(chorus)
For years we’ve all been slaves
Trapped in the Age of Rock
But can’t you see the dawn
As we enter the Age of Folk?
(verses)
They’ve pushed their loveless music
And pounded their soulless drums
They expect us to live like robots
And obey their Pentagon
They’ve poisoned the minds of rockers
And made some slaves think they’re free
But it’s time for the Folk Revolution
And time to end Rock Tyranny. (chorus)
They’ve stolen to the tune of millions
And tried to drown us in the sea
Their ugliness is what they call beauty
And they don’t want equality
They’re a bunch of moral cowards
A decadent aristocracy
But it’s time for the Folk Revolution
To create the world of your dreams. (chorus)
Every folk person shall be an artist
And by day all folk will have liberty
Love and peace will rule the world
And equal will be all who breathe
No one man will be the top dog
And folk will no more be lonely
All folk will own the world in common
Folk Revolution is the key. (chorus)
The “Folk Revolution” protest folk song was written in the 1980s to protest against the corporatization of rock music and against the hip rock capitalism of the 1980s. In retrospect, I probably overestimated the revolutionary potential of folk music as a tool for revolutionary democratic social change and I probably underestimated the revolutionary potential of rock music.
To listen to some other protest folk songs, you can check out the “Columbia Songs for a Democratic Society” music site at the following link:
http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music
2 comments:
I want to comment more on this entry later but for now just let me note that I too went through a stage when I believed, or maybe half-believed, that music would be the revolution. I will admit I was rather sketchy about whether rock or folk, or both, would be the vehicle for that transformation. I had (have) many,many friends who will go their graves believing, under either format, that such an outcome was possible.
Of course, they did not do step one to push that notion forward, except in some drug-induced haze. Worse, they never saw the political struggle for power as anything worthy of their time.
Needless to say they had no trouble, when the deal got to hot to handle and the Johnson and Nixon governments racheted up the pressure, of folding their revolutionary tents and learning that music, after all, was merely for the enjoyment of the listener.
As we come to the 40th annivesaries of both Woodstock and Altamont, I need to add nothing now to the far away echos of those events that defined the limits of "music as the revolution" theory. Yet the political struggle for the new, more just socialist society remains to be solved. Let's get to that. We will throw a few songs in along the way to aid that struggle. More later.
I think, historically, at some points music (like religion) has both helped mobilize people to fight for their freedom (i.e. Freedom songs/"We Shall Overcome" in Civil Rights Movement) and influenced the political direction of working-class consciousness.
It could be that if the music that gets aired daily over the radio or gets promoted on the Big Media screens is the kind of music that encourages working-class people not to band together as a class to transform society and immediately end institutional classism, then it may be serving the same social control/manipulation cultural function for the plutocracy that religion played in the pre-rock music era of world history.
And so it's possible that the reason many more working-class young people in each decade may end up spending their twenties and thirties trying to individually escape from their day job wage enslavement by spending their sparetime forming bands and trying to make it as musicians than the number of working-class young people in each decade who spend their sparetime banding together for radical political change, may be related to how the dominant music/media youth cultural scene in each decade tends to influence their generation's consciousness level and values, etc.
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