Brian Hoover's Blog

Quite a funny ditty. Well done.

OK, so yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the release of the Abbey Road album. I’m not a Beatles fan, never have been, but I guess this album is significant in being the last album released by the Beatles. It’s also significant because of the cover. It’s somehow iconic and has been copied and parodied on at least a hundred albums I could find with some quick google-fu. It’s one of the most popular album covers to immitate along with The Velvet Underground and The Who Live at Leeds. Apparently it took only ten minutes to put together. Not a bad return for minimal effort, but that’s how it usually works, huh. The best photos just seem to happen. Here are a couple of my favourite immitations.

So Triple J had another one of their Hottest 100 of all time countdowns last week. I’m not all that keen on these “All time” themes. Triple J normally have a Hottest 100 for song released during the previous year but a couple times they’ve had an All Time countdown. Which is cool, because they don’t overdo it. Suzanne’s favourite radio station often has X Top Y songs, where Y is some awful theme, and X is in the hundreds or even thousands. They recently had a top “2400 love songs” countdown or somesuch and it went for a week. Good grief.

Anyhow, it turns out I already have 92 of these songs on my iPod, so it’s an easy task to make a playlist. I’m missing some. There’s a few I’ll admit I have never heard of and a few I wish I had. But there’s one song that will never make it’s way onto any iPod I own, ever. That song is John Lennon’s “Imagine”.

Why is this song such an abomination in my eyes (or ears)? Take a look at the lyrics to find out why:

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky

Are you kidding me? I can’t imagine there being no heaven, and no loving God dwelling there awaiting our return. Well, yeah, I can imagine it but the world then becomes a pretty sucky place.

In the first “bridge”, I think you call it, he pretty much declares greed and hedonism is a pretty good idea. Do your own thing, don’t worry about tomorrow:

Imagine all the people
Living for today

Lennon goes on to attack nationalism and religion in the next verse:

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too

The next bridge is OK, I guess. All the world living in peace isn’t all that bad. This line dilutes the rest of this insidious, repugnant song.

The rest of the song is about having no possessions, a new world order and one world government. I’ll leave it to the reader to research why abolition of property (or abolition of ownership), and socialistic/communistic ideas are bad. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for nothing to kill and die for. I’m all for no hunger and a brotherhood sharing all the world in peace. But there is no earthly power which can govern the entire world correctly.

I’m a bit surprised to learn that my top 25 most played tracks on my iPod consists mostly of Regurgitator. I’ve been hunting down and collecting all the Regurgitator CD singles I can find and ripping them off to MP3. The CD singles have tracks which I haven’t been able to find elsewhere, and some of them are pretty damned good. But mostly I’ve been grooving on Jingles, apparently with ! (The Song Formerly Known As) played 99 times.

The list:

! (The song formerly known as) by Regurgitator, Album: Jingles
Walk This Way (Boom Boom Booty Remix) by Aerosmith
Happiness by Regurgitator, Album: Jingles

Read more…

Slim Dusty died today. In 1958, Slim received Australia’s first Gold Record for a song called A Pub With No Beer, which he recorded in 1957. He was the first Australian to have an international hit record and the first singer in the world to have his voice beamed to earth from space.

Thirty-three years later he released his 50th record, The Golden Anniversary Album, which went multi-platinum in Australia.

In June this year, Dusty was recording his 106th album and at the time his management denied he was battling cancer.