Music and Global Politics

"I wish they all could be Kabbalah Girls!" Miracle waters and mysterious red strings, scanning ancient texts instead of actually reading. One of the more curious tales of democratising mysticism is surely the move into Kabbalah by the reigning Girl queens of provocative glam and uninhibited sexuality: Madonna, Britney Spears and now at least somewhat Arianna Grande,. From the start they mixed in a...

"I recommend you find you a gun, it's too late it's already begun....your neighbours hate you and always did, all this time chomping at the bit." Chilling and arresting lyrics from the Americana raconteur, punk-bluegrass veteran and self-described "Jew from Oklahoma, Mark Rubin. Loudly sounding the warning bells of fascist return, Rubin mines deep into the Americana underbelly of prejudice and may...

Welcome back to Music and Global Politics. Like and subscribe, rate and review and support . Patreon/Gmail: musicandpoliticspod. Become an RSS member yourself using this link here: https://rss.com/?via=f3da93 In this episode we ask, is blues the core of Jazz, is it even the mother of all modern music? Is as BB King once said that "Jazz is the Big Brother of the Blues" or that Blues is High School...

Welcome back to Music and Global Politics. Like and subscribe, rate and review and support . Patreon/Gmail: musicandpoliticspod In honour of Easter, Passover and Qingming tomb-sweeping festival today , we move to matters of the spirit: Did the political tragedies and disappointments of the late 60s convert energy for change into energy for the spirit? Did intimidation and fear of violence enforce...

Welcome back to Music and Global Politics. Please rate, review, like and subscribe and support us on Patreon at musicandpoliticspod.com Today we reconsider the very origins of jazz, delve into its historical context and address several questions such as Why New Orleans? What was the role of America's largest red light distinct,, how was Jazz related to the targest Union movement in the Southern Un...

Welcome Back to Music and Global Politics. Please like, rate subscribe, share with a friend and support us on Patreon at musicandpoliticspod.com Today we explore with nuance ravin in Hong Kong. Amongst the 5th most densely populated cities in the world, along with falling 5 straight years on the World Happiness Index, high stress and some classic grump infuse the Special Administrative Region's im...

Welcome back to Music and Global Politics. Please like, rate and subscribe and support on Patreon at musicandpoliticspod.com As a thank you and gift to listeners, please enjoy Slava'a "Wagner in Drinks": https://viacheslavv.substack.com/p/richard-wagners-favorite-drinks-announcement Russia is a font of alternative perspectives usually unavailable in the West. With its strong Byzantine past, Russia...

Can Pop be a cure for the melancholy and pain of our age? Has it always been? Today we bring a practicing NYC-based psychiatrist to probe the music of Taylor Swift and Lana Del Ray for pain, therapy and mental health. Given the resounding dominance of their prolonged success, sustained depth-analysis is more than called for. The hopes, fears and travails of generations and millions is now projecte...

Welcome to Season Four dear listeners. Thank you for your patience and today we are proud to present to you Adam Swart, founder of Crowds on Demand —the original paid protesting firm. Adam has unique insider knowledge of how modern protests are built, funded, and staged for media impact, he’s breaking his silence with us as requests for protest campaigns have surged 400% this year. Here are some o...

Most everyone has heard of Bob Dylan, but what about the many other folk protest singers just as famous in their respective countries: Victor Jara in Chile, Vladimir Vysotsky in the Russian-speaking world, or Wolf Biermann for the German. Here we explore the global folk protest singer as rooted in the existentialist philosophy of Albert Camus. The authenticity of the voice as the agency of the art...

The two musical selections you hear are both compositions of Christian Kolonovits: The Soundtrack to the Film "North Face" Musical Preview of the Erl Passion Play. If you are interested in learning more about the Passion Plays, please have a look at my book length review of Oberammergau: https://mellenpress.com/book/Adam-J-Sacks/9848/ The Passion Play is the original living theater, a ritual of be...

Welcome again and thank you for joining us for another episode of "Music and Politics." As ever our discussions precede and finish with musical selections. Today's two musical texts are pre-war historical and are presented in full. These are shellac recordings made in the 1930s by members inside the institution that is our discussion to day the Jewish Kulturbund of Nazi Germany They are: The Orche...

