Tag Archives: Sting

The #45 Mix Tape

28 Sunday May 2017

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Then candidate 45 hugging US flag at campaign rally (remember, he’s the anti-Midas, everything he touches turns to crap), Tampa, FL, June 11, 2016. (Chris O’Meara/AP, Times Free Press).

I’m changing it up a bit this weekend. With so much focus on the apocalypse that is 45 and his band of greedy, racist, misogynistic, Islamophobia, and Russia-helping yes-men, I have something goofy and meaningful to say. There are already several comprehensive syllabi on Donald J. Trump out, though, so adding my scholarly musings and sources to this almost inexhaustible topic would be a futile exercise. Instead, I have a mix tape (sort of), one that highlights the changes in my music tastes over time and a group of songs that I mostly despise. Just like I loath most of America’s knee-jerk arguments over 45 and his minions from the past two years.

1. “Little Lies” (Fleetwood Mac, 1987). From their Tango In The Night album. Christine McVie sounds like a shot dog on this song (and Lindsey Buckingham doesn’t sound much better). But this was a Top-5 hit on Billboard in 1987, around the same time Trump was likely being turned by Vladimir Putin and the KGB in the former USSR. And, the song’s theme is pretty obvious.

2. “Live to Tell” (Madonna, 1986). Not exactly my favorite artist, but a one-time favorite song from the one-time “Material Girl” for me three decades ago. After several sources quoting the deposed Michael Flynn, “he has a story to tell,” I remembered Madonna’s lyrics, “I have a tale to tell.” Come to think of it, doesn’t Jared Kushner have a tale to tell about his and 45’s “thousand lies?”

3. “Spies Like Us” (Paul McCartney, 1985-86). Proof positive that Baby Boomers will vote for anything, this piece of poop was a Top-10 hit in January 1986. It’s also emblematic of the theme of ineptitude and macabre humor that runs through the song, representing the movie by the same title, and Flynn, Kushner, Carter Page, Roger Stone, and the rest of the monolithic bloc of 45’s White men.

4. “Russians” (Sting, 1985-86). Why? Because Russians (maybe with the exception of Josef Stalin and Putin) “love their children too” — didn’t you know? But they love messing with our corrupt democracy even more.

5. “Oops!…I Did It Again” (Britney Spears, 2000). God, I have no idea why anyone would’ve ever liked this zit-popper. But the then-eighteen-year-old Spears was prescient with the line “I’m not that innocent.” Neither is 45. He made be a narcissistic buffoon who can’t put two coherent sentences together with a pen, two pieces of paper, Scotch tape, and a flashlight. But he knows where his money’s coming from, no?

6. “Just A Friend” (really, “Jus’ a Friend,” Biz Markie, 1989-90). Same theme as Britney Spears’, with a twist of crossover appeal, a ridiculous baroque get-up, and off-key singing that could only be topped by NBA Hall-of-Famer (and internalized racist) Charles Barkley. But it captures perfectly the love affair between ditto-headed supremacist Americans and 45 (it doesn’t go the other way, of course).

7. “White, Discussion” (Live, 1994). A bit of my favorite grunge, which I have used before. It applies to the folks, the so-called American liberals ready to blame non-voters, third-party voters, and Trump supporters for the rise of 45. Still, many of them are to blame also, because most of them aren’t liberal. If you supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 based on principles, and not out of pragmatism, you are not a liberal, and have been voting in center-right candidates for decades. As the song goes, “look where all this talking got us, baby.”

8. “Stranger In Moscow” (Michael Jackson, 1996-97). Jackson’s introspective song applies here as well, because, well, he uses Russia and the theme of isolation throughout. Except in 45’s case, he likes it that way. And apparently, so does Russia.

9. “Lies” (En Vogue, 1990). Trust me, it fits! (s/o to Dawn Robinson).

10. “Thug Paradise” (Capone-N-Noreaga/Tragedy Khadafi, 1997). The lyrics below say it all:

I twist the truth, I rule the world, my crown is called deceit
I am the emperor of lies, you grovel at my feet
I rob you and I slaughter you, your downfall is my gain
And still you play the sycophant and revel in my pain
And all my promises are lies, all my love is hate
I am the politician, and I decide your fate

Supporters and sycophants beware: 45 is coming for you, in a steamroller with a 700-horsepower engine going one hundred.

