Oh Toby Keith, keep on rocking
I know the introduction of this post has but a tenuous connection to our class work but i felt it was interesting, so what the hell.
As someone relatively new to the culture of a place like Southern Ohio, let me just say that a 4 hour drive south to the 'boonies' was most illuminating.
What was most illuminating was my personal discovery that I don't like listening to the same song(/shit?) over and over again. While the simple, earthy denizens of the area may know something about achieving nirvana that I don't, the fact that the repetitive song had to be Toby Keith's Courtesy of the Red White and Blue made me almost want to gouge out my eyeballs.
After about the 100th playing, I had internalized his lyrics sufficiently to be disturbed by a fascist aesthetic that seemed to permeate the song. Starting with a description of a certain attack on America as a 'sucker punch' (which is something, being from manhattan, i wouldn't exactly characterize as) , Toby moves onto a gleeful metaphor of the U.S. retaliation as seeing through a black eye in order to 'light up their world like the Fourth of July."
It seems as if Mr. Keith has taken a page out straight out of the work of cultural theorists on how language obfuscates in order to compartmentalize something into easy categories. But I digress as this post is not (entirely) about why I think Mr. Keith is perhaps pandering to a disturbing ethic.
But enough of this hyperbole (or so you think).
After I returned, I wanted to post his deplorably moronic lyrics on this blog (and poke fun at them). However, I found out that such an act was an apparent infringement of copyright law and was something NMPA president David Israelite calls an "unauthorized use of lyrics and tablature deprives the songwriter of the ability to make a living, and is no different than stealing."
However, such an act is hard to define. What constitutes use of lyrics: the essence of the idea or using the words verbatim? For example, our good friend Toby uses the line "we'll put a boot up your ass, its is the American way." One has to wonder if he has exclusive rights to such a phrase. If so, are we doomed to a banal life that has lost the public use of such a delicious witticism?
I'm not so sure. But there's one thing I am certain of, for this city-boy, there's going to be no more trips down to southern Ohio unless I have a car that has more than just an AM/FM radio.
Oh and if some copyright mole is reading this, I made slight alterations to Toby's lyrics so they aren't repeated verbatim. So rest easy G-men and please don't 'light up my world'.
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