Strike While the Needle is Hot: A Discography of Worker's Revolt
Songwriters in a Fiat factory. Miners in the local music studio. Workers on the radio and musicians on the picket line. Music can carry a strike from one factory to the next, or bring it into living rooms across the globe. Record by record, this book unearths some of the biggest swings musicians, workers, and supporters have taken to co-create a popular culture of resistance.
Workers have been engaged in a culture of resistance for as long as there have been bosses. Across every movement and in every language, we have joined our voices together in rebellion and solidarity, singing songs that still echo through the history of organized labor. But in the last hundred years, new technology has allowed these militant rhythms and rebellious melodies to be recorded as they were sung–the voices of miners in Northern England, fieldworkers in California, autoworkers in France, and many others–etched into wax, shellac, and vinyl as strike records.
Strike While the Needle is Hot takes readers through labor’s greatest hits, providing both a broad overview of how militant unionists used music as a tool of struggle, as well as an inspiring history from below about specific worker revolts that would be lost to the bosses’ tune of profit and production had they not been preserved on these fragile discs.
“Political movements without music may still be called movements, but they are not worth joining. Over the past decade, Josh MacPhee has produced groundbreaking, encyclopedic work on the musical activity of twentieth-century left-wing and labor organizations. Co-authored with Kennedy Block, Strike While the Needle Is Hot compiles and annotates eighty recordings produced by trade unions, workers’ organizations, and left-wing groups for specific strikes. Vinyl records in the twentieth century were a particular kind of capitalist commodity, but the records MacPhee and Kennedy present do something fundamentally different: they break the logic of the capitalist recording industry.... The vinyl record was one tool in the masters’ collection, but workers transformed it into a weapon of their own.” —Jackson Albert Mann for CounterPunch
“This book looks so good on the coffee table. It’s a must for every Union household. Super cool artwork with stylistic, detailed writing about the songs you need to know about. I learned so much from the first moment I got it. I’m going to love this book for a long time!”—Mark Gevaart, My Labor Radio
“Full of gorgeous images of album art and inserts as well as contemporaneous news items, Strike While the Needle Is Hot shows workers taking full control of their messaging—spreading info and raising funds for strikes and documenting their own actions....[T]his is a book that deserves to be heard as well as read."—Chicago Reader
You May Also Like
Mass Market Anarchism
In the 1960s and ’70s, anarchism jumped from underground circles to the shelves of drugstores, supermarkets, and newsstands, packaged in cheap, mass market paperbacks.
An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels
This groundbreaking book traces the parallel rise of social movements in the second half of the twentieth century and the vinyl record as the dominant form of music distribution.
Paper Politics: Socially Engaged Printmaking Today
This major collection of contemporary politically engaged printmaking showcases art that uses themes of social justice and global equity to engage community members in conversation.
The Explosion of Deferred Dreams: Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in San Francisco, 1965-1975
The Explosion of Deferred Dreams offers a critical re-examination of the interwoven political and musical happenings in San Francisco in the Sixties.
Missing Music: Voices from Where the Dirt Roads End
Missing Music details Grammy-winning music producer and author Ian Brennan's ongoing quest to provide musical platforms for underrepresented nations and populations around the world.
Signal 05: A Journal of International Political Graphics & Culture
Features: The Club de Grabado de Montevideo, Three Print Collectives, New York's Come!Unity Press, music and militancy in postwar Italy, and more!
One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock
This book argues that a significant political achievement of punk was to expose the operations of power in the British entertainment industry as they were thrown into confusion by the sound and the fury of musicians and fans.
Graphic Liberation: Image Making and Political Movements
From the fight against the AIDS crisis to the struggle for Black liberation and international solidarity, Graphic Liberation! digs deep into the history, present, and future of revolutionary political image making.