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Ordinarily, heavy-handedness ain’t my bag. In any sphere, but especially in music. So, yeah, I would like to have seen a little more subtlety from Warrant with “Cherry Pie.” But Roger Waters is one who almost always gets a pass from me. Something about his anger appeals to me. So bulky metaphors like “the wall” in the old days and those obnoxious backup singers and saxaphones he tours with these days — all of which are usually wont to disqualify an artist from my library and, by extension, the geoMp3 of The Week — are given the go-ahead because they’re in service of a bad-ass flood of vitriol and frustration.

So this week’s track is a live cut from Waters’ recent Dark Side of the Moon tour, specifically from the stop in Santiago, Chile. It’s a song I had never heard before (I’m not a great follower of Waters’ is the truth), but I love it for all the reasons we should all hate Warrant’s…well, everything from Warrant and all of Warrant’s kin. The song is bold, not in any real way innovative, and in no way whatsoever nuanced. It will be placed in Beirut, Lebanon, the site of the song’s nominal story arc, which centers on a family that once took in a young, wandering Waters and showed great hospitality. Waters, now singing this song many years later, wonders aloud about the fate of that gracious family of — gasp! foreigners — who showed a shaggy Englishman real, genuine, old-timey (do I go against everything I know and say “Biblical”?) hospitality back in 1961 in “that cauldron that was Lebanon.”

Anyway, this performance (I’ve never heard the studio version) starts out strong with “But now an Englishman abroad is just a US stooge.” Okay, so the scene is decently-set: we’re outside of the U.S., post-9/11, taking in some of what the Bush Doctrine has begotten. If you can let your ears bleed out during the synth parts, you’ll eventually be treated to a rousing condemnation:

Are these the people that we should bomb?
Are we so sure they mean us harm?
Is this our pleasure, punishment or crime?
Is this a mountain that we really want to climb?
The road is hard, hard and long
Put down that two by four
This man would never turn you from his door
Oh George! Oh George!
That Texas education must have fucked you up when you were very small

I warned you about the instrument. Don’t blame the player. But that part I can take or leave. Bush himself is an easy target. It’s the part that addresses the U.S. itself and the promise we’ve drawn a big scar over this last decade that makes me choose this one. As vicious the condemnation, the plea (to us, Americans) is more intense still:

Is gentleness too much for us?
Should gentleness be filed along with empathy?
We feel for someone else’s child
Every time a smart bomb does its sums and gets it wrong
Someone else’s child dies and equities in defence rise
America, America, please hear us when we call
You got hip-hop, be-bop, hustle and bustle
You got Atticus Finch
You got Jane Russell
You got freedom of speech
You got great beaches, wildernesses and malls
Don’t let the might, the Christian right, fuck it all up
For you and the rest of the world

It’s a protest song at a time when nobody seems to give a shit about protest songs. But you’re not likely to hear a more direct, honest, deserved request than that one verse. Except for maybe “Cherry Pie,” second stanza.

“Leaving Beirut,” from the 50,000 Lunatics on the Grass bootleg (Santiago de Chile, March 14, 2007.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

Edit for an important reminder:
Vote and prove you’re not anti-American.
(It wouldn’t hurt if you also vote for a ticket that doesn’t support anti-intellectualism and jingoism.)