Song Of The Day 4/1/2015: Kid Rock - "Bawitdaba" with Special Guest Commentary By Morrissey

Whilst nurturing half-capacitated daydreams as talon-fitted headmistresses discharged their epicene rage against my knuckles, I the sole inheritor refined my rendering of the masculine ideal, one with reserved mettle to rile the under-strappings of our vile Dear Mother Thistle-Fingers. The faux-scruffy cylinders of the British Pop Invasion did little for me, their inane nursery-room peals soiling the cobblestones down to the very mortar, all nips and fragrance, lumped sacks of laundry soap disguised as budgie-down travel pillows. Their mythology had more holes than many of my countrymen's dentistry. My thoughts broke free of their anchorage and turned, with some reluctance, to the juveniles, ruffians and unformed rogues of our offspring, the Americas. Perhaps the once-beaming, browbeaten tramp Miss Liberty had yet one more lantern to bestow.

From there the light came, in the deceptively warm confines of Miami International Airport, where I was stranded for six hours in wait of a flight delayed by thunderstorms. From there the light came, on a flat-screen television in a deodorant-optional cocktail lounge designed to pay penance to sports and deep-frying machines. As I watched, in subdued terror, a gathering of people observing a contest between large-wheeled trucks with boundary issues and penchants for self-abuse, there in a so-called "luxury box" I spotted a single fedora.

Sleepy-eyed Kid Rock, casting a pinch of salt over the automotive night of reckoning not one hundred yards from him, quaffing what looked like mead from a forty-ounce vessel, analyzing the dimensions and gradients of the craggy mounds bearing the brunt of the gay evening's punishing, as if he were formulating a plan to manufacture crystals out of dirt. I could no more navigate the swinging tides of revulsion and attraction than I could negotiate tenants' rights with a dollop of foie gras. Rural Michigan's very own Terence Stamp, aviating over our shared industrial landscapes with pin-striped bemusement. Did I want to be him, or be with him? The puzzle grabbed my thoughts, regardless of the question appearing far too soon in our narrative, spun by us both in spatial isolation from each other.

My interest insatiably piqued, it was only a hop, skip and somersault to the airport record store to obtain Mr. Ritchie's debut, the creatively titled Devil Without a Cause, and within minutes I dropped the virtual needle on the lead track. What a cunning sense of anticipation he builds in the opening seconds with the Batwitdaba Men's Chorus in tow, waxing their manicured incantations like factory cherubs. Dowdy Robby then releases the blueprints of his global clubhouse to all who may wander, whether they glide on the ulterior or nick about the subterranean.

"Get in the pit and try to love someone," gentle Kid commands. The endorsement stands rightly astride aphorisms from more superficially cultivated master thinkers: "It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death." "True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself." "Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries." "Love is a battlefield." "Love comes in spurts." The consortium's decree is met, Lord-in-Waiting Rock has sealed the envelope, and to forestall or impede the love smashing against itself in the pit would make the offender maladjusted, meaningless and wretched...

...but nowhere nearly as maladjusted, meaningless and wretched as the British legal system, the gaudy, ruddy paper dollhouse wherein thieves, swindlers, fabricators and drunkards have done their level best to eviscerate my character and befoul my singular name. Courthouses supposedly serving as temples to jurisprudence are in fact room-sized, infected cavities where stray bacteria in Saville Row suits prance upon what tattered vestiges of fairness and morality yet remain. Run by a gaggle of refractory circus clowns mourning the loss of their car, the British courts offer daily episodes of torture, grief and exasperation that gravely lack the cerebral complexity of an R. White's Lemonade advert. Officers of the British court wield the kind of synaptic shortcomings usually reserved for longshoremen arguing against the laws of gravity. The judges are as wooden, dense and oblong as the benches that suffer the bloated weight of their egos. From the break of dawn to the bust of dusk these be-wigged by-products of toxic rhetoric, boarding school slapstick and blanched breakfast sausages issue forth terse globules of legalistic spunk that condemn all and illuminate none. Then in the evening they compartmentalize their duplicity and return home to mousey housewives who reek of disinfectant and dream of mutiny. Those without the rotted innards necessary to descend to the high courts instead seek clients who shall pay for their misrepresentation and lax defense. Here stands the grotty attorney, cellular phone welded to his jawbone, vacant eyes scouring the smog for excuses, forked tongue licking the pavement for loose sixpence. He is as non-existent and ineffective as a Catholic lover's prophylactic. His schooling consisted of statistical rituals and neutered emotions, and he gestures with pride at his diploma, procured from the same vending machine where he got his Cadbury shortcake. He does not suffer fools; such an act would compromise his self-adoration as he would therefore have to suffer himself. And the worst of the coterie of histrionics and hijackers always seem to get assigned, by some stroke of disaster, to my cases. My attorneys have given my court filings all the attention and comprehension they would give to the curdling milk in their commuter coffee. They have conspired with flatulent judges, their doddering clerks, antihistamine-guzzling paralegals and the dishonorable opponents to undermine my life's work. Their regard of my words, outlined in blood and tears, is no higher than their regard for inebriated tree snakes, sole-adherent chewing gum, stage-2 syphilis or English literature. Instead of appearing to represent me in the dungeon of my legal undoing they would have been exactly as effective if they'd sent legless cardboard cut-outs of the Spice Girls in their place. My crucible was their rubber-walled romper room in which they bounced my soul and built my case out of Tinkertoys and goat semen. The attorneys who handled my case did so with the concern and precision of an Underground exhibitionist at rush hour. Were I to be tried for the guillotine, my lawyers' defense would have consisted of politely asking the executioner to pull his cord more slowly. Were I forced to choose between the venal sins of meeting with my lawyers and eating a Reuben sandwich I'd respond, "Forgive me longhorns, and pass the sauerkraut." And then they lament their poor showings and low opinions which resound about their profession. If the tourniquet fits, dear barrister -- hold that mirror a further distance from your supplicating nostrils and use it for its original intent. Indeed, as I, willing slave to the muse, chronicler of the falterings and too-brief moral victories of your lost generation and mine, live and breathe to tell the tales of the pinholes of sunlight eking through the overcast atmosphere of our ebbed adolescence and grafted adulthoods, I find the British legal system in contempt of the social contract that has been misfiled and lost in a cabinet, no doubt by an intern legal assistant. Judges, attorneys, pus merchants, tea-fetchers, pound-hoarders, sphincter-smackers and gristle-feeders -- I find them all irrevocably, irredeemably guilty as charged. Such miserable splotches on the canvas of our quotidian routine need not wait until the first of April to be designated fools.