11. “Fake Love” (Drake, 2017). I’m a Aubrey Graham fan. I can’t stand Drake. Still, this release from More Life should be required listening from 45 supporters who think they’re not racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, or narcissistic. He also has a song on this album titled “Portland,” though I seriously doubt he was thinking about this weekend or Richard Collins III.

12. “Waterfalls” (TLC, 1995). Yep, yep, yep. Both 45 and MAGA-types have been chasing illusory rainbows and torrents off jagged edges, and damning everyone who they perceive as a threat along the way. And they’re both on a one-way trip.

13. “Don’t Forget Me When I’m Gone” (Glass Tiger, 1986). This is the song 45 should play whenever he finally leaves office, whether by resignation, impeachment, and/or force. As everything 45 touches turns into crap, Glass Tiger’s Top-10 schlock cannot be made any worse. Plus, not even Glass Tiger would complain about 45 using their crappy music.

14. (Bonus Track) “No Bravery” (James Blunt, 2006). 45 is part of a continuum, one that stretches through all of American history. On the international stage, though, it has been one of constant chest-thumping while killing innocents in the name of freedom or national security. Though Blunt’s was about fighting for the UK, the song has much more applicability in the US. We have so much blood on our hands, and 45 means to add to this fetid river on the domestic and international frThe #45 Mix Tapeonts.

A Children’s Crusade

02 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Living among the dead, Flanders, Belgium, most likely during Second Battle of Ypres, April 21-May 25, 1915. (http://www.flandersfieldsmusic.com/).

Living among the dead, Flanders, Belgium, most likely during Second Battle of Ypres, April 21-May 25, 1915. (http://www.flandersfieldsmusic.com/).

World War I reached its 100th anniversary on Monday. One hundred years ago this week, European imperialism, nationalism, and Social Darwinism/scientific racism all led to what was once known as the Great War. It was a war that would leave ten million soldiers, sailors and airmen dead, another seven million civilians dead from military action, malnutrition and disease, and another 23 million wounded in action on both sides.

A British Mark V tank coming out of a trench, France, circa 1917. (Imperial War Museum via http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/10/05/).

A British Mark V tank coming out of a trench, France, circa 1917. (Imperial War Museum via http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/10/05/).

That war, a mostly European war of the great world powers, was itself based in the idea that Western culture and technologies would make this a quick and winnable war of dominance, for Germany, Britain, France and possibly Russia. The first war planes, the first tanks, the first submersibles, along with mustard and chlorine gas, nests of machine guns and trench warfare. It’s amazing how small-minded these so-called great powers were a full century ago, and so remarkable that we’ve grown beyond this thinking today!

Actually, not so fast! Our world seems to have learned little from the lessons of the First World War, repeating practices that leave the globe perpetually on the brink of chaos and potentially in peril of annihilation. We’ve seen this with the Second World War, with the Cold War and its myriad proxy wars in the Global South, with post-Cold War aggression in the Balkans, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and with US preemptive aggressions in the Muslim world. Ethnocentrism and ethnic cleansing in the name of a religion (or a lack thereof, in a couple of cases) or nationalism has been a part of modern war since World War I.

Poppies in field between Kelling and Weybourne, North Norfolk, England, UK, June 2002. (John Beniston via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

Poppies in field between Kelling and Weybourne, North Norfolk, England, UK, June 2002. (John Beniston via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

Imperialism and colonialism and resistance to both in the name of freedom, or too frequently, another form of ethnocentrism and religious nationalism. Name a given nation, and you have some strain of Western imperialism and colonization, resistance and ethnocentrism and nationalism (religious, anti-religious or otherwise) running through their recent history. India, Pakistan, the former Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, the former Yugoslavia, Perón’s Argentina, Pinochet’s Chile, the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia, South Africa and apartheid, Israel and Zionism and settler colonialism, Japan and its military occupation of China, just to name a few. The First World War unleashed these forces this week one hundred years ago, a Pandora’s box that we will need to destroy, for it’s obviously too late to close it.

One of Sting’s songs from his first solo album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles, is titled “Children’s Crusade” (1984). It’s the story of Britain’s blind march into the First World War, the wasting of a generation of youth in the name of the empire, juxtaposed with the UK’s heroin and drug epidemic of the early 1980s.

