New Single!: "Smart Set"

wredfright · Smart Set

I wrote this song after seeing many, many folks who identify as "smart" say and do incredibly dumb things.  Unfortunately, there are many folks out there who just parrot authority figures instead of thinking for themselves.  If our authority figures were actually smart, then this wouldn't be as much of a problem, but we have some pretty stupid leaders, and when people who should know better swallow everything those leaders spout wholesale then that leads to problems for the rest of us.  In the 1980s and 1990s, it seems like a lot of critics and a lot of media had decent taste and used critical thinking to debunk nonsense that corporate and government leaders touted.  Now, it's a different situation, and many critics and media parrot the nonsense.  Worse, they pretend to "factcheck" things and get them completely wrong.  It's like living in topsy-turvy land these days.  Fortunately, math, physics, logic, and facts don't bend to ideology, no matter how people try, so with some careful inquiry and thinking, one can usually get to truth, but it shouldn't be this hard.

Musicwise, I played everything with the weird "instrument" this time being one of those annoying phone scams I saved from the answering machine (I feel bad for the folks who fall for that crap and wish the scammers would stop or be made to stop, but the sad attempt at scamming is pretty amusing).  The first verse notes that many supposed intellectuals only read what public radio tells them to, and public radio doesn't have the best taste.  The same goes for The New Yorker and other tastemakers these days, but it seems that in particular the glasseswearing folks who think that NPR is better than Fox News or whatnot maybe ought to dig more deeply for book recommendations.  I always enjoy it when Greg Palast calls NPR National Petroleum Radio.  For more on their creepy corporate mindset, this Corporate Crime Reporter article is a good read:  https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/npr-and-the-corporate-criminal-element/.   The Sierra Club verse is based on a real booklet the Club sends out where they suggest a good reason to recycle tires is because rodents can live in them and they can catch on fire.  I expected them to cite mosquitoes being able to breed in the tires when stagnant water gathers in the tires as a good reason to recycle tires, but they focused on rodents and fire instead which was strange considering rodents can also live in trees, fields, and other things that the Club would have no problem with.  Ditto for those things being able to catch on fire.  It was like whoever wrote and edited that material didn't actually think about the text.  I guess it's the nature of organizations to perpetuate themselves, but when one is sending out charity letters begging for money, one ought to project at least a base level of competence in the organization.  The last verse deals, of course, with all the stupid virus hysteria and how the "smartest" people in our society such as many doctors and teachers think things that don't work to fight the virus work.  What will they believe, their lying eyes or what the government tells them to think?  I love the cartoons recently that showed the hippies (and you can include the punks as well) questioning anyone who questions authority and now loving the government like this one from Henry Payne:  https://www.gocomics.com/henrypayne/2021/09/01.  

Lyrics:

Smart Set!
What's the smart set reading now?
Whatever NPR touts.
And no free-thinking is allowed.
You might milk a sacred cow.

Maybe the smart set just ain't that smart?

The Sierra Club wants me to get rid of my tires.
Because of rodents and fires.
You know where else a rodent can be?
It also catches on fire.  It's called a tree.

Said it'd be just two weeks to flatten the curve.
Then it was masks, vaccines, and people get what they deserve.
Could the uneducated do much worse?
Because a society led by the smart set's just a curse.

For more Wred Fright music, listen to the Yeast? 7"!