Today in Rock and Roll WTF: Velvet Underground Tea Partier

So: already mentioned, I've been reading Popism: The Warhol Sixties. It's a vain, catty, name-dropping, hedonistic memoir of everything fabulous/wrong with the sixties. I just wish it had more pictures. Stupid elitist grown up books with all their fancy words. I tend to have the attention span of a coked-out puppy, so every 3 pages or so I read about a new person, then wonder what they looked like or what they are doing now and run to the computer to find out. I've actually just started reading at the desk.

So I get to the section about the Velvet Underground and manage to get through about six whole pages at once, because I know about these guys already. Nico--dead. John Cale--still in music, Lou Reed--still working and being a huge wanker. Moe Tucker--wait whatever happened to Moe Tucker? And book down, Google up, welcome to reading in the third millennium.

I expected to find an obituary, or something about her living in the country with her partner/12-step sponsor raising organic mushrooms and painting with forks or something equally counterculture.

Tragically, she achieved neither middle-aged kookiness nor death. She joined the motherf*cking Tea Party. Or at least she rolls with 'em (skip to the 2:40 mark):

WTF?

Now this protest took place a year and a half ago and no one seemed to pay much attention for awhile. Until someone looked at the old footage and realised "...waaait a minute--is Maureen Tucker, commenter at the extreme right rally... Moe Tucker? Former drummer/singer for the anti-establishment, pan-sexual, Factory-living, heroin-sponge-of-an-experimental band, The Velvet Underground?" I mean this isn't even Alice Cooper "isn't-that-interesting" conservatism. This is the Tea Party movement. Which is just uninformed, reactionary conservatism. Could it be the same woman?

So like anyone looking for verification, vindication or validation, they took it to youtube where it got just enough attention for people to confirm it. That got just enough attention for her local news to interview her about her politics. That, in turn, received just enough attention that I got a hold of it. And you're paying me just enough attention to read about it now. And everybody gets their little fifteen minutes.


Ms. "Taxation-never-worked-anywhere-despite-the-fact-that-it-totally-has" Tucker doing "Heroin" (reworded for political-right correctness as "Oxycontin"  in concert these days.)