PRISONER EXPRESS

Music; it comes in a lot of varieties. Every time there's a set of people that the politicians wish to attack, music is made to sucker people into doing the killing with "patriotic" songs. The most recent example of this is various country music-singing buffoons like Toby Keith, who are not so much patriotic as they are mindless Churcho-Republican drones or mere fast-buck opportunists. You hear them caterwauling about 9-11, Bin Laden or capitalizing on other emotion-packed themes. Country music has always been pretty limited in its content. Mostly it's about getting drunk, then whining and crying about lost love, run-over dogs, or wrecked trucks. It matches perfectly the whiney notes they get out of the principle instrument, the Hawaiian guitar, which they renamed the "steel" guitar. Lately country music has had to evolve. Country music had gotten so annoying that the most common comment on it was "turn that shit off!" Finally country "artists" took the hint and borrowed techniques from 30 years back rock and roll. They began writing happy songs (without whiney guitars) about sexy tractors, the chrome on their trucks and filling the place up with babies. Before country music got sick and almost died, it was popularizing "outlaws" such as "Willie, Waylon and the Boys". Part of its revival involved neo-countries top flag-waving, church-boosting, ford-selling prostitute to strike out in an entirely new government approved direction: He got the outlaw, tax-dodger, doe-smoker silly nelson, and brought him to "justice", by cleverly converting him into a cop who catches bad boys and hangs them from trees while getting drunk with his horses.

A second variety of music is protest-songs. They went extinct in America shortly after those national guardsmen got away with murdering all those protestors at Kent State. This is when the politicians made it perfectly clear that even Caucasian students from well-off families would be blown away just as quickly as unruly negroes in the ghettos. The politicians continue to make this point when the Philly cops dropped a bomb on a shoplifter's house that burned down 60 other like dwellings in 1987. Then they blew away Randy Weaver's dog, son and wife at Ruby Ridge because he refused to be forced into snitching for the FBI. Then the government staged the WACO massacre, proving that they would even murder 80 church men, women, and children who were simply praying in peace until a mother cried CULT! Instead of writing protest songs, people learned to keep their heads down and shut up.

Rock and roll died too. The surviving artists never write anything new. They just pull their old stuff out of the grave, wrap the tatters over their shoulders, then prance obscenely about the stage until the check clears. Some of the Nuevo-rockers like apparently Aerosmith, Runny Noses, and AC/DC are so desperate for ideas that they pay Beatles inc. to toss them a rotting carcass to rejuvenate. Their result always smells worse than death: kind of like death smoldering in a cow-pie fire with a few musicians whizzing on the flames. They look nervously around, praying that they don't get caught by real rockers such as FogHat, Pink Floyd or the Grateful Dead.

The crap that cowers behind the name "Rock" now is just a collection of screamers who were once characterized as "banging on the bongos like a chimpanzee." These are such nobodies that few people older than adolescence ever heard of them. Their names are something like "Metal-Licka" and "Pantie-Era". They've got nothing to play but distortion and nothing to say but violence. Their style is the same as country's, whining and crying, only louder, with more hot, gasping wind behind it. If the music-buying public wasn't' so ignorant and self-centered, they wouldn't sell a single screech or moan of it.

Rap? Hip Hop? That's the same as the fake rock, but instead of shrieking for sex, money, and fame, they are whining for it vocally, much like country's Hawaiian guitars. They call it "mellow". They've had only a few bursts of creativity, but they quickly died. Black radio is days-worth of the same slobbering syrup of "Baby I needs Ya", Variations to hear one, "Funky cold Medina", "Superfreak" "Carwash" "Baby got Back" and "Eat it like a vul-cha". Then it's straight back to the mellow-begging-for-sex theme again. Music is a complete waste of time for thinking individuals. Music is a simulated thought for empty-headed youngsters to keep their brains from shrinking until they gain enough experience to have an actual thought of their own. Music is like the frame that keeps the zeppelin from collapsing before it is filled. Music gives youngsters something to be happy about; it occupies their minds so that they don't become worse vandal-maniacs than they already are. Without music to keep them convulsing with good vibrations, they'd be like possums trying to gnaw their leg off to escape the trap of adulthood where their momma's aren't always around to feed, groom, and love them.

Music and prison is a good mix: the forced idleness of prison gives us plenty of time to fill the pointless hours of mindless subjugation with anti-government poetry that can be set to music. With this in mind I offer a $25prize to any prisoner who writes the best protest song about the Philly cops bombing, burning and black shooting the MOVE people ( Ramona Africa should have done this herself when the city was forced to pay her and 3 other survivors millions of dollars decades late) or about Ruby Ridge, or the Waco Massacre (where the cops also burned and back-shot citizens trying to escape the flames, then stole the body parts that prove it) or any other heinous cop-crimes that particularly turn our stomachs. I want to get this set to music (you'd be ahead in the competition if you did this yourself) and published before Independence Day, so get it to me by June 1st. You know how the prison cops screw us on mail, so take the long way. I'm at www.jamesbauhaus.org and Bauhaus@quick.com. Your pen is the sharpest weapon, be bold and use it often