Tuesday, August 30, 2005

THE POLITICS OF DANCING prt5: JOHN ASHCROFT

Thought I was done with political percussive polyphonics until idigworms reminded me of former Attorney General John Ashcroft's stirring performance in the film "Fahrenheit 911":

JOHN "spent $8,000 on drapes that hide naked statues" ASHCROFT: "Let The Eagle Soar"

Ashcroft actually started his music decades ago as part of the gospel group Ashcroft and Bacon while he was still Missouri's State Auditor. They performed such hand-clappers as
"Jesus Hold My Hand": Sounds like a challenge to all homophobes; who knew he was such a screaming liberal?

By the time we get deep into side 2, it seems like they're losing inspiration: "More About Jesus" is a pretty generic name: "What do we call this one?" "Oh I dunno, it's just some more stuff about Jesus, you know..." And the title "We've Come This Far By Faith" suggests they're barely able to make it through the whole album.

Warranting further investigation: idigworms also notes Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld, which sets to music (by professional opera singers!) the strange musings of the Defense Secretary, such as:

The Unknown (just a snippet unfortunately)
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

Department of Defense news briefing
Feb. 12, 2002

2 comments:

Mr Fab said...

I believe that was Ashcroft singing - got it from CNN's website, which is why it's chopped up like that. Won't someone give this man a record deal?

revbob said...

Is there anyway that you could repost the Ashcroft and Hatch stuff?