RIP, Joe. "Rudie Can't Fail" will always be on my play list. No amount of inbred Somali goat-f*ers will ever be worth the life of a single US serviceman.
I don't think it is "American exceptionalism" to believe that my kinfolk have no reason to die for those that would reject our kinship if we offered it.
You are totally right on that. It's perfectly normal to favour the home team, and I do it all the time.
But there is more than a passing resemblance between :
(1) those who believe that ''there's an American in everyone in this world'' and therefore the US has the right/duty to protect them wherever they are (in other words, ''Manifest Destiny''), and
(2) those who believe that the US should stay out of all these conflicts because the locals just aren't worth it (''goat-fuckers''...).
What's the middle ground between life and death? Between faith and the absence of it? That's like someone claiming to be "non-binary" when they were clearly born male or female.
I, for one, totally believe that sex is binary, and gender identity is a kind of diversion. It would be difficult for me to find common ground with someone who adheres to the transgender ideology. So your analogy is a useful one. But I'm not sure it is constructive to dismiss large chunks of the world as barbarians beyond redemption...
"...not sure it is constructive to dismiss large chunks of the world as barbarians beyond redemption"
I'd chalk it up to hyperbole in response to the radical egalitarians who want to ship our coats and cloaks over to those they've seen on the latest propaganda video.
Excellent analogy and not just because Joe briefly replaced Shane MacGowan in the band. This clip, which I had never seen or heard before, reminded me instantly of "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda," the epic closing track to 1985's apotheosis of Poguedom: Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. "The Minstrel Boy" is wisely half the length of its Pogues counterpart, and thus more effective as an anti-war anthem.
P.S.: What a positively awful bandmate Shane must have been to get sacked from a group most easily identified by his voice. David Lee Roth is a different case, as that group had EVH's guitar as the "aha!" element, and DLR was a fine showman but easily replaced as a vocalist. Lots of lead singers have well-deserved reps as prima donnas, but apart from DLR and Ozzy Osbourne -- in a quartet of drug-addled guys, he was by far the least functional, which is saying something -- how many really prominent lead vocalists ever get the boot, no matter the level of in-band friction? Lead guitarists and lead vocalists have been at one another's throats since at least the Who in their early days -- think Plant and Page, Mick and Keith for much of the 1980s, Morrissey and Marr, Lowell George and the rest of Little Feat (a situation resolved only by Lowell's untimely death in 1979), not to mention Strummer and Mick Jones, the latter of whom got defenestrated from his own group. RIP, Joe and Shane. The song says "in Heaven there is no beer," but it's silent on the availability of whiskey.
I believe that Strummer's mom was, like Trump's mom, a Scottish highlander. I believe Strummer said around age 50 that he really should have gotten into Scottish Highlander music.
He was, instead, really obsessed with his father's heritage, who was an English Deep State operative for MI-6, and a close friend of Communist spy Kim Philby. His father was born in Lucknow, India and was slightly Armenian and slightly Jewish but mostly English. Strummer strikes me as a worthy successor to Kipling, who was born in Bombay.
My guess is that Ridley Scott picked up on Strummer's British Raj heritage and thus had him sing the song from "The Man Who Would Be King" but with its left rather than right lyrics, which Connery and Caine had sung.
Hence a bunch of Scots-Irish American soldiers flying around at immense risk to their lives, for reasons of state, some insanely remote place in the absolute periphery of the American empire.
It's pretty crazy, but it also works artistically and emotionally.
I can recall a few years after seeing the Pogues, driving home c. 1990 and seeing a huge line outside one of the local concert halls in Uptown in Chicago. My wife and I pulled over and asked a kid about 10 years younger than ourselves who was playing. He excitedly said the Pogues with Joe Strummer replacing Shane McGowan.
My wife and I were really fired up about going, but we had a baby in the back seat.
But ever since, I've had a hard time being annoyed at different generations, as has come back in fashion. We were just barely too old to drop everything to see Strummer and the Pogues, but we couldn't hold it against the next generation to do that.
Recently, I found a book with quotes from my father-in-law, a tuba player, saying that the Uptown, Chicago theaters always had bad acoustics since he started playing there in 1946. He said that old-timers in his band said they were bad since the 1920s.
So it wasn't the Pogues' fault they sounded muddy.
I don't go to near as many live shows as you, but I'm an audiophile and amateur musician. My experience is that the acoustics at every small to medium sized venue are poor and the bands always play too loud for the space.
A muddy mix is usually down to too much bass and live shows love to crank it because it's one of the only differentiators from a good home stereo or headphones presentation. Those kids need to go home having got their money's worth of thumpa-thumpa and deafness.
