May Day Jukebox and Open Thread
I try to listen to this song every May Day.
The Internationale (Hungarian)
Unite in the comments or, hey, use it as an open thread.
Jaybird
Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com
A request to make me feel old: How many of you have never heard this song before?Report
I am 32 and now this song. I’ve seen documentaries on it. I’ve used it theaterical productions (SLAVS by Tony Kushner), etc. I even know the Red Flag/
Though I suspect many people in my generation do not know this song.Report
It’s a fine anthem, but you’ll excuse me if I can’t exactly endorse it.Report
That’s the point, isn’t it? Never again.Report
The Far Left was much better at song-writing than the Far Right. I don’t think that anybody will doubt me on this.Report
I would put Wagner up against most musicians.Report
C’mon. we all know that the Nazis were left-liberals. Where are your libertarian marching songs?
Fun fact: the tune to Deutschland Uber Alles was written by Franz Joseph Haydn, though the original words were the far less offensive “God save Kaiser Francis”.Report
You know who else liked Haydn?Report
Gosik. They’re almost inseparable.Report
More seriously, I don’t hold Wagner’s later fans against him. That said, he was conservative (for one of the thirteen definitions of conservative out there) as these things kinda go. Yes, even while inventing Heavy Metal.Report
Wagner was an anti-semitic SOB. His later fans didn’t have to distort his ideas at all.Report
Have we had the discussion of “whether/how to separate the art from the artist” yet?
It’s usually a good one.Report
the arts-oriented blog has a no politics rule, though!Report
Well, we don’t have to have it *THERE*.Report
unfortunately it’s a fun/not fun discussion to have because it’ll mostly be a redux of that ben carson post, because the same general forces are at work. we want to agree with those we feel connection to, especially artists and other cultural leaders/”leaders”.
and when they fail on some level, from the trivial to the what the hell is your problem get out of my house, a lot of folks find it personally harmful. even if the artist in question is dead.Report
But there are a lot of weird compartmentalizations with art, though. I’m irritated at, for example, M. Scott Peck (to this day) while it’s possible for me to enjoy a Ric Flair match or a George Harrison song. (Hell, pick a Rock and Roll musician.)Report
What would make you dislike The Quiet One?Report
He had, shall we say, a wandering eye.Report
With Wagner it gets even trickier because his nationalism and its attendant anti-semitism were driving forces behind much of his work, particularly in the Bayreuth days (the Wagner of the later Ring Cycle more than the Wagner of Tristan und Isolde).
Poor Cosima.Report
I had also looked at the Pete Seeger version of this song and thought “nah, that’d be too… something.” Now I’m wishing I had picked that version.
Well, it didn’t have the pictures, I guess.Report
Then we’d have gotten into a heated discussion about how he’s no Woody Guthrie.Report
And Arlo’s close, but no Seegar.Report
Cosima was one of the driving forces behind his anti-Semitism.Report
My impression was that it was the other way around. That is, she was a bit of an anti-semite, and Wagner made her a raging one.Report
We were talking about the guy: you don’t hold his fans against him, he was a conservative, etc. If you want to talk about The Ring, we could do that too. But it’s a long conversation.Report
The guy himself was such a jerk that Nietzsche said “that guy is a pompous jerk”.
Good composer, though.Report
He influenced Quadrophenia, of all things.Report
Wagner’s views on musicians in general have influenced nearly everyone after him.
No longer simple craftsmen – and the ones that are, get denigrated for being such. [not “Great Artists”]Report
On a Jewish usenet group, somebody once pointed out that you can make Adom Olam into rousing Jewish anthem by singing it to the tune of Deutscland Ãœber Alles.Report
Wagner was a composer, not a song-writer. What was rousing Far Rigjt anthem?Report
Once you introduce (politically-charged) lyrics, it becomes nearly impossible for miost people ro separate ideology from content. I mean, it just zo happens that the stuff we fins ourselves on the way opposite side of us is artistically inferior.Report
“Remember the war against Franco?
That’s the kind in which each of us belongs.
Though he may have won all the battles,
We had all the good songs!”
