iHeartRadio (formerly Clear Channel, the most dangerous media company in America during the Bush II era until everyone just kind of forgot about it) has an app that’s kind of the poor man’s SiriusXM, and it’s…pretty good, actually? It includes access to dozens of radio stations across the US and Canada (most of which sound almost exactly the same, but also some useful stuff including Bloomberg and Fox Sports Radio), podcasts, and playlists for pretty much every musical genre short of the Motown (Mongolia Town) sound.
But the algorithm needs a little work, and that’s putting it mildly.
I was listening to the country music channel last night, and it announced they were playing a “flashback” song you “might have listened to on your Walkman.” Something from the eighties or nineties? Nope: Taylor Swift’s “Love Story.”
Released in March 2008.
Alright, fine, maybe that’s just me getting old. Then I went to the “one-hit wonders” channel just in time to hear “Don’t You (Forget About Me).”
By this band:
Simple Minds’ Top 40 hits on the Billboard chart are in the column on the right. (And they had a fifth, “See The Light,” squeaking onto the chart at #40 in 1991.)
I know the definition of “one-hit wonder” is a malleable one that often includes artists who had a big hit and a follow-up that charted but has been completely forgotten. I won’t judge you if you call, say, Gerardo1 a one-hit wonder.
But when you have another top five hit, never mind several other top 40 singles, you are not a one-hit wonder by any conceivable standard. Go home, iHeartRadio algorithm, you’re drunk.
Everyone has one completely meaningless issue that doesn’t really affect the world as a whole, and barely registers as far as most people are concerned, but that they’re inexplicably but militantly passionate about. One-hit wonder mission creep is mine. (Don’t get me started on people who say Rick Astley is a one-hit wonder when “Never Gonna Give You Up” wasn’t even his only number one hit!)
Everyone is piling on Roger Waters for his disastrous interview with Rolling Stone, but is it really fair? He’s no less qualified to opine on international affairs than the rest of us. I have no real experience in the field, so is it really my place to say he has no idea what he's talking about?
Yes. The answer is yes, I can indeed say Roger Waters has no idea what he’s talking about. Also, he should probably be on Intervention.
When you’re kind of weirding out a Rolling Stone writer with your left-wing politics, you know you’ve attained the rank of Tankie First Class:
He has also accused the Syrian rescue group the White Helmets of being “fake,” against all evidence to the contrary; said the Syrian opposition faked chemical attacks by Bashar al-Assad, a contention no credible independent expert agrees with; and recently wrote an open letter to the Ukrainian first lady, Olena Zelenska, calling on her to encourage her husband to sue for peace with Russia — a move that would be tantamount to acquiescing to Putin. (In our interview, he dismisses well-documented accounts of Russian war crimes in Ukraine as “lies, lies, lies.”)
What he sees as his advocacy for Palestine has for some crossed the line from legitimate criticism into bigotry, whether deliberate or otherwise. Waters’ previous shows have had, for example, giant pigs emblazoned with the Star of David, alongside other symbols. Waters has repeatedly insisted his problem is Israel, not with Jews more broadly. However, as we discuss the subject during our interview, Waters argues that some Jewish people in the U.S. and U.K. bear responsibility for the actions of Israel, “particularly because they pay for everything.”
I don’t hate Jews, I just hate the powerful Jews secretly controlling the world. Why is this so hard to understand?”
Waters says most of us are fed our narratives instead of being able to independently come to our own conclusions by the “completely controlled” media, which is “monopolized by the powers that be and by the government … oh, my God, Rolling Stone must be part of it.”
That compliant media, he continues, feeds us the idea that Russia and China are evil, and we by contrast are good. He sees things very differently.
“Of course, we — when I say we, I’m now speaking as a taxpayer in the United States — are not. We are the most evil of all by a factor of at least 10 times,” he says. “We kill more people. We interfere in more people’s elections. We, the American empire, is doing all this shit.”
This factor of 10 idea, I suggest, might not play all that well to any citizen of Ukraine right now — especially given the mounting evidence of war crimes we’ve seen, including mass graves, the use of rape as a weapon of war, targeting humanitarian convoys, and more.
“You’ve seen it on what I’ve just described to you as Western propaganda,” he retorts. “It’s exactly the obverse of saying Russian propaganda; Russians interfered with our election; Russians did that. It’s all lies, lies, lies, lies.”
I try to push gingerly through Waters’ brick wall. I haven’t just seen things via corporate media, I say — I’ve got friends in Ukraine, and friends who went to Ukraine as journalists. I’ve even got friends who are Ukrainian journalists. I’m relying on testimony of people I know who’ve seen things with their own eyes. And it’s not only Ukrainian officials and Western media reporting atrocities — there are war crimes investigations already underway.
This does not go far with Waters. “Maybe…” he wonders, before throwing a curveball. “Don’t forget, I’m on a kill list that is supported by the Ukrainian government. I’m on the fucking list, and they’ve killed people recently.… But when they kill you, they write ‘liquidated’ across your picture. Well, I’m one of those fucking pictures.”
“And when I read stuff, which I have done in blogs and things, criticizing me for my … I always go and look and see where it came from. And it’s amazing how often when I’ve done the hunt and hunted it down, it is da, da, da.ukraine.org,” he says, making up a hypothetical Ukrainian web address.
Jerry Lee Lewis would be scared into sobriety by this interview.
Like many famous Tankies, Waters accuses the United States of being responsible for all the ills of the world (the ones not orchestrated by the rich Jews, anyway) while voluntarily moving here from his home country and feeding the beast with his tax dollars.
Yes, I know the Glenn Greenwald argument that you should concentrate on your own country’s ills before pointing fingers at the rest of the world, but if I were alive in the thirties and fighting a rhetorical war against Hitler, I wouldn’t move to Nazi Germany and support the Waffen-SS with my reichsmarks.2
It’s cheap to resort to “America, love it or leave it” rhetoric, but sometimes it's too appropriate to pass up. Waters should make a new life for himself in Russia, where he’ll be right at home among other music legends.
After discussing Roger Waters, whose music has never been nearly as intelligent as thinks it is, we mourn a singer whose music was always much more intelligent than people gave it credit for:
I actually thought of Loretta Lynn as a television star more than a musician when I was a child. In the late seventies and early eighties she was on television constantly, with commercials, appearances on shows like Hee Haw3 and as-seen-on-TV ads for her records.
Of course, we were too young to appreciate artists like Lynn and thought they made boring “old people” music (not to mention, if word got out at school that you listened to country music, you wouldn’t even be allowed at the nerds’ lunchroom table). When you realize Loretta Lynn was one of the greatest of all time, well, that’s when you’ve truly grown up.
RIP.
“Rico Suave,” a big hit in the spring of 1991 which hasn’t been played on any radio station anywhere in the world since the summer of 1991, was followed up with “We Want The Funk,” which peaked at #18, and for which the record company paid funk legend George Clinton enough money to slum it in the video.
One thing that drives me even crazier than one-hit wonder mischaracterization is when people say their President or Prime Minister is literally Hitler and the just go about their daily business even though they profess to believe that their country is a totalitarian dictatorship on par with the Third Reich. Say what you will about the January 6 or Portland Antifa idiots, but they at least believe what they’re yelling about.
Every Newfoundlander of my generation grew up with Hee Haw and The Tommy Hunter Show on the rec room TV, even if we wished mom and dad would let us put on The Smurfs or something.