During the performance of their song “Holiday” at a recent concert in Washington D.C., Green Day’s lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong asked the stage crew to turn out the lights. He stood on stage, with a flashlight pointed out towards the audience, as they held up their cell phone lights, illuminating the entire stadium, and asked, “Do you want democracy?” The crowd responded with a unified, “Yes!” He followed up by asking, “Do you want fascism?” The crowed replied, “No!” He concluded by repeating his first inquiry, “Do you want democracy?” To which the crowd again responded in unison, “Yes!” My daughter and I were in the audience in D.C., and when Armstrong stood on stage, with a single light illuminating towards us, I thought about the role of art and music in protest and in calling out fascism.
I, as well as others, have written extensively on fascism and its current manifestations. You can see my posts on Christian fascism, the links between the United States and Nazi Germany, the ways that fascism appears in our current moment, and more. I don’t want to rehash any of that today; instead, I want to look at some artists who used their work to combat fascism, to be antifascists. Each of these artists, echo Anna Seghers’ dedication to her novel The Seventh Cross which she “dedicated to Germany’s antifascists, living and dead.” While these artists aren’t German, they carry on the legacy of those who fought back against fascism and oppression. Artists, in many ways, act as prophets, having their finger on the world around us long before most of catch up. They point out oppression. They point out systemic issues. They warn us and call upon us to respond. They are Cassandras and Amoses and Elijahs calling out to us. Today, I want to look at musicians who have used their art to counter encroaching fascism.
Back in May, I started an #antifascist playlist thread on Twitter with various songs, from various periods, that directly confront fascism. I don’t want to cover all of these songs here, but I want to highlight a few of them, notably Woody Guthrie’s “Tear the Fascists Down,” Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam,” and Sonic Youth’s “Youth Against Fascism.”
Woody Guthrie first adorned his guitar with the famous phrase “This machine kills fascists” during 1943, two years before the end of World War II. He supposedly did this after writing “Talking Hitler’s Head Off” and the lyrics appearing in the Daily Worker, a Communist Party USA paper. Guthrie wrote “Tear the Fascists Down” in late 1942, and the song points out that in order to defeat fascism and free Paris and London and other cities we must recognize it and maintain a unified front to crush it. Guthrie sings in the first verse that while bombs drop the sky “Hitler told the world around he would tear our union down,” but by standing together the union will hold.
Climbing to the top of a mountain, Guthrie looks out across the landscape and sees “every farm and every town” and the people of the world that inhabit them. Those people, unified, will “tear the fascists down” because they recognize the threat, stand together, and fight back. However, as we know, individuals in the United States, even in the halls of power, sympathized with the Nazis and fascism, seeking to create a fascist state here in the United States. William Dudley Pelley, founder of the Silver Shirts, was an avowed fascist and sought to turn the United States into a fascist nation. Rachel Maddow’s podcast Ultra and her book Prequel detail all of this, pointing out that while Guthrie sand against fascism there were those who openly sought it here. That is why the end of Guthrie’s song is important. He knows that unification defeats fascism, and he asks, twice at the end of the song, “Good people, what are we waiting on?”
Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” appeared in 1964, a little over twenty years after Guthrie’s “Tear the Fascists Down.” It’s a song about the Civil Rights Movement, specifically in response to 1963 and the murders of Emmett Till (1955), Medgar Evers (1963), and Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair (1963). Musically, the song moves from a show tune, playing upon the assumption of Black musicians as merely entertainers for white audiences, to a driving dirge. At the switch, Simone says, “This is a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written for it yet.” While the music feels like a show tune, an upbeat frolick, Simone undercuts the feeling with lyrics about violence against African Americans in the deep South and the movement.
One may ask what a song like “Mississippi Goddam” has to do with fascism? Many saw the South as a totalitarian state with fascist influences. Robert Paxton, in The Anatomy of Fascism, points out fascisms rise in the South even before Benito Mussolini in Italy. Paxton writes, “the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism is American: the Ku Klux Klan.” Fascism relies on fear and control of the powers of government, and in the deep South we saw this during Jim Crow and segregation. Lillian Smith points out that nowhere in the United States was fascism hated as much as it was in the South because Southerners saw themselves in Nazi Germany, and that is no surprise considering the ways that Hitler and the Nazi regime looked to the South for some of its policies and ideas.
Simone calls out the United States and its gradualism response to demands for equality. The recurring refrain, as she lists off calls for desegregation, an end to violence, voting rights, and more, is “too slow.” She sings,
Oh, but this whole country is full of lies
You’re all gonna die and die like flies
I don’t trust you anymore
You keep on saying, “Go slow”
We need to think about “Mississippi Goddam” and other songs of the movement as antifascist because they directly push back against totalitarian and fascist political systems that use power to suppress and oppress individuals.
Sonic Youth’s song “Youth Against Fascism” debuted in 1992 on their album Dirty. Appearing almost fify years after Guthrie and thirty years after Simone, the song deals with various forms of fascism that the band saw around them during that period. They point out the rise of white supremacists and the Klan, possibly even referencing moments such as this in 1987 when Oprah Winfrey visited Forsyth County, Georgia and interviewed people in the community, many of whom held white supremacists ideals. It also references Justice Clarence Thomas’ confirmation and the attacks on Anita Hill, the woman who called out Thomas for sexual harassment. As well, the song calls out the United States’ warmongering and calls George H. W. Bush a “war pig.”
“Youth Against Fascism” comes from a long line of antifascists song in punk from the Dead Kennedys and Regan Youth to current bands such as Propaghandi and The Muslims. It points out that while the all of the events and people they reference may not be fascist there are fascist tendencies. As well, they point out that these things, like Guthrie did in 1942 and Simone did in 1964, are things they hate, and they call upon us to push back. In the chorus, Thurston Moore repeats, “It’s the song I hate.” If it is a song we hate, one that oppresses, then, “Good people,” as Guthrie asks, “what are we waiting on?”
This is not a full list of antifascist songs that I have compiled. You can see more on the thread linked above. However, I hope it gives a good foundation for you on some songs that, like the prophets, expose the rot around us and call us to action. What antifascists songs would you recommend? Let me know in the comments below or add them to the Twitter thread above.
Interminable Rambling 