Between these once perfect shores we, the consumer/glove-puppet, have been kowtowing to the bigotry of one midget minded moralist or another since the earliest days of the DJ & the record producer shaped songwriter/singer/session musician/radio/fan base collaboration/establishment. 

Good music, poignant groundbreaking music, historically, has had only a small window of opportunity.  Songs, deep efforts, sound recordings, immaculate inspiration, vivid & honestly depicted human drama has been banned by those who would duct tape radio station doors closed.  Banned & broken, & burned at the stake; …the bleeding hearts & the artists…stand down. 

There was a moment though,  & always the occasional lucky accident; e.g., Welcome to the Boomtown.  Sometimes a song, although honest in depiction, breaks the chains of another pedantic starched & priggish ire-driven means to an end of romanticism.  Idealism, that most naïve human consideration, that clear mountain stream between two warring encampments, which provides the ultimately unattainable real estate wherein ego’s intrepid intention means for only one flag to be unfurled; one notion to be...discharged without alternative.

Honestly, what really has changed?  There’s been the yin & yang, the meat & the potatoes……..in all of it, perpetuated/forced.

&, mournfully, more often than not the ugliest of notions, filled with the bravery of superiority and influence, tends to rule the fort & the motivations of the most unmemorable moldable masses (the look-to-you-to-prove-my-meaning-morose-mass-of-my-way-or-the-highway-claims-to-malice...) go mightily on down the line squaring toes and dressing right dress  &  presenting arms.

So mediocrity stirs the soup primarily; & only the rare life affirming and world rousing oddity floats to the surface & swims.

Better than book burnings & uniformity, better than nothing worth listening to, even if those dotted around the globe making tremendous records fraught with heady notions of pain & angst & hope & verisimilitude in the midst of bogus directions are mostly living below the poverty line…in the good company of others

                                .

[yeah well like anything it’s just one of billions of fleeting human  observations in rapt…& pretentious turmoil....

& it isn't to say that I've ever listened to the Dixie Chicks...but who's to strip them from the records?]