Plant and Page were at each other's throats? I don't know if it's usually consistently that bad. I like to assume that "Almost Famous" nailed it with Stillwater. In the case of Ozzy and Shane I don't know that there was anything unacceptable about them as band mates aside from drinking problems so severe they became unreliable.
We like to assume that rock and roll is a naturally drug addled business, and it is but it's also primarily a business and a competitive one. Despite what they might say, the drugs affect live performance negatively and the singer is the only one whose instrument gets messed up by the drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, stress, colds etc.
If you are touring with a catalog of albums and loyal fans, you can (and do) get away with a lot of lousy performances. When I was young I assumed this was not the case and if I didn't enjoy a live performance of a great band, well, I just didn't get it man!
But the sad fact is that great bands do turn in lousy live performances and the fans accept it. But they won't accept that the singer isn't on stage because he's out on a bender. Big tour and you're anxious every night that Ozzy or Shane won't make it? It's tough but they gotta go.
I was totally in love with the Pogues in later 1987 after going to Ireland on my honeymoon in July 1987. But when I saw them in my neighborhood in Chicago that autumn, their acoustics were bad because 7 instruments were too many for the local Riviera theater. But their encore of "Honky Tonk Women" was outstanding.
The Pogues were my favorite band of the 80s based on the breadth of their songs that I love. What a combination of styles and what amazing presentation. Often folk music (in this case mostly Irish) fusions are performed with consummate skill (check) but far too politely, reverently. The Pogues would have none of that.
"I'm a man you don't meet every day" is a standard, but their version chokes me up every time (of course I'm a dog lover) and "And the band played waltzing matilda" is an achievement on so many levels. It's a great song lyrically but the text of the music is not especially great until the Pogues get their hands on it.
Eric Bogle wrote both “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda” and “The Green Fields of France.” That’s a couple of great songs for one man to come up with.
My Irish great uncle started his war at Gallipoli before finishing it on the first day of the Somme.
I spent a good deal of time in Ireland in the 80s and my recollection is that the Pogues were just about unknown there, at least until Fairytale of New York came out. They were positively disliked by the entertainment establishment at RTE.
Strummer was involved with Pogues from their mid 1970s beginnings, including a few stints where he was officially a Pogue. He produced Hells Ditch, and their 30-track greatest hits album (~1999).
I think it was because George Bush Snr was the first president of The End of History. It was believed that places like Somalia were only hellholes because bad guys had somehow gotten control of the government. So America would go in, kill the baddies, pour in aid and NGOs, and Somalia would become a prosperous liberal democracy.
Bill Clinton inherited the policy from HW, but after the Battle of Mogadishu he didn't double down on the nation building and send in another 100,000 troops, he just pulled the plug on it and left Somalia to the clans.
With hindsight we can see that 'liberal' Bill Clinton was much more capable of understanding war and power politics than either of the 'warmongering' Bushes.
It was GHWB's little time bomb to Clinton for winning the election. His mother had just died in November, too, and he was feeling particularly soft-headed.
The liberal Secretary of Defense at the time of the Mogadishu ambush, Les Aspin, had lusted for the job. He began the implementation of Clinton's "don't ask, don't tell policy" and the recruitment of women for combat operations. He oversaw the increasing military involvement of the US in places like Haiti, the Balkans and the Horn of Africa.
He also denied a request by Colin Powell for military equipment that might have prevented many of the deaths that occurred during the Mogadishu ambush. As the ambush unfolded, Aspin was not immediately available. He was attending some fund raiser or other social event in DC.
Aspin ultimately lost his job, when Congress began investigating his partying in Europe during some NATO conference. Like Cheney, his heart eventually did him in.
Legislature and Executive are two different skill sets. Aspin's general sloppiness was less harmful in the former. Clinton should have learned from Reagan's disaster in Beirut and not taken his eye off deployments in hostile lands, if they were needed at all, which they weren't. There was a little reporting after 9/11 that Bin Laden was involved in Somali in '93, but it had to be forgotten before 2008.
Joe Strummer's dad, like Kipling, was born in India when it was part of the British Empire.
I've never heard Ridley Scott's explanation for choosing this song, but it fits together artistically -- Irish song about war, Scots-Irish American soldiers fighting in some utterly remote part of the world for God knows what reason...
It's like the moment when I first saw this scene in Randall Wallace's "We Were Soldiers" (based on the war memoirs of U.S. Army Lieutenant General Hal Moore and UPS reporter Joe Galloway):
The overlay of the the song "SGT MacKenzie" is a bit incongruous with a bayonet charge against NVA infantry, but the lyrics and melody struck me deep (written by the great-grandson, and in honor of, a Scot who fought and died in WWI).
