7/24/08: Rare Earth “Hey Big Brother” (1971)The biggest mistake we made this month was skipping a
Dark Knight screening for
Hellboy II. We could’ve ran an early entry celebrating the new Batman film as a pretty decent celebration of eternal vigilance as the price of liberty. Sometimes that eternal vigilance has to be high-tech. There’s even a speech at the end by Commissioner Gordon that we’d like to hear from John McCain—but, sadly, our alleged candidate would be more likely to condemn Gordon through an interpreter speaking Spanish.
But at least we can jump on the announcement that Rare Earth will finally have their music compiled on
Fill Your Head: The Studio Albums, 1969-1974. That’s big news. Rare Earth is one of the weirdest pop bands to ever hit the charts, and not just because they were white boys recording for Motown. They were like a cross between Led Zeppelin and Blood, Sweat & Tears. They were also scoring hits with edits of massive album tracks. (Their biggest single was “Get Ready,” which clocked in on LP at 21:32.)
“Hey Big Brother” was a lesser hit, but it’s classic Rare Earth. It also offers one of the weirder sociopolitical messages of the ’70s. The song’s a band composition (from Dino Fekaris & Nick Zesses, instead of Tom Baird) that has a strangely conciliatory relationship with the all-seeing eye of a potentially totalitarian government. It used to seem like a stealthy way of endorsing how quickly the Left is willing to give up freedom. After all, here’s the opening:
Hey Big Brother, as soon as you arrive You better get in touch with the people, Big Brother Better get them on your side, Big Brother And keep them satisfiedNo, thanks—or so we used to say. “Hey Big Brother” now sounds like a post-9/11 anthem, acknowledging that surveillance is good even as we want to protect our freedoms from both Islamofascists and Democrats who want to make sure we’re using the proper light bulbs.
“Now that you've got the picture,” asks the band, “what you going to do?” That’s a good question. Rare Earth makes it a reasonable question, too. The message is vigilance against vigilance, while today’s good Leftists would be offering rationalizations. “If we don't get our thing together,” warns Rare Earth, “Big Brother will be watching us.” Yeah, Big Brother will be watching us to make sure we aren’t drawing any cartoons of Muhammad. Now if we only had a Presidential candidate who could get our thing together.
Make it your own: Here’s
a clip of a good live performance of “Hey Big Brother.” If you’re interested in the 3-disc
Fill Your Head: The Studio Albums, 1969-1974, then keep an eye on the
Hip-O Select site. For a cheaper Rare Earth overview, you can pick up
The Millennium Collection: The Best of Rare Earth. This series isn’t generally recommended, but the Rare Earth entry includes “Hey Big Brother” and album versions of their biggest hits. That means you get five tracks totaling over 67 minutes.
And don’t forget that Gil Scott-Heron once famously intoned re: the revolution, “The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb, Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Engelbert Humperdinck, or the Rare Earth.” Gil Scott-Heron would go on to become a crackhead.
