George Baker Selection – "Una Paloma Blanca" (1975)

Once I had my share of losing

Once they locked me on a chain

The British Film Institute recently asked no fewer than 1639 film critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics to list what they thought were the best movies of all time.  

Based on those ballots, the BFI put together a“100 Greatest Films of All Time” list, which ranked Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles – a 1975 film directed by 25-year-old Chantal Akerman – the greatest movie ever.

Be honest.  You’ve never heard of Jeanne Dielman, much less seen it.

Jeanne Dielman preparing veal cutlets

I was right there with you until last week, when I checked out a DVD of Jeanne Dielman from my local public library and watched it over the course of two nights.  (The movie is over three hours long.)

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Jeanne Dielman – which is almost three and a half hours long – depicts three days in the life of its titular character, a middle-aged Belgian widow who lives with her teenaged son.

Here’s how critic Jayne Loader summarized the first hour of the film, which depicts one day in the life of Jeanne Dielman:

Jeanne gets up, puts on her dressing gown, and chooses her son’s clothes.  She lights a fire in his room, picks up his shoes and takes them to the kitchen, where she shines them, lights the stove, grinds the coffee beans and makes coffee.  She wakes her son; he eats while she dresses.   She says goodbye to him, and gives him money taken from a blue and white china crock on the dining table. 

She washes the dishes, makes her son's bed and folds it into a couch, makes her own bed and lays a towel over her coverlet.  She shops and runs errands, returns to her apartment, and begins to prepare dinner.  She sits with her neighbor's child, eats her lunch, and returns the baby to its mother.  

The doorbell rings.  She admits a man, takes his hat and coat, and leads him into the bedroom.  She leads him to the front door, gives him his hat and coat, and takes money from him, which she puts in the blue china crock.  She opens the window in her bedroom, puts the rumpled towel in the clothes hamper, bathes, cleans the tub, and dresses. 

She closes the bedroom window and takes dinner off the stove.  Her son comes home.  They eat dinner immediately: soup, meat and potatoes.  She tells him not to read while eating.  He puts his books away.  She clears the table and helps him with his homework.  She knits, and glances through the newspaper, until it is time for them to take their evening walk around the block.  They unfold his sofa bed.  He reads while she undresses.  She turns off the stove, kisses him, turns out the lights, and at last goes to sleep.

[NOTE: I think Jeanne Dielman puts a towel on top of her bed so she can service her client without worry about a wet spot staining her coverlet.  I presume she opens the window after he’s left to air out her bedroom so it doesn’t smell like sex.]

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Here’s how one critic very accurately describes Akerman’s directorial style:

No movie has so rigorously applied the fly-on-the-wall point-of-view to this extent.  Static cameras are set up at various locations around the apartment (and, on those occasions when Jeanne goes out, at fixed locations along her route) to record any action that occurs in front of them.  

Jeanne Dielman peeling potatoes

Traditional cinematography is entirely abandoned.  There are no establishing shots or close-ups.  At times, the images are of empty corridors or rooms, with sounds indicating something is happening off-camera. At no time do any of the cameras move.  

A cynic might remark that Akerman’s approach is to stick a camera on a tripod, point it at a room, wander off, and come back in 11 minutes.

Here’s what another critic said about the film:

Despite the widespread critical acclaim, Jeanne Dielman has never gained much traction outside of its niche audience in large part because it’s beyond a challenge to sit through.  Being fascinating and unique, two qualities unquestionably in evidence here, don’t automatically deserve praise and, because of the film’s high quotient of tediousness, I find it impossible to recommend to any but the most devoted of experimental art film lovers.  It works very well, however, as a cure for insomnia.

Click here to watch a four-and-a-half-minute shot of Jeanne Dielman preparing veal cutlets for dinner, which is a typical scene from the movie.  

As noted in the above description of the movie, the camera doesn’t move – it’s completely static.  Given that there is no one other than Jeanne in the shot, it’s not surprising that there is no dialogue.

I would guess that the entirety of the very sparse dialogue in Jeanne Dielman would take up no more than ten printed pages.

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Jeanne Dielman is sometimes described as an early feminist masterpiece.

But it seems to me that the movie could just as easily be about a male character – a Jean, not a Jeanne.

