Ralph Buckley: Home
Welcome to "2012 Consciousness Awakening"
Ralph Buckley on 'itunes'_______________________________
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Shine on forever/mp3 download/$0.99
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Bluesbunny review "9/11 Conspiracy Blues"(direct link)
Ralph Buckley
The 911 Conspiracy Blues
It's a funny thing - freedom of speech. Speak (or sing) your mind and these days you are likely to be detained under anti terrorist legislation. It is therefore gratifying to see that the protest singer still survives even in the tortured form of Ralph Buckley. His whole world is a whirlwind of conspiracy, oppression and paranoia in the land of the free.
"The Man be Watchin' U" expresses his disgust at the erosion of personal freedom and makes the very valid point that anti terrorism legislation ends up controlling the individual and not the intended terrorist forces. "Morphine" seems altogether more personal and comes across like a dark, twisted nightmare. There is no love like the love a man has for his drugs apparently. Every album needs a love song and he delivers a good one even if it is about an unsavoury subject. The war in the Middle East gets the treatment in "Fuck the War" as he exposes the hypocrisy of it all with sound bites from a certain American president. We have noted that wars tend to be started by old men and in these days of Viagra, Bluesbunny wonders if the little blue pill would not be a better way for these aged gentlemen to "get it on" than sending soldiers to their death. Maybe it is like Ralph says in the title track to this album in that it is actually all about the money. "God's Tears are Everywhere" is a more conventional sixties style protest song seasoned with a Lennonesque flavour that just washes over you. You have probably guessed that our Ralph has little time for a certain Mr Bush but he has taken the time to write a delightful ditty dedicated to him ("Dear Mr Bush") that suggests that dear old Mr Bush has entirely corrupt values. The thing that impressed the Bluesbunny about Ralph Buckley is that he does not pull his punches especially on our pick of the album "The Politics of War and Murder". He makes little effort to sugar coat things making this album an uncomfortable listen at times but the truth is the truth and these days it takes a strong man to speak it.
What's next in the good old US of A? Using the fear of terrorism as a lever, will the constitution of that great country be replaced with prescriptive guidance? Freedom of speech will get sidelined in the name of national security and the day might come when not liking Pepsi will get you locked up as a subversive. Ralph Buckley seems to think so and, unfortunately, he might well be right. You can buy the album at CD Baby.
Bluesbunny Independent Music Review
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Vultures on a Carousel:
Mike
http://www.vulturesonacarousel.com/
To Hell with election coverage, at least for now; the whole process is caught in this boring in-between stage in which the candidates are more or less confirmed, but there are still more primaries to go before the terror and fury of the General Election can begin. In the meantime, I’d like to share some politically flavored side notes that I’ve been taking over the last couple of weeks.
The first of these miscellaneous musings is a YouTube channel that was introduced to me by a kindred spirit here at PJC, Sandi Droubay, professor of Anthropology. Sandi amazed me by knowing more about YouTube and social networking than me or most people my age that I know. Her channel, while not hosting any personal media, is an entire social network unto itself, a place for artists, poets, musicians, and political types to meet and swap content. You may not know it, but YouTube is more than just a poor man’s TiVo; it has immense potential as a forum for public and artistic exchange. It was here that she introduced me to the channel called “Conkling,” a channel that belongs to a Seattle musician named Ralph Buckley.
Buckley, while writing, producing, and recording all of his own music, has created nearly a hundred DIY music videos for the channel. The music he makes is beautiful and bluesy, the lyrics being both politically and spiritually inspired. His songs are as uplifting as classic Marc Bolan, as passionate as John Coltrane, and at times, as jaded as the most nihilistic punk rock. Buckley’s latest DIY album, “9/11 Conspiracy Blues,” embodies all of the confusion, frustration, and optimistic prayer that comes from living in today’s America. Even while voicing his fears of growing war and government corruption, he never loses sight of the beauty of being alive.
Thanks to networks like YouTube and people like Professor Droubay, artists like Buckley who, while being an incredibly talented musician and songwriter, could never hope to be mainstream finally have a means of reaching the world without selling out to the bloated and soulless music industry. In fact, if more artists take Buckley’s approach and create and distribute music while sidestepping the corporate middlemen that are really no longer necessary, we may see a new industry rise up and topple the current one. An industry that is centered around the idea that the artist is free to be an artist without being constrained by what non-artists want them to make. Who knows?
While we’re on the topic of underground media becoming the new mainstream, I just read a groundbreaking new graphic novel about citizen journalism called Shooting War. The novel started as a serialized web comic written by journalist Anthony Lappe and illustrated by Dan Goldman before making the jump to hardcover graphic novel and has now been optioned as a TV series. It takes place in a world a few years ahead of ours, and tells the story of a young up-and-coming blogosphere personality, political vlogger Jimmy Burns, who through sheer luck (good or bad is hard to say) goes on to expose the awful reality of the war in Iraq. While recording a live video feed on the street below his apartment in New York, a terrorist bomb explodes in the coffee shop behind him. News services around the world patch into Jimmy’s feed as he is first on the scene to report on the mayhem. Jimmy becomes an overnight household name and goes to work as the embedded reporter for the same corporate news entity that he once despised.
