My My Hey Hey

Rock and roll is here to stay.

But Diane West wishes it would go away. In her latest article, she writes, "I've always had a soft spot for the Cleveland mayor who, nearly 40 years ago, after a Beatles concert in his fair city ended in mayhem, banned all rock concerts from public venues. The reason? Rock music, he said, "did not contribute to the culture of the city and tended to incite riots." The words sound fantastic now, but once reflected a popular belief that rock music was a cultural and moral menace that would undermine ... well, our culture and our morals."

The main point of her article is the irony of people she considers anti-American and pro-communist making music that helped Eastern Europe prepare to reject communism (as suggested by Andras Simonyi of Hungary, who recently spoke at Clevelands Museum of Rock History). Of course she only considers the irony one way. That is to say, she considers the irony of John Lennon's music helping Ronald Reagan, but does not consider the Irony of Ronald Reagan being helped by John Lennon's music. Maybe what they were really looking for is not the puritanical christian capitalism that Diane West triumphs nor the soulless communism they had grown up under, but some middle path.

She also rags on Neil Young, commenting "Indeed, Simonyi titled his talk "Rocking for the Free World," a play on a 1989 Neil Young song, "Rocking in the Free World" -- a tune USA Today notes is "a savage attack on the policies of Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush ... (and) anything but a celebration of democracy." I guess it depends on what you mean by democracy. One (in this case one refers to me) suspects that Ms. Diane West's vision of freedom is very limited indeed.

In the interest of balance, and because I like them, here are the lyrics of Rocking in the Free World.

Rockin' in the Free World


There’s colors on the street
Red, white and blue
People shufflin’ their feet
People sleepin’ in their shoes
But there’s a warnin’ sign on the road ahead
There’s a lot of people sayin’ we’d be better off dead
Don’t feel like satan, but I am to them
So I try to forget it, any way I can.

Keep on rockin’ in the free world,
Keep on rockin’ in the free world
Keep on rockin’ in the free world,
Keep on rockin’ in the free world.

I see a woman in the night
With a baby in her hand
Under an old street light
Near a garbage can
Now she puts the kid away, and she’s gone to get a hit
She hates her life, and what she’s done to it
There’s one more kid that will never go to school
Never get to fall in love, never get to be cool.

Keep on rockin’ in the free world,
Keep on rockin’ in the free world
Keep on rockin’ in the free world,
Keep on rockin’ in the free world.

We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler,
Machine gun hand
We got department stores and toilet paper
Got styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer
Got a man of the people, says keep hope alive
Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive.

Keep on rockin’ in the free world,
Keep on rockin’ in the free world
Keep on rockin’ in the free world,
Keep on rockin’ in the free world.