The Digital Dispatch

From NOEBIE.net

Rebels

A Braver, A Saner and Truer Thing

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casement

Where all your rights have become only an accumulated wrong, where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to gather the fruits of their own labours, and, even while they beg, to see things inexorably withdrawn from them – then, surely, it is a braver, a saner and truer thing to be a rebel, in act and in deed, against such circumstances as these, than to tamely accept it, as the natural lot of men.

– Sir Roger Casement

Ain’t there one damn song that can make me break down and cry?

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bowie-young-americansYoung Americans came on the radio on the drive back from dropping my daughter off at school this morning. When this album was released in 1975, I was a DJ in my hometown’s first disco, The Hideaway. This song, along with Fame from the same album, were my favorites in the stacks that autumn. They had an authentic, organic sound grounded in Philly Soul, and thoughtful lyrics that went way beyond most of the rest of what we played, which I found to be repetitious and trite.*

I’d heard lots of Bowie before, of course, and couldn’t resist the hooks in songs like Space Oddity or Suffragette City or Rebel Rebel, but his persona put me off and frightened me. I was under 18 and living in a conservative Evangelical Christian home. David Bowie and people like him were threatening and dangerous – worldly, seductive, transgressional. In the case of Bowie, that was obviously his intention.

The Young Americans album changed me. It began to change my view of the world. It wasn’t the only influence in this regard, but it helped to make me more questioning of conformity, more interested in things under the surface and more accepting of others. It prompted me to recognize and confront my own homophobia for the very first time. Allowing myself to enjoy the music pushed me to consider how silly it was to feel frightened by another human being merely because they weren’t quite the same as me. Aren’t we all different?

By the time Patti Smith’s Horses came out later that year, I was ready to listen .

* …if sometimes plenty of fun. Remember That’s The Way (Uh Huh, Uh Huh)?

Old Osawatomie

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Let us remember John Brown on the anniversary of his raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry.

John Brown

“Had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the so-called great, every man in this court would have deemed it worthy of reward rather than punishment.”