Peripatetic

I got an entire set (okay, a two-song set) dedicated to me by My Favorite DJ™. I’m sure the fact that I had just made a pledge in KDHX’s pledge drive had nothing to do with it…Nah, the set consisted of songs by two artists that John knows I love: “Everybody Come Down” by the Delgados and “Lying,” the song that made me a Sam Phillips fan. Literally. It was one of those rare times that reading about an artist and a song made me go out and buy the record without having heard a single note. I read some article that talked about Sam’s spirituality, her search for truth and meaning, and it quoted “Lying” at some length, noting that it was written partly in response to Sinead O’Connor’s “I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got.” Sam’s answer is: “If I said I don’t want what I don’t have/And all the answers are in love/If I said I believe in myself/And that’s enough/I’d be lying.” Made sense to me.

And the set reminded me that I’ve been meaning to ruminate about the Female Vocalist Question. I’m guessing that I have about twice as many female vocalists on my iPod as anyone I know, and I’m forever intrigued by the “issues” people have with female singers. I’m as hard on the ones I don’t like, as hypercritical of them, as anyone—the baby-voiced ones, and even more, the thin-voiced ones, the girls who really can’t sing much at all but do so anyway. (Bananarama are my canonical example of this—their three thin little voices combined didn’t even add up to one decent voice—but there are plenty of others.) And that makes me wonder about the sort of built-in sexism of our attitude toward female vocalists; they seem to be judged so much more harshly than male singers, and we have much higher standards for them than we do for men. Or so it seems to me. I have friends, both male and female, who make blanket statements like “I don’t really like female singers,” as though they all sounded the same. Or maybe as though the listeners assume that all female singers will be grating somehow.

And I do it too, I know I’m a much harsher critic of female singers than of males, and much more particular about the ones I think are great. In my case, I think that’s because female singers matter more to me, so I want them to be good. There are heaps and piles of male singers who are just fine but don’t blow up my skirt in any particular way; I’d maybe even say that the majority of male singers that I hear strike me that way. I’m also noticing a growing trend toward annoying/quirky/whiny male vocalists (Conor Oberst, the Decembrists’ singer, others), so maybe my criticisms of guy singers will begin to match the ones of female singers. A great male singer, of course, can make me melt into a little puddle, but there are relatively few of those (hardly any rock ones, either—more soul and country singers, and Nick Drake)…and even the ones I love best don’t quite affect me the way my favorite female vocalists do. There are also relatively few female vocalists in my pantheon of the truly brilliant, I guess, but those who are there are practically like goddesses to me: lots of the Celtic singers I’ve mentioned here before, of course, and needless to say, Sandy Denny, the queen of all vocalists ever, and Lori Carson, and Emma Pollock from the Delgados, and the magnificent Patty Loveless, and Sharon Jones, and even Carol Van Dijk, who’s not a conventionally great singer but makes her voice work. And the Boone/Kelly sisters from the Damnations, and of course Sam, and…lots of ‘em, anyway.

Not sure exactly what my point is here, really; it’s just something I think about a lot. It bugs me that so many people are inherently hostile to female singers, and it bugs me even more when I’m guilty of thinking that way myself.

…has been much on my mind lately; it’s even gotten me to watch CNN a couple of times, something I swore off during the election season last year. The main focus of my interest/horror, apart from just being generally depressed at the extent to which this woman is being treated as a political football and denied the right to die in peace, has been the midnight strike by a Congressional combined force of true extremists and cowed moderates giving in to the extremists to tread into an area where Congress has no business whatsoever.

Of course the moral, ethical, and medical issues haven’t escaped my attention either; it’s just that I think there are people who are far better able to comment on those than I am—and maybe none more so than Rivka, of the superb Respectful of Otters blog. I suggest that anyone with even a passing interest in this case read her posts on the subject.

The good news: the spelling bee ended early (we lost, which is less good news, but not a big deal either), so I got back to my desk just a few minutes in to the second half.

The bad news: I think the Gophers are going down. It’s not hopeless; they’re down by 7 right now with just under 10 minutes to go. But looking over the game stats, I’m not sure the Gophers can pull it out Sigh.

Oh, and before I forget it completely, the quote of the day yesterday came from Rick Majerus talking to the local doofuses on our ESPN radio affiliate in between games about Washington’s relatively unimpressive first-round game: “I don’t know, the [Washington] Huskies, Pittsburgh, Alabama…they all looked to me like a bunch of Catholic guys who gave up defense for Lent.” Heh.

