This blog would like to thank the following cultural texts:

1. The Soul Jazz records compilation The Sound of Philadelphia - Funk, Soul and the roots of Disco 1965-1973: Philadelphia Roots Volume 2 and Chairman Palm for introducing me to The Three Degrees' "Collage," which is a pretty amazing song.

2. The Freda Payne antiwar song "Bring the Boys Home," which we should understand as a strategic gesture, not only a masculinist failure.

3. Pat Benatar's "Hell Is For Children," the most uncomfortably anthemic song about child abuse until Soul Asylum dropped "Runaway Train."

4. The original transformers movie, with Eric Idle as an anarchist junkyard robot and Orson Welles! as an evil robot planet bent on destruction and t.error. Replete with awesome cheesy 80's music including Weird Al Yankovic back when he still had a moustache.

5. Intermission, the recent 2-disc greatest hits compilation of the respective solo careers of Grant Mclennan and the late, great Robert Forster, the creative team behind the Go-Betweens. I didn't even realize they'd had solo careers after the Go-Betweens broke up in the late 80's and then reformed in 2000, but there is some great stuff here.

6. Orientalism. (to which I now return.)