Good morning, peasants!

So I kinda skipped out on my usual Sunday morning blog routines, which includes making sure a fresh earworm is ready to greet you at sunrise on Monday.  Good thing it’s always Monday somewhere, so The Nest can once again dig deep for another great lost song out of that giant bag of lame excuses we like to call the Dusty Vinyl Archive!  The dog didn’t eat DJ Scratchy’s homework, because you can’t chew on vinyl (well, you can, but it tastes icky), while the Sponkies are happy they got to sleep in today.  If you’re still not fully awake this early in the day, you will be after listening to this…

What the Beastie Boys were to hip hop, a band by the name of Living Colour was to hard rock.  The quartet first appeared on our radios in the late 80’s laying down such awesome power chords and heavy drums, that you’d have probably just assumed they were another bunch of long haired white guys trying to steal some fame from Whitesnake and Motley Crue…

Ehhhhhhh, not quite.

While it’s a running joke that white guys can’t rap, it’s less politically correct to say that black dudes can’t rock.  Fortunately for us, Living Colour proves that’s an utter load of BS with their hard edged sound that’s straight outta New York City.  Their best known song, and one that fell into the same vacuum so much other great late 80’s music did, is their 1988 #13 hit “Cult of Personality”…

They sound better than Guns N Roses and wear less makeup than Posion…. what’s not to love?

Cult of personality is a term that loosely describes how a leader, through many means of manipulation, gets the people underneath them to strongly follow and even idolize them, even against the followers’ best judgment.  It was first popularly used my Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev 65 years ago to criticize his predecessor Joseph Stalin and the totalitarian hold he had over the Russian people… and when we think of “cults of personality,” we tend to think of evil dictatorial leaders like Hitler and Mussolini and Castro, who terrorize and brainwash an entire nation into supporting their status as supreme ruler.

You will laugh at our slapstick routines, or face execution by pie in the face at sunrise!

But Living Colour reminds us that the cult of personality is not exclusive to those leaders that history views as the scum of the earth… which is why John F. Kennedy and even Ghandi get mentioned in this song.  All it takes is a heap of charisma and a propaganda machine that can get you a ton of loyal followers to join this cult.  And it’s a phenomenon we in America have got to witness twice in the last decade and a half…

Every great cult leader needs a fake smile.

I shall return next Monday, hopefully on time, with another lost song that got banished to Siberia…