Reply #17: Read about the song here

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

There's quite a bit of irony in Greg Lewis's essay about using Neil Young's "Southern Man" and Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" as a metaphor for the 2004 election between John Kerry and George Bush. Really, the essay is quite remarkable. Aside from the fact that Lewis can't even spell the band's or Ronnie Van Zant's name correctly, his misunderstanding of both Young's and Skynyrd's songs is way off the mark.

Much as the right fundamentally misunderstood Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" and Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World", again there is a wholesale mis-appropriation of both Skynyrd's and Young's message.

Thrasher could go into it all again. But it's already all been said before in this analysis of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama".

http://www.thrasherswheat.org/archive/2004_11_01_thrasherswheat_archive.html

http://www.thrasherswheat.org/jammin/lynyrd.htm

The band campaigned for Carter...saluted the artists in Muscle Shoals and there is a bit of controveresy surrounding how people have interpreted it.

It's almost a slap to the people who own that song as their own today.