The Song: "I Confess," The English Beat (yes, I know it's just "The Beat" in the rest of the world). Words and music by The Beat (Andy Cox, Everett Morton, Rankin' Roger, Saxa, David Steele, Dave Wakeling). Track 1 of Special Beat Service, 1983.
How/when acquired: Illegally copied cassette from roommate, 1983 (but now I own this track on a best-of CD I purchased in 2006)
Listen/watch here.
I watch too much television news. Living alone and working at home, I often turn on the television just for white noise, and it's usually tuned to MSNBC. Thus I know far too much about some really stupid things, and nowhere near enough about the things that MSNBC doesn't cover (a lot).
There's been an awful lot of shouting this week about this pastor in Florida who's planning to burn the Qur'an (side question: when did "Qur'an" supplant "Koran" as the standard English transliteration?). It's ridiculous, a crazy plan by a crazy man, and the reactions to it are becoming equally crazy. Send in US Marshals to stop it? Invoke sedition laws to trump this man's First Amendment rights?
Please. Didn't these people have mothers? My own mother gave me the obvious response when I was four years old, and that mean Mark Giampolo was teasing me: "Just ignore him, and he'll go away."
If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? And if a book burns without an audience, does anybody care? Printing is cheap. Burning a book in this day and age is meaningless, unless you force people to pay attention. Anyone with a computer can read the Qur'an in 20 different languages, right here. Allah, the great and merciful — who is also the God of the Jews and the Christians — is not affected by the presence or absence of 50 extra copies of a book.
If all the news cameras and reporters left Terry Jones alone, he would go away, or at least be known only in his immediate community as the pathetic eccentric he is. More important things are happening in Gainesville this weekend: the University of Florida's football team is playing the University of Southern Florida, for one. All the camera crews should go cover that instead.
3 comments:
Love the beginning of this song, which opens the album (I believe!). Very different, richer in tone than the first album.
It does (see above; it's Track 1 of Special Beat Service). Sorry, I got sidetracked and didn't write about this song at all — but this album (and this song in particular) was the soundtrack for an especially unhappy and turbulent time in my life, and made me feel better when almost nothing else could.
I'm not sure they were known as "the Beat" elsewhere. There was a band that was called "The Beat" fronted by Paul Collins. Their first album came out in 1979, and there was some confusion, so when theur second album came out, they became "Paul Collins Beat." The song on the second album (1982) that got airplay was "On The Highway." You'd probably like thier music. Have you heard of them?
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