Singles and Memes For a Week of Big Reveals

Long time since the last deluge of snarky visuals and protest songs here: click on author or artist names for their webpages, click on titles for audio, visuals or both.

What’s been most heartwarming about the general perception of this past week’s Davos summit is the level of derision the World Economic Forum elitists have drawn. Brucha Weisberger’s coverage of the meetings has plenty of goodies. John Kerry shows the world his extraterrestrial side in his mad quest to reduce global carbon dioxide levels…plus a damning two minutes of Albert Bourla of Pfizer on the run from reporters outside the WEF compound. Brucha also includes some excellent background on Klaus Schwab’s Nazi roots and an insightful Paul Craig Roberts commentary on the audacity of the WEF to assume control over us. Five minutes of snarky fun.

This one goes back a few months, but it’s essentially hilarious: the Essential Schwab album commercial “on In-Q-Tel Records”

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declared Kamala Harris President a couple of days ago. Slip of the tongue, predictive programming, or will the cadaver in chief finally be buried this weekend? Good catch by RNC Research via Kerriedawayinnyc on Twitter.

Five Times August, this era’s foremost protest songwriter, has a latin soul side. Who knew. Check out his latest single Ain’t No Rock N Roll: “All the actors say what they’re paid to say, every pop star’s bought and sold.”

Rapper L’il Kremlin’s I’m a Shill makes a good segue: no end to the lows corporate rappers will sink to for pageviews, via Riley Waggaman’s “Edward Slavsquat” Substack page

Sticking with that theme, let’s get local. Spotted on a Manhattan utility pole by Mark Crispin Miller, the preeminent historian of our time: screenshot it, make it a meme, print it out here

NY State drivers are using leaf magnets on their license plates to avoid paying tolls – and funding the genocidal Hochul regime, who are in the process of filing an appeal to bring back her concentration camp mandate. Also scroll down to the third meme that starts with Zuck telling us “I delete your posts.” via Amy Sukwan

In sixty fact-filled seconds, Naomi Wolf nails how many of the architects of the plandemic in government, academia and the media are switching jerseys

A hilarious parody of “More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Brand” via Australian freedom fighter Rebekah Barnett

Art-pop protest song maven Turfseer‘s latest hit Where Have You Gone Tiffany Dover, is a cynical-AF mashup of an oompahing oldtimey march and late 70s ELO art-pop.

Speaking of missing famous people, here’s a minute 15 second compilation video of Tiffany Dover and others collapsing with the Pfizer logo onscreen to send out to everyone – via Emerald Robinson.

Take the L train at 3:38 in the morning recently? You may have run into Too Many Zooz. This is this wild horn band doing their dancefloor jam Bedford on the platform and then the train: imagine microtonal Moon Hooch.

Hip-hop artist Hi-Rez‘s new viral video 2+2=5 with comedian JP Sears speaks truth to woke insanity – the visuals are as funny as the lyrics

Joel Smalley, one of the world’s foremost experts on morality data somehow manages to keep his sense of humor. In four minutes, here’s his hilarious Hitler documentary parody

Likewise, Dr. Jessica Rose is best known as perhaps the world’s foremost expert on the VAERS vaccine injury and death database. But she’s also a composer, keyboardist, and memestress. She pushed out this one about the FTX crypto-laundering scandal

Cartoonist Anne Gibbons visits Depopulation Park

Before it gets totally stale, here’s Ireland’s funniest protest rapper, Doctor Dr. Mc Honk-Honk’s xmas single – which actually/sadly has shelf life beyond the past month. Via freedom fighter attorney Jeff Childers’ must-read C&C News (scroll to the bottom of the page).

Ashley Everly gives us a deliciously snarky video of dancing nurses, a collage of plandemic headlines and Covid misdiagnosis with a familiar Blue Oyster Cult soundtrack

Let’s wind this up with another one that’s been bouncing around for awhile, but it’s timeless and fits well with this week’s past events: Spacebusters’ It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Genocide.

