During the Bush administration, everyone seemed to agree: there were no protest songs. Or, at least, no good ones. At any rate, it definitely wasn’t like the ’60s. In her latest blog post for NPR, Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein provides a welcome correction to this idea, noting both how many protest songs there were and how widespread the perception was that releasing a protest song was a bad idea. But even if there were protest songs, surely they didn’t have the same effect as in the ’60s, right?
The things you learn when you’re trying to place the news events of the day into a musical context: Did you guys know that Steam’s “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye”—made famous to the MTV generation by Remote Control, and sung to former President George W. Bush’s departing helicopter by a Washington, D.C., crowd earlier this afternoon—has verses? OK, you probably did. So here’s another fact I learned about the track: Its path to being a No. 1 hit in the late ’60s, and a catcall at gymnasiums and arenas all over the world in the years that followed, was both accidental and kind of resented by its principal songwriters.
The National Council On The Arts was created in… More »
The efforts of Clear Channel’s programmers have probably helped you already get sick of holiday music, but there are many fine celebratory songs that would never cross their airwaves out there. To help cut through the clutter we’ve asked Jon Solomon, whose 20th annual 24-Hour Holiday Radio Show on WPRB kicks off at 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve, to offer up some seasonal cheer in MP3 form. Today’s song brings together George W. Bush and John Lennon’s Christmas wish for the world:
President Bush stopped by Opryland last week, and apparently one of the record labels with an office down in Nashville sent a hapless intern to the presidential press conference in hopes that an industry-friendly quote could be coaxed out of the Commander in Chief. Of course, the president being the president, he played dumb when asked about whether or not artists should be paid royalties for radio play:
