Songs of struggle

In case readers think I have been idle, I have opened a YouTube account and created two playlists named ‘Songs of Struggle’, parts 1 and 2. These are songs with which the workers’ movement can identify.

Visit my channel and take a look.

Or go direct:

Playlist one is here.
Playlist two is here.

Obviously there are countless other singers and songs which could have been included – Victor Jara, Billy Bragg, etc – so perhaps I’ll create further playlists in the future. I’m open to suggestions.

United Front Song (Einheitsfrontlied)

One of the best-known songs of the German labour movement is Einheitsfrontlied or United Front Song, with text by Bertolt Brecht and music by Hanns Eisler. The song was written in 1934 after the rise to power of Nazism, and reflects Brecht’s conviction that only a united front of the working class could lead to social progress. Eisler’s simple arrangement, together with the march-like beat, means it can easily be sung by people without musical training.

It is perhaps worth pointing out that the sexism of the English translation below (“a man is flesh and blood”) does not exist in the German. The word Mensch means not a ‘man’ but a ‘person’.

And while a man is flesh and blood
He will ask, if you please, for bread and meat
And windy words won’t be enough
For words aren't good to eat.

    Then left, two, three! Then left, two, three!
    Comrade, here’s the place for you.
    So fall in with the workers’ united front
    For you are a worker too.

And while a man is flesh and blood
He won’t be driven till he drops.
He will want no slaves beneath his feet
And no masters up on top.

    Then left, two, three! Then left, two, three!
    Comrade, here’s the place for you.
    So fall in with the workers’ united front
    For you are a worker too.

As long as there are two classes
Proletarians must agree
It’s the task of none but the working class
To set the worker free.

    Then left, two, three! Then left, two, three!
    Comrade, here’s the place for you.
    So fall in with the workers’ united front
    For you are a worker too.

English translation by H.R. Hays


The original German version:

Und weil der Mensch ein Mensch ist,
drum braucht er was zum Essen bitte sehr!
Es macht ihn kein Geschwätz nicht satt,
das schafft kein Essen her.

    Drum links, zwei, drei! Drum links, zwei, drei!
    Wo dein Platz Genosse ist.
    Reih dich ein in die Arbeitereinheitsfront,
    Weil du auch ein Arbeiter bist.

Und weil der Mensch ein Mensch ist,
drum braucht er auch noch Kleider und Schuh.
Es macht ihn kein Geschwätz nicht warm
und auch kein Trommeln dazu.

    Drum links, zwei, drei! Drum links, zwei, drei!
    Wo dein Platz Genosse ist.
    Reih dich ein in die Arbeitereinheitsfront,
    Weil du auch ein Arbeiter bist.

Und weil der Mensch ein Mensch ist,
drum hat er Stiefel im Gesicht nicht gern.
Er will unter sich keinen Sklaven sehn
und über sich keinen Herrn.

    Drum links, zwei, drei! Drum links, zwei, drei!
    Wo dein Platz Genosse ist.
    Reih dich ein in die Arbeitereinheitsfront,
    Weil du auch ein Arbeiter bist.

Und weil der Prolet ein Prolet ist,
drum kann ihn auch kein anderer befrein.
Es kann die Befreiung der Arbeiter nur
das Werk der Arbeiter sein.

    Drum links, zwei, drei! Drum links, zwei, drei!
    Wo dein Platz Genosse ist.
    Reih dich ein in die Arbeitereinheitsfront,
    Weil du auch ein Arbeiter bist.

You may notice there are in fact four verses — for some reason H.R. Hays does not translate the second verse.


You can listen to the 1934 recording (in German) by Ernst Busch from SovMusic.ru:



One of the classic performances of Einheitsfrontlied is by the German singer-songwriter Hannes Wader. I have had the good fortune to hear him sing live in Germany.



Here is another noteworthy performance, by the classic German rock band Ton Steine Scherben (vocalist Rio Reiser):

The Internationale

The most famous song of all for socialists is, of course, the Internationale. I mentioned Tony Babino’s tongue-in-cheek version in an earlier post, but the best-known recording extant in English is by British singer-songwriter Billy Bragg.



Rather than keep to the ‘archaic and unsingable’ traditional English translation, Bragg uses his own modernised text.

