The Yes vote was a great win, so here's a couple of sad songs by LGBTI country singers about love gone wrong to celebrate

Celebrations in Sydney. Photo: Peter Boyle/Green Left Weekly.

They say nothing good ever happens, but events yesterday sure put paid to that! Yes, I got a ticket to Alabama's "alt-country"/Americana superstar Jason Isbell! I cannot fucking wait! You can check out this recently streamed live show of Isbell with his band the 400 Units from the famous Ryman Auditorium in Nashville to see why this is really fucking exciting news.

Also, the results were released of the non-binding survey on whether to support marriage equality in this country and it was a decisive victory for "yes" in a rare win for humanity, equality and basic fucking human decency.

(For the record, Isbell tweeted his support for Australians voting "yes" early in the campaign.)

It is a strange feeling, in this godforsaken nation, to feel positive about anything relating to the cluster fuck that passes for "politics" here. But after an unnecessary voluntary postal plebiscite (coz obviously in 2017 there is no other way to resolve an important issue than mailing out ballot papers with prepaid envelopes via a largely defunded postal service) and a fucking ugly campaign by the well-funded, Christian fundamentalist-driven no campaign...

... the vote, with a turn out of 79.5% of registered voters, was about 62% "yes", with clear majorities in all state and territories.

As a non-binding survey -- why would you spend $122 million in taxpayers money to resolve something definitively -- it does not resolve the issue in-and-of-itself. But it makes it a political certainty in some form, and a bill is expected to pass parliament by Christmas.

This has made a lot of people very happy. You can see some of them below, in the Green Left TV footage of the moment the result was announced to thousands of people in Sydney's Albert Park.



No doubt it has made a few people sad, mostly people called Miranda, Tony or Lyle. I won't show you them because there's too much misery in the world already.

So finally, Australia can catch up with famously socially progressive nations like Ireland and that country that gave Donald Trump the keys to the White House in allowing same-sex couples to marry, if not fully resolving all issues such as legal discrimination for trans people in various fields.

It may not be perfect, it may have taken an unnecessary toll on LGBTI people, but still.... if a win like that is not worth celebrating, I don't know what is.

And I know how to celebrate!

With Guinness!

With whiskey!

And sad country songs!!!

There is no occasion I can think of in which decent country songs about love going wrong are not appropriate, least of all a situation which is, after all, a celebration of love!

Now, country music has a reputation as some sort of uniformly socially backwards form, but it isn't. There is all sorts of country music, including by LGBTI performers. The mainstream country industry can be very conservative, and many just see that as the entire genre, as though you could reduce rock music to Limp Bizkit or Billy Joel, or hip-hop to, I don't know, Vanilla Ice....

So here are a couple of good country songs by a couple of LGBTI singers. Because love is love, as they say, and it frequently fucking hurts!



'I'm drinking water tonight coz I drank all the whiskey this morning. Drank the whiskey this morning, coz my baby, she ain't coming home...'

This is a fucking sad song. You see, "last night she went up to the bar, said she met some big country star". This country star is, apparently, "like [country legend] Dwight Yoakam". Not is Dwight Yoakam, which might be easier to take, merely sounds like the guy. And she's gone having "taken every last one of my good years". God, no wonder Sarah Shook is on the whiskey in the morning.

Listed last year by Rolling Stone in a list of 10 New Country Artists You Need To Know, when she isn't spending her mornings drinking whiskey, Sarah Shook is an openly LGBTI performer and civil rights activist from North Carolina, who has won an award for her work in promoting a Safe Spaces initiative in Chapel Hill, NC.



'It took 19 years to find her, and three years to make her mine. We had four good years of loving, but it only took two words to break her heart...'

Oh God, Melbourne-based country-blues singer Cash Savage knows how to pull out a gut-wrenching vocal.

In some ways, this is less "country" country than Sarah Shook. With Savage's bluesy voice over a driving banjo, it has bit of a bluesy folk vibe more than straight up "twang". But it definitely has a country soul -- ie: misery over love gone wrong.

