You’re on a music platform and sharing it with someone speaking to someone saying things you think are false. You demand the platform remove the person you find offensive, or you will remove yourself. Sure, why not? You’re all private individuals living in a society that supposedly upholds freedom - so you are entitled to apply political pressure by issuing a ‘you or them ultimatum’ and then request (demand?) of others they do the same.
But where are we as a culture if the freedom of ideas is now a suspicious, retrograde concept? How is that notion of Progressive sitting with the censorship of ideas and speech? Sounds more like a set of rules you’d find in The Totalitarian Handbook For Dummies. Why is there blind trust in ‘official’ ideas and that anything else must not be heard? Why have we forgotten the sorry history that to cede the narrative to those invested in power only leads to subjugation? Where is the idea that democracy is noisy, jostling, shared with people you disagree with but ultimately is an expression of common will, leading to common good, far better than the alternative?
Why are the children of the 60’s, Neil Young & Joni Mitchell, now the voices of the official narrative (true or not) and trying to demand Spotify censor alternative voices?
Is Joe Rogan good because he interviews Bernie Sanders? Is Joe Rogan evil because he interviews Dr. Jordan Peterson? What is the censorship equation? Is he not allowed to talk to anyone a songwriter disagrees with?
Is it misinformation to talk of lab leak origins for Covid 19? It was and you would have been censored for that speculation on social media very recently but not any more. Does that flick of the switch give you confidence? Are you happy for ideas you want to consider, to be determined by people who you can’t vote for or dialogue with?
Does it fill you with terror that Noam Chomsky wrote a forward to a Holocaust denier’s book just to make a point about free speech in the days when free speech was considered to be a Left wing idea? Would you prefer that he had been cancelled for writing in a book with a literal (literally!) Nazi?
Would you prefer that gay marriage was not decided upon by democratic plebiscite but came from above? And why not the opposite? Things change. Ideas change. Free speech goes from Left to Right and back again. It’s dizzying. Would you prefer to give the power to your ‘betters’ to make the ‘official’ decisions for you and not have to hear some discouraging messy debate, some ‘wrong think’, ideas that disgust you or frighten you?
Neil & Joni are brilliant songwriters, clearly principled, good on them, but fuck, they are wrong.
Happy New Year to the faithful & the unfaithful, to the movers & the shakers, the sad & lonely, to those who get it done & those who want it done. May you appreciate this is all a gift that one day is taken away and passed on like a baton in a relay that you wish could be held onto just a little bit longer. xx
From 1999 a rarity called Happy New Year. By the time New Year rolled around in 1999/2000 we were in hospital with a one day old baby girl, our third. We briefly wished each other a happy one and then went back to our dreaming.
From Paul Kelly’s self-described ‘mongrel memoir’ ‘How To Make Gravy’ pg 139-140
"Everybody Wants To Touch Me’ is sometimes read as a riff on celebrity. That seems to be Sydney cabaret singer Paul Capsis’s take on it on his album of the same name. Medusa-haired Deborah Conway, Melbourne singer-songwriter and mother of three, knows a little about celebrity and pregnancy both. She fronted a band called Do-Re-Mi in the eighties and had a big hit with a song called ‘Man Overboard’, featuring the memorable lines ‘Your pubic hairs on my pillow, your stubble rings the sink.’ Her shapely posterior was also famous, full-framed and proudly bare on big Bluegrass Jeans billboards nationwide, with the tagline ‘Get yours into Bluegrass’.
Do-Re-Mi functioned as a collective - a shaky construct in pop music at the best of times - and used language such as ‘ideologically unsound’ (the predecessor of ‘politically incorrect’) in their band meetings. Deborah, with her ...
Antarctica, destination of majesty, of mystery, of dreamlike otherworldliness; the air so clear you could see the future. Our nights rocked by the seas, our days filled with light, colour, wildlife, adventure.
And no internet! For 11 whole days the world could not intrude.
Thanks @Chimu & @Intrepid
Back in Australia with almost enough days to recover from jet lag before the next stop - Israel.