Update: Yeah, the Gophers lost. So I missed my opportunity to see my favorite team in their first and now only tournament game in the last six years. Sigh.

My Gophers are playing at 12:30 ET today, but instead of being glued to my computer watching the scoreboard refresh every 30 seconds, I’ll be competing in the company spelling bee—something I do every year, and something to which I committed long before I knew if the Gophers would even make the tournament. (I are a gud speler. My team has won the company bee twice in the last three years and gone on to the citywide corporate spelling bee—it’s a benefit for a local literacy organization—where we won once and came in second the other time, the latter due to my misspelling “diaphanous.” I spelled it “diaphonous.” It was a last-minute choke, and I still feel deeply guilty about it.)

If I’m lucky, I’ll make it back to my desk for the last few minutes of the game. I’m incredibly nervous about the game, because Iowa State had some really big wins this year, and as I’ve said before, this Gophers team has been playing beyond its natural abilities, and that’s the sort of thing that tends to disintegrate in the tournament. It’s hard to describe how much the Gophers matter to me; in a way, I’m more passionate about them than any other sports team, even my adored Yankees. The Timberwolves are probably just as important to me–they started up shortly after I moved to Mpls., and I patiently endured their years of suckage before KG came along. But the Gophers, well…t’s just that my years in Mpls. coincided with some very good and hugely likable Gopher teams, and my ex and I went to at least a few games every year, and I developed a strong emotional attachment to the team that’s never changed, even through their last six years of turmoil and disappointing play.

My last year in Mpls. included their wonderful run to the Final Four led by Bobby Jackson and his backcourt mate Eric Harris, whose failure to be drafted after graduation absolutely astonished me; he was small and not the world’s greatest shooter, especially for a guard, but he was the top defensive player in the country coming out of high school (Christ the King, I think, in the Bronx), and I’d have thought some NBA team would have snapped him up for his defensive skiills alone. But no. I think he played in Europe for a while; not sure where he is now, but I don’t think he’s playing anywhere.

But I digress. That Gopher team was so great, such an unmitigated joy to watch, that we actually sat for over four hours in Williams Arena (better known as the Barn, and one of the weirdest but best college basketball venues in the country), not waiting to see a game, just waiting to welcome them home between their Elite Eight win and their trip to the Final Four. Their flight was delayed, and it was a weeknight and we were tired, but we sat there with the other thousand or so Minnesotans patiently waiting to cheer the Gophers when they walked into the Barn and listen to them thank their fans. That’s how much I loved that team.

Then the scandals came and Clem was disgraced and the team lost a ton of scholarships and Dan “Remind Me Again: Why Haven’t I Been Fired Yet?” Monson came in and gave us five years of mediocrity and disappointment. He’s finally doing something right. though, because the team has played better than it should have for most of the season. They’re facing a really tough opponent today, though, and 8-9 pairings are usually toss-ups anyway, so I’m excited and nervous and mostly pretty devastated that I won’t get to follow most (or possibly any) of the game. It’s no fair, I tells ya…

…is what I’d say to the experts who were pointing to Iowa as a hot pick during the last week or so. I can say it safely now, since Cincinnati just trounced them, 76-64.

Leaving aside my non-hatred of Cincinnati, which many people seem to find inexplicable, I’ll just note that as a devout fan of the Gophers, I am sworn to hate their most reviled rivals, the Wisconsin Badgers and the Iowa Hawkeyes. That doesn’t keep me from being able to evaluate those teams semi-objectively, though, and Iowa just wasn’t a very good team this year. A nice little run at the end of the season propelled them into an undeserved NCAA berth (I don’t think Indiana deserved to go to the tournament either, but to pick Iowa ahead of them was just an insult by the committee), but anyone who’d really been paying attention could see that their brief momentum wasn’t going to last. And it didn’t. Therefore, ha!

(Warning: Expect multiple and frequent posts about the NCAA men’s basketball tournament over the next few days…)

I have a total of four different brackets, but only one of them involves money; the rest are for bragging rights.

Right now, with the first games underway but none completed yet, I’m feeling pretty good about picking Wisconsin-Milwaukee over Alabama in the money pool. I’m feeling significantly less good about picking Pittsburgh over Pacific, though, especially since most of the experts were calling that a near-certain upset. I went with Pacific in at least a couple of my brackets…but not in the one that could make me a few bucks. At least Pitt isn’t as far behind as they were at halftime.

