… Hillary’s recent speech denouncing the alt-right has raised eyebrows. It was as if in 1976 progressive-rock titans Emerson, Lake & Palmer had released a double album devoted to excoriating this new band nobody had ever heard of before called the Ramones.
If you can remember back four decades, it might strike you that the alt-right phenomenon of 2016 is basically political punk rock: loud, abrasive, hostile, white, back to basics, and fun.
Johnny Ramone was not as talented a musician as Keith Emerson, but a decade after Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper’s he had some timely ideas about how rock should get on track again. …
But it didn’t seem that way to many at the time. The punk rockers struck most nice people then as barbaric.
Which they sort of were. That was the point of picking up an electric guitar: to make a lot of noise.
Even the most deplorable habit of a few on the alt-right—the use of Nazi imagery—has its punk predecessors. The Ramones’ greatest song was “Blitzkrieg Bop.”
COMMENTS:
* Don’t forget the original first lines to “Today your love tomorrow the world” were “I’m a nazi baby a nazi yes I am”
* The Clash had White Riot. I think they were pretty explicit about being a white identify movement.
* Along those lines, some snips from a 2006 NYT article about the post-punk American hardcore scene:
How Hard Was Their Core? Looking Back at Anger
A new documentary, “American Hardcore,” tells the story of Minor Threat and like-minded bands. And it begins with hardcore veterans talking about the guy Mr. MacKaye wouldn’t sing about. Vic Bondi, from Chicago’s Articles of Faith, talks about the genre as a reaction to Ronald Reagan’s “white man order.”
The film also hints at an underlying anxiety about race. As one former hardcore kid puts it, the genre was one of the few that “felt like it wasn’t totally ripping off black culture,” which might be another way of saying it felt white.
Mr. MacKaye mentions another out-of-step experience — his years as a white kid in a majority-black school — by way of explaining his song “Guilty of Being White.” It’s an anti-racist song, he says, meaning anti-anti-white: “You blame me for slavery/A hundred years before I was born.”
Black Flag had a similar song, “White Minority,” which promised, “Gonna be a white minority.” (It was sung by a Latino singer, Ron Reyes, emphasizing the sarcasm.) Hardcore is, among other things, the sound of whiteness under siege, and in an odd way it’s a joyful noise. In the early 80’s, thanks in part to these bands, even white suburban kids could feel like righteous underdogs.
All those [desecrated] Reagan heads on flyers seem pretty spiteful, but maybe there’s also a hint of envy: tough young white guys paying grudging tribute to a tough old one.
* If Trump wrote the first Ramones album…..
1. Blitzkrieg Bop (No change. You don’t mess with the classics.)
2. Beat on the Blacks
3. Hillary is a Hag
4. I Wanna Be Your God-Emperor
5. Chain Saw (one of the tools I’ll use to build The Wall)
6. Now I Wanna Make America Great Again
7. I Don’t Wanna Start a Land War with Russia
8. Loudmouth (No change, just a dedication to Megyn Kelly, Lyin’ Hillary and that fat-disgusting-pig Rosie O’Donnell in the liner notes.)
9. Havana Affair w/ an Eastern-European Super Model
10. Listen to My 10-Point Plan on Immigration Reform
11. (I own all the property on) 53rd & 3rd
12. Let’s (not) Dance (around the issue of abolishing birthright citizenship)
13. I Don’t Wanna Fight a War for Jews
14. Today The Wall, Tomorrow The World
* I would have considered myself alt-right six or nine months ago, but I’m distancing myself from the label now. Milo, Steve and other sympathetic journalists say that the Nazi stuff is mostly “trolling” for shock value, but I’m starting to doubt that. If you’ve spend any significant amount of time on sites like TRS you know that plenty of the posters there are dead serious about it. Check out the comments under that article by the Jewish guy claiming he was alt-right. The most popular alt-right podcast is Fash the Nation, which recently featured this song. Are they trolling or serious? At a certain point, what difference does it make?
Hello Merchant you old fiend
We have grown tired of your greed
In the darkness always creeping
Looting our nations while we’re sleeping
And though the cattle-cars lie empty on the line
We’ll bide our time
Heating the Ovens of Auschwitz
In restless dreams I walked alone
Munich streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of a streetlamp
I raised my right arm and began Mein Kampf
Then our backs were stabbed by the flames of the Reichstag fire
A funeral pyre
That lit the Ovens of Auschwitz
And in the fire’s light I saw
Six Million Hebrews, maybe more
Lying even when not speaking
Poisoning young minds with false teachings
Commies telling us that we all had to share
Yet no one dared
To send the trains to Auschwitz
“Fools,” said I, “You do not know”
Jewry like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Raise right arms and I might reach you
But the Allied bombs like heavy raindrops fell…
And cooled the Ovens of Auschwitz
And the people bowed and prayed
To the Volcano God enslaved
But one man left us his warning
And in our hearts still lives his yearning
And the man said “The lies of the Rabbi’s can only be stopped by
force
And gas of course (of coursh)
And in the Ovens of Auschwitz”
* It was a lot harder to accuse someone of being a Nazi in the 1970′s because many of my generation had fathers, uncles, or family friends who fought against them. The memory was much more fresh and no one (((ethnic))) group claimed it as their unique experience. In fact, one was constantly reminded that is was Americans (now we would call them whites) who saved the Jews from the ovens. Collecting militaria was not nearly as stigmatized especially if someone you knew brought it back as war booty. reading books on WW2, military board games, soldiers occupying Germany were something that could be reflected upon by living memory (for instance now you could not read a new book on ww2 where anyone other than the most junior officer or enlisted man could be interviewed because every higher up is long since dead).The fact that the US and the USSR won the war meant that there was a more casual attitude towards their vanquished foe. Nazism was not something to be feared. In fact, everything that diminished our enemy diminished our efforts. So something like the Ramone’s video is more of a joke than it is a glorification of the Nazis in it because everyone in it were all long dead. We killed them.
* See Lester Bangs’s “White Noise Supremacists”
I’d point out that turn of the century indie rock was also very much an implicit white identity movement. It was arty white suburban guys moving to the city and creating a kind of cool that had nothing to do with hip-hop.
* White Riot – a response to blacks rioting at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival, and the Clash getting mugged by a black gang. “They can do it, why can’t we?”
White Man In Hammersmith Palais – Joe Strummer goes to a reggae concert and feels alienated and out of place. All his assumptions about ‘the black struggle’ are proven naive and wrong.
Safe European Home – Strummer gets back home from a holiday in Jamaica and says, “Thank God I don’t live there”. Another song about disillusionment with black culture.
Fun fact – I knew Strummer towards the end of his life, and he told me he voted Ukip in the 1999 European elections.
