Song 338: This week on the playlist you can hear Rednecks by Randy Newman, who also wrote the song. I got a subscription to Rolling Stone in September of 1969, not long after I arrived at N.U., and I remember reading a lot about Randy Newman long before I ever heard one of his recordings. The reading sparked a bit of curiosity about his music, but I felt I had so many other artists to catch up on that for a few years I couldn’t seem to get around to him. Then in the fall of ’74, Good Old Boys came along, and after hearing a few cuts on the radio, I decided the time had come to get to know RN better. This track, which opens the record, sets the stage for the territory that the concept album travels through. Living in the Chicago area during that stretch, I understood the references to the cage on the South Side and the West Side. In that era, I mistakenly believed that modernity, in the form of mass media, scientific technology and larger social networks, would eventually put an end to the redneck mentality that felt the need to keep the nxxxxxs down, yet, over 4 decades later, the Senate is currently debating the nomination of a man for AG who has made a career of keepin’ the nxxxxxs down, and who intends to continue doing so, whether he gets the appointment or not. Sadly, these Rednecks still do not have the ability to judge someone according to the content of character rather than the color of skin, and as Martin Luther King Day of 2017 dawns, the fight against ignorance and prejudice hangs over the U.S. Senate, with the outcome remaining uncertain, but I guess you can’t expect much from fools who can’t tell the difference between a certain part of their anatomy and a hole in the ground.
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