Happy New Years’ everyone! Unfortunately this year I won’t be having my annual loft party, but instead I made a special digital mixtape for all my friends, subscribers, and listeners, which you can download here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Knoh9KE66N4NwqqPiohXGl-v2ywDHGVF/view
or here: https://mab.to/Ov6KNPcaY
or for Antifada Patons at http://patreon.com/TheAntifada
The mix is a selection of the songs I chose to close episodes of the Antifada in 2020. So for those of you who don’t listen to the end of the show, or don’t listen at all, this is a sample of what you’re missing.
Below are some of the songs on the mix, with links to their episodes and some thoughts on why I chose them.
Before that, an excerpt of my essay about Staten Island’s Autonomous Zone, which I encourage reading in full at Hard Crackers Journal.
The most well-known face of the lineup was Scott LoBaido, a Staten Island “patriot artist” and possible mayoral candidate known for painting pro-police, pro-Trump, and American flag murals around the island. The autonomous zone concept was his idea, and one he still championed. He proposed a day of action in which every restaurant and bar in the borough stayed open in defiance of the state, something like an inverted general strike. “This is no longer Mac’s Public House,” he announced during his brief remarks. “This is a house of resistance!”
…The speakers generally stuck to this script. They were not COVID-deniers but were fighting for “common sense.” In this light, they tried to emphasize common sense critiques of the lockdowns. Domestic violence rose at an alarming rate this spring. The rates of poverty and violent crime had also risen exponentially. Their real concern, they emphasized, was that, motivated by fear, our society was willing to surrender certain rights and freedoms for a sense of security. This line didn’t sound too different from what you might expect to hear, in a different context, at a liberal or leftist rally, and honestly it was not too different from lines taken by some prominent radical European philosophers.
But if even their “common sense” appeal rang too much of culture war, that’s not to say it didn’t have a firm class identity. At every turn, the bar and their loudest supporters referred to their movement as by and for the small businessman. When they did talk about actual workers, it was either referring to a set of cultural signifiers so vague they could have meant the entirety of Staten Island, or purely paternally. LoBaido said his heart broke for the workers who without them would have no income for Christmas presents or rent.
When I asked after the rally if any of Mac’s workers were there that day, he admitted he hadn’t seen them, but insisted they had come to the previous rally and were generally supportive. Without knowing anything about those cooks and barbacks (I had never seen them speaking in Mac’s videos), I found it plausible that they supported the struggle. Even if Mac’s workers are “on the books”–eligible for unemployment–with stimulus details so uncertain it is reasonable to believe they’d prefer to keep working. So long as there is no independent movement of workers and tenants, their fate will be linked to that of business owners large and small, and the political influence they wield. “The worker need not necessarily gain when the capitalist does,” Karl Marx wrote, “but he necessarily loses when the latter loses.”
And now, the mixtape:
Track listing:
1. The Queers - “Like a Parasite”
2. Big Black - “Jordan, Minnesota”
3. Kayla Nicole - “Move like a Snake”
4. Lost Kids - “Cola Freaks”
5. The Gun Club - “Death Party”
6. Sleaford Mods - “Jobseeker”
7. Joe L. Carter - “Please, Mr. Foreman”
8. Vic Mensa - “16 Shots”
9. Killah P - “Α.ΛΗ.Τ.ΗΣ”
10. Easterhouse - “Come Out Fighting”
11. Beck and Devendra Banhart - “Life During Wartime”
12. Bob Dylan - “Shelter From the Storm”
13. Gil Scott-Heron - “Whitey on the Moon”
14. Kanye West - “Black Skinhead”
15. Nat King Cole - “Bidin’ My Time”
16. The Stone Roses - “Bye Bye Badman”
17. Nina Simone - “Backlash Blues”
18. Elaine Brown - “Until We’re Free”
19. Hogtown Jugband - “The Future’s in the Streets”
The Queers - “Like a Parasite”
From: Ep 81 - Parasite w/ Leslie Lee III
At the end of 2019, the South Korean film Parasite, which many interpreted as depicting the precarity of the underclass life, emerged as a breakout hit. The most impressive moment of the film to me was when the city is suddenly overtaken by a flood, and the family are forced to take refuge from the flooded apartment with hundreds of other working-class neighbors in a gym. The next day, they are summoned to work as if nothing had happened.
