Ahem.

May 31, 2006 01:24

This may come as a surprise to those of you who know my politics: I read National Review online. Sometimes just to raise my blood pressure. But sometimes because they have interesting, insightful points of view. That's occasional. But I figure I need to balance out some of Boulder's culture - reading the New York Times, the Economist, and National Review gives me a fairly interesting perspective.

With that in mind, I'd like to address The 50 Greatest Conservative Rock Songs.

Now this isn't all bad - in fact, I quite like the list - but it fails in two critical points:

1) By placing this list in opposition to songs like "Let's Impeach the President" and "Sweet Neo Con" the article conflates folksy libertarianism with neoconservative ideology. One could argue that this is, in fact, the fallacy of the Republican party.

2) In attempting to make certain songs toe the party line, Miller ignores tone. Could you argue that "Janie's Got a Gun" is an unequivocal statement in support of "How the right to bear arms can protect women from sexual predators"? Is “I went back to Ohio / But my pretty countryside / Had been paved down the middle / By a government that had no pride” a conservative dislike of change or a liberal opposition to growth?

Rock music is popular - marking these songs as conservative is to lay claim to the vast middle ground of belief, and in several cases, to co-opt beliefs (such as growth restrictions) not generally favored by conservatives. On the basic level of territoritality, the article fails. These songs are too complex, too fragmented for your labels. It is difficult to understand "Sympathy For The Devil" without the context of The Master and Margarita, one of its inspirations - or to discuss "Small Town" without Mellencamp's politics attached. To label these as fundamentally conservative songs is a complete failure.

On a different level, though, the list functions well. All too often we see knee-jerk reactions to cultural icons - the conservative reaction to rock and roll, the liberal reaction to country (or NASCAR). This list serves as a reminder that conservatives need not fear music. Rock and roll is art, not the enemy.

But for fuck's sake, don't delude yourself. "Taxman" is not about supply-side economics, it is about the British top-bracket 95% tax rate, and you can't tell me that when Lennon wrote "We all want to change the world / But when you talk about destruction / Don't you know that you can count me out" he was also in favor of military intervention to prevent Communism.
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