I had never heard of Steve Carlson until he was mentioned in Naked Capitalism.
Steve was born into a musical family in Southern California and credits his love of music to his Bohemian upbringing. When he was ten years old, Steve began writing and playing songs in various local bands. After receiving his Culinary Arts degree, he moved on to Maui, Hawaii where he soaked up the musical influences of island life. It was there that he dedicated his life to the pursuit of his passion, and continues creating records with lyrical poetry that captivates his listeners.
For those who get a little tired of the Jingle Bells, it may be a more tempered song
for what a year we have.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/...
I received this note yesterday:
My name is Steve Carlson and I’m a union and community organizer from northern Wisconsin. I recently made a music video of a song I wrote and recorded many years ago titled A Hell of A Time.
It’s a Christmas song, or perhaps an anti-Christmas song, or perhaps even more accurately a truly pro-Christmas song. I’ll let you folks decide. I wrote it because it seems to me that if Americans spent as much time, energy and money making a better world as we do celebrating Christmas we’d actually have that better world and something to truly celebrate.
I lived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which economically and culturally is a lot like northern Wisconsin: small towns that have been hit by the de-industrialization of America. They may have been forgotten by policymakers in Washington and too unglamorous to merit much attention from the mainstream media. Nevertheless, I believe that the people who read this blog are acutely aware of who has wound up being ground up by the march of neoliberalism, and want more socially just outcomes, even it we don’t necessarily agree on the course of action. And while some may chafe at the idea of a less than cheery Christmas song, it might be time to pull off the commercial veneer and see where we really are as a people. It’s only when you know where you are that you can map a path to get where you’d like to go.
I'm with Yves. I grew up in the Industrial North that the Reagan Monetarists
went and deindustrialized and destroyed the industrial belt of Pennsylvania, Ohio,
Michigan, Indiana and Illinois.
Maybe we have a slightly different theme song