I'm a little late on this, a little over two weeks. Utah Phillips died on May 23.
Meaning, among other things, that I can write off my chance of seeing him live and meeting him, which was on my list of shit to do.
Besides being worth two Jack Elliots, Woody Guthries or Bob Dylans, Utah was one of my very favorite people to angrily disagree with. An anarcho-syndicalist Wobbly, he really bought all that bullshit about the workers seizing the means of production, despite such illustrations as the Soviet Union, China, Wisconsin and Cuba that as terrible as Capitalism can be, Communism is far worse.
At least in capitalist systems, the poor get to eat. Plus, socialism has a nasty habit of taking away their right to bitch about their situation. Witness China, which is about to ruin the Olympics completely by ejecting athletes and ticket holders who even suggest Tibet might not want to remain Chinese.
See also the Gulag Archipelago. See also the Holocaust. Socialism has caused more deaths than Small Pox.
Still, Utah Phillips' songs and storytelling opened my eyes to some stuff. Holding the ideals I do, valuing the things I do, given the same relative level of awareness of world events as I have now, a hundred years ago, I'd be a bomb-throwing Red of the first order. People with power always abuse their power, and when the IWW got their shit together, the power of capitalist bosses far exceeded the power of mass communication.
And then, too, another lesson of history is you can get rid of the company store, and in fact you couldn't bring it back because the information needed to thwart it is so easily communicated. But you don't need a company store: people will voluntarily enslave themselves with Rent-A-Center, Visa, Mastercard, 90 Days Same as Cash, auto leases and sub-prime mortgages.
So anyway, Commie that he was, I loved Utah. Plus, his songs were great.
I was printing a poster at work today for a 'Christian Rock' act at a coworker's church, and she suggested I come and bring the honyocks. And I said, 'But I detest Christian Rock.'
Pressed to say why, I really had to think. It's so obvious, I'd never put it into words. The church I go to, it's a rock 'n roll church, and the musical selections probably contribute to my tardy tendencies. If I catch the message, I'm good. The band is talented and well rehearsed, but their material is, well...it's 'Christian Rock.'
But music has to stand on its own merits. If it carries a message, fine. But he message can't save it if the music is contrived and insincere. And almost all the 'Christian Rock' I've heard over the last 25 years is contrived and insincere.
Authentic music reaches past ideas both good and bad. Ani DiFranco is wrong about practically everything, yet I paid to see her in concert and that's something I hardly ever do. But with Ani, the music overcomes her bad ideas.
Hell, Ani is how I came to Utah, come to think of it.
Maybe if the message of 'Christian Rock' was reassuring in and of itself I could choke it down voluntarily. But for reasons that are more complicated than I'm ready to go into right now, it's just not. For every time the notion of salvation as espoused by Christianity holds appeal, the meaninglessness implicit in Atheism consoles. Or I think of the entire civilizations that never, as they say, 'heard the good news,' and try to picture a God who would condemn them wholesale for that which is beyond their power, and reconcile that with such adjectives as 'loving' that are attributed to this God.
I'm quickly getting into that complicated area I didn't want to go to right now. None of that matters. What maters, is Utah Phillips, a great Folk Hero if ever there was, is gone. A pinko with so much charm even I could love him. He can't be replaced.
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