This year we watched this drama play out on a global scale. The “essential workers” hit hardest by disaster must always grin and bear the hard work of sheltering the privileged classes from experiencing it. In New York, often the only visible faces on the streets throughout the spring were these dogged workers, trudging through the closed-up metropolis on their way to the hospital, warehouse, restaurant, or security shift. And those were the ones “lucky” enough to keep their jobs—as office workers switched to Zoom, much of Manhattan’s professional class no longer needed cleaning staff for homes and offices, baristas for a cup of coffee on the way to work, fast-food stands for the lunchbreak. The real estate lobby often brags that every new high paid condo-dweller in the neighborhood produces three jobs, they never said they would be good or necessary ones. The modernist house in Parasite can be understood, then, as an allegory of urban capitalist social structure, in which the ever-increasing desires of the bourgeois family are satisfied by an ever-growing cast of workers whose eagerness masks deep-seeded resentment and daily acts of theft and sabotage. Still, it’s a consensual relationship that could theoretically go on indefinitely, so long as the subterranean resentment does not emerge into spectacular violence.
Lost Kids - “Cola Freaks”
From: Ep 87 - If UC Pay Me w/ 3 FIRED UCSC strikers
Last winter, graduate students at UC Santa Cruz went on strike demanding a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) in order to make ends meet as rental prices rise and wages for academic workers stagnate. They were all fired. The UCSC were workers were one of dozens of rank and file campus unions fighting the way universities are increasingly structured around the hyper-exploitation of adjuncts and grad students—a dynamic that has only become more precarious in the age of COVID. You can read about many these ongoing struggles at The File Magazine.
Vic Mensa - 16 Shots
From Ep 101 - Let's Go To The CHOP w/ Alex Edward & Matt Marciniec
Laquan McDonald was murdered by the Chicago Police Department in October, 2014. An initial police report said that he had lunged at police with a knife. Subsequent evidence from autopsies and videos showed McDonald had been walking away from police, and his knife was folded. From Hyde Park, Chicago, Vic Mensa was a participant in the November 2015 demonstrations and blockades whose slogan was “16 shots and a coverup” and “Fuck 12”—12 referring to police. The demonstrations successfully made the murder and coverup a scandal, leading to the conviction of one of the officers involved and the removal of the state attorney who tanked the case. Fuck 12 and counting to 16 remain frequent refrains at demonstrations and riots in Chicago and nationwide.
Big Black - “Jordan, Minnesota”
From: Ep 113 - When Prairie Socialists Go MAGA & ICE's Eugenics Program
Thanks to the QAnon and PizzaGate conspiracy theories and last years’ arrest and sudden demise of Jeffrey Epstein, tales of child sex abuse rings have returned at a level unseen since the “satanic panic” of the ‘80s and ‘90s.
The story behind the Big Black song Jordan, Minnesota makes a more realistic account of such scandals. In 1983, Jordan resident and professional babysitter James Rud was arrested for abusing several children in his care—the police claim at least 30. As more information came out, it became clear that several people in the town, including parents of the victims, were aware of Rud’s behavior and did nothing. A rumor spread that these parents were part of a secret society that held sex parties involving their children, resulting in the arrest of several parents who hired Rud, including the mother who made the initial complaint, and other who had nothing to do with him.
As the case unfolded it became clear investigators coerced children into spinning complex tales of their abuse that included outlandish details including black limousines, being forced to eat live animals, and ritualistic murder of dozens of children. Some of these details were reinforced by testimony Rud agreed to provide in exchange for having all but ten of the 108 charges against him dropped. Here, as in the case of Epstein, the most exaggerated conspiratorial tales hide the banal everyday realities of abuse—both of abusers and sexual predators, and of the justice system.
