While a blanket license may cover musicians’ compensation and thus make the playing of their music perfectly legal, musicians may still protest the use of their voice and allure for purposes they find inauthentic to their image, brand, and identity. When it comes to music in politics, total harmony ranges beyond money.
Ferguson’s Fault Lines is, admittedly, difficult to read. To be sure, the prose is fine, and the organization is mostly sound. It does not employ much legal jargon or toil in overly complicated theories. Simply put, the book is hard to finish because it invokes memories of a low time in America.
All my friends are confused. We keep changing our majors. We do not know what to do with those majors. We are looking for jobs, not so much for saving or for growth, but because we need the money, and we need it now. We oversleep and we never sleep.
Four years ago, I was in a local antique shop called Salvage Alley. A black window shade with gold lettering was hanging from the rafters. The shade said, “Negro League Baseball Tickets Sold Here.”
Using a common language, whether verbal or musical, can ultimately create a community of people (in this case political supporters) that votes, sings, speaks, and even feels similarly. A candidate’s repertoire of songs can, in effect, address voters’ concerns.
Hillbilly Elegyis a frank, autobiographical account from an actual, living representative. What makes it all the more credible is that its intimate portrait of the hillbilly world was being written well in advance of the Trump phenomenon.
Reading this book has much the same impact as listening to one of his free-wheeling speeches. Significantly, it is a conscious strategy by his own admission.
In the eight chapters that comprise Corton’s book, fog emerges as an active, even murderous protagonist in the city, enticing, disorienting, and even poisoning those caught in its grip. Descending suddenly and often lingering for days, fogs would periodically cast London in an inescapable cloud of chill and gloom.
Roberto Durán made and spent millions, winding up broke, as most poor boys who became successful athletes do. During his salad days, he had a huge entourage, manzanillos, the “Panamanian slang for people who leech off the rich and famous,” as Durán puts it in his autobiography, to whom he gave away thousands a day. He drank, ate, whored, had children out of wedlock for which his wife forgave him. He apologizes for none of it. His autobiography is a defense of his life, an apologia, not an expression of contrition.
Penicillin, up close and chemical. When most of us think about bacteria, we think of fairly routine infections that can be cured with a trip to the doctor and a prescription for antibiotics. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics is quickly rising, and now more than…