Let Fury Have the Hour

by Antonino D'Ambrosio

  Caetano Veloso was a member of this emerging group of radical musicians. Regarded as the father of tropicalismo, the Brazilian musical movement of the 1960s, which he created together with Gilberto Gil at the beginning of the Getúlio Vargas military dictatorship, Veloso was radically altering the face of modern music. Shortly before this time, Silvio Rodríguez had joined with other musicians to form the Movimiento de la Nueva Trova (New Ballad Movement). La Nueva Trova had its roots in the Nueva Canción (New Song) movement.13 This development was in many ways part of an international wave of political folk singer-songwriters that included Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Roy Brown, and Víctor Jara. Yet for political folk artists including Pablo Milanés and Sara González it was difficult to get recorded, played on the radio, or have concerts in most venues. In what became another key element of political folk, they took it upon themselves to create their own forum in order to get the music out. Casa de las Américas,14 the literary and cultural center of Cuba, became this forum and their refuge. “La nueva trova and what some of these musicians were doing” Strummer explained, “went a long way to helping us organize protests like Rock Against Racism, the Anti-Nazi League, Rock Against the Rich, and the Red Wedge.”

  One of the key contributors to la Nueva Canción was Víctor Jara. He had taken political folk music to astounding heights in the early 1970s, describing his role as an artist as “an authentic creator and in very essence a revolutionary . . . “a man as dangerous as a guerrilla because of his great power of communication.”15 As Strummer remarked, “Jara’s music went beyond protest music, it was revolutionary music.” His music and performances were significant in helping Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity Party ascend to the presidency in Chile in 1970.16 Jara’s music is filled with his love for the struggles of the indigenous and working people of rural Chile with “La Plegaria de un Labrador (A Farmer’s Prayer)” and “El Manifiesto (The Manifesto)” being two of his most renowned songs. The song “Angelita Huenumán” is a good example of Jara’s support of the hardworking Chilean people from whom he came:

  Angelita, in your weaving

  there is time and tears and sweat,

  there are the anonymous hands

  of my own creative people

  You Can’t Have a Revolution Without Songs

  With his music, theater, and poetry, Jara was a cultural hero in the eyes of the Chilean people. It is no wonder then that his performance at the Stadium of Chile capped Allende’s campaign for office. In 1971 Jara wrote, “In every place where we perform we should organize, and if possible leave functioning, a creative workshop. We should ascend to the people, not feel that we are lowering ourselves to them. Our job is to give them what belongs to them—their cultural roots—and the means of satisfying the hunger for cultural expression that we saw during the election campaign.”17

  Unfortunately, Allende’s time as Chile’s president was cut short on September 11, 1973, as General Augusto Pinochet, with CIA support, orchestrated a violent coup d’état of the democratically elected government.18 Tens of thousands were rounded up and placed in the Stadium of Chile. They became known as the desaparecidos, or disappeared.19 Many were brutally tortured and then murdered. Víctor Jara found himself among the captives and had his hands broken by guards, who then presented him with a guitar and told him to play it. With smashed hands, Jara took the guitar and performed the Popular Party anthem.20 After torturing Jara, the military shot him with a machine gun and dumped his body in a mass grave. Survivors of the imprisonment managed to smuggle out bits and pieces of Jara’s final unfinished composition, which ended with the lyrics “silence and screams are the end of my song.”21

  Those who claim “music and politics should not be mixed,” as the Scottish political folk musician and Celtic songwriter Dick Gaughan says, should “tell that to the CIA and their thugs who murdered Jara because his repertoire didn’t suit their interests.”22 Gaughan adds that Jara’s “people’s music, folk music if you will, is very dangerous stuff! It is subversive to acknowledge that ordinary people actually have a culture with artistic merit. This gives the lie to those who would like us to think that the poor are poor because they are stupid.”23 Strummer adds, “Jara’s murder is just part of a long history of trying to destroy revolutionary music and the potential it has to mobilize people.”

