“This Machine Kills Fascists”: On Question of Form in

Political Music
Sezgin Boynik

Seeing eighty-nine year old Pete Seeger together with Bruce Springsteen and his grandson, Tao
Rodriguez-Seeger performing Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land in, almost, original version
in front of 400.000 people celebrating inauguration of American president is a very nasty historical
irony. The reason for this uneasiness is not the recuperation of Guthrie's anti-patriot political song to
its complete opposite, which has been successfully institutionalized already by Johnny Cash, but
that this song, even in its most subversive and original form, is today only evoking pan-nationalist
spatial sentiments. Seeger, Springsteen and Rodriguez-Seeger's performance at We Are One: The
Obama Inaugural Celebration at The Lincoln Memorial on January 18, 2009, included the rarely
sang verse from the song: “I came to sign that said 'Private Property' but on the other side it didn't
say nothing. That side was made for you and me”.1 What Amy Goodman in her report on the event
in Democracy Now! fails to notice is that Seeger has made a slight change to the original version of
Guthrie's song. Instead of "As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking, is this land made for
you and me?" Seeger sang this lines as: "As they stood hungry, I stood there whistling, this land was
made for you and me.” This slight change is of great importance, because in this altered version
even a spark of scepticism on national belonging (“is this land made for you and me?”), or of
questioning the legality of the oppressed is erased. Now the song is completely naturalized,
everything is accepted as fatalism of the land's determination.
Why such a fuss on a song performed in utmost patriotic ambience with the singer who
already once before distorted the same piece? This is because the recuperation of political lyrics of
Woody Guthrie is of such a scale that anyone whose aim is to deal with the general issue of political
songs has to dig this problematic with its full complexity. Apart from historical phenomenon, this
recuperation has to do also with formal problems of political music.
Guthrie as communist composed this song in 1940 and it was part of his political turn
toward the explicit and militant anti-fascism. His anti-fascism, best known through the slogan
written on his guitar (“This Machine Kills Fascist”), took in the beginning of the Second World War
even a Stalinist route.2 From the accounts and researches based on the archives of Woody Guthrie
we can see that the fascism according to Guthrie was not only of that which is part of Hitlerite evil
conspiracy; but was seen as a general condition of capitalism. For example Martin Butler is
mentioning the liner notes to his song Gotta Keep 'Em Salin where Guthrie gives the definition for
the term: “Fascism is a slavery, it is working too hard and getting paid not enough. It is being forced
to work for small pay or no pay at all in camps and prisons and on chain gang...That is all that
slavery ever was or ever will be. That is the real enemy.”3 Fascism that Guthrie was against in most
of his songs is related to the home-grown version of it, with a clear indication that it is organized as
exploitation of people with most crude means. Obviously Guthrie was singing for these people in
his savagely appropriated song This Land is Your Land. He was singing for the people that the
home-grown fascism crushed, eliminated and left hungry; for all the lumpen who understood this a

1 Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen perform Woody Guthrie's “This Land is Your Land”, Democrayc Now, accessed
13 March 2012, http://www.democracynow.org/2009/1/20/pete_seeger_bruce_springsteen_perform_woody
2 As Will Kaufman writes: “Guthrie's stalwart defence of Stalin through thick and thin led to a break with his anti-
Stalinists patron, Frank Burke, and the loss of his programme on KFVD”. Will Kaufman, “Woody Guthrie and the
Cultural Front,” in The Life, Music and Thought of Woody Guthrie: A Critical Appraisal, ed. John S. Partington
(Surrey & Burlington, Ashgate, 2011), 41.
3 Martin Butler, “'Words to Shot Back At You': Woody Guthrie's 'War' Against German Fascism,” in The Life, Music
and Thoughts, 72. It is difficult to understand how Butler who passes this invaluable information based on his
research in the archives of Guthrie comes to complete opposite conclusion on the subject: “[geographical] distance
to Europe does not prevent anyone from taking arms against the common enemy abroad.” Butler, “Words to Shot,”
74.
lot better than the analyses of elitist and progressive American left did, as Dorian Lynskey finds
wise to mention.4
How is it possible that such an anti-fascist song has turned to a celebration of ideology of
land that is most direct determinant of that condition? The usual interpretation is that listeners, like
the audience of Obama's inaugural, do not understand the real meaning of the words. According to
Frank Erik Pointner this recuperation did not happen because of misunderstanding, but due to
deliberate distortion of the song, first by Johnny Cash and later by Bruce Springsteen. Pointner is
pointing out that state apparatuses have been playing important role in this distortion and it did not
happen necessarily by elimination of problematic verses from the song, but sometimes, as in the
case of Springsteen, by slowing the tempo of the song to half and transforming it into a kind of
melancholic ballad on the yesterdays of the good old country.5 As a non-recuperated version of the
song, Pointner is mentioning a hard-core punk band Anti-Flag's version as fast, distorted and direct.
