The populist genre of the 1960s and 1970s was folk music. When Neil Young or Joan Baez took the military-industrial complex to task, they strummed and crooned about it; in a sense, their aching voices were the voice of the sixties, a peaceful, critical call-to-arms.
Does it make sense that, nowadays, it would be nü metal?
“Hemorrhage: An Ablution of Hope and Despair”
In April 1937, Mussolini and Hitler’s air forces, in compact with Franco’s nationalists, began a bombing campaign against the Basque city of Guernica. The city had no military defenses and few soldiers; hundreds of civilians were killed or maimed in the assault. While the Basque civilians were horrified at the senseless aggression of the fascists, the rest of the world barely noticed. Rather, it took a generation of artists to take to their typewriters and paintbrushes to communicate the fascists’ war crimes to a callous world.
One of these artist happened to be the Spaniard Pablo Picasso, who was living and painting five hundred miles northeast, in Paris. His response was to paint “Guernica,” perhaps his most famous canvas, an abstract depiction of the agonizing death of Guernican civilians under the wrath of the bombers. So powerful and illustrative was the painting that it is rumored to have prompted a Nazi officer to arrive at Picasso’s doorstep in Paris and ask, “Did you paint this?” To which he responded, “No. You did.”
Featuring Paul McCartney, Lenny Kaye and Philip Glass
Mercury Records
Music video directed by Gus Van Sant
In 1995, two years prior to his death, poet Allen Ginsberg published “Ballad of the Skeletons” in The Nation magazine. The poem, a scathing condemnation of Newt Gingrich’s America, received attention from other aging artists, including Philip Glass, Paul McCartney, Lenny Kaye and the considerably younger filmmaker Gus Van Sant. With rallying, Ginsberg was able to convince the four of them to work on producing a song and eventually even a music video to accompany. Continue reading
PopFront is proud to introduce Marxist Mixtape, a regular series about music, culture and politics. The goal of Marxist Mixtape is to cover individual songs from any era or genre that could constitute a contemporary popular front; that is, music that contains some progressive or leftist content, even if it’s just a blip or a few lyrics.
Pieces are short (2-6 paragraphs) and include a link to the song, usually on Youtube. For every 10 songs reviewed, we will create a Youtube playlist—an online mixtape that you can jam to from any computer, tablet or device with an internet connection.
The East (2013) Directed by Zal Batmangli
Scott Free Productions/Fox Searchlight Pictures
Fictional depictions of radicalism usually take one of two tacks. First, there’s the absurdist bent, as seen in The Monkey-Wrench Gang and Fight Club. In these tales, radicalism exists within a bubble, its practitioners iconoclastic and mad and their activities largely harmless. Even acts of extreme violence—the bombings of financial skyscrapers in Fight Club, for instance—play out as thrilling, brilliant acts, rife with revolutionary symbolism.