Let’s just admit it. We are usually asleep by the time the ball drops in Times Square. But these last few years we’ve had a hospital gala on New Year’s Eve and it just keeps getting better and better. Which means we end up staying later and later. Still, determined to see Gaga and Kathy Griffin with our man Anderson, I managed to get home just in time to see Kathy in her bra and listen to Cee Lo Green singing John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
Imagine my dismay! The outright sacrilegious audacity of the man to change “And no religion too,” to “And all religion’s true.” I was furious. I kept saying to Bob, who was trying desperately to fall asleep, let him change “F*#^” You” to “Forget You,” but WHY WHY WHY impose his religiosity on the rest of us? And it seems, I’m not the only one…http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/cee-lo-green-outrages-john-lennon-fans-by-changing-lyrics-to-imagine-20120102
This comes on the heels of a small road trip through TN right before Christmas. If you’ve never listened to conservative talk radio, which I never do, you would be absolutely astonished at the amount of Islamophobia that comes over the airwaves in certain parts of the South. There had been a demonstration at Memphis Airport because two Muslim clerics had been thrown off a Delta flight for acting suspicious. Interfaith groups went to this peaceful protest to support the clerics, and this particular radio station, which caters to Christian Fundamentalists, sent their representative. Oh the scathing links to Bible passages and doomsday scenarios.
One might think the religion that brought us the Inquisition, was preparing a holy Crusade to keep the flag of Islam from flying over the USA!
And here I was, on New Year’s Eve, back in the birthplace of Jefferson – who btw built a library at the center of his university and NOT a church for a very good reason – trying to reconcile this lyric debacle. Words have meaning to this word nerd, and you can’t try to make a classic song into a pop, feel good everybody’s OK and religion does no harm song Cee Lo. Read your history books, and keep your paws off my Beatle.
MountainMornings 