This Fourth of July hits differently. Maybe it’s the ongoing warrantless abductions of minorities by unidentified agents of the state, purportedly officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but who knows? On the surface, they’re sadistic acts of human trafficking, yet they’re draped in the American flag. So are the massive unlawful cuts to academic research, including the medical sciences, the current threats to Medicaid, and even the assassination of elected representatives by a MAGA zealot: All bedecked in the ol’ red, white, and blue.
But not everyone’s buying it. And many of us with a little punk deep down inside, or just a penchant for critical thinking, are speaking out — on the microphone. So on this Independence Day, the Memphis Flyer celebrates a dozen songs broadcasting from the heart of the rebel alliance, right here in the Bluff City, by those of us who “do not go gentle into that good night” of sheer kleptocracy, but are instead raging against the dying of democracy.
“UnAmerikan” — FAKE
In keeping with the minimalist songwriting style he perfected in the band Fuck, Tim Prudhomme hits the nail on the head with brevity and wit in this unreleased song from his latest group. FAKE is a very real quartet, and this song has been a popular favorite in their live sets. As Prudhomme notes, the devil’s in the details. “I played it for a friend the other day and she mistakenly thought I was singing ‘UnAmerican,’” he explains. But no, this is aimed squarely at a particular slice of our society, signified with a “k,” that’s obsessed with alpha male fantasies of power and performative patriarchy. Bro culture? Prudhomme ain’t having it: “I don’t like sports bars/I don’t like endless war,” he sings. And, happily, he offers an alternative. “I am a socialist/I am limp of wrist.” He’s hit upon the secret to being 100 percent Proud Boy-free. And so can you.
“People Over Profits” — Mighty Souls Brass Band
The No Kings demonstration on June 14th was full of progressive patriots waving the stars and stripes, even as they rejected the punitive patriotism of the most Trump-loving cultists. Instead, the diverse, decent, compassionate America championed by the marchers was a country fired by joy and community. And that’s where the Mighty Souls Brass Band came in, as the rattling rhythm of a snare drum and the fat bottom of group founder Sean Murphy’s sousaphone kicked in and sent a jolt of electricity through the crowd, reportedly 4,000-strong. That was in part due to the power of the street parade tradition. New Orleans-style brass bands have always involved the joy of movement, the power of the groove to bring us together. And that was on full display for the No Kings event, especially in a tune Murphy recorded with Paul Taylor, written “right around the first time that Trump was elected,” Murphy says, simply titled “People Over Profits.” Even a slower number, “St. James Infirmary Blues,” had a visceral impact derived from its deep history, evoking both the topic of healthcare, including the inequities of archaic medical systems that we thought we’d moved beyond, as well as the historical roots of the protest.
Yet one piece, played in the finest brass band street parade style, was even more on point. “Another song that is really important to me on a bunch of different levels, and that we always try to play at all the protests, is ‘This Land Is Your Land,’” Murphy says. “It’s such an amazing song. It’s sort of an alternative national anthem. And you know, it does help that Woody Guthrie could not stand the current president’s family.”
As Murphy points out, his group is especially well-suited to mass gatherings. “A brass band in particular is a great ensemble for protesting. We’re mobile, obviously, and we don’t require any sort of electrification. And, you know, we are loud! At one of the Monday protests that we did, we had a Trump supporter show up who tried opening the doors to their car and pumping out whatever music they were playing. We didn’t even know they were there until we took a break because they could not be heard over our playing! It was like the viral video from the No Kings march in Atlanta, where a brass band drowned out the Proud Boys.”
“Flight of the Fascist” — Little Baby Tendencies
Of course, as all punks know, there’s more than one way to drown out the fascists. Haley Ivey, the singer-songwriter behind the band Little Baby Tendencies, is a flutist by training but makes up for that instrument’s delicacy when she straps on an electric guitar. Lately, she’s been singing the lead tune from the band’s Inauguration Day release, Burn Down the State, where she screams at breakneck pace, “Let’s show up with a torch and burn down all their mansions/Rising up to their height and taking charge of all our freedoms … We’ll find out how fast it burns, you fascist piece of shit!” It pairs well with Ivey’s more performative side, which led her in 2023 to ’24 to stage flag burnings in honor of Independence Day.