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Mark Crispin Miller: The Best News and Music Source on Substack

Mark Crispin Miller publishes News From Underground, the best daily feed on the web. But in the past two years, his Substack has become as good a source for music, and protest songs in particular, as it is for what’s happening in the world. And as it turns out, the author of books like the hilarious Bush Dyslexicon and the scathing 2004 election fraud expose Fooled Again is also an excellent songwriter! He’s only posted one of his own so far. Queen of the Forest is a catchy, upbeat folk-rock tune in a Richard Thompson vein, with Topher Sisson leading the band: “Smile as you approach the pass.” Sage Hana did one of her usual awesome video mashups with it.

Miller is unsurpassed as a source for protest songs. Here’s Drop D’s Hotel Paranoia, set to the tune of the national anthem of busking (click and scroll down a bit):

Then they brought out the needles, and they boosted away
There were voices in the monitor and I heard them say
“Welcome to the Hotel Paranoia
Such an ugly place
So just mask your face”
Plenty of doom at the Hotel Paranoia
Any kind of fear, you can find it here

To set up the next video, this Steve Kirsch meme explains that “When you start seeing ads like this one, we’ll finally be able to trust the CDC. Until then, not so much.”

Among other great Miller finds are the best Pfizer ad ever, along with a vintage concert video of choral ensemble Oak Ash & Thorn singing the Anacreontic Song at Berkeley’s Freight and Salvage in the early 1980s (as sleuthed out in the comments to this rendition). You might recognize the melody of this popular drinking song from the turn of the 19th century.

Bryan E. Miller’s version of The Star-Spangled Banner playing over the closing credits of 2000 Mules makes a perfect segue: it’s better than Hendrix. Fast forward to 1:25:50 – or, better yet, watch the whole movie. It’s pretty lo-budget and drags in places, but the evidence is damning.

Let’s wind this up with a mix of memes, a ridiculously funny rap hit, a video that will age well and one that definitely won’t.

Is the Goliath character Mr. Magoo addicted to pills? This clip is from season 4 of the series, via the irreplaceable Dr. Jessica Rose. 

Rapper Bryson Gray is back with his latest hilarious joint, HunterBidenHacked: “You wanna know what’s really wild, when your own son calls you a pedophile.”

While it’s still hot, here’s Denise Welch’s viral “IT’S CALLED SUMMER” meme for the “climate change” psy-op.

Here’s another good one, artist Anne Gibbons on the panic du jour.

Mathew Aldred, who publishes another must-read Substack news feed, found this even funnier, spot-on Rage For the Machine meme.

Freudian slip of the year: here’s Dr. Faulty in Seattle this week, “joking” on camera about how “I developed the ancestral model strain” of Covid. You really can’t make this shit up.

The best meme of the year – via Amy Sukwan – is as good a segue as there could be.

Sobering Singles and Hilarious Hip-Hop for July 28

The Great Revealing is turning into the Great Unraveling, mighty fast. At this point it looks like the “chew toys,” as Catherine Austin Fitts calls bureaucrats like Birx and Dr. Faulty, are being thrown to the wolves, i.e. us. In the meantime, are we staring down a smallpox epidemic incubated in the population who caught VAIDS from the Covid shot? Stay tuned.

And the memes and videos are flying fast and furious. About 25 minutes of black comedy and videos today. As usual, click on artist or author names for their webpages, click on titles for audio and video – and make sure you use Brave or another browser with an ad blocker since a lot of the videos are at youtube.

Satirist and investigator Sage Hana has been putting out an infrequent but brilliantly edited series of videos for a bunch of mostly well-known songs. This is not one of them: it’s a Bonnie Tyler single from the 80s. And this salute to the heroes of the past twenty-nine months is not comedy. Anything but.

Hana’s Substack has also been a goldmine for good memes – for example, this Ronald McDonald – and this timely video of Eric Idle doing Henry Kissinger, from the 1980 Monty Python album Contractual Obligation.