Young men and soldiers, Nineteen Fourteen
Marching through countries they’d never seen
Virgins with rifles, a game of charades
All for a Children’s Crusade

Pawns in the game are not victims of chance
Strewn on the fields of Belgium and France
Poppies for young men, death’s bitter trade
All of those young lives betrayed

Though not his best work, Sting’s “Children’s Crusade” has made me think more than once about the brutality of humanity and this inherent need to dominate other human beings, as well as the lands and resources for which vulnerable people have been cleansed and displaced. He should update it for 2014 this way:

Midnight in Gaza, Twenty Fourteen
Bombed and shelled hospitals, pawns in the game
Ashes and sackcloth, death’s bitter trade
All of those young lives betrayed

And all for a century-old crusade of nationalistic paranoia, imperialistic abuse, and dehumanizing ethnocentric warfare.

Reinventing the Writing Wheel

17 Saturday Dec 2011

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, music, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Inventing the Wheel cartoon, October 2, 2009. (Bill Abbott/http://www.toonpool.com/).

One of the side effects of having lived through the hell of my family struggles at 616 in Mount Vernon, New York between ’81 and ’89 was that I’d forgotten about the person I was before we became Hebrew-Israelites. As great as I am at recalling faces, smells, conversations, exact facts and phrases based on images and songs, I’ve been almost equally as good at blocking out whole sections of my personality. All in an effort to cope with the emotional pain and psychological trauma that is betrayal, abuse and neglect.

I have the unfortunate distinction of having seen myself as a writer in ’81 at the age of eleven, only to take nearly twenty years to see myself that way again. There were a few sign posts in the dark forest of confusion about my calling that I found on my way to getting back on the writing road. One of those sign posts was my teaching assistant and friend during my undergraduate years at the University of Pittsburgh in Paul Riggs.

Paul Riggs, Professor and Department Chair, Department of History, Valdosta State University (GA), December 17, 2011. (http://www.valdosta.edu).

Paul was the TA for my section of the Western Civilization II course taught by his advisor in Sy Drescher in the Spring semester of ’88. He was a second-year history grad student, a nice looking White guy for a nerd. Already in his mid-twenties with, his blonde-brown hair and around six-feet, Paul was a rarity on campus. So was his class. Paul found a way to do more than ask us a bunch of questions that were meant to quiz us on the textbook. We debated the significance of things like a richer diet and its impact on population growth and the expansion of European imperialism, the connections between Charles Darwin, evolution, and the advent of scientific racism at the end of the nineteenth century, and so many other things that allowed us to connect the dots.

Paul was also the first teacher I had at Pitt who assumed that I could do the work without acting as if I shouldn’t have been in their classroom. It helped that he occasionally indulged me. When our weekly discussion turned to the killing fields that had been northern France and Belgium for the bulk of the four years of World War I, I allowed my imagination to get the better of me. I made a comment that connected the tragedy of deadly trench warfare to a song by Sting called “Children’s Crusade.” I started quoting lyrics, like “virgins with rifles, a game of charade,” “the flower of England, faced down in the mud, and stained in the blood of a whole generation,” and “corpulent generals safe behind lines.”

I related it all to the documents book and Drescher’s lectures on the war that wiped out a generation of

Sting, The Dream of the Blue Turtle CD Cover (1985), December 17, 2011. (Donald Earl Collins).

young men in Western Europe. It took me two minutes of class time to draw all of the different connections. Paul, shaking his head at the end, got this incredulous smile on his face. All he said was, “um, you know Sting’s overrated?”

But Paul proved to be much more helpful a year and a half later. By then I was in my junior year at Pitt, no longer living in constant worry that I’d have to return to 616 to bury my mother and press charges against my idiot stepfather. By then, Maurice was my ex-stepfather, and thankfully so. For the first time in eight years, I kept a journal, putting together a series of stories based on my worst experiences at 616, on welfare, with my family, and in Mount Vernon.

All of it made me think about writing a book that looked at the sociological and psychological dimensions of the welfare system, for both recipients and for case managers charged with providing benefits. I wanted to make Westchester County Department of Social Services the centerpiece for such a book. I decided to talk to Paul about all of my ideas, not wanting to give away how personal this issue was for me. Paul asked me the questions that it would take another eleven years to answer. “What kind of writer do you want to be?,” and “How is history related to what you want to write about?,” he asked over the course of our conversation.

