Top Fifty Conservative Rock/Pop Songs,

The list isn't all that bad, though it does skew heavily towards a conception of conservatives as prudes.

Wake Up Little Susie is conservative? Gimme a break. It's not even really pro-sexual-restraint. It's a thinly disguised bit of sexual titillation for an era when such was considered scandalous.

I wondered about this some time ago, and decided that Twisted Sister's We're Not Gonna Take It was the most conservative rock anthem.

No, seriously. Check the lyrics. Sure, it's superficially an adolescent rage against teachers and such. But what is the liberal establishment, even in its own self-conception, than an organization of unaccredited professors seeking to lecture the intellectually unformed through a never-ending series of "teachable moments"?

It doesn't make the list, of course.

Thanks to Oregon Muse.

Whoops! It was National Review's list, reprinted by the New York Times. I've edited out my previous statements about the NYT's occasional cluelessness in compling the list, because they make little sense now, don't they?

The errors were, yes, evidence of my jumping to conclusions and twacking liberal straw-men and all that good stuff. Guilty as charged.

I have to change my take on the list a bit. Before I thought it was okay, but a little infused by stereotypical liberal conceptions of conservatives. Now that I know it comes from NR, I have to say its okay, but a little infused by a somewhat stodgy conception of what the mostly-blue-state conservative staff of NR thinks religious conservatives would appreciate on the list.

Either way-- Wake Up, Little Susie is about a couple who had sex, but they've got their story about "just falling asleep all night" and they're sticking to it. Even if the Everly Brothers didn't mean it that way, I'd guess that most teenagers who heard the song at the time so interpreted it.

posted by Ace at 01:56 PM

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