Did the Occupy Wall Street movement finally get a theme song? This is a tune by a singer who goes by the name Makana (Matthew Swalinkavich), a Hawaiian performer. It doesn't seem to be very popular, but Makana himself tried to induce it to become popular by staging an infantile sort of "protest" -- singing this song while performing for a world summit at which Obama was present.
"Singer Crashes Summit with Occupy Song," roars the AFP headline. But he didn't crash anything; he had already been invited to perform. What he did was -- gasp! -- "get up the nerve" to play this, um, terribly revolting -- er, revolutionary -- song.
Makana, who goes by one name, was enlisted to play a luau, or Hawaiian feast, Saturday night for leaders assembled in Obama's birthplace Honolulu for an annual summit that is formulating plans for a Pacific free-trade pact. But in the midst of the dinner on the resort strip Waikiki Beach, he pulled open his jacket to reveal a T-shirt that read "Occupy with Aloha," using the Hawaiian word whose various meanings include love and peace. He then sang a marathon version of his new song "We Are The Many."
Too bad his "new song" sounds like a total rip off of another "change" song,
Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are 'A Changin'
Listen to the two and you'll just be embarassed for Makana. Makana heightens his Dylan copybotting by putting a Dylaneseque cap on -- which of course, is supposed to look like a worker's cap, or even Lenin's cap.
There's something terribly vain about Makana's music video -- the camera resting long upon his full face as if he were Sinead O'Connor singing "Nothing Compares 2U" and then propagandistically showing him against a flag (as if to say "I'm the real American, not you types who are the few.")
"I was pretty nervous. In fact I was terrified. I kept thinking 'what are the consequences going to be?'" Makana, 33, told AFP.
Um, why would anyone care if he put on a self-indulgent infantile act by singing...a song?! Does he actually think that the Secret Service would bum-rush him out of there for a...song?!
And if you listen to the lyrics -- really, how much less sophisticated than Dylan's -- which of course, were not War and Peace or anything like that, even themselves.
Makana's song basically says "the collective has to run things" -- and of course, makes it seems as if this tiny percentage of people -- that illusory "one percent" run everything, and as if we are all helpless serfs.
"We’ll occupy the streets, we’ll occupy the courts, we’ll occupy the offices of you, till you do the bidding of the many, not the few," sings Makana. No thank you! Violence, coercion, civil disobedience, but not for a just cause -- violence for violence's sake to seize power by an unaccountable extreme view.
Congress, the courts -- they are already doing the bidding of the many, not the few, and in orderly fashion under the rule of law. What, we're supposed to destroy civil society to have a few Bolsheviks run things in their caps?
Oh, and here, that clever "stealth socialism" in action:
He sang it "over and over" for 40 minutes, varying his tempo and delivery to avoid triggering an overt reaction. "Whenever I felt the heat might come down, I would ease off. It was a very careful procedure," he said. Sigh. Big man! Sings protest song and bares t-shirt!
Contrast that with Dylan's more complex and nuanced lyrics. He is simply reporting -- the times are a' changing. You better move out of the way. There's a critical difference. It's not necessarily good or bad, but those who were losers might be winners. But truly, there's a difference between being a bard and a chronicler of an age and singing about how it is, and trying to incite and goad something into being by artificially injecting it into a state dinner. Call me unimpressed.
Recent Comments