In many concerts Anti-Flag announces the song as “truly revolutionary song written by original
punk-rock fella called Woody Guthrie”. But is it the pace of the song, or a syncopation that
occasionally interrupts the sweetness of the melody that makes the punk version more political than
the slow tempo of Springsteen? I think that easy co-optation of Guthrie's song is due to the formal
elements of the song. To my knowledge these elements are, first, the historical condition of the
formation of the song and second, the structure of the language of the song which designates the
politics solely through identification process. As it is known, Guthrie wrote this song as a response
to the popularity of patriotic song God Bless America, as some kind of correction to its claims
related to America. This specific musical condition, which determined the writing of the song, has
also been designating its formal aspect. This formal aspect is not as naïve and neutral as one would
like to think (as for example singer Tom Morello does); Guthrie by communicating with such a
song allowed to all ideological elements of the patriotism to penetrate inside of his protest-song. If
reference to the song of Guthrie is Irving Berlin then the opposition to it is not possible only with
subverting the lyrics, but it also has to be performed through different form. Communication with
the field of the opposition has to be based (structured) on the irreconcilability of these tendencies.
An attempt to execute an anti-fascist protest song, such as This Land is My Land, in the field of
religious-patriotism (God Bless America, country-music) is from the start a vain project. In short
what I maintain is the thesis that anti-fascist detournement of patriotism is impossible without
complete negation of the elements, which conditioned this confrontation.6 This confrontation, which
is ultimately relying on communication, is not the only dead-end of This Land is Your Land, and of
many other protest songs; furthermore the politics of this song is achieved through proper
communication, or as philosopher of the speech-act theory J. L. Austin would say through the
“secured uptake”.7 This is conditioned by the song itself in the final line of each verse, “this land
was made for you and me”. This intimacy of the song is allowing for re-figuration of variations for
endless possibilities: whenever there is “you” and “me” overlapping the song will execute its
communicative practice. For this to happen, there is need for certain coherence between “you” and
“me”, both as linguistic illocution and also as ideological uniformity. In the politics of this song,

4 Lynskey adds to this also the attributes to Guthrie as “a wonderer, a pioneer, an idealist, a democrat”, which makes
him “a quintessentially American creation”. Dorian Lynskey, 33 Revolution Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs,
From Billie Holiday to Green Day (New York: ecco/Harpers Collins Publisher, 2011), 15.
5 Frank Pointner, “Woody Guthrie; aka, 'The Guy Who Wrote This Land Is Your Land'”in The Life, Music and
Thought of Woody Guthrie: A Critical Appraisal, ed. John S. Partington (Surrey & Burlington, Ashgate, 2011), 128.
6 As Guy Debord best formulated: “Critical theory must communicate itself in its own language – the language of
contradiction, which must be dialectical in both form and content. It must be an all-inclusive critique, and it must be
grounded in history. It is not a “zero degree of writing” but its reversal. It is not a negation of style, but style of
negation.” Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, translated by Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press, 2004), 112.
7 Austin is using the term “securing of uptake” in somehow loose way, but generally it is meant to refer to the process
of understanding that completes the illocutionary act. Or as Austin wrote: “1. The performance of an illocutionary
act involves the securing of uptake (i.e. “certain effect is achieved”); 2. The illocutionary act 'takes effect' in certain
ways, as distinguished from producing consequences in the sense of bringing about states of affairs in the 'normal'
way, i.e. changes in the natural course of events.” J. L. Austin, How to do Things With Words, (New York & Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1975), 117.
than, there is no clash of elements, contradictions are overcome. Because of this formal
cohesiveness This Land Is Your Land, even if it is written for lumpen, or ‘dust bowl people’, can
secure communication also between many different variations of “you” and “me”: between Pete
Segeer and Barak Obama, between Bruce Springsteen and Californians, and between Johnny Cash
and the cowboys!
