Let’s see, how many times did I start a new CeeGees post, and not finish it, since my last post on Election Day Eve?

Oh! Only five, apparently. I logged sooooo many more notes and outlines and journal entries outside of Substack, though. I touched on tons of topics I thought would be worthwhile; and points I thought might prove meaningful; and links I thought might help a few folks get through their day.

Never felt compelled to finish ‘em, though, let alone publish ‘em. Just been that kinda 10 months, I s’pose.

Here are the thoughts I thought were important enough to at least make an attempt to document, though:

1. November 8, 2024: “Evil Woman”???

   1. WOW, I was being optimistic? Just like I’d been—FOOLISHLY—the week before. But here I was celebrating one of the very first things President-Elect Trump did after winning: naming Susie Wiles—a woman!—as his chief-of-staff. Inherently, I mused, things won’t be “as” bad if a woman were to hold that powerful position.

   2. EXCERPT:
      “There are plenty of evil women in the world. But I wonder how many fewer evil women there are than evil men. …‘Cuz there are definitely fewer women who pose a grave threat to the advancement of civil society than there are men.”
      

2. February 19, 2025: "Hold On! I'm Comin'"

   1. This one had me lamenting the Dems’ by-the-book, tippytoe-around-the-edges response to threats from the White House to remove federal judges who would dare stand in the way of a clearly unlawful executive order.

   2. EXCERPT:
      “The Democrats are finally revving up the Engine of Opposition! Yup, just like a bull preparing to charge the matador, pawing the ground, snorting and drooling, the upper back muscles twitching (the same muscles the matador’s about to cut to keep him from lifting his head, though).”

   3. And this was two months before Chuck Schumer sent his “very strong letter” to the White House, sending waves of panic through the Administration…
      

3. March 10, 2025: “I’m Movin’ On”

   1. …from the Democratic Party, that is. As far as I’m concerned, I’m a Berniecrat from now on. The last straw, I said in March, was the Dem leadership refusing to take a side when Rep. Al Green was up for censure for raising a ruckus at the State of the Union. The crickets in the Capitol led to 10 Democrats voting for censure, ensuring its passage.

   2. EXCERPT #1:
      “And I’m done with Dem figureheads like the Pod Save America guys telling us to forget about more than two parties, that it could never happen. As Bernie says when he quotes Nelson Mandela, ‘It always seems impossible until it is done.’”

   3. EXCERPT #2:
      “Also intolerable: [Kamala] Harris and other establishment Dems urgently asking for more money immediately after they botched the election. No admission of wrong-headedness. Certainly no ‘election autopsy’ offered. Just, ‘Give us more money so we can keep doing what we’re doing,’ which is what they’ve done for decades—for generations! Kamala’s the one we should be calling ‘Big Balls.’”
      

4. June 1, 2025: “Everyday People”

   1. This was just a glorified note-to-self to find a current event that might complement the title “Everyday People.” In order to provide an excuse to write about Questlove’s Sly Stone doc. Which I hadn’t watched yet, but finally got around to the night before Sly passed.
      

   2. EXCERPT:
      “Reiterate that the goal [of the newsletter and sometimes-podcast] is about bringing average everyday people together, the 99% protesting the 1%, helping the powerful understand that MOST corporate and governmental decisions must help MOST Americans. Or at the very least not actively, demonstrably harm them—or we average everyday people will make sure businesses’ bottom lines and shareholders’ pocketbooks suffer.”
      

5. June 5, 2025: “Back on My Feet Again”

   1. I was sure I was actually gonna post this time. Bernie Sanders had sent out a fiery email explaining what the “Big Beautiful Bill” was really going to do—especially to the folks who typically voted for Trump.

   2. QUOTE (from Bernie):
      “…this bill epitomizes exactly what Trumpism is all about: if you are rich and powerful, and can make large campaign contributions, you are entitled to massive tax breaks that will make you even richer.
      
      If you are working class or poor, and struggling to survive, you are entitled to NOTHING. You have no basic human rights. You are not entitled to health care through Medicaid, you are not entitled to a nutrition program to feed your kids, you are not entitled to a decent education.
      

      Trumpism is about the belief that we live in a ‘dog eat dog world’ – where it is moral and appropriate for the big dogs to eat the little dogs, where the billionaires get tax breaks while children go hungry and workers sleep in their cars.
      

      Well. We disagree. That is not our value system and that is not the value system that most Americans adhere to.”

Which brings me to the above video I wanted to share with you. It’s what finally made me wanna get off my ass and start posting again. And yes, it’s Bernie Sanders-related. ‘Cuz, sorry, but in 50 years people are going to be wearing hats that say what Trump’s latest favorite MAGA-hat knockoff says, except it’ll refer to the senator from Vermont:

“Bernie Was Right About Everything.”

[EDITOR’S NOTE: OK maybe not everything. He definitely should not have insisted on calling his movement an inherently “democratic socialist” movement so far ahead of the 2020 election. That tag has nothing to do with the totalitarian regimes of Stalin and Mussolini like people think it does. But Americans weren’t gonna internalize the real history fast enough to reverse their deeply ingrained opinions and be cool with a full-on socialist president all of a sudden.]

This video from the nonprofit journalism hub More Perfect Union has reporter John Russell chauffeuring Bernie around small-town West Virginia, talking to real people, face to face, shoulder to shoulder, about real issues that matter to them. If every politician did this, and communicated in a way that reassured constituents they genuinely cared about their problems and have ideas to solve them, the only Second Civil War people would be speculating about would be that of the 99 Percent vs. the 1 Percent.

Joining the Tuesday Late-Afternoon Music Club

Hopefully the Bern video cheered you up as much as it did me. But of much greater import is the real cause for a “Celebration Day.”

That’s right. Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the release of Kiss’s classic 1985 pop-metal album Asylum. [Don’t bother to look up the AllMusic star rating, chump. Just let the truth rush over you: IT’S A FUGGIN’ KISS KLASSIC.]

So it was early 1985. In a few short months, I would pivot from Men at Work (still one of my favorites), Men Without Hats (still one of my…initial early favorites), Culture Club, Michael Jackson, and Steve Perry (I had no clue who Journey was, all I knew was “Oh Sherrie” and “Foolish Heart” made me sing along when they popped up on MTV) to Mötley Crüe, Ratt, Twisted Sister, Scorpions, and, above all others, Kiss.

Before hearing a lick, riff, or two-handed tap from any of those metal bands’ electric guitarists, though, I saw Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley on the cover of what would become the first rock music magazine I’d ever purchase, Hit Parader. They were promoting 1984’s Animalize. But the Murphy Mart where I found the magazine didn’t carry Animalize! In fact, they didn’t carry Kiss at all!

Ted Nugent, yes. Foreigner, sure. .38 Special, bet. (‘Bet’ means “You better darn well believe it,” some kids just told me.) But no Kiss. It appeared that I’d need Mom to take me all the way to the other side of town, to a far-hipper, more worldly retail outlet.

But K-Mart didn’t have it, either! What was this??

I’d never felt that kind of primal desperation to experience something before. For Hit Parader’s money, this group was apparently “The Hottest Band in the World.” I hadn’t ever knowingly heard a Kiss song to that point. But I just knew, somehow, that Kiss was…

I didn’t know what Kiss was! But…I had to have it!

Then MTV aired Animalize Live & Uncensored. (It was very much censored.) Kiss playing in their home away from home, Detroit. Paul played an animal-print guitar! Gene had a big studded lumberjack axe for a bass, as well as what I thought to be very cool hair! (‘Twas a wig.) They made their entrance standing on a lighted platform as it descended from the rafters and deposited them on the stage!

This was it. It, it, IT.

Now I knew what they looked like and sounded like. But still no Kiss at K-Mart or Murphy Mart.

One day after Dad picked me up from school, we went to a store on the town square that a friend of his from high school owned, The Sound Shoppe. I guess I thought it was just a lame small-town stereo outlet. And I already had my trusty Toshiba ghetto blaster (it’s gross a bunch of white country kids called ‘em that, but, that’s what we called ‘em). But I went in anyway.

There was stereo equipment in the front, all right. But in the back? Ohhhh, in the back. There appeared before me a looooong line of conjoined glass cases, filled from top to bottom with cassettes. I saw some Aerosmith, who I’d read a little about by then. There was Black Sabbath…never heard of ‘em but their name sounded scary, so, great!

I can’t remember seeing any C’s, but the D section was a pure delight: Def Leppard! Dio! Dokken! All Hit Parader mainstays. At that point I simply couldn’t wait any longer. E, F, G, H, I, and J could wait. I crept over to the K’s and saw…

…a lot of Kansas.

But below Kansas, there it was. Not only did the spine of the cassette I’d been longing for say “KISS Animalize” on it; not only was the “KISS” the actual logo and the “Animalize” was scrawled in a stylized font that looked like it had been scratched into the paper with claws (most cassette spines featured uniform white block lettering on a black background, or if you were lucky, red block lettering on a white background.); not only all that, but the lettering was IN COLOR. The logo was yellow outlined in green. And the album title was, naturally, blood red.

“Can I see one of these tapes, Mr. O’Neill?”

My dad’s old school buddy sauntered over and, clearly amused that such a little kid was interested in big-boy records, asked which one I had my eye on.

My recollection is that I answered just like I’d heard the concert announcer say it on that MTV special. He sounded like a carnival barker: “You wanted the best, you GOT the best. The hottest band in the worrrrrld…KIIIIISSSSS!”

So I said…

“KIIIIISSSSS!”

I don’t remember what their reaction was, maybe ‘cuz I was delirious with anticipation by then. All I know is, Mr. O’Neill unlocked the case, slowwwwwly opened the door, reached in, and…picked out a cassette called Destroyer.

Its spine just had the white lettering on the black background. No logo. Just: “KISS. Destroyer.” The band name was, at least, in all-caps.

“This is the one you wanna start with,” Mr. O’Neill said emphatically, “it’s got ‘Beth’ on it, and there’s one called ‘Detroit Rock Ci-’”

“No no, I want the one with the color, Animalize.”

“Erm, you sure? That’s one of their newer ones.”

“I know.”

“They didn’t even have the makeup on anymore when they-.”

“I know!”

So Dad bought me Animalize. And that was that. If there’d been any hope for me at all to that point, I was now a true goner. My favorite song, right away, was…sadly…“Burn Bitch Burn.” It’s the one with the line in it that, as I found out many years later, Gene had long been eagerly trying to write a song around. Finally, he’d found the perfect vessel to deliver the defining Gene Simmons lyric of the 1980s:

When love rears its head, I wanna get on your case
Oh babe, I wanna put my log in your fireplace

Anyway, my Sound Shoppe epiphany came in the spring, and it wasn’t long after that when Hit Parader (or maybe by then it was Circus?) announced a new Kiss album, coming in the fall.

It was almost too much too soon!

But that Tuesday, September 16th (records were released on Tuesdays once upon a time), after school, on the way home, I acquired my first, brand-new, day-of-release album. Critics love to hate Asylum, as do many fans. But I loved its bright, poppy sheen. I mean, how different, really, was it from Men at Work?

OK it was entirely different than Men at Work. But it, too, was catchy. And let’s face it, the silly, juvenile, raunchy lyrics provided much fascination and wonderment for an 11-year-old.

Yes, this new collection of songs just felt different. Animalize may as well have been released before I was born. I was obsessed with it, too, of course. But Asylum was music Kiss had just made, like, a few months earlier. And I was the first person in Bryan, Ohio, to own it (Mr. O’Neill told me so). It felt like the band made the record just for me.

Asylum was mine.

“Tears Are Falling” was the first single, and its video straight-up broke MTV’s Dial MTV call-in request show (it was No. 1 for so many months they had to start limiting how long videos could be eligible).

But my favorite Asylum song was “UH! All Night” (yup, it had to have that all-caps “UH!” complete with the exclamation point), Paul Stanley’s ode to his working-class, blue-collar fans, the sturdy souls whose only wish upon clocking out each day was to rock ‘n’ roll their cares away…just like me!

Well, we work all day
And we don't know why
Well, there's just one thing that money can't buy
When your body's been starved, feed your appetite
When you work all day, you gotta UH! all night
Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, whoo

"Had Enough"?

Well, "I've Had Enough."

You heard me, “I’ve Had Enough!”

"No More Tears," I say.

"You Can't Always Get What You Want,"

or "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," but

"Just for Today"?

"Good Vibrations."

P.S. But allow me to reiterate once more…“I’ve Had Enough”!!!

Happy Weekend Before the Apocalypse WOOOOOO!

J/k.

Actually, after many days of alarming news about the election, I just read some poll data from an individual who…….seems to know polling quite well? I guess?? And he is very confident that Pennsylvania is in the bag for Kamala already, and that the presidential race on the whole will NOT be close and WILL, in fact, be called on Election Night for Harris.

So we got that guy’s ballsiness going for us.

Who’s my source? Hell, I dunno. After years of sanctimoniously harping on people to show me their sources or don’t expect to be taken seriously…I’m not sure what this guy’s credentials are—other than he’s very confident, and he shows his work, and more than anything I really just needed to hear good news, so…I’m running with it. And I figured you might want to head into the weekend with a little blindly encouraging hearsay alongside me.

However, this guy is not as excited about the Dems’ chances in the Senate. I can’t really get a read on his thoughts regarding the House, either.

Supposedly the House has a better chance to go blue than the Senate has to remain blue. So, I am going to head into this last weekend before yet another Most Consequential Election of Our Lifetimes fairly optimistic there will at least be one house of Congress that’s light on the MAGA.

Mainly because I’m tired of being pessimistic.

Heavier and Heavier Tolls Along the Pursuit of Happiness

These days, I am roughly 85% pescatarian and 15% Ooh, pizza! HELL NO I don’t care what’s on the pizza just give me the pizza so I can eat the delicious pizza-ian.

In an ideal Universe, I would stop eating meat altogether. But…it’s hard. The more I’ve avoided thinking of meat as the foundation of every meal, though, the easier it gets. The thought of placing any kind of fat, gristle, tendons, or sinew inside my mouth gets grosser and grosser to me all the time.

That said. I was experiencing a particularly anxious week a couple weeks ago, and while at Kroger, I caved and bought some packets of Buddig sandwich meat. I just wanted to be able to mangle together a quick-n-easy sandwich for lunch each day, so I didn’t have to think about what I was having for lunch.

I grew up on those paper-thin Buddig deli slices (they’re actually thinner than paper-thin). And I know they have tons of salt and are injected with untold toxic artificialities. But I knew they wouldn’t have lumps of fat in them.

When I opened one of the chicken packets—historically, the chicken Buddig slices have been my favorite—an aroma wafted up my nostrils that smelled exactly like when I drive by the Tyson plant off of I-69 on my way up to Indiana: equal parts chicken meat, chicken shit, and dirt.

Not that that stopped me from preparing, and swiftly consuming, the chicken sandwich. Although I did slather extra mustard and mayo on it, to sop up some of the chicken-ness.

So…I’m confident I could totally get along without Buddig deli meat sandwiches and go full pescatarian. I’m much less sure I could go that final step and do without seafood.

I mean, salmon is soooooo good. (And good for you!)

So, speaking of salmon…

Here’s a New York Times gift article about Ketchikan, Alaska, a former fishing community that’s been forced to rely mostly on tourism. Per the pic at the top of this post, they pitch their little 8,000-person town as a vacation destination based on two hooks:

1. They are “Alaska’s 1st City”

2. They are “The Salmon Capital of the World”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Imo, my 8,000-person hometown—Bryan, Ohio—boasts far-superior hooks: It’s the home of the Dum Dum sucker AND the Etch-a-Sketch.

But salmon’s cool, too, I s’pose...

Anyway. Until I make good on my personal goal to, eventually, give up meat entirely, I want towns like Ketchikan to thrive. (I want them to thrive after I give up meat entirely, too, but…you know what I mean.)

Unfortunately, the article I linked you to above is about how Ketchikan is quickly gaining infamy as The Landslide Capital of Alaska due to climate change.

The Times piece hit me perhaps a bit more than it might have if this election weren’t on my mind so much. Because what’s most striking about this story to me is the reaction of some Alaskans to city councils considering the adoption of landslide hazard maps.

It seems like a pretty objectively good idea: keep citizens safer by alerting them to the areas that are most likely to experience landslides when (increasingly frequent) severe rainstorms hit.

And who thinks these maps aren’t such a great idea? The folks who own land around those hazardous areas. Better not to publicize the danger, or else their property values will shrink. Indeed, there was enough public pressure in the Alaskan capital of Juneau recently to get city assembly members to vote down the adoption of landslide maps.

It’s important to note that these folks don’t appear to be a bunch of greedy corporate monsters. They’re mostly everyday people whose retirement is riding on the value of this land. I’m sure there are some who are just in it to turn a giant profit and have no personal skin in the game. But many actually live on the properties in these danger zones. And yet they go on record saying they’d prefer to remain in the dark about any talk of landslide probabilities.

Another Times story (←gift link) featured a similar theme. New Yorkers of modest means have been scoring the homes of their dreams, overlooking the beach in Staten Island, Long Island, and elsewhere. The catch: they have to be willing to risk getting flooded out—and usually without flood insurance since no company wants to operate in such high-risk flood zones.

I admit that at first these scenarios stood out to me because they seemed like prime examples of “it won’t happen to me”-ism. As in:

• “I know it’d make me, my family, and my neighbors safer if we adopted landslide hazard maps. Buuuut…I need to maintain my property values, and a landslide’s probably not gonna happen to me, so…”
  
  …or…
  

• “I know this house is in a flood zone, and I couldn’t afford flood insurance even if a company were willing to sell it to me. Buuuut…I really wanna live next to the water, and the real estate agency’s willing to sell it to me, and a flood’s probably not gonna happen to me, so…”
  

I’ve always imagined “it won’t happen to me”-ism infecting members of government en masse, as well. They’re perhaps good family men and women once they get home from the Capitol building, or their state capitol building, or city hall. But while lawmaking? They hang their consciences on the coat rack on the way out their front door each morning and vote their politics.

Republicans—usually wealthy ones—want to dismantle Obamacare. ‘Cause let’s face it, their own loved ones aren’t gonna need it. And let’s abolish regulations so we can make “Capitalism at All Costs” the government’s sole priority. ‘Cause none of our friends or relatives are gonna develop black lung working in some West Virginia coal mine.

Let’s ban abortion nationally, because (1) it’s politically expedient, and (2) hey, it’s not like one of our daughters is getting knocked up before she’s ready for kids. Or in the unlikely event that did happen, well…

…that’s different.

Or if one of their daughters experienced a pregnancy-related medical emergency that sadly required an abortion? That’s different, too. As in, she’d be flying to San Francisco to have that procedure. Like, tonight. On the redeye.

