Songs banned by Clear Channel radio stations

As part of the project to mirror web resource material that the media would otherwise hope to bury, here is the list of music recordings which Clear Channel banned from the airwaves of its enormous network of radio stations. On the heels of 9/11, Clear Channel asserted these songs had “questionable content.”

Drowning Pool “Bodies”
Mudvayne “Death Blooms”
Megadeth “Dread and the Fugitive,” “Sweating Bullets”
Saliva “Click Click Boom”
P.O.D. “Boom”
Metallica “Seek and Destroy,” “Harvester or Sorrow,” “Enter Sandman,”
“Fade to Black”
All Rage Against The Machine songs
Nine Inch Nails “Head Like a Hole”
Godsmack “Bad Religion”
Tool “Intolerance”
Soundgarden “Blow Up the Outside World”
AC/DC “Shot Down in Flames,” “Shoot to Thrill,” “Dirty Deeds”
“Highway to Hell,” “Safe in New York City,” “TNT,” “Hell’s Bells”
Black Sabbath “War Pigs,” “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” “Suicide Solution”
Dio “Holy Diver”
Steve Miller “Jet Airliner”
Van Halen “Jump”
Queen “Another One Bites the Dust,” “Killer Queen”
Pat Benatar “Hit Me with Your Best Shot,” “Love is a Battlefield”
Oingo Boingo “Dead Man’s Party”
REM “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”
Talking Heads “Burning Down the House”
Judas Priest “Some Heads Are Gonna Roll”
Pink Floyd “Run Like Hell,” “Mother”
Savage Garden “Crash and Burn”
Dave Matthews Band “Crash Into Me”
Bangles “Walk Like an Egyptian”
Pretenders “My City Was Gone”
Alanis Morissette “Ironic”
Barenaked Ladies “Falling for the First Time”
Fuel “Bad Day”
John Parr “St. Elmo’s Fire”
Peter Gabriel “When You’re Falling”
Kansas “Dust in the Wind”
Led Zeppelin “Stairway to Heaven”
The Beatles “A Day in the Life,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,”
“Ticket To Ride,” “Obla Di, Obla Da”
Bob Dylan/Guns N Roses “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”
Arthur Brown “Fire”
Blue Oyster Cult “Burnin’ For You”
Paul McCartney and Wings “Live and Let Die”
Jimmy Hendrix “Hey Joe”
Jackson Brown “Doctor My Eyes”
John Mellencamp “Crumbling Down.” “I’m On Fire”
U2 “Sunday Bloody Sunday”
Boston “Smokin”
Billy Joel “Only the Good Die Young”
Barry McGuire “Eve of Destruction”
Steam “Na Na Na Na Hey Hey”
Drifters “On Broadway”
Shelly Fabares “Johnny Angel”
Los Bravos “Black is Black”
Peter and Gordon “I Go To Pieces,” “A World Without Love”
Elvis “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise”
Zombies “She’s Not There”
Elton John “Benny & The Jets,” “Daniel,” “Rocket Man”
Jerry Lee Lewis “Great Balls of Fire”
Santana “Evil Ways”
Louis Armstrong “What A Wonderful World”
Youngbloods “Get Together”
Ad Libs “The Boy from New York City”
Peter Paul and Mary “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane”
Rolling Stones “Ruby Tuesday”
Simon And Garfunkel “Bridge Over Troubled Water”
Happenings “See You in Septemeber”
Carole King “I Feel the Earth Move”
Yager and Evans “In the Year 2525”
Norman Greenbaum “Spirit in the Sky”
Brooklyn Bridge “Worst That Could Happen”
Three Degrees “When Will I See You Again”
Cat Stevens “Peace Train,” “Morning Has Broken”
Jan and Dean “Dead Man’s Curve”
Martha & the Vandellas “Nowhere to Run”
Martha and the Vandellas/Van Halen “Dancing in the Streets”
Hollies “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”
San Cooke Herman Hermits, “Wonder World”
Petula Clark “A Sign of the Times”
Don McLean “American Pie”
J. Frank Wilson “Last Kiss”
Buddy Holly and the Crickets “That’ll Be the Day”
John Lennon “Imagine”
Bobby Darin “Mack the Knife”
The Clash “Rock the Casbah”
Surfaris “Wipeout”
Blood Sweat and Tears “And When I Die”
Dave Clark Five “Bits and Pieces”
Tramps “Disco Inferno”
Paper Lace “The Night Chicago Died”
Frank Sinatra “New York, New York”
Creedence Clearwater Revival “Travelin’ Band”
The Gap Band “You Dropped a Bomb On Me”
Alien Ant Farm “Smooth Criminal”
3 Doors Down “Duck and Run”
The Doors “The End”
Third Eye Blind “Jumper”
Neil Diamond “America”
Lenny Kravitz “Fly Away”
Tom Petty “Free Fallin'”
Bruce Springsteen “I’m On Fire,” “Goin’ Down”
Phil Collins “In the Air Tonight”
Alice in Chains “Rooster,” “Sea of Sorrow,” “Down in a Hole,”
“Them Bone”
Beastie Boys “Sure Shot,” “Sabotage”
The Cult “Fire Woman”
Everclear “Santa Monica”
Filter “Hey Man, Nice Shot”
Foo Fighters “Learn to Fly”
Korn “Falling Away From Me”
Red Hot Chili Peppers “Aeroplane,” “Under the Bridge”
Smashing Pumpkins “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”
System of a Down “Chop Suey!”
Skeeter Davis “End of the World”
Rickey Nelson “Travelin’ Man”
Chi-Lites “Have You Seen Her”
Animals “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”
Fontella Bass “Rescue Me”
Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels “Devil with the Blue Dress”
James Taylor “Fire and Rain”
Edwin Starr/Bruce Springstein “War”
Lynyrd Skynyrd “Tuesday’s Gone”
Limp Bizkit “Break Stuff”
Green Day “Brain Stew”
Temple of the Dog “Say Hello to Heaven”
Sugar Ray “Fly”
Local H “Bound for the Floor”
Slipknot “Left Behind, Wait and Bleed”
Bush “Speed Kills”
311 “Down”
Stone Temple Pilots “Big Bang Baby,” “Dead and Bloated”
Soundgarden “Fell on Black Days,” “Black Hole Sun”

