Tim Fite: Fun Angry Music for Coding

So this post might have been a candidate for Angry Ruby (which is dedicated to whining about using Ruby) except that Ruby is delightful (in all sincerity) compared to dealing with several thousand lines of Bourne shell scripts that use every known flavor of grep and awk known to man. And you'd think porting them from OpenBSD to FreeBSD would be trivial. Sure. So driving home on Thursday I swore to not port another line of shell and begin the long needed port to language a not invented in the 1970s.

So besides doing a lot late night coding for the 4 days (discovering that Trader Joes energy drinks are as effective as they are economical, 99 cents!) I've started listening to Over the Counter Culture which was mentioned on the Sound Opinions Mid Year Best of 2007 sow I believe It's All Right Here got some play on NPR because my son was signing from the PG-13 version after only hearing it twice. It is quite catchy.

So besides buying Run DMC's Raising Hell (when I was a junior in high school, on a school trip to Manilla, Philippines, no doubt) and casually like some of the Beastie Boys songs that made it onto KROX over the years, I've never been a rap/hip hope listener. Just not me. However, I've really taken to this album. There are 4-5 solid tracks, which is pretty high.

Probably my favorite is In Your Hair which starts (and finishes) with these two stanzas.

A king is not a president
A roof is not a resident
The truth is not self evident
When youth is on the line

The Boss is not the boss of them
The cross is on the cross again
The crim is not a government
A crime is just a crime
The rhymes in

Hay Man are not the predictable sort you'd expect from pop hip hop:

...
Break these palms
Break these pines
Break these laws (?)
Break these lines
Break these looks
Break these lease
Break these hooks
Break this heat
Break these rocks
Break this concrete
...
Without no fuel the fire don't burn bright
Without no mule the car can't turn right
Did you hear that shit?
Let's play more Fite
Because somethings fit to change
in the furnace tonight.

Good stuff. Camouflage and I've been shot are both fairly amusing.

These songs are fairly political (predictably anti-corporate, anti-consumerism, anti-Bush-era America, etc.) but these music, rhymes, lyrics, and far from that ("stop faking butter, start faking lard!") and I figure they'll

Oh yeah the complete album is free to to download. So you have no excuse not to check it out.