Thursday, 19 March 2009
I Fought The Law
It occurs to me that a song called I Fought The Law And I Won simply wouldn't work. This gives me pause. Is it because the Blues, and its necessary downbeaten ethos, has simply interpenetrated contemporary popular music to too ubiquitous a degree for genuine songs of self-assertion to be possible? I can't listen to self aggrandizing rap without taking it, on some level, as irony. Or is this me projecting my own downbeatenness onto an idiom that is perfectly capable of self-assertion?
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4 comments:
Not a fan of the Dead Kennedys, I'm guessing? You're right, though, that their version is pretty heavily ironic. (It's sung from the point of view of the guy who killed Harvey Milk.)
I was about to write the same thing as T. Hodler. "Twinkies were the best friend I ever had" ... But that's a song of outrage, not a song of victory. The news-clippings-collage that was part of the album notes included a quote about how the guy who killed Harvey Milk ended up killing himself, so it's not finally presented as his evil triumph, just as another triumph of the system, somewhere between " The law don't mean shit if you've got the right friends" and "You can get away with murder if you have a badge".
I'm ashamed to say that I don't know the Kennedy's version. Which album is it on?
It's on "Give Me Convenience Or Give Me Death". It doesn't really challenge your point, now that I listen to it again. The last line is "I *am* the law, so I won", after all.
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