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DEATH_OR_GLORY

                                             January 13, 2015


  Stopping briefly at the "Rudy's Can't Fail" in
  Emeryville -- a basic "cool" American diner
  (and the best thing Greenday ever did, if you
  ask me)-- on my way to set up our new house in                  VILLON
  my increasingly bourgeois life, I heard an old
  Clash favorite played on the PA, "Death or Glory".          One of my
                                                              brother's
                                                              liked to
                                                              pronounce that
  I found myself thinking about what they                     "bushwah".
  were getting at, and how the song works--

  The initial mode features a bunch of cynical jokes
  about how everyone sells out:

    "'Love' and 'Hate' tattooed
    across the knuckles of his hands...
    Hands that slap his kids around,
    because they don't understand,
    How 'Death or Glory'
    becomes just another story"

  Then near the end, the bass line comes          Some words, such as "hands"
  in with a melody-- one we've heard              and "Glory" have their
  introduced before at least once at              vowels stretched so they
  the start of the song--                         become three syllables, but
                                                  the last syllable of
  At that point, the lyrical drive                "understand" (the rhyme for
  shifts into an anthemic mode,                   "hands") is not, it's just
  we're hearing an inspirational                  one syllable.
  piece to continue The Fight--

  It's entirely possible that the author
  was offering this as an example of a
  meaningless 'death or glory' story--
  there's a few hints that might be so--       The hints in the other
  but that hardly matters here, it isn't       direction:
  the way the song actually works.  The
  music itself works too well as an anthem,    There's a line something like
  and the singer's intonation conveys too      "we're gonna fight your brother"
  much sincerity.                              (or maybe "we're gonna fight one
                                               another"?)-- that's the sort of
  The cynicism is gone now, the fight for      thing you say when you want to
  glory has been embraced--                    argue against the fight (the
                                               people you're fighting are just
                                               like you, so why?).
  The cycle between the two is
  "the beat of time, the beat                  While the singing *mostly*
  that must go on"--                           works, it's a little
                                               overdone in places ("we're
  Even that story about how the                gonna *travel*!")-- it gets
  meaning of glory fades-- maybe               dangerously close to
  that's "just another story",                 self-satire.
  too, and after all, we've
  already heard That Song, Too.
                                                 The Fight must go on message
                                                 is fairly generic, reaching
                                                 back to the days of Western
                                                 explorers in a way that
                                                 can't be taken literally now--

                                                 "We're gonna climb mountains,
                   This is a difference           We're gonna travel over seas"
                   between a great song
                   and a great poem--
                   sung with the music,
                   these lines work...            SYMBOLS_FOR_PERL
                   on the page, they're
                   beyond "simple" and
                   closer to "trite".




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