Башня. Зонгшпиль /// The Tower: A Songspiel from chto delat on Vimeo.

A fascinating video musical about contemporary development politics in St. Petersburg, centered around the proposed construction of an enormous skyscraper for the energy conglomerate, Gazprom. One can hear and see echoes of past dissections of the relationship between capital, personal power and the relentless transformation of the urban landscape, regardless of its consequences for the people who live within it, as subjectively addressed to varying degrees in films as disparate as Chinatown, In a Year of 13 Moons, When the Cat's Away, Lola and Sunshine State, as well as, of course, the foundational work on the subject, the Brecht/Weill opera, Rise and Fall of the State of Mahagonny. While watching it, I was struck about the extent to which the events, protagonists and social perspectives could have easily been transferred to an American context, which speaks to its universality.

Labels: Music, Neoliberalism, Russia, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe

Just to show that I'm not entirely devoid of sentimentality:

And all the colors that you see, are all a part of me, in this crazy world of mine. Has anyone ever so concisely captured the personal alienation that so many of us feel from the world in which we live? Such a lightning flash of recognition can lead people to travel down many paths, including, but not necessarily, political activism. For my money, Donna Summer remains one of the most unappreciated pop musicians of my lifetime because of the racially tinged ridicule of disco. Another of my favorites, On the Radio, was a prominent feature on the soundtrack of an excellent, but now forgotten, Jodie Foster film, Foxes, where it was used to ironically comment upon the naive expectations of the teen protagonists in a jaded, late 1970s Los Angeles. Apparently, I'm a Rainbow was recorded in 1981, but not released until 1996. One of the impressive subtleties of this composition by her husband for her is the thread of self-doubt (or is it self-awareness?) that runs throughout: I'm a rainbow and sometimes I can shine.

Rarely have the personal and the political been as brilliantly fused as in this 1964 Holland-Dozier-Holland composition for Diana Ross and the Supremes. As accurately noted by wikipedia: The song seemed to strike a chord in the USA as, while on one level it can be seen as a simple tale of a failed relationship, it can also been as capturing the spirit of the time after the assassination of JFK, racial tension, deepening problems in Vietnam and foreseeing the end of the early optimism of the 1960s.

But, at the gut level, this reaction by someone over at YouTube has it exactly right:

When this song came out I was 13 yrs old and my best friend Denise and I were walking up the street listing to the radio and it just blew my mind. I started walking backwards and she and I walked up Clinton Ave and I said, "Denise, this song will last FOREVER!" And it has.

And, finally, along similar lines, there is Angie, the Rolling Stones' valedictory to the communal spirit of the late 1960s:

Angie, Angie, when will all those clouds all disappear, Angie, Angie, where will it lead us from here, with no lovin' in our soul and no money in our coat, you can say we're satisfied, Angie, Angie, you can't say we never tried . . .

Typically, the Stones gave expression to a stark pessimism, which suggested a socially Darwinian future. Being the good cultural capitalists that they are, though, they continued to flourish by highlighting the sybaritic aspect of their music to the detriment of its other, more ambivalent qualities, so as to be compatible with Reaganism. If there could be said to be a pop music representation of neoliberalism, the Rolling Stones would be a strong candidate for it.

Labels: African Americans, American Culture, Music, Neoliberalism, YouTube

Prometheus 6 said it best: I guess it's time to get over my childhood crush. From the Guardian:

A handful of decades ago the roles for black performers in Hollywood movies were deliberately kept peripheral to the plots, so that their appearances could easily be edited out for screenings in the American south. Black singers and musicians were barred from taking rooms in the same hotels in which they were performing. Partners in an interracial marriage might decide to leave the US and move to more hospitable locations, such as Paris, to avoid hate mail and threats. All this and more happened to the singer and actor Lena Horne, who has died aged 92.

Horne not only rose above it all, but also significantly contributed to changing the situation. The velvet-voiced, multi-talented Horne first negotiated, and then resisted, the worst that a racist entertainment industry could throw at her. She rose to its summit as an original creative artist and a free woman whose style, beauty, eloquence and independence made her a role model for millions.