But none of that’s gonna happen. Probably.

EDITOR’S NOTE: It works both ways, too. It may seem logical to drastically cut, say, the military. Because, “Hey, we could cut the Pentagon’s budget in half and still have the greatest fighting force the world’s ever known. And it’s not like we’re ever gonna need that dominant of an army.”

Until we do need that dominant of an army, that is.

Just sayin’—I haven’t heard as much about cutting the military budget since these Axis of Adversaries began to loosely coalesce (a.k.a. the CRINK Crew: China + Russia + Iran + North Korea).

Again, the Alaskans and New Yorkers profiled in these articles seem like average everyday people. And I know diddly-schnitz about what it’s like to buy property in compromised locations and have to make tough decisions accordingly.

But my gut tells me that the more a “Capitalism at All Costs” agenda pervades the decision-making of those in power, the more it will trickle down and influence the decision-making of folks in the middle class and below—like the Ketchikanians. They must feel like they have two choices: make these kinds of poor decisions and roll the dice, or give up on any further pursuit of happiness.

That’s What It’s All About…

As my guy Bernie Sanders has pointed out many, many times throughout this election cycle, we’re no longer teetering on the edges of oligarchy—a government of, by, and for the wealthy.

We’re there.

It’s like how generals from the first Trump Administration have been saying he “meets the definition” of a fascist. America still operates as a democracy more than any other form of government. But we have to be willing to admit that we already “meet the definition” of an oligarchy.

And that’s what this is all about, ultimately. That’s why Elon Musk is suddenly jumping up and down for Trump—literally so on campaign stages, and figuratively so in board rooms. Because if reelected, Trump will be focused on the fun stuff, like siccing the military on his enemies. He’ll be only too happy to hand over the rest of his administration’s agenda to his rich and powerful pseudo-buddies.

The wealthy will get to not only skip out on paying their fair share of taxes. There just won’t be any taxes—for them. Meanwhile, these tariffs on imports Trump keeps insisting are a good idea? Well, they probably are. For the rich. But they’ll function as a hefty tax on everyone else. (I don’t understand how it all works, admittedly. But to borrow a Trumpism, people [in this instance, economists of repute] are saying…)

They’ll try to abolish as much meaningful regulation as they can get away with. They’ll dismantle as many government agencies meant to help average everyday Americans as possible. And of course House Speaker Mike Johnson intends to end Obamacare.

If the White House, the Senate, and the House all turn red on Tuesday, they’ll probably start trying to stealthily pick away at Medicare and Social Security, too. To say nothing of Medicaid and other popular, and often essential, safety-net services.

Trump’s authoritarian tendencies are what his followers love about him, even if they’d never dream of (knowingly) supporting an authoritarian government. So today’s new-fangled Republican Party is praying that enough people are pissed about their current prospects that they choose to “blow it all up” again and bring Trump back to power. It won’t just be Trump pushing the agenda forward, though.

(And we should totally insist on officially calling it that, the “New Republican Party (NRP),” since it’s far more insidious than the Grand Ol’ Party of old.)

Trump will hand the keys—the most consequential keys, at least—over to the Musks and Stephen Millers of his orbit. (If you don’t know who Stephen Miller is, I’d advise keeping it that way.) Their goal is to make the American Dream a kind of country club available only to the rich and powerful. And they won’t be too interested in expanding membership.

How could the Trump/Vance team pay so much fealty to Putin and Russia? Because Putin’s Russia is the model. Putin and his oligarchs rule absolutely. They allow for just enough prosperity outside their circle of privilege to keep their people from revolting. And that’s the low ceiling the pursuit of happiness in America will have as well if our would-be oligarchs get their way.

I’ve mentioned these two sci-fi films before, and unfortunately they’ve been taking up residence in my head again lately: Elysium and Ready Player One. (I haven’t watched (or read) The Handmaid’s Tale, but I know that it, too, is an example of science fiction that feels light on the fiction these days.)

A couple trailers for your consideration:

Elysium (2013):

Ready Player One (2018):

I don’t think even Elon Musk sees the end game as being this kind of apocalyptic domination of the poor by the wealthy. But even if it’s subconscious, I do think the level of domination people like him do intend to achieve inherently and necessarily requires extreme expansion of the already-expansive wealth gap in America. They intend to get richer, and we’ll therefore—inherently, necessarily—simply have to keep getting poorer.

So it could very well be that we’ve traveled as far as we can with this whole “republic” business. The form of government Ben Franklin announced we’d been given—“if [we] can keep it”—in 1787. And hey, we kept it for a helluva long time, right?! You know, relatively speaking…

If Trump does win Tuesday, it doesn’t necessarily spell the end of American democracy. Everything I’ve been spouting off about here is all conjecture, pretty much.

But as I sit here right now, at 2:15 a.m. on a Friday night (laaaaame), I’m holding out hope—if for no other reason than I’m a completist, and it’d be a damn shame if the United States imploded a measly year and a half shy of its 250th birthday.

250’s such a nice round number.

P.S. - Just one more New York Times gift article for you. It might comfort you as it did me. Not only because the authors are saying Trump’s definitely gonna lose. But in particular they think it’s going to come down to the turnouts of educated women versus uneducated men. And for my money, I’d even like our chances if it were uneducated women versus educated men, so, I’ll definitely take the reverse…):

“A Democratic and a Republican Pollster Agree: This Is the Fault Line That Decides the Election”

P.P.S. - I’m always trying to figure out if singers are lip-synching. I won’t hold it against you if you didn’t click through on the above danger zone or in the dark links, but if you did…how ‘bout those two very different performances from the same era? I think we can make a pretty good argument for which guy’s lip-synching (and guitar-miming) and which guy’s the real-ass deal.

(Sorry, Kenny. Although, I will say that if one were to sit down with an acoustic guitar and play both your catalogs, you’re probably the better songwriter. It’s close, though.)

P.P.P.S. - Amazon Music’s had me writing 350-word essays about individual popular songs. After writing about HARDY’s, Zac Brown Band’s, and Eddie Money’s greatest hits, the last song they assigned me, out of nowhere, was the original “When Sunny Gets Blue” by Johnny Mathis, which appeared on his original greatest hits package, Johnny’s Greatest Hits.

“Sunny” is just exquisite. Mainly because of “The Velvet Voice,” but also because of the enchanting atmosphere created by Ray Conniff and His Orchestra.

I try not to use this word lightly, but this track is an absolute masterpiece on every level. And when writing about it, a thought came to mind. If Trump wins, and shit starts to hit the fan?…

(…obviously you knew I was going to link to this real quick after using that phrase…)

…I, for one, will be seeking out more examples of pure beauty like this. I’d like to think the worst wouldn’t have to happen for me to stop and smell the roses, though, so here:

Even if my election pessimism proves un-warranted next week (oh please oh please), I hearby do solemnly pledge, with y’all as my witness, to take many more moments to stop what I’m doing and seek out beauty. Amen.

And if my election pessimism proves to be well-founded?

Well…I s’pose when I do muster up the will to seek out and find beauty, I’ll find it even more breathtaking than if Trump had lost.

I know!

I don’t write for months, and then here comes a second post in two days. This one will be quick, though. (I know I’ve said that before and lied but this really will be quick…)

I just listened to the Tuesday, October 8, 2024, edition of The New York Times’ The Daily podcast, and it’s the most impactful Daily I’ve ever heard (and I’ve heard most of them). The Daily is the most-listened-to news podcast out there; Tuesday’s show provided a stunning a-ha moment for me.

I’ve never thought Trump voters—even the mega-MAGA ones—were bad people. Well…some of them are definitely bad people, but the percentage of bad MAGAns to bad liberals is pretty similar, I’d bet.

But the below episode, called “How NAFTA Broke American Politics,” explains exactly how working people decided—and still decide—to vote for Trump, his hellish intentions be damned.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: I guess if his intentions are already hellish then they’re likely well on their way to being damned already. You know what I mean STOP DISTRACTING ME GEEZ…]

Anyway. Why do so many blue-collar workers vote for Trump? Because his rhetoric sounds like (and feels like) he’d be more likely to keep what happened to Milwaukee’s Chancie Adams from happening to them.

I’d guesstimate that Chancie cares about his second-biggest political issue (if he has one) about 345 million times less than his biggest issue, which is finding a good-paying, secure job again—like the one he worked his ass off for many years to get at Master Lock.

I know the basics behind the North American Free Trade Agreement, and (although I’m far too young to have witnessed it myself, of course [insert nervous laughter here]) I even know how consequential its potential passing in Congress was to the 1992 presidential election between President George Bush (later known as George H. W. Bush thanks to his annoying son George W. Bush insisting on becoming president himself), Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, and super-rich pint-sized Reform Party candidate Ross Perot.

Not to give too much away, but we can probably trace all our problems in 2024 back to New Year’s Day 1994, when NAFTA went into effect.

Of the three dudes seeking the White House in ‘92, it’s hard to settle on who the baddest bad guy was when it comes to NAFTA. But it’s clear who the good guy was.

Please listen and let me know what you think at dean@ceegees.org…

I'm not a huge Boston fan.

Boston the band, I mean, not the city. Although I never felt much love from Boston the city either, to be honest. I definitely like Boston the band better than Boston the city, put it that way. Boston—and Philly, too—just never seemed to want me playing their towns when I toured through there, it felt like.

(Plus, I'm a Colts fan. And thus not a Patriots fan. So that doesn't help. I have nothing against the Eagles, though. In fact, thanks for giving us our shiny new head coach, Eagles! I think…)

But no, I'm talking about Boston the band. Don't get me wrong, I like Boston the band just fine. Does anybody not like Boston the band?

Although, in a related question...does anybody really really love Boston the band?

Like, who hates Boston? But also, who's coming up to you going, "OK, so my fave TV show ever is China Beach. Um, favorite movie: Flatliners. And my all-time favorite band? Who else, BOSTON!"

The roadblock I experience with Boston is that they seem to have just the one big record, that first self-titled one. One time when somebody asked me if I had Boston's greatest hits to put on at a party I was like, "Sure do." And I put on the first album. And they never said anything.

So there's Boston, which, I’ve always assumed every single song on there musta been a big hit single. And then they just have the one other non-Boston hit—"Amanda," right?

Upon further review, wrong.

Classic rock radio plays every single song on Boston ad nauseum, true. But the only proper singles were "More Than a Feeling" (obvs), "Long Time," and "Peace of Mind." "Smokin'," "Rock & Roll Band," "Let Me Take You Home Tonight"...not singles!

Whereas, conversely, not only was some song called "Don't Look Back"—from some album also called Don't Look Back—a proper radio single, but it went to No. 4 on the pop chart!

Friggin' "More Than a Feeling"—"More Than a Feeling!!"—only made it to No. 5!!

So I just don't know what to think anymore.

Which reminds me...don't look now but we're exactly FOUR WEEKS OUT from the presidential election AHHHHHHHH!

The Almighty vs. the Alternative

And it's not just the presidential election that's comin' in hot, of course. There are a whole lotta other important races for complacent Americans to largely ignore, as well.

The good news here in Tennessee is that our extraordinarily conservative state is experiencing its first-ever all-female race for U.S. Senate!

The bad news is that the candidate who's up about 20 points in the polls is the rottenest bad actor north of Georgia's 14th district (i.e. Marjorie Taylor Greene Country). And that's our incumbent senior senator, Trump super-sycophant Marsha Blackburn.

Blackburn’s opponent is State Rep. Gloria Johnson, the former special ed teacher from Knoxville who stood up on the floor of the chamber with "the Justins"—my district's state rep, Justin Jones (for more on Jones, see below video!), and Memphian Justin Pearson—to protest our state legislature's refusal to even listen to a gun safety debate after a mass school shooting in Nashville killed six, including three fourth graders.

The media dubbed them "The Tennessee Three" after the Republican supermajority decided to vote on whether they should be removed from office for "lack of decorum." The two Black guys were removed, while the white lady survived by a single vote. (The Justins were quickly voted back in.)

But anyway. How are we feelin' 'bout the presidential election? Earlier today, I inadvertently bummed out my mom during a FaceTime chat. I was belly-aching about Kamala's apparent reluctance to sit down for many (any?) hard-journalism interviews. She did 60 Minutes last weekend, which is a good start. Lots of strong moments. Lots of avoiding details and offering direct answers, though, too. Kind of the same approach as she took in the debate.

This week she's scheduled to do more interviews, which is great! But they're with Stephen Colbert, Howard Stern, the ladies of The View…all folks pretty friendly toward her campaign. Her appearance on the Call Me Daddy podcast was an inspired move, I thought. I've not heard the show, as I am not young, cool, or, crucially, female. But I know it's hugely popular with young women who might not be super-inclined to bother to vote. She's doing a Univision interview, as well, which might result in some harder-hitting questioning in addition to a boost in support from the Hispanic community.

But hey, I understand my mom's frustration.

Joe Biden always says, "Don't compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.” He’s probably been saying it since way back when we were comparing him to John McCain or Bob Dole—reasonable Republicans who fought (fairly) for smaller government, not no government like today's far-right.

In the context of the Eighties or Nineties, I might have seen that catch-phrase as a bit of a cop-out. Like, OK Joe, OK. I'll stop holding you to an insanely high standard (even though you've been a hugely consequential D.C. politician for decades and wanna be president someday, real real bad). But meet me halfway. You seem like a swell guy. But John McCain does, too. Show me why your positions are better than his positions. Don't just tell me to fall in line because I lean left, and you're a Democrat, and McCain's a Republican.

But the days of John McCain's Republican Party are long gone. No one's comparing Joe Biden to John McCain, or Bob Dole, or Mitt Romney anymore. McCain and Dole have passed on. Romney, like so many of his fellow "normal" Republicans, is retiring. There's no place for dudes like Mitt in the GOP anymore—compassionately conservative wussies content to negotiate across the aisle in hopes of nibbling away at regulations and shoring up the military.

Nah, President Biden brings up the “Almighty vs. the alternative” catch-phrase so often because, in the 2020s, we're comparing him to Donald Trump. And we're comparing Kamala Harris to Trump, too.

When Kamala is president (oh please oh please oh please), I intend to renew my hopes that she'll do a bunch of interviews and make herself available for a bunch of pressers, too. Limiting Biden’s public appearances to comfortably gaffe-free zones made sense under the circumstances of the last year or two—although his team misguided in trying to convince us Joe was OK to go for another four-year term.

But shielding Kamala—or Kamala shielding herself—from potentially hard-hitting questions is untenable in the long term. The whole point in switching from Joe to Kamala was to run someone brilliant, energetic, and capable like she (almost always) appears to be. Refusing to answer direct questions with direct answers, or avoiding scenarios where such questions might be asked altogether, is not what I, personally, was hoping for when the Kamalanomenon first came down.

In a perfect political world, I'd like some super-solid conversation with journalists to go with the good vibes and the choosing of the JOYYYYYY.

There are plenty of Trump supporters who are otherwise good, smart people. They know Trump's full of shit. They know he's a bully. But he's their bully. He makes them feel like he's only being an asshole because that’s the most effective way he can stand up to the Liberal Elite on their behalf.

One of MAGA's touchstone retorts to the libs calling for "fairness," "justice," "equality," and whatever other bleeding-heart nonsense they're being crybabies about (ha) is:

"EFF your effin’ feelings."

And yet it sure seems like so many of them are fine with ignoring Trump's hideousness as a person and voting for the warm-and-fuzzy feeling Trump-ism gives them.

So I guess I would just like for the Harris-Walz ticket to be about...

[*clears throat*]

...more than a feeling, y'know?

BUT!

All that can wait. Go Kamala. Go Tim. Go Doug. Go Gwen. Go Hope. GO GUS! Go...all of Momala's step-kids and nieces and nephews whose names I haven't learned yet.

It feels like the Harris campaign is kinda banking on voters deciding that, hey, it's either her or Trump. And they don't want Trump. So, naturally, they'll vote for her instead. So why risk getting into complex details with snarky journalists who are only out to make a name for themselves and goose up ratings by tripping her up?

That's pretty cynical. But I'm a cynical guy myself, as much as I try not to be. So I get it.

It makes me nervous, that's all.

Un Rock and Roll Digestif

Me: “OK ChatGPT, please pick a number between 1 and 1,025.”

[EDITOR’S NOTE: I’ve switched back to ChatGPT over Perplexity now that its free version provides sources for its results like Perplexity does. ChatGPT has always been a way better A.I., but, I need sources!

EDITOR’S NOTE #2: If you’re just joining us, I’m picking at random one of the songs in my “Recollection Records: Music That’s Inexplicably Entered My Head Out of Nowhere” playlist to briefly comment on as a newsletter digestif. We’re currently at 1,025 unique songs that have weirdly, randomly popped into my consciousness for no logical reason.]

ChatGPT: “Sure, I'll pick the number 415.”

And #415 is…….

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Spotify and/or Substack were experiencing technical difficulties with media embeds at time of publication so here’s Love/Hate’s “Rock Queen” on YouTube jic the above is glitchy.)

Oh geez. I mean…do you have any favorite bands who are really gross but are also so good but…are really, really gross. Ugh.

I wouldn’t say we’re talking Michael Jackson- or Ryan Adams-gross. As far as I know, the guys in Love/Hate didn’t do gross stuff in real life.

And yeah, I definitely listen to Michael and RA—I might get a little queasy while doing so, but, I do listen to them. And I’ve noticed nobody’s walking out of the stadium when they play Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2” after a touchdown.

But here’s a taste of the lyrics to “Rock Queen,” from Love/Hate’s 1990 debut album, Blackout in the Red Room, from Columbia Records. (That’s right, we’re holding you responsible for this, Sony Music Entertainment!):

Met a little girl
Just thirteen
She's a knock-down blue-eyed slut
Psycho-virgin tease

Rock queen, thirteen, buxom blonde, bad dream
Let me touch your cookies
Let me eat your cookies
Now

I really would rather not expound upon this particular track any more than I have to. But there’s no denying that if you ignore the lyrics it’s a killer rock song on a top-to-bottom killer album (musically). In fact (musically), there are times when they sound like funky mid-era grunge, like Our Lady Peace or I Mother Earth. But just like my begrudgingly favorite band, Kiss, if Love/Hate could’ve refrained from being effin’ pigs and written about murderous elementary schoolers (Pearl Jam), weird tattooed spoon players (Soundgarden), whatever Kurt Cobain was ever talking about (Nirvana)…or hell, even just of-age “psycho-virgin teases,” maybe I wouldn’t be so embarrassed that I liked these guys.

Who am I kidding…that I like these guys.

Thanks for reading!

