Because if on your 332nd birthday your music is played by Children of Bodom on a dirty effing hippie website, you've made it, dude.
What music is in your ears tonight? Music thread for everybody below...
(Martin Luther King - born this day 81 years ago)
It's always tempting to ponder what the world would have been like had things gone differently. Had Gandhi not been assassinated, had neither Kennedy been assassinated, had Martin Luther King not been assassinated.
What sort of world? Had the goals been fully realized, had the plans continued, had the voices remained clear and not faded into memory. Had they all eventually gone peacefully in their sleep at the end of perfect days. Tempting to think about.
But life is never as it seems and fate always has different plans.
This weekend we're celebrating the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, born on this day, January 15, 1929. The world has changed immeasurably since the day he was born - due in no small part to him being in it.
No doubt there will be countless playings over the next few days of his landmark "I have a dream" speech - the film footage, scratched and faded will seem from another time. The famous phrases heard over and over will probably seem less potent now than they did that day in 1963. Pundits, the shrill, the painfully misguided and the Agenda Grinders will give their interpretations and the original intent will be distorted, if not the words themselves.
Rather than play that particular speech, I thought I would play something probably less known. In fact, something considered lost for a quite a while.
During Christmas I ran a holiday sermon delivered as part of the Canadian Broadcasting Company's Massey Lecture Series. The 5 part series devoted to lectures and sermons done by Dr. King. Today I am running Lecture #4 - "Non-Violence And Social Change".
Dr. Martin Luther King: “Life is sacred. Property is intended to serve life. And no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.”
The lecture talks about the recent (1967) riots and the current role of non-violence in the Civil Rights Movement. It's not a sermon and not a speech delivered to a crowd. It's a talk, given by him in a small room in a radio studio - one on one, spoken from the heart.
Happy Birthday to the late great Frank Zappa. Today is known in the blogosphere as Day Zero of Zappadan, the annual blogswarm honoring Frank. The blogswarm started several years ago, but this year we've added Alicia Policia's "Yellow Snow Cupcakes" (edible) as a Zero Day tradition.
What songs accompany your holiday sweets this evening?
Country legend June Carter Cash, the woman responsible for stealing Johnny Cash's heart and for living Reese Witherspoon's Oscar-winning role, would have turned 80 today. Lets all pick up an acoustic guitar and strum a few chords of "Jackson," in memory.
Let's hear it for the cultural heroes who always speak the truth as they know it, no matter what the cost to themselves:
NEW YORK — Three months after Bruce Springsteen persuaded Pete Seeger to sing This Land Is Your Land with him at President Obama's inaugural concert, they'll be back together on stage Sunday — on Seeger's 90th birthday.
A sold-out benefit concert at Madison Square Garden will celebrate Seeger, the folk singer/songwriter who was banished from commercial TV for 17 years.
Seeger says a party for 15,000 isn't his idea of a birthday celebration, even with more than 40 musicians, including Dave Matthews, Eddie Vedder and Arlo Guthrie, whose dad, Woody, taught Seeger how to jump freight trains 60 years ago.
