If the first casualty of war is the truth, the second casualty is verse.
From the doves
I have to hand the award for “Funniest comment on the Beastie Boys’ new single I’ve heard” to Joe Macare and his blog, The New Hip Hop, Political Correctness Trend:
Peace is good and war is BAD / I got a trust fund from my DAD!
Everybody’s favourite wealthy white Manhattanite rappers, the Beastie Boys, have written an anti-war anthem.
“Now don’t get us wrong ’cause we love America
But that’s no reason to get hysterica”
Now, granted, I haven’t had the chance to actually hear the song ‘In A World Gone Mad’ yet, but the lyrics are bad. Very bad. If I’m 100% honest, there is no difference in *quality* between this swill and Poets For The War – obviously, I agree with the sentiment of the Beasties’ effort and not the latter, but they are essentially two sides of the same deeply embarrassing coin.
Go check out the rest of the entry — Macare doesn’t have perma-links on his site, so just visit it and look for the entry for Thursday, March 13th.
From the hawks
I saw the link in Joe Macare’s blog entry to Poets for the War and decided to pay that site a visit. It’s a treasure-trove of bum-clenchingly bad poesy. Here are the final two lines from James Starling’s (I nominate him for Soldier of Fortune magazine’s future poet laureate) study in contrasts, The Two War Protestors. Here, he borrows the “Bet you didn’t expect this!” trick from Edward Arlington Robinson’s Richard Cory:
That night, Abdul did return to his neighborhood
In a black trashbag, with his severed head in a hood.
Rhyming neighbourhood with hood is, in my opinion, the ballsiest move since Canadian rock band Trooper’s Boys in the Bright White Sports Car:
Here they are
The boys in the bright white sports car
Waving their arms in the air
Who do they think they are?
And where did they get that car?
Rhyming car with car?! Pure. Lyrical. Genius.