The Voyage Home … and a musical tribute to peace

Well, my trip to the coast is officially over, and overall, the driving was pretty good considering its late December in Canada.  I have some more pictures to upload, taken today as I drove through the Crowsnest Pass, and I plan to make a post about the route I took, and my review of the trial of my new GPS mapping toy.  But one of the things I most love about long car trips is the chance to rediscover my music collection.

I don’t listen to my music a lot … I don’t bother to get my laptop together for the drive to work, and even still, its too short of a drive to get a full sampling.  But when I travel like this, I have my entire CD collection rip’d to my hard disk, and I run an iTunes party shuffle.  It can make for some eclectic song shifts … one particular one I remember was Crash Test Dummies “Mmmm_mmmm_mmmm_mmmm” fading into the opening strains of Ozzy and “Crazy Train” … which is part of the fun.  I also have a chance to rediscover old favorites that i haven’t listened to in ages, and have forgotten, and in the case of this trip, I rediscovered a true old gem that feeds into today with an eerie fit.

I’ve mentioned Moxy Fruvous before on the blog before, and this is another one about one of their songs.  When I wrote the last entry, I focused on the album Wood, talking about two songs from that album, but on this trip I happened to catch one of the songs from 1994’s Bargainville, “Gulf War Song.”  As the name implies, its something of a protest song about the first Gulf War, but the lyrics resonate strongly with today’s conflict as well, I think.  You can see the full lyrics at the link above, but I’d like to highlight a few specific bits below.

We got a call to write a song about the war in the Gulf
But we shouldn't hurt anyone's feelings
So we tried, then gave up, 'cause there was no such song
But the trying was very revealing
What makes a person so poisonous righteous
That they'd think less of anyone who just disagreed?
She's just a pacifist, he's just a patriot
If I said you were crazy, would you have to fight me?

The entire first stanza is sheer genius, IMO … “poisonous righteous” may have to become my new phrase for those infected with the bug of partisanship and battle, and the final line, to me, sums up the absurdest position of those “poisonous righteous.”

So we read and we watched all the specially selected news
And we learned so much more 'bout the good guys
Won't you stand by the flag? Was the question unasked
Won't you join in and fight with the allies?

I try to speak about the manufactured and pre-packaged news that we see happening around us today, but as I heard these words again recently, they struck me as a wonderfully poetic expression of that idea from another time, oh so different from today, but oh so alike as well.

Fighters for Texaco, fighters for power
Fighters for longer turns in the shower
Don't tell me I can't fight 'cause I'll punch out your lights
And history seems to agree that I would fight you for me
That us would fight them for we

This what passes for a chorus in the song, though the first line is different in each chorus, and the last line is only in the final one.  The reference to Texaco is easy, perhaps, but in context it works very well for me.  What I truly love are the final lines, which to me are a very nice statement of how we end up grouping ourselves for battle.

When we think of protest songs, we often think of the 60’s, but I think this one is an excellent example from the 90’s, and one that is particularly topical today, not just for the fact that we are back in Iraq.  More than that, the song seems to have captured, more than a decade ago, that mood that would engulf the world in 2006.