Strike While the Needle is Hot: A Discography of Worker's Revolt
Songwriters in a Fiat factory. Miners in the local music studio. Workers on the radio and musicians on the picket line. Music can carry a strike from one factory to the next, or bring it into living rooms across the globe. Record by record, this book unearths some of the biggest swings musicians, workers, and supporters have taken to co-create a popular culture of resistance.
Workers have been engaged in a culture of resistance for as long as there have been bosses. Across every movement and in every language, we have joined our voices together in rebellion and solidarity, singing songs that still echo through the history of organized labor. But in the last hundred years, new technology has allowed these militant rhythms and rebellious melodies to be recorded as they were sung–the voices of miners in Northern England, fieldworkers in California, autoworkers in France, and many others–etched into wax, shellac, and vinyl as strike records.
Strike While the Needle is Hot takes readers through labor’s greatest hits, providing both a broad overview of how militant unionists used music as a tool of struggle, as well as an inspiring history from below about specific worker revolts that would be lost to the bosses’ tune of profit and production had they not been preserved on these fragile discs.
“Political movements without music may still be called movements, but they are not worth joining. Over the past decade, Josh MacPhee has produced groundbreaking, encyclopedic work on the musical activity of twentieth-century left-wing and labor organizations. Co-authored with Kennedy Block, Strike While the Needle Is Hot compiles and annotates eighty recordings produced by trade unions, workers’ organizations, and left-wing groups for specific strikes. Vinyl records in the twentieth century were a particular kind of capitalist commodity, but the records MacPhee and Kennedy present do something fundamentally different: they break the logic of the capitalist recording industry.... The vinyl record was one tool in the masters’ collection, but workers transformed it into a weapon of their own.” —Jackson Albert Mann for CounterPunch
“This book looks so good on the coffee table. It’s a must for every Union household. Super cool artwork with stylistic, detailed writing about the songs you need to know about. I learned so much from the first moment I got it. I’m going to love this book for a long time!”—Mark Gevaart, My Labor Radio
“Full of gorgeous images of album art and inserts as well as contemporaneous news items, Strike While the Needle Is Hot shows workers taking full control of their messaging—spreading info and raising funds for strikes and documenting their own actions....[T]his is a book that deserves to be heard as well as read."—Chicago Reader
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