When they reach a certain age, singers often take up songs that reflect back on life. Some songs betray boastful arrogance and self-satisfaction, such as Frank Sinatra and My Way, while others convey a jaded, world-weary, disenchanted sensibility like Peggy Lee singing Is that all there is?. To my mind, one of the best such songs is by Charles Aznavour, who died last week at the age of 94.
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The late night talk show host apparently has a recurring segment where he drives around in a car with a celebrity and they sing along to recorded music. It does not sound like much fun to me but this segment with Paul McCartney was pretty good, where they surprised many people of McCartney’s home town with unannounced stops at various locations.
Like many people, I had seen the music video This is America by Donald Glover (aka Childish Gambino) that had gone viral because of the startling juxtapositioning of images and its searing take on the state of the country.
I was in Boston last week visiting with my grandson (who is now 15 moths old and great fun to be with) and when driving I noticed a car in front of me that had one of those ribbon decals stuck on the back with the message too faded to read. The reason it struck me was that nowadays one rarely sees them. There was a time when these decals were all the rage and some cars had several of them, each a different color promoting a different cause.
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Last night the NBC TV network broadcast a live performance of this rock musical to coincide with Easter Sunday. I started watching the high-energy 2½ hour show but gave up after 40 minutes. This was not because I thought it was bad. I liked what I saw but the frequent breaks for commercials finally got the better of me. It seemed like for every 8 minutes of the show, we had a break for about 4 minutes of commercials. I understand the business model of ads paying for free programming, but the time spent on ads was just too much and they were so frequent that it destroyed the sense of engagement. If a DVD comes out, I may well watch it but today clips were made available and I embed some below.
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The bass player for that great rock band The Ventures has died. Here is the band playing one of their hits Walk, Don’t Run.
The South African jazz composer and trumpeter died today at the age of 78. He was not only an accomplished jazz musician, he was also an anti-apartheid activist who lived in exile because to return to his native country during the apartheid era would be to court immediate arrest. His talent immediately made him recognized and befriended by other great politically conscious musicians such as Harry Belafonte and Yehudi Menuhin. He returned to South Africa in the early 1990s, after the end of apartheid. I had not known that he had been briefly married to Miriam Makeba for two years.
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It is well known that rock and roll originated in the black community but was coopted by white musicians like Elvis Presley and British groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Stereo Williams writes about the history of racism in rock and roll and says that there are many myths about it. In particular, he starts by closely examining the charges of racism against Presley supposedly based on something that he said.
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The old song For What It’s Worth by the group Buffalo Springfield in 1967 was symbolic of the turbulent 1960s when there were riots and clashes between police and the public as the Vietnam war raged and the Civil Rights movement fought for equal rights. I can see this song returning to vogue as we head into another turbulent time where street clashes become the norm.
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Today is the 150th anniversary of Canadian independence and on Tuesday it will be the US’s turn. But the celebrations will be quite different in these two neighboring countries. On the program On The Media host Bob Garfield talked with Stephen Marche about how Canada’s lack of patriotic fervor has enabled it to withstand the vicious xenophobia and divisiveness that is endemic in the US and parts of Europe. In addition, it has “a flourishing economy, an effective single-payer health care system, and a Prime Minister with a philosophy of tolerance.”
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