Not one to mince words, Ivey’s up front about the song’s practical value for rabble-rousing, which gives her mixed feelings. “It’s a little too all-encompassing and a little too shallow,” she says. “I feel like other songs on the album discuss very specific facets of what’s going on, you know, like the complicity of all of us human beings. ‘Sun Song’ on there, I really like because I am, honestly, at the end of the day, very, very passionate about the climate crisis, which I feel like is probably our number one most like the biggest peril that we face.”
“Knighted (Not Deputized)” — Red Squad
While we’re on the subject of heavy guitars recruited to the antifa cause, we can’t sleep on one of the city’s most outspokenly political bands, Red Squad. Their latest, released just before the election last year, brings the riffs and the power chord crunch to spin a somewhat tongue-in-cheek fantasy about tracking down fascists to deliver death metal justice. While presumably not to be taken literally, the scenario is one all lovers of democracy can embrace: “1/6/21, this dipshit storms the Capitol/Bear sprays a cop and fucks off on the lam/They want the best, and we’re deputized by Kamala/We say fuck that, knight us or we walk!”
It’s a unique spin on activism in the video game era, but what matters most are the riffs and the hammering rhythm. And, for all the song’s neo-vigilante romanticism, it now works as a resounding cry of frustration in an era when Trump’s insurrectionists walk free. This had an immediate impact on Memphis’ No Kings march, as activist Hunter Demster pointed out on social media when he noted that “The guy who showed up yesterday to troll the No Kings protest and did a Nazi salute was Joshua Lee Hernandez. He was a J6er who was convicted of assaulting a police officer. Trump pardoned him.”
Red Squad could have been singing about that very convicted criminal: “We swore to catch him/We’ll put his ass on ice/Oath keeping fascist!” But instead of calling modern day knights and screeching eagles, the protesters just swiped his oversized MAGA hat and let him look like a fool.
As Joybomb’s founder and singer-songwriter Grant Beatty told the Flyer recently, “When I was a kid, I got into punk rock and went to the Warped Tour, and there was Rock against Bush. ‘Political punk’ sounds so cheesy, but at the time, you know, there was a war going on. Being a kid, I was super inspired by a lot of that stuff and those bands, even going back to the Clash, you know? Protest music through the power of good lyricism and clever writing and rock-and-roll.”
He brings that energy in full to this tune, an ironic take on the omnipresence of microplastics in our environment, our food, and our bodies. “We’ll call it human progress,” he sings. “And forever we’ll flow/Adapting to your new home/Wash it down your sore throat,” goes the chorus, before a spoken word interlude makes clear that we’re living in dark times indeed. “The land mourns and all who live in it languish/Together with the wild animals and the birds of the air/Even the fish are perishing.” It’s a perfect wake up call for an age when the president aims to defund the Environmental Protection Agency research and staff until we’re blue in the face.
“El Último Lago de China” — Los Psychosis
In a similar vein, Los Psychosis, a self-described “Memphis-based Latinx psychobilly band,” takes a hard look at the big picture of the environment. Translated as “The Last Lake in China,” the song mourns the disappearance of clean environments where humans can thrive.
As the band’s singer, Javi Arcega, notes, “On NPR, they were talking about the last lake in China that is clean enough to drink water from, and what locals were doing to save it. And at the end of the story, the narrator said that it is no longer the last clean lake in China. It made me think about how great the nation of China is, how huge and powerful it is, and yet there are no clean lakes there. I didn’t even know I was intentionally writing a political environmental song. I had this conscious feeling of like, ‘Hey, we’re destroying the Earth!’ And you can think, ‘I’m so glad that’s not happening in my town,’ but if you’ve heard about Flint, Michigan, you’ll realize it is happening in your town.”
