rants
There is something in the air - but it's not on the airwaves
Sunday, April 3, 2005
There is something in the air, but it is not on the airwaves By Chris Chandler and Anne Feeney
(To the tune of Something's in the Air/ We have got to get it together 1969 Thunderclap Newman/Pete Townsend)
Ya know, we have GOT it together. There ARE people in the streets - at the very onset of Oil War Two there were already more people on the streets protesting than there were at the height of the Vietnam war. There is something in the air, but it is not on the airwaves
If there are a half a dozen Jaycees in Cincinnati on a street corner waving yellow ribbons Fox news acts like it's A Republican Woodstock. "By the time we got to Fallujah we were half a million strong."
But put a million people on the street and they build a fence around you and call it a protest zone.
We like to look at Vietnam through the soft focus of Hollywood - which took the blood of war and turned it into rose-colored glasses. We see 1000s of beautiful semi-naked 20 somethings putting daises in the barrels of M16s all to the tune of Country Joe McDonald singing "one two three what are we fightin for."
It makes for spectacular video. Sometimes I see these images and I want to run naked through the streets singing "Why don't we da do it in the road!"
But I know better.
When the first American troops went in to Vietnam in 1964 there was barely a soul on the streets, yet people were already singing Blowin' in the Wind, and Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and I Ain't Marchin' Anymore. These songs were being released on major record labels. Mega hits would follow. Today we have more people on the streets and there is not yet there has not been a single hit song on the radio. How could this be?
There is something in the air but it is not on the airwaves.
It's not like Barry McGuire was a deep thinking anti-war intellectual when he sang "Eve of Destruction." No, he was jumping on a bandwagon made possible by people in the streets. Yet right now, there are more people on the streets than there was then, but you have to think twice before jumping on that bandwagon for fear it might be a paddy wagon bound for Guantanamo Bay.
If you speak the truth on national TV your show will be dropped, regardless of the ratings...ask Bill Maher. A show doesn't need an audience as much as it needs sponsors. Sixties protesters were brought up in the brand-loyal fifties, these kids were major consumers of all kinds of goods. They queued up to buy groovy Carnaby Street "Mod Gear" and "Wear Your Love Like Heaven" cosmetics. Today's protester does not BUY anything. They won't shop at GAP - they boycott Taco Bell - hell, they won't even go to Starbucks.
Oh, before the Berlin Wall fell we loved to talk about how the Soviet Union would broadcast only the songs of the state and we romanticized that is was our radio broadcasts wafting in from West Berlin that tore down the wall. .
Yet now, the cell phone's in the other hand. There is a new wall running down divided America. And it is American radio that is being manipulated by the agenda of the state because the state has become indistinguishable from the corporation - which, as I said before, needs sponsors more and than it needs an electorate.
But I am warning you, there is something in the air, and soon it will be the people's broadcasts wafting in from The Indie Media and Free Speech TV, that tears down the wall, and this time it will not be the Berlin Wall that falls, it will be Wall Street.
Because the revolution is now, there is something in the air and we have got it together.
(To the tune of Something's in the Air/ We have got to get it together 1969 Thunderclap Newman/Pete Townsend)
Ya know, we have GOT it together. There ARE people in the streets - at the very onset of Oil War Two there were already more people on the streets protesting than there were at the height of the Vietnam war. There is something in the air, but it is not on the airwaves
If there are a half a dozen Jaycees in Cincinnati on a street corner waving yellow ribbons Fox news acts like it's A Republican Woodstock. "By the time we got to Fallujah we were half a million strong."
But put a million people on the street and they build a fence around you and call it a protest zone.
We like to look at Vietnam through the soft focus of Hollywood - which took the blood of war and turned it into rose-colored glasses. We see 1000s of beautiful semi-naked 20 somethings putting daises in the barrels of M16s all to the tune of Country Joe McDonald singing "one two three what are we fightin for."
It makes for spectacular video. Sometimes I see these images and I want to run naked through the streets singing "Why don't we da do it in the road!"
But I know better.
When the first American troops went in to Vietnam in 1964 there was barely a soul on the streets, yet people were already singing Blowin' in the Wind, and Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and I Ain't Marchin' Anymore. These songs were being released on major record labels. Mega hits would follow. Today we have more people on the streets and there is not yet there has not been a single hit song on the radio. How could this be?
There is something in the air but it is not on the airwaves.
It's not like Barry McGuire was a deep thinking anti-war intellectual when he sang "Eve of Destruction." No, he was jumping on a bandwagon made possible by people in the streets. Yet right now, there are more people on the streets than there was then, but you have to think twice before jumping on that bandwagon for fear it might be a paddy wagon bound for Guantanamo Bay.
If you speak the truth on national TV your show will be dropped, regardless of the ratings...ask Bill Maher. A show doesn't need an audience as much as it needs sponsors. Sixties protesters were brought up in the brand-loyal fifties, these kids were major consumers of all kinds of goods. They queued up to buy groovy Carnaby Street "Mod Gear" and "Wear Your Love Like Heaven" cosmetics. Today's protester does not BUY anything. They won't shop at GAP - they boycott Taco Bell - hell, they won't even go to Starbucks.
Oh, before the Berlin Wall fell we loved to talk about how the Soviet Union would broadcast only the songs of the state and we romanticized that is was our radio broadcasts wafting in from West Berlin that tore down the wall. .
Yet now, the cell phone's in the other hand. There is a new wall running down divided America. And it is American radio that is being manipulated by the agenda of the state because the state has become indistinguishable from the corporation - which, as I said before, needs sponsors more and than it needs an electorate.
But I am warning you, there is something in the air, and soon it will be the people's broadcasts wafting in from The Indie Media and Free Speech TV, that tears down the wall, and this time it will not be the Berlin Wall that falls, it will be Wall Street.
Because the revolution is now, there is something in the air and we have got it together.