Friday, April 11, 2014

"All right, then, I'll GO to Hell."

From Anais Mitchell's brilliant Hadestown, Greg Brown performs "Why Do We Build The Wall?":



Damn, but it's been a long time since I posted a Friday Jukebox, hasn't it?

Thing is, I'm kind of funny about music.

There's music I love the hell out of. Play it over and over again.

But I don't like a hell of a lot of music. Not hate it, just don't like it. And if I don't really like the music I much prefer silence.

But I like the hell out of this one. It mirrors the burly vigor I'm feeling looking forward to the end of a hard week's work and a pleasant upcoming two days off...while echoing the little trickle of tired, sullen anger that's always within me as my country slides unthinking into the New Gilded Age. I love the funky growl Brown gives his Devil, smoothly chortling his way to his appointment with Armageddon while he grins mercilessly at the fucking rubes and fools he's got doing his work for him.

The rubes and fools all around us; looting what they can take and spoiling what they can't, sporting their bling as the World burns.

As Huck said; I'll go to Hell.

But don't expect me to be fucking gracious about it.

2 comments:

Lisa said...

Couldn't agree more with your feelings.

I think C. S. Lewis's "Screwtape Letters" was one of the finest roundups of our predicament (that from a Christian p.o.v.)

(But I couldn't load the vid.)

Syrbal/Labrys said...

I used to get Fundy neighbors almost in tears, telling me what a good person I was and how they couldn't BEAR the idea of me in Hell. And I'd ask them, "So, your idea of God is someone who would condemn a good person to hell for what could almost be summed up as a semantics argument, or for wearing bluejeans instead of a skirt at all times?" They would regretfully inform me in the affirmative.

And I would say, "Well, then your god is a tyrant -- I only bend knee to temporal ones to save other lives threatened, if an eternal one is demanding that I bend knee to save myself, I WILL go to hell (and BTW, take over!) and I will go SINGING.

So very not the response they were looking for -- Jedi mind tricks aside.