Okay, so, this is going to be a pretty short post, at least in comparison to my others. There's this poem that I want to put on here and I want you to guess what the title of it is and who wrote it. Don't cheat, don't look it up on the internet. Chances are, you've come across this poem before. Just read the words and absorb it. If you can't figure it out, or think you know but want to check, go ahead and look it up.
Born down in a dead man's town,
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground.
You end up like a dog that's been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up.
Got in a little hometown jam,
So they put a rifle in my hand,
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man
Come back home to the refinery,
Hiring man says "Son, if it was up to me..."
Went down to see my V.A. man,
He said, "Son, don't you understand"
I had a brother at Khe Sahn fighting off the Viet Cong.
They're still there, he's all gone.
He had a woman he loved in Saigon;
I got a picture of him in her arms now
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary,
Out by the gas fires of the refinery,
I'm ten years burning down the road,
Nowhere to run, ain't got nowhere to go
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2 comments:
honestly, all i can think of is springsteen, for some reason. and before you accuse me of googling it, it's my guess.
SWEET! i'm right!
Yeah. The point, though, is that the song is nothing like what people think. Taking out that chorus takes away the words that everybody knows and just looking at the plain verses is something that people need to do with this song. I mean, Reagan wanted to use it as his 1984 campaign song, not because he wanted to address issues brought up in the song, but because of the frickin' title. Years later, I hear that Springsteen did a more solemn version that didn't have the loud, poppy music behind it because people just weren't listening to the words of the song. I really need to look and find that version.
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