Freak Power; Or, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Historical periods and events do not happen in a random and isolated fashion. Nor does history happen all at once. Civilization is the deliberate continuum of humanity crashing into itself all over the world that we measure by history and assess by culture.
Rock & Roll can be anything it damn well wants. Music is broad enough to contain all kinds of sounds and rhythms; and art is capable enough to inspire the entire spectrum of reactions in the human psyche, from the emotional to the political. Way before Elvis and Alan Freed, Adolph Hitler’s Nazis produced exhibitions of what they judged as Degenerate Music, an idea inspired from writings in the 1920s by Detroit automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, who published screeds against what he saw as Jewish cultural influence.
“Popular Music is a Jewish monopoly,” Ford wrote in The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, a series he published in his Dearborn Independent newspaper in the early 1920s. “Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, the slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin.”
It is difficult for me not to feel a certain sense of ethnic pride when learning of the disgust that my Jewish-American antecedents inspired in the rotten souls of men like Henry Ford and Adolph Hitler just for writing, publishing, promoting and performing good time music for the masses. But God knows, you don’t have to be Jewish to be antifascist and, as much as I would like to believe it was, being Jewish is not necessarily a prerequisite to antifascism, either. None of these delineations are hard and fast. Even punk rock has its racist skinheads, which is exactly what made Rock Against Racism necessary in the first place.
If your art is attacked as degenerate by the likes of racists, xenophobes, nativists, pseudo-scientific, pseudo-historical, pseudo-intellectual creeps, then you are likely producing quality work.
Punk was so sorely needed exactly because so many of the “hippie” bands and their successors had grown so jaded from the rapid growth of the industry.
When marijuana became legal in Michigan on Dec. 1, 2019, John Sinclair, who from 1969–1971 served 29 months of a politically motivated ten-year sentence for…