As to marriage equality, Cash Savage never waited for any bullshit plebiscite. She married her partner, magazine editor Amy Middleton, a while back.

***

And yes, OK... I guess I might as well throw a couple of "happy" and "positive" songs in the mix.



'Aint gonna reference no lonesome road, I confess my affection has grown and grown. I'm in love!'

Here, Cash Savage sings to the glories of love in a song that is almost a spiritual experience. Soulful doesn't being to describe Savage's vocal style, and on "19 Years" and "I'm In Love", she shows how perfectly capture both extremes of that crazy fucking thing called "love".

And ok, this one below is not country nor is about love, at least not in an individual sense. This is a song by Gossip, fronted by LGBTI singer Beth Ditto, about LGBTI defiance in the face of the then-Bush administration's attacks on her community. It is... well it is defiant and on point.



'Standing in the way of control, we live our lives....'

The Daily Carlo: More good news! Andrew Bolt is back on form railing at marriage equality!!!

Here at the Daily Carlo, it is almost as if we (there is no shame in a royal "we" when you are as successful and talented a blogger as we are) have been bitten by some sort of "optimist bug" because, rarely, this is the second blog post in a row to be about good news!

There seems a rare outbreak of good news, whether it is finding the existence of some new songs by Texas-based country singer Hayes Carll songs on YouTube or discovering that Murdoch journalist, culture warrior and convicted racist Andrew Bolt is back on form railing wildly about the "tyranny" of the June 26 United States Supreme Court decision that ruled in favour of same-sex marriages!

This is reassuring, as I was getting worried about the poor bastard. After the historic referendum in the Irish republic in May that voted in favour of marriage equality, a clearly demoralised Bolt wrote: "The battle for same-sex marriage has been won ...  In 2004, Newspoll showed only one-third of Australians backed same-sex marriage. In 2014, it was twice as many and I suspect support has grown since."

Describing himself as a "sceptic" about allowing full equality between heterosexual and same-sex marriages -- still explicitly banned in this country thanks to a 2004 law passed under John Howard -- Bolt said that "the Yes vote in Catholic Ireland last week broke the back of any real resistance here, too".

But the arch-conservative has got his mojo back, which is just as well, as it is Written that one of the Final Signs Of The Coming Of The Apocalypse is when "a Tabloid Hack shalt cease opposing Equality, Progress and Things That Make People Happy Without Having Any Impact On Others" and so I'd begun stocking up on canned food.

He's back on form!

Now, all is as it should be. In the gloriously titled "A tyranny of judges forces same-sex marriage on US voters", Bolt hits out strongly at those five oppressive judges who voted to "invent the right to same-sex marriage" despite the fact this runs "in direct opposition to the expressed views of voters in several states".

Of course, if we wanted to be picky, we could point out that it would seem Bolt is being a little selective in his defence of popular opinion, seeing as US polls have consistently shown majority support for marriage equality since 2010.

But in his deeply reassuring rant, Bolt approves of the "magnificent dissenting judgement" of Justice Samuel Alito, who noted: "At present, no one—including social scientists, philosophers, and historians—can predict with any certainty what the long-term ramifications of widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage will be."

And indeed the ramifications could be anything. Society could collapse. The Earth could open up and swallow us whole. The Giant Evil Squid Monster From The Deepest Ocean, renown for its homophobic views, could be reawoken after a 10,000-year sleep and devour us all.

Or, and this is just one of the many options, gay people could, if they so choose, have their relationships officially recognised as marriages on the same equal footing as straight marriages. It is really very hard to tell.

SEE THE TYRANNY!!!

THE OPPRESSION IS HORRIFIC!!!

IS THIS WHAT THE BOSTON TEA PARTY SACRIFICED ALL THAT TEA FOR???

ARRRRRRGHHH!!!!

OH FOR GOD'S SAKE DON'T PROVOKE THE GIANT EVIL KILLER SQUID MONSTER FROM THE DEEPEST OCEAN, YOU KNOW IT HATES THIS KINDA THING!!!

Oh, and here you go, here is a totally unrelated song by Gossip.




'Standing in the way of control, we live our lives...'