Here’s the best-ever video for Anitra’s Dance, the immortal gothic theme from Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King. It’s all about diminishing returns. Scroll down and laugh if you can.

Embattled New Zealand head of state Jacinda Ardern wants you to know that “We will continue to be your single source of truth.” In her own words, via Mathew Aldred‘s must-read Substack.

Let’s shift gears to hip-hop, first with Who’s My Name, by “Sniff Sleepy,” the cadaver-in-chief in his own words, artfully and pseudonymously edited, via El Gato Malo. Indestructible, by RC feat. Hailey Lewis makes a good segue, with some beautiful footage from the Canadian Freedom Convoy from this past winter

Americana guitarist Molly Tuttle shows off some sweet flatpicking, alongside her dad Jack on mandolin in Grass Valley, her shout-out to large crowds of people who get together and exhale CO2 in harmony around carbon-consuming structures like campfires…a time-honored tradition.

Singer Lisa Tingle’s band the Caughtery jangle and clang through The Uninvited, from darkly sparkling electric bluegrass in a Walkabouts vein to a stomp toward the stadium. A lockdown parable? You decide.

Beth Blade and the Beautiful Disasters have just released Persephone, a metaphorically-loaded mashup of the Peter Gunne theme and thrashy metal for those of us who may feel “owned but not possessed” during this twisted time in history.

Lately, it’s been the custom here to wind up a page of singles with something funny, but today it’s time to get serious. Watch New York State Assembly speaker Carl Heastie strong-arm a member of the New York State legislature to change his vote, on video, on June 13th, 2019 to repeal religious exemptions to vaccination. Coincidentally, the previous day Merck had announced the construction of a big pharma plant in the Albany area. Thanks to Dr. Meryl Nass for passing this along.

Memes and Singles of the Week For July 23

It’s been a crazy week. but the Great Awakening seems to be pushing the Great Reset off the cliff. Today’s playlist starts with some snarky visuals, then about 25 minutes worth of tunes and a shocking but cruelly funny bit of news. As always, click on artist or author names for their webpages, click on titles for audio and visuals – and make sure you use Brave or another browser with an ad blocker because some of the songs are at youtube.

Sometimes a video is worth a thousand words. This is so sweet. All the Dutch kids on their four-wheelers showing solidarity with the farmers protesting the World Economic Forum’s sick Agenda 2030! Thanks to the irreplaceable Tessa Lena for passing this along

Mathew Aldred shares the funniest social media gaffe of the week:

“If masks worked, they would have been banned, just like hydroxichloroquine” via author Amy Sukwan.

Artist Anne Gibbons‘ meme of the week is the Philanthropath of the Year Awards, inspired by Margaret Anna Alice’s must-read Substack. Let’s get the word “philanthropath” into the global urban dictionary!

Fran Leader, who for years has been tip of the spear among British activists sounding the alarm about the dangers of EMF exposure, has a great meme dump today: check out the “authoritarian virus” and the Matrix joke.

Now for some tunes! Satirist and documentarian Sage Hana has a characteristically spot-on video for a live, late-career version of Blondie’s One Way Or Another. Pay careful attention to the final frame

Jessie Kilguss wrote her janglerock anthem Great White Shark for a prison songwriting class….that she was teaching. The gist of this bittersweet gem is that maybe sharks aren’t so scary after all. Yikes!

Nina Diaz‘s Silly Situation turns mid-80s Cure inside out with a world-weary Marianne Faithfull angst.

Let’s take a dive into the deep end of the noir soul pool with a good segue from Lizzie No‘s Sweeter Than Strychnine into All Back, by Ali McGuirk

Lukas Lion‘s The Great Puppet Show, a creepy circus-rock hip-hop protest song, has gotten a lot of traction lately:

If we can make Hollywood movies, you think we can’t manipulate what the latest news is?
We’re the kings of illusion, we choose what the truth is.