Yours,
~Dean

P.S. I sooooo wanted to call this post “More Than a Feeling,” but then I realized I’d already named a CeeGee “More Than a Feeling”…but then I went back to double-check and lo and behold I hadn’t used “More Than a Feeling,” I’d used “Foreplay/Long Time.” And I was like, “I don’t even like Boston that much.” But alas, they are the first band with two songs used as a CeeGee title.

P.P.S. Three songs if you count “Foreplay” and “Long Time” separately. Which you most certainly should.

P.P.P.S. No lip-synching. No BGV tracks. Imperfect. And effin’ awwwwwwwsum. Just sayin’.

I’m pretty sure Schoolhouse Rock calls the clowns in Congress lying dog-faced pony riders in the first 30 seconds of this classic toon explaining how separation of powers worked in the U.S. from 1787 until, oh, mid-2024 or so.

And now for something completely different. Here’s frequent Supreme Court case lawyer and cable news commentator Neal Katyal explaining how presidents are pretty much above the law now to a rather flummoxed British TV anchor.

READ TIME: A wee short 11 MINUTES!

Earlier this morning I’d been sitting here at my desk in my home office (i.e. bedroom), dressed in shorts and flip-flops (and a shirt and underwear too, don’t get excited), trying to work.

But even more so today than yesterday—when the U.S. Supreme Court ended their term by deciding to give presidents absolute immunity for any official action they take while in office—I’ve found myself mentally and emotionally hog-tied by the events of the last five days in the federal government.

I’m just going to gather the frazzled notes I’ve taken between today (Tuesday, July 2, 2024) and the end of last Thursday night’s presidential debate and paste them to the bottom of this post. Make of them what you will. Read, or read not.

(And SHUT UP, Yoda, yes they can “try” to read these notes, and if they give up in utter disgust—because it’s all TMI, and/or TL;DR, and/or too disjointed, and/or too depressing—so be it. At least we mind-melded for a few glorious moments. Eat your heart out, Lawrence Kasdan.)

😑

After scanning these notes, though, I think the most important opinion to convey is the following.

Even as…

• depressing,

• demoralizing,

• discouraging,

• frustrating,

• infuriating,

• insulting, and

• downright alarming…

…as the actions of members of all three branches of government have been lately, we’ve still gotta get swing state voters to vote in November. And particularly for president. More specifically, the guy (gal??) with the (D) next to their name.

I know, I know, if you hear somebody say This is the most consequential election of our lifetimes! one more time—after having said it 70 million times already this year and 70 billion times in 2020 and 2016—you’re gonna strap yourself onto the nearest set of briskly trafficked train tracks.

I’m with ya. Last Friday morning I’d decided that, OK, this is finally it. I’m taking whatever steps I need to take to renounce my status as a Democrat. And I’ll start taking ACTION, dammit, to help find a way to get a younger Democratic candidate on the ballot for president.

Actually, rather than a younger candidate I should say a more capable campaigner with a more youthful perspective on the Democratic ballot for president. Because it’s not that Biden’s too old. It’s that his age has greatly diminished his ability to communicate and quickly process information.

I’m biased, but…Bernie Sanders is older than Biden, and his faculties are as sharp as they were when he first declared for the 2016 presidential campaign.

Like everyone who thinks Trump is an existential threat to the very existence of our republic—If I hear someone call Trump an existential threat to the republic one more time I’m gonna nosedive off the nearest mountain peak or comparable very-tall land mass or manmade structure!!—I was upset after Biden’s withered debate performance last week. More sad-upset than mad-upset, though, y’know? I was sad for him, sad for his family, sad for the country.

But then his campaign, along with Vice President Kamala Harris, and California Governor Gavin Newsom, and other surrogates and Democratic establishment representatives, started spinning the narrative. In fact, we actually didn’t just witness clear confirmation that our almost-82-year-old commander-in-chief has lost far too many steps to campaign for a second presidential term.

No, he had a cold, that’s what caused Joe Biden to end a debate answer with, “We finally beat Medicare.” To voluntarily change the subject from his most winning issue—women’s reproductive rights—to his least winning issue, immigration. He was just a little under the weather, and you should all stop wetting the bed and kindly STFU now, capeesh?

First of all, bull-effin’-ess. The PR people who had the grapes to tell the press Biden had a cold 45 minutes into the debate are the people keeping MAGAns’ hate for “smug liberal elites” alive and well. Grrrrr.

Second of all, a COLD is all it takes for the president to melt down and deliver so many incoherent, rambling answers? And whiff when Trump threw underhanded softball after underhanded softball of the most preposterous lies conceivable?? After a full week of intense Camp David debate prep???

What if he comes down with shingles on the flight to a summit with Xi Jinping, or Vladimir Putin?

My love-hate relationship with Bill Maher is as up-and-down as ever, but I still agree with him on the substance of a bunch of issues. Here is a free link to a New York Times opinion piece he wrote explaining why Biden must step down from the campaign, for the good of the country he’s served so well for the last three and a half years as president (and the 587 years as vice president and senator before that).

Maher uses “jumped the shark” (to the point of actually explaining the Happy Days origin of the term) in describing the state of the Biden campaign. (*sigh* It’s the moment when a TV show or other entity surpasses believability and moves swiftly toward irreversible decline.) And he’s right. They expect us to believe this was merely “one bad debate.” Just like Obama, and W., and Reagan all infamously had bad first debates.

Reagan’s slip-up, shown above, was certainly awkward. But as far as I know it was the single-worst moment of his presidency in terms of pointing to any early-onset Alzheimer’s he may have been experiencing.

I genuinely hate to say it, but five days in and I still remember the lion’s share of Biden’s debate performance coming off that poorly. And he looked weak. And he appeared to need Jill’s help to navigate a single step immediately after the debate ended. (AND I don’t understand why anybody’s surprised since it’s always been this way to some extent and he had trouble communicating and completing sentences going all the way back to the dang 2020 Democratic primary debates GRRRRR!)

I certainly don’t feel confident that Joe could rebound like Reagan did in a second debate, if Trump is even dumb enough to go through with a second debate. And saying that pains me. Not a joke, as Joe might say. The guy’s done a pretty great job despite what I thought would be insurmountable opposition.

But if he doesn’t step down, and he loses? What a crappy way to lose a legacy. And it will be lost. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, in comparison, deeply damaged her legacy by not retiring before she passed away. The decision paved the way for the far-right SCOTUS we have now, obscuring the incredible work she did throughout her life. Biden’s failure to learn from that miscalculation, though, would be much worse.

Donald Trump is going to tear down the institution of government in America and mangle it into his own image if he wins in November. If anyone harbored any hope he’d show at least some restraint during a second term—for fear of being held accountable for his most wicked inklings—SCOTUS obliterated that hope yesterday.

Ugh.

I was only going to write a little bit about the Biden conundrum, and then a little more about the immunity the court has granted presidents to officially skirt the rule of law. But I overshot on the Biden stuff. So here’s a text I sent to my mom yesterday when she asked me to explain why this immunity ruling is so consequential:

As far as I can tell, the 6 conservative SCOTUS judges, including the two with egregious and direct conflicts of interest no other judicial system in America would tolerate, have decided the president must have complete and total immunity for all actions committed in service of his duties as president. 

Where to draw the line? Well, they’ll let lower courts figure that out on a case-by-case basis. But anything the president does in the context of speaking with anyone else in the government is protected. And the president’s motives or state of mind cannot be considered when determining whether an act is done in service of the presidency. 

Justice Sotomayor said in her dissent that they’ve made the president a king. If I understand the ruling correctly, now Trump really could have shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, as long as he comes up with a good enough excuse sayin he was somehow acting in context of his job as president.

My theory: In the aftermath of the debate, a light bulb went off and the far-right conservative justices decided now’s the time to stop pretending to be fair and impartial and just go for broke. The Democrats won’t even ruffle any feathers by replacing Biden, so they’re certainly not going to have the fortitude to stand up to the Supreme Court somehow, at least anytime between now and November. And assuming Biden remains on the ticket Trump will win and the New World Order according to SCOTUS conservatives will begin.

It changes everything as far as I’m concerned, if this isn’t the turning point that gets people to take action then we are truly doomed. Anyway enjoy dinner, have a good night!

I’m sure there’s about 44,000 better explanations of the implications than the above. But put more simply…the institution of the U.S. Supreme Court has now officially jumped the shark itself. And has become far more dangerous to American democracy than Donald Trump is at this precise moment. And they’re certainly more dangerous than a diminished Joe Biden is right now.

Here’s a free link to another New York Times article showing where Trump’s head is after SCOTUS gave him this mandate to do all the crazy shit he’s said he’d like to do to people who have wronged him, like Liz Cheney.

So, yeah. He is going to devote his entire second term to ruining or jailing his enemies—or worse—along with abolishing the two-term limit on the presidency, I’d imagine. And why not? What’s stopping him? Not the rule of law any longer, so long as he acts within the context of the federal government.

For that matter, what’s stopping him from commanding the IRS to audit every citizen who wrote a negative tweet—or perhaps unflattering Substack newsletters?—about him? Sure, we can hope and pray that the government officials he enlists to do his dirty work (people who very much do not enjoy immunity against the rule of law) refrain from carrying out his more vile demands. But you gotta believe that, if not most, then at least some will err on the side of breaking a few laws and keeping their job. Because, really, how likely is it that they’ll get caught? And if they’re caught, how likely is that they’ll be prosecuted? Years and years later, after appeal upon appeal upon appeal upon appeal?

So this is why swing staters simply must vote for Biden…or if something crazy happens, vote for whoever the new Democratic nominee is.

It positively sucks that it’s like this. The two-party system is absolute horseshit. The Democratic establishment, including a stubborn Team Biden, are failing us by insisting on quadrupling down on tired old political norms.

“You don’t turn your back [on the leader of your party] because of one performance,” bellowed Gov. Newsom after the debate. “What kind of party does that?” I agree with journalist/podcaster Ezra Klein’s answer to that question: a party that is serious in its belief that a second Trump term spells the end of America as we know it.

Come to think of it, maybe I shouldn’t have been so hard on ol’ Master Yoda earlier, because here’s what he said right before the “do or do not” part of his famous “There is no try” speech in The Empire Strikes Back:

Yes, we must unlearn what we have learned, at least when it comes to the strategies we’re using to remain the world’s premier democracy, as it has been for almost 250 years. The Supreme Court certainly doesn’t care about upsetting mammoth apple carts like Chevron or Roe. Those decisions had provided 40 and 50 years of legal precedent for thousands and thousands of cases. But Justice Roberts & Co. decided, contrary to their messaging in their confirmation hearings and closed-door meetings with legislators, that the court should expand upon its power.

In 2028—no, in 2026—let’s once and for all find somebody to run as a third-party candidate for president who can actually win. And forevermore we’ll finally have a Clooney Party, a Winfrey Party, an Alright Alright Alright (McConaughey) Party, a Stewart (as in Jon) Party…whatever party it needs to be to compete with the D’s and R’s.

And let’s make ranked-choice voting a reality in the U.S., too, while we’re at it.

But it just doesn’t look like we have any of that kind of healthy disruption in us here in 2024. So in the meantime, hit up your friends and loved ones who live in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. And send them one of those swimmer’s nose clips like this little baby—lightweight and durable with soft TPR pads and a nylon frame, it’s Speedo’s “Liquid Comfort” clip, now available at a special reduced price for a limited time—for when they have to enter their polling place, hold their nose, and pull the lever for (probably) Joe Biden this November 5th.

[DISCLAIMER: CeeGees.org may receive a small commission for sales generated via external commerce links but probably not because no attempts were made to engage or collaborate with said external commerce websites so…never mind!]

Thanks for reading!

Yours,
~Dean

P.S. If you’re reading this in 2025 or beyond, and Trump is president, and I’m in jail right now for my crimes against Trumpocracy…send me a peanut butter pie or something, would you please?

P.P.S. You don’t need those notes I mentioned, do you? I’m always taking notes on this stuff, for future CeeGees that rarely get never written. Every day I lament not being able to post more. I’m certainly trying to (SHUT UP, Yoda) trying to get back to a place where I can post and podcast regularly. But if you want to read reams and reams of meditations and gripes about all this D.C. insanity, email me and I’ll give ‘em a light edit and send ‘em out…dean@ceegees.org.

P.P.P.S. 🍇🍇🍇🍇🍇🍇🍇🍇🍇🍇🍇

Here’s how New York Times Senior Editor David Leonhardt started his “The Morning” early-a.m. daily newsletter this morning:

Polls show that many of the policies enacted by President Biden are popular. His measures to reduce the cost of insulin and other drugs receive support from more than 80 percent of Americans. His infrastructure bill, his hawkish approach to China and his all-of-the-above energy policy, which combines expanded oil drilling with clean-energy subsidies, are popular, too.

But voters obviously like some of his policies more than others. And an unusual pattern seems to be hurting Biden’s re-election campaign: Voters are less aware of his most popular policies than his more divisive ones.

And I guess that last concept confuses me a bit. Is it unusual that more people know about his divisive policies than the practical, truly populist policies?

If you’re an average everyday American—someone who’s not an extremist, in either direction—then you’re probably not gonna hear about every policy the president’s administration trots out. Because you’re not tuned in consistently. And that’s OK—if, when you do tune in, you really tune in. Otherwise, the only presidential initiatives you do hear about will be the ones that are hot-enough topics to not only make news, but rile folks up as the news is being made.

So I guess it must just be a 2020s thing: Americans with diabetes know about Biden capping the cost of insulin, but if neither you nor a close loved one have that disease then you probably haven’t heard about it. Or at least it didn’t register quite the way Biden’s dilly-dallying on immigration reform has…or his hesitance to pressure Israel to ease up on the whole killing-five-innocent-women-and-children-for-every-one-Hamas-militant thing has.

I made up the 5-to-1 statistic. But it certainly feels like that’s what it is based on the stories I’ve read, seen, heard, or half-read, half-seen, or half-heard since Israel started retaliating for that unfathomably wicked October 7 Hamas attack. Which kinda speaks to the issue at hand: fair or not, right or wrong, average everyday Americans get their news piecemeal these days (including me a lot of the time).

That means, yeah, if it’s not eye-popping, wackadoodle, sensationalistic news—or if it’s not normal news that’s been promptly sensationalized—it’s not gonna land on enough people’s radars.

So we gotta go get crazy, Grandpa Joe!! Below please find a humble suggestion on how to let the vast majority of Americans know you capped insulin at $35 for everyone on Medicare (and are close to getting the private insurers to do the same. The whole story is complicated, as Associated Press reported recently, but Joe’s heart seems to be in the right place about it):

Short of that kind of performative political theater, of course folks are only gonna know about the more divisive stuff.

But the good news? Average everyday Americans are only paying attention to Trump World in piecemeal fashion, too. Which means they don’t know much about what’s going on with him, either—OTHER THAN, you know…he’s now a convicted felon.

So. Do we wanna vote for the old guy who’s doing some good things but took too long to seriously address the border or the atrocities in Gaza? (And who keeps telling me how great the economy is when it just doesn’t feel that great to me?) Or do we wanna vote for the other old guy, the one who’s a convicted felon?

If you’re like me, you’re wincing a little at how inconsequential these hush money charges appear compared to the circumstances behind the other three Trump indictments. (Hopefully casual news-followers have actually heard about those—namely: inciting the Capitol riots, interfering with a free and fair election, and hoarding nuclear secrets to casually show them around Mar-a-Lago to Lord-knows-who.)

But I’m feeling ever-so-slightly better and better about average everyday Americans holding their nose and pulling the lever for Grandpa Joe in November.

I think.

Pick a Number, Any Number

And for my next trick, I will once again ask a chatbot to pick a random number between 1 and (now) 1,066 so we can dish about another song on my “Recollection Records: Music That’s Entered My Head Out of Nowhere” Spotify playlist.

That’s right, it’s been almost five years since I started playlisting the songs that randomly materialize in my brain out of the clear blue sky for no apparent reason. And I’m up to 1,066 now. (And I’m just gonna ask Siri to pick the random number from now on…I don’t know why I was making things difficult and asking Perplexity or ChatGPT to do it when EVEN SIRI OR ALEXA can do that shit…)

Anyway. The number from 1 to 1,066 Siri has selected IS…

492.

And the 492nd song on my “Recollection Records: Music That’s Entered My Head Out of Nowhere” Spotify playlist?

Oh geez. I mean…I did not care for Seger for the longest time. Growing up in Northwest Ohio, right on the southern border of Michigan, meant non-stop Seger on allllll the classic rock radio stations (or at least what would eventually come to be known as “classic” rock stations…back then they were just rock stations, and Seger was just regular ol’ old-time rock ‘n’ roll).

But I was so damn sick of “Mainstreet” and “Turn the Page” and “Against the Wind” and—even before the truck commercials—“Like a Rock” and…actually I never got sick of “Night Moves.” That song’s vintage of cheese has always held just the right aroma for me. Its gouda-grade glory transcends its over-saturation of the airwaves.

But if you give me what’s basically a Harold Faltermeyer pop rock tune (Seger just wrote the lyrics)…in 1987, perhaps MTV’s most pop-culturally dominant year ever…and tack on a video featuring a glance of a lady’s aerobicized butt and a flash of Brigitte Nielsen’s 8-foot-long legs before the ramblin’ gamblin’ man even starts singing? Good enough for me.

DID YOU KNOW…this was Seger’s only No. 1 pop hit?!! I didn’t.

Thanks for reading! And watching!

Yours,
~Dean

P.S. Feel free to watch the “uncensored” version of the Seger video here. But it’s blurry, and as far as I can tell it commanded a censored version because it shows a stripper’s thonged behind, twice, for a total of 0.9 seconds.

P.P.S. Note to pre-“Shakedown” video shoot Bob Seger: I know you don’t care about these superficial showbiz things, and I don’t expect you to pop out in Eat ‘Em and Smile-era David Lee Roth spandex, but in 2024 we tend to call the pants you’re wearing in this video “dad jeans,” and…this is gonna be your biggest hit, man! I don’t know, at least pull on some light-pink pleated linen slacks or whatever Don Johnson was wearing in Miami Vice back then. Could you try a little bit??

• And…Prince at the SNL 40th anniversary afterparty

No more massive missives for CeeGees.

Gonna wrap these up in a somewhat reasonable amount of time from now on. Really. Takes me too long to write ‘em, takes you too long to read ‘em.

Not that I mind spending the time on my end. But if I’m spending that kinda time, that time commitment carries over to the reader. And making these so damn long is:

• arrogant,

• boring,

• embarrassing,

• frustrating,

• inefficient,

• insensitive,

• lazy,

• presumptuous,

• self-absorbed,

• self-indulgent,

• unhealthy,

• unhelpful,

• unproductive, and

• unsustainable.

And not necessarily in that alphabetized order, obviously.

