SONG: John Mellencamp's 'Walk Tall'
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- Written by Fran Lucientes
Like other songs posted on this web site, the lyrics to "Walk Tall" by John Mellencamp contain some critical perspectives that are rarely expressed elsewhere in U.S. mainstream media. -- The theme of this song is encouragement and advice to those trying to maintain a moral compass and clear-sightedness in a time of deliberately sown confusion by which "the simple-minded and the uninformed" are "easily led astray." -- The lyrics as presented below combine single and album versions of the song, and punctuation and spelling have been slightly amended from other versions; some repeated lines are eliminated....
HIROSHIMA: Dorothy Day's statement
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- Written by Hank Berger
Aug. 6, 2005, is the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, about which Dorothy Day published the statement reproduced below in the September 1945 Catholic Worker....
SONG: Jack Johnson's 'Good People'
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- Written by Fran Lucientes
While the mainstream media in the U.S. has filtered out critical reporting on the state of U.S. society, some significant commentary seeps into the national psyche through the medium of popular music, albeit in ways much more oblique and less confrontational than a generation ago, when songs like "Four Dead in Ohio" by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (1970) commented on national ills. -- "Good People" (2005) is a good example of a gently satirical song now getting significant air play in the United States. -- "Good People" is written and performed by Jack Johnson (born 1975 in Hawaii), who was a professional surfer until an accident led him to return to guitar-playing skills picked up at age 14 and honed in his college years at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he majored in film. -- "Good People" can be found on "In Between Dreams," Jack Johnson's third studio album. -- The song is written from the blasé point of view of a couch potato who sees through the fictions of mainstream media news but is living in an oh-well-what's-the-use state of cynical apathy. -- Nevertheless, he's no one's dupe about what he's watching. -- "We've got heaps and heaps of what we sow," he says. -- Even so, one question haunts him. -- Why there are no "good people" on the TV shows he watches? -- "Where'd all the good people go?" he asks, plaintively, over and over again. -- The lyrics as presented below have not been presented elsewhere, but are derived from web-posted versions. -- "Run the ResoLut" refers, apparently, to a powerful software program for manipulating color images....