If we are intending to save Guthrie's politics from these distortions, it is necessary to
deconstruct the social consonance of protest-song once and forever. How to deal with the nature of
communication in the protest songs that are more complex, contradictory and ‘dadaistic’ than that
of Guthrie’s, or, as an early philosophical commentator about Bob Dylan's turn toward the electric-
folk described, as songs that “mouthed the new truth of the meaninglessness of any sort of social
action.”8 What kind of cohesion, if any, these new protest-songs are constituting? Now, in this most
dramatic moment of Occupy movement, the answer to this question is even more urgent and
meaningful than at the changing times of Bob Dylan.9 There is one, among many, mass media
imposed problematic of Occupy, that this movement as their precedents in sixties, are lacking their
anthem, or song, which could be compared to Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan. 10 There are many
discussions asking if really the Occupy movement needs a protest song at all, and if it does what
kind of song it should be? Dorian Lynskey, author of a book on history of protest songs, already
mentioned in this text, claims that since Occupy movement is based on “radically new approaches
to structure and strategy” thus the questions related to anthem or suitable song is “irrelevant”.11
Lynskey's proposal is, of course, a new kind of song, which by the end of his short text turns out to
be not so much of a radical novelty. By referring to collective singing of Bob Marley songs, and of
Pete Seeger's We Shall Overcome, as a reaction to brutal eviction of encampment in Zuccotti Park,
Lynskey tends to close the radical openness of movement by observing certain psychodramatic role
that protest songs might have: “That episode made me realise that as much as Occupy is a radical
departure from previous protest movements, certain human needs remain constant and in that
challenging moment those songs acted as symbolic bridges to older struggles, offering both a
reminder that there will be setbacks and a promise that they can be endured.”12 This possible regress
to the old forms in protest-songs of Occupy movement is detected and criticized by The Wire
magazine's writer Mark Fisher as obsolete and instead of “folksiness of 'protest music'” as he
describes it, it should offer a new form of political antagonism, ...[something in a line of] 21st
century form of political music.”13 But what is very intriguing in the discussions related to sound-
scape of Occupy is that singing is not the only form in protest music; percussion, rhythm and noise
8 Steve Strauss, “A Romance on Either Side of Dada,” in Rock and Roll Will Stand, ed. Greil Marcus (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1969), 109.
9 What has changed from Guthrie to Dylan could be best described as change of reception from the uptake to the
“digging”. Or as Bobby Seale described in the famous episode of 'Huey Digging Bob Dylan', it is “to put the song
on the broader level”, which in fact in this case is the complete re-writing of the mentioned song (Ballad of a Thin
Man), and listening to music from the ultimate political position, as a pure intellectual practice; reading that shows
the racial nature of society in clearest way (“This song is hell. You've got to understand that this song is saying a hell
of a lot about society”). Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party (London: Arrow Books,
1970), 213-218. Digging of music is only possible through the intellectual activity with the clear political position.
This is best pronounced by Amiri Baraka: “Music, as paradoxical as it might seem, is the result of thought. It is the
result of thought perfected at its most empirical, i.e., as attitude, or stance. Thought is largely conditioned by
reference; it is the result of consideration or speculation against reference, which is largely arbitrary”. Amiri Baraka,
“Swing – From Verb to Noun”, in The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, ed. William J. Harris (New York:
Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991), 40. Anyone interested in the uptakes of the abovementioned song of Bob Dylan, and
there are many, could check Mike Marqusee for “democratic (and defensive) anti-intellectualism, celebration of
instinct” uptake of song; or Greil Marcus for “[shared] inaccessible clandestine” feeling. Mike Marqusee, Chimes of
Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan's Art (New York & London: The New Press, 2003), 149; Greil Marcus,
Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (London & Basingstoke: Picador, 1997), 38.
10 James C. McKinley Jr., “At the Protests, the Message Lacks a Melody”, New York Times October 18 2011, accessed
14 March 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/arts/music/occupy-wall-street-protest-lacks-an-anthem.html.
11 Dorian Lynskey, “The Tunes They Are A-Changing”, The Occupied Times of London, accessed 14 March 2012,
http://theoccupiedtimes.co.uk/?p=2054.
