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Glorious ode to touring off 2011’s Searchlights

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The first song on The Shondes' 2011 LP Searchlights (EXotic Fever)

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Classic anthem off Bikini Kill’s split LP with UK comrades Huggy Bear about resistance and embracing contradiction.

As Kathleen Hanna wrote in Jigsaw Fanzine #4 (1991):

“My whole life is constantly felt by me as a contradiction. In order for me to exist I must believe that two contradictory things can exist in the same space. This is not a choice I make, it just is”

Read the whole essay here

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The second track off BK’s 1993 debut LP, Pussy Whipped

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In 2013, Granada’s city hall decided to dedicate a city square to him, renaming it “Joe Strummer Plaza”. The dedication was decided upon after presentation of a popular Facebook petition suggesting such. Joe Strummer himself visited Granada in 1984.

Joe Strummer in Granada, 1984

Additionally, ¡oh, mi corazón! translates to “oh, my heart” in English. This comes off as something akin to a lament, especially when the heavy subject matter of the song is brought into question.

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Roger Waters spray painted these lyrics on the Israeli apartheid wall while visiting the West Bank city of Bethlehem on June 21, 2006, the day before he performed in the Arab/Israeli Peace Village Neve Shalom. He had originally scheduled the concert for Hayarkon Park outside Tel Aviv, but moved it after discussions with Palestinian artists and Israeli refuseniks about the Palestinian call for an international cultural boycott against Israel’s inhumane and illegal policies. He wrote about the experience in The Guardian.

Two years previously, Waters had helped launch the social justice organization War on Want’s campaign against the wall.

The political “commentary” about 2000’s Israel, is in no way related to the line written in the 1980s.
Here’s the wikipedia page summarizing various positions in a more balanced way on the Israeli West Bank barrier.

It’s very 1984'ish – “we don’t need no thought control.” The lyrics also remind of Louis Althusser, a French Marxist philosopher who wrote about how the school plays a part in state control of a population. The school is an ISA, Ideological State Apparatus. Just another great layer of depth to the song.

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A spoken word track off Waits' 80’s classic Rain Dogs. While this song’s titular location is in Minneapolis, Tom Waits has explained:

Most of the imagery is from New York. It’s just that I was on 9th and Hennepin years ago in the middle of a pimp war, and 9th and Hennepin always stuck in my mind. “There’s trouble at 9th and Hennepin.” To this day I’m sure there continues to be trouble at 9th and Hennepin. At this donut shop. They were playing “Our Day Will Come” by Dinah Washington when these three 12-year-old pimps came in in chinchilla coats armed with knives and, uh, forks and spoons and ladles and they started throwing them out in the streets. Which was answered by live ammunition over their heads into our booth. And I knew “Our Day Was Here.” I remember the names of all the donuts: cherry twist, lime rickey. But mostly I was thinking of the guy going back to Philadelphia from Manhattan on the Metroliner with The New York Times, looking out the window in New York as he pulls out of the station, imagining all the terrible things he doesn’t have to be a part of.
(from wikipedia )

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Courtney Love did not attend Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, but many involved with the feminist punk rock Riot Grrrl movement did. While Hole is often associated with riot grrrl, Love’s relationship to the movement was actually largely antagonistic. She particularly had issues with singer Kathleen Hanna and drummer Tobi Vail of the seminal riot grrrl band Bikini Kill.

Love was also particularly critical of K Records co-founder Calvin Johnson and the surrounding DIY punk scene that pre-dated (but overlapped with) riot grrrl. In a Peel Sessions performance of the song Love changed the lyric to “I went to school with Calvin”.

Rock stars such as Love’s husband Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Henry Rollins of Black Flag also got their professional start in Olympia.

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One of XO’s more upbeat tracks. According to Matthew LeMay’s 33 1/3 volume on the album, this song was originally called “Crush Blind”, which was changed to “Poor White” before arriving on the title we know today.

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XO engineer/producer/mixer Larry Crane is cited in Matthew LeMay’s 33 1/3 book as saying that “…the lack of color in ‘Bled White’ has its origins in Smith’s skeptical eye towards gentrification…” (p. 48)

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