Over on the ACLU boards, where I regularly post, there's been the usual argument about free speech, i.e., what are the limits to it, and when should we be offended by what we read, and how should we deal with people whose only reason for posting is to insult people, insulated as they are by the Internet from any sort of consequences (such as a punch in the snoot). Now, I usually take the "ignore them, and if you don't like it, don't read it" approach. For a bit o' fun, I decided to take the opposite point of view and argue the "Words can hurt my feelings!" point of view.
When it comes to maintaining Ironic Distance from the blizz-blazz yap yap yap posted here, your old pal Юåf+êrvÕ¡ usually manifests his badass self somewhere out in the neighborhood of Aldebaran in the Hyades, i.e., I hold that words are just animal noises people make with their mouths: bow wow woof woof arf. Ya take the good with the bad, and ignore the awful.
But today, I had a LIFE CHANGING EXPERIENCE, an epiphany, if you will, that has shuddered me all the way down to my Size Elevens. A revelation provided to me thanks to the modern miracle of Etheric Transmission by invisible waves propagated through the atmosphere!
Yup, folks, you've guessed correctly: Top 40 Radio Has Yet Again Altered My Existence!
And no, it wasn't that copy of Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade I bought today in Berkeley in a vain attempt to recapture the mid-Eighties alt-rock gestalt that was the essence of Being Юåf+êrvÕ¡ during the musically bleak Reagan Years that had anything to do with it.
It was good, old fashioned Top 40 Radio, the way they used to play it back when mammoths ponderously stomped the Earth and I was doing the rough drafts for my work at Lasceaux; Top 40 radio in the form of the immortal work and insightful eye of R. Dean Taylor, the Michelangelo of the seven inch rotating 45 r.p.m. vinyl disc!
Yes, you guessed it:
The Source of my Mystical Transformation was "Indiana Wants Me" by R. Dean Taylor.
Now, follow the text closely folks, as this tale of murderous woe worthy of a Childe Ballad unfolds:
The song opens with the sound of police sirens, not those whoopity-whoop fruitcake air raid sirens like they use in those garlic eating countries like France where the cop cars are these little silly cars like Fiats or Citroens, or even worse ENGLAND, a country actually ruled by a QUEEN and a nation that has never been able to make a car with a working electrical system, no, but a good old fashioned "I can see the little red lights flashing in my rearview mirror, here, throw this out the window, fast, while I floor it around this corner" AMERICAN police siren, so we know right away that someone's in some kind of trouble, perhaps a car stuck on the railroad tracks á la Bloodrock's early 70's hit "D.O.A.", or maybe the death classic "Teen Angel" where the dopey girl ran back to get her boyfriend's ring out of a car stuck on the railroad tracks, for the love o' Mike, and managed to get plastered into smithereens by an oncoming freight train, (what a dumb broad SHE must have been), heck, even like Paper Lace's indescribable horror "The Night Chicago Died" which had a chunk at the middle with police sirens in it, so I guess you could make the case that in the post-Strawberry Fields Forever world of Art-Pop that PASTICHE had been elevated into the king's throne and ruled with an iron hand, except, of course, for the inescapable fact that the Shangri-La's producer Shadow Morton had been injecting stuff like sirens and motorcycle noises into teen psychodrama such as "Leader of the Pack" YEARS before the Beatles.
Anyway, sirens.
So we know there's trouble a-brewing. Trouble with the LAW! And then the CHORUS comes in before the verse in an interesting twist on the usual verse-chorus verse-chorus set-up:
"Indiana wants me, but I can't go back there."
And then we find out exactly WHY the singer can't go back to corn country, as our boy R. Dean jumps into the verse, no messing around setting the scene here with a lot of extraneous familial details like Kenny Rogers did in "Coward Of The County":
"If a man ever needed dying he did
No one had a right to say what he said about you"
SEE? WOW, and I can't find a typeface BIG ENOUGH for that "WOW!", perhaps a 400 point Arial Bold would suffice to get the message across.
The protagonist of our song had his FEELINGS HURT because some mook said something about his wife or his girlfriend or maybe his mom or his skinny gay Lou Reed look-alike boyfriend or Miss Indiana or maybe his third cousin on his dad's side, heck, at this point we just don't have enough information to know, but we DO KNOW that as far as Our Hero's concerned, that WORDS HURT HIS FEELINGS! Really! There's no doubt about it, R. Dean all but says that he got all macho and puffed up and stuck out his chest and made some kind of PHYSICAL DEMONSTRATION because this other guy made some BAD NOISES with his loud mouth.
But wait, as with a good Popeil product, THERE'S MORE!
"I'll never see your smiling face or touch your hand
If just once more I could see
You, our home and our little baby"
I get it! REVELATION! The other guy said something really bad about Our Hero's Wife, and he killed the guy! SEE? WORDS SURE HURT SOMEBODY HERE! Only it was the gabby guy with the big mouth that had his words handed back to him on a platter, although we're not made privy to exactly HOW the deed was done, a careful and erudite listener can write in the details with a bit of imagination: a straight razor down in the ol' motorcycle boot, the cheap .22 caliber handgun, the ten-penny nail-studded sawed off baseball bat with a handle wrapped tight with electrical tape that I, I mean, Our Hero, keeps under the seat of his car, or, perhaps he just gave the chap a good old fashioned VERBAL tongue-lashing, and Mr. Yappymouth fell over in a dead faint, and hit his head on the jukebox, and the next thing you know, BLOOD CLOT, and bammo, the guy's joined the Choir Invisible. I'll bet Mr. Loudmouth.com isn't laughing NOW, because dead people only rarely laugh, not to mention that the song's thirty years old, and even if the dead guy COULD laugh, the irony wasn't all that deep OR funny, and after thirty years, it wouldn't seem funny to anyone, much less the dead. Heck, R. Dean would be out on parole by now, and back with wife and the kid, except, of course, I doubt that she would have waited faithfully until parole, she would have been out running around, hey, perhaps that dead loud mouthed guy KNEW something.
Anyway, the subtext is OBVIOUS, that turning Our Hero's Life into a dismal sewer because someone said POTTY WORDS was a BAD THING! He's being chased by the police, and no one likes that! Just ask Rodney King!
And so, I hereby vow, that I, DRaftervoi, have had my life changed and transformed, and that I now believe that we've got to tiptoe around the Filthy Bits, and avoid the Tough Topics, and generally keep this place as clean as a Teletubbies show. NO MORE WILL I REFER TO YOU AS "SKANKY!" My WORD OF HONOR!
It just goes to show you that TRUE ART has the power to transform and ennoble each of us, and that our lives and our entire outlook can be forever changed by the power of a genius like R. Dean Taylor!
Юåf+êrvÕ¡
Next Week: Manifest Destiny, the B.I.A, and "Indian Reservation" by Paul Revere and the Raiders, a critical historical perspective.