Crowded House: Don't Dream It's Over
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Crowded House: Don't Dream It's Over [live acoustic]
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There are days when I worry that we've lost the dream. Two generations past the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., my daughters are growing up colorblind and feminist, and I'm proud of my culture for supporting this stance, and making it seem natural. But as I noted this weekend at Cover Lay Down, that doesn't mean the fight is over: rather, having peeled away the obvious layers of discrimination, we find ourselves living in the murky core of cultural dis-ease, where it is harder to name the abstract injustices which still linger deep at the root of society.
Like my previous entry into this week's theme, this well-known EnZed pop ballad is clearly intended to be romantic in nature. But strip away the pop production, as in the above live take from the Netherlands-based 2 Meter Sessies, and it, too, transforms effectively as an anthem for our times, a call for change in a world where the vitriolic stream of talk radio madness overwhelms any attempt at rational discourse, where the news stations dumb down our world daily in their attempt to demonstrate that every idea has two equal and equivalent sides, where my inner city students struggle to find safe haven in a culture which seems to have forgotten them.
Don't dream it's over. The walls between us remain, and their slippery abstraction makes them more poisonous than ever.