Okay, so I’ll get this blog rolling by admitting what a dork I am for tuning into Conan O’Brien’s Late Night Show ten minutes before the show even starts to catch NOFX perform at the end of the show. I’ve sat through a mildly entertaining interview with Seth Green, an uninspired exchange with a woman from “The Princess Diaries 2,” and now I’m waiting for local commercials to segue into the last live music segment of the show. Okay, it’s on … (time elapsed: roughly 2 minutes) … So Fat Mike, El Hefe, and co. have just performed “Franco Un-American” on the show where they wore “Stop Bush” and “Not My President” t-shirts and Mike sang “I never looked around, never second-guessed — then I read some Howard Zinn now I’m always depressed. And now I can’t sleep from years of apathy — all because I read a little Noam Chomsky.” Then he changed the part of the lyrics about the president laughing ‘cuz we voted for Nader to say “Don’t anyone think about voting for Nader.”

The piece d’resistance of the performance had to be when they broke it down and said Bush “loves Dick, but hates homosexuals.” I can’t tell if it was because of sound issues, or trigger happiness on the censorship board, but the sound kept cutting off toward the end of the song. I think it might have had something to do with what El Hefe was singing on the back-up mic, but I’m not sure.

Perhaps the most inspiring, and important distinction for me about this performance is how it differed from Good Charlotte’s performance on the show in Spring 2003, right after the President had sent the U.S. into war. They had a hugely popular, if ridiculously bad, song on the top of the charts, a huge audience watching them, and they said and did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING with their time in the spotlight…worthless. Maybe, I’m putting too much import on the power of mainstream television generally and late night TV specifically, but I think it’s the least some of these folks could do with their power when they have a chance to be in front of such a huge audience…Hell, even Ted Leo had “No War” on his guitar strap.

… and now you know how one of Clamor’s founding members occupies 10% of his brain while he’s working late into the night on a million other tasks. Now it’s time to turn on Sportscenter…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 11th, 2004 at 1:50 am by Catherine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.