And is anyone else surprised at how close Niagara was playing Oklahoma for a while there? They’re down 13 now, but they were within 4 points at a couple of different times in the game. That would have been quite the bracket-buster.

…for me to finally at least start telling my Replacements stories. Why? Well, an e-mail from my friend Missy kind of reminded me, for one thing, and Westerberg’s been touring (I missed his appearance here only because I was out of town—no way would I have missed him otherwise, despite my relative lack of enthusiasm for his solo work), and my dear friend Peter, the band’s discoverer and long-ago manager/mentor, has been much in my thoughts lately, because he had a birthday a month ago and because it’s been bugging me that I haven’t written him in well over a year. And mostly because I can point to several bands who changed my life in vague, difficult to describe emotional and aesthetic ways, but I can really only point to two or maybe three who changed my life in literal, material ways: Uncle Tupelo, maybe the Jam, and probably most of all, the Replacements.

(But first, a preliminary Reason to Be Cheerful for the day: 2.5 minutes into the second half, it’s Gophers 40, Indiana 33 in the second round of the Big Ten championship. I think my Gophs are officially off the bubble now, but I’m not sure the selection committee agrees with me; a loss to Indiana wouldn’t completely ruin their tournament hopes, but a win would pretty well cement them.)

The stories are going to take me a while, though. So I’ll start with some prehistory: For most of my college years, my best friend was Martha, previously mentioned in this here blog. Martha was from Minneapolis (okay, actually Hopkins, an upper-middle-class-ish close-in suburb), and her then longtime boyfriend was a guy named Sprague, who was something of a minor figure in the Mpls. music scene. He was in one version of the twangabilly band Safety Last, which also featured, at various times, Gary Louris, later of some lameass alt-country band, and the extraordinarily talented and underrated singer/songwriter Lianne Smith. Sprague was also a recording studio guy, and went on to do some studio work as well as guitar playing for various minor luminaries. (He was also a complete jerk, as I recall from my occasional encounters with him, and he treated Martha appallingly, but I guess lots of 21-year-old guys are jerks…not to mention lots of 19-year-old girls, I guess.) So Martha was up on all the Minneapolis bands, and sometime in early 1982, she told me about the Replacements, sang snippets of “I’m in Trouble” to me, and finally played me “Sorry, Ma.” I became a fan right away, though I only saw them once in my remaining years in NYC–a show at CBGB that was good but wasn’t spectacular in either of the ways that the Mats could be spectacular.

(Gophers 51, Indiana 42, 11:20 to go. And the Gophers are already in the bonus. I am guardedly optimistic.)

So that’s the prehistory. I didn’t know about them as early on as a Minneapolitan (or even someone from elsewhere in the Midwest) would have, but I knew about them and knew I liked them pretty early in their history.

Flash forward to 1984. I moved to Austin for my first attempt at grad school. Saw the Replacements one drunken evening at the Continental Club in late ‘84, I guess. They were pretty rowdy and sloppy, but not out-of-control sloppy, so it was the best way to see them…but I was really drunk, so it wasn’t quite as memorable an experience as it might have been. Slight fast-forward again to February 1985. I had just been dumped by a guy I didn’t even really like all that much, with whom I had had a pretty unsatisfying relationship (he had a great body, not so much on the personality…and he was kind of a pothead, though he never smoked around me because I was so disdainful of it). True to form, though, I waited for him to dump me rather than dumping him when I had the chance. And even truer to form, I fell into mild heartbreak/obsessiveness after the breakup, out of habit rather than any actual feelings for the guy. (In a rare burst of insight, I actually recognized that my reaction to the breakup was way out of proportion to anything I’d felt during the relationship, and started seeing a therapist to help me break that pattern–which I did, almost permanently.) But even if the heartbreak was self-inflicted rather than sincere, it felt like heartbreak, and for those first few weeks afterward, I felt like raging hell.

(Gophers 60, Indiana 46, 8:00 left. I never underestimate the ability of any team from Minnesota to snatch defeat from the jaws of certain victory, but this is starting to look pretty good.)