First stanza

Stand up, all victims of oppression,
For the tyrants fear your might!
Don’t cling so hard to your possessions,
For you have nothing if you have no rights!
Let racist ignorance be ended,
For respect makes the empires fall!
Freedom is merely privilege extended,
Unless enjoyed by one and all.
    So come brothers and sisters,
    For the struggle carries on.
    The Internationale,
    Unites the world in song.
    So comrades, come rally,
    For this is the time and place!
    The international ideal,
    Unites the human race.

Second stanza

Let no one build walls to divide us,
Walls of hatred nor walls of stone.
Come greet the dawn and stand beside us,
We’ll live together or we’ll die alone.
In our world poisoned by exploitation,
Those who have taken, now they must give!
And end the vanity of nations,
We’ve but one Earth on which to live.
    So come brothers and sisters,
    For the struggle carries on.
    The Internationale,
    Unites the world in song.
    So comrades, come rally,
    For this is the time and place!
    The international ideal,
    Unites the human race.

The oldest recorded song... ever

The oldest known recording of a piece of music is a haunting performance of the French folk song Au Clair de la Lune, and is a remarkable 150 years old.

The recording was made on 9 April 1860 by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, inventor of the phonautograph, the first ever sound recording device. The phonautograph transcribed sound waves onto paper as a visual representation, described by Science News as “a bunch of wavy lines scratched by a stylus onto fragile paper that had been blackened by the soot from an oil lamp”. But it could not play it back again, as audio playback was not even conceived at the time. To hear this song, we had to wait until 2008, when American historians from the First Sounds group found the recording in Paris and extracted it using modern computer technology.



At first, the voice was believed to belong to a woman or girl, but further contextual evidence suggested that the recording was being played too fast, and was more likely to be of Scott himself:



Despite the difficulty of knowing precisely how this recording should be reproduced, it is extraordinary to hear a voice from another era coming down to us.

• You can hear more of Scott’s phonautographs at FirstSounds.org.
• Read the original New York Times report (March 2008).
 

Lunacharsky on music

Extract from Lunacharsky: ‘Taneyev and Scriabin’ from On Literature and Art, 1925.

Music originated as an expression of human emotions. We cannot for a moment doubt that it was born of man’s cries of emotion. We know wherein the “music” of the animal world originates. Erotic music is the most objective example since, besides its cries of naked passion, it includes some elements of enticement, attracting the female by a sort of serenade. In the nightingale’s song we find not only the emotions of the male, but an art that is self-contained, unfolding in the mating process and reaching, not in the individual, but in the species as a whole, true perfection.

Every other type of song has apparently developed along similar lines: sobbing gave rise to lamentation, which in turn became a dirge; the wild shrieking of warriors before battle resulted in military marches, and so forth. The whole significance of transforming emotional cries into music, or, more probably, into singing, lay in the fact that a purity of form was acquired, that there gradually evolved clear tones and their set combinations, the skill of producing melody, etc.

In following this course, music eventually became most complex. Man gained helpers, the most varied instruments, to express the personal or social emotions that burned in his breast.

 

Tony Babino: The Internationale

While we’re on the subject of music, readers may enjoy this swinging version of the Internationale sung by Tony Babino. It was commissioned for Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story and used over the closing credits.



Or you can watch it with a more interesting video, also on YouTube.

Venezuela: the hip hop movement gets organised

I reproduce an article by Hip Hop Revolucion published on www.venezuelanalysis.com.

January 9th 2010


Over the 17, 18 and 19 of December the first conference of activists and militants of the Venezuelan Hip Hop movement was held. Convened and organized by the Hip Hop Revolution collective and with the participation of activists from over 8 states from the west of the country, the [congress] discussed and debated the creation of urban art schools, a joint project of the HHR Collective and the Ministry of Communes.

The hip-hop movement congress held in December in Merida, Venezuela. Photo: HHR.

For three days at the headquarters of INCES [the National Institute of Socialist Education and Training] in La Azulita, Merida state, workshops were held on political education, music production, screening of documentaries (provided by the National Film Archive), group discussions and the creation of the definitive curriculum of the urban art schools, whose classes began over this period.

During the meeting a joint statement was drafted which we reproduce below:

Hip Hop is one expression of the creative power of the people. It is a culture that originally emerged from conditions of poverty, in the most neglected, marginalized and oppressed sectors of society. We view ourselves as a resistance movement that confronts capitalism and its system of domination. We view ourselves as the successors of the historical class struggle that led our people to their first nation-wide rebellion in 1814, the first act of genuine rebellion of an insurgent people who spilled into the streets to destroy the society that screws us.

