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Om författaren

Michael Stewart Foley is the author of Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance During the Vietnam War, winner of the Scott Bills Memorial Prize from the Peace History Society. He has edited or coedited three other books and is a founding editor of The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics visa mer and Culture. A native New Englander, he has taught American history at the City University of New York and, in England, at the University of Sheffield. He is now Professor of American Political Culture at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. visa färre

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Johnny Cash' politics transcended divisions. He was no partisan. He was a free thinking rebel he wasn't always right but tried to follow what he believed. He was tolerant of wide array of perspectives. Cash's politics was based on empathy: for the poor, for the native American, for the prisoner, for the lost, for the drunk, for the solider. You want to understand this politics? Listen to the song: Man in Black.

This book is well-researched and does a great job of articulating of Johnny Cash's political worldview, which was based on love/empathy. Johnny was often a bit of a contradiction but deep down, he lived to try to lift the load of others. True art does this. You can't divorce his politics of empathy from his music. It's an integral part of what makes Cash tick.… (mer)
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ryantlaferney87 | 1 annan recension | Dec 8, 2023 |
It's always baffled me how anyone could listen to the lyrics of The Man in Black and not think that Johnny Cash had at least a very strong progressive streak in makeup. And yet, fans regularly castigate his daughter, songwriter and musician Rosanne Cash, on Twitter whenever she expresses a liberal viewpoint. "Your father would be ashamed of you," is the general and often literal response from country music fans whose perceptions of her father's political leanings are filtered through their own conservative viewpoint.

Then again, maybe I was doing the same thing — cherrypicking examples and ignoring the overall message in Cash's music and actions. I didn't think so, but then again I wouldn't, would I? So it was with great interest I listened to an interview with Michael Stewart Foley, the author of [Citizen Cash] during a live-streamed session of last fall's Johnny Cash Heritage Festival, and later bought his book. Foley does a great job of meticulously detailing the ways that Cash demonstrated his political viewpoints and how they evolved over the years, though always with a central touchstone — empathy — guiding each turn.

Songwriter Kris Kristofferson once wrote a song (The Pilgrim, Chapter 33) that many listeners thought was describing his good friend Johnny Cash:

He's a poet and he's a picker, he's a prophet and he's a pusher
He's a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he's stoned
He's a walkin' contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction
Takin' every wrong direction on his lonely way back home


The line "walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction" seems particularly apt. Foley shows that Cash didn't hew strictly to any particular political ideology, but rather came to his stance on various social and political issues through the lens of empathy — putting himself into the shoes of the person or identity group in question to unearth their essential humanity. That empathy-based values system explains how he could be supportive of Richard Nixon (who promised to end the war in Vietnam with the spectacularly euphemistic slogan "peace with honor") and campaign for a Republican candidate for governor in his home state of Arkansas (who promised to enact comprehensive prison reform of a notoriously inhumane state correctional system).

Sometimes Cash's empathy stemmed directly from his own childhood as the son of a poor sharecropper who nevertheless saw the worse plight of black sharecroppers no further away than across the road, and who listened to and appreciated black music (or "race music" as it was called then) at a time when white people weren't supposed to admit to such things. His own (relatively minor) brushes with the law while in the throes of an addiction to amphetamines and barbiturates led him to perform countless free concerts at prisons around the country, including the most famous ones that were turned into live albums At Folsom Prison and At San Quentin.. At other times he immersed himself in reading historical accounts and talking to people to better understand their lives before writing a concept album like Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian or Blood, Sweat and Tears, a collection of songs about American working men, with an emphasis on black workers.

There are other aspects of Cash's life that don't fit neatly into the progressive box. His devout Christianity led him to be less than forthright in supporting equal rights for women; more than once he asserted that he believed in the Bible's teaching that a woman's role in life is to support her husband. And he was a steadfast supporter of Billy Graham, whose antisemitic and homophobic views were far from exemplary.

The main thing I took away from this book was a growing belief that there are an awful lot of people in this world on all sides of the political spectrum who would benefit from using empathy to guide their values and their votes. I'm going to do my best to take my own advice, even when (especially when) it's a hard road to walk. In the end, I guess we're all walking contradictions in our own way.
… (mer)
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rosalita | 1 annan recension | Jul 4, 2022 |

For kids born in the late 1950s and beyond, who felt they had been robbed of the American Dream and abandoned by the people who last went to the culture barricades, Fresh Fruit actually offered hope.

My first encounter with the Dead Kennedys was in a pulp rock magazine, probably Creem. It wasn't a positive reaction. The band's name was a turn off for someone born after the Kennedy assassination. It was years later when I finally listened to the band. Cleveland's WMMS was a world class rock station and I heard many new bands before most of the country did, but I never heard the Dead Kennedys. It years later when I was in the Marines in California that I first "Holiday in Cambodia" and became a fan.

Bloomsbury Academic has put out many these books covering a specific album of a band: Patti Smith's Horses, Meat is Murder, The Velvet Underground and Nico, Born in the USA and one hundred others. The books give an introduction to the band and the historical setting at the time. It is more than a book just about the album, rather the album is the central point of the book. Jello Biafra (Eric Reed Boucher) had a vision of music much like Patti Smith. He saw Rock and Roll as selling out. Corporate and Arena Rock crushed the spirit of Rock and Roll.

Biafra, from Colorado, moved to San Francisco and eventually met with East Bay Ray and Klaus Floride. The name was Biafra's idea and was rejected by the band for some time before being accepted. The band's hardcore sound and biting political lyrics made them famous. In what many would see as a liberal haven, the Dead Kennedys viewed something entirely different. Many saw Jerry Brown and Diane Feinstein as patron saints to the far left; the Dead Kennedy's and Biafra, who wrote nearly all the lyrics, saw things very differently. In "California Uber Alles," Biafra records Jerry Brown as saying:

Carter power will soon go away
I will be fuhrer one day
I will command all of you


"Lynch the Landlord" was rage against the price gouging landlords, including mayor Diane Feinstein.

The Dead Kennedys also used their own sense of humor and sensationalism to get their message out. Biafra ran for mayor against Feinstein. There was humor and political attacks, and although Biafra only won 4% of the vote, that number far exceeded the number of punk rockers in the city.

Perhaps their most over the top, and honest, "prank" occurred at the 1980 Bay Area Music Awards where the Dead Kennedys performed, supposedly to give them mainstream credibility. The band stopped their performance of "California Uber Alles" to announce they are not a "punk band" but a "new wave band" and tear into the commercial corruption of punk into new wave music. They mock The Knack's "My Sharona" by playing "My Payola" complete with a "boring" guitar solo. If there was any possible doubt the Dead Kennedys were anti-establishment, it was completely removed by this single act. The song would later appear as "Pull My Strings" on the album Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death.

Dead Kennedys' Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables is a look at the late 1970s San Francisco and exposes what many at the time did not notice -- the hypocrisy of the political left. The Dead Kennedys were more than just a protest or political band. They used humor and wanted to show people that standing up against the establishment was not only worthwhile, it was fun. Well worth the read for those in the 50 plus crowd who want to remember and for the younger crowd to see that their parents might not be the conformists you think they are.

… (mer)
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evil_cyclist | Mar 16, 2020 |

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