Friday, October 02, 2015

Friday Music and fewer Guns Please

Friday. Another week, another mass killing here in the good old USA. The knee jerk reaction is, get rid of the guns. Living in a time when crime rates are falling, murder rates falling, violence is falling, mass shootings stick out all the more - it's hard to put them down to whatever societal malaise causes crime. I don't know what it is. But they would be a lot harder to pull off if getting guns was harder. And - at the risk of venturing into mind-reading - if guns weren't treated quite so fetishistically, if they weren't linked so much to the idea of power and virility and freedom - you might have fewer sexually insecure losers going on shooting sprees. So - yeah: get rid of them. Or take "get rid of them" as the starting point and make the gun defenders come up with a better plan. Some plan at all...

And - I don't trust too much psychological profiling in cases like this, but you can't get around this fact: more or less all of these massacres are perpetrated by men. Seem to be mostly white guys at that, though that's not anywhere near as hard a rule (like this one, perpetrated by a mixed race guy). But male - that's pretty much a rule.

All right. No more about that for now. Let's have some music.

1. Jay Farrar - New Multitudes
2. Television - Beauty Trip
3. Velvet Underground - Some Kinda Love (live - Quine tapes)
4. The Strokes - Killing Lies
5. Nick Cave and Bad Seeds - Hiding All Away (live)
6. Pavement - Zurich is Stained
7. Husker Du - I Don't Want to Know if You Are Lonely
8. Six Organs of Admittance - Bar-Nasha
9. Butthole Surfers - American Woman
10. Egg Hunt - We All Fall Down

and some video. Lots of New York rock on there - here is the least of them, though still pretty good - The Strokes:



Maybe not the Velvets,but the next best thing, when it comes to New York rockers. Richard Lloyd gets a nice solo here:



And we should not neglect the great midwest - Husker Du:

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