SR-71 Tells Politics of 'Politically Correct'
December 14 -- Given the tumult that the U.S. presidential election has been during the past weeks, Baltimore band SR-71 figured that it was an opportune time to put out a song called "Politically Correct" — which has, in fact, vaulted the quartet onto mainstream rock radio playlists. The band even created a video for the song, interspersed with clips from the election and posted it on click2music.com.
But frontman Mitch Allan says the song is more about societal behavior than presidential politics and was, in fact, inspired by watching Mel Brooks' frank and irreverent Blazing Saddles with a girlfriend at the University of Maryland, where he was a film major.
"I had to see some comedy films for a class," the 28-year-old singer-guitarist says, "and she had never seen it. So we rented it and came home and watched the movie, and she's laughing and laughing and laughing, but she's intimidated because of the language and how it was so over the top about racial issues. So we had this big political discussion, and afterwards she went to sleep and I picked up her guitar and wrote the chorus on the spot. The song is about me, pretty much how I'm always putting my foot in my mouth. I come from the Mel Brooks era, where you could say exactly how you felt and people understood. If someone asked your opinion, you could tell them and didn't have to butter them up — not like today, where you have to measure everything before you say it."
Allan doesn't subscribe to that theory, of course. And here's one of his pet peeves: SR-71, which was named after the high-speed military jet (all of the band members' parents have spent time in the Air Force), came out at about the same time as other "number name" bands Blink-182, S Club 7, and others. "I couldn't stand the fact that we had a number in our name with everyone else — even with Blink-182, who are cool," Allan says. "You don't think about everybody else when you make a decision as important as a name."
But he and his bandmates — guitarist Mark Beauchemin, bassist Jeff Reid, and drummer Dan Garvin — will still take it over its predecessor, Honor Among Thieves. "That was long and huge," he notes. "Now our name on a T-shirt can be huge; it sounds long, but it looks really short. We like that."
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