Tuesday, January 19, 2010

the name

The name of the blog comes from the lyrics of the Mekons song, "Memphis, Egypt."

destroy your safe and happy lives before it is too late,
the battles we fought were long and hard,
just not to be consumed by rock n' roll...
capitalismos, favorite boy child, we must apologise,
up in the rafters a rope is danglin',
spots before the eyes of rock n' roll...
we know the devil and we have shaken him by the hand,
embraced him and thought his foul (stinking) breath was fine perfume
just like rock n' roll...
east berlin can't buy a thing, there's nothing they can sell me,
walk through the wall no pain at all
i'm born inside the belly of rock n' roll...
it's something to sell your labor for when hair sprouts out below,
i'm a microscope on that secret place where
we all want to go, it's rock n' roll.


I read it as a take on "My, My, Hey, Hey" in light of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since this blog is about the historical context of pop music, the vision of rock and roll as a consuming fire is a convincing one. In my likely absence in the next couple of days, it is a left as an exercise to contrast this with the Brazilian notion of antropofagia.

No comments:

Post a Comment