"The Snake" (1963)

[Original review of Johnny Rivers recording here. Version of "The Snake" by Oscar Brown Jr. here, version by Al Wilson here. My video of the Johnny Rivers version here. Version by Donald Trump here.]

[swear words] Out on the social media beat: I started my own YouTube channel (I know it's comical that I even have one) because, several years ago when I was much better about doing regular 300-word write-ups of individual songs, I would occasionally run across one that somehow wasn't on YouTube yet. So I'd make a video and upload it, giving me something to point to in my review and enabling people, at least in theory, to hear the song. All the song videos on my channel, such as they are all 17 of them, represent the rock-bottom production value type of video, made from a music file of the song with a decent bitrate and for visuals using a static image, usually the cover of an album that houses the song. This is also from back in the days when I kept music files by the gigabyte on my hard drive. Mostly these videos just sit there, accruing modest levels of views. Five digits is big traffic for them. Most are obscure one way or another, just things I love and have written about: Jonathan Richman's "That Summer Feeling," Percy Mayfield's "The River's Invitation," Boss Hog's "Ski Bunny," etc. Inevitably they attract the kind of comments every YouTube song video attracts. After newspaper sites, YouTube comments are well known for being the most rancid on a per capita basis. They also contain significant portions of vacuousness.

Once in a while someone files a complaint and then a video is banned in certain countries, or everywhere, usually for commercial reasons. It's not always permanent, and I can't always tell when it changes because the videos are always visible to me (thanks YouTube!). But some do appear to go live more widely on and off, judging by view count patterns. Just this month, someone complained about the Angry Samoans video for "They Saved Hitler's Cock." Honestly, I'm so chickenshit I didn't even use the expletive, labeling the video simply "They Saved Hitlers" to avoid problems (for which, just last month, someone else came along and mocked me ... for that matter, I ducked a similar way in my write-up). In this case, though possibly it was the usual copyright protectionism, I suspect the problem was not the word "cock" like I worried about originally but the word "Hitler." The song uses the name lightly, making him the usual symbol of bottomless evil but more playing it for a joke. I happen to think it's a pretty good joke, which is why I was writing it up in the first place. But in the current historical moment I have much less problem with putting it out of sight. If people are going to be idiots about it, I prefer seeing Hitler and his ideas shunned categorically and the more aggressively the better.

In terms of the Johnny Rivers song, that's a different matter, posing a quandary I have been wrestling with for some time. I posted the video on November 8, 2012 (I must say I'm a little chilled by the fact that it was two days after the 2012 US presidential election and exactly four years before the next). I wrote about it because I think Johnny Rivers is generally underrated and I wanted to say some things about that, because I like the song (and, more exactly, I like the album that it is the first song on), and because I felt nostalgic about the album. My judgment when I wrote it up was that the song plays way too loose with misogyny—it's dated—and the whole story of the snake is trite. My misogyny angle was confirmed in a way by the first comment that came in, not so long after posting it (by the way, I'm sure all or most of these comments are from people finding the video on YouTube or the internet and very few if any via my blog posts, at least I hope so): "all cunts are snakes!" (three years later someone replied "PIG!"). Now I'm going to talk about YouTube comments.



As a general rule I stand completely on the sidelines with YouTube comments. Actually, I try never to look at them. As a blogger I might hang back from commenting and responding to comments more than other bloggers, but at least I read them, look forward to reading them, and try to do a little general hosting and thank yous and whatnots (because you all must know how much I appreciate getting your comments). On YouTube, however, even on my own freaking channel, I don't. It's just a constant shithead clown show there to watch with bemusement if at all. Not all comments and commenters are repulsive. Some very nice people have said some very nice things, for example on my videos for Phoebe Snow's "Take Your Children Home" and especially Dolly Parton's "Down From Dover." But the Johnny Rivers video more chugged along in the usual morass. We have to face it. Some comments and commenters just are repulsive. Someone else did try to reason with PIG! pretty close to real-time, saying, "you are gender confused. listen to the words. the snake is a guy." Then came the nostalgists, and sure, I have to admit in a way I was asking for them, anyone who posts old songs on YouTube arguably is: "I have this LP!!!" and "I loved this -- still do" and (my favorite, for the sudden crass note) "My father has this LP! So cool! One day is gonna be mine yeah!!!"

