Song du Jour: "Life During Wartime"

God Johnson, "Life During Wartime" (live at the Cabooze, 10/28/06).

Something's happening. In his A-List for Michael Franti and Spearhead, Britt Robson wrote about it: "Watching Franti, a six-foot-six dreadlocked former b-baller, deliver the goods onstage is the perfect sustenance for door-knockers and cold-callers putting their shoulders to the tectonic plates to produce the lefty tsunami of Election 2006."

Franti and Robson and the door-knockers aren't alone. Above ground, as the pendulum swings and politicians like Keith Ellison talk about love, the underground is teeming with a movement of punks, hippies, and other uncategorizables, many of who were in costume last night at the Cabooze for the free love-in that is Wookiefoot.

Hugs between utter but not complete strangers abounded, and I am so tempted to invoke the '60s here, but I won't because this is a new generation of lovers, who have blitzed through their own cynicism to embrace, as Barack Obama has it, "the audacity of hope."

This Talking Heads tune, done by some squeaky-clean porn-star boy-angels in robes spoke to it, all of it. Sung by the "You Looked Better On Myspace" T-shirt-sporting keyboard player, the song lifted the room and turned it into, yes, a party, a disco, some foolin' around -- with a throbbing conscience and consciousness that will serve all concerned well over the next couple weeks and years.

In other words -- just one, actually -- what was it that V (Guy Fawkes) heard all night at the Cabooze? Over and over, from young and old, drunk and sober, high and grounded, coming up to him, dancing, clasping his hand, flashing him the V-peace-victory sign, showing him their coat-hangered V tattoos, giving him the light-dark love, asking him where he would be on November 5 and invoking the quote, "remember, remember the fifth of November"?

What was it?

What was it they said?

Oh, yeah:

"Revolution."