I feel similarly when I hear bagpipes; I guess the Celt/Scot gene is strong in me, lol.
What version of the movie has the song with this video? I watched it on Amazon prime and it's not there. I watched the "extended version" on Youtube, in search of it. and the song is at the end, during credits. But this beautiful sequence seems nowhere in the movie versions I've seen.
I suspect some version of this video was assembled from the best clips of "Black Hawk Down" by some guy named "Delvian" who says, "I'm just a guy who likes making videos now and then. Generally gaming or music videos. I also have a channel with lyric videos, feel free to check that out as well!"
It's insane that Delvian might have created the best music video ever ...
I have a friend who was in Mogadishu in special forces before the Battle of Mogadishu. To deliver food supplies, he told me, they had them mowing down people in the streets -- men, women, children. Then he had to leave when the UN troops arrived because there was some rule about UN troops not allowing American special forces to fight with them. His commander said that, brave as they were, the less experienced, non-special forces troops, forced to fight alongside UN troops, didn't stand a chance. He told them to be prepared to return to Mogadishu quickly.
And that's what happened. He hadn't finished his first beer in months before they were sent back to retrieve the bodies of the boys dragged through the streets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ3wk6KBLjo
"Best Electric Guitar Solo Ever"?!
Or this, the link at the bottom of the Substack post: "Black Hawk Down Minstrel Boy"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj2j7R1NL-s
Black Hawk Down is the only book I can recall making my heart pound while reading.
RIP, Joe. "Rudie Can't Fail" will always be on my play list. No amount of inbred Somali goat-f*ers will ever be worth the life of a single US serviceman.
Oh yes, American exceptionalism...
At least we can agree on one thing: the US should butt out of most conflicts around the world, and perhaps stop feeding them.
I don't think it is "American exceptionalism" to believe that my kinfolk have no reason to die for those that would reject our kinship if we offered it.
You are totally right on that. It's perfectly normal to favour the home team, and I do it all the time.
But there is more than a passing resemblance between :
(1) those who believe that ''there's an American in everyone in this world'' and therefore the US has the right/duty to protect them wherever they are (in other words, ''Manifest Destiny''), and
(2) those who believe that the US should stay out of all these conflicts because the locals just aren't worth it (''goat-fuckers''...).
Shouldn't there be a middle ground?
What's the middle ground between life and death? Between faith and the absence of it? That's like someone claiming to be "non-binary" when they were clearly born male or female.
I, for one, totally believe that sex is binary, and gender identity is a kind of diversion. It would be difficult for me to find common ground with someone who adheres to the transgender ideology. So your analogy is a useful one. But I'm not sure it is constructive to dismiss large chunks of the world as barbarians beyond redemption...
"...not sure it is constructive to dismiss large chunks of the world as barbarians beyond redemption"
I'd chalk it up to hyperbole in response to the radical egalitarians who want to ship our coats and cloaks over to those they've seen on the latest propaganda video.
No!
Sounds like a Pogues song.
Love the Clash.
Excellent analogy and not just because Joe briefly replaced Shane MacGowan in the band. This clip, which I had never seen or heard before, reminded me instantly of "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda," the epic closing track to 1985's apotheosis of Poguedom: Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. "The Minstrel Boy" is wisely half the length of its Pogues counterpart, and thus more effective as an anti-war anthem.
P.S.: What a positively awful bandmate Shane must have been to get sacked from a group most easily identified by his voice. David Lee Roth is a different case, as that group had EVH's guitar as the "aha!" element, and DLR was a fine showman but easily replaced as a vocalist. Lots of lead singers have well-deserved reps as prima donnas, but apart from DLR and Ozzy Osbourne -- in a quartet of drug-addled guys, he was by far the least functional, which is saying something -- how many really prominent lead vocalists ever get the boot, no matter the level of in-band friction? Lead guitarists and lead vocalists have been at one another's throats since at least the Who in their early days -- think Plant and Page, Mick and Keith for much of the 1980s, Morrissey and Marr, Lowell George and the rest of Little Feat (a situation resolved only by Lowell's untimely death in 1979), not to mention Strummer and Mick Jones, the latter of whom got defenestrated from his own group. RIP, Joe and Shane. The song says "in Heaven there is no beer," but it's silent on the availability of whiskey.
Strummer throwing Mick Jones out of the Clash was a bit of a problem considering Jones had most of the musical talent.
I believe that Strummer's mom was, like Trump's mom, a Scottish highlander. I believe Strummer said around age 50 that he really should have gotten into Scottish Highlander music.
