#396: Michael Jackson, "They Don't Care About Us" (1996)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNJL6nfu__Q

1. My brain has decided, when I read science articles that mention dark matter, to picture protest banners that blare "Dark Matter Lives". Thanks, cortex, I can tell this will be endlessly cogent and helpful.

2. At an Amanda Palmer concert back in 2012, one of the opening acts was two of her bandmates as a saxophone duo called Ronald Reagan, who played instrumental covers of '80s pop hits. They played "Take on Me" by a-ha; the crowd sung the choruses for them. They played "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey; the crowd sang every single word. Then they announced that would play a true gem of the 1980s, a song from the best-selling album of all time. As they blew into the opening riff, I turned to my friends and said "Weird Al Yankovic was popular but not *that* popular", then shrugged and bellowed along to "Eat It". Great rock song.

Emergency readiness goes boink: on The Defense of Thaddeus A. Ledbetter, by John Gosselink

The Defense of Thaddeus A. Ledbetter, by John Gosselink, is an "epistolary novel". That is, it's told as a series of letters and emails and journals and paperwork and drawings, by or to or concerning 12-year-old Thaddeus, who has been placed in In-School Suspension for the entire second semester of the school year. Thaddeus is the Misunderstood Victim of a Massive Injustice, and he writes primarily to himself, his lawyer uncle Pete, and especially his school principal Frank Cooper, who has never encountered anything like him. He is of course concerned with his own vindication, but he is selfless about it: even in exile, he shares his school improvement (and church improvement) (and scout-troop improvement) schemes, plus his handy educational Thaddeus Fun Facts, and even the official rules of Slug Bug with his persecutors.

Cooper and Pete share their own perspectives, which for some reason aren't always in exact accord. They seem over-worried about discipline forms where the "cause for referral" is a scrawled "HE TRIED TO SET ME ON FIRE!", and too little interested in the perspectives of, say,

#401: Sundays, "Hideous Towns" (1990)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQSGLVJU8p4

The fact that one of my favorite first-wave punk songs is expressed as an attempt to start a dialogue, though, hints at the real mismatch between me and punk rock: I don't, anymore, do self-righteous anger well. I used to, and certainly there are no shortage of worthy targets: too many of the world's nations are run by rank-hungry sociopaths, too much of its land and air and water is churned through in the ruthless pursuit of short-term private economic profit, and too much of its culture is run by cowards terrified of funding anything but the latest escapist sequel to an escapist sequel that had already lost whatever spark of individuation it began with. Anger is, as Johnny Rotten observed, an energy, and some extraordinary people (I.F. Stone, Lyndon Johnson, Ralph Nader, Walter Reuther, Catherine MacKinnon, Malcolm X, Cesar Chavez, Greg Palast, Glenn Greenwald, to name some post-WWII Americans) have clearly found it an endlessly renewable one -- but in my body it burns up too quickly, and gives off toxic pollutants. So even if I try to focus on the evils of the other, rueful awareness of my own imperfections gets in the way, or I veer off topic and find myself more interested in the good things about my allies than in the bad things I'm supposed to be fighting.

I was a low-level community organizer once, in poor areas around Boston. I was okay at it -- helped one neighborhood get streets full of horrible potholes repaired after a decade-plus of being ignored, helped another get some traffic enforcement on cars racing 50 mph through streets that were the only place their kids could play -- but the relentless earnestness and long hours made me miserable, and I doubt I could do it again any time soon. Too, I could try to be punk rock, but I would probably come out more like the Sundays' "Hideous Towns".

#409: Modest Mouse, "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" (2000)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EA5b3FNI4w

My Mom wouldn't have liked Modest Mouse, I feel sure. I don't mean the music, necessarily; once I introduced her to rock music, she developed some pretty interesting taste. Most of it was gushingly melodic, to be sure -- XTC and They Might Be Giants and Barenaked Ladies; sugar-rush bands like the Primitives and Stretch Princess; modern folkies like Dar Williams and Christine Lavin and Kate Jacobs; some punk-pop (she enjoyed her little moments as the white-haired woman in glasses carrying used Bad Religion and Vandals cd's to the puzzled young men at the counter). But she loved the jangle and the textural haze of the Church, and the sultry bass and sinister dance pulse of Shriekback, and you can triangulate to "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" from that. That lithe exercise-friendly bass line, the Ennio Morricone guitar and violin stabs, the alarmed-rattlesnake-racing-through-cookware percussion, and the way Isaac Brock doubles every word he sings by simultaneously speaking it as close to the lowest audible frequency as he can manage: she might have found it perversely sexy, as she did Shriekback's Barry Andrews. It's conceivable.

#412: Savatage, "the Wake of Magellan" (1998)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k1TMhUxEgY

Switching from Joan Armatrading's unpredictable piano rhythms and soft washes of guitar to Jon Oliva's unpredictable piano rhythms and Chris Caffery's soft washes of guitar, we transition smoothly from jazz-pop to heavy metal.

I sometimes explain my musical tastes to myself (rightly or wrongly) as a logical consequence of my growing-up environment.