Maybe you're way ahead of me by now, but I was completely mystified in 2016 when the comments took a new turn: "Emperor Trump brought me here," was the first. Then "Trump!!!!" "TRump 2016" "Very obvious that this describes the muslim invasion of Europe." And so forth. What had happened, though it took me some time to figure it out, was that Donald Trump had made reading the lyrics of "The Snake" a staple of his rowdy Nuremberg campaign rallies in 2015, 2016, and perpetuity until his death. I noted in my original review of the song (in 2012) that it was written by Oscar Brown Jr. whose wide-ranging career I described quickly: "elsewise worked eclectically in jazz, civil rights, the theater, and poetry." It should be easy enough to see even from that that Brown's adaptation in 1963 of an Aesop fable ("The Farmer and the Viper") was never intended to be anything like a statement about Middle Eastern refugees. If anything, the way I read the song's route to its greatest success—Al Wilson ("Show and Tell") scored a minor UK hit with it in 1968—I think it's more like someone thought it sounded cool to match up soul music effects with a nasty old story song that feels vaguely profound even as it leans way too hard (we can certainly see now) into misogyny. It must have had an audience before Al Wilson's hit, because Rivers's version came first and they have obvious similarities, notably in the guitar play. Brown's original, for its part, has the same kind of impulse, but the style of music is more jazz scat singing. Brown's heirs have attempted to stop Trump from using "The Snake" at his rallies, so far to little avail.

My video is not the only one featuring the Johnny Rivers song, let alone the only version of "The Snake" of any kind, on YouTube. But it's my most popular video running away—once again Donald Trump's golden touch, he would doubtless observe. And I know the dozen or so gleeful Trumpers who have felt moved to comment on my video don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Yet because it is my video, which provided them a platform however feeble, I felt and feel enough responsibility to worry about what's the right thing to do here. I considered taking it down altogether once I figured out what was going on, and then, perhaps in classic dweeby liberal fashion, argued with myself about consistency and values, notably around the issue of free speech. To me, only commercial speech and hate speech are not free speech and these Trumpers were not committing commercial speech (unlike the trolls who regularly drop comments on my blog with links to illicit-looking websites, say, which I always delete immediately as commercial speech—it ain't free, folks!), or hate speech either exactly, as I saw it, though there is that "muslim invasion." Is that enough to be hate speech? Where is the line between ignorance and hate? How much is too much? In the end, I left the video up and wrung my hands now and then. You can see for yourself if you're interested that the comments never get any better. They still come in now and then too. Some back and forth has gone on, and I believe I have even in some moods "liked" or "upped" or whatever it is a couple of comments coming more from my tribe.

I guess the thing I want to say, after all this—preaching to the choir I'm sure and saying the things the people who most need to hear them won't be able to hear ("lack all conviction" v. "full of passionate intensity" as always)—is that, to paraphrase the commenter: Very obvious that "The Snake" describes the Trump takeover of the US Republican Party and its vast power holdings. Trump is the snake. That's what he is. Suddenly the story doesn't seem so trite to me anymore. That's what I want to say. Simplest terms possible: Trump = the snake. Which makes the people who support him the silly woman in the song and lyric by Oscar Brown Jr., acting based on their fears (mostly) and on their vaunted moral values (which you can't give them credit for anymore as they are undermined by Trump in every way, looking your fucking way decadent evangelicals) and more exactly, probably, on a toxic mixed bag of racism, lust for power, and, down at the lowest echelons, the TV spectacle of "winning." Winning, winning, all this winning. I am tired of it now, just like Donald Trump predicted. We took him in, he seemed so pitiful. In retrospect, the only way Trump was going to stave off the legal and/or financial jeopardy inevitably coming his way, was improbably enough to win the sanctity of the highest office in the land, head of a political party that has argued for decades that, if the president does it, then by definition it is not illegal. Hurrah for Trump, Trumpers, hurrah hurrah. We took pity and took this poor pitiful creature in, even knowing his total level of mendacity and disreputability. YOU ALL HEARD THE ACCESS HOLLYWOOD TAPE, RIGHT? One of the most telling things about Trump and his followers is that they all think it's smart to not pay taxes. That's a measure of success and intelligence in their world—undermining a system that has worked better for everyone than much of what we've seen before in history. And they fucking invited him in! Sad!

My response to my own video. Think of it as an extended YouTube comment.