But I think I need to write a single-segment entry, every few days. And then do the podcast…every week? Every other week? And the podcast could be kind of a “best-of” from all the entries published since the previous pod, maybe.

Still mulling the details. Feel free to write me at dean@ceegees.org if you have ideas for what would be most helpful/useful/interesting.

But I wanted to write something today, because my birthday is four weeks from today, and I’ve been telling myself for years that on my birthday in 2024 I’d:

1. have my shit together, and

2. release an album of my own songs on that day, too.

Which is not going to happen. Definitely not the album thing, but also not the “shit together” thing. Although I’ve been making some pretty big strides the last few weeks along those lines. There’s hope; a path to personal shit-togetherness.

And I suppose there’s still a path for this newsletter and podcast to inspire cultural and communal shit-togetherness, too. Although things seem bleaker than usual, even, don’t they? So I guess I/we will need to remember that even if it’s only a wee-tiny bit of extra understanding we’re able to conjure up here, that’s a small win worth pursuing.

I gotta keep doing the self-indulgent music talk, too, though. And even more self-indulgent: I’m going to try to have an album’s worth of songs of my own written by my birthday, at least. So I’ll probably throw in a mention about my progress with that over the coming weeks…maybe include a link to a demo idea once in a while for your kind consideration.

(SIDE NOTE: I almost wasn’t going to include the below because Soundcloud chops off the beginnings of your songs for some reason now. Unbelievable. But eff it. Here’s a bunch of demos I did a long time ago, which I’ve showed, like, seven people. I do like ‘em, though. I guess just rewind to the beginnings of each song so you can hear the first beat? Sheesh, Soundcloud…)

And I’d also like to go back to some of the ideas I never got around to back when I was first thinking about what I wanted CeeGees to be. In fact, check out this pre-Substack version of CeeGees if you haven’t yet.

I’d especially like to follow through on devoting segments to some friendly and constructive criticism of other media entities and personalities I like but often disagree with, in a section of the site I’d tentatively titled “With All Due Respect…”

So there would be “Blog Save Pod Save America” (Pod Save America), “Realer Time” (Real Time With Bill Maher), “Rumble Strip” (Rumble With Michael Moore), and “The Lefsetz Letter Letter” (The Lefsetz Letter).

I need to come up with one for Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, too. Maybe “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver With Dean Moore This Afternoon?”

Anyway. I hope this Substack can be a helluva lot more helpful than it has been in the past, and a helluva lot less of me saying blahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh whatever-whatever for an hour.

See ya sooner than I saw ya since last time, hopefully!

Yours,
~Dean

P.S. Here’s a list of song titles I want to have done in 30 days. (Self-indulgent!!) None are done yet. A couple are done musically and like 80% done lyrically. A bunch more are done musically and barely have any lyrics. And a few more are kinda-sorta done musically and don’t even have a title, let alone a lyrical thrust yet (the titles in brackets are those ones…not even working titles, placeholder titles…just the nonsense words I mumbled in order to hack together a melody).

If I ever do record a record of these, it’ll be called Slow to Get Up.

1. I Just Kinda Wanna Cry

2. [Out of My Hands]

3. [Weight of the World]

4. Hooligan

5. The Referee

6. [Sailing on the Sun]

7. No Fair

8. The Girls I Like Don’t Like Boys Like Me

9. Least of My Concerns 

10. Callin’ Bullshit

11. [Only Heaven Knows]

New formatting tweak!

Friday-ish let’s do the current events/politics commentary, and sign off by chatting about a randomly-selected song off the “Recollection Records: Music That’s Entered My Head Out of Nowhere” Spotify playlist as we’ve been doing.

Then maybe mid-week-ish we’ll have a CeeGee that covers some deeper analysis of a vintage rock album from my tape collection (as we’ve been doing) and…also mulling ways to spotlight musician-led causes.

So it’ll be less s#!t for me to write in one sitting and, more importantly, less s#!t for you to read in one sitting…

Manifesting Middle-Class Mind-Melds

My intention has always been for CeeGees to serve as a catalyst for finding ways for people who disagree to start working together.

Extremists on either side of the political aisle are probably an alien invasion or a Skynet-style A.I. takeover away from collaborating on anything. But non-MAGA conservatives and non-”Defund the Police” liberals, who all fall somewhere within the middle class, need to find a way to come together. Because they hold shared interests.

In my view, Americans who are not rich have no practical reason to vote Republican at this point. I certainly understand their wanting to remain true to their conservative values—which I can identify with as a Midwesterner from a conservative background. And I know Democrats are hard to root for when some, admittedly, come off like snooty elitists.

But it sure seems like Republicans in office usually vote against the best interests of the bulk of their everyday-folk constituencies—particularly when it comes to the big stuff that really counts. However, screaming at people to “just snap out of it”; to overcome intense DNA-level biases (which we all can’t help but have); to ignore their backgrounds and traditions and instincts…isn’t helpful. And it doesn’t work anyway.

Cool Mayor Energy

I really liked Megan Barry when she was Nashville’s mayor back in the mid-Teens. Yes, her left-leaning, but moderate-adjacent policies usually aligned with mine. But also…

She liked to party!

Or, at least show up to concerts at places like my favorite venue, the Basement East, and look like she was having a legit good time.

And then she had an affair with her security guard, and had to step down, and pleaded guilty to an eensy-weensy felony for using taxpayer funds for a vacation or something-or-other. And then her only son passed away under tragic circumstances. So I didn’t see or hear much about her for some time.

Then I attended a fundraiser last summer for the Covenant School (who just marked a year since their campus was shot up by a troubled young person; three adults and three children dead). Barry was on the board of the charity putting on the event, and was in attendance. There was a bunch of music. She looked like she was still having a legit good time.

Now she’s running for the U.S. House out of Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District, one of the three districts gerrymandered to high hell so that blue-dot Nashville could be split evenly between them. Each district extends out into the Tennessee countryside, giving rural folks the edge in numbers when voting to select who represents both them and Nashvillians in Washington.

Thought I’d share an interview Barry did recently with the excellent digital reboot of the Nashville Banner (excerpted below), which touches on a few concepts I feel are relevant to CeeGees’ all-around interests:

Banner: How do you win votes from people outside of Nashville, whether it’s on abortion or guns or immigration, who may not be 100 percent on board with you? 

Barry: Actually, there’s a lot of common ground. ... There have been enough polls across Tennessee that say that Republicans and Democrats support access to women’s health, they support making sure that our children are safe with actively passing gun safety legislation. I think that we actually have a lot more common ground, rural and urban, than what our current representation in Washington gives us.

Banner: You’ve been visiting many of these communities outside of Nashville. What have you heard from people?

Barry: The issues of access to health care is a big one. And I don’t just mean access to women’s health care. I mean access to health care in their community. So many of these rural communities don’t have hospitals. We still haven’t taken the Medicaid expansion. That’s $22 billion. When [Barry’s GOP opponent] Mark Green was in the [state] legislature, he did not support passing that. You hear that in the communities: People want their children to have access to health care.

Banner: How would you convince someone who’s planning to vote for Trump that they should vote for you as well? 

Barry: I had a conversation with somebody over the weekend because I was in Linden, which is in Perry County. And I walked up and I said, “Hey, Megan Barry, running for Congress, would love to earn your vote.” And he said, “Are you a Democrat?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Nope.” And I said, “So I know who you’re gonna vote for at the top of the ticket. That’s pretty clear. But you might think about voting for me down the ticket.”

He was a vet. And so we talked a lot about my opponent. Even though he is a vet, and I’m grateful for his service, he at every turn has voted against veterans. Did I convince that guy to maybe push the button for me? I don’t know. But I think I at least made him think.

So yeah, encouraging folks to think twice, and maybe even to investigate the voting habits of the politicians they’re perhaps supporting by default, is good. The former mayor seems to have the right idea on how to approach folks.

A couple other thoughts when trying to reach out to someone who’s on “the other side”…

Don’t Make Fun of Them

CNN’s SE Cupp is a conservative “Never Trumper,” and she’s right on the money with her commentary viewable via the above link.

Hillary Clinton calling Trump supporters “deplorables” back in 2016 might be the event that’s second-most-responsible for the rise of Trump. (I love Seth Meyers, but here’s the event that could very well be most-responsible.)

And as Cupp points out, it’s stuff like the clip she shows of MSNBC’s A-list network personalities that’s going to get Trump back in the White House. Snidely saying how silly it is for our southern border woes to be the #1 issue for voters in Virginia is unhelpful. You look like jerks.

We have to assume that, for now, MAGA devotees are lost to us. We’re not going to get very far at this moment in history by reasoning with extremists. But you don’t have to be a MAGA fan to think that the border crisis is, indeed, a crisis. We must take serious people seriously…unless we don’t care if anyone but our allies takes us seriously in return.

Blog Save ‘Pod Save America’

Lastly, I have a whole series of sub-titles like “Blog Save Pod Save America” for segments that take to task media figures I personally (usually) like, but who can also be ginormous buttheads and annoy the snot outta me.

This isn’t about the Pod Save America podcast specifically, but does single out the production company founded by the guys behind PSA, Crooked Media.

I read the Crooked newsletter “What a Day” almost every evening; it’s pretty much my go-to evening news roundup during the week. And the writers work in jokes and insults to politicians and other figures they think are morons. Which is usually fine.

But here’s another example of what I don’t think is helpful when talking about a serious subject like abortion, which serious people—even when they agree on the issue overall—can see in different ways:

In every election, ballot measure, and special where reproductive freedom has centered the race post-Dobbs, it’s won. As Crooked’s Erin Ryan says, when it comes to a vote: “Abortion is undefeated.”

I am 100% pro-choice. But I still find it distasteful—and much more crucially, incredibly unhelpful when the mission is to preserve women’s bodily autonomy above all else—to characterize abortion as if the specific procedure is something to root for. As if we want more abortions.

While I don’t think any woman should be restricted in any way in deciding whether she will remain pregnant…it sucks when one ends up being necessary, doesn’t it? Serious question: is it an important part of the fight for reproductive freedom to characterize abortion as no big deal?

I just think taking the subject lightly—and not respecting the fact that there are some serious people who aren’t MAGAns or super-religious, but still see abortion as extinguishing “life,” in some form—is only going to make those folks resentful, and feel insulted, and if they’re anti-choice, fight that much harder against the right to control what happens to one’s own body.

Pick a Number, Any Number

And for my next trick, I will once again ask A.I. to pick a random number between 1 and (now) 1,066 so we can dish about a song on my “Recollection Records: Music That’s Entered My Head Out of Nowhere” Spotify playlist.

That’s right, it’s been almost five years since I started playlisting the songs that randomly materialize in my brain for no apparent reason. And I’m up to 1,066 now. (And I’m just gonna ask Siri to pick the random number from now on…I don’t know why I was making things difficult and asking Perplexity or ChatGPT to do it when EVEN SIRI OR ALEXA can do that shit…)

Anyway. The number from 1 to 1,066 Siri selected IS…

492.

And the 492nd song on my “Recollection Records: Music That’s Entered My Head Out of Nowhere” Spotify playlist?

Oh geez. I mean…I did not care for Seger for the longest time. Growing up in Northwest Ohio, right on the southern border of Michigan, meant non-stop Seger on allllll the classic rock radio stations (or at least what would now be considered “classic” rock stations…back then he was just regular old time rock ‘n’ roll, I s’pose).

So I was so damn sick of “Mainstreet” and “Turn the Page” and “Against the Wind” and —even before the truck commercials—”Like a Rock” and…well I never got sick of “Night Moves.” That brand of cheese has always had just the right aroma, it transcends classic rock radio over-saturation.

But you give me what’s basically a Harold Faltermeyer pop rock tune, in 1987, that’s promoted with a video featuring a glance of a lady’s aerobicized butt and a flash of Brigitte Nielsen’s legs before the ramblin’ gamblin’ man starts singing? I was in.

DID YOU KNOW: This was Seger’s only No. 1 hit?!! I didn’t.

Thanks for reading!

Yours,
~Dean

• And…Prince at the SNL 40th anniversary afterparty

ON THIS EPISODE:

In this audio version of last Friday March 15th’s CeeGees.org Substack newsletter, we come to the next stop on the tour of my vintage cassette collection: Def Leppard’s Hysteria.

Then the week’s serious-er subject that stood out to me most: data being released that affirmative action did not help the folks it was created to help—namely Black and Native Americans—as much as we thought. And we go into a bit more detail on the…well, the details.

And then our friendly neighborhood AI (*gulp*) picked “Rusty Cage” by Soundgarden to mull over for our final segment (inspired by the “Recollection Records: Music That’s Entered My Head Out of Nowhere” Spotify playlist).

The Primary Link to check out on affirmative action is a “The Morning” newsletter from The New York Times, gift link HERE.

The Quote(s) of the Show:

As [President Johnson] said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, [and say], ‘You are free to compete with all the others.’” Or as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.”

SHOW SYNOPSIS:

CeeGees Aloud: where together we try to figure out how to find Common Ground, forge Common Good, and fight Corporate Greed in this absurdist 21st century society of ours.

And to help the medicine go down, we discuss classic rock, classic pop, classic country, and, especially, '80s metal, too. (OK fine, call it "hair metal" if you must...)

Theme music: Faith in Phantoms' "Let It Go"

I meditated this morning. I’m usually good for meditating five-or-so out of seven days each week. The days I miss, it’s usually because I didn’t “sit” early enough. So today I did it first thing.

It’s always a guided meditation; I subscribe to the 10 Percent Happier app, which was co-founded by journalist Dan Harris and thus is far less susceptible to woo-woo-ism and/or hippie-dipitude.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hit me up at dean@ceegees.org if you’d like a free 30-day guest pass to try it out, no credit card required. (And no kickback for me or anything…just may as well use it!)

Today I chose a meditation entitled “Be Simple and Easy.” It’s one of the first ones I tried, almost a decade ago. The very basic idea behind it is to not let yourself get too caught up in the complexities of everyday life. You’ll know when extra care and concern regarding a facet of your human experience is truly necessary. Otherwise, don’t overthink. Be simple and easy.

Easier typed than done!

But in the spirit of Munindraji, the Buddhist mentor who passed down this low-key lifestyle pursuit to such famous disciples as Joseph Goldstein (who was my meditation teacher this morning)—and because I’d like to make this CeeGees entry significantly shorter and less complex than usual—I decided to keep today’s issues-based section super-simple, and super-easy.

You know…nothin’ too heavy. It’s Friday, after all! So for the “filling” of today’s poo-poo panini, we’re gonna chit-chat about…

…affirmative action.

Keepin’ it light, y’all!

But first, a music musing…

THE BOTTOM SLICE: The One Hard Rock Band I Wasn’t First on My Block to Discover (Grrrrrrr.)

I remember reading it in Hit Parader magazine, albeit a couple months after it happened (a couple months being the quickest you could get the scoop on your hard rock heroes back in the day—before hourly MTV News reports, let alone the Internet).

Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen had lost his left arm in a New Year’s Eve 1984 car crash.

I was young enough that I don’t think it even registered how horrific such an event was. I was reading about real life, but still looked at “Heavy Metal Happenings” (the name of the news section in HP, which was my favorite part of the magazine) like it was fantasyland stuff. It was little more than a cartoon comprised of photos instead of doodles to me at that point.

However, I’m sure I felt a certain sadness that Def Leppard’s drummer would never play drums again and would have to leave the band.

Not that Def Leppard was ever one of my favorite bands. And the reason they weren’t is pretty petty (assuming eight-year-olds can be petty).

The band’s third LP, Pyromania, had blown up by the time I discovered Def Lep on MTV. And thus, somehow, infuriatingly…my best neighborhood buddy, Trent, had the wherewithal to have his mom buy it for him just before it was really on my radar.

I mean, I wasn’t that butt-hurt that, for the first time, I wasn’t gonna be the one to give my friends and the older kids in the neighborhood their first glimpse of a popular new record from a cool “adult” band, like I’d done with Synchronicity, Kilroy Was Here, Business as Usual, Toto IV…but…I was pretty butt-hurt about it.

Trent only went on to beat me to four other albums that I can remember: Bryan Adams’ Reckless [a big defeat for me], the Flashdance soundtrack, the Top Gun soundtrack, and, inexplicably…DeBarge’s Rhythm of the Night. Which, by that time I was shying away from groups like DeBarge (publicly, at least). So it was brave of Trent, a guy’s-guy athletic type, to share that he’d secured that particular record for his collection.

I still borrowed it. And dubbed it. But no more showing off dance-poppy records that I’d discovered long before my classmates. I kept the “wimpier” bands I loved a secret ever since some girls in class asked me what I was drawing one day and laughed uproariously when I replied, with entirely inappropriate melodrama—thinking it would impress them—”Boy George! It’s the cover of KISS-ing to Be CLEV-ahhhhh.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: And kids thought I was gay after that! Can you believe that shit?? I mean, his name was BOY George. Not GIRL George. And I wouldn’t call that color lavender, per se. It’s more of a fuchsia, I always thought. Fuchsia. Way more manly-looking word than, like, pink or whatever, no?

OK fine I get it now. Totally fine. Nothin’ wrong with being gay, or being straight but assumed to be gay. But if I were gay I’m not sure I would’ve bought THIS a scant couple years later, would I have? Just sayin’!

So from that point forth, Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), Duran Duran’s Seven and the Ragged Tiger, Lionel Richie’s Can’t Slow Down, and the Thompson Twins’ “Hold Me Now” 45-rpm single were all kept under careful wraps.

But anyway. I didn’t own Pyromania until I was in college, probably. I think I bought the cassette for a dollar at Karma, just to have it. (I’d played the crap out of the tape I dubbed off of Trent’s album, though.)

So when I saw the release date for Lep’s follow-up album, Hysteria, scrawled across the chalkboard at the Sound Shoppe, you bet your ass I was gonna get that record the second it came out. (Well, the second school let out for the day, and I got picked up from Grandma and Grandpa’s, and had Dad drive me to Sound Shoppe.)

And…I loved it, obviously. Problem was, now it wasn’t just Trent I was competing with for the distinction of Biggest Def Leppard Fan in Bryan, Ohio. MTV was in every kid’s living room by 1987. And most of the hard rock bands du jour were voraciously playing into the pop-metal vibe.

So, while nobody but me had Mötley Crüe’s Shout at the Devil, everybody at least knew about, and loved (or professed they loved, because it was suddenly cool), “Smokin’ in the Boys Room” when it came out on MTV only a year after I’d gotten the balls to buy Shout.

