I don't know when conservatives started trying to embrace rock music, but it must have started fairly recently. Rock was always seen as subversive by wingers, a cultural malignancy that must be destroyed. Movies like The Blackboard Jungle depicted rock as both symptom and catalyst of cultural decay and its chief manifestations, sexual promiscuity and juvenile delinquency.

It was Minneapolis station WDGY that led the local record-burning hordes when John Lennon commented that the Beatles were "bigger than Jesus". When I was in high school in the 1980s, Jerry Falwell was insisting that rock & roll was the devil's music, and the beat was dirty. Pat Boone attacked Duran Duran for their cheesy but innocuous lyric "dance into the fire". Boone maintained that that was clearly a satanic reference.

So it seems odd that the National Review would compile such a list, but the choices themselves seem odd and misplaced. "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Taxman" are obvious conservative anthems, but "Won't Get Fooled Again?" Miller claims that the song champions a conservatives' flinty distrust of government. He seems to forget that liberalism -- especially 60's liberalism -- is aggressively anti-authoritarian (remember, John -- don't trust anyone over 30).

A number of Miller's other choices seem very strange indeed. "My City Was Gone" by the Pretenders? ("The farms of Ohio / had been replaced by shopping malls / and muzak filled the air / from Seneca to Cuyahoga Falls" -- maybe John thought the song was celebrating urban sprawl). "Der Komissar" by After The Fire? (A fun song, but it's all throwaway lyrics....I haven't the faintest idea what it's about, or if it's about anything).

Miller scrapes so hard to find 100 songs to back up his thesis that he even chooses Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man" -- a conservative song, I suppose -- but I've never heard it on a rock station. And never will.