  Veloso had his own encounter with state repression in 1968. Veloso and Gil were arrested by the Vargas dictatorship for “disrespecting the national anthem and Brazilian flag.”24 After a brief imprisonment, they were exiled to England. This only bolstered Veloso’s resolve to continue speaking out, making him a defiant hero in the eyes of many Brazilians. The exile was a critical mistake on the part of the Vargas dictatorship for it allowed Veloso to introduce himself to a new audience in England and Europe while exposing the troubling political situation in Brazil.

  Strummer borrowed heavily from Veloso both thematically and stylistically, as exemplified on the Clash album Sandinista! and much later on his solo record Global A Go-Go. At the heart of Veloso’s tropicalismo was a cultural movement whose aim was the reevaluation of traditional Brazilian music and the incorporation of non-Brazilian musical styles. The movement pushed Brazil into a new era of pop avant-garde but it more importantly challenged the dominant sociopolitical order of the day. Veloso’s impact is revealed in the beautiful “Algeria, Algeria (Happiness, Happiness),” a song recalled in Clash songs like “Know Your Rights.” “I’m going without handkerchief, without papers/Nothing in my hands or pockets,” Veloso sings, alluding to the tightening repression imposed by the Vargas dictatorship on the Brazilian people, who had to carry documentation at all times or find themselves subject to arrest or worse.

  “Algeria, Algeria” was, in part, influenced by another Brazilian political musician, Chico Buarque, a politically outspoken and popular performer often described as Veloso’s rival.25 Buarque’s “A Banda” was the spiritual, musical, and political inspiration for “Algeria, Algeria.” “A Banda” depicts a Brazil that is slipping away:

  My long-suffering people

  Said good-bye to their sorrows

  To see the lands pass by

  Singing songs of love

  You Can’t Have a Revolution Without Songs

  Both songs declared the need to recognize the serious political and cultural problems gripping Brazil during this time. Some of Strummer’s latest recordings, including “At the Border Guy” and “Bummed Out City,” are reminiscent of this political theme. Veloso and the tropicalistas were resisting the introduction of mass consumer culture into Brazilian society and the dictatorship’s attempts to curry favor with the United States. “What is good for the United States is good for Brazil,” Juracy Magalhães, minister of foreign affairs under Vargas, famously declared.26 Veloso was deeply troubled by this and the threat it posed to Brazilian culture while dismayed by efforts of the Brazilian left to respond to these and other issues.

  Veloso realized that the left was easily distracted by sectarianism rather than solidarity. Again, these are beliefs that Strummer shared with Veloso and immortalized in the Clash song “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais,” which challenged punks and nonpunks, black and white youth, and marginalized communities to join together rather than fight one another. Frustrated, Veloso joined with Rogério Duarte,27 who believed that to truly fight oppression you must first come to remove “the embryonic forms of oppressive structures within the very groups fighting against it.”28 Veloso found himself unpopular for this stance but pushed forward to establish Esquerda Festiva (Festival Left)29 as a more thoughtful response to the political turmoil gripping Brazil.

  As Veloso was trying to use his music to rebel against the Vargas regime in Brazil, Silvio Rodríguez became captivated with the revolution in Cuba and angered about the country’s subsequent isolation perpetuated by the U.S.-led embargo imposed after the Batista dictatorship was overthrown. Living in Argentina at the time, he was inspired by the political folk music of
“the voice of the silent majority,” Mercedes Sosa.30 Sosa was the driving force behind the Nueva Cancíon movement, and the first to experiment with mixing traditional music and rock ’n’ roll. “Sosa was the mother of rebel music,” Strummer explained. “She had the courage and will to produce something radical and paid a huge political price for it “her work continues to challenge me to this day.”

  Soon Rodríguez, like Jara, became an important voice in freedom and justice movements throughout the Americas as he became the heir to the legacy left behind by Jara’s death. He is considered by many to be the current voice of Latin American rebellion, a position he respectfully downplays: “that people identify so well with my songs is for the very fact that they recognize their own lives.”31 Rodríguez adds that “many people describe me as a poet who sings, but what I am really doing is inviting everyone to join my band, which is the band of the Revolution and of beauty.”32 Rodríguez’s music is not as overtly political as Strummer’s and his musical style is more esoteric than Veloso’s. As Strummer pointed out, mysticism, poetry, and the innovative use of language expand the boundaries of societal consciousness on all things political and cultural in Rodríguez’s music.