It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature

Product placementTalk about subverting mother nature. In the guise of an environmental message –stop overfishing for the sake of tap-dancing penguins– Happy Feet screws up everything. Forget ecosystems, it wants you to unlearn social systems. This movie builds upon our awareness of the selfless Emperor Penguins from last year’s Oscar-winning documentary and marches it straight off a cliff of ice. Calfs it right into the warming ocean.

Happy Feet is a Footloose attack on the seemingly dogmatic tradition of penguins to value an individual’s vocal heart song as opposed to tap dance. Although, such a presumed rigidity might not be unexpected from a society of birds which spends two thirds of the year balancing eggs on the tops of feet. Emperor penguins have no limbs with which to retrieve an egg should it fall by accident unto the ice. One of the heartbreaks of March of the Penguins was to learn that an egg succumbs to exposure within seconds of rolling upon the ice.

For the children perhaps, Happy Feet soft pedals the harsh brutality of Mother Nature. Getting past that, the movie befuddles us with what it means to work individually toward a mutual goal. Collectivity is portrayed here as mind numbing, spirit killing conformity, as opposed to biological imperative, genetic behavior.

But let’s address a real pop misconception. It’s not herd mentality. It’s herd. There’s nothing wrong with humanizing the animals, but don’t let’s pretend to learn something from them, the fiction of us.

There’s a preacher penguin in the movie whose head towers over the rest, the archetype of the sinister puritanical demagogue. This character keeps every penguin in line by shaming those who might stray. Do you recall ever seeing a penguin taller than the others? It’s one of the charms of penguins that they are all the same. Penguin behavior appears curiously random to us, yet at the same time it’s as mechanized as dominos. There is a deeper leadership somehow, and I think it’s what humans are seeking for ourselves.

Happy Feet is the message you get when there is no God but Coca Cola. When product placement rules, not even secular education is served.