Imagine a woman singing Steve Earle’s Copperhead Road and you get Kasey Waldon‘s Simple As Love

Let’s end this on a (very darkly) comedic note with the irreplaceable Dr. Pam Popper‘s commentary on the damning new memoir by the “scarf lady.” The founder of Make Americans Free Again unpacks the criminal Fauci’s co-conspirator Deborah Birx’s memoir in five minutes, letting her dig her own grave in admitting that she was the main proponent of the asymptomatic spread madness, and the testing madness of the early days of the plandemic. Birx even brags about how she subverted any attempt by the White House to return to normal. As Birx confesses, “They never managed to catch the subterfuge.” Start the video at about the two minute mark.

Some Takeaways and Tunes From Yesterday’s Defeat the Mandates Rally in LA

In early March 2020, if someone had told you that the crowd at a daylong outdoor concert in Los Angeles would have saved their wildest applause for the truckers, doctors and cops onstage, you would have figured that the music must have been pretty lame, right?

It wasn’t. But at yesterday’s Defeat the Mandates Rally at Grand Park in downtown LA, the rockstars were the dudes from the Freedom Convoy, the physicians from the Front Line Critical Care Coalition, and an energetic group of cops and firemen who’d been fired, or whose jobs were imperiled by Governor Gavin Newsom’s Covid shot orders.

What was most apparent was how much the crowd skewed female – and how mainstream, and LA-diverse they turned out to be as the Highwire‘s camera panned the park. Mama bear has been poked and she doesn’t want her kids in any genetic engineering experiment. One particular sign in the crowd spoke for everybody: “There’s a new variant spreading around the world, it’s called freedom and I hope you catch it.”

You may have heard about the ten bills currently on the table, in one place or another, in the California legislature. Word on the street is that they’ve been masterminded by State Senator Richard Pan, a shill for big pharma since he was first elected. He’s on the way out, so this last-gasp batch of Orwellian proposals runs the gamut from the codification and prosecution of thoughtcrime, to weaponizing law enforcement to carry out health department orders. The way that bill works, money earmarked for police gets diverted to the health gestapo if the cops stand down. Recipe for murder and mayhem? Hey, nobody’s taking the shot anymore, so Klaus the Louse and Bill Gates have to go to plan B.

And that’s not working either. The cracks in the oligarchs’ united front, which was never as united as many thought, are showing. And that’s in stark contrast to the energy and discipline of the left coast freedom movement. Amy Bohn, tireless leader of Parents For the Educational Rights of Kids, a.k.a. PERK, has been on the front lines of the fight and made an early appearance. Her group has all kinds of useful resources, including a concise guide to stopping this tarnish on the Golden State. “If you negotiate with tyranny, you’re not going to get anywhere,” she warned.

It was another tireless activist, bestselling author Naomi Wolf of Daily Clout, who drew the most thunderous roars of applause. If you’re open to the idea that these days, we may be getting some help in mysterious ways that we don’t quite yet understand, you should read her latest Substack – it will blow your mind. Expertly sussing out her audience, she spoke to the collective wrath of the mom contingent, relating how her crew are currently digging through the latest Pfizer document dump and have found all sorts of incriminating evidence of fraud.

Just as dynamic and perceptive a presence as Wolf was ten-year-old New York activist Jayla, who offered plenty of common sense in her moment in the spotlight: “How am I supposed to enjoy my childhood when I can’t go anywhere?” she asked. She thought it was equally implausible that kids shouldn’t be allowed to join the fight, considering that it’s their future which is most at stake. Echoing her later on were a very popular crew of LA-area high school kids who’d been booted from classrooms for random acts of self-preservation.

FLCCC doctors Richard Urso and Ryan Cole were the first to specifically call out the World Economic Forum, underscoring how what was widely considered conspiracy theory in 2020 is now accepted as gospel truth. Cole, always a sage presence, was especially amped: “I prefer dangerous freedom to peaceful slavery,” he enthused. He also was the first on the program to acknowledge openly that what Sage Hana calls “OG Covid” has been extinct since 2020. Dr. Robert Malone seconded that without actually speaking the forbidden word.

