Friday Jukebox

Mark of New Jersey

Mark is a Founding Editor of The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, the predecessor of Ordinary Times.

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8 Responses

  1. Jaybird says:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRge7lXu56E

    That’s my favorite right there. To my shame, the first version of the song that I had heard was Springsteen’s off of the, sigh, USA for Africa album.

    Which, come to think of it, probably deserved to be in the “best covers” thread from months and months ago.

    Anyway, there’s a nearby restaurant called “Rasta Pasta” (and it’s exactly what you think it is) and Maribou and I eat there semi-regularly and she semi-regularly gets upset at my rants about Haile Selassie that are given in the middle of songs by Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh, and that other guy. I guess the point of this little digression is that one tends to find Holy Men in strange places.Report

    • Mark Thompson in reply to Jaybird says:

      @Jaybird, Jimmy’s got songs that go on Selassie rants? His relationship with Rastafarianism has always been pretty lukewarm (at best), and AFAIK, he’s never really identified as a Rasta.

      That said, I never really minded the Selassie rants in Tosh’s music, and explicitly Rasta spirituals have always been amongst my favorite reggae songs, probably for much the same reason that songs like “Amazing Grace” and the like remain beautiful to me.Report

      • @Mark Thompson, Speaking of religious spirituals, I just wanted to note what I think has to be the strangest use of a religious spiritual I’ve ever encountered.

        That would be the fact that a bizarrely uptempo version of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” is, like, the anthem of English rugby fandom. I’ll never understand how that came to be as long as I live.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Mark Thompson says:

          @Mark Thompson, this one terrifies me with its simplicity and beauty.

          It’s the other side of Amazing Grace.

          http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFGgbT_VasI

          You find holy men in the strangest places, sometimes.Report

          • Mark Thompson in reply to Jaybird says:

            @Jaybird, That song still sends chills up my spine.

            “You find holy men in the strangest places, sometimes.”

            There was a time when I was a one-man cult dedicated to that particular holy man. Dozens of albums, including every fifth-rate “Greatest Hits” collection by obscure labels who managed to get licensing on even more obscure songs that I could find. Not to mention the dozens upon dozens of bootleg tapes (this was back in the early days of the intertubes when you had to trade music online via newsgroups).

            Good times. Alas, it’s probably been a decade since I last saw any of those tapes.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Mark Thompson says:

        @Mark Thompson, no, not really. *I* go on Selassie rants.

        You know he actually went to Jamaica? He gave speeches. He never denied anything they praised him for.

        Now Jamaica might be stuck with the one religion with more direct evidence to the contrary than Mormonism and I blame Selassie for that in no small part.

        Now imagine that being said over a bowl of garlic butter spaghetti with chicken cooked in jerk spices. Oh, and they’ve got this spicy chocolate sauce served hot over vanilla ice cream that is to die for.Report

  2. Uh,why I can’t watch that?Report