The Lion King highlighted the Disney monarchist reordering of nature. It’s lovely to think of the lion as the King of Beasts, but it’s certainly very silly. No animal rules another except for interpersonally. Looking at man’s natural order, isn’t it rather silly to think that one idle fat man should lord over others who labor?

Ant armies are not led by ant generals. Queens may be the backbones of insect colonies, but they are not social architects. Penguins and ants may have something to teach us about how human beings can someday achieve balance with nature. It might have something to do with conformity and a sense of collective purpose. We know already it doesn’t come from Marx or Jesus, it’s something farther inside.

I’ll bet you right now such an inner compass will be more like a penguin’s heart song and less like a tap-dancing, individualist, obey your thirst, just do it, gotta be me, fool.

Campus cops taser torture Iranian student inside UCLA library

It’s just been a little over 2 months since Boulder cops murdered a young man with their tasers simply because he had grown some marijuana in a field there. He fled the cops because he didn’t want to do jail time for something so stupid. Instead of just sluffing off such a minor ‘crime’, the cops murdered him instead. Now, this past week, campus cops at UCLA put themselves in the international spotlight for torturing an Iranian student with their taser guns inside the student library. These thugs did it in front of numerous students, whom in turn got threatened with being tasered for coming to the aid of the cops’ victim. Because this act of brutality got caught on video, it has even sparked an official protest from the Iranian governement. I think it rather obvious that the student’s accent and Mid East appearance had much to do with why the cops went after him like animals on a hunt.

They Don’t Care and the jumping mouse

Rodent member of endangered ecosystemMighty Mouse or Mighty Myth? asks The Gazette of their readership today and yesterday in quarter page announcements in their paper. “Does the Preble’s Meadow Mouse really exist?” (Or did that evil environmental movement make it all up?)
 
The editorial board over at our loony local rag really is brain dead when it comes to environmental affairs. Just weeks ago they were also running an editorial expressing doubts about whether global warming was real. (Or did the evil environmental movement make the whole thing up?)

The announcement suggesting that it was all “mighty myth” that another wild animal was endangered, was part of the announcement to invite people to a Right Wing think tank presentation at the U. of Colorado-Colorado Springs campus, all designed to push for the virtual annulment of the Endangered Species Act. So I headed over there at noon to show my support for the jumping mouse and Yogi the Bear vs the real estate and construction magnates. Nature vs more crappy development was my message. It’s not just about the jumping mouse. It’s about whether we destroy all nature’s natural habitats or not.

Well, it turns out that my sign saying,
—They don’t care
—Developers just want to pave over nature and
—DAMN THE WILDLIFE!
provoked some interest as I parked myself inside next to some buffet items as the developers broke for lunch.

First, I was berated by some of the overly dressed crowd for having missed the morning presentations by the all Right Wing panel. Actually, they had one lonely environmentalist who had not made it yet from Denver. But how dare I have an opinion about the mouse without hearing all their important commentary?!!! My response was to just shuck it off. I told them I thought the whole thing was about the spotted owl, and I had heard enough about that rare bird already while living in Washington. Jesus, you tell me I came all this way about a mouse?

It turns out that some of the developers took my sign personally. So I had to discuss whether they were evil people or not. And then the two campus cops showed up, and I thought I might get scanned to see if I was a threat to Homeland Security. But Professor Null, jefe of the Right Wing think tank sponsor, said that he would vouch for me, and even offered me lunch. I thanked him, but told him I wasn’t sure whether their food was organic or not. But that I might come in and listen to their accumulation of proof that nature’s wetlands really were no longer necessary to preserve. Full speed ahead!

I only stayed 2 hours. I did get to hear the last panelist, the liberal who could make it from Denver. I also got to shake hands with Craig Manson, Bush’s creep who had formerly been put in charge over “our nation’s critters” to dismantle the Endangered Species Act. He was still working on it as I could see. Nobody quite like him since James Watt had been in charge. He was definitely the big wig invite for sure. I told him that I was sorry I had missed his work in the morning, but that I had read some interviews he had done online, and that “they were quite interesting,” as I politely and sarcastically put it.