As a tiny part of the people, we do not view our movement as a form of isolated struggle, we recognize our origins and we join with the collective construction of our neighborhoods and communities for a fully just society.

We realize that the struggle of our movement begins within ourselves; we must try to destroy our individualities and understand that alone no progress is possible. Our culture is collective from its roots, for this reason we look beyond the four elements of our movement, we view our cultural creation as an act of freedom that can neither be bought nor sold, traded nor negotiated; it is simply for living and building.

Part of the commitment of our movement is to achieve horizontal organization; we rule out competition between partners and brothers, the proposal is to be inclusive, to convey the message to the people, our people.

We base our knowledge on experience and invention, producing and generating spaces of thought and discussion, pointing inward toward the internal, inviting our people to investigate, discuss, activate and collectivize, making art, inclusive art, that is born of the people, that is not seen in museums, that they still do not want to show, the art of collectively creating with words, painting, the body, sounds and the spirit.

We believe in collective discussion and construction, because “knowledge” and the so-called “intellectuals” and “middle class thinking” have screwed over the world. We choose and identify with the “uneducated” people, with their unwritten words, with their unstudied knowledge, with their unanswered questions, with their hunger without food, their homes without a home.

We are committed to the transfer of knowledge and action to the older and younger generations. Our shared project of the popular urban art school is an option we propose as a grain of sand towards new thinking and the construction of a new society, where neither race nor gender nor religion, nor training are separated, but are amalgamated into one piece, in one territory and in permanent construction.

Committed and activated,
Epatu, Activate.

Translated by Kiraz Janicke for Venezuelanalysis.com

Long live Palestine

The people of Palestine are living under Israeli occupation in appalling conditions. It is in response to this that the British musician Lowkey has released a single, Long Live Palestine, Part 2 — the release date of 1 January 2010 is timed to be one year after Israel attacked Gaza and left over 1400 Palestinians dead. There is a campaign underway to get the song into the charts. Here is a snippet:



[Update: I notice the video has now been deleted, so try this instead.]

There are various ways to buy the song: see the campaign’s Facebook page for more details.

Lowkey’s song is stridently political and openly partisan. Yet it succeeds because the politics complement the music, they do not overpower it. It is a fine example of art enlisted in political struggle.


Additional links:
Lowkey’s MySpace page
Palestine Solidarity Campaign (of which Lowkey is a patron)

Two fingers to the machine

For the last few years it has been a foregone conclusion that whoever wins The X Factor, the juggernaut singing competition which has just completed its sixth series on ITV1, will go on to produce that year’s no. 1 Christmas single. Remarkably, that pattern has been broken.

Our Christmas treat was supposed to be Joe McElderry’s cover of Miley Cyrus’s saccharine ballad, ‘The Climb’:

I can almost see it
That dream I’m dreaming but
There’s a voice inside my head saying,
You’ll never reach it…
My faith is shaking but I
Got to keep trying
Got to keep my head held high…

People who really want to listen to this kitsch can find its self-congratulating video on YouTube.

But we will struggle to raise an earnest festive tear over this year’s actual Number One, Rage Against the Machine’s thrash-rap anthem ‘Killing in the Name’, with its unsentimental coda, “Fuck me, I won’t do what you tell me!”


Lyrics here: www.ratm.net/lyrics/kil.html

‘Killing in the Name’ sold about half a million copies, beating ‘The Climb’ by 50,000 in a victory organised predominantly via the internet. The ‘Rage Against the Machine for Christmas No. 1’ campaign, launched by part-time DJ Jon Morter on Facebook, won nearly a million members. This is important because it shows that the internet, although saturated with corporatism, has provided a space for alternative viewpoints to flourish.

Commodification

The outcome of this small cultural struggle represents a mass statement against the commodification of art.

A certain use-value exists in all the products of human labour, as production that does not meet any needs is a waste of energy. In art however this use-value is not paramount. What is most important in art is its spiritual value — the affirmation of our humanity in objective form.