And that was my frame of mind when my roommate Bill (not my now-husband Bill, but a friend since college days who I still refer to as “my other Bill”) brought home the 12″ single of “I Will Dare” b/w “20th Century Boy” and “Hey Good Lookin’.” He brought it home, then went out with his girlfriend for the evening, and I threw the record on the stereo. For some combination of reasons known only to the cosmos, it just…hit me. That’s the only way I can think of to put it. It hit me the way the first days after you’ve fallen in love with someone hit you, the way seeing King’s College Chapel at Cambridge hit me the first time I was there, the way a big ol’ Austin sunset can hit you when it isn’t too hot to be outdoors yet. I’d say the song “resonated” with me, but there’s no way that verb is anywhere near adequate. It hit me right in the solar plexus, not to mention the head and heart. And when it was over, I picked up the tone arm and put it on again…and again…and so on. I must have listened to it 25 times in a row that night, pausing only once or twice to check out the b-sides. Fifteen or so listens in, I knew all the lyrics (or thought I did—there’s a line in there that everyone always gets wrong, and I didn’t find out for sure what it was until later in this story) and was singing, shouting, sobbing along. Twenty (!) years later, I can still remember exactly how I felt that night…and “I Will Dare” remains (if I’m forced to choose) my favorite song of all time.

(Gophers 71, Indiana 52, 2:00 to go. I’d say that I don’t think even the Gophers can blow this one, but I’m afraid I’d jinx them. And stranger things have happened. I once saw then-Gopher Sam Jacobson—a guy who really should have had at least a little bit of an NBA career—score 12 points in 90 seconds to give the Gophs a come-from-behind win.)

I was grad-student poor in those days, so I couldn’t go out the next day and buy the entire Replacements catalog, but I did buy Let It Be, the album from which “I Will Dare” comes, as soon as I could find it, and gradually, over the next few weeks, I bought all the rest, too. Fanaticism ensued. I went to the giant Perry-Castaneda Library at UT and scoured their periodicals collection looking for articles about the band, which were surprisingly few and far between back then. I did find a short profile in Musician magazine, with a publicity photo in which Paul looked really cute…which he actually kinda wasn’t in those days, as I was soon to find out. Not that it mattered; I was already in love with him, so what he looked like wasn’t strictly relevant.

(And the final: Gophers 71, Indiana 55. That noise you just heard was a giant sigh of relief emanating not only from me but from a significant portion of the population of Minnesota.)

Yeah, okay, I wasn’t in love with him, I was in love with his songwriting. It’s an important distinction, sure. There are songwriters I love who I suspect aren’t tremendously nice people. But—going out on a bit of a limb here—in a way, it’s different for girls. I wouldn’t say that I never had a favorite band without having a crush on one of the guys in it, because that wouldn’t be true at all. (After all, I spent a good part of the early ’90s listening to almost nothing but American Music Club, and God knows I never had a crush on Mark friggin’ Eitzel, to say the least.) But I also can’t deny that crushing on a band member has often been a component of my fandom for any given band, at least the ones with boys in them. (And sometimes even ones without boys in them, though that’s a totally different type of crush.) It’s pretty much just the cult of personality, really. And though some of the women I know would deny it with their last breath, most of the women I know who are serious music fans (and that used to be a really small number; more on that sometime) also get crushes on boys in the band. It doesn’t diminish the sincerity or informedness of their fandom, I’m not suggesting that in the least. It’s just a component of the fandom. Now that a) I’m old and married and b) often don’t pay as much attention to the individuals in bands as I used to, partly because CDs, with their smaller photos, and the iPod have contributed to my not gleaning as much information about bands as I did in the past unless it’s a band I’m really passionate about (I can tell you the names of all of the Delgados band members, for sure, and Dolorean too). And c) it’s harder to have crushes on guys in bands these days because they’re often literally 20 years younger than me, and I just don’t get crushes on anyone who was born when I was, like, in high school.

But I digress. And it’s time to wrap up for the day anyway. The next installment will begin with the day Tim was released: October 14, 1985.

I’ve got about a million things I’ve been wanting to post, from thoughts about events in the Middle East to my personal first sign of spring to some musical ramblings, but in addition to having been away for part of last week/weekend, I’ve also been pretty shell-shocked following news last week of the death of my friend Dan Bentele, who left us on March 2 as a result of complications from a seizure disorder. More than a week later, I’m still reeling a little (and My Favorite DJ™ just dedicated Lucinda Williams’s “Pineola” to Dan, which got me choked up again).