–Tom Lehrer, “The Folk Song Army”
More catchy Communist songs:
(1) Song about the Motherland: Virtually the second Soviet national anthem from the time it was introduced in the movie *Circus* in 1936.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx9kvN3QbAw
http://tinyurl.com/ca45oyn
Even labor camp prisoners sang–in some cases *sincerely*–“I know of no other country/Where a man can breathe so free.”
http://books.google.com/books?id=vTnOVXCPbZAC&pg=PA62
By the way, *Circus* is available with English subtitles at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia4DyErYhAs
It is not by any means entirely a bad movie, despite it being propaganda for Stalin’s USSR The opening scene of “Marion Dixon” almost being lynched for having a black child is, alas, all too plausible. And the scene where Solomon Mikhoels serenades the litle boy in Yiddish–a rebuke to Hitler’s anti-semitism–is actually more poignant today than when it was filmed because of the fact that Mikhoels would later be murdered by Stalin…
(2) Aviators March (“Higher and Higher”). Contains the quintessential Communist line “We were born to make fairy tales come true.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DisPLXjp6cI
http://books.google.com/books?id=smaxkHf8fKUC&pg=PA122
And of course
(3) Hymn of the Soviet Union (now back with new lyrics–by the original lyricist!– as anthem of the Russian Federation under Putin). For Paul Robeson’s rendition of an English translation of the original, see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtU3vUOa2swReport
The Far Left was much better at song-writing than the Far Right.
Writing songs is clearly a substitute activity for those who lack the mad skillz to actually gain power.Report
You might recall that the original anthem of the animals in Animal Farm was Beasts of England, whose tune is described as “sounding like a combination of ‘La Cucaracha’ and ‘Oh My Darling, Clementine'”. That’s Orwell making fun of the Internationale.
Of course, it dates from the benighted days before we all realized that freedom means the freedom to burn to death in a sweatshop. We were so young!Report
It is easy to make fun of the pompous Stalinist version form the 1930s but it was originally composed by one of the fighters for the Paris Commune in the 1870s. We can make fun of it now but to millions of worker’s in the days of Lochner it was a uniting song and a promise of a better life. Plus it was sung more up-tempo like the Read Flag.Report
I think Mike was being pithy about the conservative definition of freedomReport
Ooooh, open thread! Here’s a fun article to read:
Ten Responses to the Technological Unemployment ProblemReport
They forgot “population retraction”.Report
It is May Day, after all.Report
To-morrow ‘ill be of all the year the maddest merriest day,
For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.Report
It’s been a bit of a depressing May Day, sitting here watching the snow accumulate outside my office window. Music simply hasn’t helped.Report
I just had to email a link to this post to my husband to remind him of the good old days, back in the former USSR. I’m sure he must have known it by heart at one time, albeit in Russian not French.Report
Plus, I’m sure he’ll love all those pictures of Lenin and Trotsky.Report
Egads, I thought you liked him.Report
I do. He gets a kick out of these things.Report
The Internationale is just a terrible song, musically.
Now the Soviet national anthem? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF4KiLKZ8s0
That’s a song.Report
and in that same vein
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT2z0nrsQ8oReport
It’s not as bad as the Star Spangled Banner. Or the Marseillaise. Hatikvah’s not great either.
O Canada is kind of pretty. And I really wish the Aussies had picked Waltzing Matilda when they had the chance.
Here’s Albert Brooks choosing a new anthem. It’s space awesome.Report
I like Hatikvah and the Marseillese. I agree with you about the Star Spangled Banner.Report
Yeah, that is exactly what a national anthem should sound like.Report
The Soviet National Anthem is great. So is Haydn’s original piece referred to above.
I don’t mind the Star-Spangled Banner. I can’t stand what a lot of singers do to it, either through incompetence or improvisation, but it’s still a very nice song. And I’ve noticed that the only people who complain about it are lifelong civilians. Many veterans have a strong attachment to it. That means something.Report
It means they have a strong attachment to what it stands for, which makes them less able to judge it objectively as a piece of music. It’s like judging how pretty a girl is by asking her father 🙂Report
The ideal national anthem would not be an anthem, so that it wouldn’t evoke nationalist sentiments. “We Got the Funk” would be great, if America’s not still so white as to make it too cynical a choice.Report
Like I said, Waltzing Matilda was the right choice Down Under.Report
In Michael Moore’s “The Big One”, he suggested “We Will Rock You”.Report
Why not this (nsfw at the beginning)? It has the benefit that, like our current anthem, it’s about war.Report
Did he ever update it for the invasion of Iraq? There’s a pretty good rhyme for what he don’t really give a.Report
So Everybody Must Get Stoned wouldn’t be a good choice?Report
Proposed far-right anthem: “Everything I Know is Wrong.”Report
Proposed far-left anthem: “Everything I Know Is Right.”Report
I call a foot fault, there’s no such real music title AFAIKReport