Protestors across America, here’s your new chant (in 2/4 time):
“Fuck ‘Ice’ / Do I have to say it twice? / No one wants you here / So, fuck you, ‘Ice’ / There will not be any peace until the ‘Ice’ gets off our streets / Get out of our cities / Fuck you, ‘Ice.’ ”
Fort Worth pop singer-songwriter Jeff Zero just released the song after not being asleep, getting pissed off at the news, putting out a social-media call for artists, gathering them, and performing and recording the track (at a studio that shall not be named out of fear of backlash) — quickly but not sloppily. “Fuck ‘Ice’ ” is quite the tight, rousing acoustic guitar-forward ditty. Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie would definitely approve.
“Ostensibly,” Zero said, “ ‘Fuck “Ice” ’ is a protest song about the weather — obviously *cough, cough* — although I suppose that under the right lighting, from a certain angle, and with a particular mindset, one might somehow interpret it differently.
“ ‘Ice’ can be dangerous,” Zero went on. “Nobody likes when ‘Ice’ spreads across the land. It can cause people to slip and fall. Cars can slide off the road and crash. ‘Ice’ even sunk the Titanic. ‘Ice’ lingers in the shadows and melts in the light. The weather is changing, and hopefully we will soon get ‘Ice’ off our streets and out of our cities.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE/Ice) has become a scourge in the hands of the current occupant of the White House. Once Donald Trump assumed office, his administration said ICE would target “the worst of the worst,” but analysis by the Cato Institute and others found that 73% of ICE detainees had no serious criminal convictions. The same person who described Mexicans and other immigrants south of the border as murderers and rapists probably has no idea that only 5% of all ICE detainees have been convicted of violent crimes like murder and rape. The White House’s goal is not to make our world safer. It’s to terrorize mostly Democratic-voting communities to scare them from voting. Or even living.
Why’d you do it, Jeff?
“The short version is that I oppose the American gestapo that is ICE,” he said. “Masked agents without cameras or nametags/identification snatching people off streets was dystopian on its own, but the occupation of Minneapolis, coupled with the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were the final straws. To remain silent is to be complicit.
“When I was a younger man,” Zero continued, “I was taught that ‘if you ever find yourself saying, “Somebody should do something,” remember that you are ‘somebody.’ So, I did.”
Zero is hoping for a chain reaction among local singer-songwriters from his track and the recent, earlier release of an anti-fascist song by a Fort Worth friend of his.
If you know indie-rock singer-songwriter Denver Williams, Zero said, “he is not the type of person to be political or to cause friction. He’s just about the easiest person to get along with as you’ll ever meet. We’d had some private discussions about the state of things, but then he wrote, recorded, and shot a video for ‘Now that All of Your Secret Racist Dreams Are Coming True.’ That was my wakeup call.”
Zero deflects credit for his new track. “I’m not sure I did anything. I was angry and frustrated and felt I needed to pick up my guitar to deal with my thoughts, and ‘Fuck “Ice” ’ came to me almost fully formed in about 20 minutes.”
Gathering all the musicians, performing and recording the song, and shooting the video took about a week, Zero said.
“I am beyond happy with the results and with the support of my circle of friends, who all came out and sang, played, and helped,” he said. “It turned out better than I dared hope, and it was all 100% unscripted and spontaneous once we got [to the studio]. It was an amazing day, and I am blessed beyond measure to have the support of some amazing people, all of whom volunteered their time and effort.”
The patriots who responded to Zero’s call with gusto include percussionist Mike McMurray, pianist/accordionist Tommy Henson, guitarist Stin Hudson, and harmonica player CKB, along with lead guitarist Williams and the angelic “Fuck ‘Ice’ ” choir: Sonny Votolato, BK, Itchy Richie, Sarah Savage, and Faith Thompson, along with Henson and Hudson.
Zero hopes the song raises awareness “in an indirect allegorical way with enough plausible deniability to spark debate and inspire someone else to write Protest Songs Nos. 3 to 1,000.”
“Fuck ‘Ice’ ” is available for free streaming and downloading via Bandcamp.
https://jeffzeromusic.bandcamp.com/track/fuck-ice
This column reflects the opinions of the editorial board and not the Fort Worth Weekly. To submit a column, please email Editor Anthony Mariani at Anthony@FWWeekly.com. He will gently edit it for clarity and concision.
