Real Life Rock Top 10: February 2023

1. Joe Biden, State of the Union Address (February 7).  Biden was a band onstage in Birmingham in the UK in 1978—the Beat, the Au Pairs, UB40, singing about unemployment, wife beating, Margaret Thatcher. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, third in line to the presidency after Vice-President Kamala Harris, at his right, sat behind Biden with an expression and a slouch of bored disdain. On the floor, the nihilist Republicans who are really running his office jeered, booed, shouted bullshit and liar and liar and liar liar liar liar liar liar liar. They were today’s skinheads in the audience, in 1978 the youth corps of the National Front or the British Union, shouting Nazi slogans, calling the men in the bands black apes and nigger lovers and the women communist cunts, then as now doing everything they could to stop the show.