Theme
3:59pm August 3, 2015

“I’m pushin’ all the buttons on the radio
Tryin’ to find a song where I can hide
A song where I can hide”

— 

Wayne Parker

Okay it’s weird when you literally can’t find any lyrics for an album online, in this day and age.  Although there’s one song on this album where I’d be glad if nobody ever had to hear it again.  But the rest are really good.

And the bad one is actually a good song, musically speaking, it’s just inexcusably racist.  Which I only discovered as an adult, because when I was a kid listening to this I was so young I didn’t understand enough words to know what was being said. 

Be warned, if you ever listen to the song “Oklahoma Twilight”… you might want to just skip it, as far as I can tell it tries to set a love story between an over-idealized ~spiritual and close to nature~ Cherokee woman and a white military captain who saved her life during the Trail of Tears (it’s not named, but I strongly suspect that’s where this happened).   Supposedly he found her frozen in the snow and ~as he warmed her flesh he warmed her heart and she became his wife~ and ew, and it’s just as awful as all that sounds. 

Worse, she becomes so devoted to him that she kills herself when he dies, and even that becomes somehow idealized.  (It’s sung from the perspective of their son.)  You know a song involving Indians is going to be bad when it throws in lines like ~Sister Moon looked after her and blessed her with a child~ and then ~where the eagle meets the crow~ being a weirdly random description of the place where she killed herself, and… hopefully you know the kind of flowery close-to-nature-y lyrics I mean. 

I hated finding out the meaning of the lyrics, because the sound of the music itself is embedded into my head as familiar and incredibly home-like and stuff, but then the song itself says things that make me sick to my stomach. 

Oh yeah and how did the guy die?  Killing Indians, as part of his military captain thing.   And she was still supposedly so devoted to him she killed herself to be with him, because she’d promised she’d “always meet him down the line”.  How does this make sense?  Who would be so devoted to someone committing genocide against their own people, that they’d not only marry them and have their kids on purpose, but kill themselves when the guy dies so they can be with them forever?  And then this is passed off as beautiful and romantic, something that the son wants to sit around remembering in the Oklahoma twilight.  “Unfortunate implications” doesn’t even begin to cover this train wreck.