I really didn’t know the answers to either question. I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to pursue an advanced degree, become a professor, or become a writer. But I knew that I needed to find out.

Still, one thing that I decided to do that would determine most of my career travels over the next decade is to make myself into the semi-dispassionate scholar I knew I needed to become in order to be a better historian, which I presumed would make me a better writer. Only to spend this past decade reconnecting to my emotions and passion, which has made me the writer I once hoped to become.

The Contrarian One

15 Tuesday Feb 2011

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, Politics, race, Religion, Youth

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Sting as Feyd-Rautha in David Lynch's Dune, July 20, 2007. TAnthony. Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because this is a low-resolution screenshot illustrating a character which is a subject in the article that uses it, and by nature no free version exists.

For the most part, I have protected the privacy of my childhood classmates and friends by not calling them by their actual names in this blog. I have used pseudonyms, code names like “Crush #1” or “Crush #2,” code letters based on their position in my cohort or how I saw them growing up. I don’t apply these rules to the adults I interacted with because they were public figures, authority figures really. That’s been one of my unofficial journalist-esque rules for this blog, and I’m sticking to it.

In this case, however, I’m pushing the envelope a bit. Even though I have no plans on using a name today, I’m using some initials of a former classmate that almost none of my readers will know. But for those that went through Humanities with me and read this post, the initials may make this person obvious. This classmate — and friend, I guess — was one of the few free thinkers I knew in my Humanities days. He wasn’t just smart — we were all smart. He fashioned himself an intellectual, someone who either thought against the grain or refused to get caught up in what he considered the daily stupid stress sandwich of grades, awards, and more grades that was our magnet program. Most of all, the kid was a contrarian, the one and only JD.

Just like with most of my classmates, I didn’t get along with him at first. He immediate came off to me as someone who saw himself above the fray, maybe even better than the rest of us. It didn’t help that JD introduced himself as “half-Russian, one-quarter French and one-quarter English” that first day of seventh grade nearly thirty years ago. For most of the first year, I thought that his persona was an act, an attempt at upper-crust coolness. I didn’t understand how girls — White and Black — liked this guy, zits and all.

Richard Dean Anderson as MacGyver, May 18, 2007. Source: http://www.just-whatever.com/2007/05/18/what-would-macgyver-do/

At various times during our Humanities days, his looks were compared to Sting, and later, MacGyver — actor Richard Dean Anderson’s most famous character. I’m sure that he liked the comparisons. If you meshed the two, you’d maybe end up with a JD, but probably about two inches shorter than the real life person.

At first, I didn’t think that he was all that smart. After all, we ended up in a fight over my outburst of laughter because he said Australians spoke “Australian” instead of English. I always wondered why we fought this week, of all weeks (twenty-nine years ago this week, by the way). It wasn’t as if we hadn’t annoyed each other before. Eventually I did begin to get Mr. OshKosh, as I called JD in my mind — and occasionally, out loud — during our Davis years. He was a deliberate individual, often trying too hard to be one. It was obvious to me that he thought the whole Humanities thing was a joke, that he found school a Sisyphean effort.

Still, even though we had fought — and I somehow managed to win against the karate kid — we’d get caught up in weird intellectual conversations about communism versus capitalism, or about America’s endless cultural corruption. JD would always take the most extreme view of America the ugly, leaving me no choice other than to argue with him or to agree with him, depending on the severity of his argument. He was a devout atheist, at least in argument, indirectly questioning my Hebrew-Israelite and, later on, early Christian beliefs. That he made me question what I thought I believed and what I actually did believe, I appreciated even at the time. I also got the sense that he was constantly questioning his world while casting doubt in my direction.

It was part of the dissatisfaction that I sensed in him all during our six years together in Mount Vernon’s schools. I didn’t know how much of it came from his home life, but my guess by the middle of high school was that we only saw a tip of a very large iceberg for six and half hours a day and five days a week. What was more obvious, at least to me, was that he seemed comfortable in his uncomfortability at Mount Vernon High School, with the flight of his White classmates in ninth and tenth grade, with the hypocrisy of Humanities as academic light in a sea of ignorance while ignoring the elephants in the room.

