![]() “I think I’ve learned a lot in the years since I’ve been so obsessed with these things, and it’s changed my perspective on what works, what doesn’t work, and what’s worth your energy. So in a sense, the song is about the education of a kid is looking for a healthier way to save the world. just to harass and scream at people, but that’s what we were doing.” ![]() I don’t think Martin Luther King would have really endorsed people going to D.C. We just wanted to give those people some hell, you know, and make them uncomfortable. And then there were people like me and my friends, who went there definitely knowing that we weren’t going to change anything. All these balls and people in fur coats and cowboy hats and Texas-shaped belt buckles were in the streets. for all the people who helped get him elected. “I was at the second inauguration of Bush and there was a huge party, essentially, in D.C. The opening lyric, “Tired of being an angry child,” is rooted in Blakeslee’s experience as a pissed-off protester during the George W. But I think they’re coming at it from a very different perspective from where a lot of other people would be.” It’s not like they’re completely wrong about everything. Some of their points within their confused rhetoric are pretty good. The only people that are really right now getting together in public in large groups to do demonstrations are the minutemen and tea party people-what I consider to be far-right people. “It’s not that I want to revive a movement that someone else had in the past, but I see a vaccuum right now where there’s not so much of a cohesive or clear movement that comes from the people that is really working in a strategic way to bring about change. King’s non-violence and Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary” militance.)īlakeslee is the kind of guy who worries that the progressive movement has lost its fighting spirit. (Then again, Deusner may be more right than he knows: Blakeslee says that, when he was in the eighth grade, he wrote a 20-page paper about the relative merits of Dr. And when it comes to writing rock lyrics, an eighth-grade book report is a much better model than, say, a graduate-school thesis. The world of underground rock has enough songs whose lyrics are buried under so many layers of protective irony that no one knows what the hell they’re about. ![]() Deusner complained that “M.L.K.” has “all the gravity of a grade-school book report,” but I would argue that the song’s simplicity is its chief virtue. In a startingly mean-spirited review (seriously, did Blakeslee steal this dude’s girlfriend or something?), Pitchfork’s Stephen M. “What I’m trying to say in the song is don’t forget him, don’t forget his spirit, don’t forget how much he and the people who worked with him were willing to risk for things that we take for granted now, or that we may not even have yet,” Blakeslee told me over the phone on Friday. “We Shall Overcome” it ain’t, nor does it bear any resemblance to John Mayer’s insufferable 2006 call to apathy, “Waiting on the World to Change.” Between roller-coaster guitar riffs worthy of the Mothers of Invention, Blakeslee testifies to the power and continued relevance of Martin Luther King Jr.’s meaning and message. One of my favorite songs from the past year is this endearingly earnest civil-rights anthem by The Entrance Band, a Los Angeles psych-rock band fronted by singer-guitarist Guy Blakeslee. The Entrance Band: Guy Blakeslee, Derek W. ![]()
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