One of our CS city councilman recognized me from the city council picnics we sometimes do together. We had a nice cheerful talk about torture, in which he told me that he believed that it did not exist. Then, ala Cheney, he told me that he was for it, except it did not exist! lol…. These White Men speak with forked tongue. He told me that he had family in the military, so that was why he had forked tongue. I will withhold his identity in order to protect the guilty.

I did have a few who came up and whispered that they were in agreement with my sign. But they kind of looked worried that they might get fired for fraternizing if done too openly. So was I too hard on the hard working real estate developers, as some of them had told me? “We’re not all bad.” Well, look at this list of the folk on the board of the Right Wing think tank co-sponsor of this event with The Gazette. Scroll down and check out the many developer folk at The Center for the Study of Government and the Individual

Toxic chimp

Toxic ChimpI’ve been content to think of George Dubya as an ugly little monkey, as dangerous as he is rabid perhaps. But -and this is no joke- the comparison vastly undersells monkeys.

A recent study involving elephants recognizing themselves in mirrors made the distinction more clear. “Humans, great apes, dolphins and elephants, well known for their superior intelligence and complex social systems, are thought to possess the highest forms of empathy and altruism in the animal kingdom.” George it’s painfully obvious, and fatally obvious to too many, doesn’t score there.

Homosexuals that go moo

Buses that go mooDogs that go moo.
 
Are there such things, or is this an analogy? Let’s see, if animals vocalize in order to interact with like animals, isn’t a mooing dog likely to attract only other dogs that moo? And maybe dairy farmers. In any case, they are unlikely to procreate. Instead the dogs will run together in mooing herds.
 
Now where’s the harm in that?

This might be why people are confused by the ad campaign. Is it pro gay marriage? Against? I’d be on board with the gay marriage issue if Republicans weren’t using it to drive simpleton voters away from anti-war and class-war solutions.

What are they trying to say with a dog mooing? That homosexuality is an aberration of nature? That it’s not natural? A dog that moos? Taking it further, how would you explain a natural phenomenon that evolves non-evolving DNA. Seedless watermellon? Not natural.

I don’t think a dog that moos works. Now a dog that swishes? Fantastic. And natural.

Animal cruelty at the rodeo

Cruelty
I just learned how they make horses and bulls jump up and down at the rodeo. I must admit I wondered why it was that the animals suddenly leaped about madly (bronc’d) after they got out of the gate and not before, and why did they stop once the rider was thrown?

It turns out there’s a strap that the other cowboys cinch around the animal’s testicles. They yank it tight as they open the gate. Then, once the rider is thrown, attendants chase the animal and release the cinch.

This is why animal rights groups protest the rodeo. Oh they may protest the general mistreatment of the animals, and the risk of injury to which the animals are routinely and senselessly subjected, but that strap around the reproductive organs cinches it.

Sharing our neighborhoods with nature is a sub-urban myth

Urban myths are stories too amazing to be disbelieved. Here’s a sub-urban myth which we want so much to believe. The myth of sharing our neighborhoods with their original animal inhabitants.

If one of nature’s varmints is disturbing your domestic bliss, you can choose to remove him. Most of us like to think there is a human to do this. You can catch racoons in a live trap, same with skunk, or any other indigenous critter which you have deemed a pest, but you cannot release them into the wild. Using a live trap just takes the killing out of your hands. The animals will be euthanised. That’s the harsh reality.

If you rent the trap yourself, or borrow one from a neighbor, trap the little feller yourself and drive him twenty miles afield, you may be breaking the law. In fact, unless you are releasing him into another suburban neighborhood, you are breaking the law. There’s a very good reason for this. Wild animals who’ve comingled their food and feces with domestic animals are likely carriers of domestic deseases. To release them into the wild would mean contaminating the wild populations.

About the only honorable course of action we might consider could be to accept that we cohabit with our fellow critters and let them be.

