Thinking a lot about how people have liked to meme on late-life Johnny Cash for “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” and his “Hurt” cover but man, I think his last few years were amazing. He was a man who was always on the right side of things, pro-union, anti-prison, and then at the end of his life he just got weird and apocalyptic, looking back on his own life and staring death in the face. That shit rules. He went out with dignity, which can be said about a lot of people, but more than that, he went out with ambition. “You can have it all, my empire of dirt” sounds melodramatic coming from 29 year old Trent Reznor singing about drugs, but coming from a 70 year old man who was one of the faces of his entire goddamn genre, who had fought for change his entire life and never seen any real progress? That’s fucking devastating.
“I wore black because I liked it. I still do, and wearing it still means something to me. It’s still my symbol of rebellion – against a stagnant status quo, against our hypocritical houses of God, against people whose minds are closed to others’ ideas.“— Johnny Cash
“Hurt” literally only works when it’s sung by an 80 year old man who somehow achieved both everything and nothing that he set out to do in his lifetime. I don’t make the rules.
