Music

Folk music and the far right

One strength of the far right in Britain today is in their ability to capitalise on the concerns of working-class and poor people and exploit and twist those interests for their own racist aims. In the last couple of years, the BNP leadership has recommended to its activists that they start to spread their influence and try to insinuate themselves into the folk and traditional customs of Britain, in an attempt to retain what they call the “pure” culture of the white working classes. Fortunately, this kind of elite preservationism has not gone down well in British folk/trad circles, which have...

David Rovics: the remembering tradition

Tom Unterrainer went to listen to David Rovics singing his songs. I remember Warsaw We stood side by side The Star of David flew above the ghetto There we lived and there we died “I remember Warsaw”, David Rovics American radical culture has suffered a number of notable losses of late. Most recently Howard Zinn, and before him Utah Phillips, Kurt Vonnegut and Studs Terkel have passed from the scene of the living, to be remembered by their words and music alone. These were great losses indeed, all the more so for us British-based America-philes who have admired the distinct, “dissident”...

Can music change the world?

The Ruby Kid is a hip-hop artist who performs with Black Jacobins. Al Baker is a songwriter from Manchester who fronts folk-punk band The Dole Queue. As part of the recent “Red Scare Tour” they joined up to play to hundreds of people across the country, including a packed-out benefit gig for Leeds UCU’s strike fund. Here they discuss the crossovers between politics and music, and what it means to make “political” art. The Ruby Kid: We both get referred to as “political” artists a lot of the time; what does that label mean to you? Do you think it’s a useful one? Al Baker: I never describe my...

No Shelter Here

Reading the lyrics of the rock band, Rage against the Machine, was probably my first real exposure to radical ideas. My 13 year old self would doubtless have viewed the victory of the band’s ‘Killing in the Name’ in a chart race for Christmas number one against manufactured karaoke drivel like the X Factor as a triumphant prelude to the imminent revolutionary destruction of capitalism. Assuming there still are some 13 year olds somewhere in Britain who feel the same today, I am happy for them. I don’t, however, feel the same sense of euphoria that it seems many friends of my generation do. The...

Abuse, race and celebrity

Michael Jackson’s life and death raise a number of issues that socialists should be interested in. Abuse: Jackson’s father Joe physically and psychologically abused him while a child. As the manager of the Jackson 5, the band Michael and his brothers were in as children, Joe relentlessly forced them to pursue fame. He would punish the children with whippings. Michael would claim in later life that he had no childhood and that in his youth he would often vomit on seeing his father. Michael was twice publicly accused of child sexual abuse, One trial was settled for $22 million and at the other...

Why we’ll remember him

I’ve been thinking about Michael Jackson a lot this week. This is hardly surprising given the massive media coverage and that, well, everyone is talking about it. Within hours of the news breaking, the inevitable jokes were already doing the rounds. Generally, I’ve got a (probably quite inappropriate) weakness for dark humour. However, on this occasion, I was struck by it all being quite sad. The bare bones of the matter are that one of the most outrageously talented performers of our times had collapsed and died. The reports in the London free papers, which I’ll admit to ploughing through...

Michael Jackson – a communist obituary

I’ve been thinking about Michael Jackson a lot this week. This is hardly surprising given the massive media coverage and that, well, everyone is talking about it. Within hours of the news breaking, the inevitable jokes were already doing the rounds. Generally, I’ve got a [probably quite...

What is it all for?

Joe Flynn reviews Journal for Plague Lovers by the Manic Street Preachers. The Manics’ new album has been hyped in the press as a return to their 1994 peak. All the lyrics are taken from notes left by Richey Edwards, a former band member who disappeared in February 1995. Since then the Manics have gone from relative obscurity as dark iconoclasts, to mainstream success as dad-rockers with occasional moments of weird, sub-Stalinite political rhetoric. Edwards never contributed musically to the Manics. He was their self-styled “Minister of Propaganda” back in the days when the band had the absurd...

The story of electric blues

I was prepared to be disappointed by Cadillac Records, the film about the legendary Chicago blues label Chess Records. All too often the music biopic is formulaic and unimaginative. Cadillac Records is in fact superior on a number of levels. It helps that the soundtrack is based on the amplified slide guitar of Muddy Waters, the unique vocals of Howlin' Wolf and the chromatic hamonica of Little Walter that echoed across the black ghetto of Chicago's South Side throughout the 50s. The plot also moves at a fast pace with a laconic voiceover by the actor playing Willie Dixon. Dixon, a ex-pro...

Socialist (and anti-Stalinist) songs from the early 1950s (audio)

Socialist (and anti-Stalinist) songs by Joe Glazer and Bill Friedland, and a few other songs, from the early 1950s. For more on Glazer, Friedland, and the "Jacobin Jerques", click here . The Giveaway Boys In Washington - Joe Glazer Unite for Unity - Joe Glazer and Bill Friedland In Old Moscow - Joe Glazer & Bill Friedland Our Line's Been Changed Again - Joe Glazer & Bill Friedland Land Of The Daily Worker - Joe Glazer & Bill Friedland Old Bolshevik Song - Joe Glazer & Bill Friedland Kevin Barry - Earl Robinson Talking Un-American Blues - Betty Sanders Joe Hill - Pete Seeger, Baldwin "Butch"...

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