• Raphaël A. CosteauOP
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    1 month ago

    And I would call his interpretation of “Watching TV” over simplistic, it’s a song that has the fucking verses:

    Her grandpa fought old Chiang Kai-shek//

    That no-good low-down dirty rat

    Who used to order his troops

    To fire on the women and children

    Imagine that imagine that

    And in the spring of '48

    Mao Tse-tung got quite irate

    And he kicked that old dictator Chiang

    Out of the state of China

    Chiang Kai-shek came down in Formosa

    And they armed the island of Quemoy

    And the shells were flying across the China Sea

    And they turned Formosa into a shoe factory

    Called Taiwan


    Instead of being an empty critique of authoritarianism, I consider this song much more a sincere lament of the direction that China was taking in the years of Deng given past history. A criticism that can be disagreed but that has its background of truth.

    CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

    • Judge_Jury [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Oh wow, I didn’t know about that one. I knew that Waters had been very vocal about Israel and - wherever I’ve seen him anyway - has been much cooler than I’ve expected from a fairly old rock star. I didn’t know he was out there dropping direct historical narratives, though. I’ll have to listen closer next time I try one of his albums

      All I want from him politically is pretty much what he already does: being anti-imperialist in a way that refers to our global empire rather than like, “it was imperialistic of you to eat the last funyun without asking”