Monday, September 16, 2013

Clint Eastwood is Boss/Will The Real Clint Please Stand Up

From the 28 July, 1979 NME featuring the Talking Heads (cover), Swell Maps and Pretenders. I wonder what Lee Perry thought of Clint talking to the chair at the Republican National Convention? I have always liked the Upsetters lp named after him (with the great "Dry Acid"). My guess is he would have approved and could possibly claim that he came up with the idea first. I did see Scratch interrogate/talk to both E.T. and R2-D2 set up on the edge of the stage at a memorable show in the 1990’s, well before the phantom BHO conversation on national television. I revisited Clint’s convention performance recently and enjoyed it (as much as I enjoyed all the great late 1970’s travelogue footage of the San Fernando Valley and Burbank in Clint’s “Every Which Way But Loose” which surprisingly has aged well). Clint was a somewhat unlikely though solid JA icon from the 1960’s onward. Given the steady stream of spaghetti western, kung fu and grindhouse fare into JA, it is not surprising that Clint in his outlaw guise was a constant lyrical trope outside of strictly liturgical subject matter. Then there are the numerous tributes to GREAT American 1970’s television, some with the great production of Joe Gibbs. How many Starsky and Hutch 12 inch singles are there? David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser as Kingston icons! And so was Kojak! Can we ask David Katz why there is no Scratch produced cover version of “Don’t Give Up on Us Baby” to sit alongside the great cover by Sharon Isaacs of Morris Albert’s “Feelings” (which some friends swear by). The hybrid liturgical/hard case cinema stuff is the most intriguing. Clearly, the JA gospel/gangster precedent does not get quite the recognition that it should from American hip hop in its wake –(e.g., the lyrical content of certain of the Bone Thugs-N-Harmony catalogue, Jay-Z and his occasional gospel/gangster foray etc., etc). Which brings us to this article from the archive from the NME. Music lawsuits and the threat of music related lawsuits. All of the current legal tussle between GG (as RP refers to him on possibly the most engrossing and interesting Twitter feed out there here ) has me thinking it might be time to put my lawyer hat on and do some court reporting from the Central District of California to break down some legalese for you tell you how the current Black Flag legal saga all shakes out.

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