Posted on August 19th, 2005 by Gavin M.
Ugly American
?2005 Brian and Michelle Jacobsen
Go ahead and call me ugly, I promise that I won’t be mad,
If bein’ a patriot’s ugly, then I know I look pretty damn bad,
So go ahead and call me an Ugly American.
Well…
MP3 samples here.
Just as conservative humor (q.v.) takes the form of jokes and wit without actually being funny or witty, conservative music somehow manages to put together all the elements of songwriting and performance without being musical.
Listen and see; it’s amazing and educational.
Having a snare drum be slightly off-time can be a good thing. Charlie Watts has a naturally relaxed snare hit, for instance, while Topper Headon’s is early. It can make a song’s whole tempo sound different than it is, and there are even techniques for getting those effects artificially: You can back a snare off with a delay unit, or speed it up by delaying the rest of the drum kit before tracking the other instruments. With digital recording, there are probably ways to do it with a mouse click.
But that’s all in the range of a few milliseconds, and one thing you never do is take a heavy, thick, propulsive-type snare sound and make it drag. People hear it and think, “Agh! This grates on my nerves in a way I can’t identify. It sounds tired and lame, like the band can’t get out of its own way.”
‘I Love America’ is like the ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ tribute song with Journey/Survivor keyboard sprinkles on it, or something — and damn me if that snare doesn’t start off by sliding a full sixteenth note down the hill with the whole band chasing it backwards on roller skates. And then the bass goes into funny curlicues with notes out of the scale, while the singer crams syllables into places they don’t want to go — wrapping up a verse with the immortal injunction, “Justshut yourbigba zoo.”
It’s like a… Well, I don’t know what it’s like. It resembles rock ‘n’ roll in nearly every particular, while somehow not actually being rock ‘n’ roll. It’s ‘conservative music’ — a thing of its own.
Most of the drums here sound programmed despite the main guy being a drummer (it can be hard to distinguish between 100% canned tracks and mixed machine/triggered tracks). But then…but then…what maniac would program nerve-wracking mistakes into his beats? Check out “Soldier’s Ballad.” How?! Why?!
We just learn and learn. The conservatives are far ahead of us in many ways.
