The video, which draws heavily from the anxious, war-torn 2000s, is a bit over-wrought at moments, but there lies a dreaminess within it that lends itself to the "art", doing the music and lyrics justice. It's in the way it's shot, and the way it's acted.
To that end, I love the look of the kids in the video; I always have. Actors Jamie Bell and Evan Rachel Wood were excellent choices to represent average kids, looking and acting (and speaking) exactly as average kids would if they found themselves torn apart by the sense of duty and equally potent sense of futility that war evokes.
No doubt plenty of "average kids" actually did find themselves torn apart back in 2005, just as they did in 1968.
And 1952. And 1943. And 1917....
"Summer has come and passed / The innocent can never last / Wake me up when September ends..."
#261)"Uneasy Rider" by The Charlie Daniels Band - Charlie Daniels is one of the greatest country musicians - greatest musicians of any genre - of all time. "The Devil Went Down to Georgia", his most famous song, with its tight (as in circulation restricting) sound was innovative (as in Earth shattering) for the time, and it's actually only the beginning. Some of the greatest country songs of all time are CDB deep tracks.
That being said, Charlie Daniels is not the same person he was when he started out. Over his long, illustrious career he has undergone a dramatic sea change, the once "long haired country boy" becoming (like a lot of "elder statesman" country singers) a staunchly right-wing conservative, driven by his faith and a balls-to-the-wall (and for this, unavoidably self-righteous) brand of patriotism. He's entitled to his opinions of course, and he's certainly never failed to use his music to express them (in other words, it shouldn't be all that surprising), and mind you, I do not have a problem with patriotism or ALL right-wing thinking.
But I don't know, man...I've been going through a kind of divorce from country music the last few years, as it's become more aligned with the far right in this country. Not the right, not normal conservative/Republican, but the ideology that gave us President Trump. I just can't get there the same way anymore.
Perhaps that's because I too have gone through a sea change over time. As I've aged, I've gotten less conservative. Not MORE liberal, exactly, just less conservative. I support the military (certainly the vets), I support cops, I'm for law and order, and ultimately I just want it to be fucking quiet in my neighborhood and my midst at any given hour of the day. I support gun ownership, but do I think those rights should be left unrestricted? No. I'm a mid-western, middle-aged heterosexual male, but do I care if gays get married? Nope. Do I think pot should be legal? Yup. Do I think we should gut out every last bit of green space to, as Joni Mitchell sang, "put up a parking lot"? Nope. We have enough parking lots. Enough opportunities to consume.
I'm a middle-of-the-roader on just about everything. I refuse to take a cartoonish stance on one side or another of the brewing culture war in this country.
At the end of the day, it should only ever be about the music, and to that end, everyone should be able to groove to whatever they want - together, ideally. Music really should be, to quote Longfellow, the "universal language of mankind".
It's just that Charlie makes it about much more than the music. A song like "Uneasy Rider", which in 1973 satirized (if not mocked) the south, southern culture, and the very type of "redneck" people that he now identifies so staunchly with, would never, ever be recorded by 2017's CDB. And that's too bad.
Charlie must have realized his sea change early on, because there is a 1988 "update" to "Uneasy Rider" (on the album Hometown Heroes) in which Charlie and a buddy find their way into a gay bar...in this incarnation, he's the redneck, laughing with a predictable roll of his eyes at all the funny queens and the "orange haired feller" on the stage "singing about suicide". It's meant to be funny...but it isn't. It tries way too hard, its premise makes HIM the one with the issues, and in the current agitated political climate, it's even less funny than it was 30 years ago.
I still enjoy the original "Uneasy Rider" though. Not because it's "liberal" or "Democrat", because honestly it wasn't actually those things in 1973 either (Charlie Daniels was never those things entirely...he was always a maverick, hard to figure out...good for him), but because it is funny...it's clever. It tells the story of a situation you'd never want to find yourself in, but also depicts the exact way you fantasize that you would handle it.
"I couldn't resist the fun of chasing them just once around the parking lot..."
