No, I’m not talking about “yippee I’m flying” power pills. Neither am I trying to vilify the American anthem. What I’m up to now is no less than telling you about a rarity as exotic and cool as you can probably get. I’m talking about communist rock. But fear not, we’ll skip Marx and Gramsci, McCarthy and Fidel, and will go straight to business, focusing on music and music alone; more in a revisionist way of catching up with forgotten “activists” than trying to argue about your ideology or mine. Then, if the guys of Meanwhile, back in communist Russia (not a communist band, by the way) allow it, we can get started.

Ok, some people may actually think that all of those artists involved in the “anti-Bush” campaign are communists, or that the ones in favor of free music downloads hide a copy of “Das Kapital” in their pockets, or that those stinky hippies –who have always looked suspicious anyway– were talking no hip slang but Russian all along. Sorry to prove you wrong, but not even a rabid anti-Bush activist like Eddie Vedder could be labeled a communist, nor Trent Reznor (didn’t he give away his last record for free?) or David Crosby (you can’t get hippier than that!). Real communists are people who loathe private property and fight for a fair way of life, where the state has the power to assign rights and duties to every citizen according to their needs and abilities. And there is just a handful of rockers whom, that I know, think that way. Stereolab, the sophisticated “lounge meets kraut rock” band, has got to be the epitome of them all.

But the French guys who gave us Marxist pop (sipping Serge Gainsbourg in large doses of Louis Althusser) are not alone. Back in the USA you can find an enormous array of lefty musicians, some of them still alive (and active?). Let’s recap: The whole folk revival generation, going from Woody Guthrie’s last days to Bob Dylan’s folk rock big-bang, via Pete Seeger’s old-timey persistence or the stark hard-fighting preaching of Billy Bragg (not American, by the way). You can write names as big as you can fit (Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Kingston Trio, John Lennon, etc) in that time line, by the way, for the distinction among humanist and communist tends to be a little blurry at times.

Obviously Latin American music (Viva la Revolución!) has traditionally been prone to red colored ideals. From the entire canon of Cuban music –the so called trova, their version of the folk revival– to Argentine comrades like La Renga –Che Guevara lovers who play a very greasy brand of Motorheadish rock–, Todos Tus Muertos (hardcore reggae for revolutionaries), Manu Chao (a third world version of Paul Simon?) or the prophetic Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota. Some of them did even get to live in communes or joined the guerrilla (bolivian troubadour Benjo Cruz died in the jungle), while most of this musicians –“communists” in their youth– got “corrected” by the dictator of the hour. Africa and Asia have had their share of communist rockers as well (Fela Kuti stands above them all), as Russia has also produced some very interesting artists (Vladimir Vysotsky, a great bard that mixed Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits; The Red Elvises, etc.), but rather strangely, westerners seem to be more preoccupied by this kind of things than communists themselves.

But let’s not forget punk rock, which naturally assimilated several social struggles and leftist ideas as their own. Militant bands like Gang of Four (post-punk really, but they even have published political treatises on neo-marxism!), Fugazi (DIY + indie + SXE has to be communist!) or Alternate TV (they said that The Clash were sell-outs, imagine that!), paved the way for groups like Manic Street Preachers (the first rock band to ever play in Cuba) or RATM (need I say more?), which continue to “lead” our struggle today.

Well, nowadays discussing things like left and right does sound outdated, but the aesthetic implications of “red rockers” still find great resonance (Franz Ferdinand’s cover art cries tovarich, right?), and with social hardships arising as a result of the economical model failure, we most definitively can use the empathy of hard-fighting musicians’ quest for a fair society. No matter whether they sound like the Matching Moles or Bruce Springsteen, I’m pretty sure that we will still need them around for a while.