Song 374: 7 weeks after my last personal friend song post, this week on the playlist you will find Everybody Woke Up Green by my good friend Joe Canzano, who also wrote the song, and you can hear a YouTube video of it here. The first time I heard Joe perform this tune, in the early 1990s, it became an instant favorite, and on the night when he showed up at the Jack Hardy songwriter gathering on Houston St., I suggested that he use it as his calling card, which he did. As much as I always enjoyed the deft commentary on racism and other ethnic phobias embodied in this recording's lyrics, the current political environment has highlighted their meaning to a degree I could not have imagined 2 decades ago. Given recent racist episodes in Ferguson and other similar events across the country, the line about cops out in Loa Angeles might sound odd at first, but if you recall the Rodney King riots of 1992, then you understand that while the bad news has lately come from other places, L.A. certainly earned its reference in the words here. I savor the science-fiction vision of a world where everyone's skin has turned green, and the folks at Breitbart etc. would plead for a new method to determine who we're supposed to hate. To give Joe the last word, truly, there is no proper color to cover ignorance.
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