concert footage
Good evening, buckaroos. We’re the South End String Band and we want to welcome you to the Floyd Norgaard Cultural Center. I suppose I could get up here tonight and rail about how culture in America has gotten dumbed down, shrunk up, pixellated, sterilized, mass produced and just plain ruined. Easy to do. Rant and rave about low IQ hi def TV, splutter about internet pornography, beat my fists bloody about American Idol. I could throw a cord of my best maple onto the bonfire of the Culture Wars, smear myself with blackberry tattoos and stick a sea lion bone thru my nose and howl to the moon all winter long.
The Moslems hate this western culture and half of us westerners do too. Violence and sex and the worship of money. Satan’s serving Big Macs with whisky by a naked teenager, they think. And the Chinese are working on the special sauce using lead paint and soy, probably sell you a Whopper for 10 cents. The Culture Crusades are gonna be fought the rest of our lives and the rest of our kids’ lives. We think the enemy is Satan or the Sunnis or the Shi-ites or the Taliban or the Liberals.
But the enemy is really something that’s already won — and most folks barely noticed. The so-called enemy is technology. Digital, satellite, nano, speed of light computer technology. Driven by money and mega corporations and governments. Course us Cro-Magnons feel bad about losing our cave drawings and the drumming around the fire circle. But the tribes with the bronze tools, they’re always gonna win. You better get metal too.
This time it won’t take centuries. The good old days folks want to save, they’re in the rearview, looking closer than they really are, but they’re already roadkill on the digital highway. I don’t blame people for hanging onto their old ways, for wanting to preserve a way of life that makes sense to em. You couldn’t drag the band here into the 20th century, much less the computer age. So tonight we want to take you to a simpler time, a time where we plowed with jackasses and harvested and baled nettles and made our implements by hand. Made our music ourselves and played that music with friends and neighbors.
Oh, I know, I’m gonna miss that era too. But tonight, let’s not worry about that or our e-mail or the netflix we could be watching or the latest installment of American Idol; let’s imagine, well, a slower paced life. Bank up the stove, pour yourself a shot from the jug and kick off those muddy boots. The culture wars are gonna have to wait awhile, but in the meantime, let’s have a twist of this……
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