What are they hiding?
May. 10th, 2004 06:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gordonzolaOk, Sir Ivan has me baffled.
I went to my parents for Mother’s Day and found a four-remix CD of his techno-reprise of "San Francisco", the old Scott Mackenzie song. You know, the one that goes, "If you are going to San Fran-cisco / Be sure and wear some flowers in your hair." Ok, I realize that most of you probably know neither song. Bear with me.
Back before our candy raver radio station (The Party) turned into a 24-7 Tupac station, which then turned to second-run pop hip hop station, The Party played the techno version of "San Francisco almost every day. I always had a mocking dislike for the original even though, and I swear I’m not lying this time, it was playing on the radio as I got in the car to leave upstate NY for good and move back home in 1989. That’s the kind of thing that’s supposed to give you a soft spot for a pop song. It didn’t.
I think it’s the "You’ll be sure and meet / some gentle people there" line. A crucial formative experience for me were the 1984 Democratic Convention protests that were dubbed "The Summer of Hate". The Afflicted, a local punk band, even wrote a song about it. Kinda. It ended with the lyrics, "Summer of Hate / Ain’t it great? / Rock in the new fascist state!" Anyways, the original line was always too embarrassingly sappy for me not to cringe when I hear it.
The real question however, is what the hell was it doing at my parent’s house? My parents were not hippies and they certainly don’t listen to techno. I’m the only candy raver in the family. The CD was unopened. I unwrapped it and put it on. My Mom’s going a little deaf so just smiled and pretended to be mildly disapproving. My dad said, "What the hell is that noise?" It was like I was in high school again.
Neither of them would admit knowing anything about it at first but my mom finally said she thought it came in the mail one day. I was trying to figure out what they were hiding. Had they made a major lifestyle change? Where they doing x on the weekends and making younger "friends"? I found it hard to believe that some record label was mass mailing techno CDs at random to the suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Hmmmm. It was a cut out though. And the more I looked at the sleeve the weirder it was. I didn’t realize Sir Ivan was so old. He looks like he could have been on the younger side of the original hippies way back when. Maybe he was just trying to find his demographic.
Then I read the liner notes and found that his version is "dedicated to the memory of the 1.5 million Jewish children under the age of 12 that were murdered by the Nazis and all victims of hate crimes – with the hope that there will one day be peace in the Middle East and everywhere else in the world". Well, that seems rather random for a song about wearing flowers in one’s hair at Golden Gate park.
So I found his website and some promo materials . It turns out that Sir Ivan is the son of a Auschwitz survivor and lost "59 relatives" to the Holocaust. He also performs under the superhero alias "Peaceman" and considers himself a philanthropist. So maybe he really was just sending his message out with a request for donations. It would be like my mom to recycle the cover letter but be unable to throw out the CD which would sit, never touched again, until one of her sons found it and began mocking her.
I can’t believe I pretty much accused her of lying on Mother’s Day. I’m a bad son.
Oh, btw you can get your free copy from the first website linked above. The song still sucks though.
I went to my parents for Mother’s Day and found a four-remix CD of his techno-reprise of "San Francisco", the old Scott Mackenzie song. You know, the one that goes, "If you are going to San Fran-cisco / Be sure and wear some flowers in your hair." Ok, I realize that most of you probably know neither song. Bear with me.
Back before our candy raver radio station (The Party) turned into a 24-7 Tupac station, which then turned to second-run pop hip hop station, The Party played the techno version of "San Francisco almost every day. I always had a mocking dislike for the original even though, and I swear I’m not lying this time, it was playing on the radio as I got in the car to leave upstate NY for good and move back home in 1989. That’s the kind of thing that’s supposed to give you a soft spot for a pop song. It didn’t.
I think it’s the "You’ll be sure and meet / some gentle people there" line. A crucial formative experience for me were the 1984 Democratic Convention protests that were dubbed "The Summer of Hate". The Afflicted, a local punk band, even wrote a song about it. Kinda. It ended with the lyrics, "Summer of Hate / Ain’t it great? / Rock in the new fascist state!" Anyways, the original line was always too embarrassingly sappy for me not to cringe when I hear it.
The real question however, is what the hell was it doing at my parent’s house? My parents were not hippies and they certainly don’t listen to techno. I’m the only candy raver in the family. The CD was unopened. I unwrapped it and put it on. My Mom’s going a little deaf so just smiled and pretended to be mildly disapproving. My dad said, "What the hell is that noise?" It was like I was in high school again.
Neither of them would admit knowing anything about it at first but my mom finally said she thought it came in the mail one day. I was trying to figure out what they were hiding. Had they made a major lifestyle change? Where they doing x on the weekends and making younger "friends"? I found it hard to believe that some record label was mass mailing techno CDs at random to the suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Hmmmm. It was a cut out though. And the more I looked at the sleeve the weirder it was. I didn’t realize Sir Ivan was so old. He looks like he could have been on the younger side of the original hippies way back when. Maybe he was just trying to find his demographic.
Then I read the liner notes and found that his version is "dedicated to the memory of the 1.5 million Jewish children under the age of 12 that were murdered by the Nazis and all victims of hate crimes – with the hope that there will one day be peace in the Middle East and everywhere else in the world". Well, that seems rather random for a song about wearing flowers in one’s hair at Golden Gate park.
So I found his website and some promo materials . It turns out that Sir Ivan is the son of a Auschwitz survivor and lost "59 relatives" to the Holocaust. He also performs under the superhero alias "Peaceman" and considers himself a philanthropist. So maybe he really was just sending his message out with a request for donations. It would be like my mom to recycle the cover letter but be unable to throw out the CD which would sit, never touched again, until one of her sons found it and began mocking her.
I can’t believe I pretty much accused her of lying on Mother’s Day. I’m a bad son.
Oh, btw you can get your free copy from the first website linked above. The song still sucks though.
