Fake phony frauds

A s’faccim, in the argot of renowned NYC talk-radio pioneer Bob Grant, for whom my post title was also a stock-in-trade.

Bruce Springsteen crosses the picket line
I once inadvertently torpedoed a budding relationship when I told the girl in question that The Boss was what rich people liked to play to pretend they gave a damn about the working class. It hit a little too close to home. Word to the wise: some of these Northeasterners take their Springsteen awfully seriously. It’s like he’s not just an entertainer, not just a rock star, but somehow the voice and conscience of America itself.

If I’ve grown cynical about Bruce, it’s because his best work has meant so much to me and now feels so far away. He had a nearly two-decade run of some of the greatest records and concerts ever, but the once working-class hero has turned plastic celeb sipping almond milk with Barack Obama.

Contrived is one thing, offensive is another: My fandom came to an abrupt halt in 2009 with the release of his Obama inauguration album, Working On A Dream. It was bad enough to start with “Outlaw Pete,” an abysmal Western pastiche, but a song called “Queen of the Supermarket” was the kind of bad that made me wonder if Springsteen had ever been good in the first place. It was a cloying, condescending caricature of a poor workin’ stiff dreaming of that cute checkout girl down at them thar grocery store — as if Bruce was mocking those he’d long claimed to represent and whose image he was long since back to appropriating. His whole act had turned more and more a kind of bougie minstrel show, helping enable the privileged to read whatever their priorities into the supposed people’s struggle.

Periodically I’ve dipped back into what Springsteen Inc. has been up to lately, hearing the material how one might slow down to gawk at a wreck on the highway. I had plenty of opportunity to go see Springsteen on Broadway but wasn’t about to drop several hundred bucks on the privilege. Today tons of progressive ticketholders still cheer on The Boss from front rows and luxury boxes, shouting along with “The Promised Land” as if 40-odd years later, the downscale protagonist wouldn’t likely be a Trump supporter adamantly against the Green New Deal, critical race theory, top surgery, and whatever else is fashionable on Martha’s Vineyard. As Bruce readily admits, myth almost always sells better than reality. Even if the shows were vastly more affordable, the Bruce that means anything to me survives only on tape, no matter how well rehearsed the stage monologues. He can’t properly perform the old songs like “Thunder Road” or “Racing in the Street” anymore, let alone write new ones, because he’s forgotten what they mean.

In this late day and age, it’s better that the man has finally turned to extraneous cover albums. If it’s going to be exhausted oldies karaoke, best to take on material he still retains some capacity to interpret. As Bruce himself sang on “Better Days” back in 1992, “it’s a sad funny endin’ when you find yourself pretendin’, a rich man in a poor man’s shirt.”

Fuuuuck Bruce Springsteen—in the liver, with a rusty railroad spike. I never did like his sorry ass, and ain’t ever gonna. Above, our red-pilled ex-fan said one of his albums was “the kind of bad that made me wonder if Springsteen had ever been good in the first place.” Well, sorry bub, but wonder no more.

The "voice and conscience of America itself”? In a big pig’s eye. The putative “boss” was never anything but a Standard Issue, Mark 1-Mod 0 limousine liberal as far as I’m concerned, and straight to Hell with whatever Northeasterners might or might not think of him. He stinks like a dead halibut in the July sun, and he always has.

As a palate cleanser to wash the foul taste of Springsteen out of everyone’s mouth, here’s more Bob Grant.

In a May 1993 broadcast, Grant referred to civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. as "that slimeball” and as "this bum, this womanizer, this liar, this fake, this phony.”

In 1995, the progressive media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting accused Grant of racism and homophobia. As evidence, they highlighted his repeated use of the word "savages" when referring to African-Americans and statements such as "minorities are the Big Apple's majority, you don't need the papers to tell you that, walk around and you know it. To me, that's a bad thing. I'm a white person". They highlighted his description of Haitian refugees as "swine" and "sub-human infiltrators" who multiply "like maggots on a hot day" and his comment that "Ideally, it would have been nice to have a few phalanxes of policemen with machine guns and mow [gay pride paraders] down”.

Heh. Like anybody else, Grant wasn’t always one hundred percent right about everything, of course. But when he was right, he was by-God RIGHT. “Combat radio,” Grant called what he did on his program, and back during his WABC heyday in the early-mid-90s, that’s exactly what it was, too.

Ah, how well I remember hearing Curtis Sliwa nail infamous shitstain Al Sharpton to the wall on the Bob Grant show with a tape Sliwa had recorded at now-defunct Freddy’s Fashion Mart up in Harlem, featuring the bloated, Marcelle-grease-stained bottom feeder calumnifying “white interlopers” and urging his biddable, low-IQ followers to violence.

Said incitement soon bore deadly fruit when a mentally-disturbed spook-a-loo and “protest” attendee finally heeded Sharpton’s blatant call to action, walking into Freddy’s carrying a full gas can and a loaded .38, shooting several people in the course of burning the place to the ground, and leaving several corpses in his wake. Sharpton, of course, repeatedly denied ever saying anything at all in his daily “protests” that could possibly be construed as incitement to violence, which was just a bald-faced lie.

And then Sliwa and Grant played, over and over again, the tape which exposed Sharpton as the liar, agitator, and all-round scumbag he was, and always had been. It was beautiful, is what it was—a golden radio moment those of us who were around to hear it will never forget. SIDE NOTE: It was Sharpton’s use of a bullhorn to amplify his exhortations to violent action against Freddy's that inspired Paul Shanklin to have Conk Boy always speak through one in his note-perfect parodies for the late, lamented Rush Limbaugh show.

Back in the 90s, at my crib on any given weekday it was Grant, then Limbaugh, then a mad dive for the power button to switch the damned radio off the moment the inarticulate stammer of reliably hapless boob Sean Hannity began wafting around the room like a bad, bad funk.

In those days I was bartending at Mona’s on Ave B and didn’t get back home til 6 or 7 in the AM at the earliest—the bar closed at 4, then a cpl hours of clean-up and a few rounds of drinks for myself and my co-worker Steve plus several of our crusty-punk pals who helped us with the sweeping and mopping, winding up with the long footslog home to good old 241 E Broadway to wake the GF so’s she could get to work up at Bloomingdale’s by ten.

That arduous work-nightly routine made it tough sometimes to be up and at ‘em by noon when the Grant show kicked off, but somehow I managed it. Truth is, though, if I’d needed to I’d have set an alarm, that’s how much fun the man was to listen to.

Unfortunately, “human” debris like Sharpton never really fade away, as certainly should have been the case more than once over a way-too-long, illustrious career as the king-Hell hate-fueled race-baiter, rabble rouser, serial extortionist, and purveyor of inflammatory hoaxes of all time. Sadly, thanks to a lifetime get-out-of-jail-free card he owes entirely to his Uppity Nigger™ status, Sharpton is still gadding about poking his nose into affairs not his own—although these days he does look a lot more like a Stage IV cancer patient than the plus-sized barrel of dung he used to so closely resemble.

Hopefully, his sudden weight-loss IS due to some horrible kind of cancer, from which he’ll die screaming in agony. Couldn’t happen to a nicer asshole, if you ask me.