geoMp3 of The Week: Bruce Springsteen Covers Blind Alfred Reed’s “How Can a Poor Man…?”
Turns out I’m a cynical gloomist. This week saw a momentous rebuttal of the great rightward veer of the last eight years and the still inexplicable approval of that track in 2004. Kerry was no prize pig, of course. That was easy to see. But to vote for Bush in 2004 meant you either A) hated gay people so much you just had to have somebody in the White House who would stack the Supreme Court and hopefully disallow even the proclamation of gayness, or B) really, really wanted the U.S. to be renowned internationally as a fundamentalist Christian army involved in a global pseudo-holy war. Oh, wait, C) would be that you were one of the no-bid contractors that made out like a bandit in Iraq as soldiers in Afghanistan looked around and wondered what the fuck they had done to anger their commander-in-chief so much that he abandoned the only potentially just military effort in the Middle East.
But, oh, we’re still embarrassingly right, it turns out. So this week’s track is going to be a song that in 2006 expressed a very specific kind of anger — about why the fuck our government officials were worrying about rolling up their shirtsleeves without actually rolling up their shirtsleeves following Katrina. So let’s presume we’re not going to see a gaggle of white dudes laughing at the plight of poor black people in New Orleans, and let’s instead keep this song around and transfer its anger to another injustice that apparently even black people don’t mind participating in — the approval of Prop 8 in California and similar measures in Florida and Arizona.
The song itself is a protest, obviously, and originally written by Blind Alfred Reed. This performance is Springsteen’s, who obviously likes to dress up like Woodie Guthrie for Halloween, but it’s really good. But in terms of its relationship with place: the song’s uprising spirit goes in Grant Park, because of the information that scene should put into George Bush’s dark little brain (and my crush on Michelle Obama). But the anger that once belonged in the lower 9th Ward or some other disaster scene in Louisiana should now go out West (well, all over, really). And you bastards in your bloodless and uneven marriages should ask yourselves why your precious, divine overlord will ordain a black man as president (What? Palin herself told James Dobson [who else?] that God would make the right decision on election day) but why that son of a bitch doesn’t want two loving adults to be able to marry.
“How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?,” from a Sold on Song show broadcast on May 13, 2006.
And the kml for all mp3s of the week.
