{"id":3013,"date":"2006-12-10T04:39:26","date_gmt":"2006-12-10T11:39:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/12\/10\/call-it-love-or-call-it-reason\/"},"modified":"2006-12-10T04:39:26","modified_gmt":"2006-12-10T11:39:26","slug":"call-it-love-or-call-it-reason","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=3013","title":{"rendered":"Call it 'Love' or call it 'Reason'"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently Foolish Owl<\/a> posted the lyrics to Love Me I’m a Liberal. It’s a great song. If you haven’t read the lyrics you should go do that now<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Reading the lyrics to ‘Love Me I’m a Liberal’ made me sad. There was a time in my life I loved Phil Ochs. When I’m Gone<\/a> was on the short-list of songs I wanted played at my funeral. I still have his live album<\/a> and it’s wonderful.<\/p>\n

But I don’t listen to his music any more, not since I read a biography of his life. Phil Ochs was a great lyricist, but he was also violent and abusive.<\/p>\n

Like most music genres political folk is male dominated, and there’s a lot of sexism in it. When the lock-out ended it took me a while to clean out the sexism of Talking Union Blues<\/a> so I felt comfortable posting it on my blog. The original third verse of Union Maid<\/a>, is so offensive that it makes me giggle. That doesn’t bother me that much. I either listen to the music in its original form, or (more likely) a recent re-recording that has lyrics I like better. The nice things about folk music is that everyone changes the lyrics up sometimes.<\/p>\n

It is regrettable, but understandable, that such sexism was acceptable in political movements in the past. But I can overlook that in a way I can’t overlook men like Phil Ochs sang for freedom and abused the women around them.<\/p>\n

It’s particularly political folk music that I have this reaction to. Other forms of art I’m generally less fussy about. I’m not going to stop loving In My Life, because 50% is a conservative estimate of the number of men in the Beatles who were violent and abusive.<\/p>\n

But political folk music, at least the stuff I listen to, is music about liberation. Abusing the power society gives you is fundamental incompatible with anyone’s liberation. Just like I wouldn’t be interested in a brilliant interpretation of When I’m Gone, from someone who didn’t mean it. I lost interest in Phil Och’s interpretation of ‘When I’m Gone’ to the extent that he didn’t mean it.<\/p>\n

I want to emphasise that my reaction is not one of political purity, but my emotional reaction to the disconnect between the song and what I know of the person who wrote it. I’d be interested in how other people feel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently Foolish Owl posted the lyrics to Love Me I’m a Liberal. It’s a great song. If you haven’t read the lyrics you should go do that now. Reading the lyrics to ‘Love Me I’m a Liberal’ made me sad. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,62,96,92],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminism-sexism-etc","category-popular-and-unpopular-culture","category-rape-intimate-violence-related-issues","category-whatever"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3013\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}