This episode is a lecture delivered at the Historisches Seminar at the Ludwig Maximillian University in Munich. It is preceded by an introduction and two musical works: Gloria: Cum Sancto Spiritu (1926) Berlin Philharmonic Chrous, conducted by Siegfried Ochs Bist du Bei Mir, sung by contralto, Paula Salomon-Lindberg, believed to be recorded after 1933, accompanied by Rudolf Schwarz on the piano. (...

At a time when America's democracy can seem like its teetering on the brink, its worth remembering that West German Democracy was a shining success story in its democracy and the cultural attraction to its freedoms. This was a singular case, where after World War Two the occupying army was not seen as a threat or a terror but rather as a glimpse of a better life. The reactions to rock were by no m...

In this episode we speak with a representative from Estonia's quinquennial Song and Dance Festival one of the largest of its kind in the world. Maris shares personal memories of how students in the late 1980s stood up to Soviet uniformed authorities and refused to stop singing. We address: what differentiates this festival from others of its kind? what place this festival has in the collective mem...

In this episode, we continue to examine the toxic brew that is Wagnerism with Dr Larry Mass. In this concluding discussion of his musical life, we cover his growing awareness of the dark underbelly of the musical phenomenon once still often brushed under the rug. Dr Mass helps us to both understand musical listening under the framework of addiction but also the complex processes of psychological d...

Welcome dear listeners as we confront what some refer to as the defining issue of our times: Palestine. We welcome as our guest arts communicator and educator, Marianna Ellenberg who has consistently integrated avant-garde and experimental music into her stage productions. She offers a personal perspective onto the blowback of the latest, devastating round of bloody conflict onto the arts world, o...

Welcome dear listeners to the first episode of a recurring segment on Hip-Hop and Politics. Today we welcome MC MasD from Dujeous to dive into Afrocentricity and XClan. Dujeous was a leading live instrumental Hip-Hop band of the 90s and 00s in NYC, reminiscent of the Roots. They had a great selling single entitled "Spilt Milk" and a critically acclaimed album "City Limits." We touch on the roots o...

Please join us dear listeners as we embark on a multipart musical biography with Dr Lawrence Mass. An addiction medicine specialist, gay rights activist (co-founder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis) and longtime Wagnerite, Dr. Mass is completing his trilogy of books on the perils and pleasures of Wagnerism. We listen and discuss the works that have shaped his life as an enraptured and conflicted lis...

Dear Listeners, Thank you for joining us as we embark on season 3. We begin with a journey into Chinese Jazz, into the delightful and turbulent demimonde of interwar Shanghai, where Russian marching bands clashed with American swing bands, helping to kick start Jazz in China. Composers like Li Jinhui and Chen Gexin crafted a Chinese songbook, part and parcel of China's national renaissance after W...

In this episode of "Music & Politics" we explore music in the age of dictators, in the 1930s and 1940s: Stalinism, Nazism and the Popular Front. Though "totalitarianism" is a contested term of the Cold War era, it well applies to the musical aesthetic of the great works of art-music of the 1930s. As we suggest at the outset, even the output of Hollywood's Golden Age like Max Steiner's soundtra...

The music listening public has come back full circle to that point over a century back when music existed only in the ether, evanescent and fleeting, or in the "cloud." Despite any resurgence of vinyl, most music is accessed in a streaming format without any tangible, physical, consumable object. The shift is catastrophic for working musicians, who must return to performance for any sustainable li...

In this episode of "Music and Politics" we shine a light on Charleston, SC, a city in the Deep South once the largest and richest in Colonial America. Seen from this perspective, the history of America and its musics looks very different: at once dominated by the tyranny of slavery and also much more African. As a centre of Gullah culture, Charleston saw efforts to preserve the spiritual song of s...

In this episode, we discuss the Jewish politics of pop and punk with conversations about Lou Reed and Brian Epstein that ranges from fashion to the avant garde, drug addiction, the demimonde and gay sexuality in an era of erotic prohibition. We are glad to feature Steven Lee Beeber, the author of "The Heebie Jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret Jewish History of Punk," that argues for Punk as the most Jewi...

Please tune in for this conversation with cultural historian Dr Jon Gentry on "degenerate music," what it is - what it means and why it matters! Perhaps more familiar as "middle class panic" against "dangerous" popular music like the backlash against Hip Hop in the 90s, this is a history that reaches back to Darwin and the 19th Century. Taking a term from biology, inserting it into politics and th...