Filmmaker Mikki Willis proudly announced that his 2020 documentary Plandemic has become the most-watched film in the history of the internet (Plandemic 3 is coming on the Fourth of July, and in the meantime you can get a free audio download of his new book). Willis shared that his brother died of AZT poisoning in 1994, and three months later his mom died from the effects of chemotherapy. The second that Willis mentioned AZT pusherman Anthony Fauci, the crowd spontaneously burst into Dr. Paul Alexander’s, “Lock him up!” chant. The colorful, philosophical Alexander – who refused to take a multimillion dollar Pfizer deal to just shut up and go away – energized the troops with a characteristically uproarious appearance a little later on.

Journalist Lara Logan emceed the latter half of the bill and spoke eloquently to the impact of divide-and-conquer schemes. Dr. Bob Sears underscored how much “Our country has been discriminating against people of a certain medical persuasion for decades now.” He’s been fighting pharma-funded mandates and the marginalization of the vaxx-injured for a quarter of a century: one suspects there were others in the crowd with as much experience.

The most entertaining and utterly fearless of the several political candidates on the bill was Dr. Michael Huang, who as he tells it is the one remaining doctor in the state who writes medical exemptions to lockdown and jab orders. “I am the Chinese version of Del Bigtree,” the affable family physician boasted. Having successfully treated two thousand patients for Covid, then helping over a thousand school kids “come off face masks,” as he put it, he’s running for state Senate to represent the district situated around the park. He deserves our support.

Bigtree, whose weekly news program The Highwire now has three times the viewership of every nightly tv news show, was as much of a firebrand as he was at the January rally in Washington. “Senator Richard Pan wants to kill your children,” he asserted, “We will not recognize any leader again who will not stand for freedom.” Words of wisdom for any candidate running this fall. Ultimately, Bigtree said, the only thing in this moment that we have to fear is fear itself.

Attorney Leigh Dundas, longtime crusader against sex trafficking and leader of Freedom Fighter Nation, was also on fire. “Two years ago, on the steps of the Capitol in Sacramento, I said we are on a bullet train to Auschwitz if we do not course correct. Well, we did not course correct.” She also asserted that “The Third Reich will not rise on my watch….the Third Reich wasn’t over when World War II ended. The Third Reich ended when we put the criminals on trial and then put them to death.”

There’s more to unpack and a lot of takeaways here – as historic a moment as this was, this blog doesn’t recommend spending eight straight hours in front of a screen even if you’re getting paid for it. The Highwire has archived the whole thing if you’re feeling ambitious.

Carina Powers, founder of Latinos For Medical Freedom reminded that in California alone, that demographic numbers almost sixteen million, most of them Mexican-American. It would be wise for the movement as a whole to reach out and embrace this population. Inflammatory rhetoric about border closures is not a way to win the support of millions of America’s most unselfconsciously patriotic people.

It was stunning to watch the elegant, articulate Dr. Christine Parks completely drop her guard for once: “It’s time to stop the fucking gaslighting and it’s time to stop the mandates!”

Best joke of the afternoon was from Kevin Sorbo, who deadpanned that “If you want to get rid of Covid, tell the Clintons that Covid has something on them.”

A close second came from actress Leigh-Allyn Baker, who via uplink explained that “I’m just your average, run-of-the-mill. everyday domestic terrorist…I mean mom.”

Oh yeah – there was intermittent music, most of it acoustic or semi-acoustic. Protest song maven Five Times August – whose hit Silent War topped the list of best songs of 2021 here – debuted a defiant, catchy, Tom Petty-esque new tune, Fight For You. And he got the crowd singing along to his bestselling hit Sad Little Man, a corrosive portrait of Fauci: “I released this song in November…in an ideal world it would be irrelevant by now.”

