Over at The American Prospect, Charles Pierce does a hilarious riff on the "Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs" piece that I blogged a while back. A sample:
I liked it so much better when conservatives weren't trying to be cool. I liked their, stern, iron-jawed parental disapproval of everything that happened since Calvin Coolidge blew town. I liked it when they thought it was all devil music sent by Khrushchev to take advantage of a young populace already weakened by fluoride in the water and Elvis on the electric television set. Becoming a young conservative meant you made a conscious choice to be the least cool person in your immediate social circle. You made a principled, rational decision to be a humorless little prig, and you were proud of it. People knew where they stood then. Now, though, we have boomer conservatives playing with popular culture and hurting themselves. Trust us, when you refer to some of the songs on your list as "little-known gems," you're already pretty much blown what little cred you may accidentally have picked up on your shoe.
Check the whole thing out, it's a riot.
/HT to Katherine
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I have The Clash's "Rock The Casbah" (#20 on John J. Miller's list) on my iPod. According to Wikipedia, "The song was inspired by the banning of rock music in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini." Whether that bit of rock lore is true or not, take a look at these lyrics:
By order of the prophet
We ban that boogie sound
Degenerate the faithful
With that crazy Casbah sound
But the Bedouin they brought out the electric camel drum
The local guitar picker got his guitar picking thumb
As soon as the sharif had cleared the square
They began to wail
Sharif don't like it
Rockin' the Casbah
I can only surmise that Mr. Miller has quite a case of "selective hearing" and that, by extension, he would deem The Pretenders' tune "Middle of the Road" to be neither liberal nor conservative. :)