Something new every day ...
posted by McFrozen on August 16, 2001
For my birthday, Katie and I went to dinner at a nice brewpub then went to Barnes & Noble to do some browsing and maybe some buying. I was tempted to get the recent Woody Guthrie biography, but I've got a pile of half-read books on my nightstand already, so I decided to fill two holes in my music collection.
I got Remain In Light and Back to Basics (Billy Bragg, not Olivia Newton John).
It turns out that probably my favorite song from Remain in Light, Listening Wind, isn't a lovely little song about how life in the third world is more connected to nature. It's a song about a guy in a third world country who decides that he doesn't like the colonization that he sees happening around him and that he doesn't like Americans, so he builds bombs to blow them up. I like that song even more now.
Also recommended: Spirit of the Century by The Blind Boys of Alabama. Incredible, incredible gospel group. The album linked above happens to be on Realworld, but they have an extensive catalog.