12 Lynskey, “Tunes They Are”, http://theoccupiedtimes.co.uk/?p=2054.
13 Mark Fisher, “Autonomy in the UK”, The Wire: Adventures in Sound and Music, no. 335, January 2012, 38-39.
of drumming are also forms of music heard there. Actually in the book published recently on scenes
from Occupied America the only music form discussed is a practice of “drumming in circles” which
the founding editor of n+1 Mark Greif explains as “an action and practice that itself seems to cross-
pollinate with, and manifest, the new political and deliberative structures culminating in occupation
– without words. With drums.”14 Greif in his account is clearly stating that new forms of politics in
Occupy led to new forms of music, which could not be easily fitted to singing of protest songs with
acoustic guitar and harmonica. Even if there is a newness in this music making, one big paradox is
at stake, or as Greif notes, there is possibility of this music to jeopardize the essence of occupation
“[that] is to exist in a common space where authority is not used to overrule anyone's form of life-
giving expression.”15 Noise and unbroken loud expression of drumming could create such a sonic
barrier that the most preliminary point of Occupy, that is a communication, becomes impossible.
Then the question comes to this: how is possible to co-exist in the midst of noise of drumming
without mutual incomprehension? This dilemma on music during the Occupy was not arbitrary and
technical problematic, it had direct relation with the philosophical fundamentals of movement, first
with policy of uninterrupted communication without incomprehension, and second with avoidance
of any form of violence. Music in occupy movement is possible only when these fundamentals are
respected, or more precisely when uptake is realized without a force. This is partly possible by
using the drumming as a communal communication. Greif who is speculating on this aspect
(through reference to the Indians, Babatunde Olatunji and hippies from West Coast) is also adding a
new one, the bodily, sensual and rhythmic essence of communication during the Occupy: from the
particular rhythm of “mic check! Mic check!” of acoustic word-passing, to the general feeling of
bodies being together.16 What is at stake here is not only re-constitution of communication even in
the political musics other than protest songs, but also a new step in complete elimination of the
issue of force as disturbance or corruption which is seen as ultimate obstacle toward the
comprehensible communication.17 Music of occupy is based on politics of communication; even the
slight move towards the force of noise is seen as eruption of non-communication. That is why the
drumming in the last instance is accepted only as a “humble and guiding tempo” of the meetings of
General Assembly, or as members of drumming circle named themselves “the pulse” of the
movement.18
The question is where is the place today that political music happens that is not only a
mimesis and sound effect of the collective emancipation? Or renewing the question of Mark Fisher,
we can ask if there is such music with “new forms of political antagonisms?” Instead of cataloguing
the current affairs on this issue, I would like, as a conclusion to deal with the music form that
historically stretched the political antagonisms in its most effective contrasts, namely with the
practice and theory of formation of punk. I believe there are many things to learn from this moment,
not only because of punk's extreme internal contradictions, but also because the structures from
which punk was constituted didn't cease to exist; they are here, everywhere from Malmö to Paris,
back to London, Tottenham. To be more precise, the disguised structural fascism that entailed the
punk's contradictions are still here; now my aim is to deal with these in terms of nationalism, neo-

14 Mark Greif, “Drumming in Circles”, Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America, ed. Astra Taylor, Keith Gessen, and
editors from n+1, Dissent, Triple Canopy and The New Inquiry (New York & London, Verso: 2011), 57.
15 Mark Grief, “Drumming”, 57.
16 Importance of this visceral point is also indicated by Judith Butler in her short speech in support of Occupy in
Zuccotti Park: “we are coming together as bodies in alliance”. Judith Butler, “Bodies in Public”, Occupy! Scenes
from Occupied America, ed. Astra Taylor, Keith Gessen, and editors from n+1, Dissent, Triple Canopy and The New
Inquiry (New York & London, Verso: 2011), 193.
17 Issue of violence will continue to be a headache for Occupy, not because it has inherited this difficult problematic
from previous revolutionary theory and practices, but on the contrary, because participants in the movement refuse
to theorize the problem of violence. Basing on the book, on scenes from occupied America, it is possible to say that
violence is seen as something ontological to the constituency of the state. As opposition to this essence of the state,
Occupy is offering a “new agenda”, which is to keep the movement outside of the corruption of violence through
another form of power, which is the non-violence power. Rebecca Solnit, “Throwing Out the Master's Tools and
Building a Better House”, Occupy!, 148-149.
18 Mark Grief, “Drumming”, 62.
fascism and race conflicts.
There is no better introduction to punk than Paul Gilroy's analysis of politics of black music.
In order to show the form of different approaches of black radical politics, which was resisting the
reconciliation to reductionist socialism of 'euro-communism' and any kind of humanist approaches
of liberalism, Gilroy attempted to theorize its stance with the difference of “cultural politics” of
black people. Gilroy is proposing something that is a politics of “contradictory but complex unity”,
somehow anachronistically echoing the claims of Occupy activists.19 The difference is that Gilroy's
“complex unity” does not have the nature of co-existence and harmony; on the contrary it is woven
with antagonisms and clashes. This is an important distinction: the sound of this politics has to be
complex and resistant. It cannot be conceived by re-adapting the already existing forms of music
making, especially not the music of protest songs. The music of new politics has to have new form.
