It's Always More Complicated

You've been a good old wagon, Daddy, but you done broke down.

Once he was like a Cadillac, Now he's like an old worn-out Ford.

Liam Gallagher, the eternally chippy younger brother of rock, apparently now needs a hip replacement. At 49, the ex-Oasis frontman is suffering from arthritis, which he seems to be approaching with customary but misplaced stubbornness. This week it emerged that he is refusing to have the surgery his doctor recommended, because hip replacements are for old people.

He'd rather, apparently, just be in pain.

Quite apart from the ageism/ableism here, how is this not really foolish? If he had a good old wagon/Cadillac that was showing signs of wear and tear, we think it most likely that he would get that fixed before it got worse and ground to a complete halt, no?

It may sound massively macho and metal to say, soldiering on here, upper lip stiff as anything, it's only a scratch, only hurts when I laugh, etc, but we suspect that this is going to hinder any lively bopping around shortly down the road.

Apparently Mick Jagger is still performing at his advanced age and after heart surgery by pursuing a rigorous exercise regimen and healthy lifestyle. Not going 'I'm well hard and can continue to party hard'.

A Place: Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich - The Legend Of Xanadu (or if you insist on a real place, Bobby Bloom, Montego Bay)
A Food: Millie Small - My Boy Lollipop (or if you want a little more sustenance, Bessie Smith - Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer)
A Drink: UB40 - Red Red Wine
Animal: Smokey Robinson and the Miracles - Mickey's Monkey
A Number: Peter, Paul and Mary - 500 Miles
Colour: Nicky James - My Colour Is Blue
Boy's Name: The Supremes - Nathan Jones
Girl's Name: Beach Boys - Barbara Ann
Profession: George Formby - When I'm cleaning windows
A Vehicle: Shane and the Shane Gang - Whistlestop Train

Was thinking that when I was a young 'un (and in spite of things like polio, and the so-called 'Asian' flu, and the general prevalence of diseases that anti-vaxxers have forgotten were still a peril within living memory) the Big Threatening Horror was The Bomb -

Four Minutes Warning and then Oblivion, or maybe a radioactive wasteland inhabited by mutants...

I also remembered the beginning of Nancy Mitford's Pigeon Pie (1940):

Sophia Garfield had a clear mental picture of what the outbreak of war was going to be like. There would be a loud bang, succeeded by inky darkness and a cold wind. Stumbling over heaps of rubble and dead bodies, Sophia would search with industry, but without hope, for her husband, her love and her dog. It was in her mind like the End of the World or the Last Days of Pompeii.

Anyway, another song applicable to the situation I lately recalled: Bessie Smith, Safety Mama:

About 'political correctness' and Norbert Elias's theory of the civilising process and the way new canons of behaviour get internalised over time and generations, and when spitting in public became a no-no, and the changes in attitude towards smoking over my life-span, and Erwin Goffmann's ideas about 'onstage' and 'offstage' behaviours, and why some people react so violently to being pulled up over matters that are really about civility in its broader senses...

But at the moment, dr rdrz, yr hedjog is Go Floppp.

So, instead, have this, which I have been meaning to post ever since I mentioned it to oliviacirce at Wiscon when she had her 'Safety' badge on:

Having suggested in my post yestereen on the music letter meme apropose of 'Many a New Day', that it was from some unnamed genre which is the opposite of torch song -

Torch songs being, pretty much, the ones in which the female singer yearningly declares that she will never stop Loving That Man even if he is not there/has run off with her best friend/has never ever looked at her/etc. I.e. they are from a position of abjection -

I was thinking about songs which do the reverse and posit a subject position of emotional agency vis a vis heterosexual romance in the singer, I realised that these actually fall into at least 3 categories.

a) Along the lines of 'Many a New Day', the ones that are about 'Men - who needs them? if one ditches you they're like buses, there'll be another one along soon'. Other example: The Marvelettes' 'Too Many Fish in the Sea' (also, perhaps, their 'I'm too strong to be strung along', which I can't find on YouTube).

b) Ones with the message along the line of my darling Dame Rebecca's famed apercu 'Men are terribly poor stuff'. E.g Rosemary Clooney and Marlene Dietrich, 'Men are Good For Nothing' and the Velvelettes' 'Needle in a Haystack'.

c) And then there are the ones that are 'Go on, get stuffed: who needs you?' addressed to some specific bloke, either named, as in the case of 'Nathan Jones' being given the air by the Supremes, or unnamed, as in the guy being told that 'I Will Survive' by Gloria Gaynor. (Given the mention in both of those of keys and doors, perhaps the archetype of this one is the blues classic 'You Got the Right Key but the Wrong Keyhole'.)

Any further suggestions?

When record companies first marketed race records - music by and for blacks - the singers were women: Mamie Smith and her Hot Jazz Titans, Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, Victoria Spivey, Alberta Hunter. According to Hamilton, "nearly every work of blues history" dismisses these women as "popularisers, not folk singers". They did not count as "the real black voice".