Former Mighty Mighty Bosstones frontman Dicky Barrett offered a message of unity, then turned the stage over to his guitarist bud Grant Ellman of roots reggae band Prezence, who delivered one of the night’s smartest, most aphoristic numbers. “We’re dying to get better,” was the chorus.

There were also low-key cameos by theatrical rap-rock band Sonic Universe and cinematic disco loopmusic violinist Dpak, as well as a couple of moments where it was obvious that rap duo Hi-Rez and Jimmy Levy were lipsynching. Dudes, you are perfectly competent at what you do, you don’t need that backing track. Just let it flow. By the way, Hi-Rez, that was ballsy of you to propose to your girlfriend onstage. The two of you won’t forget this day, ever.

There were many, many others on the bill. In the interest of brevity, too many to enumerate. Marines facing discharge over the Covid shots, heartwrenching survivors of Covid vaxx injury and ubiquitous Constitutional scholar and Arizona sheriff Dr. Richard Mack.among them.

And did anybody notice, toward the end of the night, how The Hill’s Kim Iversen was trying to play both sides of the issue? Changing jerseys, but leaving the old one on underneath just in case? In insisting that there were still good journalists in the corporate media, and that she always stuck to the facts, she never once enumerated what those facts were. Her closing ad-lib spoke volumes: “Party at my house! Just kidding. Don’t show up at my house!”

Singles for the (Almost) Ides of March

This blog predicted that 2022 would be way better than 2021. The global totalitarians’ ongoing death throes have been ugly – Justin Trudeau building a shitlist and seizing citizens’ bank accounts for wrongthink seems to be a prototype. But the blowback has been fierce, and reason for real optimism. No wonder the narrative has suddenly been shifted from hygiene theatre to the latest circus of two corrupt-AF ex-Soviet kleptocrats duking it out, with no thought to the colossal toll on their respective nations’ populations.

Another reason for optimism is that more and more musicians are stepping back into the ring. Today we celebrate that with a short, roughly twenty-five minute self-guided playlist. Click on artist names for their webpages, click on song titles for audio.

Americana songwriter Kaitlin Butts‘ Blood comes across as a very subtle protest song disguised as a fierce kiss-off ballad, set to a simmering oldschool country backdrop with some tasty resonator guitar. “My name dragged through the mud, and godawful things swept under the rug.” Relatable, huh?

Dr. Jordan Peterson may be known as one of the most insightful researchers and analysts in the reality space, but as it turns out he’s also a songwriter! His latest anthem, Wake Up is an aptly creepy, Floydian art-rock tune with a shifting cast of vocalists.

Lowly Weep, by UK songstress Darkher, is a heavier art-rock take on the mystical gothic sound that New York’s own Kristin Hoffmann was exploring back in the late zeros and teens. Don’t let the awkward title put you off.

Here’s Good Before, by another moody songwriter, Maria BC, rainy-day jangle-and-clang spacerock. All is not so safe in her hotel womb.

Let’s wind up the playlist on a positive note. Rapper Bryson Gray‘s No Mask No Vax – featuring his bud Forgiato Blow – is a singalong Pitbull-style banger. Gray is a man of many lyrical styles and as rugged as individualists get, as he makes clear in Controlled, a hilarious, golden age-style dis at everyone who hates on him. “Big Pharma must be lobbying rappers.” Thanks to fearless investigative journalist and incorrigible listmaker Sharyl Attkisson for the tipoff.

Today’s last song is an oldie, from 2016. How did Debris, by Neia Jane, pop up on the radar here earlier this week? It was on autoplay after a completely unrelated Soundcloud clip. Imagine Guided by Voices at their majestic, multitracked peak, but with a woman out front

Singles For Today: Laughs, Raised Middle Fingers and Moody Mystery

More protest songs, epic darkness and riotously vindicating laughs at the end, Click on the artist name for their webpages, click on song titles for audio.

