. In this song, it was taking down the establishment, it was railing against big government, it was railing against authority abuse. It was featured prominently, in my estimation, in one of the best movies, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing which was about racial tensions in Brooklyn in the 1980s.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, go ahead.
N. Rodgers: Good. There's a line in there, people were all the same. No, we're not the same because we don't know the game.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I suspect if you distill down almost every lament from almost every rap song, what you would get is we are the same as people, but some of us are privileged to understand and play the game in a way that gives us more stuff and the more privileged you are, the more on the game you are.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, and so much of it is about access.
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: Okay.
N. Rodgers: When people say equal playing field, I'm like no equal access to the playing field.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: You got to be able to get on the field before you worry about whether the field is an even playing field or not.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, that's one of the themes of Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing, was that you had people who lived in Brooklyn for generations who didn't have access, so they could never get ahead. They were always one step behind
N. Rodgers: That's the fundamental unfairness in the system, it's not that people can't perform, it's that they don't have a chance to perform.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. But I loved the music, I love the lyrics. Again, it's propulsive. This is the decade where I became politically aware, late '70s through the late 1980s. The early rap songs before they became so overtly misogynistic really appeal to me. I just love it, it's one of my prized possessions. There is a shelf behind me, these are the ones that I will grab if my house is ever on fire.
N. Rodgers: If you start to grab CDs when I could just buy you new ones, I will kill you. If you just die in the fire, I will kill you.
J. Aughenbaugh: I get marked out of the house.
N. Rodgers: That's all it matters. Get marked out of the house, don't be running back in for CDs, I will buy you more. All that does is give the band more money, which I'm okay with.
J. Aughenbaugh: By the way, here's my special mention as we conclude. Nia had a number of songs that were specially mentioned. Me, I have an entire genre
N. Rodgers: I was going to be topping me, always going to be.
J. Aughenbaugh: No, I'm not trying to top you. I had a really difficult time picking a song from this genre because for me, part of the appeal of the entire genre of music is that it is anti-authoritarian. Nia, you and I have had plenty of conversations off-recording where you laugh at me, struggling with authority.
N. Rodgers: Yes. You think you would have gotten better at it by now.
J. Aughenbaugh: Particularly because one could argue, in a very small, minimal way.
N. Rodgers: You are authority. You are the man.
J. Aughenbaugh: But there's an entire genre of music that I love and that's jazz. Pretty much almost all great jazz takes existing song structures and flip them on their head. The greatest innovations in jazz take a song structure and then basically go ahead and say, yeah, the heck with that, we're going off when we're doing this
N. Rodgers: Philosophically protesting.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: The normativity of music.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, and there are very few jazz artists that I'm aware of who are not in our archives.
N. Rodgers: But not anarchists in the sense of protest, anarchist in the sense of, I'm just going to turn that on its ear 90 degrees.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. The first time I heard, for instance, Thelonious Monk.
N. Rodgers: Who also was a protester in political situations.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I take that back so a lot of them probably were both.
J. Aughenbaugh: The first time I heard him play, I was just like, he's doing something with a piano that I've never heard anybody ever do before, or when Coltrane, went spiritual and he came out with a Love Supreme, I was just like, woo, hey, and it was about God, or when Miles Davis decided that typical jazz song structures no longer work for him, and he was going to fuse it with rock music. Now a lot of that doesn't appeal to me but good Lord was I impressed when he decided to do that
N. Rodgers: Can I just admit something to you Aughie which is a little embarrassing, but here we go. I don't listen to jazz that deeply, and here's what I mean, I love jazz. I love to go and listen to it live, especially blues and jazz. But for me, it's just losing myself in the rhythms. I find myself with my feet tapping or my head nodding or my shoulders move. I am that person in the club who's like [inaudible]. I'm so mellow by the time that stuff is over that I'm like, Oh, I love everything in everyone and now I have to go home. But I like jazz because it's so rhythmic in whatever way that it's going to be rhythmic, even if it's arrhythmic, that it makes me, I don't know, it speaks to my inner dancer, it speaks to my inner, whatever that is that makes you want to pop along with the music. Pretty much, any jazz of any decency will do that to me.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, this is one of the great things.
N. Rodgers: I've never thought about it structurally like you.
J. Aughenbaugh: But again, that's one of the great things about art.
N. Rodgers: It speak in different ways.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. For me, it is the intellectual, but for other people, jazz music is much more emotional and it's much more about feeling. We're going to do another podcast episode about our favorite movies and trust me, there are plenty of people who love going to the movies who don't want to go ahead and think so deeply about the political messages in movies, and then they go ahead and take politics and film with me and then they're just like, Oh dude now you've got me thinking about this stuff every time I watch a movie.
N. Rodgers: You want to be rude in the movies for me.
J. Aughenbaugh: But again, that's one of the great things about art.
N. Rodgers: It does teach person individually.
J. Aughenbaugh: In different way, and that's why either you or I look down on people who like certain popular artists that don't resonate with us because we understand that certain artists and their music and their lyrics connect with other people and we don't want to take that away from folks.
N. Rodgers: If you like the way Bob Dylan sounds, one, I feel sorry for you, and two, enjoy because he is a master poet, his lyrics are unquestionable, he won a Nobel Prize for it.
J. Aughenbaugh: You human genre artist earlier in this episode, Taylor Swift, Shake It Off.
N. Rodgers: I love that song.
J. Aughenbaugh: There are swift days and that's how they refer to themselves, Taylor Swift.
N. Rodgers: Don't stand between them in concert tickets because they'll hurt you.
J. Aughenbaugh: I've listened to every single one of her albums, some of them multiple times, in most of her songs, I find no connection with but I like the fact.
N. Rodgers: Well, you're not a 19-year-old girl who's breaking up with a boy.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, that might be it.
N. Rodgers: You have some deficiency in understanding from her point of view
J. Aughenbaugh: Sure.
N. Rodgers: Same with me. I have those similar things with a lot of the rap artists I don't connect to not because music is not excellent, it is. But because I have not been abused and.
J. Aughenbaugh: Oppressed.
N. Rodgers: Oppressed and frightened, and been told things like every time you see a cop put your hands up and don't do dangerous things and always go along with them like the talk that bad parents have to give their kids, I've never had to have that because I have the privilege of not having that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: It doesn't resonate with me in the same way. I can admire the ability of the people and still be really the message doesn't connect with me at whatever.
J. Aughenbaugh: At a core or central level
N. Rodgers: But, but still admire those folks. We would like to challenge any listeners who want to send us titles. We're happy to listen to more music, it's never bad to go out and find a new song. If you know of a song, you can find both of our email addresses on the research guide for this podcast and that is always linked where you download the podcast. We would love to hear from you if you think, oh, you haven't heard this and it's really good and you should hear it. We want to know.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Aughie and I are both open to listening to whatever new things come along or all things that we haven't found. We're all about finding a new person to listen to me, I love this album, I'm going to go buy all the others.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, please do.
N. Rodgers: That's all.
J. Aughenbaugh: Thanks, Nia.
N. Rodgers: Thank you Aughie.
You've been listening to civil discourse brought to you by VCU Libraries. Opinions expressed are solely the speaker's own and do not reflect the views or opinions of VCU or VCU Libraries. Special thanks to the Workshop for technical assistance. Music by Isaak Hopson. Find more information at guides.library.vcu.edu/discourse. As always, no documents were harmed in the making of this podcast.