Kanye West - “Black Skinhead”
From: Ep 104 - Our Beautiful Dark Twisted Reality w/ Brandon Sutton
“Black Skinhead” represents Kanye at one of his manic creative peaks, capturing the psychotic violence of breaking with the failures of the past, and its nightmare world full of cultural tropes of the right, left, and beyond: Malcolm X, Frank Miller’s 300, Spike Lee, and, of course, the working-class punk genre best known for its embrace of neo-Nazism. What the conjunction of all this means is unclear, but the 2013 track ends with a chillingly prescient map of the future:
So follow me up cause this shit's about to go down
I'm doing 500, I'm outta control now
But there's nowhere to go now
And there's no way to slow down
The transition of Kanye West from famed producer, to “socially conscious” emcee, to schizophrenic fashion ingénue, to evangelical Trump supporter reached an anti-climactic new stage this spring when he announced he would run for president. In the past, West could answer all criticism of his erratic with the undeniable trendsetting of his initially criticized prior work (the genre-creating 808s and Heartbreaks was the best representation of this phenomenon). It was only logical that he would then be drawn to Trump, another figure whose has turned his proud ignorance and idiosyncratic intuitions into a string of bafflingly colossal successes. But 2020 may prove to be the year that finally broke Trump and Kanye—perhaps because they have grown too content with the cult they have achieved to expand, or perhaps because the world is ready to move on to some even more chaotic know-nothing.
Les Miserables - “Do You Hear the People Sing?” (2012 film soundtrack)
From: ep 106 - Be Water w/ Wilfred Chan
This song became the anthem of the pro-Democracy movement in Hong Kong, which for a generation has opposed Chinese rule in favor of national independence. While this movement is correctly criticized as a nationalistic, conservative, billionaire-funded, and racist against Chinese “mainlanders,” the struggle also contained revolutionary left tendencies of abolitionists and anti-authoritarians, who developed novel street tactics at a stunning scale of coordination. Protesters operated under strict ethics of boycotting pro-Chinese businesses, supporting each other without criticism, and resisting the spread of rumors and disinformation. Their slogan of “be water” contributed to uncontrollable flash demonstrations in metro stations, malls, and university occupations defended by sophisticated blockades. In the end, the force of the Hong Kong police was too durable. The reactionary wing became dominant as the movement receded. Nonetheless, the spirit and tactics of the streets of Hong Kong inspired the world. Their “frontliner” tactics of an umbrella-wielding black bloc shielding demonstrators from surveillance and crowd-control munitions spread to riots in France, Chile, and the United States. The use of laser pointers to disable security cameras, drones, confuse police, and point the way forward are now also common. The ferocity of these movements show a willingness to risk life and limb to revolt, but their often ill-defined agenda has lead to little other than boiling-over and cooptation. In this regard, the lesson of Hong Kong is not so different from the events of 1832 Paris republican insurrection referenced in Do You Hear the People Sing?—the people are angry, and want freedom, but who are the people, why are they angry, and what will freedom look like? Without clear answers, these struggles, even if successful against the immediate enemies, will be doomed to cooptation by the left or right wings of capital.
Gil Scott-Heron - “Whitey on the Moon”
From Proletkult 6, also see Proletkult 7 - BLOW UP THE MOON w/ Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space
Space-age enthusiasm has long been attacked by those who point out the immense expense of NASA alongside the reign of poverty for much of the Earth’s population. Over the past year the introduction of Space Force as a new wing of the US military has taken that absurdity to its full extent. If scientific discovery and a brighter future for all humanity was once the purpose of space travel (and not just an extension of the Cold War arms race), today it is purely about securing the supremacy of certain geopolitical alliances and their preferred telecom businesses. In May, I wrote more about Space Force for the Pluto Books Blog.
Nat King Cole - “Bidin' My Time”
From: Ep 108 - Biden Time w/ Virgil Texas)
Since Biden clinched the nomination, a tedious debate raged between liberals and leftists supporters of Bernie Sanders was whether they should vote for Biden, and now, if and how we should “push Biden left”. The pro-Biden position was that Trump represents a unique threat to democracy, and no matter how flawed his opponent, he must be voted out. Biden critics, like Virgil Texas in our episode from July, put forward the position that this logic was guaranteed to allow the Democratic party to drift further to the right, and they should instead be forced to make real concessions to the emerging leftwing of the party to earn Bernie’s voters. The debates after the election demonstrated this debate was in vain. Even though figures like Sanders and the squad campaigned hard for Bernie, they were still scapegoated immediately after the election for the Democrats’ down-ballot loses. Biden froze-out Sanders and Warren and their supporters from his cabinet, instead appointing the usual Obama/Clinton-era slew of lobbyists of apparatchiks. The Democratic party was and remains the graveyard of social movements.
