Powerful lyrics for difficult times

It's Friday, and that popular dude is welcome back as far as I'm concerned.  Now we just have to get through today's schedule and whatever isn't complete by this afternoon probably comes home to haunt the weekend.  Still.... it's Friday!  Yesterday brought beautiful spring-like blue skies and a top-down drive from work to a local restaurant where Melissa, mom, and I had bangers and mash and corned beef and cabbage in honor of St. Patrick's Day.  No green beer.  I have my boundaries and standards, thank you very much.

This morning's soundtrack was both compelling and relavent.  It started off with a track from the Russian movie Brat 2 (Brother 2), that's 2 as in sequel.  The group Смысловые галлюцинации (Smyslovye Gallyutsinatsii, which I believe means Semantic Hallucinations) doing the song Вечно молодой (Vechno molodoj, Forever Young). Then straight-ahead jazz with Fred Wesley, The Fray, and the very good (and local, as in Seattle) one-man-indie-band, Telekineses.

The drive finished up with two songs back to back that have a lot in common, ideologically.  Both are written and sung by Canadian poet-musicians, and both call out political conditions and hypocrisy.  Both were written several years ago, and both play just as relevantly today.  In Call it Democracy, Cockburn writes:

Padded with power here they come

International loan sharks backed by the guns

Of market hungry military profiteers

Whose word is a swamp and whose brow is smeared

With the blood of the poor

Who rob life of its quality

Who render rage a necessity

By turning countries into labour camps

Modern slavers in drag as champions of freedom

Sinister cynical instrument

Who makes the gun into a sacrament --

The only response to the deification

Of tyranny by so-called "developed" nations'

Idolatry of ideology

And....

See the loaded eyes of the children too

Trying to make the best of it the way kids do

One day you're going to rise from your habitual feast

To find yourself staring down the throat of the beast

They call the revolution

IMF dirty MF

Takes away everything it can get

Always making certain that there's one thing left

Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt 

Compare that with Cohen, writing in the song, The Future:

Give me back my broken night 

my mirrored room, my secret life 

it's lonely here, 

there's no one left to torture 

Give me absolute control 

over every living soul 

And lie beside me, baby, 

that's an order! 

Give me crack and anal sex 

Take the only tree that's left 

and stuff it up the hole 

in your culture 

Give me back the Berlin wall 

give me Stalin and St Paul 

I've seen the future, brother: 

it is murder. 

Tough lyrics for difficult times.  Both express the frustration of the disenfranchised and the sense of, "...staring down the throat of the beast they call a revolution."  There is certainly a bit of that in the air these days, and not just elsewhere in the world.

The full playlist:

 - Smyslovye Gallyutsinatsii: Vechno molodoj

 - Fred Wesley: Peace Power

 - The Fray: Over My Head (Cable Car)

 - Telekinesis:  Tokyo

 - Bruce Cockburn:  Call It Democracy

 - Leonard Cohen:  The Future (Live)