He was, instead, really obsessed with his father's heritage, who was an English Deep State operative for MI-6, and a close friend of Communist spy Kim Philby. His father was born in Lucknow, India and was slightly Armenian and slightly Jewish but mostly English. Strummer strikes me as a worthy successor to Kipling, who was born in Bombay.
My guess is that Ridley Scott picked up on Strummer's British Raj heritage and thus had him sing the song from "The Man Who Would Be King" but with its left rather than right lyrics, which Connery and Caine had sung.
Hence a bunch of Scots-Irish American soldiers flying around at immense risk to their lives, for reasons of state, some insanely remote place in the absolute periphery of the American empire.
It's pretty crazy, but it also works artistically and emotionally.
I can recall a few years after seeing the Pogues, driving home c. 1990 and seeing a huge line outside one of the local concert halls in Uptown in Chicago. My wife and I pulled over and asked a kid about 10 years younger than ourselves who was playing. He excitedly said the Pogues with Joe Strummer replacing Shane McGowan.
My wife and I were really fired up about going, but we had a baby in the back seat.
But ever since, I've had a hard time being annoyed at different generations, as has come back in fashion. We were just barely too old to drop everything to see Strummer and the Pogues, but we couldn't hold it against the next generation to do that.
Recently, I found a book with quotes from my father-in-law, a tuba player, saying that the Uptown, Chicago theaters always had bad acoustics since he started playing there in 1946. He said that old-timers in his band said they were bad since the 1920s.
So it wasn't the Pogues' fault they sounded muddy.
I don't go to near as many live shows as you, but I'm an audiophile and amateur musician. My experience is that the acoustics at every small to medium sized venue are poor and the bands always play too loud for the space.
A muddy mix is usually down to too much bass and live shows love to crank it because it's one of the only differentiators from a good home stereo or headphones presentation. Those kids need to go home having got their money's worth of thumpa-thumpa and deafness.
Plant and Page were at each other's throats? I don't know if it's usually consistently that bad. I like to assume that "Almost Famous" nailed it with Stillwater. In the case of Ozzy and Shane I don't know that there was anything unacceptable about them as band mates aside from drinking problems so severe they became unreliable.
We like to assume that rock and roll is a naturally drug addled business, and it is but it's also primarily a business and a competitive one. Despite what they might say, the drugs affect live performance negatively and the singer is the only one whose instrument gets messed up by the drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, stress, colds etc.
If you are touring with a catalog of albums and loyal fans, you can (and do) get away with a lot of lousy performances. When I was young I assumed this was not the case and if I didn't enjoy a live performance of a great band, well, I just didn't get it man!
But the sad fact is that great bands do turn in lousy live performances and the fans accept it. But they won't accept that the singer isn't on stage because he's out on a bender. Big tour and you're anxious every night that Ozzy or Shane won't make it? It's tough but they gotta go.
I was totally in love with the Pogues in later 1987 after going to Ireland on my honeymoon in July 1987. But when I saw them in my neighborhood in Chicago that autumn, their acoustics were bad because 7 instruments were too many for the local Riviera theater. But their encore of "Honky Tonk Women" was outstanding.
The Pogues were my favorite band of the 80s based on the breadth of their songs that I love. What a combination of styles and what amazing presentation. Often folk music (in this case mostly Irish) fusions are performed with consummate skill (check) but far too politely, reverently. The Pogues would have none of that.
"I'm a man you don't meet every day" is a standard, but their version chokes me up every time (of course I'm a dog lover) and "And the band played waltzing matilda" is an achievement on so many levels. It's a great song lyrically but the text of the music is not especially great until the Pogues get their hands on it.
Eric Bogle wrote both “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda” and “The Green Fields of France.” That’s a couple of great songs for one man to come up with.
My Irish great uncle started his war at Gallipoli before finishing it on the first day of the Somme.
I saw the Pogues in Philly a couple of times. Shane McGowan quickly got too drunk to sing both times. The band was top-notch.
I spent a good deal of time in Ireland in the 80s and my recollection is that the Pogues were just about unknown there, at least until Fairytale of New York came out. They were positively disliked by the entertainment establishment at RTE.
Strummer was involved with Pogues from their mid 1970s beginnings, including a few stints where he was officially a Pogue. He produced Hells Ditch, and their 30-track greatest hits album (~1999).
More juicy tidbits at Wikipedia (Pogues or Strummer), and here; http://www.nowthissound.com/ntsib/2012/12/18/strummer-week-the-pogues/
50 was too early. Godspeed, Joe.
Also, remind me what the eff we were doing in Somalia?
