Saturday, January 31, 2015

Hard On The Mind


After my recent rant about the lack of modern protest songs I could hear people thinking "What's stopping Oggy from writing a protest song of his own?" Mainly, my point is that there are quality singers and musicians and producers with abundant current event material who are opting to continually beat down the topic of sex and dancing and 'boo hoo my boyfriend cheated on me'. I accept that eight of ten songs on an album can be about those topics. yes. But what the fucking hell is wrong with y'all? not 10 out of 10! Please can you write one or two songs every two years about politics, AIDS, ebola or somehing that shows your public school education was not totally squandered on keeping you out of jail.

Well, I am not as talented a performer as Bruno Mars. That's the issue. So me writing a song about the rain forest and Bruno Mars writing the same song are not the same.


Still, I understand that I must make the world one in which I want to live so here's my offering to the bleak landscape of protest songs. I'm telling you that Culture Club managed to put a cool beat behind all their songs and some of them were subversive. I have to lean toward country genre. The Clash pretty much only wrote protest songs. But the top 100 songs today all are about love or heartbreak. It's pathetic. 100 songs about the same two topics. In fact, I went through many of them, at great cost to my mental health, and the only one I could sense a little bit of social consciousness in was "I Don't F**k With You" by Big Sean which was almost unintelligible but I could determine

"Ain't nothin' but trill in me, aw man, silly me
I just bought a crib, three stories, that bitch a trilogy
And you know I'm rollin' weed that's fuckin' up the ozone
 
I got a bitch that text me, she ain't got no clothes on" Big Sean.


Big Sean actually included a reference to the ozone layer and that's more than all the other top 100 even attempted. It's pathetic, right? I also sampled Taylor Swift's atrocious offerings and concluded she has nothing to say about anything and actually has no skill at all either as a writer or singer but her personality is pretty much flawless so that's why she's popular. I mean, she's impossible not to love. But her music is abysmal.

Well, I'm going to try to balance the scales now with the ultimate epic protest song to protest the lack of protest songs. And this is how it goes because Protest Songs are for the people, see, and I'm not trying to profit from this song I simply want to raise awareness so I'm going to write all the lyrics and chords out and it's going to inspire Taylor Swift and Bruno Mars to stop looking in the fucking mirror for two seconds and write a good tune about Putin or ISIS. That will be my reward.




Hard On The Mind
By Oggy Bleacher

(Intro)
[G] I've heard every [D] Love Song [emi]I want to [C]hear
And I [G] know that [D] when you're young
the [emi] future don't look [C] clear

But if [emi] you only [A7] sing about [D] yourself
and [emi] ignore the [A7] environment's [D] health

[G] then you [D] might as well sing about [emi] burgers and [C] soda pop
[G] it don't [D] matter if [emi] you make it [C] hot

it's [D7] all the same 
it's [G] all the same

(Verse)
You can [G]write  a catchy [D] song about [emi] breast cancer or [C] tumors

I
[G]know you can
I [D] know you can

Take your [G]pick between [D] prostates or [emi] testicles or [C] drug shooters
The [D7] truth won't hurt
It'll [G]make you [G7]cool

Or if [C] Health don't ring your [G] bell [G#dim]
[A7] sing about race and give 'em [D] hell

The [G] wealth gap's getting [D] wider than the [emi] thigh gap will [C] ever be
so [G] don't sweat the [emi] small stuff when we're [D] fucking up the [D7] big blue sea. (mini rant about oceans dying)

I [G] know that getting [D] laid is a [emi] real high [c] priority
I [G] know it is
I [D] know it is

But we're [G] talking about a [D] single protest [emi] song, or fuck [C]  authority
that's [G] all I ask [D]
that's [G] all I ask [G7]

I [C] know you can [G] shake your ass [G#dim]
But can you [A7] write a catchy song about [D7] separating your fucking trash? 

There are a [G] million other [D] things that [emi] you can write [C] about
than [G] getting drunk and [emi] posting videos of [D] your girlfriend [C] pouts

[G] Just because you were [D] born after [emi] Kurt Cobain [C] died
Doesn't [G] mean it's [D] OK to lay in [emi] bed and get [C] fried.

[G] No one [D] expects you to be the [emi] next Sting or Jackson [C] Browne
But [G] for the love of [emi] god
The [C] rainforests are [D] all burning [G] down [G7]

(Out-tro)
So [C] take my advice,[C7]
the [F] tradition is [F#dim] clear
[G] musicians write [B7] songs
that are [E7] easy on the [A7] ear,
but [D7] sometimes [G7] hard on the [C] mind
(Ukrainians are [A7] dying)
[D7] Sometimes [G7] hard on the [C] mind
(At least pretend [A7] you give a shit)
[D7] Sometimes [G7] hard on the [C7]mind.

 That's it. it took probably as long to write that as it took Bruno Mars to write some shit about his girlfriend's hair. So don't tell me it's hard to read the news and write about your opinion. That's a bullshit excuse. Part of my Dusty Music Box project is about 20 songs from WWII, all pro-America songs, all celebrating freedom and honoring enlisted men. Can someone please send me a link to one modern song that celebrates the enlisted men and women of the last 15 years? In 1943 there were pro-America songs in every Genre: Western Swing, Pop, Ballad, Kids music, Country, and they only had 4 years to do it. Modern Musicians have witnessed continuous war/deployment since 2001 and all I've seen is old Bon Jovi Songs get dusted off. I would be happy with a single song celebrating the troops. It's really irritating that even Country has not added any music to the pro-America propaganda catalog. Future Musical Historians are going to see a major disconnect with popular music in 2015 and current events. Prohibition of booze lasted from 1920-1933 and there were songs galore about that topic. 13 years. Marijuana prohibition lasted about 70 years...and I have not heard one blatantly topical song about marijuana recently. Only "Smoke Two Joints" by Sublime back in 1995...9 years ago...was a popular song about pot. Today, after 70 years, pot is legal in several states...and not one popular song to mark this historical event. Why? I blame the studios and the producers first because I suspect they pressure artists to avoid this topic, and then the artists second because they have to believe that their material is good enough.






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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.