The Pleasant Dilemma of the Post-Obama Protest Singer

Summary

---

Here's a guy for whom righteous indignation and fantastically ribald profanity are weapons as vital and irreplaceable as his blunt, nasal voice and beat-to-shit acoustic guitar, which he strums so violently that he's worn giant holes in the wood, a sort of sonic erosion-the guitar's the mountain; he's the lava. (Hamell, born in Syracuse and now shacked up in Westchester, has a twentysomething wife, a young son named Detroit, and a song about the day when a teenaged Detroit will inquire as to whether his dad messed with drugs, premarital sex, and other seedy improprieties in his own youth, and what Hamell will do when that day comes: lie.) And though he begins tonight with a spoken-word diatribe about the anesthetizing, demoralizing, stupefying inanity of modern television, slinging quite a few vituperative arrows at Fox News in particular, soon he is on to less political topics, namely the various drug-related misadventures cataloged during the manic oompah strut of "When You Are Young": smoking kitty litter, snorting interred ashes, etc.

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

The Pleasant Dilemma of the Post-Obama Protest Singer

For the seething, cynical, sarcastic, permanently embittered, militantly radicalized leftist folk singers, comedians, and folksinger/comedians out there, these are jubilant but deeply confusing times, the exhilaration of We Did It now undercut by the bewilderment of What Do We Do Now? For starters, with even the New York Pos...

See the full content of this document

---