  The song “Unicornio” has come to define Rodríguez’s political folk. The poetic imagery is a beautiful subterfuge for a message of human struggle. Rodríguez sings: “My blue unicorn got lost yesterday/but I only have one blue unicorn/and even if I had two/I’d only love that one.” While “Unicornio” captures Rodríguez the mystic, other songs including “Nuestra Temo” (Our Story), “No Hacen Falta Alas” (You Don’t Need Wings), and “Sueño de Una Noche de Verano” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) showcase Rodríguez the steadfast humanist and radical. These recordings have much in common with Strummer’s recordings on Rock Art and the X-Ray Style and Global A Go-Go. It is music that confronts the tired uniformity of popular culture and speaks to the culturally disenfranchised. Even now what is most evident in the music of Veloso, Rodríguez, and Strummer is their unyielding accountability to produce work that celebrates culture as the true foundation of a free society.

  Each of these artists felt a responsibility to “turn people on to something new.” With his two first albums, Strummer showed that he was composing “genreless” music, creating records that moved effortlessly from honky-tonk to cumbia to Balkan to Celtic to Arabic music. In his bio on Global A Go-Go Strummer explains that “Shakhtar Donetsk,” the album’s spiritual and cultural anchor, “is the name of a Ukrainian foot-ball team and I just knew there was a good story in there. We don’t know what’s going on beyond our own neighborhood, that’s what it’s saying. The song is about the movement of peoples and exiles and economic fugitives. Refugees add to our culture. They bring talents and abilities with them. So it’s a song calling out for some more intelligent leadership in the world.”

  Indeed, fashioning a music that is political yet enchants the listener allowed for each musician to boldly delve into areas of life and society that most performers never dare to explore. With his posthumous final album, Streetcore, Strummer returned to hard-driving rock ’n’ roll evocative of his finest work with the Clash while creating a spiritual and rebellious record. “Where the hell was Elijah,” he sings in “Get Down Moses,” demanding to know where the prophets have gone who promised salvation. “[You gotta] get down Moses,” he continues. “Once we were free/The recipe for living/Is lost in memory.” It is an album of recollections, connections, and faith, channeling every disparate musical influence from bits and pieces of past Clash songs like “The Call Up,” to lyrical touches suggestive of Dylan, Springsteen, and Woody Guthrie. In the track “Arms Aloft,” Strummer may have penned the truest description of the spark that fuels his political spirit:

  Falling back in the garden

  of days so long ago

  somewhere in the memory

  the sun shines on you boy

  May I remind you of that scene

  We were arms aloft in Aberdeen

  The spirit is our gasoline

  Significantly, the chief distinction between Strummer’s political folk and that of Veloso, Rodríguez, and Jara is that they were products of sweeping political movements. The musicians cast themselves into the middle of the political fray and this served to inspire them to create. The social and political movements of the 1960s, from the civil rights movement in the United States to France in May ’68, provided a compelling forum for artists to originate work that was distinctly political. Just as “you can’t have a revolution without songs,” you can’t have songs without a revolution. While punk was a social movement, it was chiefly a marginalized subculture dominated by reactionaries that did little to change the dominant political culture. Strummer, the eternal seeker and optimist, spent a lifetime creating music in hopes of placing it within a larger social movement.

  In the end, the political folk music of these musicians advances a tradition of what Veloso explains as “liberating people to see a broader perspective, enabling a new un-dreamt critique of an anthropological, mythic, mystical formalist, and moral nature,”33 thus creating a condition of freedom with music that establishes a dialogue with the outside world. These musicians serve an important function in our society, particularly when many people find themselves isolated and at risk in a world that seems to be teetering on the edge of disaster. They craft a soundtrack of our rebellion and give us the courage to conceive of a grand intervention in the future of the world. It is, after all, as Veloso explains, a right that at once begins to be lived as a duty.

