From a letter to Sally Williams, dated 1/17/58:

Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives…and to the ‘good life,’ whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.
Hunter S. Thompson

Conspicuously absent from the absurd eulogies for Hunter S. Thompson was any mention of radical sociologist C. Wright Mills, a man whose work transparently inspired Thompson as well as democratic activists in the student left, some of whom conspired to draft The Port Huron Statement. While those selfsame obituaries committed an exceptionalist foul that somehow Thompson just wasn’t meant for these times, it overlooked the manner in which Thompson was part of the sociopolitical avant garde, in which progressive politics were expressed in all forms of cultural expression. Although documentaries like Festival Express expose the overt cynicism of acts like The Grateful Dead (a 15 dollar ticket in the early ‘70’s would cost 63 dollars today, and judging by the footage, our parents weren’t always the suckers they became: “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” my ass), the radical left wasn’t solely their province, at least no moreso than it was possessed by the streetfighters of Paris ’68: there was nevertheless a global movement afoot, something the world hadn’t seen in perhaps 120 years, a time when monarchies fell and empires staggered. These three songs exemplify the tradition of political folk music in global context.

Forengingen til livets beskyttelse– Betjent Larson

This is how residents of Christania, a longstanding artist community within Copenhagen said “Fuck the Police”—they did it personally, recognizing the policeman’s humanity, but nevertheless understanding his role as a functionary of the State, and thus by opposing the State, they must necessarily oppose the police as defenders of an order they couldn’t morally support. Many Americans believed Scandinavia to be an idyllic world of social democracy, but all the while films like I Am Curious Yellow & Blue exposed to those who saw it the nationalistic, racialized tensions and the relative social conservatism of those States.

A Cid Symphony– Burning Bush 3

Their only release—a triple album in 1967—demonstrates the variety of the Berkeley student body—these merry pranksters embodied in some manners the most marginal aspects of the student left, but for all the vilifying remarks made in ensuing years to purposefully eradicate the humanistic aims of American youth politics, Ernie Fischbach and Charles Ewing’s artistic statement expresses elsewhere on the album a poetic plea for birth control at the student-funded health clinic, as well as principled Beefheartian stand against the militaristic paranoia that persists in American political culture. “Burning Bush 3” offers an escapist Utopia, which permitted the conceptual freedoms that couldn’t be realized in civic life, the fingerpicked strings creating a babbling brook where the fire hydrant water runs into the gutter.

[visit a website here, buy it here]

William Onyeabor– Better Change Your Mind

Found on Luaka Bop’s new compilation of West African psychedelia Love’s a Real Thing, “Better Change Your Mind” meditates optimistically on the social potency of Africans to exert their political will on a world that for 400 years has seen fit to kidnap, torture and enslave their people, literally and figuratively from the earliest days of the slave trade through the political Ponzi schemes that destabilize democratic regimes and embolden terroristic dictators. The upbeat funk defiantly addresses global superpowers and declares their Eurocentric Realpolitik morally bankrupt, as if to say what things fell apart might someday be rebuilt.

[visit the website here, buy it here]