Gilroy is here most precise when he describes the attempt to cast Burning Spear in the role of Joan
Beaze as “inept”. The political impact of Burning Spear and other reggae musicians is not only
because of their lyrics, but primarily because of the new complex form of the music, that is a bass
influenced form called dub.20 Neither the lyrics of “protest songs” nor the drums are anymore the
sole vectors of politics: music is political only with the form that in its very materiality is a carrier
of resistance.21 This materiality in Gilroy's theorization has certain visceral elements, or what he
calls part of politics of pleasure; but what really constitutes this sound is its non-reconcilable nature.
Non-reconciliation with any elements of racism and apparatuses that enable these elements to be
reproduced is the essence of cultural politics of black people’s resistance. The cultural politics of
this resistance, when organized in collective social movements, such as anti-racist platforms of
Rock Against Racism (RAR) in England in the end of seventies, introduced a new set of anti-racist
theory and practice. By clearly indicating that racism is not anomaly of society and the state, but
directly implemented by it, this platform of seventies radically split from the anti-fascist stances of
populist tendencies that equated fascism with neo-nazism (such as Anti-Nazi League) and that
sought to resist it with a more proper patriotism.22 Referring to platform of RAR we can ask how
this radical politics and irreconcilable anti-racism of black music conjoined with the other youth
subcultures also active in the resistance against fascism. We can ask one very regular question: what
was the relation between black reggae music with white punk? Gilroy is maintaining the idea that
this relation, the unity of anti-racism, was complex and contradictory; blacks’ anti-racism was
influenced by the visual collage style of punk iconography, and the punks who “cemented their
appropriation of black style” also in some way pacified this resistance by reconstituting whiteness
once again. This is a position, which Gilroy maintains in his writings throughout the eighties
through the reference to Dick Hebdige.23 But Hebdige who in his analysis clearly shows that punk
played that role of reworking and reshaping the concept of whiteness, also made explicit how this
confrontation of white punks with the black rastafarians was not a complete appropriation. This
conjunction between white-punk and black-reggae was designated by the impossibility of
comprehensive communication, or as Hebdige explains “the fundamental lack of fit between these
two languages” which generated the peculiar unstable dynamic within the punk subculture”.24

19 Paul Gilroy, “Steppin' out of Babylon – race, class and autonomy”, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in
70s Britain, ed. By Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (London: Hutchinson & University of Birmingham,
1982), 282.
20 Paul Gilroy, “Steppin'”, 300. Or as Gilroy clarifies further: “Though they may introduce an analytic coherence,
political lyrics must be regarded as secondary to the issues implicit in the form of reggae and its consequent
exploration in Dub. This may be a difficult point to grasp, but Dubbing is a feature of overtly commited and
apparently unpolitical recordings alike.”, Gilroy, “Steppin'”, 301.
21 For understanding the importance of the memory of resistance in constituting the politics of Afro-Caribbean and
Asian people in Britain most accurate text is: A. Sivanandan, “From Resistance to Rebellion: Asian and Afro-
Caribbean Struggles in Britain”, Catching History in Wing: Race, Culture, Globalisation (London: Pluto Press,
2008), 90-139.
22 Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack': The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Unwin
Hyman, 1987), 120-135.
23 Gilroy, “Steppin'”, 296; Gilroy, There Ain't No, 124-125.
24 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London & New York: Methuen, 1979), 69. Hebdige specifies this
Hebdige further points that “at the heart of the punk subculture, forever arrested, lies this frozen
dialectic between black and white cultures”. This tension is constituted as a stand still dialectic, and
the politics of this music has a very strange and peculiar form.25 Punks, by facing the impossibility
of easy confrontation with the radical politics of black tradition, did not assume a false position of
communication, uptake and identification, which was a main problematic of protest-songs of
hippies and is of Occupy movement. But how one can understand the dead-end of punk-form which
is not just a pose of more dangerous recuperation, that of cynicism and pessimism?26 Hebdige by
naming this impossible dialectic of miss-communication as “noise” is politicizing this stance in
most accurate way.27 By elaborating this, my aim is to finish and propose a moderate alternative for
political music. Noise is what subculture represents, not as social mimesis of loud music, but
something which brings together both the conflict involved in cultural confrontation and the
information theory of cybernetics, or what Hebdige describes as “an actual mechanism of semantic
disorder: a kind of temporary blockage in the system of representation”28. What is more important
in understanding of the concept of noise, is that it maintains the category of politics solely through
its attitude embodied as a refusal.29 Noise is refusal not because it associates with the categories of
negativity, primarily as negation of false communication, but most strikingly because it is capturing
the field of constituency of ideology as contradictory, or as a complex unity of contradictions.
