dagblog - Comments for "The Beauty of the Blacklist: In Memory of Pete Seeger"

My cassette with "In My Life"

artappraiser — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 01:24:46 +0000

In reply to That was fun. Just last night

My cassette with "In My Life" is too worn out to make an MP3 with. Back in the olden days, another life, I bought a used MGB without being aware it didn't have a radio, only a tape deck. I owned like 3 cassettes at the time, and had not much in the budget for more, partly because I had just bought the MGB. One of the tapes was a Beatles greatest hits mix from the beginning to Abbey Road. It got played thousands and thousands of times. It still works, but you can imagine...

I prefer to remember Pete

rmrd0000 — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 18:05:23 +0000

In reply to The Beauty of the Blacklist: In Memory of Pete Seeger

I prefer to remember Pete Seeger for "We Shall Overcome" and "this Land is Your Land."

There was a discussion of how soon the criticism of a recently deceased person should come when Nelson Mandela died. Seeger supported a murderer but also defied the House Unamerican Activities Committee.

Mandela appeared to use the Communists as a matter of convenience. Bayard Rustin left the Communist Party and joined the ranks of the Civil Rights movement

Eric Snowden fled to a country that has harsh homophobic laws, represses journalists and imprisons activists like Pussy Riot. Excuses are made for why Snowden had to do what he did. Perhaps Seeger felt that the failure of the US to fully address issues of poverty and civil rights along with its policy of overthrowing foreign governments led Seeger to make the choice for Russian support just as Snowden made his choice.

I just find the whole

artappraiser — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 17:33:04 +0000

In reply to Yep, good stuff - much as

I just find the whole phenomenon so intriguing. That the nostalgia for what happened is so strong that it still affects their music scene today, even with young people, just makes it more interesting.

Some random thoughts:

When the problem is people drowning in agitprop or an ideology, passionate counter-agitprop (including "protest lyrics") may not ever be a good response.

Freshness of style is revolutionary and inspirational in itself, opening minds to new worlds. More than one person in the documentary opined that the phenomenon happened because the music was apolitical. Maybe only people who already feel "free" respond well to protest lyrics and other ideological art along the same lines?

An especially interesting point made in the film was about "coolness" and timing. That in '61 and '62, the Soviet Union was "cool" and that many youth were therefore inspired believers. And had Beatlemania happened at that time, instead of a few years later, when the USSR had become "not cool," Beatles music would not have infected Soviet youth in the same manner. Basically that the powers that be that rejected the Khruschev modus operandi made a really big mistake. Throw in thoughts of Pete Seeger in at this point, i.e., would it have helped if the powers-that-be promoted his style of music? Or not?

If it's an essence of conservatism to desire resurrection of, or reference to, old styles of art, what does it mean that they are now so nostalgic about The Beatles and that they still affect lots of their music?

Yep, good stuff - much as

PeraclesPlease — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 07:52:37 +0000

In reply to From what you say here, I

Yep, good stuff - much as they tried they couldn't keep out the Beatles or even the Monkees, and couldn't shut down the thousands of imitation bands & look. And the kids didn't trust Radio Free Europe - they understood propaganda's propaganda from either side. But The Animals? Procol Harum? Zappa? Golden. Of course getting a bootleg cassette - which didn't even become a mass format until 1968 - much less a real album was much harder and more dangerous.

Even today, much of the music in the East is twisted with the nostalgic very aged 60's band feel.

My backyard ;-)

PeraclesPlease — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 07:46:04 +0000

In reply to This whole thread has been

My backyard ;-)

That was fun. Just last night

EmmaZahn — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 05:15:53 +0000

In reply to From what you say here, I

That was fun.

Just last night I bumped into some Beatles songs on YouTube and lost an hour or so listening and remembering the early mid-Sixties and thought how lucky The Beatles were in their timing, something someone in the documentary also noted.

