Jim Goad on Joe Strummer
By Jim Goad, one of my all-time favorite writers.
Jim wrote the amazing 1998 book The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats. A lot of people say it’s racist but I contend it’s merely against being racist against whites. The Redneck Manifesto book gets a lot of shit, partially because a lot of white-pride folk dig the book too, but I’ll add my line from my book Starving in the Company of Beautiful Women:
I have heard the defensive constructs about the difference between white power and white pride. But how come people who profess white pride never possess any qualities that instill any in me?
But Jim Goad makes me happy. He’s funny as hell, and right on, and says stuff a lot of people think, but are too politically correct to say.
A few quotes from Jim Goad that I really dig, (and I’m paraphrasing from memory, but the meaning is intact):
“There aren’t a lot of great working-class writers. The working class are too tired from working to write.”
“The problem with armchair coffee shop socialists who yell ‘Workers of the world unite!’ is that most of them have never worked a day in their life.”
“Rich white people invented racism to keep poor blacks and whites from uniting and killing them. A black worker and a white worker sitting next to each other on the assembly line have far more in common than the white worker has with the white owner of the factory.”
(That last one sort of reminds me of a line in the recent Colbert book):
“Upper-middle class is a meaningless term created by the Upperclass to keep the Middle class from joining with the Lower class when the revolution comes.”
And as for Joe Strummer, I still have and wear a Rudimentary Peni t-shirt. It’s my favorite shirt. I wear it mainly because of their song “Rotten to the Core”:
Have you Realised that Rock Stars
Always seem to lie so much?
John Lydon once said he cared
But he never really gave a fuck
Said he’d use the money he made
So that people would have somewhere to go
But now he lives in the USA
and Snorts Coke after the Show.Why is it that Rock Stars
Always seem to lie so much?
Joe Strummer once said he cared,
but he never really gave a fuck
Said he’d use the money he made
To set up a radio station to make the
Airwaves full of something more than Shit
Have you noticed we’re still Waiting?
December 14th, 2007 at 3:01 am
I say old chap, those punk rock lyrics are bloody good!
December 14th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
True words, and then I find myself wondering about bands like Green Day. I wish I could see The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black do something. Then I wouldn’t feel like I was slimed ( yea,well,LOL!).