True Sounds of Liberty

"I'm all tsol in the supermarket"



Thinking about Gang Green out of Boston, thinking about True Sounds of Liberty out of the Southland - California, that is.

Okies - original and culturally adapted - black, white, asian, mexican, south asian, mideastern, whatever - seem to comprise 80% of the population of SoCal; it has become the method of the place. A lot of integration has taken place; a lot more is to come. It's great.

As an "American-Asian" (as compared to an Asian-American) both in trade and by relationships, it is always quite apparent. Oh, "I am so sure." The thing of it is, down through the ages, it hasn't always been perfectly easy. Viz Gang Green; that is such a concise, cheerful, serious picture of the cultural politics of Boston and the Irish Diaspora. Wikilink: Irish diaspora. It is a more or less mind-boggling amount of people (80 million) whose country has done a mind-boggling amount of change in the past 100 - 200 years. I'm definitely part of it; Ireland has become a very big, integration-minded place. As far as statistics are concerned, in the US, Massachusetts has the greatest gross percentage of Irish-heritaged people, while California has the greatest gross number.

I got the feeling of the Southland when I arrived; my friend and I went to a get-together out in the Inland Empire, Low Desert, somewhere away from San Bernardino. This guy was living in a very big water vat, big as a house, and quite comfortable, a temporary lodging for someone in their 20s, near an orange grove. Hanging out by the orange groves is like being at the beach all the time back east in the summer; it is cool. Orange and green with a grey sky; Mass and Vermont are more Blue and green and snowy white in the winter. There aren't a lot of trees, beside the orange trees. When one goes to altitude (which isn't difficult; there are several ski areas within the city limits of Los Angeles), as on Big Bear Mountain, it is like the Sierra Nevadas, which get rain like Maine. We decided to drive up on an 80 degree day down in the San Bernardino valley, in April, we were stopped halfway up by the California Highway Patrol; there was a foot of snow already only 1/2 hour up; the road was closed by a blizzard. We drove back down and got some cappucino smoothies and went to visit some friends.

So it takes punk rock to make the Okie case. True Sounds of Liberty has all that emotion, the traditions, the feel of it, and makes it so reasonable; so perfectly easy to deal with. Gang Green is just the best at working the opposite side of the center in this case; their "cover versions" of Crocodile Rock and Sweet Home Alabama make it so easy to get away from the boring sounds of happiness that have the power to occasionally soothe the soul, but lack problem solving ability.

Why would a Back East man get info from Steely Dan, the Beach Boys, Queens of the Stone Age, Linda Ronstadt the Eagles? NASCAR and MIT, that's a marriage we need to see. Take the challenge and jump up in time to 2007, because it's a futuristic modern world, we got problems, we don't need the provincialism.