In the first place, a must must read:
~ From Counterpunch :
Roaming Charges: Runaway Sons of the Nuclear A-Bomb
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Brilliant, as usual. Were or are any of you Iggy Pop fans? At that time - around the release of "Raw Power", although anti-social, we were more just mellow surfers rather than punk rockers watching aghast as the Yuppies seemed to take over, the marches against the Vietnam War were fewer if not entirely over with, San Diego had finally given Angela Davis the boot and they were rejoicing and uncorking champagne at City Hall over her departure, boards were getting shorter, JFK, Bobby & MLK were all gone and everything seemed lost. And we were radical surfers...at least we believed Tom Wolfe was a dork.
I found a few interesting clips you might be interested in taking us from the inception and influences of "Raw Power" to present date anti-Ukraine War rock 'n roll - punk, hailing from Coachella 2022.
About twenty minutes duration:
Songs That Changed Music: Iggy & the Stooges - Search and Destroy
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In one interview, the Stooges guitarist explained how he was attempting to replicate the sounds of battlefield machine gun fire and chaos. Someone more very recently took that to heart, and switched out the Ride of the Valkyries in the film Apocalypse Now, substituting Search & Destroy in its place. And, it works.
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| Maneskin: Well, I hope he doesn't catch a cold...just kidding but I do worry about Iggy too losing his trousers.... |
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| More Maneskin at Coachella are there hot springs there ? Nah. |
Meanwhile little by little, more European and American music artists are coming forward with anti-Russian War in the Ukraine songs and sentiments. (well not down here doh ) One group, Maneskin from Italy performed channeling Iggy (their mentor)on the last set at Coachella:
~ From Variety:
Maneskin Covers Britney Spears, Iggy Pop and Charlie Chaplin at Coachella
By, Chris Willman
"The Italian band Måneskin made its name in the U.S. with a crafty cover, of the Four Seasons’ “Beggin,'” and there were more where that came from during the band’s set Sunday night at Coachella: The group went to both ends of the pop/punk scale and memorably covered Britney Spears’ “Womanizer,” followed by Iggy Pop and the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”
Although it may not exactly count as a cover, singer Damiano David also offered a partial recitation of one of the greatest movie speeches of all time — the climactic monologue from Charlie Chaplin’s classic anti-fascist film “The Great Dictator” — as the introduction to a new, original song that was dedicated to Ukraine.
Probably not much of the young crowd immediately recognized the 1940 Chaplin speech, which was shortly followed by David yelling “Fuck Putin!” in the middle of the new song, “We’re Gonna Dance on Gasoline,” their last number of the night on the Mojave stage.
But there was mass recognition, and an outbreak of joy, as the “Eurovision” winners tore into Spears’ modern pop classic in a fercious fashion befitting the rest of their hard-rocking set. As with another already iconic cover from earlier in the weekend — Harry Styles doing “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” with an assist from its originator, Shania Twain — David took a song with a strong female point of view and did not bother doing any gender-switching in the lyrics.
“As you know, we really like doing covers,” the singer told the crowd. “More than how much we love doing covers, we love Britney Spears,” he added.
Earlier in the set, David had made the closest thing to a costume change by doffing a sheer nightgown he was wearing to reveal a skimpy outfit that resembled bondage gear — saying that this stripping down was supposed to happen later in the set, but the lack of promised cool temperatures on stage made him get to it sooner. When the Spears song soon came up in the setlist, he said, “Britney Spears makes us hot.”
The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” was dedicated to that band’s singer, Iggy Pop, who was a featured guest recently on an original Måneskin recording, the similarly titled “I Wanna Be Your Slave.” That song naturally preceded the Stooges’ song in the set.
As saucy as much of the rest of the 10-song set was, from “ZItti E Buoni” forward, the finale took on a more serious, if hardly less rocking, tone, after David put his outer layer back on. The new “Gasoline” song was preceded by a sober reflection on the war in Ukraine — David’s own words mixed with Chaplin’s.
“Are you having fun?” the singer asked. “I’m happy to hear it. But sometimes we’ve gotta understand how big our privilege is, to have the chance to just attend a gig and have fun and be careless and have nothing to think about. And none of us have to think of, (when) you wake up, how many bombs have been launched on the city. So before we start playing our last song, I just want to give you a pitch that Charlie Chaplin gave.”
David then recited an excerpted and condensed version of the climactic speech that the great movie actor gave in character at the close of the satirical “The Great Dictator,” released in the early part of World War II. The part of the famous recitation revived by David reads in part: “Do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish… Don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who … treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men — machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!”
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(***Is any of this making you feel...a little bit old ? That's okay, I just hope these kids get around to watching Charlie Chaplin. And like it or not, these are the new poets, the new voices in our time. Anyone who is missing any of this has really missed the boat. .....)
..........
" How are you sleeping at night?
How do you close both your eyes,
Living with all of those lives
On your hands?
Standing alone on that hill,
Using your fuel to kill.