I’m a little surprised, though maybe I shouldn’t be, at how hard Dan’s death has hit me. He was an online friend (though I saw him a few times a year, generally, since he lived in St. Louis and I’m there fairly often), and as such, he wasn’t part of my day-to-day life, so theoretically, it’s not the same thing as losing a “real world” friend. A few other online acquaintances have died during my years on various music lists—there was a very troubled young man named Alec Horgan who killed himself shortly after a bunch of us met him at Twangfest, and there was a great guy named Mark Domsic, a veteran noncommercial radio DJ who died of a heart attack, and a brilliant, likeable, unusual Postcarder named Robert Morris, who died far too young for reasons unknown (unknown to me, at least). And in all those cases, I grieved but wasn’t quite sure how to grieve, because these were people I didn’t know well, exactly, and yet their lives touched mine enough that I felt their loss.

(Oh, geez, now John is playing “Let the Mystery Be.” I’m going to be weeping all over the keyboard in a minute here. )

It’s somewhat different with Dan. For one, he was one of the first online friends I made, way back in the AOL days before I even had real Internet access—late 1993, I’m thinking. We had a mutual friend, a lovely gal named Jenny Lau, who used to work for the Bodeans, so I was predisposed to like Dan before I even had any correspondence with him. He was enormously likeable, as it turned out, so I didn’t even need the predisposition to like him.

(And now it’s “Windfall,” which I was singing in memory of Dan as I drove to work this morning. Need to pause for a second to fight back the tears; I am at work, after all.)

Over the years, we corresponded one-on-one less frequently, but we were always at least vaguely in touch, and as mentioned, I saw him in St. Louis regularly (and at SXSW a couple of times too). He always had a hug and a smile and a bunch of questions for me about how I was doing, etc. He knew how much I love St. Louis, and he was always trying to come up with job ideas for me there. He also promised to come up for a Chiefs game sometime, though sadly, that never happened. He was the consummate good listener, which meant that I knew less about him than he did about me, but I did know that he’d worked in a bank but left to teach English as a second language, that he loved working on his family’s farm with his brother, Doug, and that he was very close to his family even though they didn’t share his politics. I could never figure out why he was still single; he was practically the definition of A Catch.

Reading people’s reminiscences about him on various lists, I was struck by how many of them had similar things to say about Dan: “He was one of the first people to introduce himself to me at Twangfest,” “He took me under his wing at SXSW and made sure I met people,” “He always came up and shook my hand and reintroduced himself, as if I’d have forgotten who he was.” That was Dan—a guy with a big heart, a big smile, and an easy way with people that made running into him an unalloyed pleasure; he was one of those rare people who never really met a stranger.

It’s painful to write about him in the past tense, and I can’t help feeling that he had a lot left to do in this world, but on the other hand, he lived every minute of his life to the fullest, something I admire tremendously because I know I don’t do it. I’ll miss him. I already miss him. Rest in peace, Dan.

(Talking to my dad about this last night, I found out that he had also learned of the death of an old friend recently, a friend from Peace Corps days. He worked for the Peace Corps back in its earliest days, in the early ’60s, and when he started talking about the memorial service for the woman who died, the list of names of people who were there took me back to a time in my life that I remember fairly vividly (considering I was just a toddler at the time) and very happily; they’re names to conjure with, for me, and the news of the death discombobulated me a little. It’s been a very disorienting week or so, for a number of reasons, the rest of which I’ll get into later.)

It’s hard for me to be shocked or surprised by anything the US government does nowadays in the name of “homeland security,” but this shocked me: NPR : Electronic Anklets Track Asylum Seekers in U.S.

If you can, listen to the audio segment, which is more detailed than the article. According to the reporter’s concluding statement, if the Department of Homeland Security likes the results of this trial, they’ll consider making all non-citizens wear electronic ankle bracelets.

I haven’t written about music much lately, which probably means that my readership has dwindled from four to one or two…

There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that every time I think about what I want to say in my epic Celtic/British Isles Traditional Music and Me, I’m nowhere near a computer. The other is that I haven’t bought much lately, trying to stay true to my plan not to acquire too many CDs per month. I broke down today, though, because the new Delgados’ single, “Girls of Valour,” with a cover of Ewan MacColl’s magnificent “Ballad of Accounting” on the b-side, is available, and I had to have that. Then while I was ordering that, I figured I might as well shell out for the live CD they’re selling only on their site, despite the horrible exchange rate. (There are two iTunes-exclusive EPs at the iTunes Music Store too…but I haven’t bought those. Yet.) And then, because the LynxPod has been playing Kate Rusby at least twice a day lately, I decided to pick up one of her early CDs, Sleepless. It was cheaper new at my favorite online retailer than it was used at Half.com or Amazon, happily.