Rap artist Lukas Lion‘s biggest hit is 1984, which was censored by youtube, so you know he has to be good. He’s brilliant, actually.

Fear is their greatest tool.
Fear can turn the brightest minds to fools
Televise endless lies, keep people terrified
That’s the way they maintain their rule.
Fear is the prison that they want us all to live in
And ever since the beginning this has been their only mission….
A real pandemic doesn’t need advertising…

One good song deserves another, so he came up with 1984 Part 2 (scroll to the bottom of the page after Margaret Anna Alice’s eloquent and meticulously referenced takedown of Kathy Hochul’s fascist end run around the New York State legislature).

The Ministry of Truth has taken over.
There’s a reason that they chose Corona.
Corona means crown, work it out man
It’s all symbolism from the beginning they told ya.
A virus of the mind, infecting your thoughts.
But enough is enough. Now we’re saying no more.
The emergence of apartheid, creating segregation
That’s the road that they’re paving.
Cuz if you’re not jabbed then it’s you that they’re blaming.
It’s you that is dangerous. Mass manipulation.
Coercing you to get penetrated.
What’s the difference between that and a rapist?

Lion’s latest release is The Great Puppet Show, a circus rock hip-hop parable: “Our magical screens will make you believe anything that we please.”

Irish folk-rock songwriter Dantom a.k.a. Daniel Thomas Dyer has a couple of spot-on, sarcastic protest songs from his album Root of the Root up at Odysee. The funnier one is Talking Covid Attack Blues (aka Sleeptalking Blues), a full-band Subterranean Homesick Blues for the twenties,  with pricelessly amusing backup vocals:

Spread the facts from the BBC, most trusted source in the world to me we should al live i fear
PCR, they say it’s the best, gold standard, 40 cycles…
Been on Facebook most of the time, we need more censorship there I say

He’s one of the few to make the connection between 9/11 and the plandemic in a solo acoustic tune, Breathe. Thanks to Mark Crispin Miller for passing these two along

On the more expansive side, Darkher’s new single Where the Devil Waits has stately ominous High Romantic angst rising over a cello drone and spare acoustic guitar

The big epic on this list is the new single by New Zealand band Die! Die! Die!, This Is Not an Island Anymore, rising from a drony intro punctuated by percussive blasts. It sounds like peak-era Sonic Youth with Kim Gordon out front, but much noisier and postrock-y

Let’s end this with a good vindictive joke. This isn’t a music video: it’s what tyrants look like once the mob outside the castle has busted down the gate. Here’s Boston Mayor Michelle Wu going into full panic mode once she realizes that her Twitter chat is not turning out the way she planned. The people have spoken!

Samson: The Funniest Rapper on Whatever Platform

Samson’s latest single, A Quick Word is beyond hilarious – and beyond brilliant. Hang in there for the first thirty seconds, in case you think it’s just a random doctrinaire Christian rap. In fact, it sounds so doctrinaire that it could be a parody – and it is, but not a parody of what you might think. The jokes are too good to give away. Hint: it’s about a religion that’s been established in violation of the US Constitution (thanks to Mark Crispin Miller – whose daily New From Underground feed is giving New York Music Daily some serious competition – for passing this along).

Look up Samson and you’ll see search results like “tiktok rapper.” He bounces from platform to platform, including some of the evil ones that this blog doesn’t use. It’s a shock that he hasn’t been booted from his youtube channel – guessing that they’re making too much money from the ads. But you don’t have to go to fascist censored youtube to find him.

Samson is working class to the core, and he’s pissed. Check out 46=13, his examination of runaway inflation. That one’s snide and funny, but The Sixth Sense – which opens with a clip of Kamala Harris equating the January 6 Capitol trespassing incident to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor – is even more venomously amusing. “There are compilation videos of you inciting this shit,” he reminds her.