Must be a sign that it is finally time to replace my old vinyl albums with MP3s(?). I think this one will be first:

In My Life

From what you say here, I

artappraiser — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 03:10:46 +0000

In reply to Just to clarify, 1) yes, they

From what you say here, I think you might enjoy this documentary if you haven't seen it:

http://www.thirteen.org/beatles/about/

I know did. Especially as I have always had an interest in the Velvet Revolution stuff, and got to know someone who was a member of an important artist/intellectual dissident group in Leningrad in the 70's, but I had no idea about any of the earlier Beatles subculture stuff (except vague things about the Soviet's powers-that-be trying to stem the tide against blue jeans, rock n'roll, and long hair and the like.)

Edit to add: they have the full video available here:

http://www.thirteen.org/beatles/video/video-watch-how-the-beatles-rocked...

This, from the first link is really the gist of it:

Art Troitsky, Russia’s leading rock music writer and self-proclaimed “radical young man” during the Beatles era, describes just how important the band was, behind the Iron Curtain. “In the big bad West,” he says, “they’ve had whole huge institutions which spent millions of dollars for undermining the Soviet system. And I’m sure that the impact of all those stupid Cold War institutions has been much, much smaller than the impact of the Beatles.”

And there is ample evidence to support that opinion in the documentary, some of it actually quite touching.

This whole thread has been

Resistance — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 00:38:13 +0000

In reply to Just to clarify, 1) yes, they

This whole thread has been interesting. Thank you for sharing this link, I had never heard of her before. How terrible and sad her fate. How is it you can find these things, is it a study of your's?

Just to clarify, 1) yes, they

PeraclesPlease — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 00:16:36 +0000

In reply to PP, since my snippy comment

Just to clarify,

1) yes, they cared about our protest songs - figures like Havel were huge fans of counter-culture figures like Zappa and Lou Reed, as was the earlier generation from the Prague Spring, where Ginsberg snuck in to Prague to join in the protests and the beat generation was idolized

2) Seeger was a promoter for Stalin in the west, and carried some responsibility for that role he adopted for more than a decade. To say he "stood behind workers every time" is pretty ironic when Eastern European workers for 2 generations were essentially low-paid labor for Uncle Joe & Russia, sending their excess production Moscow's way - which is one of the ways the Soviet Union propped its system up for so long - those calls to the workers meant more time in horrendous conditions in the mines, collective farms, huge spewing factories that destroyed the mountains & nearby streams. That Koestler gave the wakeup call to the Beria years in 1938 gave less excuse to Seeger for his romanticism.

You might enjoy Skvorecky's "The Engineer of Human Souls" (only marginally about Stalin), Kundera's The Unberable Lightness of Being (not the movie), or Viewegh's

which works as both book & movie by Petr Nikolaev. (note: none of these are depressing - the last 1 quite humorous)

Ironically, a number of the Czech heroes who fought the Nazis as part of the underground or in foreign armies were either executed or placed in prison camps by the Communists as too strong & dangerous to the state - Milada Horakova being one who even Einstein, Churchill & Eleanor Roosevelt tried to save - instead her execution was slow strangulation for 15 minutes.

PP, since my snippy comment

Ramona — Fri, 31 Jan 2014 22:40:24 +0000

In reply to Not quite - it's that we

PP, since my snippy comment still bothers you, even though I thought I explained what I meant, let me try again: I did not mean they didn't care about us, or we didn't care about them. I was answering a question about why Seeger wasn't over there singing protest songs with them. What I meant, and obviously didn't convey well--and probably should have left alone--was that our protest songs wouldn't have meant much to them. They wouldn't have been singing our protest songs. They had their own problems.

Hope that puts an end to your stewing.

dagblog - Comments for "The Beauty of the Blacklist: In Memory of Pete Seeger"

My cassette with "In My Life"

I prefer to remember Pete

I just find the whole

Yep, good stuff - much as

My backyard ;-)

That was fun. Just last night

From what you say here, I

This whole thread has been

Just to clarify, 1) yes, they

Báječná léta pod psa (The Blissful Years of Lousy Living)

PP, since my snippy comment