Imagine Jean Dielman waking up and getting out of bed, making coffee and eating a croissant while reading the morning newspaper, shaving and getting dressed, taking a streetcar to the office where he works as a bookkeeper, adding numbers with the help of an adding machine and entering the sums in a ledger, stopping at a bar near his office for a glass of beer at the end of the workday, going to a delicatessen and buying something to take home for dinner, eating while reading the evening paper, watching a sporting event on TV, brushing his teeth, and going to bed.

Jeanne Dielman drinking coffee

Maybe throw in a weekly visit to a discreet neighborhood prostitute – someone like Jeanne Dielman herself – and you’d have a movie that’s the male mirror image of Jeanne Dielman.

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“Una Paloma Blanca” (which means “a white dove” in Spanish) was recorded in 1975 by the George Baker Selection – whose 1969 hit, “Little Green Bag,” was prominently featured in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.   

The George Baker Selection is Dutch – not Belgian, like the titular character of Jeanne Dielman – but the record was a #1 hit in Belgium in 1975, which was the year that Jeanne Dielman was released.  That’s close enough for government work.

Click here to listen to “Paloma Blanca” by the George Baker Selection.

Click here to buy the song from Amazon.

J. Geils Band – "(Ain't Nothin' But a) House Party" (1973)

It ain’t nothin’ but a party, baby

It ain’t nothin’ but a house party

My plan was to post today about Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles – the 1975 movie that the British Film Institute’s members recently voted to the #1 spot on their “100 Greatest Movies of All Time” list.

But my public library has yet to cough up the DVD of Jeanne Dielman that I put on hold a couple of weeks ago, so you’re going to have to wait a little longer for the definitive take on that movie from little ol’ 2 or 3 lines himself.   

In the meantime, we’ll talk about a film that didn’t make the BFI top 100 list – Woody Allen’s 2008 movie, Vicky Cristina Barcelona – which I recently watched on Netflix.

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Vicky Cristina Barcelona stars Javier Bardem, Scarlett Johansson, Penélope Cruz, and Rebecca Hall.

Don’t feel bad if you’re not familiar with Rebecca Hall.  Neither was I – or so I thought.  It turns out I’ve seen a number of movies and TV series that she’s appeared in – most notably the 2012 BBC series Parade’s End, which was based on Ford Madox Ford’s World War I tetralogy.  (Both the Parade’s End novels and the TV series are remarkable – I recommend them both.)

Rebecca Hall

Hall’s rich socialite character in Parade’s End is a real piece of work.  When she learns she is pregnant as a result of an affair with a married man, she quickly seduces the rather dour character played by Benedict Cumberbatch while they are on a train.  She knows that the Cumberbatch character – who is honorable to a fault – will do the right thing and marry her after their encounter.  After he does just that, she continues sleeping with half the upper-class men in London, knowing that her husband will never divorce her for their son’s sake.

Back to Vicky Cristina Barcelona . . .

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Woody Allen seems to have had sex on the brain his whole life.  (Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, and all that – but Woody is a much bigger perv than the typical guy.)

In Manhattan, Allen’s character is a 42-year-old writer who is “dating” a 17-year-old high school girl.  (At least two women later claimed that the movie was inspired by Allen’s sexual relationship with her when she was a teenager.)

He later initiated a sexual relationship with his inamorata Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter when he was 56 and she was 21, and eventually married her.

If you’re a Generation Z’er, you’re probably wondering how Woody Allen avoided going to jail.  All I can tell you is that times were very different when Manhattan was made in 1979.

Having said that, I think Manhattan is his best movie.  Of course, I haven’t watched it in years – maybe I would find it creepy today, but I certainly didn’t in 1979 . . . and no one else did either.

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Vicky Cristina Barcelona really isn’t all that different from Manhattan.

Instead of gushing over Manhattan, it gushes over Barcelona – its food, its architecture, its general je ne sais quoi.

Woody Allen was born to wear a hat

Each movie is at heart a sex fantasy for males of a certain age.  In Manhattan, of course, that male was portrayed by Allen himself.  In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the primary male character – an artist, naturally – is played by Javier Bardem.  

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In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the artist portrayed by Bardem (Juan Antonio) approaches two twenty-something American friends – Johannson (Cristina) and Hall (Vicky) – who are spending the summer in Barcelona.  He coolly offers to fly them to Orvieto, Spain in his small plane, where they will spend a weekend being wined, dined, shown around the town, and thoroughly (and jointly) rogered.

Cristina quickly succumbs to the artist’s charms, and moves in with him before you can say Jack Robinson.  The happy couple are later joined by the Penélope Cruz character (María Elena) – Juan Antonio’s ex-wife and fellow artist, who has fallen on hard times.  Pretty soon the two women are the best of friends, and Juan Antonio is having his way with both of them.  (It ain’t nothin’ but a house party for Juan Antonio.)

Juan Antonio gets Vicky into bed as well.  She goes ahead and marries her American fiancé – a rather conventional sort who is into golf and making money – but she’s fallen hard for Juan Antonio, and contemplates walking away from her husband and shacking up with the artist.

Woody seems to think that its only fair that Juan Antonio – who is clearly Allen’s alter ego – isn’t limited to having just one woman.  Woody’s a man with highly evolved ideas about sex and love, especially compared to the narrow-minded types who make up most of the world.  Why shouldn’t someone as special as he is be allowed to have his ménage à quatre  and eat it, too?

Vicky and Cristina eventually come to their senses and say sayonara to Juan Antonio and to Barcelona.  We don’t know what happens to the artist and his muy crazy (but muy hot) ex-wife after Vicky and Cristina return to the U.S.  But I’m betting the rest of his life is a Catalan Groundhog Day – repeated reunions and breakups with his ex-wife plus serial relationships with gullible young female travelers from all over the world.

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Allen pitches his movies to college-educated urbanites who see themselves as smart and sophisticated.  But if you’re looking for intellectual nutrition in your movies, look elsewhere – Vicky Cristina Barcelona is just empty calories.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is easy on the eyes, and even easier on the brain – at least the aging male brain.  It has no nudity – if it did, we’d recognize that it is essentially soft-core porn, albeit soft-core porn with a heapin’ helpin’ of intellectual pretensions.  

I’m surprised that so many critics loved it – it was included on a number of top-ten-movies-of-the-year lists.  One reviewer called it “a witty and ambiguous film that's simultaneously intoxicating and suffused with sadness and doubt.”  Another review praised it as “the work of a confident and mature artist.”

I’m not buying it, boys and girls.

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“It Ain’t Nothin’ But a House Party” was originally recorded by the Showstoppers, a Philadelphia-based soul group whose members included two of the legendary soul singer Solomon Burke’s younger brothers.

The record failed to crack the Billboard “Hot 100” when it was first released in 1967.  It was a #11 hit in the UK in 1968, and did a little better when it was subsequently re-released in the U.S.

The song has been covered by numerous groups, including the J. Geils Band.

Click here to listen to the J. Geils Band’s 1973 cover, which was titled “(Ain’t Nothin’ But a) House Party.”

Click here to buy the song from Amazon.

Doors – "The End" (1967)

Ride the snake, ride the snake

To the lake, the ancient lake

The snake, he’s long

Seven miles

Ride the snake

He’s old and his skin is cold

As I noted in the previous 2 or 3 lines, the British Film Institute’s 2022 “100 Greatest Films of All Times” list omits Nashville, The Wild Bunch, The Godfather Part II and several other films that anyone with half a brain would agree belong on the “100 Greatest” list.

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The movie that was ranked #1 by the BFI’s 2022 voters is one that I’ve never heard of – much less seen.  I would bet dollars to donuts that you’ve never heard of it either.  

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles – a 1975 film that was written and directed by a 25-year-old Belgian woman, Chantal Akerman – barely cracked the top forty on the BFI 2012 list.   But ten years later, it was ranked #1. 

Chantal Akerman

What explains the sudden ascension of this rather obscure movie to the top of the new list – replacing Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which in turn had replaced Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane?  

 Obviously Jeanne Dielman was the same movie in 2022 that it was in 2012.  What changed in those ten years was the BFI electorate. 

The BFI sent ballots to 800-odd film critics, programmers, and academics in 2012, but invited twice as many to vote in 2022. 

The new 2022 voters apparently included a lot of politically correct  types who gave more weight to diversity than to any other criteria. 

“It’s high time a woman won,” one British critic wrote, explaining his vote for Jeanne Dielman – and probably explaining why that film ended up in the top spot of the “100 Greatest Films” list.

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As noted above, I’ve never heard of Jeanne Dielman, much less watched it.

I did find a four-minute clip from the movie on Youtube tonight and watched it.  That four-minute scene consists of a static shot of movie’s title character preparing a couple of breaded veal cutlets for dinner.

Jeanne Dielman preparing veal cutlets

First, she dredges the cutlets in flour.  Then she dips them in the whisked egg.  Then she coats the cutlets with breadcrumbs.  Finally, she covers the dish containing the cutlets with a sheet of aluminum foil and put the dish in her refrigerator.

Click here to watch that scene.

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From the reviews of it that I’ve read, Jeanne Dielman consists of roughly three hours of similarly banal scenes leading up to the disclosure of an awful secret.

I had hoped to watch the movie before publishing this post so I could tell you whether the ending justifies the three tedious hours that precede it.  Unfortunately, my local public library – which is not only the biggest and most well-funded library in the state of Maryland, but also as woke a library as you would ever hope to find – doesn’t own a DVD of Jeanne Dielman.  

So I’ve made a request through the state’s interlibrary loan network, and will hopefully be able to offer my thoughts on Jeanne Dielman in the near future.

“Why didn’t you just buy a copy of the movie, you cheap bast*rd?” I can hear you saying to yourself.

No way, dude.  It’s enough of a sacrifice that I’m going to spend three-plus hours of my life that I’ll never get back watching Jeanne Dielman – no chance I’m going to spend my own do-re-mi.

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“The End” – which was released in 1967 on the Doors’ eponymous debut album – is about 12 minutes of not very much happening.  You could say it’s the classic-rock equivalent of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.  

A special remix of the recording was featured in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 movie, Apocalypse Now, which came in at #19 of the BFI “100 Greatest Movies” list.  Apocalypse Now has it moments, but you are out of your pea-pickin’ mind if you think it’s better than Coppola’s Godfather Part II.

Better than Apocalypse Now?  You bet it is! 

But that wasn’t the only time the BFI voters picked the wrong movie by the right director.  For example, they picked three Stanley Kubrick movies for the “100 Greatest” list: The Shining, Barry Lyndon, and 2001: A Space Odyssey.  But Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket and Clockwork Orange should have been ranked ahead of those movies.  

Hell, I might even rank Eyes Wide Shut and Lolita – hot messes, both of them – above 2001.  A friend of mine once ascribed the legendary status of 2001 to the fact that almost everyone who saw when it was first released (which was 1968) went to the theatre high, and I think he was 100% correctimundo.

Click here to listen to “The End.”

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.

Ronee Blakely – "My Idaho Home" (1975)

We were young then

We were together

We could bear floods and fire and bad weather

Every ten years, the British Film Institute asks hundreds of film critics, programmers, archivists, and academics to pick what they think are the ten greatest movies of all time.  The BFI’s “100 Greatest Films of All Time” list – which is published in Sight and Sound magazine – is based on their votes.

The 2022 list is missing almost 20 movies that had been included on the 2012 list.  Four of those spots were filled with movies that were filmed between 2012 and 2022:  Parasite, Get Out, Moonlight, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire.  (That’s not a joke, boys and girls.  The BFI voters actually believe that those four movies are among the hundred best ever made.)

The other 16 new additions to the list were older movies that could have been chosen for the 2012 list, but weren’t.  There were a number of new voters in 2022, so you would expect some differences of opinion.  

But what explains most of the turnover on the list is political correctness rearing its ugly head.  More woke voters = more woke movies = a clearly inferior “100 Greatest” list.

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Among the movies that were deleted from the “100 Greatest” list in 2022 were Nashville, The Wild Bunch, and The Godfather Part II.

ARE YOU F*CKING KIDDING ME?  I mean, Parasite was a very clever and original movie.  But better than Nashville, The Wild Bunch or Godfather Part II?  

Be honest.  Having seen Parasite once, do you ever need to see it again?  I didn’t think so.  

But that’s certainly not true of the three movies mentioned above that were dropped from the list – I’ve watched each of them multiple times over the years, and I’m ready to watch each of them again.

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Unlike Martin Scorsese – who used classic-rock songs like “Gimme Shelter” and “Layla” on the soundtracks of his gangster movies – Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather movies feature instrumental music composed especially for those films.  

The Nashville soundtrack is something entirely different.  It features songs that were written and performed by several of the movie’s cast members.

Keith Carradine wrote three songs for Nashville and sang two of them in the film – including “I’m Easy,” which won an Academy Award.

Ronee Blakely in Nashville

But I think the best songs on the soundtrack were those written and performed by Ronee Blakey, who was a singer-songwriter first and an actress second.  (Blakely had recorded two albums before making her utterly convincing acting debut in Nashville.)

My favorite of the half-dozen songs she wrote for Nashville is “My Idaho Home.”  (Blakely was born and grew up in Idaho.)

It’s as sentimental and corny as any country-western song you can name, but it works because Blakely performs it as if she believes every single word.  A song like “My Idaho Home” isn’t meant to be analyzed – turn off your brain and turn on your heart when you listen to it, and you’ll believe every word, too.

Click here to watch Ronee Blakely singing “My Idaho Home” in Nashville.  (If you’ve seen the whole movie, watching this three-minute excerpt will be enough to remind just how remarkable a film it is.)

Click here to buy the recording from Amazon. 

Black Flag – "TV Party" (1981)

We’ve got nothing better to do

Than watch TV

And have a couple of brews

Tomorrow, the sun will rise in Appleton, Wisconsin – which is the largest city in Outagamie County – at 7:21 AM and set at 4:14 PM.

That works out to a daylength of just under nine hours – meaning it will be dark for almost fifteen hours there tomorrow.

On a typical December 14, the temperature never gets above the freezing mark – the average high for that date is 31º F., and the average low is 17º F.

December is the second-cloudiest month of the year – it’s overcast or mostly cloudy over 55% of the time in December.

Let’s review the bidding.  If you’re in Outagamie County tomorrow, you can expect about fifteen hours of darkness, nine hours of clouds – and 24 hours of freezing temperatures.

No wonder Outagamie County is the drunkest county in the United States.

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That statement is based on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute joint program’s 2021 County Health Rankings & Roadmaps report. 

According to that report, 31% of adult residents in Outagamie County said that they had engaged in either binge drinking or excessive drinking in the previous 30 days.

If 31% admitted to excessive drinking, you know that a lot more than that actually drank excessively.

If you’re a glass-half-full kind of person, the good news is that only 32% of vehicle-related deaths in Outagamie County involved alcohol – in some counties, the alcohol-related driving death rate is twice as high.  

So at least some of the good folks of Outagamie County are smart enough to call a cab when they’ve had a snootful.

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It turns out that Outagamie County is not that different than the rest of Wisconsin when it comes to excessive drinking.

In fact, all eleven of the drunkest counties in the U.S. – and 41 of the top 50 counties in the excessive-drinking rankings – are in Wisconsin.

What the hell is it about living in Wisconsin that makes people drink so much?  It’s just as cold and dark in Minnesota as it is in Wisconsin, but only one Minnesota county – Le Sueur County, which was formerly the home of the Green Giant Company – made the top 50.  

Of course, Minnesotans are notorious liars when it comes to confessing their sinful behaviors.

After Wisconsin, Iowa is the drunkest state in the county, with six counties on the list.  North Dakota and South Dakota have one county each among the 50 drunkest counties.

Shockingly, Alaska is not represented on the drunkest-county list.  It may be that most heavy drinkers in Alaska fall into snowbanks and freeze to death or get eaten by bears, and so are unable to fill out their excessive-drinking survey questionnaires.

Also, Alaska subsidizes internet access – it’s free to needy Alaskans.  So a lot of guys in Alaska may be staying home and watching porn instead of going out and getting hammered. 

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Black Flag was a hardcore punk band that was formed in Hermosa Beach (a small beachfront city just south of Los Angeles) in 1976 and stayed together for a decade.  

“TV Party” was released in 1981 on Black Flag’s debut album, Damaged.  The lead singer on that record was Henry Rollins – a 20-year-old fan of the group from Washington, DC – who had joined Black Flag only weeks before Damaged was recorded.

Henry Rollins

Click here to watch to the truly remarkable music video for “TV Party.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

Four Tops – "Shake Me, Wake Me (When It's Over)" (1966)

Shake me

Wake me 

When it’s over

If you watch TV during the day, you’ve no doubt seen a lot of commercials for Medicare Advantage health insurance plans recently.

Those commercials usually feature celebrity spokesmen that the French would describe as being  d’un certain âge – “of a certain age” – which means they are as old as Methusaleh.

That’s because the people watching daytime TV are as old as Methusaleh.  

(According to Genesis, Methusaleh died at age 969.)

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Here’s how I would rank the four Medicare Advantage plan celebrity spokesmen that I see the most often.

#4 – Jimmie “J. J.” Walker 

Walker starred in the CBS series Good Times, which aired in 1970s.  Walker’s character on the show was a goofball – the only thing I remember about him is his catchphrase, which was “Dyn-o-mite!”  Why in the world would anyone think he was a suitable pitchman for a health insurance plan?

#3 – William Shatner

Shatner, who is best-known for portraying Captain James Kirk on the legendary Star Trek TV series,  has made some legendarily bad record albums.  Click here to listen to his appalling cover of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”  That recording alone is enough to drop him to the next-to-last spot in these rankings – but his career is based on more than a dopey catchphrase, so I put him above Walker.

#2 – Joe Namath

Based on his statistics, Joe Namath may be the least distinguished quarterback in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.  But he was the author of the most shocking upset in pro football history, and he was a legendary ladies man as well – so I’m putting him at #2 on this list, despite the fact that my cat probably knows as much about health insurance as he does.

#1 – William Devane

Devane, who starred on the popular primetime soap opera Knots Landing for ten years, has a certain gravitas as an actor.  He’s portrayed the President of the United States in several different movies and TV series, and has also done turns as the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense.

That gravitas has helped Devane land a bunch of commercial deals.  He not only is a Medicare Advantage plan spokesman, but also shills for a precious metals asset management firm.

William Devane

I ranked Devane #1 on this list not because he has any more expertise or credibility than any of the other celebrity spokesmen, but because he looks a lot like my father did when he was alive.  

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The lyrics to “Shake Me, Wake Me (When It’s Over)” are a little clunky, but no matter.  After a mere two measures of introduction, the Four Tops and the Funk Brothers hit the ground running and never let up – this record is relentless.

As the Motown Junkies website correctly notes, “Shake Me, Wake Me” marries “a driving, fully danceable upbeat tune, and . . . the most anguished and depressing lyrics you could come up with”:  

This is a song about a guy who is losing his mind, paranoid and permanently on edge, plagued by fears his partner is about to walk out on him, stoked by (possibly imaginary) rumors, fueled by insomnia.  And it sounds like a party, like the narrator’s pain would make a great ringtone. That, right there, is the magic of Holland-Dozier-Holland, and this is as good an example as you’ll ever find in their catalogue.

I’m not sure why this song was given to the Four Tops instead of the Supremes.  The Supremes covered  it on their The Supremes A’ Go-Go album – which was the first album by an all-female group to top the Billboard album chart – and that cover is underwhelming.  Instead of going full speed ahead – like the Four Tops – or throwing in a heapin’ helpin’ of schmaltz, the Supremes sort of played it safe and hit a hybrid off the tee.  Click here to listen to the Supremes’ cover of “Shake Me, Wake Me.”

Click here to listen to the vastly superior Four Tops recording of the song.  

Click here to order the record from Amazon.

Rage Against the Machine – "Killing in the Name" (1992)

F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me

F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me

F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me

F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me

F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me

F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me

F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me

F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me

You took the words right out of my mouth.

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All four members of Rage Against the Machine were given writing credits for “Killing in the Name,” but it seems that guitarist Tom Morello came up with the record’s characteristic riffs.

Morello and I share a birthday – he was born in Harlem 12 years to the day after I was born in Joplin, Missouri.

His Kenyan father, Ngethe Njoroge, participated in the Mau Mau uprising against the British in the 1950s.  He and Morello’s white mother – a schoolteacher from Illinois named Mary Morello – met at a pro-democracy protest in Nairobi in August 1963.  

Ngethe Njoroge

She returned to the U.S. with Njoroge after discovering she was pregnant.  The couple were married in November of that year, but Njoroge denied that his paternity of Morello two years later and returned to Kenya – where he later became Kenya’s first ambassador to the United Nations.  (Morello’s family included several prominent Kenyan politicians.  One of his aunts was the first female member of the Kenyan legislature, while his great uncle was the first elected president of Kenya.)

Tom Morello with his mother, Mary Morello

Morello went to Harvard College.  While he was there, he formed a band called Bored of Education, which won the Ivy League Battle of the Bands in 1986.  The band’s keyboard player was Carolyn Bertozzi, a Stanford professor who received a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1999, and was a co-winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  She is the author or co-author of some 600 scientific papers.

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“Killing in the Name” was released on Rage Against the Machine’s eponymous debut album in 1992.  

Click here to listen to “Killing in the Name.”

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.