A quick search turned up a couple of funny older videos. Birthday Bash is about ruling-class condescension via plandemic restrictions, in the context of the media tempest in a teaspoon over the Obama 60th birthday party. And this tiktok clip from what looks like the summer of 2020 proves that Samson already had his eye on the ball back then, even if he wasn’t referencing the VAERS database like he does now. Youtube says he gets hundreds of thousands of hits per video, but that’s probably underestimated by a factor of ten or more. Just like VAERS.

Play For Today 9/7/21

Been awhile since there’s been a playlist on this page, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of entertaining singles floating around. Here’s a fun and informative self-guided mix: the links in the song titles will take you to each one.

The Brooklyn Boogaloo Blowout are best known for their latin soul jams, but they’re a lot more eclectic than their name implies. The most electrifying song on their live album is Sheba, an Ethiopiques-tinged surf song

Louisiana rocker Rod Gator‘s Wanna Go for a Ride is the Clash’s version of Brand New Cadillac, as the Legendary Shack Shakers might have done it, darker and grittier with a guitar solo to match

Acoustic Syndicate‘s cover of the Grateful Dead classic Bertha has a tightness and a snarl that the original band sometimes let slip away. “Test me test me test me test me, why don’t you arrest me?” What a theme the lockdown era!

It makes a good segue with one you probably know, RC the Rapper‘s Just Say No, one of the big boombox hits from this summer’s protests here in the US. “It isn’t a theory if it keeps coming true.”

The smooth reggae grooves of Micah Lee’s No Lockdowns keep the inspiration flowing (thanks to the fearless folks at Texans For Vaccine Choice for this one).

The breathing metaphors and carefree sounds of children laughing on the playground in Alma’s Sips of Oxygen are a much subtler kind of commentary: “Someone in the doorway, hope they’re not afraid of them.”

Marianne Dissard and Raphael Mann’s delicate chamber pop duet reinvention of Townes Van Zandt’s If I Needed You is the great lost track from Nico’s Chelsea Girl album….with a woman who can hit the notes on the mic.

Let’s end this with something equally artful and poignant: Danny Wilkerson‘s Endless Haze, the best and least Beatlesque song on the new reissue of his very Fab Four-influenced 2018 solo debut album. The stark haggardness of the Boston Symphony Strings back his playfully lyrical but wounded chronicle of losing a battle with the bottle.

A Surreal French Moment From When Romany Punk Still Ruled the World

American bands are notorious for cultural appropriation, but it works both ways. So often, when acts outside the US emulate American styles, the result can be surreal to the extreme. French band Push Up’s sardonic, minor-key Balkan and Romany-influenced blend of punk rock and hip-hop wasn’t particularly extreme, but it was definitely surreal. You could call them Gogol Bordello lite. Their album The Day After came out in 2015 and is still streaming at Spotify.

It opens with Turn It Off, which is basically a one-chord jam about mass media brainwashing – prophetic,huh? The group bring in some brooding changes in Kiss From the Devil, a not-so-subtly metaphorical look at the perils of selling out.

They work a growly mashup of hard funk, lush 70s soul and hip-hop in I Try and follow with the moodily reggae-tinged Talking to You. Check Your Back is much the same, but with snakecharmer flute and more of a hip-hop edge. The Same – as in “I prefer not to be the same” – has soul organ, while You Never Got a Smile is a starrily organic, Eastern European attempt at American corporate urban pop.

Will You Make It has a psychedelic blend of keys, flute and acoustic guitar. The oldschool soul jam Quincy’s Interlude introduces the album’s lithely funky title track. The album’s most epic number, Pushaz is one of its strangest but also catchiest: imagine Gogol Bordello, Queen and Serge Gainsbourg all together in the studio, taking a stab at 70s soul music.

The rest of the songs on the album are pretty dubby: the Steel Pulse-tinged reggae tune A Dreamer, and a couple of versions of earlier tracks, the first of which is unlistenable at high volume because of the whistling. A snapshot of a world where Romany punk still ruled pretty much wherever there was a party..