I Don't Wanna Be a Mercenary: Punk Rock vs. the Mercenary Movement in the 1970s
Interesting article: http://shit-fi.com/mercenaries
In "Anarchy in the UK," Johnny Rotten sang a line about the MPLA, the Angolan revolutionary group. Famously (at least in my house), Greil Marcus dismissed this lyric, condescendingly quipping that there’s no way those letters meant anything at all to the bile-filled Rotten. The point of
this argument was to discredit any actual connections to existing left formations within the punk explosion so that Marcus could make a cockamamie mystical argument about punk’s relationship to transhistorical rebellious urges. At the same time, even more interesting is that Sex Pistols singles originally had
pressings in South Africa and Rhodesia, today among the most difficult-to-find vinyl rarities of the era perhaps because of censorship.
and
[T]he idea that boredom motivated the mercenaries and many punks alike indicates that people's political positions are largely contingent, even if the possibilities for them are structurally conditioned. What that means is that, even today, many young people who do take right-wing or extremist positions can be won over to much more palatable political stances, including left-wing ones, through organizing. There is no preordination that makes a white kid become a shooter in a Black church. It is difficult to imagine how to reach a person who would do something like that and intervene, but this type of work is also necessary. Cultural expression could be one of the best ways to start the process, making it imperative still today that we produce politically engaging music.
Read the whole article; it's worth it.
It is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists.
-Karl Marx