EDITOR’S NOTE: It looks lame compared to “Looks That Kill” but that Smokin’ in the Boys Room” video was the absolute coolest thing I’d ever seen at the time…but then, I was pre-pubescent, so…

Certainly zero of my peers liked Kiss when they officially overtook Men at Work as my favorite band in fifth grade. But the cool kids, shockingly, all wanted to borrow my copy of the sickeningly poppy Crazy Nights album when it came out. Just a year earlier they were making fun of me for pretending to have gone to a Kiss concert by wearing a cheap knockoff Kiss concert tee.

(They were half-right—I had most definitely attended the Kiss concert. But the shirt I proudly wore to school the next day was a cheap knockoff that I had my chaperone, one of Mom’s co-workers who let me tag along with her and her son, buy me in the parking lot. Looked cool to me at the time!)

Pretty soon, everybody magically liked Def Leppard, too. And why not. Five Top 10 hits and seven successful singles total propelled Hysteria to 12 million in sales in the U.S. alone. No one was more responsible for the juggernaut that was ‘80s MTV pop metal than the Leps.

Def Leppard released Hysteria four-plus years after Pyromania, partly because drummer Rick Allen figured out a way to rig his drum kit so he could play with just the one arm. The band admirably insisted to their label that Allen remain in the band, so the long layoff made sense.

However, the followup to Hysteria, Adrenalize, took five years to make it to record shelves—or CD shelves, more specifically. My buddy Trent bought Pyromania on vinyl, the premier album format of its time; I bought Hysteria on cassette, the premier album format of its time; and by 1992, Adrenalize was mainly being sold on compact disc.

And if Hysteria was pop of the metal variety, Adrenalize was pop of the…just plain pop variety, really.

Did I buy it? Damn straight. Did I play it much? Nah, I’d largely been poached by the Seattle Sound by that time. Grunge was just as melodic, and often heavier than even Def Lep’s first two records, which were categorized amongst the “New Wave of British Heavy Metal” bands like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, believe it or not.

And heavier meant cooler by the time I was finishing high school. Not that Nirvana and Soundgarden being “cooler” than Warrant and Faster Pussycat had that much to do with my level of enjoyment, really.

OK, maybe a little…

THE FILLING: How Affirmative Was Affirmative Action?

The Bottom Slice you just consumed was a big ol’ fat-ass slice of bread. And I’m serious that I want to try and make CeeGees a more easily digestible endeavor for folks.

EDITOR’S NOTE: TOO LATE!

So all kidding aside, I picked the topic of affirmative action to touch on in this installment because, obviously, there’s no way we’re gonna talk about such an intricate, delicate subject in proper detail in just one sitting.

So I’d just like to point you to a resource I found informative when it comes to this controversial approach to school admissions. And we’ll get into more detail about the ins and outs of the practice at a later date.

Did Affirmative Action Even Work?

“The Morning” newsletter from David Leonhardt of The New York Times is my go-to early-day news briefing. This morning’s featured topic explored the notion that the data behind the recently outlawed affirmative action—universities’ prioritization, to various degrees, of diversity over aptitude in the admission process—might not have actually helped non-White students become more upwardly mobile in the long run.

And contemporary affirmative action certainly didn’t help the demographic JFK and LBJ intended it to—Black and Native American families who’d been horrifically, historically discriminated against and thus drastically disadvantaged by American systems over hundreds and hundreds of years.

Here’s a clip from “The Morning”:

Affirmative action was created in the name of fairness—to address the oppression of Black Americans. That oppression has spanned not only centuries of slavery, but also policies that continued into the 20th century, such as segregation of jobs, schools and neighborhoods and whites-only mortgage subsidies. The white-Black wealth gap remains so large today partly as a result.

As [President Johnson] said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, [and say], ‘You are free to compete with all the others.’” Or as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.”

(That MLK quote, incidentally, is a pretty simple-and-easy explanation for why I support reparations, but that’s for another CeeGee…)

This was news to me. Not the generations-long discrimination part, of course (I still have a rather unhealthy and probably unhelpful tendency toward White guilt). But I just assumed that the only question regarding affirmative action was how much it unfairly excluded worthy students who were not Black or Native American. It never occurred to me that it might not even really be helping Black or Native American kids as much as one might think.

Below is a gift link to the March 15 edition of the newsletter; if you decide you want to click through to any of the Times links Leonhardt references, or the Atlantic articles linked to for that matter, and you need gift links for them (both outlets utilize a paywall), let me know at dean@ceegees.org.

What Groups Need Affirmative Action?

The demise of the old version of affirmative action is likely to affect some of its previous beneficiaries much more than others.

THE TOP SLICE: Pick a Number, Any Number

The number from 1 to 979 Perplexity.ai selected for me this week IS…

167.

The 167th song on my “Recollection Records: Music That’s Entered My Head Out of Nowhere” Spotify playlist?

Ha!

Geez O’Pete. I mean, not only did I mention Soundgarden earlier in this newsletter, but I was referring specifically to the Badmotorfinger era of Soundgarden. And “Rusty Cage” is my favorite song from that album.

Last week, I mentioned that my favorite Scorpions song was the first song of theirs I’d ever heard, a lesser-known track called “I’m Leaving You.” Is it my favorite because it represented the first time I ever heard the band? Which happened at a time in my life when the hormones were raging, MTV was new, and hard rock delivered to one’s living room was brand spanking new?

We’ll never know until my body’s handed over to science and my brain is examined by a mad scientist of the heavy metal maniac persuasion. (Man, I hope that actually happens somehow…)

“Rusty Cage” was not the first Soundgarden song I ever heard. It was the fourth. However, it was the first one I “got.”

I saw the video for “Hands All Over” from their previous album, Louder Than Love, on MTV’s 120 Minutes. (And let it be known that, as cool as I may sound for having watched the much more erudite, alt/goth-minded 120 Minutes as a wee lad, I never liked it. But, on occasion, MTV wasn’t sure if some of those pre-”grunge” Seattle band offerings were heavy metal (early Alice in Chains) or goth rock (early Soundgarden…or so thought 120 Minutes’ producers).

So I watched, just in case some real rock snuck through. And I remember seeing “Hands All Over,” and…not quite knowing what to make of it.

And I still hadn’t fully grasped the band when “Jesus Christ Pose,” the first single off Badmotorfinger, started playing on MTV. I knew it was some exotic variation of “badass,” but…

“Maybe I’ll just go give Enuff Z’Nuff’s new CD a listen instead,” is probably the conclusion I came to.

Same with the second single, which was the biggest single from the album, “Outshined” (until years later when Johnny Cash’s “Rusty Cage” brought newfound acclaim to the Soundgarden version).

“Rusty Cage,” though…hell yeah, man. There was no ambiguity with that jam. It fraggin’ rawwwwked. The way that slithery call-and-answer guitar intro built the suspense; and then how the band ripped into the main riffiness; and how they launched into that must-headbang bridge that was more headbang-worthy than anything on Headbangers Ball; and then…

That coda. I doubt any early grunge moment was more responsible for the “grunge” moniker than that monolithic slab of down-tuned guitar nastiness. If my musical path hadn’t been fully altered by Alice in Chains by that point, “Rusty Cage” finished the job.

I’m not saying I didn’t also continue to buy every single Enuff Z’Nuff record that came out for old time’s sake, but…

Look, glam was fun, and the mid-Eighties pop-metal before glam rawked pretty hard usually. But the early Nineties, I soon came to accept, were gonna be a time for heavy, grungy, melodic badassery. The proof being the charge I felt when I first “got” Soundgarden.

The End! Thanks for reading!

Yours,
~Dean

P.S. It is not hard for me to say I’m sorry that I cannot write a short CeeGee to save my ass. I literally couldn’t send this Friday newsletter out before Saturday. And I definitely started writing it during daylight hours on Friday.

P.P.S. It means I really, really care! (Right?)

Last week’s Substack CeeGees.org newsletter version of this episode:

ON THIS EPISODE:

In this audio version of last Friday March 8th’s CeeGees.org Substack newsletter, we provide a refreshed rundown of the mission of the newsletter and podcast—which is to “…find Common Ground, forge Common Good, and fight Corporate Greed.”

That’s the tagline, but it’s tough to implement the harder work it’ll take to actually move the needle. (It’s definitely gonna take more than just me bellyaching from my bedroom…)

And then, next stop on the vintage cassette collection tour is Scorpions’ World Wide Live. And artificial intelligence picked “Shake & Tumble” by Firehouse to mull over for our final segment (inspired by the “Recollection Records: Music That’s Entered My Head Out of Nowhere” Spotify playlist).

A couple links to check out from the current events portion of our program:

In Biden’s 2024 State of the Union, he said:

“Wall Street didn’t build America. They’re not bad guys—they didn’t build it, though. The middle class built this country. And unions built the middle class.”

Joe ad-libbed the “They’re not bad guys” part. Read the speech as it was written here, and then read the transcript of what he actually said here.

SHOW SYNOPSIS:

CeeGees Aloud: where together we try to figure out how to find Common Ground, forge Common Good, and fight Corporate Greed in this absurdist 21st century society of ours.

And to help the medicine go down, we discuss classic rock, classic pop, classic country, and, especially, '80s metal, too. (OK fine, call it "hair metal" if you must...)

Theme music: Faith in Phantoms' "Let It Go"

In honor of President Joe Biden’s non-disastrous State of the Union address Thursday night, may I present to you a State of the Substack address.

So…

The overall mission I have for this space is to “find common ground to forge common good and fight corporate greed.”

The quote that used to be at the top of the CeeGees.org home page was from former Pink Floydsman Roger Waters, who has unfortunately (IMO) let his quest for international justice cloud his judgment from time to time. But this statement about the U.S. he made a few years ago on Michael Moore’s Rumble podcast really resonated with me, and explains the place I’d love to help society reach somehow:

CeeGee #1: Common Ground

I’m a left-leaning Southerner from the Midwest who lived for some time on the West Coast (and I’m a “SWAM,” for the record—a Straight White American Male). And I know that I have a lot in common with folks who aren’t like me. With folks who are, for instance:

• …from Eastern Tennessee and have lived there all their lives (and are probably White).

• …from North Nashville and have lived there all their lives (and are probably Black).

• …from Central America and lived there all their lives (and are probably Brown) until it became too dangerous and they migrated to the U.S.

• Etc. Etc.

I also likely have lots of differing thoughts, concerns, hopes, and motivations than such folks do, too. But—while I still have serious concerns about Joe Biden’s agenda, and his chances to win reelection in November—the reason CeeGees is here is ultimately to bring disparate people together who agree with Biden’s declaration from his SOTU address that America’s core values are:

• Honesty

• Decency

• Dignity

• Equality

As friggin’ cynical as I am these days, I am somehow still able to convince myself that most people are good people. (How far above 50% it is, I’m not so sure.) And good people want good things for good people.

Now, human nature being what it is, I also maintain that most of us (me very much included) need a little help remembering that a majority of human beings, no matter where they’re from or what they look like, are basically good.

So how do we find common ground amongst people of so many stripes? Black, White, Brown, male, female, young, old, rich, poor, gay, straight, liberal, conservative—how do we bring together people who are inherently good, but who are also flawed and biased against folks who aren’t like them?

CeeGee #2: Common Good

Once we find that all-important common ground amongst very different, good-hearted people, we need to work together to create a whole bunch of common good.

All generally good people want to be treated equally. We want to be given a fair shot at a dignified life. And, being (mostly) good people, we want decency to defeat dickishness throughout the vast majority of our society. Can’t always be the case, but surely we can boost the ratio of decency to dickishness beyond what we’re currently experiencing.

CeeGee #3: Corporate Greed

Sometimes I’ve called it “capitalistic greed” instead of “corporate greed,” but that suggests I hate capitalism. I don’t.

I do hate 21st century capitalism.

My political hero—hell, my hero hero—is Bernie Sanders. And he hates capitalism regardless the century. But I disagree that capitalism is inherently evil, as fervently as I’d argue against humanity being inherently more evil than good.

But obscene levels of greed has corrupted the capitalist system. The only question is whether there’s any going back. If there isn’t, then yeah: we have to find a better system.

In Biden’s State of the Union last night, he said:

“Wall Street didn’t build America. They’re not bad guys—they didn’t build it, though. The middle class built this country. And unions built the middle class.”

He ad-libbed the “They’re not bad guys” part. (Read the speech as it was written here. Read the transcript of what he actually said here.)

And sure, Wall Streeters aren’t all bad guys. (I would’ve reworded Joe’s ad-lib as, “They’re not all bad guys.”) Just like all MAGAns aren’t all bad people. But they’re driven by ill will, and are badly in need of a redirect.

Here’s How We Fix It!

We fix it by…….ARE YOU FUGGIN’ KIDDIN’ ME??! I DON’T KNOW HOW THE HAIRY HELL TO FIX IT!!

(Ahem.)

Which is why the current version of CeeGees, much to my dissatisfaction, has to-date been mostly a lot of would-be proselytizing that’s ultimately preaching to the choir. I’m thankful for the chance to preach to the choir! But endlessly analyzing the problem from my house without getting out there and actually interacting with people isn’t enough. (Obvs.)

So, for now, CeeGees has served as a way to work toward how I can best help, and then how I can best gather the courage to actually go do the helping.

The Time-Honored Proverbial S#!t Sandwich

Our format here on CeeGees, as it currently stands, is the shit sandwich format:

Bottom slice: a music mini-essay analyzing the next album release in line on my tower display of fascinatingly vintage cassette tapes leaning against the wall of the front room of my East Nashville abode.

Filling: a mini-essay analyzing a current event, with attempts to spotlight equally topics that are local, regional, and international in addition to national (which is what I tend to focus on—nationwide stuff I can often do very little about, other than gripe about it).

Top Slice: Another music mini-essay, this time examining one of the 975-and-counting songs on my “Recollection Records: Music That’s Entered My Head Out of Nowhere” Spotify playlist. Usually it’s a self-indulgent journey back to when I first heard the song, which may or may not explain why it lodged in my brain without warning one day and prompted being added to the list.

So, some fun music stuff + some serious stuff + some more fun music stuff (the fun music stuff usually being classic rock, classic pop, classic country, or, especially, '80s metal…or fine, call it "hair metal" if you must...).

One Last Tiny Little Seemingly-Inconsequential-But-Oh-So-Helpful Thing

If you like a particular CeeGee (and let’s face facts, you’re gonna like all of ‘em), would you please just click on the little ❤️ icon underneath my byline at the top of the page? Or at the top of the email if you’re reading inside your email?

It’d be helpful! Thanks!

BOTTOM SLICE: “C’mon, Colly-Fone-Yahhhhh!!!”

We started at the top-left of the top cassette case of my cassette tower, and have been moving downward. This fourth CeeGee’s Bottom Slice, though, calls for a left turn (literally and figuratively).

Y’see, if we went from Rage of Angels to the second album from Steelheart, Tangled in Reins, it’d take us sooooo long to get to some of the records in the second column I wanna get to. So who sez we hafta go top-to-bottom? We can take a left turn, right? So long as the next featured album is positioned directly next to the previously featured album? In some capacity? As stated in the official CeeGees Rules & Regs? (Which are really more guidelines than rules…)

ANYWAY. That means next up is the definitive live album from the greatest German rock band of all time (and no I can’t name a second German rock band at the moment but that’s not important right now), the Teutonic Terrors themselves, Scorpions!

1.

First thing that comes to mind when I look at this album cover is that the Scorpions might just be the biggest bunch of rock ‘n’ roll cheezeballs of all time, too, across all countries of origin.

But don’t get it twisted, as the kids say these days. It’s a wonderfully aromatic, creamy blend of cheese the Scorps brew up. Maybe it’d smell more like Limburger if they were actually taking themselves seriously, but, since they’re definitely not (much), we can liken their balls-out brand of hard rock and wistful balladry to, what, perhaps a tangy Tilsit?

2.

Fun Fact: like the Eagles (not The Eagles), it’s the Scorpions (not The Scorpions). Or, rather, it’s Scorpions. There’s no ‘the’…although it’s awkward not to say “the” Scorpions during casual conversation so…feel free to keep saying it wrong (like I am).

3.

Off the top of my head, World Wide Live was probably the second-most-influential live album for me as a kid, just behind Kiss’s Alive! and just ahead of Iron Maiden’s Live After Death.

The Scorpions studio album released before World Wide Live was their biggest-ever, Love at First Sting, which featured the band’s biggest hit song to that point, too: the ever-ubiquitous and riff-tacular “Rock You Like a Hurricane.”

But that song was released before I’d fully assimilated into an MTV zombie. In fact, they’d released three singles from Sting by the time I discovered the band, via MTV, on the album’s fourth and final single/video, “I’m Leaving You.”

And—possibly because it was the first song of theirs I ever heard—“I’m Leaving You” is still by far my favorite Scorpions song. The track didn’t chart anywhere in the world, though, including Germany (it was really just released as a “single” so they could send another video to MTV). But it’s a tight, masterfully melodic pop-rocker.

So imagine my dismay when I realized “I’m Leaving You” was NOT on World Wide Live! The disappointment dissipated pretty quickly, though, as I got my first taste of the band’s classics that came before Love at First Sting: “Blackout,” “Loving You Sunday Morning,” “Can’t Live Without You,” “The Zoo,” “No One Like You,” and, of course…

4.

…“Another Piece of Meat.”

It must be said that the Scorpions liked to pretty shamelessly objectify women back in the Seventies and Eighties, about as much as any other popular hard rock band in my view.

Sadly, I’m fairly certain this album cover…

…primarily influenced this:

And that scene’s a classic, of course, so…thank you, Scorpions? I guess?

But these days I’m pretty snowflakey about this sort of thing. I’m just sensitive to the fact that this was the kinda stuff that influenced my (very) early perspective on women about as much as anything else.

The side-boob seen on the original Love at First Sting cover’s fine (although that was banned too—in America, at least. I had to endure a boring band shot for my Sting cover). And by today’s standards the gum-on-the-breast Lovedrive cover was no big deal (although of course they just haaaad to show the lady’s entire breast on the back cover).

But the Animal Magnetism cover is pretty gross. And I’m not even going to talk about the original cover for 1976’s Virgin Killer. Look it up if you must. The band says all of the cover selections were made by their label, a German subsidiary of RCA. In fact, unbelievably, the RCA logo is prominently displayed right next to the band’s logo on Virgin Killer.

And, to be fair, when they had their big breakout album with “Rock You Like a Hurricane” on it, there was never another gross album cover after. Maybe they despised those risqué covers and were relieved when they had enough clout to insist upon boring covers like this?

5.

Fun personal fact: I always remembered being very…um, “taken with” the pitcher at the beginning of the “I’m Leaving You” video.

A couple years after moving to L.A. after college, I met up with a guitarist at his home studio. We were seeing about working together—trading stories, comparing favorite bands. And Scorpions are not one of my very favorite bands, but somehow they came up anyway. And I expressed that the criminally overlooked “I’m Leaving You” was their best song.

