A nasty breakup last month enabled me to cut yet another blues album. Compared with my past work, it's a bit more lyric-driven, conveying my bitter heartache and budding songwriting skills at the same time. The title track, Consider it Facebook Official (Gimme My Human Rights Back, Satan Whore),"" will be the first single released:
""Well my baby girl done left me / And she took my human rights away / Oh my baby girl gone 'n' left me / But not before she took my human rights away / I don't know what I'm gonna do with myself now / Cuz my right to self-determination left with her in a Chevrolet.""
Obviously, the theme that ties the album together is the soul-crushing split with my winter-break fling of eight days (who, by the way, is a heartless, skanky ho). But like most blues artists, I try to use the lovelorn lyrics to address larger social issues. Hot-button topics like losing it all in a Ponzi scheme, text message car crashes and bioterrorism via norovirus all work their way into my songs. But it's the title track that I hope really gets people thinking.
Human rights are like white privilege: You never know how far they get you in life until you're stripped of them. As the song alludes to, I lost mine when my girl decided I was spending too much time at the Lava Lounge with the gang - and not enough with her - and left for London with my human rights in her handbag. She'd been borrowing them because she had a friend from Sudan in town that wanted to use them and I wasn't going to need them that week. Later, when I remembered she still had them, it was too late.
""You never did care about me,"" she said when I called her about mailing them back. ""It was always about your stupid human rights. You should have known a good thing when you had it.""
Boy was she right. I wouldn't have guessed it before, but losing my human rights has been a tremendous inconvenience.
To get the full sense of things you'll have to buy the album (it's on sale now in the back of my van, five bucks if you're interested - supplies are sort of limited), but I'll try to give you a gist of it. I got fired from my job of four years last Tuesday. Boss said he'd been out to can me for months; now that my right to dignified work was in a purse in England he figured he had an excuse. In so many words, I told him I had some dignified work for his own can, only to see the campus police called in to shut me up, seeing as my right to freedom of expression was across the pond at the moment.
""This might hurt a bit,"" Capt. Mary Schauf said as she pressed a stapler to my lips, ""but it's not like you have a right not to be cruelly and unusually punished or anything.""
Feeling glum, I slunk over to Wando's and asked for a drink. ""We don't serve yer kind here,"" sneered the barkeep disdainfully, ""ya friggin' no-right.""
My outrage was assuaged by the throbbing pain in my face telling me it'd be tough to sip on much anyway. Dejected, I turned round to search for solace in the one thing that never fails to redden my blood when I'm feeling a little blue: Big Buck Hunter. I fumbled in my pockets for some jingles, but just as I was about to pop some in the slot a guy came over and stabbed me in the back. As I lay bleeding on Wando's floor, I faintly recall a crowd gathering around to steal my quarters off the ground and eventually Mary Schauf standing above me. ""I'd love to call an ambulance sir, or tell them to give you your quarters back,"" she said. ""It's just too bad you let that psycho tramp walk off with your basic rights to live and own property. That was dumb.""
I mumbled that I understood, and we shared a chuckle over how funny I sounded trying to say that through my stapled mouth. In all, it was a pretty bad day. But I learned something: You can't sing the blues if you ain't got 'em, and you can't sing at all without your human rights.
E-mail dhottinger@wisc.edu if you have any spare human rights.
