Papa Don't Preach - Madonna
Father and Son - Cat Stevens
Bloody Motherfucking Asshole - Martha Wainwright
Papa Was a Rolling Stone - The Temptations
My Old Man - Ian Dury & the Blockheads
Daddy's Gone - Glasvegas
Dance With My Father - Luther Vandross
Alcoholic - Starsailor
Five More Minutes - Mull Historical Society
Dinner at Eight -Rufus Wainwright
It would probably be possible to create a whole list from the laundry washed in public of the Wainwrights, but i've just included a couple, though Beauty Mark is another good one by Rufus Wainwright. Dinner at Eight is an outstanding song, definitely my favourite by Rufus Wainwright, even though it sounds like it belongs in a musical.
There are also quite a few of these in the world of extremely adult AOR, what with Vandross, Clapton's My Father's Eyes and the beast that is Mike and the Mechanics' The Living Years. Hey, nothing wrong with it if people have got something to get off their chest.
It does strike me, though this is hardly a new thought, that the role of fatherhood has declined without measure in the last few decades and that we no longer live in a patriarchal society at all.
There are various different levels to this. First of all, how many people do we know or hear about whose defining parental relationship is with their father - this applies both to people we know and the number of celebrities who go on and on about how great their mother is in interviews. I suppose it was always thus that the father was a distant figure but his clear and defined status as head and provider of the household overrode that - it goes without saying that this is not so often true anymore, but next to that and linked in to it is, i think, the passing of the idea of a paternal god. If God was a father, that fed into the idea of one's own father - now it is not hippy-thinking to view "god" as female, whichever way you look at it, mainly in the sense that we are realise our status as a race is entirely wrapped up with the Earth, and the Earth has always been personified as female. I think both subconsciously and consciously people's highest power now is an alma mater rather than a pater familias. There are various other little factors governing this as well, like the fact the monarch has been a female for nearly 60 years - all this is pretty obvious stuff, I guess. I think, as fatherhood finds its new role, what's interesting is that the modern conception of a "good" father is a father who is able to take on several of the roles traditionally given to a mother as possible. All good stuff.
This is just an outsider's view looking in, on various levels, but i guess the fact that more and more people are outsiders to what fatherhood means is indicative of the point. The whole line of thought was triggered by what I wrote below, based on one of the great fathers of all time, Agamemnon, and the seemingly inescapable idea of the sins of the father passed down from generation to generation, whereas now I feel the sins of the father can, if lucky, be very easily escapable, and one no longer needs to put oneself before the judgment of Athena ...
This one is dedicated to some of the great fathers, Agamemnon, Royal Tenenbaum, and of course, our current "Daddies' Sauce Father of the Year", John "JT" "Captain Fantastic" Terry...
It's intended to be comical, rhythmical and littered with allusions that give value to my education ...
FATHER OF THE YEAR
They say that things get better.
The future is unwritten.
There's no cycle of violence.
Sometimes things just get better.
He named his son Orestes.
Wit was his only refuge.
The son he named Orestes
took beatings in the playground.
He said he had the illness
to end all feuds and bad blood.
It wasn't consequential
if that was true or not.
For years even the furies
bowed down to his royalty,
this king through generations
destroyed all things around him.
You see, Little Orestes,
this pattern that emerges.
There's really no avoiding
the judgement of Athena.
He died one summer evening
in mystery and in torment.
Orestes did not do it
if that's what you are wondering.
Sometimes things just get better.
The furies leave the mirror.
Succession is forsaken.
A new story is written.
Orestes became Duncan.
No one is any wiser.
Duncan had a girl called Jo,
not Iphigenia.
A king has many enemies
and chance has many allies.
He paid and was not paid back
on that summer evening.
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