FYI -- all that dKos traffic (as well as a posting at Michael Moore's site) crashed the site, but it's back up now. Go watch! :)
Nico
Think Progress
++++++
Last night, folk-rocker Conor Oberst (aka Bright Eyes) performed on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. If you've heard any of his albums, you know Bright Eyes is clearly political (he participated in last year's Vote for Change tour, as noted in the Rolling Stone excerpt I posted below the fold).
But last night's performance was just incredible -- in fact, I'm legitimately surprised NBC even allowed it to air. Bright Eyes performed a song (not on any of his albums) called "When the President Talks to God". Maybe I'm just not used to seeing anything half-way politically-controversial on broadcast TV, but I found it amazing -- just go watch. And please, please recommend this diary so others can see. Bright Eyes' lyrics have been compared to Bob Dylan's, and this performance certainly summons up a bit of that old spitfire rebel spirit that Dylan personified. It's a breath of fresh air. Enjoy.
"When the President Talks to God"
When the president talks to God
Are the conversations brief or long?
Does he ask to rape our women's' rights
And send poor farm kids off to die?
Does God suggest an oil hike
When the president talks to God?
When the president talks to God
Are the consonants all hard or soft?
Is he resolute all down the line?
Is every issue black or white?
Does what God say ever change his mind
When the president talks to God?
When the president talks to God
Does he fake that drawl or merely nod?
Agree which convicts should be killed?
Where prisons should be built and filled?
Which voter fraud must be concealed
When the president talks to God?
When the president talks to God
I wonder which one plays the better cop
We should find some jobs. the ghetto's broke
No, they're lazy, George, I say we don't
Just give 'em more liquor stores and dirty coke
That's what God recommends
When the president talks to God
Do they drink near beer and go play golf
While they pick which countries to invade
Which Muslim souls still can be saved?
I guess god just calls a spade a spade
When the president talks to God
When the president talks to God
Does he ever think that maybe he's not?
That that voice is just inside his head
When he kneels next to the presidential bed
Does he ever smell his own bullshit
When the president talks to God?
I doubt it
I doubt it
+++++
From RollingStone.com:
Nobody can skewer young love with the gauche emotion, mordant wit or rude detail of Conor Oberst. The Bright Eyes maestro is only twenty-four, but he's broken a career's worth of hearts, strumming his acoustic guitar and chronicling his romantic torments in indie-rock gems such as "Going for the Gold." He commands a cult of hot, sullen Conorites who would gladly crawl through broken glass to lick his plectrum. And though he blew up nationwide with his previous album, 2002's Lifted, and is a veteran of both the Vote for Change Tour and The O.C., he still sticks to the tiny indie label he helped establish in 1993, when he was just a thirteen-year-old Omaha, Nebraska, kid peddling his home demos. Respect!
His two new albums are completely different animals. I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning is a masterpiece of country-flavored heartland angst, plowing the musical ground between The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and the Cure's Seventeen Seconds. Digital Ash in a Digital Urn is a more self-conscious studio experiment, with Kid A-inspired synth diddles. Any mortal songwriter would get slaughtered attempting the emotional excesses of these tunes; sometimes it takes four or five minutes to tell whether it's a good one or not. But Oberst is brilliant at going too far, riding the subways with grievous angels and lost souls even more screwed up than he is. He really puts on the chill in Wide Awake's "Lua," an acoustic ballad about doing drugs all night with a desperate lover with a heavy heart ("So many men stronger than me/Have thrown their backs out trying to lift it"). By morning, they can't even recognize each other. You'd have to go back to Guns n' Roses' "Night Train" for a more harrowing chemical romance, especially when Oberst croaks, "Me, I'm not a gamble/You can count on me to split."
More here:
http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/album/_/id/6822323/brighteyes?pageid=rs.Artistcage&pageregio
n=triple1
http://www.saddle-creek.com/