Oh a cowboys is the life for me...

...and I love to ride, but not on the open sea....

It's been a while since my last blog and this one here isn't actually going to involve any movie reviews!! shock horror!! except to just say my Kick Ass blu-ray arrived from those lovely people at play.com yesterday... steelbook edition which has the blu-ray AND DVD (dunno why I need both, but whatevz) and another disc of special features. All of which are pretty interesting.

Anyways, to the main point of this blog... COWBOYS!!

We all played cowboys and indians as kids, and yeah, I had a boss little toy bow and sucker arrows.. you used to lick the tips of them and fire them at your sister and hope they'd stick to her forehead, but they never did.
Cowboys have always interested me, but have never really been something I've actually looked into until now.
My current fascination with country music has also spurred me on, as well as reading Cash by Johnny Cash.
Guns, horses, hats and awesome shirts... all the fun things we know about cowboys and how lovely they are portrayed to children. But when you look into the reality of cowboys and outlaws of the old west, you find out just how gruesome some of those times actually were.

Now the man above was known as The Gentleman Killer for the plain simple face that he was known as a true gentleman by all.
His name was John Wesley Hardin, and even though this man killed around 40 people, everyone who knew him said he was one of the kindest and nicest people he had ever met.
His reasoning for killing all those people was because he "never killed anyone that didn't need killin'"
Obviously this guy was a complete nutjob, but became so infamous that Johnny Cash AND Bob Dylan have written songs inspired/about him.

Lately all that I've been listening to is Country. I've had on a bit of Jim Reeves, George Jones, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, Marty Robbins.. and obviously the Man In Black.

If no-one has ever listened to Marty Robbins, I suggest picking up a copy of Gunfighter Ballads. I was suggested this album by my good friend Gary and I tell you what, it's awesome! From start to finish it's just tales of outlaws in the old west.
Cowboys riding into town, pulling out their guns, looking for their enemies, finding women, loving them and losing them, riding through the old towns and breaking in horses and the such.
It just got me thinking about how interesting the old west is.
Johnny Cash in his autobiography Cash talks about how when he wrote his concept albums he spent alot of time in old libraries, reading up on the history of the old west, the history of cowboys and the people who have made into the history books.
This is slightly off topic of cowboys, but there are other people who have been made famous by country music...

One of whom is Ira Hayes.

Call him drunken Ira Hayes

He won't answer anymore

Not the whiskey drinkin' Indian

Nor the marine that went to war

He fought in World War II and was one of the guys in this picture:

He was part of the Pima Indian tribe and fought in the marines and helped secure on of the mountains in Iwo Jima during the war.

The song is about how much Ira done for his country, even though the country wasn't all that kind to the native Americans who lived there. Apparently he never spoke much about the flag raising but would speak about his time in the marines.

Wikipedia it.. it's an intersting read.

Anyways, back to the cowboys... just the way they are depicted in the music of the likes of Cash and Robbins is remarkable.

It's not like gangster rap these days where they glamorise the use of foul language and guns to be the answer for everything, but they tell the stories and tell them like they are.

Big Iron for example, its a song about an outlaw looking for a guy called Texas Red, but a ranger pulled out his gun and killed him first before he could get anywhere.

Give My Love To Rose is a song about a man who just got out of prison and was found by the railroad track, dying. We don't actually know why, but this could be to do with maybe someone he got on the wrong side of before he went to prison, or maybe someone who had a vendetta against.

But either way, he tells the singer of the song (Johnny Cash) to take the bag of money he has and give it to his wife and son, tell them to carry on their lives and he's sorry he wasn't there for them.

Another song, Folsom Prison Blues, Johnny Cash sings about being stuck in Folsom prison, hearing a train on a nearby rail road going past, knowing those people are out probably on vacation, visiting family, or generally just enjoying themselves, while he's stuck in a tiny prison cell.

The lyrics are as follows:

When I was just a baby,
My Mama told me, "Son,
Always be a good boy,
Don't ever play with guns,"
But I shot a man in Reno,
Just to watch him die,
When I hear that whistle blowin',
I hang my head and cry.

This neither glamorises nor "big's up" the idea of killing someone.

It tells a story of a man having to pay the price, living in a tiny cell, in his own living hell with the guilt of killing someone, hanging his in shame and despair knowing that he won't be riding that train any time soon.

And then we have 50 cent... here's some lyrics from his song "Hustlers Ambition"

The women on my life bring confusion shit
So like Nino from New Jack, I'll have to cancel that bitch

I want the finer things in my life
So I hustle (hustle)
Nigga you get in my way when while I'm trying to get mine
And I'll buck you (buck you)
I don't care who you run with, or where you from
Nigga fuck you (fuck you)
I want to find the thing thats in my life
So I hustle (hustle)

And this defo has be my favourite line from the song:

I cook crack in the microwave, niggas can't fuck with me

So, as you can see, the lyrics of 25p AKA 50 cent, don't really make much sense, but those that do seem to make out that it's ok to "cancel" which I'm presuming means to "pop a cap in" those "bitches" that are seemingly confusing and frustrating poor old fiddy!

And apparently it's also ok to "buck you" if you get in his way... which I don't think means you get to sit on his back and ride for as long as you can til you fall off, like the cowboys do in the rodeo (see? cowboys rule!).

Although I love how he thinks it's the norm to "cook crack in the microwave" LOL!!!

Anyways, this was a pretty pointless blog, I think next time we might tackle the subject of the living dead...