Timing: America 250, the Return of Marx, and the Anti-Communist Film Festival

    This fall we are having an Anti-Communist Film Festival. The idea came to me over a year ago, and is now dovetailing with the new rise of communism that’s happening just in time for America’s 250th birthday. Our sponsor is the Victims of Communism Foundation. The timing is pretty amazing.

    We will soon have information and launch a campaign that will be featured on the Victims of Communism website. There will be scholars and academics and journalists and politicians involved, and they will be addressing important macro and geopolitical issues. For me a main focus is artistic freedom. Specifically, I want to make sure that the new communists don’t prevent bands from playing songs they like. On this Fourth of July and America’s 250th birthday, I want bands to know they are free to rage against the machine of socialism. Because Rage Against the Machine has become the machine. It’s time for a sharp, freedom-long band to arise.    

    It’s not a small thing. On July 3, 2018 music critic Chris Richards published one of the most deplorable pieces of journalism to ever appear in print or on a screen. In “The 5 Hardest Questions in Pop Music,” Richards makes the argument that musicians should restrict what kinds of songs they will play. Richards describes a band that loved a record by a black R & B artist and wanted to cover it but decided not to: “A band of white indie rockers performing the songs of a black R & B singer? No way. It would be seen as cultural appropriation.” Richards adds, “As badly as I wanted to hear their covers they were right.”

    Richards argues that cultural appropriation should be avoided when it feels like “taking” instead of “making.” Some examples: “When Justin Timberlake beatboxes, or Taylor Swift raps, or Miley Cyrus twerks to a trap beat,” he observes, “it feels like taking. Nothing is being invented other than superficial juxtaposition. On the flip side, when the Talking Heads echo African pop rhythms, or the Wu-Tang Clan channels the spiritually of Kung-Fu cinema, or Beyonce writes a country song, it feels more like making. The borrowed elements become an essential, integrated part of a new, previously unheard thing.” He adds: “We think we know this difference when we hear it, but sometimes we don’t—so there are more questions to ask, and many of them point toward an imbalance of power.”

    In other words, bands should answer to the social justice left and censor themselves. I can think of no more appalling diktat on our country’s 250th birthday. 

    Music has always been central to my life, from the romance of soul to the anger of punk and the lyricism of Elvis Costello and Lauren Daigle. When I worked in a record store in the 1980s, the group Ciccone Youth, a side project of Sonic Youth, released The Whitey Album. It featured covers of 1980s pop songs, including Madonna’s “Into the Groove.” The Whitey Album is a white art-punk band covering a dance artist from New York and appropriating club fashion and black dance music. It’s America. We loved it. Chris Richards wants it banned.

    In his book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century, Alex Ross describes how totalitarians have always tried to suppress music: “Lenin, the prototype of the twentieth-century dictator, had favorite authors and composers, but he was too rigorous a materialist to bother much with art. Music he regarded as a bourgeois placebo that covered up the sufferings of mankind. In a conversation with Maxim Gorky, he extolled the power of Beethoven, but added, ‘I can’t listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid nice things, and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell.’”

    In 1958, a Polish jazz musician named Thomas Stanko heard the jazz pianist Dave Brubeck perform in Poland as part of a concert series that the U.S. State Department sponsored. Brubeck, in a 1958 interview in Down Beat, described the tour: “Whenever there was a dictatorship in Europe, jazz was outlawed. And whenever freedom returned to those countries, the playing of jazz inevitably accompanied it.” In Poland, the word freedom “was in the mouths of everybody we had anything to do with.” Stańko agreed. “The message was freedom,” he recalled in a New York Times interview in 2006. “For me, as a Polish who was living in a Communist country, jazz was a synonym of Western culture, of freedom, of this different style of life.”

    Punk rock has always had a tradition of rejecting communism. Tommy Ramone of the Ramones hated communism, as did many punk rock bands in East Germany who were suppressed and beaten by the Stasi. In “Blues for Ceausescu,” the band Fatima Mansions rip apart Nicolae Ceaușescu, the communist dictator of Romania from 1974 until 1989. The band was particularly unflinching when Ceausescu took a trip to England:

Go to England, baby-raper, false economist
Call yourself King Charles III
Nobody will notice
Nobody will be alarmed
There is no constitution
Go. Goodbye.

    Well, in America we do have a Constitution, as well as the freedom to defy anyone or anything that would take away our freedom. For some of us, a large part of the joy of America is her art, literature, and music. Thought police like Chris Richards don’t want artists to be free to express themselves, just as they don’t like the idea of the Anti-Communist Film Festival. The rules laid down by Chris Richards are part of a bigger picture of what would and would not be acceptable under our new socialist overlords. “Liberals are Killing Art,” a 2014 essay by Jed Pearl in The New Republic, puts it well:

Do more and more liberals find the emotions unleashed by the arts—I mean all of the arts, from poetry to painting to dance—something of an embarrassment? Are the liberal-spirited people who support a rational public policy—a social safety net, consistency and efficiency in foreign affairs, steps to reverse global warming—reluctant to embrace art’s celebration of unfettered metaphor and mystery and magic? If you had asked me ten years ago, I would have said the answer was no. Now I am inclined to say the opposite. What is certain is that in our data-and-metrics-obsessed era the imaginative ground without which art cannot exist is losing ground. Instead of art-as-art we have art as a comrade-in-arms to some more supposedly stable or substantial or readily comprehensible aspect of our world. Now art is always hyphenated. We have art-and-society, art-and-money, art-and-education, art-and-tourism, art-and-politics, art-and-fun. Art itself, with its ardor, its emotionalism, and its unabashed assertion of the imagination, has become an outlier, its tendency to celebrate a purposeful purposelessness found to be intimidating, if not downright frightening.

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