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“Fortunate Son” – Creedence Clearwater Revival
(Words/music: John Fogerty, available on Willy and the Poor Boys, Fantasy Records 1969)

In my mind, “Fortunate Son” remains one of the most essential protest songs.  In many ways, it does everything that the punk movement a decade later strived to accomplish.   It seethes with righteous anger, targeting upper class hypocrisy with the same pointed anger every punk envies.  John Fogerty sings with more indignation than anyone this side of Joe Strummer, making his performance sound personal and desperate.  In the same year as Woodstock, Fogerty’s song stood as the angry answer to the Summer of Love by pointing fingers and refusing to compromise.  Critics point towards the Stooges or McCartney’s “Helter Skelter” as punk rock’s touchstones, but fewer songs seem as “punk rock” as “Fortunate Son,” even to this day.

This made those awful, blindly patriotic Wrangler Jeans’ commercials from a few years ago so infuriating.  These commercials, which I think included Brett Favre, took the song’s first two lines out of context.  It stripped the song of everything that made it so powerful, undercutting Fogery’s undercutting.  I imagine it was some advertising agency employee Googling partriotic songs and ending up on some misguided webpage listing “Fortunate Son” as one.  Yes, it’s patriotic in the sense that it embraces freedom of speech, but it doesn’t fit the conventional definition of “patriotism,” or at least not the definition Wrangler tried to shove down its audience’s throats.  I’m not sure who owns the publishing rights to Creedence’s catalog (whether it’s Fogerty or someone else), but the egregious misuse of the song remains with me to this day.  Even the song’s (slight) rebirth during the recent War on Terrorism as a protest song can’t make me forget about Wrangler’s mangling – and if John Fogerty signed off on it, I can’t help but think a little less of him.  If it’s true that once a song becomes public, it belongs to all of us, it’s our responsibility to demand to have it back from those who choose a cut-and-paste interpretation of it.

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