The Bad Penny (beta)

Hello, Bad Penny readers. Surely you are familiar with and have probably read some installments of our ongoing On Tyranny series, which focuses on how Authoritarian America is damaging artists, their careers and their personal lives. This writer has been somewhat surprised at how tame and mild some of the editions are in this series, which is closing in on 65 installments.

This is not one of those installments.

Today’s entry comes courtesy of Morgan Y. Evans, who resides in Orange County, California, and whose Walking Bombs project is a solo and collaborative vehicle for Evans, writer Morgan Ywain Vink-Lainas Evans, and other compatriots of theirs. Yesterday, Walking Bombs issued a new single, a lo-fi version of the song “Barbaric Balconies,” which you can purchase for a buck and a half on Bandcamp here.

Much of Walking Bombs’ material conveys Evans’ rage against the machine, for lack of a better phrase, so what he shared with us for On Tyranny didn’t exactly come out of left field. We edited Evans’ submission a bit to make it a smoother read but left the artist’s message fully intact, as one of the core missions of this website is to defend and fight for freedom of speech, arguably the most important right in a democratic society. Just be forewarned that much of what follows is, as the kids say, “NSFW.”

That said, it’s real, unrestrained and from the heart. In fact, we’d go so far as to say that the rage expressed in this missive of sorts should be awakened in the hearts of each of us who are gravely concerned that democracy – which has already left the building, if you haven’t noticed – might never come back. As The Bad Penny says on the On Tyranny index page and often reiterates in entries, thank you to Evans and others for mustering the courage to speak out and inspire others to do the same when we realistically may lose the right to do so in the blink of an eye.