Link → This Mix Kills Fascists
Patriotic Americans – This Mix Kills Fascists
Christr Vogt
pā-trē-ət: noun – A musical dissident whose aim in songwriting is to thwart economic unfairness and war-mongering with the ultimate goal of putting Democracy back in the peoples’ hands by rocking their assess.
1. “Hank Aaron” – Smoke
I’ll admit outright that I was looking for a reason to include Smoke on my mix probably even before I received the theme, but was actually able to locate an arguably relevant track in this ditty. Very simply put…what’s more American than baseball? What more heroic African American player is there in all the Leagues history than Hammerin’ Hank, the last Negro League player to play in the Major Leagues and recipient of an outpouring of public support following threats made on his life in response to his beating Babe Ruth’s home-run record? Also, The lyric “in her spare time she’s sewing handkerchiefs to catch our tears. I still see her hemming them in tiny stitches in the dark until it blinds her” plays nicely into the direction I took the loose theme “Patriotic Americans,” which I translated here as “kick ass, subversive people and generally sad themes of marginalization in the history of American and British music alike.”
2. “Song to Woody” – Bob Dylan
This one’s self-explanatory, I think. “Here’s to Cisco and Sunny and Leadbelly too, and to all the good people that traveled with you. Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men that come with the dust and are gone with the wind.” Again, it was inevitable that I would include mention of dust-bowl era folk heroes in a mix of this sort.
3. “Hallelujah I’m a Bum” – Harry McClintock
Just listen. Haywire Mac is a champion. Thematically, the same applies to this song as the last…it’s an ode to the tramps. Mac often sang about union workers to humorous effect.
4. Christ For President – Billy Bragg and Wilco
Amen! Not Really! But we can all get behind Guthrie’s sentiment, I think…”with a job and pension for young and old we will make hallelujah ring.”
5. “Town Called Malice” – The Jam
The tempo of this song is so damned dance-y that the first several times I heard it I overlooked completely the fact that the lyrics are fucking tragic. “Rows and rows of disused milk floats stand dying in the dairy yard and a hundred lonely housewives clutch empty milk bottles to their hearts.” It’s enough to make you stop believing indeed….
6. “Do They Owe Us a Living?” – Crass
“OF COURSE THEY FUCKING DO!” This marks where I began to take some serious liberties with the theme by shifting the genre a bit. It’s abrupt, I know, but while Crass couldn’t be farther from Guthrie stylistically, they are both saying very much the same thing: “The living that is owed to me I’m never going to get, they’ve buggered this old world up, up to their necks in dept.”
7. “Kill the Poor” - Dead Kennedys
If Bush had his way…actually, a third term in office is all he might have needed to fully eradicate the pesky threat of mid-western, blue collar farm boys.
8. “Forming” – The Germs
Darby Crash - inarticulate buffoon or well-read punk-rock genius? Both. One can barely parse the entirety of the Germs Anthology for one discernable lyric without succumbing to the desire to make google do the work but the dude walked around quoting Nietzsche, go figure…. In this song, Bobby Pyn attacks the actions of the “Prez,” the Queen, and the Czar.
9. “Apeman” – The Kinks
Again, this song made its way onto the mix almost exclusively through a bias…The Kinks might be the coolest band ever to have lived. Would the likes of Guided by Voices have formed without their influence? No. “I don’t feel safe in this world no more, I don’t want to die in a nuclear war, I want to sail away to a distant shore and make like an ape man.” The Kinks are the very definition of patriots…somehow.
10. “American Boy” – Estelle Featuring Kanye West
Apart from having “American” in its title this song breaks from the theme entirely but it’s danceable and it kicks ass…so deal.
11. “My Kind of Soldier” – Guided by Voices
“…you can ride on my shoulders when you’ve won.” You know, really…this song also has nothing to do with the theme. But I’m absolved the accusation of having put it on the mix completely without reason because Robert Pollard has never written a topically coherent lyric anyways.
12. “Cunts Are Still Running The World” – Jarvis Cocker
Heh, this song is great.
13. “Johnny Appleseed” – Joe Strummer And The Mescaleros
A perfect closing song, I think. “If you’re after getting the honey…” Strummer tells “the man,” “…then you don’t go killing all the bees.”