Joe L. Carter - “Please Mr. Foreman”
From: Ep 110 - The Black Radical Tradition (Part 1) w/ Kazembe Balagun
A line from this obscure blues song by a Detroit autoworker about the perils of speed-ups and automation became the title for Marvin Georgakis’ chronicle of the revolutionary organizations of the late‘60s/early ‘70s Detroit I Do Mind Dying:
The song was written and recorded by Joe L. Carter in 1965 when he was a production-line worker at Ford Rouge. Like most of the Detroit blues singers, Joe L ., as he billed himself, had been born in the South, worked regular jobs during the day, and played mostly on weekends. The Detroit blues sound had never had much of a mass audience. Other than brief spots on some black radio stations, its exposure was mainly limited to the red-light district around Hastings Street which began to be torn down in the late fifties in the name of urban renewal. The blues singers often had colorful names and played unusual instruments. The only one to achieve national fame was John Lee Hooker, but there were many others... They played a down-and-dirty urban blues that spoke of the agony of everyday industrial life… ’’Anybody who plays music in Detroit plays the blues sometimes. ” Hailey commented, “Anybody who lives in Detroit lives the blues sometimes, if not all the time.”
Elaine Brown – “Until We’re Free”
From: Ep 110 - The Black Radical Tradition (Part 2) w/ Kazembe Balagun
Much of the second part of our Black Radical Tradition episode focuses on radical black feminism. While today the Black Panther Party is too often remembered as a macho-militant organization founded and run by men, it was actually one of the few major revolutionary organizations of the time to support women’s liberation, and have women in leadership positions. Elaine Brown was ones of those leaders, chairing the Party from 1974-77 while Huey Newton fled criminal charges to Cuba. As chairwoman, she led a campaign to elect Oakland’s first black mayor, founded the Panther’s Liberation School, and worked to root out sexism in the movement. She was also one of the most astounding musicians of the era.
Killah P - “Α.ΛΗ.Τ.ΗΣ”
From: Ep 116 - Apres Moi, Le Troika w/ Pavlos Roufos
In September of 2013 members of the Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party in Greece carried out a planned assassination of antifascist rapper Pavlos Fyassas, aka Killah P. In October of this year a high court finally ruled Golden Dawn criminal, and that its leadership should be jailed. During those seven years, the far-left party Syriza had come and gone, with the center-right New Democracy returned to power in January of 2020. The failures of Syriza to meaningfully fight against EU-imposed austerity and New Democracy’s swift attacks against Greece’s autonomous social movements and refugee/migrant population, marked the end of an era marked by hope for Greece to boldly lead the way out of an era of neoliberal barbarism. While some have hailed the ruling against Golden Dawn as a “victory for democracy,” others, like our guest Pavlos Roufos, saw it as a cynical maneuver to consolidate Greece’s rightwing. The event raises questions about how popular front antifascism (of which the Greek revolutionary milieus are generally critical), combined with the failure of social democracy, can actually defend the rightwing of liberal democracy. I couldn’t find the lyrics to this song, but it’s my favorite of his musically.
Easterhouse - “Come Out Fighting”
From: Ep 93: How Trotsky got Sp!ked w/ Trash Future
Easterhouse was the post-punk band associated with Britain’s Revolutionary Communist Party, who rebranded as “Living Marxism” in the ‘90s, and today maintains the “Sp!ked” blog. Veterans of this group are frequent guests on Tucker Carlson and similar rightwing shows for their nominally leftwing critiques of liberalism and social movements. In the episode, we go through the history of how RCP degenerated from Trotskyist cadre to Koch-funded culture warriors in a quest for influence. They abandoned their politics in the process, which should serve as a cautionary tale for those tempted by the so-called free-speech absolutism of Greenwald and Taibbi, who are often correct in their critiques of liberal media and politicians, but have little to offer ideologically other than nostalgic appeals for a neutral media and unmediated public sphere that never really existed.
Hogtown Jugband - Future’s in the Streets
(Not in any episode)
I can’t say I know anything about this band. I’m not sure where “Hogtown” is or if they indeed employ jugs as instruments, as none are not audible in the track. I am, however, very grateful that they sampled some perfect quotes from Sean and Jamie from this fun pop punk song.
I hope the other tracks are self-explanatory. If not, please leave a comment!