I've had fun over the past few years accusing Bruce Springsteen of being a socialist scumbag. It hasn't been a terribly tough case to make--just look at the man's songs and it's about all the proof you need, but there were always those conservatives who tried to defend Bruce as some kind of populist, and not what he is.
But why listen to a loudmouth like me? Bruce is going to release an entire album of covers tomorrow. Covers written and made popular by communist Pete Seeger (who joined the Communist Party in 1942).
Last summer Howard Husack wrote a classic piece about Seeger called America's Most Successful Communist.
Of all the cover albums that one could record, you have to wonder (if you were still in denial about him) why Bruce would pick such a radical. Let's look at Seeger's background via Husack.
We start in the 1930's with the Popular Front:
The Popular Front sought to enlist Western artists and intellectuals, some of them not party members but "fellow travelers," to use art, literature, and music to insinuate the Marxist worldview into the broader culture.
This continued into the 1950's:
The American Communist Party's bluntest expression of the idea of culture as a revolutionary tool came in writer V. J. Jerome's talk "Let Us Grasp the Weapon of Culture," presented to its 15th national convention in New York in 1951. "Cultural activity is an essential phase of the party's general ideological work," Jerome observed.
And what better way to grasp the weapon of culture than through music?
It took a while for the Popular Front's strategy to get results in popular music and Pete Seeger was the catalyst.
It happened in early March 1962, when the clean-cut, stripe-shirted Kingston Trio released their recording of Seeger's "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" Seeger's lament about the senselessness of war and the blindness of political leaders to its folly soared to Number Four on Billboard's easy-listening chart, and it remained on the list for seven weeks.
Seeger succeeded again with Turn, Turn, Turn a few years later:
His musical version of chapter three of Ecclesiastes-"Turn, Turn, Turn"-amended slightly the words of Scripture, transforming the meaning of the biblical poetry. The song became an anti-Vietnam War anthem and a Number One hit for songwriter Seeger, thanks to the Byrds' folk-rock version, which topped the Billboard pop chart in December 1965.
At this point, Dylan and other lefties took the torch from Seeger but his mark had been made.
For his part, Pete Seeger, who lives near the Hudson in Wappingers Falls, New York, continues to perform, now singing "Turn, Turn, Turn" as a protest against the Iraq war, a radical to the end. "I'm still a communist, in the sense that I don't believe the world will survive with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer," he told Mother Jones last autumn. (The lefty magazine crowns Seeger "the grand old lion of the Left.")
So we here at Fraters would like to raise a big Johnny Cash middle finger to socialist scumbag Bruce Springsteen for releasing an album of commie covers.
An album of BOB Seeger covers would have been more welcome and I can't stand Bob Seeger.
Can you imagine the pompous ass Springsteen covering Her Strut with the classic line "But they doooo respect her, but(t)?"
THAT I might actually pay money to hear.
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