  CLASH OF THE TITAN

  By Joel Schalit

  I was ten years old when the Clash’s first record came out, living a short walk from the epicenter of the punk rock explosion: King’s Road, in London. Even for the smallest, youngest, and least hip of awkward immigrant children like me, it was impossible not to know who the Clash were. Like the Sex Pistols, they were literally everywhere: on BBC radio, in London’s weekly entertainment magazine, Time Out, on television shows like Top of the Pops, even on the pages of conservative newspapers like the Daily Telegraph. But at the time, it was very difficult to understand why the British media fixated upon them so strongly.

  In contrast to Lydon and company, the Clash’s first two records weren’t the kind of radically conceptual artistic statements meant to start cultural revolutions like Never Mind the Bollocks or the Pistols’ posthumously released The Great Rock and Roll Swindle. Instead of denouncing the music industry as a monolithic authoritarian political structure, albums like Give ’Em Enough Rope were simply really great rock records that you could dance to. They eschewed the Pistols’ antipolitics in favor of a more traditional American folk music liberalism, filtered through the sensibilities of four young men raised on British pub rock, nostalgic for the days of protest singers like Woody Guthrie, the Weavers, and early Bob Dylan.

  Like the MC5, the early Clash were all about resurrecting the hyperbole of radical street politics, romanticizing riots, rebellion, and at times even old school revolutionary violence. The brashness of their early songs helped give this nostalgically radical stance a lot of fashionable weight, but the band consistently failed to explain where it was really coming from. Were they Marxists? No. Were they Leninists? No. Were they anarchists? Definitely not. Were they upwardly mobile rock and rollers who coopted revolutionary slogans in order to gain market share? Maybe, depending on what side of the punk fence you stood on. If you were in a band like Crass, you definitely thought they were bourgeois. Accommodationists. “We’re Crass, not the Clash!” they declared. But if you were someone like Billy Bragg, the Clash opened punk’s door to the Communist Party.

  While their politics may not have been expertly defined, there was no denying that the Clash had a real axe to grind. No matter how stylized and image-conscious that proverbial axe was, many people felt that the Clash helped demystify much of the tension underlying the Britain of their day. Regardless of how clueless they were about their politics, the Clash’s firs
t two records successfully anticipated the crisis of the British welfare state. To the imminent election of Margaret Thatcher, the failure of the Labour government to address growing income discrepancies, and Britain’s inability to recognize the existence of an increasingly multiracial immigrant society, the Clash’s emotional political drive added the sense of melodrama necessary to raise consciousness about the way the UK was deteriorating.

  However, the real significance of the Clash’s work did not become apparent until 1979’s London Calling, followed by 1980’s even more magisterial Sandinista! Over the course of producing these two albums—and an occasional twelve inch—the Clash moved beyond the nihilistic political straitjacket of Sex Pistols–inspired British punk to develop one of the most politically sophisticated critiques of American imperialism ever to surface in rock ’n’ roll. They went after everything, from American consumer culture writ large across the face of the globe, to the Middle East and even the Nicaraguan revolution. It not only made artistic sense but was politically valid too.

  Yet what’s difficult to figure out about these records is how they expressed their politics musically. Instead of simply delivering political sermons, for example, “Know Your Rights,” the Clash’s utopia was embedded in how they synthesized the musical forms of England’s emerging multiethnic culture, melding dub and reggae with punk rock and pop, experimenting with hip-hop and New York’s burgeoning postdisco remix culture. Metaphorically speaking, it was all there. Regardless of how many other artists engaged in similar international maneuvering during the ’80s (the Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, or Paul Simon, to name a few), the Clash added an explicitly progressive political dimension to their global explorations that was firmly rooted in the ’60s Left. Whether the band actually understood the implications of what they were doing is beside the point. The fact is that they pulled it off, and in doing so, the Clash helped give punk radicalism its first overtly multicultural set of artistic sensibilities.