And the guitarist asked if I’d ever seen the video. And I said, “Of course!” And he said, “You know at the beginning when all the girls are playing softball?” And I said, “Boy, do I!”

And he said, “The pitcher’s my wife, wanna meet her?”

And so I met the softball pitcher from the Scorpions’ “I’m Leaving You” video who I crushed super-hard on a couple decades earlier. Ah, Hollywood.

Here’s the video. I think it is exceptionally written, directed, and acted. The girls and the band all perform the slapstick perfectly. Impeccable timing throughout. (I’m not kidding.) It is the embodiment of a mid-Eighties MTV hard rock video. Enjoy.

6.

Not-so-fun-fact for Scorpions: the first time they ever charted in their homeland was with the second single off Love at First Sting, the power ballad “Still Loving You.” And Sting was their ninth record! Even “Rock You Like a Hurricane” didn’t make a dent! More info here if you’re interested…

7.

World Wide Live and Twisted Sister’s Stay Hungry were the two albums I remember playing intense, heated, deadly serious air-guitar to in my bedroom the most. Although when I say “air-guitar,” I actually had something tangible I mimed with.

FILLING: See Above…

The “Filling” section is usually where I nestle the current events content. But this edition’s an open-faced shit sandwich, I suppose. The filling’s on top of the bread, i.e. we started with it.

TOP SLICE: Pick a number, any number…

Me: “OK Perplexity, please pick a number between 1 and 975.”

Perplexity.ai: “Sure, I'll pick the number 482.”

And #482 is…….

Oh geez. I mean, Leahey Brothers, eat your hearts out!

Firehouse (it’s stylized “FireHouse” but I don’t like the capital ‘H,’ so I’m lower-casing it) is, IMO, the best third-tier hair metal band.

• First-tier hair metal band examples: Mötley Crüe and Ratt.

• Second-tier: Poison and Warrant.

• Third-tier: Firehouse and BulletBoys.

“Shake & Tumble,” I just found out, was the first single from Firehouse’s self-titled debut album (crazy!). The record actually came out in 1990. So they’re technically a Nineties band, but…very much an Eighties band in spirit, and practice.

In fact, Alice in Chains’ debut, Facelift, hit shelves two weeks prior to Firehouse. I loved both records. A strange sociological phenomenon, to like grunge and glam simultaneously.

I believe “Shake & Tumble” is still a must-play for the band at their concerts. But it pales in comparison to one of the all-time glam jams, “All She Wrote,” and my second-fave track on the album, “Home Is Where the Heart Is.”

However, it does best Firehouse’s breakout MTV hit, “Don’t Treat Me Bad.” Which I never liked, and certainly couldn’t come close to being able to sing. But my high school band Cryin’ Shame made me (try to) sing it anyways.

I wish I had a photo of me wearing the blue paisley vest my mom made for my first-ever rock performance at the IBEW Warehouse in Bloomington, Indiana, sometime in early 1991. But here is the magazine ad that inspired it:

And here is my Firehouse-fashion-inspired senior picture. I’ve still got a few left if anybody wants one.

Thanks for reading!

Yours,
~Dean

P.S. The below is how you damn well do it. No Bandstand-like lip-synching that I can detect…

P.P.S. Possible lip-synching here…

P.P.P.S. BulletBoys singer Marq Torien’s pants, with the painted-on words and such, inspired another personal fashion choice when Cryin’ Shame morphed into Valhalla. I designed the Valhalla logo and painted it—in hot pink, naturally—on my acid-washed jeans. And I do still have those, somewhere…

One of the handful of reasons I’m turning in a mini-CeeGee this week (and turning it in a day late) is: on Publication Day yesterday I was tracking bass (see above) in a friggin’ crazy-amazing studio owned by a moderately famous country music figure. And the unrealistic thinking was that in my down time I could still write the day’s CeeGee. But alas, there was no down time, really, and I wanted to give my all to the recording. And I also wanna give my all to each CeeGees post. And then the reality came to me that my all this week would only be able to produce a mini-CeeGee.

But! I don’t want the five potential topics I earmarked for the week to disappear into the ether, so let me give you a heads-up on them and some links for you to follow at your discretion. And then we’ll get back to normal format next week.

1. HYPOTHESIS: White rural rage, while justified, is what’s killing democracy.

Following is a gift link (so you can bypass the paywall) to an opinion piece from economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. In “The Mystery of White Rural Rage,” Krugman reviews a new book called White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. I definitely recognized a bit of condescension toward rural folk when I read it last Monday, but this is probably the biggest topic CeeGees exists to contemplate, so, I take his point:

“…loss of dignity explains both white rural rage and why that rage is so misdirected—why it’s pretty clear that this November a majority of rural white Americans will again vote against Joe Biden, who as president has been trying to bring jobs to their communities, and for Donald Trump, a huckster from Queens who offers little other than validation for their resentment.”

Then at the end of the week came a searing criticism of the piece from former Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi. I used to really dig Taibbi’s writing. He was a hero of the left during the years leading up to Trump, but has since devoted his Racket News Substack newsletter to takedowns of the smug liberal elite (I get it, but…) and hammering away at how wrong Russiagate was (I get it, but…) and how right he was that Russiagate was wrong (I get it, but…for such a talented writer to prioritize this stuff when there’s so much more important stuff to cover is a huge bummer).

Anyway. Maybe “The Turning of Taibbi” will be a future CeeGee. But in the meantime, here he is on Krugman:

Nobel-winning columnist Paul Krugman of the New York Times spent the last year telling “ignorant” Middle America its negative feelings about the economy are “demonstrably false,” because despite what their bank accounts or home evaluations might say, “Bidenomics is still working very well.”

Taibbi touches on a point that Krugman and all opponents of the MAGA right would do well to internalize and take deadly seriously: it doesn’t matter how “demonstrably false” it is that the economy is good overall right now; it doesn’t feel good to an enormous block of voters in rural America. What does feel good to them, unfortunately, is to rally around the figurehead of a movement they believe speaks for them, and just for them.

Being a part of MAGA means your pain is being felt, and acknowledged, and taken seriously. And as the authors of White Rural Rage say in an MSNBC interview Taibbi rips apart (and deservedly so, for the most part): if neither party is going to do anything for Middle Americans, at least MAGA gives them a way to vent.

In that Morning Joe interview (embedded below), the authors’ argument sides with rural folks in substance, but I agree with Taibbi that the primary impression they give is one of utter disdain for rural whites as a demographic. The truth is the truth, but it’s not helpful for Rage co-author Tom Schaller to have immediately started the interview by angrily, aggressively, breathlessly defining heartlanders as the most:

• racist

• xenophobic

• anti-immigrant

• anti-gay

• conspiracist

• anti-democratic

• anti-free press

• anti-free speech

• violent

The majority of white Middle Americans and Southerners are not those things (well…not all those things), despite the fact that I don’t doubt they are more those things than other comparable demographics.

But what is the mission here, gentlemen? To piss rural white people off even more? Or to sound the alarm that we need to do more things to actually help them, and to help them feel it helping them, so they can maintain more of their dignity and make better voting choices?

(Hint: it’s that last option. Or at least it should be.)

P.S. The Rev. Al Sharpton asks the authors a question in the below Joe clip that I’ve always wanted CeeGees to address, as well: isn’t much of what the New Right is doing geared toward keeping middle- and lower-class Americans from coming together as a multi-racial majority to rise up against those intent on instilling authoritarianism and oligarchy?

These guys seem to answer the rev in the affirmative, but their attitudes sure don’t seem likely to inspire anybody to do anything productive about the problem. They don’t have any answers, and Krugman admits at the end of his piece he doesn’t have any answers, either. And I don’t have any answers either, but I hope to at least keep from pouring salt on the wound like these dudes are.

P.P.S. Taibbi likens this Krugman point—“Technology, then, has made America as a whole richer, but it has reduced economic opportunities in rural areas. So why don’t rural workers go where the jobs are?”—to late Eighties/early Nineties hellfire comedian Sam Kinison’s legendarily controversial bit, “Live Where the Food Is.” AND I TOTALLY MADE THAT CONNECTION WHEN I READ IT, TOO! I don’t love how this one’s aged, but…it is a classic.

2. Speaking of the New Right pushing authoritarianism and oligarchy…here’s a gift link (good for 14 days) to “Defense Contractors Are Bilking the American People,” Bernie Sanders’ article on the need for Congress to reinstate the Truman Committee on war profiteering so we can end corporate greed in the defense industry.
   
   “No one denies that we need a strong military,” Bernie says. “But, like every other agency of government, it must be run efficiently and cost-effectively. It cannot simply be a cash cow for a handful of giant corporations.”

   

3. I don’t have a gift link for this Rolling Stone piece on the music industry failing to properly address sexual abuse, “Survivor Groups Call On Music Industry to Address Sexual Abuse.” But you should be able to copy the link and open it in an incognito window to read it. (Sorry to expose that secret hack, RS…)
   
   As we watched the film industry have to own up to sexual abuse within its ranks, all I could think about was how the music industry had to be at least as bad, and probably worse.
   
   When I revisit the stuff I loved as a pre-teen—the music that made me want to be a musician myself—so much of it is subtly chauvinist at best, violently misogynistic at worst. Every industry has this issue, but the music industry has directly profited from it more than anybody else, so it’s far beyond time we get the same #metoo treatment as the film industry has.

   

4. Here’s a link to a MoveOn petition that demands for country music radio to, “Stop the racism and gatekeeping! Play Beyoncé’s new country songs on your radio stations NOW!”
   
   MoveOn goes on to say, “Demand that the country music industry acknowledge country music's roots in Black music history and stop the racism and gatekeeping. Beyoncé’s new music IS country music.”
   
   Now, I signed the petition, but…here are the songs in question if you haven’t heard ‘em yet:

“Texas Hold ‘Em,” I get. There is a banjo in it, after all. But it’s not really country. And “16 Carriages” is really not country.

But guess what? Neither is most of the stuff on country radio! And country radio listeners are requesting Beyoncé, you say? And you’re not playing it because it’s not real country?? Sorry, but I can’t buy that suddenly the conglomerates in charge of country radio programming these days have suddenly become purists and won’t play a Black woman’s music solely because it doesn’t fit their format.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: I did my own extremely scientific research, pictured below, a couple days ago by examining a big Nashville country radio station’s playlist preferences. During the 9:40 a.m.-to-6 p.m. time slot I investigated? Guess what! The good news is…they totally played “Texas Hold ‘Em!”

Once, around 3 p.m.

Also in that timeframe they played Morgan Wallen 11 times (!!) and Jason Aldean four times, twice back-to-back. Both those dudes have a problematic history of questionable judgment, at the very least, when it comes to racial issues.

So maybe they played Kane Brown, who is Black, four times, too, just so they could say they played a Black guy as much as they played Aldean? (Not.)

5. And finally, here’s a link to a newsletter from everybody in the music business’s favorite curmudgeonly former entertainment lawyer, Bob Lefsetz. I certainly don’t always agree with the guy, but this entry was super-helpful to read for me—because I have to force myself to get out there and meet new people. My default setting is to remain in my “hidey-hole,” as my therapist calls it. To stay in an environment I know I can control.
   

   And it sure seems like that’s where society is headed, too. Whether it’s because we don’t wanna get shot, or we don’t wanna get anybody’s cooties, or we’re just too lazy to bother to leave our homes (or all of the above), it seems inevitable that in a decade or so we won’t need to leave our homes for anything, and, therefore, we won’t.
   
   So Lefsetz’s “New People” entry is worth a read. See ya next week. ~Dean

[EDITOR’S NOTE: I needed a reset this week, so here’s the podcast covering last week’s newsletter, and next Friday March 1 the newsletter will return. Thanks for listenin’!]

The Substack newsletter version of last week’s CeeGees: https://www.ceegees.org/p/brick-by-boring-brick 

ON THIS EPISODE:

Starting this episode, we narrate the dang newsletter first, then revisit the current events piece for an update on what’s gone down since the newsletter was published the Friday before.

In Dean’s recitation of last Friday February 16th's CeeGees.org Substack newsletter, he reckons with the curse of record collector completism, goes local to spotlight the singer from Paramore’s ballsy call-out of the Tennessee House, and looks back at some personal experiences with this week’s super-heavy (but melodic) Top Slice of the CeeGees proverbial music/news/music s#!t sandwich.

Looking back, then, on Tennessee politics, we suggest a podcast on which a writer for The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum, talks about her article “Is Tennessee a Democracy?” (Hint: the answer could be “no,” but…it ain’t great.)

This week's media to explore further:

The Tennessean: “Paramore's Hayley Williams decries TN GOP after Allison Russell resolution dustup”

https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2024/02/16/paramore-hayley-williams-decries-tn-republican-leadership-after-allison-russell-resolution-dustup/72614456007/

The Tennessee Holler Podcast: “Anne Applebaum Asks, ‘Is Tennessee a Democracy?’”

On Spotify:

On Apple Podcasts:

The Atlantic: “Is Tennessee a Democracy?” (gift link) https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/tennessee-republican-partisanship-one-party-state/674732/?gift=g4VZR7q4r0asHoB9wEmtBSJkYmKih_6QA9kcFt662mY&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share 

SHOW SYNOPSIS:

CeeGees Aloud: where together we try to figure out how to find Common Ground, forge Common Good, and fight Corporate Greed in this absurdist 21st century society of ours.

And to help the medicine go down, we discuss classic rock, classic pop, classic country, and, especially, '80s metal. (OK fine, call it "hair metal" if you must...)

CeeGees Aloud is 50% narration of the previous week's CeeGees.org Substack newsletter, and 50% check-in on the current events discussed in that newsletter.

Theme music: Faith in Phantoms' "Let It Go" (

)

The namesake concepts of CeeGees can certainly be better-grasped by considering national and international news. In our last CeeGee, for instance, the current events filling in our little music/news s#!t sandwich was the public’s perception of Joe Biden’s age. Before that we discussed surprise bipartisanship in D.C.

But it’s hard to wrap my head around ever doing something productive about our dearth of Common Ground, our disrespect of the Common Good, and the debilitating growth of Corporate and Capitalistic Greed on a national level, let alone on an international level.

It’s easier to talk about big news items like that, though. But change needs to start at the local level. And I’m sure my locality, Nashville, is experiencing similar challenges to your locality. So I need to drill down into something local. Hell, I have a subscription to the Tennessean but barely ever read it if I’m being honest.

Maybe that’s ‘cuz local goings-on hit too close to home, literally and figuratively. It’d be that much more in my face that I’m musing over a topic I might actually be able to do something about. Other than just griping.

I doubt I’ll be able to set much action into motion today, but I will at least commit to talking about something local (or regional) inspired by a Tennessean story for this post. But first we gotta lay down the first piece of bread.

THE BOTTOM SLICE: The Curse of Completism

(Disclaimer A: I’ve been calling the first music segment the “top piece” of the shit sandwich, but you don’t start making a sandwich with the top piece. That’s just simple Newtonian physics. Also, it’s snappier to say “slice” rather than “piece” of bread. We’re all about making improvements, and not being dumb, here at CeeGees…)

(Disclaimer B: As faithful readers know by now, “I” say that “I” experienced all this ‘80s and ‘90s and sometimes ‘70s music first-hand. I WISH! It was really my long-lost cousin “Moneybags” Melvin who introduced me to this stuff and gave me his collection of CDs and tapes. And “I” am saying “I” to make it sound like it was me who was cool enough (and old enough) to have bought these albums—pretty much to get back at Melvin for only leaving me his music collection and not any of his other vast riches upon his disappearance and subsequent classification as dead by absentia.)

(Disclaimer C: So from now on I’m not even going to mention this me/Melvin distinction anymore, Melvin doesn’t deserve the satisfaction. [And I’m just going to come out and say what everybody else is thinking in my extended family—the guy probably totally faked his death! Most of his dough is still squirreled away in the Seychelles!] So from now on, just remember: I’m super-young, and telling these stories in the first-person to take credit for discovering these awesome artifacts away from my selfish probably-not-dead rich cousin…….)

Like I said…The Curse of Completism

“I’m a completist” is my excuse for owning the cassette that’s third-down from the top-left of my top tape case on my cassette tower, pictured above.

Of course, for a band like Kiss, who for better or worse (I know, I know, “Worse!” you’re saying) is my favorite band, I own every proper album release in CD and cassette format and many on vinyl. But in my heyday, if I liked the debut album, by, say, Dangerous Toys, I’m gonna get their sophomore album on the day it’s released, no questions asked. (Here’s their dopey MTV hit about a dude catching the singer in bed with his girlfriend.) If the second album sucked, however, and the third album is about to come out? Well…

I’m gonna get their third album on the day it’s released, no questions asked. It’s a sickness. Possibly literally. I’m sure Dangerous Toys have a sixth album, and probably a seventh and beyond. But I can tell you they definitely have a fourth and fifth album. Because I bought them. Didn’t listen to ‘em, but, I bought ‘em. Because…well, I just had to.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Dangerous Toys were pretty great musically, actually. Lyrically, no. A little tune on their second record called “On Top” may someday be randomly AI-selected for a Top Slice review because the chorus pops up in my consciousness all the damn time, without warning. And considering the lyrics, my consciousness oughta be ashamed of itself.

But below please find the band’s second single from their debut record, a long-forgotten number that was nonetheless huge on MTV. And it was my favorite song to play in my high school band, ‘cuz it was a little [a little] more high-brow, musically and even lyrically…)

From Completism to “OCDean”-ism

My apologies if it seems like I’m making light of obsessive compulsive disorder. I forget who gave me the nickname “OCDean,” or why they did. But I have had some bouts with panic disorder, which I’ve learned is related to OCD.

In the past, I thought OCD and panic seemed like odd bedfellows. What does losing one’s ever-loving shit during a panic attack—cloudy vision, heart palpitations, extremities going numb, loss of simple reason—have in common with the compulsion to clean, check, count, arrange, etc.?

But it makes total sense to me now. Your body revolts when your subconscious mind determines you’ve lost control of your destiny, whether long-term or short-term. And I’ll bet many folks with OCD initially experience something akin to a panic attack. And in lieu of being able to control the things in life that are inherently out of one’s control, they do something they can control, which is count the cracks on the sidewalk, or wash their hands every few minutes. But…this is all speculation on my part. [EDITOR’S NOTE: The author is not a doctor and his precarious meanderings are his own.]

