Originally published in San Diego CityBeat circa November, 2002

Have you noticed how awful every song written about September 11 is? For two straight evenings, I traversed a maze of web rings like Songs of Memory and Heal the Pain We Bear - consisting of dozens and dozens of 9/11 songs by obscure, mediocre artists.

For two nights,  I listened to their laments about our national tragedy. Oh Christ, how I twisted in my headphones; each website, each song – just another jagged stone in an avalanche of suck.

9/11 tribute songs have four basic lyrical themes:
1) Songs about Putting a Boot in Someone’s Ass: A good example is Toby Keith’s oafish, “The Angry American”:

This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage
And you’ll be sorry that you messed with the US of A
Because we’ll put a boot in your ass it’s the American way.

(I guess Toby doesn’t realize that, so far, the only asses that have any boots in them are innocent people that we killed  while trying to find the right asses in which to put our boots. Those asses remain at large and boot free).

2) Patriot Songs, Flag-Waving Songs, etc: Like, “Stand Up for the USA,” by Fani Mancini. Or how about this kettle of vomit by Matty Oz:

We’re Americans
We’re known for pulling through
We’re Americans
We bleed red white and blue.

(What is this notion you always hear that Americans have some sort of special ability to survive or “pull through.” Is the survival instinct solely an American trait? Wouldn’t the citizens of any nation rebuild after a fall? Christ, even ants regroup after you destroy their nest).

3) Song’s That Mention Jesus, God, or the Devil: Suffice to say, that religion quite regularly rears its ghastly head from the slag-vat of obscure, mediocre 9/11 songs. I especially enjoyed the tunes about all those faces and images of Satan that supposedly materialized inside the billowing black clouds of the twin towers:

The faces in the smoke
could be warning everyone
The Devil might be saying
‘It’s not long until I come.

(Last week, I was gazing at the passing clouds and saw an ominous outline of a duck. Uh-oh. Could it mean. . . Yes, yes, the ducks are coming, oh God help us, the ducks are coming!)

4) Songs That Mention Saving the Children: There are plenty of obscure, mediocre songwriters with their “Save the children,” songs. But the most famous is Charlie Daniels’, “Last Fallen Hero”:

We will make whatever sacrifice
Pay whatever price
So the children of tomorrow
can be free.”

(But of course, it’s only the children of tomorrow whom we hope will be free. Certainly not the adults. And not the children of today either because in the future they’re going to be adults and who gives a fuck about adults?)

Anyway, after surfing all those web rings, I realized that I’m the only obscure, mediocre songwriter left who hasn’t written a 9/11 song. So I bucked up and wrote a musical response to September 11. I called it, “When the Towers Fell Like Great Falling Cement and Metal Things.”

And I was so pleased with the song, that I called my pal David Allen Coe and told him that I had written the perfect 9/11 song. But David Allen Coe said that it was not the perfect 9/11 song, “Because it didn’t say nothing about America, or Jesus, or the children, or kicking ass, or ducks.

So I wrote another 9/11 song. It’s a fight song in the key of D. It’s called, “Jesus Will Help Us Kick Your Ass for the Children”:

Jesus will help us kick your ass for the children
And we’ll raise our banners high

What about the children, the children, the children?

God will help us fuck you up
And we’ll sing, “America – land of the free,”

And crack bricks over anyone’s head
Who dare not sing as loud and proud as me.

What about the children, the children, the children?

Jesus will help us kick your ass
And the children will all be fine
And grow up to kick your children’s asses
Again and again till the end of time.

Chorus
Oh Christ help me, the ducks are coming!
Quack quack – they’re coming indeed.
The ducks, the ducks, the ducks are coming!
Quack-quack, quack-quack. Quaaaack-quacccccck.

(Repeat/fade – with sirens and screams in background)

EJD
10/16/02

This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 1:04 am and is filed under (religion), The Best of Sordid Tales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.