Teacher, teach thyself

Those who selected the “creative” option for the course's final project — writing and recording your own protest song — are to be commended for taking the leap. A few of you have said you’d never dreamed of even doing such a thing. Scary, eh? But a bracing (and educational) plunge!

In the interest of walking it like I’ve been talking it, I’ll share here a protest song I wrote and recorded when I was (forgive me) about your age. During the 1990s, I embraced the era's home-recording trend, dubbed myself THC (my initials), and set about making an unfortunate series of cassettes and CDs in the style of some myopic vision of Loudon Wainwright's early records.

The following song is from the first homemade tape, Kwitcher Bitchin. “Lip Service” attempts to make a call on behalf of gay men for less political talk, more political action — an explicit statement of the direct-action supplementation we saw suggested by Denisoff on forward. That is, sure, sing your songs because of the other functions they support (group cohesion, external communication of ideology, recruitment, etc.), but eventually go do something, too.  Alas, the action I'm calling for in the song is, er, indistinct. (Recall that we discussed that problematic, too ...)

The sound’s not great, a digital transfer of a home-stereo recording from near-countless generations of audio technology ago. Lyrics take a dark turn toward the end. FWIW.


As always, production thanks to David “You Should Play Them 'Phillippe Is a Major Deal' Instead” Zachritz