Thursday, Aug. 20, 2009
Podpicks for August 20, 2009
This week the guest Pod Picks chair is occupied by Logan Young, who recommends some anti-authority songs for downloading (legally, of course) to your iPod or other personal media device.
“Whatever It Is, I'm Against It” by Groucho Marx – Contrarian before contrarian was cool, no matter what it is, Julius “Groucho” Marx is not for it – or at least his character, Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff, claims in the famous scene from 1932’s Horse Feathers. The fourth Marx Brothers film, the song was written by deuce aces of the era Burt Kalmar and Harry Ruby. But, as always, the delivery was all Groucho. Dressed in full academic garb with his mortarboard slightly askew, Wagstaff never actually cites specific things to which he is opposed. “Whatever it is,” he dismisses so brusquely, “I’m against it." For all the lost H.L. Menckens and Dr. Gregory Houses still out there, this is the true curmudgeon’s anthem.
“Zero Tolerance for Silence (Part 1)” by Pat Metheny – Let’s face it, protest songs are a dime a dozen. Be it Britain or Iraq, Roe vs. Wade, black power or white guilt, nearly everyone’s got an axe to grind. And after a while, even that genre’s best practitioners – Woody Guthrie, Marvin Gaye, Black Flag, etc. – can get a bit heavy-handed. Real, concrete music of dissent is pretty hard to come by though. So when an American jazz legend released a 40 minute album of nothing but unrehearsed and unrepentant guitar noise, people took notice. Released in 1994 on Geffen, 15 years later it’s since become Metheny’s own, personal Metal Machine Music. But unlike Lou Reed's hocus opus, no one could've seen this one coming ... especially not “the man” himself, David Geffen.
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