We won’t take it standing still,
Watch us dancе.
How are you sleeping at night?
How do you close both your eyes,
Living with all of those lives On your hands?
Standing alone on that hill,
Using your fuel to kill.
We won’t take it standing still,
Watch us dancе.
We’re gonna dance on gasoline!
We’re gonna dance on gasoline!
We’re gonna dance on gasoline!"
Keep it up kids.
~~~~~
Finally.....something sad but more soothing:
"Transcribed with the permission of Bob Hecht, from his Podcast:
During World War II there were a number of songs that seemed to capture the ethos of the time. One of the most significant and popular was “I’ll Be Seeing You,” famously recorded by Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Jo Stafford and many others. The song became a virtual anthem of the war, embodying as it did, the reality of wartime separations and loss.
This is the story of a song that began its life as just another poignant ballad of love and loss was largely forgotten, and then came roaring back to life.
And the guy
who wrote the words to that song would never know that it not only
became a huge hit, but the virtual anthem of a wartime generation.
Partings were a fact of wartime life. Many of those partings were for
years, though many were forever, with nearly a million American and
British lives lost.
“I’ll Be Seeing You” became emblematic of such separations. This sentimental ballad with its appealing and sing-able melody, and its straight-forward relatable lyrics, resonated with anyone who had either lost someone, or who was waiting and hoping to see them again.
So how did the song happen? Well it came from the songwriting team of Sammy Fain, who wrote the music and Irving Kahle, who wrote the words.
Fain and Kayle had many hits together during their 17 year collaboration, dating back to 1925; including “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” and “Let A Smile Be Your Umbrella.”
They wrote “I’ll Be Seeing You” in 1938 for a Broadway musical comedy called “Right This Way.” But the show was a flop, lasting for only 15 performances. Sammy Fain once joked that a lot of theater-goers at those 15 shows, never even stuck around for the whole show. “Where’s the exit?”, Fain asked sarcastically. Well, Right This Way.
Then in 1943, the forgotten song was unexpectedly rescued from obscurity when someone must have realized the timeliness of its sentiment for the universal plight of wartime separations. Everyone big recorded it. Bing Crosby had one of the biggest hits with the song, as did Jo Stafford, Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra.
But lyricist Kahle never knew of the song’s surprising late success. He had died the year before its resuscitation, at only 38, of a heart attack.
“I’ll Be Seeing You” differed from earlier Tin Pan Alley songs about loss and separation. It wasn’t about rejection by one’s beloved, about being dumped. It was a universal song about the power of love transcending time and distance.
And it wasn’t only lovers who related to the song. It was also meaningful to mothers separated from their sons and daughters; and to children separated from their parents.
In a World War II memoir, there’s the story of a young girl desperately missing her father. She writes, “the line ‘I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you,’ had a profound effect on me. It was amazing to be able to look at the moon, and realize that all those miles away, he was able to look at the same moon.”
The song didn’t have that same salutary effect on everyone, however. Jazz critic Francis Davis spoke about that in an interview. “I grew up in a home where my mother had lost her brother in World War II,” Davis said. “We had my grandmother in the house as well. There were certain songs that we had to turn off when they came on the radio, because they just reminded my grandmother in particular, too much of her son. One of them was ‘I’ll Be Seeing You.’”
For soldiers during the war, the song was virtually ever present. One soldier recalls overhearing his buddy on the phone to his girlfriend. He was singing to her “I’ll Be Seeing You,” but he changed the words to “I’ll be squeezing you in all the old familiar places.”
But another soldier recalls hearing the song in the midst of the allied invasion of Sicily. “When we hit the beach,” he remembered, “we were all hit, the medics couldn’t get to us. I could hear a wounded soldier nearby singing ‘I’ll be seeing you.’ And then he stopped. I had listened to him die.”
Lyricist Irving Kahle had considered “I’ll Be Seeing You,” the greatest song he had ever written. And he’d often expressed his disappointment that it hadn’t become a hit – at least not during his lifetime. He would surely have appreciated knowing what his words came to represent, and what the song meant to so many millions of people, during very difficult times.
And all it took for the song to catch on was the complete catastrophic upending of the world order, in which parting became a normal fact of life for so many; and for which there just happened to be a song already made; a song that managed to distill the mood of an entire era.
At Kahle’s funeral, his longtime songwriting partner, Sammy Fain, arranged to have a special piece of music played during the service. Of course, that was “I’ll Be Seeing You.”
But our last words go to songwriter Sammy Kahn, who once said, “You know, old songwriters never really die, because their songs keep them alive, forever."
~~~~~
And guess who is singing? Our own, Iggy Pop. Ahhh, sweet !
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I know, I was too old to be into the punk scene. But as far as that other - like they say, it's only rock 'n roll but I like it like it yes I do. Apparently if you want to see Iggy, you'll have to go to France. I'd go, if he actually sang "I'll be seeing you". But with a shirt on.
Take care.
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