Something else to expect in the 2008 elections

Obviously, it's hard to make predictions in this campaign season. Candidates have been up and they've been down. Winners have lost and losers have won. Dogs and cats have, in fact, been observed living together in harmony (with mice, no less), and I'm pretty sure I saw Gozer The Destructor buying cigarettes and a skin mag at the gas station when I filled the tank earlier today. But I think I may be able to predict one thing.

It seems that Tom Scholz, the man who was Boston, is kinda pissed off that Mike Huckabee has occasionally been using the Boston song "More Than A Feeling" at campaign rallies. Indeed, it seems that Mr. Scholz is a teeny bit left of Huckabee, preferring Barack Obama as a candidate. So he's asked Huckabee to just quit, already, and stop using his damn songs.

Now, I have to be honest here: I really dislike Boston. Behind every cool album cover showing a guitar-shaped spaceship raining flames down on the world was a piece of vinyl with some of the lamest, wussiest, cheesiest ballads ever used to peel off a high school sophomore's panties in the back of a 1973 sedan during Carter's last year in office. And the biggest ripoff wasn't the cool album cover implying world-destroying cosmic guitars that never came through: the biggest ripoff was that the guys in Boston--or Tom Scholz, who basically was Boston on their first album--were pretty talented musicians who had a propensity for starting a song with a pretty cool instrumental that promised something harder-rocking than the pansy pop ballad that you got 45 seconds into the song. But I think it's pretty funny that Scholz is telling Huckabee to, in so many words, kiss his ass and go to hell. He may write some lame-ass songs, but hey, go Tom!

It appears that this tiff is occurring in the wake of John Mellencamp telling John McCain to stop using "Pink Houses" and "Our Country" at McCain rallies. Coincidentally, Mellencamp is another performer I don't have much use for. But once again, I think it's pretty funny. Go "Jack And Diane"-guy!

But here's the really funny part:

Scholz, in a telephone interview Friday, said he understands “More Than a Feeling” has been a centerpiece at some rallies, and said Goudreau is identified with the band in an endorsement video.

“Whenever a campaign publicly exploits a well-known song, there is some inference of support” by the band or artist, he added.

He recommends that Huckabee “stick to music recorded by far-right Republicans.”

What's so funny about that, you might ask?

Republicans have a problem. I know, there are many problems, but we're just talking about this one: they don't have very many cool rock'n'rollers. Not very many live ones, anyway. I guess they kinda had Elvis, at least during that phase when Elvis was so stoned he thought he would make an awesome DEA agent with his karate skills, music industry connections, and passion for shooting holes in things. I mean, when you get right down to it, the conservatives pretty much have Ted Nugent and Damn Yankees (and please don't leave a comment pointing out that Ted Nugent is a member of Damn Yankees--that was the fucking joke... great, you made me ruin it, thanks a lot). And liberals? We pretty much have everybody else.

I've long suspected that the reason you see so many conservative types saying musicians (and, for that matter, actors and writers in their respective gigs) should "shut up and sing, I don't listen to them for their politics" is sour grapes. One can't help thinking that if Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about how the flat tax saved his baby, conservatives would be all about how everyone should embrace The Boss' political anthems. Ditto if U2 did a song about the sinfulness of homosexuality or R.E.M. did a song about reading your Bible everyday.

Is there some kind of mass-media conspiracy? No, I think it's that one of the central tenets of liberalism, "question everything, especially authority," goes better with the rock'n'roll ethos of rebellion, originality and novelty. You see more conservatives in country music in part because country music attempts to hew to an ethos of tradition; rebels and iconoclasts in the country genre often find themselves more welcome among rock fans (and the politics of iconoclasts can be awfully hard to pin down--take Willie Nelson, for instance, who's kinda liberal and kinda conservative and kinda in his own world). That's not to say you can't have conservatives in rock--hi, Ted--I'm merely saying it's not as natural a pairing of instincts.

So here's the prediction (remember, I said I had a prediction to make): from now on, all Republican rallies will feature either country music or The Nuge. Long shot prediction: every single public appearance by McCain or Huckabee will feature "Don't Tread On Me."

That's all.