Alternative Nation
“Why the heck should the government suspend the First Amendment when we’re making such poor use of it?” asks media critic Norman Solomon toward the end of the two-disc set Monkeywrenching the New World Order: Global Capitalism and Its Discontents, forming the crucial question behind several recent spoken-word releases from Alternative Tentacles Records. In post-9/11 America — a country that has welcomed the Patriot Act, casually accepted White House spokesman Ari Fleischer’s warning that Americans “need to watch what they do,” ignored evidence of teacher blacklists and canceled Bill Maher — free-speech advocates can feel like an endangered species.
But this cautious climate has emboldened some outspoken activists who know they have nothing to gain by keeping quiet. When Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men topped The New York Times‘ bestseller list, it became apparent that these agitators might have a larger-than-expected following. Well-attended area appearances by Moore and Alternative Tentacles’ Jello Biafra proved just how sizable that audience is, even in America’s Heartland.
Biafra’s own backstory demonstrates how attempts to limit free speech can work against the security of American political power. Before a bipartisan Senate committee (headed by Al Gore) held hearings aimed at curbing musicians’ artistic expression in the early ’90s, Biafra was known primarily as lead singer of the sharply satirical punk band Dead Kennedys. Since then, Biafra’s work with the No More Censorship Defense Fund and his label, Alternative Tentacles, has made him one of the most important and articulate voices of dissent in American popular culture.
On The Big Ka-Boom, Part One, which documents a November 2001 speech Biafra gave at the University of Wisconsin, he decries the war on terrorism while calling for radical change to confront worldwide poverty, the inhumanity of corporate rule and the disingenuous nature of political power that works to satisfy short-term economic interests. Biafra is clearly speaking to the converted, and his sarcastic tone and approach (he runs at length with a comparison of President Bush to MTV’s Butthead) won’t win him many new friends. Knowing this, he talks strategy with his Wisconsin listeners, brainstorming about how to reach a larger forum.
If Biafra comes up with a way to broaden his appeal, he should share his methods with Noam Chomsky. Chomsky’s An American Addiction, a portrait of U.S.-sponsored terror in Colombia that simultaneously skewers the war on drugs and the war on terrorism, is riveting stuff, provided that listeners accept the credibility of his analysis. Chomsky’s emotionally controlled, world-weary MIT delivery makes him sound legitimate, which gives him an advantage over the snarling Biafra. But Chomsky, like Biafra, is addressing fans (at Roxbury Community College in Boston), and this allows him to speak in off-the-cuff generalities that might do little to persuade the uninitiated.
The narrowness of the audience these discs are likely to reach becomes apparent near the end of Monkeywrenching‘s first disc, which climaxes with a report on putting pies in the faces of key corporate figures. A double album contemplating the aftermath of the WTO protests in Seattle, Monkeywrenching offers some great moments, such as Howard Zinn, with his refreshingly down-to-earth delivery, offering advice to teachers (“make friends”) and Counterpunch’s Alexander Cockburn hilariously dramatizing the closed-door blame game that must have followed the WTO. But voiced mainly by academically flavored white males (just three of the fourteen speakers are female; only three are non-Anglo), the discs occasionally sound like a Woody Allen-penned send-up of leftist babble.
With the unexpected exception of incisive post-9/11 commentary from Mumia Abu-Jamal, the scope of Alternative Tentacles’ music-heavy sampler disc Apocalypse Always is even slimmer. Other than Wesley Willis’ delightful genre-twister “Good News Is Rock ‘n’ Roll,” this anthology seems designed to drive away everyone but the faction of the punk audience that wishes 1977 had never come to an end.
The homogeneity of the anarchist/punk voices is blown away by Prisons on Fire: George Jackson, Attica & Black Liberation. James Baldwin and Harry Belafonte speak with great passion about the murder of prison leader George Jackson. Angela Davis eloquently ties the prison movements that took shape in the late ’60s to a global, multiracial class-based revolutionary movement. But the most unforgettable voices on this disc are lesser-known, such as the mother of George Jackson reporting the cruel words of a laughing prison guard: “We killed one of your sons last year. We got another one this year. You pretty soon won’t have any sons left.” And there’s a prison guard defending his captors at Attica: “Medication was given to us while they didn’t get any … they took care of us first. They took care of us 100 percent. I know they have grievances; I know because I work with them … we have to tell those people out there about them.” Finally, there’s prison activist Ruchell Magee, who drives home one of the fundamental themes running through these discs: “Slavery today is the same but with a new name. They’re making millions and millions of dollars off enslaving blacks, poor whites and others daily, peoples who don’t even know they are being railroaded.” Magee speaks deliberately and emphatically, savoring every syllable of free speech available to him.