Michael Crichton World Outlaw

The kingdom of non-aligned animals should move to extradite Michael Crichton for his piece o’ crap novel which denied global warming. Not because he denied anything, nor fabricated a parallel non-ailing planet, but because his work was propaganda made to incite support for the fuel and chemical barrons who have still plenty of poison to sow. Crichton was lauded as having been a gifted scientist before he became a best-selling author. It suggested by the talking heads that Crichton was perhaps a more talented scholar than he was a novelist, to give his poohpooing of Global Warming more credibility. This statement addressed really the fact that his books are by no means literary. Crichton’s successful, he’s rich, but by no means brilliant. He takes home $60 million a year from publication and movie rights to his string of so popular novels. Apparently that’s not enough.

Bullshit artists

Penn, Teller, corporate AmericansOne of these likable dweebs may not be a complete asswipe.
 
But it isn’t Penn Asswipe Jillette.
 
I just caught an episode of BULLSHIT in which the dynamic duo was poking fun at the Endangered Species Act. The ESA is complete bullshit apparently because it doesn’t protect animals which may or may not be endangered, rather it protects land to which property rights advocates may feel they are entitled.

The Laurel to this Hardy is silent throughout, so it’s hard to accuse little Teller of the damnable untruths spewed by his well fed partner. This was an unforgivable attack on nature at risk. This was crapola from guys who have shown themselves on other subjects to know better.

Am I being too Politically Correct? Let me show you how PC works. Nothing’s inviolate, fine, but suffer the consequences for making light of defenseless animals in dire need. Nothing you can ever do will redeem you for minimizing the problems of your fellow beings who cannot speak for themselves.

You concluded your segment with Jerry Springer-like soft advice about animals facing extinction: “yes worry about them, but don’t pass laws, that doesn’t help anything.” Really you corporate prigs? You small minded, otherwise hip-sounding, gutless asswipe agents of corporate culture. Nothing you ever have to say will redeem the swill you have pitched here.

“Ninety nine percent of all creatures who’ve ever lived on earth are now extinct.” Really? Isn’t that kinda like saying one hundred percent of everyone who lived before us has died? Not a figure that tells us anything. How about saying, in the span of several billion years for which Earth has been in existance, twenty five percent of all extinctions ever have occured in just the last one hundred years? That might be more helpful, if hopefully also alarming. Yuk yuk.

And then to suggest at the very end of the show, not just that man might someday endanger himself and disappear, but that he might be replaced -ha ha- by one of the species currently endangered, is the height of cynicism. You goddamn twit. You know better, that’s what makes your message damnable. You call Paul Watson an asshole for ramming (illegal) fishing vessels, you accuse the Endangered Species Act proponents of using tear-jerk emotional manipulation, and yet the only example you give of the downside of the ESA is a crippled girl who has to shower outside at her friend’s house because she cannot build on the lot of land she has purchased because it is protected sanctuary for a protected bird.

You couldn’t have been more repulsive if this EPA segment had been satire. Instead you were part of the well-funded corporate lobby against nearly the only tool the environmental movement has ever had. And you portray California Representative Richard Pombo, the congressman with the worst environmental record ever, not to mention being an Abramoff and DeLay crooney, as some kind of folk hero.

It is true that the EPA is less about the species and more about land use control. Of course it is. The real story is why environmentalists cannot fight the corporate rapists on their own terms and have to couch their efforts in the language of saving the species.

By the way, is the Endangered Species Act by some coincidence facing an attack in congress right now? Yes.

Mad Cow is here

Ground cow disease
A third U.S. cow has now been found to have Mad Cow Disease. The refrain remains the same. Have no fear, no part of this infected cow ever found its way into the food supply.
 
Great. But where did that cow come from? Specifically, where did that cow get its BSE? Does it grow on trees? Does it generate itself spontaneously?

No, it is hereditary. Or it is aquired through the ingestion of infected animal parts. In this case they are saying that the animal was old enough to have been fed infected animals before such rendered parts were banned. Maybe. First of all that is to admit that the feeding of rendered mammals to other herbivors was risky behavior, something they have resisted admitting, and second, there’s nothing to say that this third cow got BSE previous to the feed restriction.

