"Of Songs and Diatribe"

 

“Of Songs and Diatribe”

By Jim Culp

December 11, 2022

 

Way back in 1981, I wrote a song that would sit in a box for many years. Years later, I read all my song lyrics that night, and decided to put four of them on an album. As luck would have it, I worked at a company called ACS, and many times that work took me to Tacoma, Washington. Amid that large stretch of cities lied the massive bases of Fort Lewis (Army) and Fort McChord (Air Force). I worked exclusively with Range Control on Fort Lewis building their MOUT* sites. My team and I installed seven of these sites, and then were tasked much later on to repaint many of them.

During this time, I met a great guy named Mike Morrison. Mike was a hard worker, and a killer guitar player. So, I asked him to play guitar on my coming CD. The record had four songs but let me focus on one of them for the purposes of this article. The first song on the CD was called “the Devil’s Blues…” which I had written in 1981 with my trust Harmony guitar that I had received for Christmas the past year. “The Devil’s Blues” was a parody about people blaming their problems and life’s negative occurrences on an imaginary figure. This figure (or entity if you like) was “the Devil,” or “Satan,” the father of lies and deceit. This character was in many religions (most notably in Christianity and Islam) but in some other also.

Anyway, the album was painstakingly recorded and produced, and place on three music outlets: You Tube, iTunes, and word of mouth. I gave it as a gift to a large number of people and sent a copy to everyone in my immediate family; but that’s another subject you can read about in my autobiography, due to publish in summer of 2023.

Time went by, and this record had been on those two channels for eleven years. Great…right?

I get a notice from YouTube last night, and it said they were removing it from that channel, because “it might imply violence.”

Holy Shit on a Ritz cracker. I am now complete… because I’ll heard it all now.

(* MOUT means “Military Operations in Urban Terrain)

 

-JimC

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