The capitalist has no interest in the human content of a work of art. He or she wants to know what dimensions it has, who created it and how ownership can authenticated, and what price can be fetched for it. That is why Marx wrote that that ‘capitalist production is hostile to certain branches of spiritual production, for example, art and poetry’.[1] As a member of a ruling class with privileges to protect, the bourgeois prefers to excise radical content, and as a seller looking for the broadest market, he prefers a sanitised commodity which will appeal to the maximum number of people. Of course a huge amount of outstanding art of all forms has been published, patronised etc by capitalists. But the more art tries to meet commercial imperatives rather than spiritual ones, the greater the danger that its human content will be compromised.

Is ‘The Climb’ art? Of course. But it is art degraded by its submission to commercialism. Almost every aspect of such art — lyrics, music, singer, performance, cover art, distribution, etc — is determined by its ability to generate profit for the bourgeoisie. Whereas ‘Killing in the Name’ is an outburst of sincere human emotion, ‘The Climb’ is kitsch: the mass reproduction of cheap, pre-packaged emotions.

Capitalism likes predictability. The reason that the novels of Jane Austen are adapted over and over again — and when the novels run out, we are given pseudo-Austen like the film Becoming Jane — is not because of the quality of Austen’s work per se, but because it has proven commercially successful time and time again. The filming of sequels works on the same principle. Shows like The X Factor are designed to provide a guaranteed return on investment. The young singers elevated to celebrity by the show are, by virtue of the process, those prepared to be manipulated by corporatism. The X Factor nakedly represents the bourgeois attitude to music and musicians — they exist only to be exploited for profit. If the music is outstanding, then perhaps that will help sales in the long run. But a capitalist tends towards the short-term and judges everything by the bottom line.

The submission of singers like McElderry to his corporate sponsors makes it harder for us to feel personal sympathy for his defeat. But ultimately he, like most other winners of such shows, is a victim of the process. The true measure of capitalism’s loyalty to the hopeful people it exploits is that Steve Brookstein, the show’s first winner, was dropped after one album [2].

The irony is that ‘Killing in the Name’ is owned by Sony records, one of the largest conglomerates in the world with an annual revenue of nearly $80 billion. Even though Rage Against the Machine has declared that it will donate its profits to the homeless charity Shelter, Sony will take its cut. Simon Cowell’s record company Syco is even a subsidiary of Sony. Cowell is unlikely to profit directly from sales, but the publicity generated around this small struggle cannot do any harm to someone who has milked faux controversy as part of his career, and another of his protégés, Susan Boyle, is currently at Number One in the album charts with the sugary-titled I Dreamed a Dream. Capitalism has hundreds of years’ experience in commodifying art, and when art movements try to break free it has proved highly skilled in recuperating those in turn. Anyone who felt betrayed to see the erstwhile ‘anarchist’ Johnny Rotten doing butter commercials knows the power of filthy lucre. Rock music has always been a form of working class expression, arising from the cultural space created in the post-war boom — but also, it has always had to wrestle with the power of the capitalists who control popular music’s means of publication and distribution.

Nonetheless this is a victory for music fans, a genuine grassroots rejection of corporatism. In the words of Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, it has ‘tapped into the silent majority of the people in the UK who are tired of being spoon-fed one schmaltzy ballad after another’ [3]. The recent financial crisis has increased the class consciousness of the masses, and although the British revolution will not come for many years, perhaps this is one small expression of that process.

Readers may also be interested in my article ‘Michael Jackson and the cult of celebrity’.

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[1] Marx, Chapter 4 of Theories of Surplus Value (1863).
[2] Patrick Barkham, ‘Remember this guy?’ (Guardian, December 2008).
[3] Quoted on ‘Rage Against the Machine beat X Factor winner in charts’ (BBC, 20 December 2009).

Michael Jackson and the cult of celebrity

A week after Michael Jackson’s death on 25 June, his greatest hits album Number Ones tops the album chart, and four others have charted. Six of his singles have entered the Top 40. HMV reports an 80-fold increase in sales of his music. We are repeatedly informed that he sold 750 million records worldwide.

The mythologising of Jackson has intensified since his death. Documentaries and talking heads enthuse about his ‘genius’, his defining of popular culture, his global fame, and how he provided ‘a soundtrack to our lives’.[1]

Michael Jackson was one of the most important cultural figures of the last thirty or forty years — whether you enjoyed his work or not, his influence upon pop, video and dance is beyond question. Thriller alone revolutionised the music video as a medium. But whether he was in fact a ‘genius’ is, from capitalism’s point of view, completely irrelevant. Exceptional talent helps, because it makes the cult of celebrity more persuasive. But the purpose of ‘celebrity’ is to sell products. For the recording industry, the measure of quality is not creative but commercial success.

