Unverified Voracity Finally Posts It
By multiple, persistent request. Some time back the Hoover Street Rag pled for assistance, asking if anyone out in MGoBlog land had a copy of "The Victors" by a jazz singer named Pat Suzuki. Several people offered versions of this weird piece of Michigan apocrypha, the HSR's request was met, and I got a file containing the audio. At the time, however, the laptop's soundcard was on the fritz and I had no idea what was actually in my possession.
One thankfully persistent reader, however, has not let it drop. It turns out that the item in question is surreal. Its closest analogue in my experience is Marylin Monroe's infamous rendition of "Happy Birthday" directed at JFK; both are utterly transformative. And weird. And were undoubtedly undertaken in cocktail dresses.
Anyway, here it is. Click the play icon next to the link for a swanky javascript player; right click and "save as" to download.
Pat Suzuki SINGS(!) "Hail To The Victors"
Seriously. I was pretty annoyed by Josh Jarboe's sudden dismissal from Oklahoma for -- gasp! -- rapping, more annoyed when I read Bob Stoops' pre-dismissal quote to the effect of "sticks and stones," and just plain angry when the bitter old men at the Oklahoman smarmily applauded the about-face. So I wrote something to that effect.
I probably wouldn't have bothered, though, if I knew that SMQ was going to kick off his final week of amateur wordsmithery by dropping a bomb on the Typical White Middle-Aged Sportswriter villians referenced above:
Was it "the Internet culture" that asked him to act swiftly, with the full weight of his position? Every Day Should Be Saturday, the most widely-read college football blog on the Web, linked to the video with no call for discipline. The very mainstream-leaning Wizard of Odds, which broke the video's existence and posted the version that drew tens of thousands of hits last week, made no call for discipline. None called Jarboe a "thug" or described his freestyle efforts as "jabber." Who, then, is Stoops actually frustrated with?
The finger points squarely at the old men who don't understand the internet but feel free to blame it for all ills, real or imagined.
Maybe they need someone to degrade them. West Virginia has leapt up the Fulmer Cup scoreboard with a series of crimes spectacular and petty:
- Three players are caught with felonious, drug-dealing amounts of weed.
- Noel Devine and four other players got in a nightclub fight.
- Charles Pugh pulls a Kevin Quick and goes on a stolen credit-card spree.
- Evan Rodriguez beats up a girl.
- Kendall Washington breaks into a home, steals some stuff, and shoots a guy. He wasn't actually on the team at the time, FWIW.
When I initially noted this apparrent explosion of bad behavior, Washington was believed to still be on the team and his nine points brought the 'Eers into a tie for the lead. It turns out he was dismissed after spring practice. The points go away but this is a kid who had some major issues in high school; Rodriguez pursued and acquired him.
So, like... WTF? As I've noted before, West Virginia was not a big mover in the first couple years of the Fulmer Cup, scoring nine points total. Michigan racked up 15 points, all of them coming last year when Lloyd Carr's retirement was impending. Driven by the realities of recruiting players to West Virginia, Rodriguez brought in his fair share of... uh... characters but he largely kept them in check. Even Pacman Jones had but one incident, that as a freshman. From there on he was off the police blotter.
"Coach Stew" -- West Virginia fans are constitutionally incapable of using their coach's full last name -- has not had similar fortune. Why?
It's tough to scare the hell out of your players when you're obviously thinking "I can't believe I'm a Division I head coach. How much are they playing me? I get a whistle!"
I foresee this ending badly.
(Sidenote: in searching for Stewart pictures I came across this engineering dork LOL page:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: graceful_fail() in /web2/dmblogs/docs/wp-content/blogs.php on line 77
Snicker.)
Back to the future. Wolverine Historian has assembled Rick Leach highlights for your edification.
August 6th, 2008 at 12:19 PM ^
August 6th, 2008 at 12:24 PM ^
If we're talking about the same wedding here (which could very well be), the song played during none other than the father-bride dance at the reception...
The song went over quite well, and each "hail" was appropriately marked by a number of folks throughout the hall, including the bride and her father (with his UM cufflinks)... quite awesome, actually.
