On A Saturday?!

So who’s responsible for waking up Billie Joe Armstrong tomorrow?  

Somebody really should get on that.  I mean...I'm assuming that he's going to wake up on his own, but he did specifically ask.  

So, for those of you unawares, back in 2005, the punk rock band Green Day released a song called "Wake Me Up When September Ends."  Billie Joe Armstrong is the lead singer of the group and writer of the song.  

Now, I'm not entirely sure when exactly we're supposed to wake up Mr. Armstrong.  Technically, today is still September, but it is ending.  Tomorrow could either be the end of September or the beginning of October.  It's usually not polite to call people at midnight to wake them up, but in this case, maybe we were given specific instructions, so it's okay?  I'm not sure!  

I'm also not clear on whether or not I'm the one who's supposed to be waking him up.  If I were, it would have been helpful for Mr. Armstrong to include some sort of contact information in the song, rather than just leaving all of that to chance.  I don't think I know anybody who considers Mr. Armstrong as a personal friend, so I'm resorting to, at best, third party notification.  It's not an ideal solution to my problems here.  

All in all, there were some issues with Green Day's instructions about being woken up at the end of September.  I'd ask for clarity, but they're still sleeping.  I'll try again tomorrow.    

"Ticking Bomb" Is A Better Song Anyway

I keep waiting for Aloe Blacc to tell me that it’s my song  

Well, it's not your song.  It's his.  And Elton John's...but I have a feeling that may be your point.  

Exactly.   So, today's Sametime Status deals with Aloe Blacc's song, "The Man."  It's more or less an okay song.  The lyrics (which, I won't lie are a little disappointing from Aloe Blacc, whose music I tend to respect more than most R+B/Hip Hop artists) deal with the ubiquitous Hip Hop theme of being better than everybody else.  They include the following lines:  Yeah you can tell everybody; Go ahead and tell everybody; I'm the man, I'm the man, I'm the man; Yes I am, yes I am, yes I am; I'm the man, I'm the man, I'm the man.  Poetry, ladies and gentlemen.  Poetry.

Anyway, the important part to note here is that first line there "Yeah you can tell everybody."  Every aspect of that line is lifted directly from Elton John's song "Your Song."  So much so that Elton John is actually listed as a co-writer of "The Man."  I'm sure he's collecting money off of it, too.  

So, whether Aloe Blacc is paying homage to a better song, or if he somehow originally thought he could get away with a theft this blatant is irrelevant.  Here we have a reasonably talented musician riding the coattails of a better musician in order to sell records.  

Also, when I hear "The Man," everytime I hear that I can tell everybody, I'm expecting to hear that I can tell them it's my song.  Instead, I get to tell everybody that Aloe Blacc is the man.  It's nowhere near as great an honor.  Also, given that 83% of hip hop lyrics are about somebody being "The Man" or better than any other hip hop artist, it's a dubious claim at best.  Not to mention the fact that every time I inform people that Aloe Blacc is the man, they really don't care. 

Everybody Sing!

I have a hammer.  Is that whole hammering in the morning thing mandatory?  

I try to limit my hammering to mid afternoon, usually.  I don't keep it to a very set schedule.  It seems like the timing of hammering is really up to the person with the hammer.  

Today's Sametime Status, of course, is a reference to Pete Seeger's 1949 progressive protest song "The Hammer Song," more commonly known as "If I Had A Hammer."  For those who are unfamiliar, the first line of the song states that "If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning."  In a remarkable bit of trivia I learned about 3 minutes ago while researching when this song was written, I learned that it was originally released on the Record Label "Hootenanny Records."  

That's amazing!  

So anyway, not long ago, I had the occasion to use a hammer.  It's a relatively rare and special gift for me, since most of my hammering is done on computer keyboards.  But, I had to use a hammer, and it was slightly after noon at the time.  This made me sad because I've been told through song that hammering should be done in the mornings.  I had missed my opportunity.  

So that led me to think about just how strictly this "hammer in the morning" rule must be adhered to.  Maybe it's more of a guideline than a rule?  It would still be morning in the central time zone, so maybe my only issue was being off by a few hundred miles in my hammering.  That may or may not make it better, since it would solve my timing conundrum, but the location of the nails that needed hammering was pretty fixed, and missing that location by hundreds of miles would be pretty egregiously bad, even for a remarkably amateur carpenter such as myself.  Hitting the board next to the nail is about as bad as I get, and even then, I like to think my on-target hitting percentage is somewhere north of 50%.  I didn't keep stats.  

So, I was left with my hammer and nails, needing to complete the hammering process regardless of the timing.  I just hope nobody noticed that I was hammering at the wrong time and though, "wow...that Jeremy jerk has got it all wrong." 

That would be bad.