Crawdaddy! The Magazine of Rock

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.

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