SOUNDTRACK: LITTLE BIG TOWN-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #91 (October 6, 2020).
Little Big Town is a country band that has been around for a while. I feel like I’ve heard of them, but I’m not sure.
Evidently the band is really the four main singers, but they have added more touring members for this Concert.
They open with “Nightfall.” It has nice folkie guitar and Karen Fairchild sings with a strong folksinger style. The snaps from Hubert Payne’s drums really ring out in a cool way. Thee upright bass John Thomasson adds a nice anchor to the melody.
I thought maybe they weren’t all that country after all. But as soon as the chorus jumps in and the accents start flying–especially the high notes from Kimberly Schlapman–the country has come into the house. The song is catchy though.
Up next guitarist Phillip Sweet jokes is the “most profound thing” they’ve done. “Wine, Beer, Whiskey” opens with a surprise trumpet intro from Jacob Bryant. Although songs about drinking are about as cliché as they come, the stompin,’ dopey tone is quite fun and Jimi Westbrook’s lead delivery sells it well.
They apparently use some songwriters known as the Love Junkies who came up with “Girl Crush.” There’s some nice harmonies on this track. You really can’t hear keyboard player Akil Thompson on the other songs, but his chords ring through here. Westbrook puts down his guitar while Sweet plays.
They end with “Boondocks” their first hit about where they come from. I like the bowed bass and Evan Weatherford’s slide guitar lead, but the thought of thousands of people stompin’ along to these lyrics is a tad disturbing.
[READ: October 5, 2020] Parable of the Talents [an excerpt]
During the COVID Quarantine, venerable publisher Hingston & Olsen created, under the editorship of Rebecca Romney, a gorgeous box of 12 stories. It has a die-cut opening to allow the top book’s central image to show through (each book’s center is different). You can get a copy here. This is a collection of science fiction stories written from 1836 to 1998. Each story imagines the future–some further into the future than others. As it says on the back of the box
Their future. Our present. From social reforms to climate change, video chat to the new face of fascism, Projections is a collection of 12 sci-fi stories that anticipated life in the present day.
About this story, Romney writes:
I’ve ended this collection with a meteor. An African -America woman born with “hyperempathy” must navigate the 2020as and 2030s in a hellscape formed by climate change disasters… The reader is introduced to a rising demagogue whose slogan in “make America great again.” Did that send chills down your spine?
At the time she was writing, however, it’s more likely she was inspired by the past than by the future. When Ronald Reagan accepted the presidential nomination from the 1980 Republican National Committee, he gave a speech in which he promised, “For those who’ve abandoned hope, we’ll restore hope and we’ll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again. Butler perceived the problems behind that phrase and used science fiction to explore how such a mindset could lead to history repeating itself, resulting in story that is even more powerful today than when she first wrote it.
I first looked at the date of 1998 and thought it was so current, not exactly realizing it was 22 years (and a lifetime) ago. Without even reading the story, just reading the above paragraph, it’s pretty easy to see exactly what Reagan wrought. He really was the beginning of the end for the country.
And Butler could totally read the writing on the wall.
Not much happens in this excerpt. A farm is burned and most people killed. the refugees take shelter with the narrator at their farm/commune.
It’s the details below that are so chilling.
The farm that was burned was attacked by men wearing black tunics with large crosses on the chest. This was no gang of thugs or bunch of looters, this was an organized group–and one the narrator is unfamiliar with.
Was this group of people from “my current least favorite presidential candidate, Texas Senator Andrew Steele Jarret?”
Welcome to the year 2020 (although her book is actually set in 2032).
It sounds like the sort of thing his people might do–a revival of something nasty out of the past. … Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier “simpler” time. Now does not suit him. … The current state of the county does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God [and they could stomp] anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country. But in these days when more than half the people in the country can’t read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them.
I’m not sure what happened that people can’t read anymore, and maybe we can just update that to facts are so meaningless and people are so easily swayed by dumb ideas that history (and science) are meaningless.
It seem inevitable that people who can’t read are going to lean more toward judging candidates on the way they look and sound than on what they claim to stand for. Even people who can read and are educated are apt to pay more attention to good looks and seductive lies than they should.
That sure sounds like 2020, aside from the good looks part.
This story is more concerned with God–religion as the great arbiter of right and wrong, which certainly seemed like it would be the crucial issue. Of course our current occupier doesn’t care one whit about God, but he will use it when he needs to. But just replace the religious aspect of this text with skin color and “cultist” with “antifa” and you could read this in any paper today.
“cultist” is a great catchall term for anyone who fits into no other large category and yet doesn’t quiet match Jarret’s version of Christianity. … Jarret supporters have been known, now and then, to form mobs and burn people at the stake for being witches. Jarret condemns the burning, but does so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear.
Welcome to 2032, just a decade earlier.
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