As you could probably guess, the bride's family are probably the most dedicated Michigan family I have ever met, and we're fortunate to have grown up with them and to have known them our whole lives...
If you were at the Henry Ford Estate, then yes, you were at the same wedding.
And your report is the same as mine would be. Quite well.
August 6th, 2008 at 12:25 PM ^
August 6th, 2008 at 12:25 PM ^
August 6th, 2008 at 12:28 PM ^
August 6th, 2008 at 12:32 PM ^
August 6th, 2008 at 12:32 PM ^
August 6th, 2008 at 12:36 PM ^
I guess I am an old, old world optimist since "old world" refers to the statue QB's of the '90's on.
Don't get me wrong, I think very highly of Rick Leach and what he meant to the teams of the late 70's. The guy was a winner and ran the team very well. But as a passer, he left a little to be desired. His spirals were not that tight, and threw what was described (for Wash. Redskins QB) an option pass. The receiver had the option of catching the ball on either end. Leach's numbers we not steller: 250-537 with 35 ints.
Steve Smith from the early 80's, on the other hand, was reported to be the second faster player on the team. A guy named Carter was faster. Smith's number were a little better, 324-648 with 32 ints. I don't think Smith's teams were quite as dominant over the competition as Leach's teams were.
But either way, Michigan has a return of either on of them with comperable surrounding talent and they will be just fine.
Don, you're a goddamn half-wit. Wrap your squirrel-sized brain around that fact. Your claims and your analogies are so stupid that I don't really know where to begin.
First, your synopsis that "It's interesting that so many blithely dismiss his boastful, mysoginistic references to shooting other African-Americans while black kids are being shot on the streets every day and funerals are a weekly occurrence." No fucking shit, hot shot? Look, no one is saying that ghetto culture is admirable or idyllic. But, like all things, people born into a certain culture perpetuate that culture. It's what they know. So, to hold a young man accountable fore merely having the misfourtune to be born poor and black is ridiculous. And, as SMQ pointed out, talking about murder is hardly restricted to those hip hop "punks" you seem to know so much about.
Second, your wonderfully astute observation that "Funny, but I don't think I'd see the same reaction if some white idiot wearing a Confederate flag t-shirt bragged about shooting black people," is the fucking Titanic of moronic attempts to draw a non-analogous conclusion. Why inject race into this? Jarboe wasn't saying anything about killing white people. The nalagy doesn't work and doesn't come close to working.
Third, what is the dismissal over? You say it was the previous gun case that got him in trouble. But why wasn't he expulsed when the close was concluded? It was absolutely about this rap "video" and that's stupid.
What this boils down to is a kid saying something that someone else doesn't like and getting kicked off the football team. That's it. Say your boss reads your above rant, finds it distasteful, and fires you. Is that fair? No. Is that legal? No, not unless you wrote that assinine essay while on the company clock.
Certain elements of our culture have wandered into a dangerous and self destructive path. We all know that. But so often we hear about college football coaches being in the business of putting quality young men into the world. The fact, remains, however, that this is all business. Fuck the kids. If we want people like Jarboe to be functioning, productive members of society, you must recognize that their athletic gift does not grant them the ability to seperate themselves from the negative elements which defined their upbringing. You want a better world? Try showing some patience and actually, you know, helping people learn what it is to be a man in the world. Washing your hands of soemone like jarboe does absolutely nothing for anyone. But, I get the feeling that you're alright with "balck kids shooting black kids" as long as its not in your neighborhood.
Don, would you happen to be "Old Fan" from the pre-druple days? For some reason I have it stuck in my head that "Old Fan" was some conservative early 30's white guy who admitted to being "Don" in real life.
Ease up, there.
1. I can plausibly buy the argument that Jarboe should have never been at Oklahoma in the first place. He brought a gun to school, and that's fucked up.
2. However, Oklahoma saw fit to let a borderline felon into their school. This required, at least, a tacit acceptance of what he did - not that they condoned it, obviously, but that they were getting in bed with a kid they KNOW brought a gun to school.
