nathan28 wrote:MacCruiskeen wrote:So you've noticed that every record and every book sold by any commercial company is a commodity. Like wow, eureka, tell the world the news. This doesn't mean that there's no substantial difference between "God Save the Queen" and "Born to Run", nor does it make Noam Chomsky equivalent to Tom Clancy.
Whoa, hold it there with that subtlety. Are you sure you are not, and have never been, an Obamabot?
Laugh of the day. Thanks.
I resent the positions I'm forced to assume here, or have attributed to me - honestly, the commercial but pretty good rock music of Springsteen doesn't even make my Top 50 in the pop-and-rock category. He has at times annoyed me (in college this roommate just wouldn't stop playing his records!). I also understand the critique that Born in the USA / Born to Run are anthemic and easily abused for the refrains, despite the lyrics that no one understands (i.e., because they're sung unintelligibly, not because they're too hard to understand).
But that's true of a lot of things that are meant one way, but abused by the machine on behalf of a different function (sometimes intended so).
And whatever his failure to do more than lip service and a few donations for good causes, or to live up to the standards of John Lennon or William Blake or Noam Chomsky (!), still I'll object if I wander in on a claim that -- by playing at this year's Stupid Bowl -- Springsteen in fact staged the Nuremberg rally for Incoming Fuehrer Obama! And THAT, I shall now repeat for the last time, is the thesis of the OP, which is not a critique of the Super Bowl, or of football, or of militarism, or of the uses and abuses of stadium rock per se ...
Finally, it should be noted: Springsteen most emphatically did not "let" the Republicans use his song for the 1984 Reagan campaign, any more than Heart allowed the use of Barracuda as Sarah Palin's theme song. In both cases, the artists objected in public, and the Republicans went ahead and kept playing the songs and paying the user fees to the labels, as they were legally entitled to do.
Phew! Was this really worth all this effort? See other thread on Internet addiction... But yes, it is. Obama-Hitler talk is outrageous and exists mainly to cover up the far more Hitlerian and unelected regime we just had, which is about to escape without a reckoning (and with Obama's help, of course), and ultimately serves to aid the revival of the Republican Party.
I want to see the Republicans go defunct, and then the Democrats. It will not happen the other way around.
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