The Smoking Argus

As the false left/right paradigm continues to crumble thanks in large part to President Obama exposing himself as the false prophet of “Change”, the chords of rEVOLution are beginning to bubble up and spread across the individual centric new-media outlets scattered across the internet.

Let us not forget, within his first one-hundred days he has expanded the war he promised to end, reauthorized the despicable practice of rendition, refused to prosecute any and all who tortured, reclaimed the doctrine of state secrets in order to protect the insidious agents of tyranny within the central authority, gave his seal of approval to the continuance and expansion of warrantless/suspicionless surveillance, and has appointed a myriad of agents openly hostile to the Constitution to his administration.

Thus without further adieu, we present some of the up and coming artists of the pro-liberty movement. Please consider supporting these artists so they may continue to inspire us to resist the ever encroaching hand of tyranny.

1.) Green Room Rockers “Broke” from their album “Hoosier Homegrown”
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2.) Aimee Allen “Revolution” from her album “I’d Start a Revolution if I Could Get Up in the Morning”
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3.) Marc Scibilia “Hope Anthem” single
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4.) Jordan Page “Song for Bob Dylan” from his EP “Revolution”
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5.) Jeanette Thompson “Oh Freedom” from the album “Negro Spirituals”
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6.) Metallica “Don’t Tread on Me” from their self-titled single
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In addition to the artists and songs listed above, Polygraph Radio is now live and streaming liberty oriented music 24-hours a day, 7-days a week. So be sure to give them a listen and feel free to add your suggestions for a rEVOLution playlist in the comment form below.

Joseph Marohl

The music of Antony and the Johnsons is a mix of jazz, faerie music, blues, and cabaret. It’s definitely not rock-and-roll, not pop, not rap. The group’s second album, I Am a Bird Now, won (somewhat controversially) the prestigious Mercury Prize in the UK in 2005. The new album, released last month, is as delicately downbeat as the previous albums.

Antony Hegarty’s stark but lush vibrato transcends its inspirations. Singer-performance artist Laurie Anderson compared it to the effect of hearing Elvis Presley sing for the first time. I’d go further and say it is like what hearing the human voice in song for the first time must have been like in prehistory.

In a New York magazine article last month, Antony included among his influences Kate Bush, Boy George, Marc Almond, Nina Simone, Lou Reed, and Nico Muhly. In an NPR interview with Terry Gross, Antony included John Waters, Charles Ludlam, Jack Smith, and Kazuo Ohno (102-year-old pioneer spirit of Butoh dance in Japan, whose picture appears on A&tJs’ new album, The Crying Light, which is also dedicated to him) as his spiritual fathers.

No other musical artist I can think of could treat ecological annihilation with the sublime poetry of song after song on the latest album, arguably the group’s best yet. In Antony’s characteristic reversal of affect, sadness in joy, happiness in melancholy, these songs, like “Another World,” find the sweetness and light in the long-predicted global cataclysm, only now clearly evident to our senses: “I’m gonna miss the wind / Been kissing me so long.”

My gift is not for music analysis. Music often strikes me as excessively manipulative-and too easily consumable as a commodity that merely encourages more consumption. Unless I can dance to it, I rarely see the point of it. In solitude I prefer silence or, more precisely, the ambient sounds of my real environment.

But the music of A&tJs is a comfort to me. His poetry, as mystical as anything by Rumi, Teresa of Avila, Blake, or Yeats, is grounded in imagism. There’s a hard edge to even his most fragile lyrics:

“Epilepsy is dancing,
She’s the Christ now departing,
And I’m finding my rhythm
As I twist in the snow.”

The video for this song, directed by the Wachowski brothers (The Matrix, Speed Racer), captures its (and the whole album’s) eerie pansexual eroticism spurred by an awareness of fading wilderness.
I can imagine that Antony is not for every taste. He is often compared to Devendra Banhart and CocoRosie, artists with whom he’s collaborated and whom I admire as well. But it seems to me that Antony is several rungs above them-his artistry is unforced, never precious, never even overtly “experimental,” though his accomplishment is unlike anything in music now or ever before. Unlike his influences or the artists he’s compared to, Antony imbues his work with a unique mix of moral righteousness, spiritual vision, and naïve intelligence.