* Listen to the song HERE *
According to some anyway. According to others, it’s a good time to campaign and protest against the status quo (I don’t mean the rock group, although it’s fair to say they aren’t to everyone’s taste).
There is a strain of political or ‘protest’ song-writing which comes across as tediously preachy, with obvious messages we all know already and which serve little point in revisiting after hearing them once. But thankfully there have been plenty of belters created in the name of a good cause. Varied too - from the cheery 'I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag' by Country Joe and the Fish, the confrontational bombast of ‘Fight the Power’ by Public Enemy, the mournful devastation of ‘Strange Fruit’ by Billie Holiday, to the disco funk of ‘War’ by Edwin Starr.
My pick for the times would be ‘Don’t Trust Banks’ by garage-rockers Apache Dropout. Everyone hates the banks, and the song’s weedy vocals and cruddy production values encapsulate a feeling of being squashed into submission by financial institutions beautifully. I dedicate it to the poll conducted last year by the organisation Positive Money which showed that just over 1 in 10 MPs accurately understand how money is created in our economic system.
To the uninitiated, 97% of our money supply is created by private banks when they issue loans. They create money out of thin air, allocate where it goes, and then charge interest on top. Thank goodness they’re such trust-worthy, socially responsible institutions, or else the banks would reign supreme, we’d have ever-increasing debt levels and inequality, unaffordable house prices, squeezed public services, and the continued evaporation of democracy.
Oh well. To quote Apache Dropout: “We must be poor.......again.”
Happy voting.
May 2015
www.lcpumpkin.co.uk
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