Create a mythology around an artist, and even their worst work will be bought in huge quantities, together with the usual mass of accompanying products like T-shirts, books and DVDs. People will watch a mediocre film simply because it has a favourite ‘star’ in it, or buy a weak album out of a sense of completism or loyalty. The identification of the fan with a particular personality — more correctly, a brand — becomes a pursuit in itself. A mass of magazines and other media work round the clock to glorify celebrity — without it, they and many other lucrative businesses couldn’t exist at all.

A fair assessment of Jackson’s achievement is difficult while the media remain dazzled by his ability to make money. Genuine appreciation of his work, and sadness at his death, must compete with commercialism until it is often difficult to tell them apart. With typical hypocrisy, the same tabloids that labelled him ‘Wacko Jacko’ eulogised him once he was dead. AEG Live’s cynical offer of a ‘souvenir ticket’ in lieu of refunding fans’ money is only one example of cashing in, or, as the chief executive put it, “Since [Jackson] loved his fans in life, it is incumbent upon us to treat them with the same reverence and respect after his death.”

A complex relationship exists between artists, the capitalist who distributes their work, and the values of wider society. In this atmosphere, artists are often complicit in the manufacturing of their celebrity, and Jackson was no exception. Stories of him sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber, or of his pet chimp Bubbles, were publicity stunts staged by him and/or his team deliberately to excite the media.

Statue for the HIStory tour. Photo: Noud! (flickr)

The overblown statues created for the HIStory tour symbolise the milking of the cult of celebrity at a time when Jackson was faltering creatively. And his ‘messianic’ performance of Earth Song at the 1996 Brit Awards fully deserved its deflation by Jarvis Cocker.

Yet Jackson was the victim of celebrity as well as a beneficiary of it. Hounded by the media, repeatedly turning to plastic surgery, possibly anorexic, he was denied a childhood by his premature success. As remarked in the obituary by Caroline Sullivan in The Guardian:

The band’s working life was brutal: when they were not in studios they were on tour, sometimes playing 45 shows in 90 days. As lead singer, Michael’s schedule was more onerous than that of his brothers. After three hours’ daily tutoring, he spent the rest of the day recording the 13 albums the Jacksons released for Motown between 1969 and 1975. From the studio window he watched ordinary children playing, and would “always cry from loneliness.”[2]

Jackson is often described as a Peter Pan trying to recapture a lost childhood. Whether or not this is so, he does appear to have behaved inappropriately with children. Although he was never proved to have molested them, his acquittal was never a satisfactory outcome for the right-wing tabloids, nor did it spare him the abuse of those who assumed him guilty. He was himself a victim of abuse, from his ambitious father, the recording industry, and those keen to sit in judgement upon his private life.

The most striking outward expression of his troubles was his appearance. Jackson has been criticised for turning to plastic surgery to make him increasingly resemble a white person. His own claim was that he had the skin condition vitiligo. Perhaps he did, but this surely can’t be the whole story: the cosmetic surgery which gave him a narrower nose and thinner lips had nothing to do with his pigmentation. Rather than blaming Jackson, however, we should be asking what were the racial attitudes that caused him such anxiety over his identity? Whether Jackson should have handled the issue differently is a debate for the black community, which has preferred on the whole to stress his contribution to culture.

Likewise, Jackson is not ultimately to blame for the excesses of his celebrity cult. Jackson’s former publicist, Michael Levine, commented, ‘a human simply can not withstand this level of prolonged stress.’ The list of casualties in music, film and other arts is long — Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty are the obvious contemporary examples. The problem lies less with artists than with capitalism and its commodification and exploitation of them and their art. Michael Jackson’s talent was distorted by a context of abuse, racism and commercialism. No doubt he always had anxieties, as we all do, but his celebrity exacerbated them until they took over his life and career.

Despite that, Jackson was the most influential pop performer since Elvis Presley and gave pleasure to millions of people across the world. How he would have developed in a free, fair and equal society is something we can never know.

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[1] Comparison of the blanket coverage of this one death, when the stabbing of a Muslim woman by a racist on 1 July was met with indifference, tells us a great deal about current attitudes in society. The BBC item in my link does not even trouble to record the date of her death.
[2] Obituary, The Guardian Friday 26 June 2009.