3. They knew he did that, but let him in. Not he's gone. So, what changed? Obviously, the video.
4. Taking anything said in an amateur free-style rap, or any music, for that matter, seriously, is folly. Just as Johnny Cash did not, actually, "shoot a man to watch him die", you can't take anything Jarboe says at face value. Bon Jovi wasn't wanted dead or alive, the guy from Five for Fighting isn't actually Superman, and Roger Daltrey was nor dumb, deaf, or blind, and he probably wasn't that good at pinball.
The point? He said things that some people find offensive - and the people that do find it offensive show a patent inability to divorce something said in a song - a place, where, I think, I've established people frequently say things that aren't literally true - from their actual intentions.
This is from someone with no vested interest in Oklahoma at all, so him not playing football does not, really, effect my college football viewing world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k99h5aikc4g
wanted...wanted dead or alive....
Fine, please replace with "and, despite 'Elderly Woman Behind a Counter in a Small Town', Eddie Vedder, while possibly behind a counter in a small town, is not an elderly woman."
I knew before I posted my comment that a common response would be to bring up all the songs in popular music over the years referencing some sort of asocial or criminal behavior, and use it to explain away the sort of stuff that Jarboe was spouting, as though that stuff existed in some sort of cultural isolation divorced from reality. It always kills me when white middle-class kids from relatively stable homes in communities with reasonably well-funded schools, a viable business environment, and a decent availability of jobs who listen to Johnny Cash or Queensryche or Van Halen and aren't induced to mimic what is sung about simply assume that their experience is universal. The fact is that the vast majority of us here at MGoBlog all have had multiple influences on our lives—parents, schools, teachers, friends, neighbors, employers–who collectively are a giant counterweight to whatever negative influences we encounter. That's what a community does, or should. The problem is that other kids may not have those advantages, because the communities they live in are ridden with joblessness, unstable family situations, absent fathers, chaotic schools, endemic violent crime, rampant drug use, and all the other social ills that make the papers every day. When you then create an entertainment subculture that glorifies violence, rhapsodizes about drug use, sexualizes young women, and dismisses education, all against the backdrop of a crumbling outer culture, the nice comfortable notion that music and words have no real effect on young people isn't so plausible. Tens of billions of dollars are spent worldwide on the premise that intentionally composed images of people, still or in motion, in combination with words and music, can influence the thoughts and ultimately the behavior of individuals. This is exactly what underlies advertising, and companies and organizations and politicians devote huge amounts of energy and money to creating it because endless amounts of research over the years has proven that people in fact ARE influenced by what they watch on a TV screen. The influence may be subtle, and it won't automatically induce them to do something that's completely at odds with their culture or values. That's the rub: if the culture they're in is as dominated by negative forces as positive, then dismissing the potential effect of what is seen in a video is naive. Looking at it another way, if you'd shown "Triumph of the Will" to American audiences in 1938, the universal reaction would likely have been a mixture of puzzlement, distaste, fear, and perhaps some loathing, since the cultural context of that film had little to do with ours. Show it to the German audiences of the day, soaked as it was with anti-Semitism, fervent paranoid nationalism, and veneration of all things military, and it was an extremely potent form of visual propaganda. Or another way: I grew up in Grosse Pointe, and so all of my friends came from stable two-parent homes, plenty of money, great schools, clean and well-maintained neighborhoods, and most importantly, a complex network of personal, business, and professional relationships that mutually benefited everybody. So when the late 60s and 70s rolled around and all of us started smoking dope and dropping acid and snorting god knows what all, on top of drinking our brains out, we had all kinds of familial and societal structures and relationships to moderate the worst of our inclinations and bail our asses out if we got in trouble. Yeah, there were some kids who got too deep into it and never came out the other side, but the vast majority of us came out relatively unscathed precisely because of all the positive things in our comfortable, stable lives. For the kids in other communities who didn't have those things to fall back on and support them, it's a different story. There's an old expression: "when the rich catch cold, the poor catch pneumonia" and it applies in all kinds of ways.
And no, Electron, even though I'm 55 and therefore a certifiable cranky old fart, I'm not Old Fan.
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