What we do know is that the American system of testing only a sampling of livestock is still woefully inadequate compared to everywhere else in the world. When some American ranchers offered to do a more stringent testing themselves in order for their beef to qualify for the japanese market, the U.S. government forbid the ranchers to do it.

It’s as if FDA officials are very nervous that wider tests will find that Mad Cow Desease is prevalent in this country.

In Britain and in Europe, every single cow is tested for BSE. In the U.S. we test less than 1%. In fact, the FDA recently increased the scope of its tests twentyfold, still under 1% of all cattle slaughtered, and as a result discovered BSE in this third cow. Now they want to scale the tests back again because, well, better to let them explain it. Makes sense right? The FDA is not nervous for the American people obviously, they’re nervous for the meat industry.

Meanwhile, let’s find out what those FDA officials are feeding their children.

King’s missing dong, episode 1

Time Magazine characterizes King Kong’s enthousiasmOkay, I admit that’s my own headline. There was indeed no trace of a King dong, but neither was there lust, nor anything more than a communication barrier overcome by physical clowning. A young white lass with Vaudeville chops was able to cajole the mighty Kong where scores of unfortunate black maidens had failed.
 
But really the special effects in the latest King Kong were amazing.

With special effects the filmmakers were able to create a giant gorilla who went ape at the sound of tom-toms summoning him to dine on a mouse-sized snack.

Special effects recreated superstitious black peoples who subsisted on the craggy coast of Skull Island, separating themselves from the island’s vegetation to live behind great fortifications and beneath countless pointy sticks on which were impaled human sacrificees.

Special effects produced dinosaurs also very keen to fight over what would be a tiny human morsel, willing to discard bigger kill for the smaller bird in the bush, even gnash away at a rocky surface trying to snatch said bony morsel.

To another extreme, special effects created bats which prey on animals larger than insects, and they stalk their target, hanging upside down each time a bit closer.

Convenient for the slow shutter rate of film projectors, these bats fly with the awkwardness of pterodactyls, the beating of their wings visible to human eyes. Lucky for our heroes who escape by holding on to the wing of a bat, while he flies with the other. A feat clearly accomplished only through special effects.

Special effects depict a world plainly ignorant of what some know as the food chain. The filmmakers can adhere to the laws of gravity, sort of, and whichever laws of physics can be illustrated, but they can’t grasp the food chain or that animals kill to eat, they do not maraud mercilessly.

By depicting nature as malevolent, we are expressing the highest disrespect for what really have become our wards. Like depicting Jesus with a machine gun for example. It might be funny, but it would be pretty undeserved.

But there’s more. Special effects produced stampedes both human and Jurassic, from which few casualties are seen. Men are able to keep pace beneath Brontosaurus legs to make the Spaniards who run with the bulls every year in Pamplona look like wusses.

And in the end you have Kong flinging blond lasses left and right, you have an entire opera house audience stampede to the exits with nary a body left behind.

In fact, given Peter Jackson’s fondness for gross-out scenes like the close-up of the carnivorous worm devouring a man head first, it seems strange that they cranked back the special effects for Kong’s final splat unto street level from the Empire State building. Kong’s body at rest on the street is shown not one bit like a sack empty of its potatoes, the usual sudden end to a 100 story fall.

David Letterman fans might have hoped to see Kong burst like a watermelon fallen from a great height, but special effects intervened.

And so the special effects try to approximate mechanical consequences, but ignore the organic, what used to be the common knowledge of life.

While this might suit the lower educated of today’s movie audience, Peter Jackson certainly does not limit himself to that denominator. In an early scene he risks boring that crowd with three interminable inside jokes: the actress they had wanted to cast for this adventure, “Fay,” was already doing an “RKO” picture for that damned “Cooper.” Rocky Horror Picture Show fans would get those references, but so what? Why not throw some bones to zoology majors and enlighten everyone.

The special effects in King Kong trade not merely in the currency of the implausible or improbable or impossible, they perpetuate the currency of ignorance with which people do great evil to nature and the environment and other cultures, particularly indigenous ones.

This film plays with lots of movie land conventions, but to an audience that is less privy to the inside references and more prone to base human reactions to the demonized stereotypes.