Despite holding many of his most private cards to his vest, JD was probably one of the five most honest people I knew in all of my education. His body language, his lack of interest in most things in the classroom, his varied cultural and intellectual interests outside of the classroom, his dating habits all but betrayed his closed-mouthness when it came to who he understood himself to be. He was, and has remained, my favorite contrarian.

A Musical Mirror in Time

13 Saturday Nov 2010

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, Pop Culture

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My iPod, November 13, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

A side benefit to working on Boy @ The Window has been walking down memory lane in describing the music of those times. The music I listened to for inspiration, out of love, rage or goofiness. Or music that provided my means of escape from the drudgery of poverty at 616, the organized chaos that was Humanities and Mount Vernon public schools. Music that I stumbled upon, or deliberately discovered or discounted.

I’ve wondered off and on what the tunes in my ear and head would’ve been like if all the music that I’ve been exposed to since the end of the ’80s had all been at my fingertips in ’81 and ’82. I know one thing for sure. Had I the ability to send my eleven or twelve-year-old self my iPod from ’10, weird or not, Hebrew-Israelite or not, I’d been one of the coolest kids in school. Assuming that I wouldn’t have had to defend my improbable toy against bullies and muggers, that is.

So, now that I have access to music from any time and any year up to 2010, what would I’ve listened to

My iPod, Sting's "Desert Rose", November 13, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

during the Boy @ The Window years? Thinking about Crush #1, the music I had available in mind and in ear was Stevie Wonder’s “As” and “That Girl,” and The Police’s “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” between March and June ’82.

Fully acknowledging that I was in some sort of love then, gee, what would’ve fit my mood? What would’ve been appropriate to the chaos in the rest of my life? U2’s “Beautiful Day” — where “you’ve been all over, and it’s been all over you?” Or Coldplay’s “Clocks,” Sting’s “Desert Rose,” Tevin Campbell’s “Can We Talk,” and Celine Dion’s “That’s The Way It Is,” all songs of shyness and unrequited love? Talk about framing a mood!

Well, what about Crush #2, my obsession with her, and the pain she helped cause? What could complement music like Richard Marx’s “Should’ve Known Better,” Paul Carrack’s “Don’t Shed A Tear,” or Geto Boys’ “My Mind Playin’ Tricks On Me”? Going back to January ’88, Live’s “White, Discussion” would’ve been a place to start. White male angst about race and possibly love — “Look what all this talking got us, baby” screamed at maximum lung-ness by lead singer Ed Kowalczyk — could’ve just as easily been my sarcastic and rage-laced refrain regarding Crush #2.

Other, more goofy and less epic tunes to lay out my anger and disappointment — or to get over it — hmm. Probably something like Michael Bolton’s “Time, Love & Tenderness,” Mariah Carey’s “Can’t Let Go,” or Annie Lennox’s “Walking On Broken Glass.” Music from the ’90s. So much better for coping with crushes and trifling people.

On a more serious tip, what from my present would’ve soothed my constantly worried mind back in the days when mp3 would’ve been thought of as a kind of motor oil? My faves of the ’80s were Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie” and “Broken Wings,” because the songs met me where I was, a teenager struggling to find his true self, to succeed in school, to survive life at 616. Other than some social justice-lite songs like Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On,” Sting’s “They Dance Alone,” or Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up,” there wasn’t much of a message in most of the music from the mid- to late-80s — at least related to my life.

My iPod, Nickelback's "If Today Was Your Last Day," November 13, 2010. Donald Earl Collins.

But bringing music back from the future would’ve helped. Like Anthony Hamilton’s “Comin’ From Where I’m From,” Creed’s “Higher,” Sounds of Blackness’ “Optimistic,” even Nickelback’s “If Today Was Your Last Day.” The line of lines — “Against the grain should be a way of life” — has been when I’ve gotten the most out of myself, my God and my life.

I can only imagine what life would’ve been like with a piece of second-decade, twenty-first century

My iPod w/ U2, November 13, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

technology in the early ’80s. It made have made most of my embarrassing, disheartening and sorrowful moments easier to bear. But without those moments, I certainly wouldn’t have as full an appreciation of the music I listen to now and the blessings that have occurred in my life in the three decades since. As Anthony Hamilton would say, “Sometimes you gotta walk alone,” although with music, not completely alone.