By Dave Cusick (CIVL Director of Programming / The Podfather) – Email
Please, please, don’t forget to vote.
Radiohead
“Electioneering”
Thom Yorke said in a 1997 interview that after shaking one too many hands, he began accompanying each handshake with “I trust I can rely on your vote.” He was also reading a lot of Chomsky at the time, and he “had that feeling when you read Chomsky that you want to get out and do something and realize, in fact, that you’re impotent.”
Wilco and Billy Bragg
“Christ for President”
In 1992, the daughter of folk singer Woody Guthrie invited English singer / songwriter to peruse her late father’s lyrics archive. Guthrie had thousands of songs’ worth of lyrics that he hadn’t ever set to music, and so his daughter asked Bragg if he’d please choose some of them to give life as songs. Bragg agreed, enlisted the band Wilco to help him, and released the first volume of these in 1998, followed by two more over the next several years.
Tears for Fears
“Everybody Wants to Rule the World”
In fifth grade, I was on Safety Patrol, which meant that five minutes before the final bell rang, myself and other select students left our classrooms, donned yellow rain slickers and hats, grabbed a flag with a stop sign on it, and ran down to the crosswalks to direct traffic for students leaving school. At the end of the year, they brought Safety Patrol from every school in the city to the amusement park. I heard this song hundred of times on the radio that year, but the loudspeakers that day is the one in my permanently memory.
Something tells me that the world has changed enough in 30 years that they probably don’t have 10-year-olds directing traffic anymore, let alone send them to the amusement park unsupervised.
Ella Fitzgerald with the Chick Webb Orchestra
“Vote for Mr. Rhythm”
We could do far worse than Mr. Rhythm.
