The Tea Party

Another Tea Party?
In the aftermath of the global financial mortgage-backed security fraud/unavoidable catastrophic necessary-bailout-for-the-rich-but screw-the-poor in 2008, there was of course, great anger and frustration amongst the citizens of the United States.
  All that emotion, and all that anger would and should have been directed at the big banks on Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the Rich arseholes like those theives at Goldman Sachs, who first committed fraud by selling worthless mortgage-backed derivatives and crashed the economy when those assets were found out to be junk. Goldman and the other big, theiving scumbag banksters then took government bailouts to the tune of over $700 billion and claimed a big win for crapitalism by giving their Chief Executive Arse-holes huge bonuses all thanks to the kindness of middle-class American taxpayer, whom they ripped-off to balance their books and preserve their asses.

   Instead, all that anger was directed at homeowners who were about to be foreclosed on by those same big banks. Why? Because Fox News, CNBC and a guy named Rick Santelli told them to, apparently. In a long rant against big government and reckless mortgage-ownership, Santelli and the two rightest of right-wing networks stirred up the masses against... the future homeless... the homeowners that took on too much risky debt. Of course, neither Fox, CNBC or Santelli explained that the biggest banks in the world were the ones that created, bought and sold those ridiculously risky mortgages, paid for those mortgages to get the triple-A stamp of approval by Standard & Poors and other ratings agencies, then sold them off, fraudulently, to make more money from suckers like your grandmother's Pension Funds company.
   When all this anger stirred up by the television came to fruition in marches, protests and  demonstrations against the government, they were not met with tear gas and police in riot gear (there weren't enough of them to justify that), but instead they were met with the smiling happy face of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santelli and other bimbos making speeches who decided that these people were all against Big Government helping home-owners and they would call themselves the Tea Party, named after the Boston Tea Party which had something to do with drinking tea and getting fightin' mad against big government...

    However, there was already something called The Tea Party.

   The Tea Party is a rock band, not associated with any right-wing political group. Three musicians, originally from Windsor Ontario met in Cherry Beach Studios in the Toronto Portlands in 1990, and after a marathon jam session, they decided to form a band.
    Singer/Guitarist Jeff Martin, Bass/Keyboardist Stuart Chatwood & Drummer Jeff Burrows created a band they named The Tea Party, not after the Boston Tea Party of the American Revolution, but in reference to the 'beat generation' poets/writers Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. The idea of the name was to pay homage to the musical undertones of the poems themselves and the poets who often spent time in 'hash sessions', using hashish and sometimes benzedrine to spur the flow of creativity in their minds.

   The music of The Tea Party is a blend of rock and progressive ideas, often using a mixture of keyboard and guitar-riffs and special guitar-tunings to give their songs a little bit of an exotic-sounding middle eastern-ish feel. Their songs often take a little inspiration from the bands of the psychedelic era, combining improvisational elements with extended arrangements to create music that took listeners on a journey from beginning to end. This blend of hard-rock, progressive and middle-east/north african vibes has led their music to being described as "Moroccan-Roll" by some reviewers and fans.
   All of this would suggest that The Tea Party are truly skilled musicians and indeed they are. Not only are they capable of performing all of these eclectic and wonderful sounds, they are probably one of the best live bands that has ever been, and if you ever get the chance to go see them, you should buy a ticket immediately.

   In fact, their greatest success in winning over an audience is ironically in Australia where live bands usually meet a difficult struggle. Many bands touring "Down-Under" come away with a feeling like they've been kicked in the side by the crowds of rowdy Aussies that often don't hold back when it comes to letting a band know when they're not performing well. Large venues are not so easy to fill, even for well-known rock acts, while the Australian bar-scene is reputed to be notoriously un-kind to bands and artists that look better in a video than they sound in a live venue. It's said the Australian highways are littered with the broken and scattered egos of British and North-American popstars and rockstars that thought very highly of themselves before going to land of the Kangaroo and Koala. Suffice it to say: If a band can consistently impress the Aussie audiences, they've done very well.

teaparty.com    
     The band and the political movement that took the name tea party have never met in real life. However, the closest they came was via the band's website. The members of the band took the name teaparty.com and bought the website domain name all the way back in 1993 when the internet still was still so slow that many people wondered if it was 'for real'. Needless to say, when most people were using a 56kbps (or even slower) telephone modem to surf the web, there wasn't a whole lot of argument over who should own any given domain name. However, while the band was on an extended hiatus after 2007, this break-up in the group coincided with the rise of that other Tea Party in the USA.

   Around the time of the height of popularity of Palin, Bachmann and friends, in about 2008-11, the band's website was hit by so many requests of the political sort that the band had to change the site to a single photo of the band with a caption that read simply: "No politics, just Rock and Roll."  That website/domain name had suddenly skyrocketed in value. There were rumours that the band was going to cash-in on this bonanza, and It is estimated that at that time, they could have sold their stake in the internet domain for as much $1 Million US, and most internet value-checkers think that it could still garner a large chunk of money now. However, so far the band has still not sold the domain name and it remains theirs today, showing that they aren't willing to sell out their music or their fans for a bit of quick cash.
   Now, in the year 2014, the unfortunate shared-name right-wing US political group has, to this point, seemingly done little to help or accomplish anything for all those angered voters in the United States. Palin, Cruz, Santelli, Perry and others appear to have all but stopped talking or trying, except in the most superficial sense, to still hold true to the wishes of the most middle of middle-class citizens. And to be brutally honest, these political representatives really couldn't even accomplish the one thing that all of them could agree on: they couldn't stop Mitt Romney from getting the Republican nomination for the president in 2012! Long before that, in 2011, many of these supposed right-wing 'tea party' activists actually joined or took part in the Occupy movement in several cities, suggesting that these people may not have been very well-represented by Sarah Palin or Herman Cain in the first place.

   The Tea Party, the band, were not only formed first, but it appears that they may outlive their U.S. political counterparts as well. In 2011, they responded to their audience wishes and re-united. They have revamped their website and they have since released a DVD of their live shows in Australia in 2013. Currently, they are hard at work on their upcoming release of a new album this summer; 2014. Rest assured, even without having heard it yet, this music blog is already predicting that The Tea Party will produce yet another great album as they have done so many times before.

   So the moral of this blog is this, when you are contemplating something so profound as listening to The Tea Party, I would suggest that The Tea Party that you really want to give your attention to is not a bunch of politicians that make empty promises under another big banner with meaningless slogans like "Taking Back America". I would instead recommend giving both your listening time and your monetary donations to The Tea Party that is much more respectful of your true needs and sense of self. The Tea Party that takes you on a musical journey to new places, opens your consciousness, enlivens your senses and awakens your spirit, not just your anger. The Tea Party that engages your mind, while giving it the freedom and creativity that it truly desires, and The Tea Party that puts on a great live rock show that rivals the best in the world. For in the end, there really is only one...

Objective opinions of political persons, bankster activities and movements are backed by facts learned mostly from Matt Taibbi's book Griftopia (2010)

The Tea Party can STILL be found at www.teaparty.com

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