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: