It’s July and it’s hot and humid, in the high 80’s all day. The windowless metal trailer we’ll be unloading tonight has been parked in the sun since early this morning, heating up, and I will shortly spend a couple of hours inside that hotbox lifting heavy things.
But that isn’t what I’m dreading about tonight’s shift.
The worst thing about tonight’s shift is that the MOOD Media music streaming service at the Big Box has been broken since Friday. Every one of the eight streaming channels we can choose from just gives the same error message: “No signal. Now playing: Rain fade backup.”
That odd phrase — “rain fade backup” — refers to a 45-minute loop of almost a dozen songs that then repeats. Over and over. In an 8-hour shift you will hear each of those songs (or partial songs) 10 or 11 times. Always the same songs. And this has been going on since last Friday.
The loop starts with a snippet of Natalie Merchant’s “Wonder” which plays for about 30 seconds, and then abruptly cuts to Melissa Etheridge’s “I’m the Only One,” which plays until the word “drown” the second time through the chorus. Then that cuts off and we get 40 minutes of complete songs, all Country. And then a bit of static, followed by “Doctors have come from distant cities …”
Some of the songs in the Country loop are fine songs that I would be happy to hear once a shift. The Osborne Bros. “It Ain’t My Fault” is a fun and funny growl, and Terri Clark’s “Girls Lie Too” can be amusing, and Chase Rice’s “Three Chords & the Truth” is endearingly earnest, and the “Hey!”s in Kelsea Ballerini’s “Dibs” are enjoyable, and I suppose Josh Turner’s “Firecracker” is a capable little romp even if it’s not breaking any new ground. But I’m not sure I’d put any of them in the category of Songs I Want To Hear Over And Over, 10 or 11 Times, Every Day At Work.
That’s not a knock on any of those artists, mind you. If I tried to come up with a list of songs that would belong in that category, I’d probably wind up maybe not wanting to hear them either after almost a week of “Rain fade backup” repetition. By the 9th or 10th iteration, even a song that might otherwise make you go “Ooh, turn it up!” is going to make you go “Oh no, not this again.”
But that’s still not the worst part. Here is the worst part: the 45-minute endless loop also includes Aaron Tippin’s odious “Where the Stars and Stripes and the Eagle Flies.”
I have discussed this horrible song here previously as an archetype of the Anti-Kitten-Burning Coalition feigned patriotism of Country chauvinism I described here: “‘Where I come from’ we claim universal generalities as our peculiar virtues.” Tippin’s monsterpiece received particular attention in a later continuation of that discussion, “Sha la la, la la la, la la la,”* after discussing the willfully ignorant jingoism of “More Trucks Than Cars,” we turned to Tippin:
But that song is nowhere near as aggressively off-putting as the execrable Aaron Tippin schlockfest “Where the Stars and Stripes and the Eagle Fly.” Good Lord this song is terrible.
I mean, it’s amusing when Tippin sings about loving his wife “the way my daddy did” (?) and it can be fun to try to parse the various contradictory antecedents for the “you” he keeps referring to. But mostly this metrically and grammatically awkward song is like an unironic version of one of those screaming-eagle promos that used to run on The Colbert Report. The only reason this dreck should be played, anywhere, is as an artifact of the kind of embarrassing, hostile, defensively performative faux-patriotism that flowered after 9/11.
Tippin re-recorded this song and released it late September of 2001, but he’d written it long before then, and in his rush to cash in honor the victims he didn’t have time to filter out all of the reflexively anti-urban posturing that defines this genre of song. This also makes it an example of that strange category of post-9/11 cultural output produced by people who still clearly despise New York City.
I have not grown more fond of this song after hearing it several dozen times over the past week. Most of the song, after all, is Tippin condemning the imaginary kitten-burners in his head and bearing false witness against his neighbors by accusing millions of them of being such evil kitten-burning monsters.
And most of the rest of the song is Tippin proudly assuring anyone within earshot that he’s better than those kitten-burners, and therefore he’s good, and you should just tell him that, tell him, “Aaron, you’re such a good person,” over and over until he stops doubting it.
It is, as I suggested, a Very Bad song.
But it’s also a time-capsule of an earlier era of rah-rah Americanism which was then in a turn-of-the-century transition from Reagan’s cheery “Morning in America” to the coming “Carnage” of Trumpism. And thus Tippin’s smarmy jingoism includes this line: “There’s a lady that stands in a harbor for what we believe.”
That’s a Statue of Liberty reference and, implicitly, an endorsement of Emma Lazarus’ “New Colossus“:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
That statue and that poem were explicitly attacked and rejected by Stephen Miller back in the first Trump administration. Those words are anathema to MAGA Republicans. Admiring the “lady who stands in the harbor” makes you their enemy and their foe and their target.
It makes you “woke.”
This is the one redeeming feature of listening to this song a dozen times last night and a dozen more times tonight: the realization that this anthem of American chauvinism is now canceled and rejected because it’s too “woke” for MAGA world.
In any case, the point here is that MOOD music streaming service needs to fix their signal and to provide all of our associates and customers some monetary compensation for the past week of suffering.
And they need to retire this “Rain fade backup” permanently. (Or just lend it out to protesters outside of the hotels where ICE agents are staying as though they were normal, decent people who should ever again be allowed a single night’s rest.)
* That post takes it’s title from Bruce Springsteen’s “Darlington County,” from the first part of the chorus. Hence, “Sha la la, la la la, la la la,” rather than, “Sha la la, la la, la la,” if it had been from the second part of the chorus, obviously.
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