Saturday Morning Playlist 7/30/05

1. To a Black Boy - Danger Mouse and Murs
A tragic narrative about a black high school student who gets sent to prison for sleeping with his 15 year-old white girlfriend in Georgia.

2. You Belong to Me - Bob Dylan
Such a wonderfully romantic Dean Martin cover from a rather twisted Oliver Stone flick, Natural Born Killers.

3. Set Me Free -The Kinks
I've never particularly cared for the Beatles much. I can appreciate their impact and their contributions to rock, but I've always preferred the Kinks.

4. Needle of Death - Yo La Tengo
This song always brings me back to all the folks I've known who didn't hop off that ol' Junk Train in time. I remember spending this one night in May picking gravel out of my head and broken glass out of my hand. A very good friend of had decided to attack me after going on a two-day Angel Dust, cocaine, heroin, Jack Daniels, and Painkiller bender. I hit him twice square in the jaw and once in the gut, pulling my punches to not hurt him. And then I realized that he had that murder look in his eyes, pharmacueticals coarsing through his veins and completely oblivious to pain. I ended up having to beat one of my best friends to a bloody, unconscious pulp to keep him from running a knife through his ex-girlfriend's new lover.

5. Yesterday is Here - Tom Waits
6. Looking Out My Backdoor - CCR
7. Abraham, Martin, and John - Dion
8. Bad Luck - Social Distortion
These are my "Driving Through West Texas" songs. The last time I crossed throught there, my dad and I were driving in my little Ford Ranger, soaking wet and shirtless (my truck has no AC), and discussing the meaning of faith and the existence of God. We rarely fight over the music because we learned a long time ago that music is not, as some say, the soundtrack of our lives. It is the background music to the human experience.

9. Born in the U.S.A. - Bruce Springsteen
This song, one of the songs I remember hearing constantly growing up, and I still think it represents why the NeoCon movement has been so successful and the American Progressive movement has been such a failure, at least in terms of setting the political agenda for the last five years. Joe Sixpack puts people in office. Not Rob Reiner. Not Michael Moore. Not MoveOn.Org. Not John Ashcroft. Not even Karl Rove. The Progressive movement has failed in the eyes of Joe Sixpack because there's a perception that Progressives are more interested in the views of academicians and celebrities than people who actually live paycheck to paycheck. Cutting the working class out of the national diologue opened the door for guys like Karl Rove and his ilk to exploit this weakness.

10. Division Day - Eliott Smith
Such a wonderful musician and such a tragic life.