Anyway, that cassette that’s third-down from the top-left of my top tape case on my cassette tower? I’ll tell you the five things I know about it:

1. It was released by a band called Rage of Angels.

2. The album is entitled Rage of Angels.

3. The background color on the spine of the cassette is black.

4. The text on the spine is red.

5. I never once listened to Rage of Angels, or Rage of Angels, but am going to on Spotify right now. Wanna join me?

Now see, if Rage of Angels hadn’t randomly been placed in that third slot in my top tape case, we wouldn’t have been driven by some unseen force to find out they were from Stamford, Connecticut (eat your hearts out, Amie and Jay), they broke up before this album was even released, and two members went on to play in Steelheart. Who—get this—is the next band in line in the cassette column we’re slated to discuss next week! And if I decide to take a (literal) left turn the week after that—which I swear I was considering doing already—the “Bottom Slice” featured artist would be Christian pop-metal band Stryper! AND this band is called Rage of Angels because they were a Christian metal band formed to inherit Stryper’s heavenly throne!!!

SPOOKY!!

THE FILLING: Good on Paramore. Standing up for what’s right is not easy in Tennessee.

Did you hear about the Tennessee House of Representatives blocking a resolution honoring Nashvillian Allison Russell’s recent Grammy while passing a resolution (introduced at the same time) honoring Nashvillian band Paramore’s recent Grammys?

Probably not if you’re not based in Nashville, but it is a top story on the Tennessean’s website at the time of this publication. I only watched the first three minutes of the below Roland Martin Unfiltered segment and don’t know Martin’s perspective on current events very well, but he gives us a great overview of what went down:

That’s the story that jumped out at me most of the top entries on the Tennessean home page. I know I’m taking the easy route by picking something music-related as well as local, but it’s worth internalizing what a statehouse body with a supermajority can get away with.

I’m just going to reprint Hayley Williams’ statement she sent in to the paper below. It bashes House Republicans for rejecting the Black girl who’s a constant voice for justice in the maddeningly challenging environment that is Tennessee, while affirming the white girl—who, by the way, is also a “vocal voice for justice” as described by State Rep. Justin Jones, D-Nashville, who brought the two resolutions. But Williams isn’t as vocal, and she’s not Black or queer, and she hasn’t publicly fought the GOP’s policies like Russell has.

But like Mr. Martin alludes to above…for frig’s sake, Republicans. It’s the easiest thing you could possibly do, is to just say, “OK, sure, congrats on your Grammys, thanks for putting Tennessee in a positive light on the international stage” or whatever. Or, if they were just tight-asses who didn’t want such frivolous ceremony on the House floor, then fine: vote down both resolutions.

But, of course, they only voted down the ornery Black girl. Just like they voted Rep. Jones and Rep. Justin Pearson out of the House last year (they’re Black) but didn’t vote Rep. Gloria Johnson out (she’s white) when the trio participated (together) in protesting the House’s inaction on gun violence.

Non-subscribers can read certain articles from the Tennessean, so here’s this one in case it’s a freebie. And if it’s not, here’s Williams’ statement (eat your heart out, Dave). Good on her.

This week, Rep. Justin Jones put forth resolutions to honor my band, Paramore, and another local-to-Nashville artist, Allison Russell, on our recent Grammy wins (as far as I can tell these resolutions have no legal weight to them. They're like a big high-five or when the whole restaurant joins in to sing you "Happy Birthday").

House Republicans only let the measure that acknowledged Paramore's win pass. They blocked Allison's.

For those that don't know, Allison Russell is an incredibly talented musician and songwriter. Her music spans genres with strong ties to the Folk/Americana scenes. You might have seen her on the Grammy stage performing with the great Joni Mitchell.

Oh, she is also Black. She's a brilliant Black woman.

The blatant racism of our state leadership is embarrassing and cruel. Myself, as well as Paramore, will continue to encourage young people to show up to vote with equality in mind.

I'd like to say thank you to Brother Jones for your steadfast commitment to your community.

And thank you to Allison Russell for using your voice and artistry to band people together, not tear them apart. CONGRATS on your incredible Grammy night.

On behalf of Paramore, Happy Black History Month.

THE TOP SLICE: Pick a number, any number…

OK THIS TIME I’ll make this quick(er). (EDITOR’S NOTE: Ugh.) I have a Spotify playlist called “Recollection Records: Music That’s Entered My Head Out of Nowhere.” Lots of hair metal, lots of classic rock, lots of ‘70s, ‘80s, and some ‘90s pop. And lots of other stuff too, cuz there are now 969 songs on this playlist.

So I’m gonna have Perplexity.ai (Lord help us) pick a random number from 1 to 969, and I’ll talk about what I first think of when it comes to the song chosen. Here we go.

Perplexity picks… 532.

Oh geez. I mean, dude: if you like super-heavy music that is still melodic, which is some of my favorite stuff, Prong is your band. Any heavier and you’ve got Sepultura. Any lighter and you’ve got…I dunno, Metallica?

And Metallica scared the bejeepers out of me when I was first getting into hard rock. Now they seem so tame. But Prong never got tame. And except for their first couple albums, which were more like punk-metal and therefore not particularly tuneful (but I own them, because, OCDean), they always had amazing melodies and musical sensibilities in general.

Personal Prong Experiences:

1. My first band’s makeshift manager said she could sneak me in to Jake’s in Bloomington for the Prong concert. Not sure how long I would’ve lasted looking as 16 as I did, but she couldn’t get me in anyways. BUT, she was very nice to rip a big Prong promo poster off the wall and give it to me. I need to frame it at some point.

2. I believe they were touring behind the Cleansing album, which the above tune was on, when they came to X-Fest in Indianapolis and ripped the place apart (figuratively). They never got airplay on X103 so I don’t think anybody else knew who Prong was. But the field in front of the stage was a mess nonetheless. Everybody mashed together and jumping up and down in unison (plus one dude actually singing along when he could catch his breath from the b.o.).

3. My last gasp as a Californian. I was preparing to move to Nashville from the hippie surfer town of Ventura (which was decimated by fire damage a couple years ago). And randomly, a rare Prong show popped up in a tiny venue I’d never heard of on the other side of town. I wouldn’t be surprised if the promoter rented the place out and it was a one-off. I remember the ceilings were crazy-low. And the turnout did not necessitate any mashed-together bodies. But they still ripped the place apart (figuratively).

Happy Friday night, music (and current events) fans!

Yours,
~Dean

P.S. In the spirit of the modern-day media industry, I have not proofed the above, ‘cuz I just wanted to get it out there so it could get some traction and I could move on to the next thing. Maybe I’ll get to reviewing it if I get any spare time. “Perfection is the enemy of the good,” after all. 🤢

P.P.S. This P.P.S. will self-destruct in exactly 10 seconds. Have a nice weekend!

ON THIS EPISODE:

As with (probably) all episodes this season, this second pod back revisits the current events topic of the previous week’s CeeGees Substack newsletter (at CeeGees.org): President Biden’s age. 

BONUS asides (informed by events that took place since last week’s CeeGees) include commentary on the need for the president’s team to SHOW-DON’T-TELL us that Joe can still do the job at a high level. We need to see him kicking ass behind the scenes if he indeed kicks ass behind the scenes so dang much!

Then Dean narrates aloud last Friday February 9th's CeeGees.org Substack newsletter, which asks readers and listeners, “What was your musical heaven growing up? Specifically the record store where you rushed to after school every Tuesday to devour all the new albums that had come out that day?” 

And after discussing “the age thing,” the “Pick a Number” music segment breaks down Kiss’s complicated relationship with Germany and Dean’s complicated relationship with Peter Criss’s 1978 solo album.

This week's articles to explore further:

New York Times (gift link included to bypass paywall): "Opinion: Biden’s Age Is a Campaign Problem, Not a Governing One" by Michelle Goldberg (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/12/opinion/joe-biden-age-campaign.html?unlocked_article_code=1.V00.AXdg.go7Jo1x1MTpR&smid=url-share)

New York Times (gift link included to bypass paywall): "I’m a Neuroscientist. We’re Thinking About Biden’s Memory and Age in the Wrong Way." (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/12/opinion/neuroscientist-on-biden-age-memory.html?unlocked_article_code=1.V00.sKLm.WadMpQIx8KP4&smid=url-share)

SHOW SYNOPSIS:

CeeGees Aloud: where together we try to figure out how to find Common Ground, forge Common Good, and fight Corporate Greed in this absurdist 21st century society of ours.

And to help the medicine go down, we discuss classic rock, classic pop, classic country, and, especially, '80s metal. (OK fine, call it "hair metal" if you must...)

CeeGees Aloud is 50% narration of the previous week's CeeGees.org Substack newsletter, and 50% check-in on the current events discussed in that newsletter.

Theme music: Faith in Phantoms' "Let It Go"

Happy Friday, music (and current events) fans! OK, lighter in tone and quicker in tempo this week.

And to review for newbies, CeeGees is a music musings s#!t sandwich with current events commentary as the filling. Most music commentary covers classic metal/rock/pop/country that I’m much much much too young to have consumed, I got the music bug from my way way way older mysterious cousin “Moneybags” Melvin Moore from Monaco. I just speak in the first person because it’s…easier that way.

THE TOP PIECE: The Sound Shoppe, My (i.e. Melvin’s) Music Sanctuary

For our second look at one of my (i.e. Melvin’s) old cassettes, we continue down from the top-left. It happens to be a big one for me, so thanks in advance for the indulgence.

What was your musical heaven growing up? Specifically the record store where you rushed to after school every Tuesday to devour all the new albums that had come out that day?

[EDITOR’S NOTE: For you younger CeeGeesies, “albums” were collections of songs recorded by artists at roughly the same time and released for purchase together as a single product. This was a physical product, something you could hold in your hands, the format being what we called a “compact disc” (or “CD”). If you’re really old you might have instead purchased in cassette tape format. Or if you’re really old, vinyl disk format…which I guess if you’re really young you might actually have heard of vinyl too since they are back in style.]

My heavenly haven for (mostly) hard rock was the Sound Shoppe right on the town square of Bryan, my 8,000-person home town nestled in Northwest Ohio farm country.

I could dance, and I wanted to! (I’d even leave my friends behind…)

My first-ever record purchase—not that I bought with my own money, but just that I consciously decided I wanted and asked my mom to consider buying—was, ironically, not a very good “album.” Men Without Hats just had the one big hit, “The Safety Dance.” But I wanted the big record, not the small record, so I asked for the full-length album rather than the single, not knowing what the difference was.

And I got it home and started to get really good at lifting the needle on the record player after “Safety Dance” was done playing and dropping it in the groove before the song so I could listen just to “Safety Dance” over and over instead of having to trudge through the rest of the record. (I should probably revisit that record, Rhythm of Youth, though—who knows, maybe it’s good?)

But that Men Without Hats transaction went down at a K-Mart. As MTV increasingly lured me into its programming, K-Mart’s limited selection quickly became insufficient. So we went allllll the way on the other side of town to the Murphy Mart. They had even less selection—although I did have Mom buy me my first-ever music magazine at Murphy Mart, a Hit Parader whose cover featured a band I was curious about called Kiss. I knew that in previous years they wore crazy makeup and were real-life superheroes (I was young enough to truly think they were literally real-life superheroes), but had never really considered that this rock “band” played music.

And when I got that new purchase home, that was all she wrote. The hardest-rocking song I’d gotten into to that point was The Police’s “King of Pain” (which still ties with Stewart Copeland’s “Miss Gradenko” as my fave Police tune). And sure, Sting looked cool amongst all those candles in the “Every Breath You Take” video. But he didn’t look like the guys in this magazine.

And it was indeed always all guys in these rock mags, of course—although Joan Jett did find a way to sneak into that first Hit Parader. (In the band listings on the cover, her name even secured a higher billing over both Kick Axe and Zebra.) But otherwise it was Dio, Judas Priest, Mötley Crüe, Ratt, Van Halen, Scorpions, Def Leppard.

A Rock ‘n’ Roll Alter on Which a Budding Metalhead Might Worship

One Friday, Dad picked me up from Grandma and Grandpa’s and asked if I wanted to stop by the music shop owned by a friend of his from high school. “Oh great,” I thought, “maybe we can walk out of there with another Creedence Clearwater Revival album, or maybe some Chicago. 🙄” (Of course, I secretly loved Creedence and Chicago, on my way to really loving Creedence and Chicago later on.)

The Sound Shoppe looked like such a tiny place from the outside, but it was deeeeep (at least to me). By then I’d graduated to preferring cassettes, so I—skeptically—shuffled past the vinyl record section and…

And there were tapes. And tapes. And tapes and tapes. Twice as much selection as K-Mart. I started scanning through the ‘A’ section and immediately found a record from Accept. I didn’t know what they sounded like or why they were called Accept (still don’t), but I knew they were featured in that Hit Parader magazine.

“Waitaminute. If this store has a record by this weird band led by this tiny little singer with the blond crew cut, foreign-sounding name, and head-to-toe camouflage outfit, then…”

Neither K-Mart nor Murphy Mart ever had any Kiss. I remember they had some Beatles compilations, and some Led Zeppelin. But…who the hell were the Beatles and Led Zeppelin?

It was the moment of truth. Time to skip ‘B’ through ‘J.’

And there they were. “They.” As in, multiple Kiss titles. But did they have the only Kiss album I’d ever heard of? Thanks to that February 19## Hit Parader [EDITOR’S NOTE: precise year omitted to protect author from suggesting he’s way, way older than he actually is], that album was called Animalize. I probably ignored the band’s more popular ‘70s releases like Destroyer, or the best live album in rock history, Alive! (don’t argue, just accept what you begrudgingly know is true). Because there it was. I would have picked Animalize anyway because it was the only tape with the actually supercool Kiss logo right there on the spine! And in COLOR, no less!

In the interest of time and risking sounding even more self-indulgent than usual, we can skip talking about the songs on that album, like the hit, “Heaven’s on Fire” (sacrilegious?). Or the song after it that had a cuss word in its very title!! (“Burn Bitch Burn,” a truly deplorable song lyrically, in all ways. But that opening riff…). Or the track that I was almost positive said the F-word, even though it wasn’t written in the lyrics (“Get All You Can Take”).

Let’s just say that purchase, and my dad’s assistance in helping me discover the Sound Shoppe, changed every last thing. My wiring was forever altered.

THE FILLING: Sorry, But…the Age Thing

Did you hear about Joe Biden getting cleared by the special prosecutor of any criminal wrongdoing in his own “stolen” classified documents case? The prosecutor pretty much said he wouldn’t bring a case because Ol’ Joe is too senile.

That’s the story that jumped out at me most in current events this week, that a high-profile public figure called out Biden’s ability to recall important dates and events from his vice presidency. Here’s a CBS News article:

Prosecutors said it was possible that Mr. Biden would "present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." During his interview with Hur, the special counsel wrote that the president was confused about the timeline of events and was unable to ascertain questions about his time as vice president. 

I hate to ask you this—especially if you’re reading this while winding down on a Friday night because I said I was going to take things more lightly this week—but if an alternative choice to Biden for president in November does not step forward, is Trump going to win?

I’m not ready to say that, but I can’t help but just resent it that no massive can’t-miss figure like Oprah, or Tom Hanks, or, I think, Jon Stewart will step forward. I know it’s a huge life undertaking and all, but dang, man, this is important! I don’t think I ever knew what “existential” meant before 2016. But I do now: this is an existential crisis. As in, if Trump wins, American democracy will no longer exist. We’ll be one giant leap away from Elysium (call-back from last week!).

I just can’t help but dwell on Biden’s showing in the Democratic debates four years ago, when he was but a young whippersnapper at 77. (He’ll turn 82 two weeks after the election this year.) he was a true and total disaster at times, making weird references like how poor moms can’t even drop the needle on a record and…something-something-something, lemme find what he said…….

Y’know, it’s not quite as cringeworthy as I remembered it, but I think that probably has to do with our becoming desensitized to his lack of sharpness.

As my dad said back in 2000 [paraphrasing]: “No, George W. Bush isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but he’s surrounding himself with good people.” And that fact, however accurate it might (not) have been, made it OK to vote for Dubya.

As my mom said back in…well, back on Sunday, “But who’s the alternative to Joe, then?” And she’s right, the answer is nobody right now. And it should have us all very afraid. Because in this instance there do seem to be good people around him, but not to the extent that everybody knows who they are and is comfortable voting for Joe knowing that his cracker-jack staff is guiding him in the right direction.

As my younger roommate Dave has said, if the attitude toward Biden of the younger people he hangs out with is any indication, he doesn’t think Biden has a prayer in November.

THE BOTTOM PIECE: Pick a number, any number…

And as always (I know this is only the second time we’ve done it but let me have this, OK??), the bottom music piece of the CeeGees shizz sandwich requires an AI bot (Lord help us) pick a number from 1 to 965 that will determine which of the 965 songs I muse over in my Spotify playlist called “Recollection Records: Music That’s Entered My Head Out of Nowhere.”

And the wiener is: 712.

Oh geez. I mean, the image that first comes to mind is the cover of the cassette I got during a trip to Defiance, Ohio (you know, the big city! Because Mom and Dad had already bought me the five Kiss titles the Sound Shoppe had to offer.) But it wasn’t Peter’s entire solo album (released on the same exact day as his three other Kiss bandmates’ solo albums; this marked the beginning of the end of Kiss’ ‘70s heyday in my view). It was a German import (I’d already graduated to buying German imports, y’all!!) that featured (to Germans, I guess) the best three songs from each solo album.

I couldn’t believe my luck that this Sam Goody’s had this tape. I had seen the images of the four faces from the solo album covers before, but I didn’t know about the actual solo albums. Jackpot!

The tape had a weird yellow spine. And what was this “Casablanca Records?” I knew record labels were a thing from their gaining mention in Hit Parader, but I thought Kiss was on Mercury? (Casablanca was the infamous label mostly known for disco in addition to breaking Kiss.)

And the name of the tape was weird, “The Best of Solo-Albums?“ Even at that age I knew that wasn’t proper grammar. (And I am now cursed with the persnickety eye of a copy editor, doomed to annoy any would-be writers who might dare deliver so much as an errant emdash.) AND THAT LOGO! Where did the cool double S’s go?

Of course I didn’t know until later that this was, indeed, an imported album from Germany. And in designing an early version of Kiss’ logo, lead guitarist Ace Frehley (unknowingly, he insists) used two S’s that together looked remarkably like the Nazi officer’s SS.

So that logo was a no-go in Germany.

But anyway. I loved Gene Simmons’ “Radioactive” (spooky!), and Ace’s three songs from his solo album all ripped. But I wasn’t all that sure about the other stuff on the compilation. It was certainly no Animalize. (Now Paul Stanley’s solo album is a close second to Ace’s for me.)

That said, “Hooked on Rock ‘n’ Roll” was by far the best of the three Peter songs. But it was the last song on Side One of the tape, and thus would’ve required stop-and-go fast-forwarding to get to. So I’d usually just rewind back to the beginning of that side and re-listen to Ace’s songs. (Sorry, Peter! I think it’s a real nice album as an adult, the ‘50s throwback stuff just didn’t resonate with my zygote ears…)

That’s all I got! Thanks for reading!!