I think it was because George Bush Snr was the first president of The End of History. It was believed that places like Somalia were only hellholes because bad guys had somehow gotten control of the government. So America would go in, kill the baddies, pour in aid and NGOs, and Somalia would become a prosperous liberal democracy.
Bill Clinton inherited the policy from HW, but after the Battle of Mogadishu he didn't double down on the nation building and send in another 100,000 troops, he just pulled the plug on it and left Somalia to the clans.
With hindsight we can see that 'liberal' Bill Clinton was much more capable of understanding war and power politics than either of the 'warmongering' Bushes.
Yea, and verily.
It was GHWB's little time bomb to Clinton for winning the election. His mother had just died in November, too, and he was feeling particularly soft-headed.
Bush didn't tell Clinton to go after Aidid, that was Ghali. And Clinton fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
The liberal Secretary of Defense at the time of the Mogadishu ambush, Les Aspin, had lusted for the job. He began the implementation of Clinton's "don't ask, don't tell policy" and the recruitment of women for combat operations. He oversaw the increasing military involvement of the US in places like Haiti, the Balkans and the Horn of Africa.
He also denied a request by Colin Powell for military equipment that might have prevented many of the deaths that occurred during the Mogadishu ambush. As the ambush unfolded, Aspin was not immediately available. He was attending some fund raiser or other social event in DC.
Aspin ultimately lost his job, when Congress began investigating his partying in Europe during some NATO conference. Like Cheney, his heart eventually did him in.
Legislature and Executive are two different skill sets. Aspin's general sloppiness was less harmful in the former. Clinton should have learned from Reagan's disaster in Beirut and not taken his eye off deployments in hostile lands, if they were needed at all, which they weren't. There was a little reporting after 9/11 that Bin Laden was involved in Somali in '93, but it had to be forgotten before 2008.
Agree 100 percent. The entire soundtrack to "Black Hawk Down" is one of my favorites.
Re: Strummer -- brilliant. And another of my favorites of his: Johnny Appleseed. We lost Strummer way too early.
New lyrics
The minstrel boy to the war has gone,
In the ranks of death you will find him.
His father's sword he has girded on and his wild harp slung behind him
"Hated Whites" screamed the average Joe
"Though all the world betrays you!
One sword at least to defend thy rights,
one faithful harp to praise you"
I just played this for my mother. I think she liked it.
Thanks. Never heard before.
Joe Strummer's dad, like Kipling, was born in India when it was part of the British Empire.
I've never heard Ridley Scott's explanation for choosing this song, but it fits together artistically -- Irish song about war, Scots-Irish American soldiers fighting in some utterly remote part of the world for God knows what reason...
It's like the moment when I first saw this scene in Randall Wallace's "We Were Soldiers" (based on the war memoirs of U.S. Army Lieutenant General Hal Moore and UPS reporter Joe Galloway):
https://youtu.be/fuaSi-H0oGY?si=ETU9w233EAZvlj2a
The overlay of the the song "SGT MacKenzie" is a bit incongruous with a bayonet charge against NVA infantry, but the lyrics and melody struck me deep (written by the great-grandson, and in honor of, a Scot who fought and died in WWI).
I feel similarly when I hear bagpipes; I guess the Celt/Scot gene is strong in me, lol.
What version of the movie has the song with this video? I watched it on Amazon prime and it's not there. I watched the "extended version" on Youtube, in search of it. and the song is at the end, during credits. But this beautiful sequence seems nowhere in the movie versions I've seen.
Oh, I see now, that was a music video which spliced scenes from the movie over the song.
Did Ridley Scott do that or someone else? Its really is more amazing than the movie itself, good as the movie was.
I suspect some version of this video was assembled from the best clips of "Black Hawk Down" by some guy named "Delvian" who says, "I'm just a guy who likes making videos now and then. Generally gaming or music videos. I also have a channel with lyric videos, feel free to check that out as well!"
It's insane that Delvian might have created the best music video ever ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj2j7R1NL-s
I have a friend who was in Mogadishu in special forces before the Battle of Mogadishu. To deliver food supplies, he told me, they had them mowing down people in the streets -- men, women, children. Then he had to leave when the UN troops arrived because there was some rule about UN troops not allowing American special forces to fight with them. His commander said that, brave as they were, the less experienced, non-special forces troops, forced to fight alongside UN troops, didn't stand a chance. He told them to be prepared to return to Mogadishu quickly.
And that's what happened. He hadn't finished his first beer in months before they were sent back to retrieve the bodies of the boys dragged through the streets.
He does not want to be thanked for his service.
R.I.P. Joe Strummer.
Re: https://www.stevesailer.net/p/deciphering-canadian-crime-stats?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
You'll find Chat GPT is extremely helpful with problems like this.