Referring to Louis Althusser's famous essay 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' Hebdige
shows that interpellation to ideology does not happen smoothly and quietly, but that this process
sounds like a “teeth-greeting harmony”. Punk form is then, with its unity of contradictions, a form
open to the noise, to the concept of noise that departs from a position that music of the spheres of
ideology is not a well-orchestrated symphony but a “teeth-gritting harmony”.
This form of “noise” is some kind of constructivism put on work.
Here one has to be careful not to reproduce racist ideologies by stating that the antagonism
between black and white is due to the antagonism of the forms of their refusals; which would lead
to the position that blacks’ refusal is a real expressions in contrast to whites’, which is a constructed
and synthetic negation.30 This position would not only re-constitute the communication (of course in
completely unequal base, as all colonial communications are), but also it would discard the
elements of politics from the position of noise. It is not that white punk advanced the practice of
negation inherent to black music; the noise is precisely about discarding this easy-going
evolutionism; it is introduce a sharp break in the music. Noise is the future.31 This said we are now
tension as “punk's curiously petrified quality, its paralysed look, its 'dumbness' which found a silent voice in the
smooth moulded surfaces of rubber and plastic” p. 69.
25 Hebdige, Subculture, 69-70.
26 Roger Sabin, for example, in his account tends to disclose the frozen form of punk as explicitly nationalistic and
latently racist. Roger Sabin, “'I Won't Let That Dago By': Rethinking Punk and Racism, Punk Rock: So What?: The
Cultural Legacy of Punk , edited by Roger Sabin (London & New York: Routledge, 1999), 199-218.
27 It seems that Gilroy in his account of this encounter is more in favour of some kind of communication, or as he
describes as: “new forms of communication created in the encounter of RAR and punk” [Gilroy, There Ain't No,
129]. Considering the fact that Gilroy in acknowledgements part of his book salutes a bulk of musicians who are
known with their solo virtuosity and 'warm heart' approaches, this communicative tendency is understandable.
28 Hebdige, Subculture, 90.
29 Hebdige, Subculture, 132.
30 This is the reason why Dan Graham is correct when he describes punk as a form of propaganda that displays its own
contradictions. But he himself is reproducing a very non-contradictory (i.e. ideological) piece of propaganda in the
text, when tries to explain the very reasons of punk contradictions through some state based statistical data: “Britain
was having difficulty accepting its new position as a poor and multiracial society. Among its working class, The
Pakistani and Jamaican Commonwealth arrivals were rising toward middle-class status faster than native whites.”
Dan Graham, “Punk as Propaganda”, Rock My Religion: Writings and Projects of Dan Graham, edited by Brian
Wallis (Massachusetts, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 110.
31 As Jacques Attali famously stated: “Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of
society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It
makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible...” Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political economy of
Music, translated by Brian Masumi (Minneapolis & London; University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 11. Anyone who
is interested to know more about the 'black noise' without reducing the scope to humanist sentimentalism is
recommended to look at Kodwo Eshun's brilliant study of 'afro diasporic futurism' in sound. Kodwo Eshun, More
able to claim that politics of noise is a break not only from ideology of identification and
communication, but also from any manifestation of commonality. Accordingly there cannot be a
black or white noise, but, as Amiri Barak said, it is the matter of attitude and stance. The positioning
is not to find the right riff, or the right melody in the complex and contradictory field of noise, but
to posit the noise itself as a form of politics. This is what might kill fascism, primarily because this
music does not have blind spots, or Achilles’ heels, where fascism is most strong: in its insistence of
traditionalism as retreat from modernism, in its nationalism as a identification, identification as
humanism, in its co-optation of negativity as guardian of traditional national humanism, in its
exploitation of political incorrectness, in its cynicism, in its relation to ideological state apparatuses,
and in its famous insistence on sameness, repetition and reproduction. Noise is a form of political
music that can once and for all realize the break from all these conjunctions and regress without
even giving a chance for re-emergence of any relation between any “you” and “me” exempted of
antagonisms and conflicts.

Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet Books, 1998).