It is incendiary. It is angry. It is everything that we all feel right now, if we empathize in any way with those in New Orleans and beyond.
Ahe-yuhe-yu
We shall live again.
We shall live again.
But in the meantime:
Baby was a black sheep. Baby was a whore.
Baby got big and baby get bigger.
Baby get something. Baby get more.
Baby, baby, baby was a rock-and-roll nigger.
Oh, look around you, all around you,
riding on a copper wave.
Do you like the world around you?
Are you ready to behave?
Outside of society, they’re waitin’ for me.
Outside of society, that’s where I want to be.
(Lenny!)
Baby was a black sheep. Baby was a whore.
You know she got big. Well, she’s gonna get bigger.
Baby got a hand; got a finger on the trigger.
Baby, baby, baby is a rock-and-roll nigger.
Outside of society, that’s where I want to be.
Outside of society, they’re waitin’ for me.
(those who have suffered, understand suffering,
and thereby extend their hand
the storm that brings harm
also makes fertile
blessed is the grass
and herb and the true thorn and light)
I was lost in a valley of pleasure.
I was lost in the infinite sea.
I was lost, and measure for measure,
love spewed from the heart of me.
I was lost, and the cost,
and the cost didn’t matter to me.
I was lost, and the cost
was to be outside society.
Jimi Hendrix was a nigger.
Jesus Christ and Grandma, too.
Jackson Pollock was a nigger.
Nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger,
nigger, nigger, nigger.
Outside of society, they’re waitin’ for me.
Outside of society, if you’re looking,
that’s where you’ll find me.
Outside of society, they’re waitin’ for me.
Outside of society. (Repeat)
Patti Smith, “Rock n Roll Nigger”, Easter, copyright 1978.
30 Years ago. This song was written thirty fucking years ago. What the fuck has changed. It has gotten worse. We now exterminate cities. We now withhold insurance from doctors who want to go help those in need. We now prevent food and water from getting to the “niggers” dying by the thousands in New Orleans. Why? Who the fuck knows.
And we wonder why they are “outside of society”. A large portion of the US population is “outside of society”. They have fucking nothing. Their life is a living hell.
And now, in New Orleans, they are being exterminated because they are “outside of society”.
Fuck this country. I mean it. Fuck this country. “We” have continually made excuses for why we can’t take care of our own. “We” have continually obscured the plight of the impoversihed in this country. “We” have been happy [even if uneasily so] to enable economic decimation of a third of our population.
And now “we’re” openly killing them.
Fuck this country.
This country no longer has anything to do with what those who wrote our constitution envisioned. It is a fascist economic state.
Welcome to our fucking country: Land of the deluded and the exploited, and now, the murdered.
.
Leadership fails :: Democracy failed :: Muster all Assets for Election ’06 & ’08
Our Country is We The People – ordinary citizens always have and will be the backbone of America. From a position of solidarity with our brothers and sisters in NOLA and the underdog in our society, one may write those lyrics. However when HOPE is lost, all is lost.
Diary recommended!
The seventies took Nixon and the republicans down ::
time to rumble once again – let the people’s voices be heard.
~~~
I certainly hope we can do something before the 2006 elections.
These people need to be prosecuted for their criminal behavious.
This might be a good time for what lyrics can give us. Here’s mine for the moment. It’s the last chorus (and different from the rest) of Bob Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” the true story of a black woman who worked in a hotel kitchen and who was beaten to death by a young white customer named William Zanzinger after she splashed something on him by accident. He got a six-month sentence:
Funny – last night while writing this & then restringing my guitar, what was I listening too. First Patti, then Bob Dylan, then Hendrix’s performance at Woodstock…
Poet’s of rage all…
And get this: last week I posted, for my composition students, a blog about listening to Hendrix play just that, as I walked up the hill towards the Hog Farm that Monday morning at the end of the Woodstock festival.
And I play that Patti Smith album regularly in my store.
Thanks for posting this, Patti is still a genius. I’ve been hearing and reading about the people who are obeying authority these days: The people who went to the Convention Center because they were promised help there. The Texas trucker with a trailer full of bottled water whe was all ready to leave for LA on Monday night, but his boss said no! The Florida airboatmen who were loaded with supplies and ready to go on Thursday, but FEMA said no! The rescuers who posed with Bush.
What is it with these people, sitting down and saying “okay, you’re the boss.” I saw a doctor on TV who didn’t bow to authority and did what was necessary. Will there be any more? It’s getting hard to find courage anywhere.
I know how you feel – putting “we” in quotes. That sentiment of unity is dissolving fast. Hopefully, out of destruction comes creation, “we” must be creating something awesome.
Yes we need to forge a “we” that we can be proud of – something that in reality, not just design, lives up to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. It just sucks that in the meantime thousands of our own people are dying needlessly.