10.12.11
Hank Jr’s recyclables
At the beginning of the week Hank Williams, Jr. promised a “new” tune as payback for the Fox & Friends imbroglio in which he compared the president to Hitler. Two times.
This precipitated the loss of his big money gig as theme song provider to ESPN’s Monday Night Football. (To see the look on the man’s agent as it happened: Priceless.)
The entertainment press jumped all over the press release announcing Hank’s new song and now you can hear it in the YouTube stream above.
‘Cept it’s not a new song.
Hank unfurled his mediocre country-ish hard rock tune, Keep the Change ‘– an obvious play on the Obama administration, in 2009.
And it’s been flogged on YouTube ever since.
Rewritten only slightly to mention Fox & Friends — it was all about hating on the President (lyric: “we know who to blame”) and how we’re in the United Socialist States of America.
“I’ll keep my Christian name,” Hank sang in 2009. And that’s carried over.
Yep, we’ve all been in danger of losing our Christian names since the Muslim took over in the White House. Any day now I expect to get a card in the mail saying my new designation is Dick Muammar Destiny al Pasadena.
Here’s Hank, from 2009, singing the same song for the drumming up of love from the Tea Party:
The Tea Party generated (and generates) a lot of music.
The stuff for Ron Paul protesting fiat money and the Fed is enough to make you run screaming from the room.
And YouTube arrays much of the most popular material in the genre down the right side of the page for Hank Jr’s live performance of Keep the Change.
Many of these tunes were discussed last year here.
So it’s not really a coincidence (occasionally the computer algorithms are spot on) that the next video flashing up right next to Hank Jr’s is this:
As painfully stupid and bigoted as it is, Tea Party music is very successful. It is passed around, linked to, played repeatedly and serves as rallying cry/expression of defiance/social glue for its audience. It is brimming with conviction.
There’s no corollary on the other side of the line.
Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie would have perished due to neglect if they’d found themselves catapulted into 2009 and forced to compete for matching Democratic or progressive attention.
Hank Jr’s Keep the Change is not the only Tea Party tune with the same title and subject.
Country artist Darryl Worley tried for publicity using the same method last year.
It won’t come as a shock to anyone that lots of country music artists and their fans don’t like the president …
However, the country charts have largely shied away from this type of inflammation if we don’t include the short period after 9/11 when it granted a dispensation for those who liked the idea of getting our war on. (Chuck, you can correct me if I’m way off.)
These days there’s no political challenge in Country Music TV’s Top Twenty. And while any analysis of the country audience would come away with the idea that a profoundly anti-Obama song might move significant units, no one with a big reputation has tried to test it.
Until now.
Darryl Worley’s “Keep the Change??? is just such a song, one the singer obviously hopes will set his career on fire. For those unfamiliar with him, Worley’s highest-charting number, the jingo and manipulative “Have You Forgotten,??? benefited from the brief country music get-out-of-jail-free card given out after 9/11 to all redneck boors with hearts of gold …
[Worley] rather calculatingly seemed to believe, perhaps with justification, that if “Keep the Change??? … sells enough to white and worked up rural people who buy it because it massages their fear and loathing, country music [would] eventually be forced to play it …
For a Kalamazoo newspaper, Worley — it is told — “[is] concerned about the state of the nation and the overall emotional well-being of its people.??? And that the song “transcends political ties??? — which must surely be one of the biggest crocks you’ll read today.
“We (co-writers Jim ‘Moose’ Brown and Phil O’Donnell) pick song titles because we know they’ll stir up a stink,??? Worley told the newspaper.
It was a strategy that did not work.
Hank Jr’s repackaging of his Keep the Change is obviously a transparent attempt to monetize an epic career embarrassment on Fox.
But even Hank can’t be so stupid that he would think it could make even a few thin dimes against the pile the Monday Night Football song raked in.
Christoph Hechl said,
October 13, 2011 at 4:25 am
Well generally speaking, i wouldn’t give much for an artists political opinion and therefore i can only assume, that Mr. Williams was so surprised to be asked for his, that his mental capabilities for filtering were not up und running yet when his mouth started to open.
Well seriously: Endangering a job like that without any need is about as stupid as you can get, still i refuse to ask the question “how stupid can one be?” for sheer fear of the answer.
George Smith said,
October 13, 2011 at 9:38 am
Hank Jr’s always been notorious for opening mouth before engaging brain. It’s that most of the time in the past he’s never accidentally successfully timed it with being on a venue with such a large audience when the social atmosphere is so inflamed.