Lappe, who produced the Amnesty International Award-winning Iraq documentary “Battleground: 21 Days on the Empire’s Edge,” puts us at an incredible vantage point in Iraq a few years from now. As the American military, under the leadership of President McCain, continues to fight the war on fronts around the world, the situation in the Middle East escalates with the jihadist movement fracturing under idealistic rivalry. A more modern, media-minded terrorist faction is starting to emerge as the figurehead for the new Islamic extremist. This is an Iraq where McDonald’s and Starbucks signs saturate the capital city; a war in which US soldiers wear visors that show them their surroundings as a HALO style first-person shooter, and the Pentagon gets busted for hiring Pixar to produce fake al Qaeda tapes.
It’s heavily satirical but at its heart this is a story about the growing power of citizen journalism, which in my opinion is one of the most amazing things about growing up in the 21st century. For the first time ever people have the ability to not only capture images and write stories wherever they go using common mobile devices, but to instantly submit them to the entire world using YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc. The founding fathers called the media the Fourth Estate, a watchdog branch of the Government to protect the rights of the people and keep the other three branches in check. Now the people are the watchdog.
This would be a good place to segue into my final story of the day, that of Wikileaks. Everyone knows about Wikipedia, the open source online encyclopedia that the public can log in to and edit as they see fit. Actually, this is only one application of the online Wiki technology; there are many more sites that use this kind of interface for a variety of different purposes. One of these is Wikileaks, a site that uses the Wiki technology to create an untraceable database of leaked classified documents. Wikileaks claims that it’s goal is for maximum political impact in countries all around the world, and especially targets parts of Asia, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet bloc.
The site provides an easy interface for spreading classified documents, simply log in to a secured server and upload the files. In 2007 Wikileaks made a name for itself among internet whistleblowers by publishing a military document called “Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta,” a handbook for the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Currently the website has generated some buzz over a lawsuit with a Swiss Bank for publishing confidential documents that allegedly show money laundering and tax evasion. Because of the lawsuit the website was forced to shut down it’s wikileaks.org domain, but can still be accessed using an FTP address.
As much as it would be a shame to lose the site and all of the classified files that are now publicly available, if the site were to shut down it wouldn’t be the end of this kind of internet muckraking. In fact, if this Wikileaks is ordered to shut down, a new one would be so easy to create that a whole slew of Wikileaks could be up by the next day. The only thing stopping a movement like this would be a full-fledged neutering of the internet, which won’t happen for another decade at least.
In the meantime you can still come by my blog at Vultures on a Carousel.com and check out all the fun things happening there. It’s one part mobile journalism, one part citizen journalism. I’m trying to cultivate my skills as a media mad scientist while encouraging the same interests in others. Sandi Droubay has also encouraged me to begin using my YouTube channel (Araqnidm) for regular video posts in which I dictate my latest column on camera, so that will be fun. If that’s not interesting to you, at least don’t forget to check out Ralph Buckley’s YouTube channel, Conkling, as well as ShootingWar.com where you can read the free web comic and articles regarding the graphic novel. If none of this interests you, why the hell did you read this behemoth of a column?
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Melchiades
Here the good rock'n'roll blues of Seattle. The voice is sensitive, tortured and generous. The texts are descriptive of a section of American life.
Mr Buckley offers to us good titles on pearls.
Much melancholy invades us then progressivment.
An album not to be missed.
Thank you a lot!
Melki_________
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vampinabox
Artist
2007-07-24
The cruel poetry of addictions and obsessions
After his rather self-explanatory album "Fuck the War" (which included a little jewel entitled "Butterflies"), Ralph Buckley makes a spectacular comeback with an album that bears a deceptively colourful cartoon figure on the cover, and the equally deceptive title "cocoa krispies & lucky charms".
What awaits the listener is a journey into the desperate world of addictions and obsessions, accompanied by sometimes almost joyful melodies, whose discrepancy with the themes of the songs made me think of Paul Roland. Morphine, alcohol, love gone bad, utopian dreaming and for dessert, some kind of ironic existential dilemma: which weighs more - the death of a bee or of God himself?
The tragic aspect of our existence, the absurdity and inhuman materialism of the world we live in are illustrated in this half-hour album with poignant tenderness and sincerity. The sweetness of the melodies makes this poignancy even more painful; but this is why art is here - to denounce and exorcise ugliness by speaking of it through beauty.
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windzug
Artist
2007-07-23
1 A
Der Albumtitel und das Cover in Verbindung mit den Songtiteln ist Sarkasmus,
wie ich ihn liebe ;-)
Cocoa krispies & lucky charms heißt dieses Album
und der erste Titel lechzt sofort nach Morphium,
während der letzte Track Gottes Tod verkündet
...so abgründig..so gut!
punkig-pockig-glamour(ig)-70ths
geile dreckige Stimme - kraftvoll - sehnend/hechelnd
klasse Akustikmucke mit sehr geringem E-Anteil
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