Matter of Fact, It's the Only Dance in Cuba

Well, that's that taken care of! A couple of days ago, I had mentioned my difficulty in locating and securing decent free file hosting; it appears I've now found some, and I can operate as such without subjecting my readership to pop-under ads and general slipshoddiness.

So, huzzah! Less hassle involved in music posts! How to commemorate the occasion? How to try out the new host? How, how, how. How to--

Why, of course! Today is Sunday, February 24th, 2008. You remember what that means, right? It means that today marks the final day of Fidel Castro's fourty-nine-year reign as Cuban head of state. Fourty-nine years! Fidel Castro has been in power longer than Barack Obama or Stephen Harper have been alive. Love him or hate him, you know this is important; when a dude spends half a century doing anything on the world stage, much less running a nation, it's going to be notable when he finally retires.

It is popularly reported that Castro is believed to have survived at least 600 (not a typo; six hundred) assassination attempts since his ascension to power in 1959; that works out to 12.24 a year, or roughly one assassination attempt per month (with an extra one thrown in every leap year) for the last five decades. Fourty-nine years of gunshots, explosives, poison pills, gimmicked pens, contaminated wetsuits, booby-trapped mollusks and exploding cigars -- no, I'm not kidding about these -- and after all of that he retires to go home and die peacefully in his sleep someday. What a world!

Today is historic, and with this movement into history comes a shift in popular culture; from this point onward, every reference made to Fidel Castro's Cuba is now outdated and behind the times. Books, magazines, newspapers, comics, movies, television shows -- they weren't outdated yesterday, but by tomorrow they'll be as anachronistic as calling Russia 'the Soviet Union' or calling downtown Winnipeg 'safe'.

So, with that in mind, here are a few songs that just aren't going to mean what they used to any more:

Jay Chevalier and His House Rockers - Castro Rock (Castro Rock, 1960)
[buy compilation | site | bio]

Lord Invader & His Calypso Group - Fidel Castro (Calypso Travels, 1959)
[buy | bio | info | via]

The Skatalites - Fidel Castro (Foundation Ska, 1997)
[buy | site | info | myspace]

Urge Overkill - Sister Havana (Saturation, 1993)
[buy | site | info | myspace | music video -- hoo boy the nineties did not age well]

MP3 posts, you guys! It's good to be doing these again.

I should get working on the next installment of Slurpees and Murder Home Video, but I'll have to think of a topic first; a Homicide Watch doesn't really make sense when there've been no homicides lately. (Although that has not been for lack of effort; the local news has been pretty damn weird over this past month.) Well, we'll see what I come up with.