ANTI- Records have announced the release of Songs of Resistance 1942 – 2018, a political album of songs from acclaimed guitarist Marc Ribot featuring guest spots from the likes of Tom Waits, Steve Earle, Meshell Ndegeocello, Justin Vivian Bond, Fay Victor, Ohene Cornelius and Sam Amidon.
As well as featuring some original numbers Ribot also looks to the past, as hinted at in the album title, drawing on traditional songs from World War II anti-Fascist Italian partisans, the U.S. civil rights movement and Mexican protest ballads.
It would appear that part of the thrust to release such an album was borne out of a frustration at the lack of songs being sung by protesters. Ribot himself is no stranger to protest and has been an outspoken activist/community organizer in a number of causes, from affordable housing to musicians’ rights in the digital age.
“I remember being at Occupy Wall Street early one morning because there was a report that the cops were going to come and break things up,” he says. “It was a moment when people needed something to sing. They tried Tom Petty’s ‘I Won’t Back Down,’ but it didn’t quite fit. It frustrated me that we had this rich history of songs for that occasion, but nobody knew them.
A look back through the canon of protest songs of the past and you can but empathise with him…We Shall Overcome is maybe the most famous, the melody for which dates back to eighteenth-century Europe. According to Dorian Lynskey’s 33 Revolutions per Minute, it was sung as a rallying cry of black strikers outside the American Tobacco plant in Charleston, South Carolina in 1945. Pete Seeger later came across it in 1947 at a left-wing Folk School and the rest is history as they say.
One of the new compositions to be revealed is Srinivas on which he is joined by Steve Earle. The song is said to be largely based on texts the guitarist encountered as news stories or overheard conversation.
“Srinivas” is a metered version of news articles on Srinivas Kuchibhotla, a Sikh immigrant murdered in February 2017 by a racist who mistook him for a Muslim. “In the original version,” Ribot points out, “I had named the guy who shot him, but Steve changed that—he said, ‘That guy is just some poor idiot, it’s not about him, it’s about the ones who set him up.’ That kind of intelligence and wisdom coming from the artist was important to me.”
“There’s no way Steve Earle is going to be a sock puppet for anyone else’s voice, and that’s exactly the kind of situation I wanted,” Ribot emphasized. “It’s cool to have professional protest singers and all that, but I wanted to include artists who reached outside the ‘protest’ bubble.”
Steve Earle has been singing songs about blue-collar lives for a long while now. If you want to weigh up how heavy such things are on his soul then read Lynskey’s 33 Revolutions per Minute. In there is a whole chapter dedicated to John Walker Blues which you could argue was very much in that bubble – a direct response and protest. Back in 2001, Earle was himself thinking of creating a protest album but the events of 911 meant there was little room for dissent in the US.
John Walker Blues was written about a young American called John Walker Lindh who converted to Islam and ended up fighting for the Taliban. After being captured in December 2001 (for a second time), he was interviewed by CNN. Earle was struck by his youth, he was the same age as his son. He then began writing the lyrics for the song from Lindh’s perspective…”I’m just an American boy, raised on MTV.” He was attempting to humanise Lindh while everyone else was trying to vilify him. According to Lynskey, Elvis Costello told him he was ‘fucking crazy’ when Earle told him of his plans to release the song. He did release the song, it featured on his next album Jerusalem.
Over a forty-year career, Ribot has released twenty-five albums under his own name and been a beacon of New York’s downtown/experimental music scene, leading a series of bands including Los Cubanos Postizos and Ceramic Dog. Since his work with Tom Waits on 1985’s Rain Dogs album, though, he is best known to the world as a sideman, playing on countless albums by the likes of Elvis Costello, John Mellencamp, Norah Jones, the Black Keys, and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ Grammy-winning collaboration Raising Sand.
At a time of such overwhelming social turmoil, finding a focus for this kind of project is challenging. Nevertheless, Ribot’s purpose remained clear. “There’s a lot of contradiction in doing any kind of political music,” he says, “how to act against something without becoming it, without resembling what you detest. Sometimes it is hard to figure out what to do, and I imagine we’ll make mistakes, and hopefully, learn from them. But I knew this from the moment Donald Trump was elected: I’m not going to play downtown scene Furtwangler to any orange-comb-over dictator wannabe. No way.”
Portions of the album’s proceeds will be donated to The Indivisible Project, an organization that helps individuals resist the Trump agenda via grassroots movements in their local communities. More info on The Indivisible Project can be found at https://www.indivisible.org/