Yours,
~Dean

P.S. In the spirit of the modern-day media industry, I have not proofed the above, ‘cuz I just wanted to get it out there so it could get some traction and I could move on to the next thing. Maybe I’ll get to reviewing it if I get any spare time. “Perfection is the enemy of the good,” after all. 🤢

P.P.S. Accept band name history here!

If this band name history synopsis didn’t meet your expectations, this P.P.S. will self-destruct in exactly 10 seconds. Have a nice weekend!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

SHOW NOTES

CeeGees Aloud: where together we try to figure out how to find Common Ground, forge Common Good, and fight Corporate Greed in this absurdist 21st century society of ours.

And to help the medicine go down, we discuss classic rock, classic pop, classic country, and, especially, '80s metal. (OK fine, call it "hair metal" if you must...)

It's kinda-sorta Season 2, but really it's the first episode not generated on Substack. CeeGees Aloud is 50% narration of the previous week's CeeGees.org Substack newsletter, and 50% check-in on the topics discussed in that newsletter.

This first pod back explains what our new initiative is, ties in college basketball with this music and current events podcast somehow, and then recaps that Congress' bipartisan border/international aid bill, their bipartisan bill to help poor kids (and REALLY help rich adults), and their bipartisan siege upon the evil social network companies were all successful and perfect and we're finally tired of winning we're winning so much.

And then Dean narrates aloud (with some new BONUS asides woohoo) last Friday February 2nd's CeeGees.org Substack newsletter, which analyzed Aerosmith's Permanent Vacation album and the Doobie Brothers' "It Keeps You Runnin'" for very important reasons Dean will explain within.

Articles mentioned to explore further:

NPR: "Congress devolves into chaos over border and national security funding" (https://www.npr.org/2024/02/06/1229490663/congress-devolves-into-chaos-over-border-and-national-security-funding)

NPR: "Senate GOP blocks border bill, Democrats shift focus to Israel and Ukraine aid" (NOTE: As mentioned in the episode, NPR first titled this piece "With border deal derailed by GOP opposition, Democrats move to pass Ukraine aid") (https://www.npr.org/2024/02/07/1229785349/border-deal-ukraine-aid-senate)

Common Dreams: "'A Mockery': House Passes Tax Bill That Favors Corporations Over Children" (https://www.commondreams.org/news/corporations-child-tax-credit)

Theme music: Faith in Phantoms' "Let It Go"

I know, I know, depending on what coast you’re on you’re probably either just squeezing in one last drink and app at Happy Hour, or just sitting down to Happy Hour. But that’s when I wanted to send my first post in months—when you’re happy! And won’t get too mad at me for not sending a post in months!

It’s rough out there.

It’s hard to know what’s most useful to write about anymore. And it’s hard to feel optimistic. Most of those supposedly in-the-know seem to think Donald Trump has a better-than-average shot at winning back the White House. Three days after my last post on October 4, Hamas staged their attack on Israel. And I keep getting notices for job openings that say, “Teach our artificial intelligence software to better understand English!” (So that human writing and editing will become obsolete, I presume…)

So I dunno if you’re anything like me, but I’m not sure what to do with this Substack anymore, or how to feel about the state of the world, or what to believe our futures might look like.

Too heavy? Yeah, too heavy—for a Friday, especially! Sorry…

OK, going for more optimism, here. (I can’t promise an optimistic piece, but “more” optimism than normal I can commit to.) I’m gonna implement my half-baked plan to prepare a nice shit sandwich of music and current events for you like I was musing over in my last post. A little music commentary at the beginning and end, with some current events commentary in the middle.

THE TOP PIECE: Moneybags Melvin

This is but the top cassette case in my cassette tower of four total cassette cases. My dad and I built this tower, and a CD tower, when I was in college, in the living room of my first rental house after moving out.

Building such a structure was one of Dad’s and my greatest achievements in handiwork. Which is to say, we were never the handiest of handymen. But every once in awhile Dad would surprise himself and install something elaborate. Or, one time (not in band camp), I took apart a broken washing machine and was able to put it back together again. (No I didn’t fix it or find what was wrong but the point is I totally disassembled and totally reassembled a washing machine. Right? Whatever.)

Now, of course, I was not old enough to have purchased most of these cassettes. I barely even know what cassettes are, tbh. These are all my much older cousin Melvin’s, and were handed down to me after Melvin perished in a mysterious yachting accident off the coast of Monaco.

If I’m being honest, I’m fairly pissed all I got were Melvin’s cassette and CD collection, seeing as he went yachting in Monaco on the reg. But nonetheless, I shall always cherish his mentoring me on all things classic rock and ‘80s metal. He told me his grandiose stories of growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s absolutely consumed by music and MTV so precisely and passionately, in fact, that it almost feels like I was there myself (when, as mentioned, I am far far far too young to have taken part in the ‘80s and ‘90s music scene).

Therefore, since Melvin was such a killer storyteller, I am going to go ahead and talk about these cassettes in the first person, as if it were me (preposterous!) who grew up with this music. It’s the least I can do for my dearly departed cousin Melvin (who should’ve at least given me his Honolulu blue 1970 Pontiac Firebird. At least!).

“Walk This Way”

Anyway! The cassettes are arranged by color, from darkest at the top down to lightest at the bottom of the tower. Otherwise there’s no rhyme or reason to the slot in which they were placed. That said we start at the top-left slot with Aerosmith’s Permanent Vacation.

“I” (me actually being Melvin, of course) might not have purchased the Boston bad boys’ big comeback album if not for their collaboration with Run D.M.C. on the remake of their ‘70s hit “Walk This Way.” But it was so exciting the way the video started off, with these two vastly different bands in green rooms separated by a flimsy wall, and the old fogies Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith (who were 38 and 36, respectively) getting so offended by the rap music leaking through the wall that Tyler smashes a microphone stand base through the wall to stop the ruckus.

I’m writing this all from memory, let’s see how close I got:

Pretty close. Anyways. Mayyyyyybe I’d heard some rap by the time this video came out? But this was the first time a (painfully) white kid from Northwest Ohio farm country ever truly paid attention to a rap group—just like all the other (painfully) white kids in the hinterlands who MTV execs wisely targeted before focusing on big-city kids. We were the most impressionable, I suppose.

But at the time I didn’t like Aerosmith. I knew nothing of the original “Walk This Way,” or the massive ballad “Dream On,” or anything else they’d released—other than the album previous to Permanent Vacation, Done With Mirrors. Which, other than the coolness factor of having to look at the cover in a mirror to read, was a bust for my (i.e. Melvin’s) young ears.

Except for the single, “Let the Music Do the Talking,” I thought the record was boring. No life to it. I’d later find out that it had only gone halfway toward bringing back the magic of the band’s ‘70s heyday. Reunite the so-called “Toxic Twins” in bringing back guitarist Perry to once again team with vocalist Tyler? Check. Excise the “toxic” from the Twins’ agenda? No check.

It wasn’t until Aerosmith made the very public decision to get clean—as a band—that they were able to wrap their unclouded heads around listening to label guru John Kalodner and revamping their sound to be more pop-oriented. And the rest is Aerosmithstory (I came up with that word! Just now!).

Totally dug every song on Permanent Vacation. Album opener “Heart’s Done Time” announced the band was truly back and hearkened back to their ‘70s glory days. But then “Rag Doll” was way different…way catchier and poppier. And “Angel” is a powerful and unjustly forgotten entry in the annals of the ‘80s power ballad—and probably the harbinger of the “Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” version of Aerosmith we had in store. And then of course there was the first proper single of Aerosmith’s second coming, “Dude (Looks Like a Lady).”

Which kinda had the same premise as Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing”—it was taking the piss out of the glam metal scene that had taken over MTV by 1987. And yet it was a glam metal scene Aerosmith were only too happy to assimilate themselves into, like ‘70s brethren Kiss, Whitesnake, Judas Priest, and Twisted Sister were also doing with great success at the time.

I think the vaunted/infamous John Kalodner helped Aerosmith reinvent themselves just so he could insert himself into the video for “Dude” and provide us one of the iconic images of the hair metal scene:

THE FILLING: Finally, some bipartisan—but inevitably sabotaged—movement in D.C.

Did you hear about the left and the right working together in Washington this last week?

That’s the story that jumped out at me most in current events, that they actually came upon the precipice of a compromise that would limit immigration, which the right wants; and send more much-needed aid to Ukraine to continue holding off Russia’s invasion, which the left wants. (Well, many on the right still want to help Ukraine, too, but not enough to cross the shitkickers in their party who aren’t interested in maintaining a democracy in America, let alone democracy in some Eurasian country 5,000 miles away.)

I don’t know all the details, but the New York Times’ “The Daily” podcast talks about where things stand in yesterday’s episode, see below. But it sure sounds like two objectives both sides either really like, or at least don’t really hate, have been sabotaged at the very strong, very powerful suggestion of Donald Trump.

Trump thinks he’s going to win back the presidency on immigration remaining a crisis. And, it is bad down there. But apparently not really as bad Republicans in Washington have been insisting?

The GOP plan appears to be ramming into folks’ minds the thought of [paraphrasing] “strong young males who are bad hombres coming from shithole countries in droves to cross our Swiss-cheese border.” The play is that this is going to so frighten people that the right will eek out some big wins in the coming election. So instead of following through with what Republicans in Congress themselves demanded—no new aid to Ukraine until the border is addressed—Trump now may have persuaded enough Republicans to vote against the bill and keep immigration a crisis until November.

I may be getting some of the details wrong, so here’s “The Daily” episode that has the full story:

And two more bipartisan initiatives?!!

I’m running too long, here (as usual, just like the good ol’ days), but YES:

1. Both parties ganged up on the heads of the world’s biggest social media platforms this week. It may have only achieved a personal face-to-face apology from Mark Zuckerberg to the families of kids who have been abused or died due to mistreatment via Facebook and Instagram, but still. A pretty even contingent of Democrats and Republicans leading the charge in a hearing against evil corporations is…something.
   

2. AND: A bill that might actually pass is receiving bipartisan support, too. The good news: it’ll help poor kids. The bad news: as former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich explains in an article on his Substack, it “restores a set of business tax breaks that will benefit the richest 1 percent of Americans quite a lot, and the richest 0.1 percent even more.”
   
   What’s your take? Would you pass a bill that would provide relief for some while supercharging inequality even more?

THE BOTTOM PIECE: Pick a number, any number…

OK I’ll make this last one quick(er). I have a Spotify playlist called “Recollection Records: Music That’s Entered My Head Out of Nowhere.” So it can’t be something I consciously know I heard on an ad or a TV show or film. It’s something that came outta nowhere, and thus is clearly buried deep in my psyche, from past repeated listens. (Repeated listens encouraged by ol’ Cousin Melvin, no doubt.)

And therefore…lots of hair metal, lots of classic rock, lots of ‘70s, ‘80s, and some ‘90s pop. And lots of other stuff too, cuz there are 965 songs on this playlist, and counting.

So I’m gonna have Perplexity.ai (Lord help us) pick a random number from 1 to 965, I’ll talk about what I first think of when it comes to that song—probably where I was when I first got into the tune—and then we’ll be done here. And you can go back to enjoying your Friday. Or Saturday, or Sunday, if you’re reading this then.

And Perplexity’s pick izzzzzzzz… 512.

Oh geez. I mean, I don’t know where I first heard “It Keeps You Runnin’.” Let’s see, it was released in…yeah 1978. So, even before Melvin’s time!

But I can say that I enjoy Michael McDonald Doobies as much as, if not more than pre-Michael McDonald Doobies. The only other tidbit I can offer is that the Doobie Brothers were the second-billed band on the Lynyrd Skynyrd music cruise I played on with Truth & Salvage Co. some years ago. So I remember hanging briefly with a couple Doobies members who were definitely not Michael McDonald.

And I love this Michael McDonald-as-premier-backing-vocalist skit from Rick Moranis on SCTV:

Happy Friday, music (and current events) fans!

Yours,
~Dean

P.S. In the spirit of the modern-day media industry, I have not proofed the above, ‘cuz I just wanted to get it out there so it could get some traction and I could move on to the next thing. Maybe I’ll get to reviewing it if I get any spare time. “Perfection is the enemy of the good,” after all. 🤢

P.P.S. And I’m sure there are typos because this bluetooth keyboard’s period key keeps sticking and weird punctuation keeps happening. So that’s why that weird punctuation happened. If it happened. If it didn’t, this P.P.S. will self-destruct in exactly 10 seconds. Have a nice weekend!

I haven’t posted in so long because I’ve had to focus on getting a full-time job. Once I got my full-time job I had to focus on proving that I should be allowed to retain my full-time job.

Which, I’m pretty sure I’ve done so far. I’m editing the freelance work coming in for American Songwriter magazine. What a concept, doing something for a living that I actually went to college and got a degree for. Just took a short 26 years for me to land that first journalism gig out of IU!

That’s not really true, though, I’ve done a lot of freelance and part-time writing and editing stuff…just not full-time music magazine writing and editing stuff.

I feel kind of like the Writers Guild writers coming back from the picket lines, trying to make sense of the past many months and figure out what to write about.

• Today, Kevin McCarthy got voted out of his beloved Speaker of the House gig. First time that’s ever happened.
  

• Of course, there have been a lot of firsts over the last few months when it comes to national news, starting with all those Trump indictments. None of that crap seems as much of an existential crisis to me anymore for some reason. Maybe it’s because I’m working Monday through Friday and concentrating on making a good impression at work. When your mind is occupied with day-to-day business busyness, the political clown show in D.C. seems less relevant to the kind of shit I need to be worrying about.
  
  Which, of course, is the kind of thing the extreme far right folks are hoping for—that left-leaners will become preoccupied elsewhere and let their guard down, and/or assume Trump is going to jail and could thus never be elected (which, remember, doesn’t mean he can’t still be friggin’ president from a damn jail cell!).
  

• There have been a lot of firsts over the last few months when it comes to local news here in Nashville, as well. The lead story (for me, at least) being that super-duper progressives were elected as mayor and as the representative for District 51 in the Tennessee House.
  
  Last year, my buddy Jay (hi Jay) and I walked down from a rehearsal at my house to the house of Aftyn Behn, a very active activist who was a guest on my COVID-era version of East Nashville Happy Hour in early 2020. She was hosting a meet-n-greet house party for who I assumed was a long-shot for mayor—and I think at the time he was. But there was free pizza and wine, so, we went.
  
  And since it’s almost 1 a.m. I have to go to bed soon (still not used to going to bed before 3 ), so I’ll just confirm that, lo and behold, Freddie O’Connell freakin’ won, he is now currently our mayor. And Nashville is a solidly blue dot in the red state of Tennessee, but…like I said, he is super-duper progressive.
  
  And an even bigger surprise: the state House representative for Aftyn’s district passed away unexpectedly, she decided to run to replace him—and she was a real long-shot I thought—and she up ‘n’ won! For a hot second there I was poised to come on board her campaign as a writer and/or event producer, but her campaign manager’s cooler head prevailed (i.e. I’d never worked on a campaign before and they didn’t have the budget for such silliness). However, Aftyn did allow me to propose and compose her policy agenda on arts funding. Which was kind of exciting—especially when she won.

  

But now I have to figure out what CeeGees should be moving forward.

The easy part: I still want to include a music-related element. Two ideas that would definitely be fun for me and may or may not be fun for anyone else:

1. I now have 950 songs in my Spotify playlist that needs a new name but is currently called “Recollection Records: Music That Has Entered My Head Out of Nowhere for No Reason.”
   
   I can’t have heard the song on the radio recently, or seen somebody play it at a concert, or consciously have heard it in any other context. It has to be a song that I become aware of randomly popping into my head for no apparent reason. There are a lot of ‘80s metal songs. But the last song that popped in there was “I Know What Boys Like,” by…I don’t even remember who it’s by. Oh…The Waitresses?? Never heard of ‘em, but…I found myself humming the song for no reason this morning.
   
   Is that weird? That that’s happened to me 950 times over the last five or six years or so and counting? Or does that happen to everybody?
   
   But anyway, I’d like to play a song at random and try to remember where I first heard it, what the circumstances might have been, maybe talk a bit about the song’s and/or the artist’s origins.
   

2. Similarly, I have a collection of cassettes and CDs I still display in my living room as art pieces. They are no longer positioned by title but by the color of the spine of the tape or disc case. And I figure I’ll just start at the top-left of the cassette tower and work my way through all of them, talking about the same stuff as mentioned above.
   

But, of course, the music stuff should serve as an add-on. What I really want to do with the blog is explore ways to find Common Ground, forge Common Good, and fight Corporate Greed.

My running idea before my job hunt hiatus was to seek out folks who hold different positions within various different communities throughout the entire state of Tennessee and find out what makes them tick, what makes their communities tick, what they’re passionate about, what they’re worried about, what they need their local government to do for them, and what they’re willing to do for their communities to make their own lives, their family’s and friends’ lives, and their communities overall better. Stuff like that.

Hell, I need to ask myself all that stuff. I need a reset now that my life has taken a turn—for the better, but it’s a strange turn I haven’t made in a while…and the sexy Australian lady who tells me how to get places in my car hasn’t offered up much in the way of what direction I should be turning next on the Highway of Life. In fact, she ain’t said shit.

And here is where I would have found the link to the part in Spaceballs where the evil Spaceballs are “combing the desert” for Lone Star and his crew, and the two Black stormtrooper types who have only been given a giant hair pick to comb through the sand—when their white counterparts have been given much bigger, proper giant combs—say, “We ain’t found shit!” Which, within the context of the film is quite funny, but as I said, I have to go to bed so I can get up at 7 a.m. and go to work tomorrow. So I can’t be searching for funny videos for this post. Which is killing me because that’s what the post needs to not be me just spouting off with a bunch of words. but I didn’t want to not post yet again. So at least this will have gotten my juices flowing. Thanks for humoring me.

P.S. Under normal circumstances it would also be appropriate to discuss where the aforementioned Spaceballs skit falls on the Woke-a-Meter. My first thought is that Mel Brooks is acknowledging that Black people always get short shrift, in an act of empathy and solidarity. Kind of like it’s a running joke that Black folks are always the first to get knocked off in horror flicks. But are Black folks sick of that kind of crap being used for comedy fodder?

P.P.S. If it weren’t now 1:34 a.m. I might also find the “Life Is a Highway” video and link to it where it says “…what direction I should be turning next on the Highway of Life.” But I’m a company man now, can’t compromise my ability to be an effective editor any more than I already have.

I can’t even edit back through this. I’m just gonna post it. That is really painful. But you don’t mind, do you? Just this once?