sláinte

To know me is to know the zealousness of my Anglo/Celtophilia; and no other band embodies both Englishness and Irishness (paradoxical but apparently possible) as gloriously, and obnoxiously, as the Pogues. As the English-born son of Irish emigrants, Shane MacGowan and his band of joyous rabble-rousers combined the reactionary angst of the London punk scene with the lumpenproletariat defiance lauded in Celtic tradition - thereby creating something heretically novel, incendiary, and somewhat sublime in its own twisted right.

(By the way, if it seems like I'm overanalyzing the Pogues, who essentially created really good drinking music, it's because I am - I wrote a 20-page paper about the band and the Ulster punk scene during the height of the Troubles, ~1976-1985, for my Irish Lit class last semester (seriously). I still kind of can't believe that while my classmates pored over obscure 19th-century emigration records, I got away with using Undertones albums and YouTube videos of Stiff Little Fingers tearing shit up as my primary sources. Suckers.)

AnYwAy, I am aware that yesterday was St. Patrick's Day and that this post may seem a little late to the Irish Catholic game. But, in my defense, I was on a plane all day yesterday and my deeply flawed understanding of the basic laws of time and space tend towards the belief that, once a minimum of three time zones are crossed within the space of one 24-hour period, then time, for the traveller in question, ceases to exist at all. So for all intents and purposes today is March 17th in Caroline's Wonky Universe. Bottoms up!

In honor of Ireland, Shane MacGowan's teeth, and disconcerting 1980s music video nonsense, here's what I think is the Pogues' most beautiful track, "A Pair of Brown Eyes," off their revelatory 1985 album Rum, Sodomy and the Lash.