Search - Strike :: Shots Heard Round the World

More than just punk...

Bryan S. Spaeth | St. Louis | 07/07/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Sure, there's a Clash, early-Jam and Stiff Little Fingers feel to the music, but The Strike harken back to the older tradition of political folk music. Before Howard Zinn wrote "A Peoples' History of the United States", if you wanted to know about working class history your only options were a handful of inaccessible scholarly books and folk music. Guess which reached the wider audience?



Just after the turn of the 20th century, Joe Hill and his fellow IWW songwriters would write to inspire and educate the working masses. They would sing of both current and past struggles, publicizing both the ups and the downs, the working class heroes and the martyrs. And this tradition stayed alive and healthy through 1930's and 40's, in the form of singers like Paul Robeson and songwriters like Woody Guthrie. At sitdown strikes and picket lines across the country, working people sang about their own desires and goals. They sang songs that made fun of their misery and raised their spirits. But something started going horribly wrong in the fabulous 50's; Woody's anthem "This Land is Your Land" lost its crucial verses, the less meaningful, non-political folk music seemed to gain popularity while the singing tradition and history of the American worker was labeled "foreign" and "communist".



In the turbulence of the 60's, political folk returned, but with rare exceptions like Bruce "Utah" Phillips and Phil Ochs, these protest songs tended to be either more introspective, more middle class or to the easily missed symbolism of the negro spiritual (it had to be misleading to keep the slave owners and their lackeys off the scent).



To a great extent, in the US (the UK has Billy Bragg and Shane McGowan and Attila the Stockbroker), the situation is much the same today. There are exceptions here and there (Rancid's song "Harry Bridges" is a noteworthy attempt at working class education), but none that I know of so consistent and well written as the songs of The Strike. Whether singing about the lynching of wobbly (IWW) organizer Frank Little or The Haymarket Martyrs or The International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, The Strike refuses to let the history of the American working class be lost; but they also live in the present, and write as eloquently and passionately about today's ongoing struggle for liberty.



So yeah, they're a great poppy-punk band and even if you don't care about politics, you can enjoy them. But they're a working class band, an intelligent band, a band that inspires and educates without the preaching and guilt tripping that a less gifted songwriter might be tempted towards. I can't recommend this cd (and if you can find it, their first cd "A Conscience Left to Struggle With Pockets Full of Rust") enough."