So I went a little wild, but hey, I hadn’t bought a single CD in at least three weeks! (Instead, I indulged myself by finding old but mint copies of two favorite books from my childhood: The Witch’s Daughter by well-known children’s (and adult) author Nina Bawden, a wonderful, slightly magical, and ultimately sad story set in the Outer Hebrides, and a much more obscure book, We Danced in Bloomsbury Square, by a prolific British writer whose real name was Mabel Esther Allan but who wrote this book and a few others under the more exotic name Jean Estoril. It’s about twin sisters from Birkenhead (across the Mersey from Liverpool) who get scholarships to a prestigious ballet school in London; the beautiful blonde twin is a first choice for the scholarship, while the dark-haired, brooding twin, who narrates, has to squeak in as an alternate. I usually tend to think that my love affair with that part of the world began when my parents sent me to acting camp in England the summer I turned 14 (in lieu of the much more expensive summer experience that I really wanted–a trip to study French intensively by living with a French family through a program called the Experiment in International Living), but when I think back, I guess it started much earlier, with the children’s and young adult books set in England that I devoured whenever I could. I remember that We Danced in Bloomsbury Square was one that my dad picked up from the review slush pile at the magazine where he worked; the used copy I picked up on Amazon has the same cover, and when I took it out of the package, I got chills. “There is no frigate like a book/To take us lands away,” indeed. (And unfortunately, that poem, which I used to love, is one of the many Emily Dickinson poems that you can sing to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” I’ll never forgive the person who taught me that trick…)

Fortunately, I’m not aware of anything on the immediate CD release horizon that I absolutely have to buy…but I’d be happy to be disabused of that notion, so if you’re reading this, tell me what you’re listening to now and what you’re looking forward to among new releases. I want to know.

I’m sure the Delgados stuff is going to take a few weeks to arrive, but I’m just speechless with excitement about hearing them do “Ballad of Accounting.” British folk legend Dick Gaughan first made it well-known, I guess, but I know it first and foremost from Songlines, the first solo album by the magnificent Karan Casey, former lead singer of Solas. Karan, who will figure prominently in the forthcoming epic referred to above, loves a good political/class struggle song—that album also features her wonderful a capella cover, with John Doyle duetting, of UK politico-folkie Leon Rosselson’s brilliant “The World Turned Upside Down,” about the Diggers, which is a story so remarkable that I’ll save it for another day, or you could just read about it yourself. But back to “Ballad of Accounting”: with, or perhaps in spite of, her impossibly light but never ethereal classically-trained soprano, she manages to capture all the bite and rage of the song. The accounting referred to in the title is not the kind that CPAs do, of course, but rather the idea of accounting for a life: “Did you alter the face of the city?/Make any change in the world you found?” and “Did you ever demand any answers?/
The who and the what and the reason why?” and…oh, I’ll just post the full lyric:

“Ballad of Accounting” by Ewan MacColl

In the morning we built the city
In the afternoon walked through its streets
Evening saw us leaving
We wandered through our days as if they would never end
All of us imagined we had endless time to spend
We hardly saw the crossroads and small attention gave
To landmarks on the journey from the cradle to the grave

Did you learn to dream in the morning?
Abandon dreams in the afternoon?
Wait without hope in the evening?
Did you stand there in the traces and let them feed you lies?
Did you trail along behind them wearing blinkers on your eyes?
Did you kiss the foot that kicked you? Did you thank them for their scorn?
Did you ask for their forgiveness for the act of being born?

Did you alter the face of the city?
Did you make any change in the world you found?
Or did you observe all the warnings?
Did you read the trespass notices, did you keep off the grass?
Did you shuffle off the pavement just to let your betters pass?
Did you learn to keep your mouth shut, were you seen and never heard?
Did you learn to be obedient and jump to at a word?

Did you ever demand any answers?
The who and the what and the reason why?
Did you ever question the setup?
Did you stand aside and let them choose while you took second best?
Did you let them skim the cream off and then give to you the rest?
Did you settle for the shoddy? Did you think it right
To let them rob you right and left and never make a fight?

What did you learn in the morning?
How much did you know in the afternoon?
Were you content in the evening?
Did they teach you how to question when you were at the school?
Did the factory help you grow, were you the maker or the tool?
Did the place where you were living enrich your life and then
Did you reach some understanding of all your fellow men?

Pretty great stuff, no? I can’t wait to hear the Delgados do it.