Horne shared stages with Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Billy Eckstine, Judy Garland, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and many other legends of American music during her long and varied career.

She became one of the first African Americans to cross the music-business colour divide and tour with an all-white band, singing for the successful Charlie Barnet swing orchestra in 1940 and sometimes sleeping in the band bus when hotels would not let her enter with her colleagues. She became a favourite pin-up among black servicemen, but would nonetheless refuse to perform on wartime tours in which black GIs were either excluded from the audience, or on occasion placed behind the German PoWs in the seating arrangements.

Indeed, it seemed that just about every aspect of her life was a provocation:

. . . She had been singing at the Manhattan nightclub Café Society when the impresario Felix Young chose her to star at the Trocadero, a nightclub he was planning to open in Hollywood in the fall of 1941. In 1990, Ms. Horne reminisced: My only friends were the group of New Yorkers who sort of stuck with their own group — like Vincente, Gene Kelly, Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen, and Richard Whorf — the sort of hip New Yorkers who allowed Paul Robeson and me in their houses.

Since blacks were not allowed to live in Hollywood, Felix Young, a white man, signed for the house as if he was going to rent it, Ms. Horne said. When the neighbors found out, Humphrey Bogart, who lived right across the street from me, raised hell with them for passing around a petition to get rid of me. Bogart, she said, sent word over to the house that if anybody bothered me, please let him know. . .

In 1945 the critic and screenwriter Frank Nugent wrote in Liberty magazine that Ms. Horne was “the nation’s top Negro entertainer.” In addition to her MGM salary of $1,000 a week, she was earning $1,500 for every radio appearance and $6,500 a week when she played nightclubs. She was also popular with servicemen, white and black, during World War II, appearing more than a dozen times on the Army radio program Command Performance.

The whole thing that made me a star was the war, Ms. Horne said in the 1990 interview. Of course the black guys couldn’t put Betty Grable’s picture in their footlockers. But they could put mine.

Touring Army camps for the U.S.O., Ms. Horne was outspoken in her criticism of the way black soldiers were treated. So the U.S.O. got mad, she recalled. And they said, ‘You’re not going to be allowed to go anyplace anymore under our auspices.’ So from then on I was labeled a bad little Red girl. . .

And in 1947, when Ms. Horne herself married a white man — the prominent arranger, conductor and pianist Lennie Hayton, who was for many years both her musical director and MGM’s — the marriage took place in France and was kept secret for three years.

And, there was this:

Horne's long-suppressed anger over the treatment of blacks in white society erupted in 1960 when she overheard a drunk white man at the Luau restaurant in Beverly Hills refer to her using a racial epithet.

Jumping up, she threw an ashtray, a table lamp and several glasses at him, cutting the man's forehead.

When reports of her outburst appeared in newspapers across the country, Horne was surprised at the positive response, mostly from African Americans.

Phone calls and telegrams came in from all over, she told the Christian Science Monitor in 1984. It was the first time it struck me that black people related to each other in bigger ways than I realized.

Not surprisingly, Horne was one of the strongest, most publicly visible voices for civil rights in the 1960s.

Labels: African Americans, American Culture, Music, Obituaries, Racism, YouTube

Labels: Celebrities, Europe, Global Recession, Music, Neoliberalism

Well, not quite. The story is a little more complicated than that. But, as this article indicates, the discovery that three African American brothers in Detroit performed and recorded music that anticipated the punk explosion of the late 1970s remains quite striking, given that punk was often described as the antithesis of disco, drawing a stark racial boundary. Of course, it wasn't true, as both punk and disco emphasized multiculturalism, but that was the perception manipulated by the mainstream.

Labels: African Americans, American Culture, Music, Racism

Labels: Celebrities, Europe, Global Recession, Music, Neoliberalism

Timeless:

Labels: Music, Neoliberalism, YouTube

Labels: American Culture, Music, YouTube

Radical hip hop, courtesy of Immortal Technique:

Hat tip to lenin over at Lenin's Tomb.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Culture, American Empire, Bolivarian Revolution, Hip Hop, Music, Neoliberalism, Racism, YouTube