Beyond that, thanks to the current administration, Arcega feels as though, being a Latino, his very existence is a political act. “I feel like it’s so important to be a voice for the people because there’s only a handful of us Latin musicians in town that are very active in the music scene. At the same time, it’s easy to be a target. So I’ve just got to play it cool and [try to] not be a target. But it’s very hard because you just want to sing about what’s going on.”
“Ferguson to Palestine” — Aktion Kat
If you’re wondering where Aktion Kat is coming from, look no further than the title of his 2023 album, It’s Fun to Transgress! The subtitle puts a finer point on it: Rock ‘n’ Roll for the Revolution. And, like Los Psychosis, Aktion Kat is ready and willing to embrace a more international perspective, especially on the hard-hitting, yet surprisingly folksy, “Ferguson to Palestine,” where he sings: “Riot police and flash grenades/Tear gas canisters Amerikkkan made/All funded by the taxes we pay/Occupation is a crime/Ferguson to Palestine. It’s about class, it’s about race/It’s about fuckin’ time that we smash the state and we all participate/Revolution in our time. Ferguson to Palestine/We oughta know, we all should know, this is for real/It’s not a show. There’s blood in the streets wherever you go/Hands up, don’t shoot. I’m young and Black/I wanna live and not get shot in the back.”
It’s an unflinching embrace of radical chic, and if some feel it’s merely a fashion statement, note that Aktion Kat has played a supportive role in nuts-and-bolts politics, as with last December’s Community Distro event that passed out harm-reduction gear and collected contributions for a food pantry. Also note that the group’s allies are legion, and, as they write, “Their myriad komrades are molotov kocktail-slinging kittens from the 9th dimension.” Moreover, they’re armed with a comic strip and action figures. Who said smashing the state couldn’t be fun?
“Original Man” — Iron Mic Coalition
While many of the aforementioned artists are on the new side, the Iron Mic Coalition (IMC) is a 20-year-old Memphis institution. And, although one of their most outspokenly political members, Fathom 9, has passed away, this local hip-hop collective is more relevant than ever. Case in point, their release from this March, IMC 4th Edition: Still Iron, keeps the politics front and center. But, as founding member Quinn McGowan puts it, their politics are woven into a whole way of life, built on the four pillars of hip-hop: DJ’ing, emceeing, break dancing, and graffiti.
The way McGowan sees it, all four of those elements are inherently political. “Hip-hop has never been designed to be passive, right? It is an active culture.” Yet at the same time, he emphasizes that rapping is meant to convey the totality of human experience. “I try to be careful about the idea that hip-hop has to adhere to a singular identity, right? People who are rapping are doing activist type stuff, or they are doing poetry, or they are sampling. Activists need to relax, too. It can’t be marching and chanting and fighting all the time.”
Having said that, one can hear McGowan mulling over that tension in the lead cut, “Original Man,” when he raps, “The navigator relapsed to a state of inattentiveness/Which in a last-moment scenario requires the sort of inventiveness/That suggests that I was meant for this!” He’s grappling with the need to be awake to the world’s injustices, even as he feeds his needs as a complete human. Ultimately, he’s down with the resistance. “In the ’90s ran with the mujahedin/Over dunes like Muad’Dib,” referencing the native rebels in Dune.
It’s a balancing act that McGowan has maintained for decades; it’s now carried on by his son Eillo, who also raps on the track. The way he sees it, IMC is playing the long game. “The funny thing about this fourth project, is that, you know, without being contrived or manufactured in any way at all, the album speaks to the moment, not because we as a group are particularly prescient, but more because we’re literally doing what we have always been doing. We’re not doing anything different. We’re trying to speak to the moment that we’re living in and trying to stay with the truth that formed us.”
“Stay Focused” — Chinese Connection Dub Embassy (CCDE)
“KKKaren Anthem” — Negro Terror
These twin groups are familiar voices of protest in Memphis, both having the Higgins family at their core. The late, great Omar Higgins helped jumpstart both CCDE, a roots reggae group, and Negro Terror, a hardcore band, before his death in 2019, and his brothers Joseph and David now carry the torch.
The CCDE single “Stay Focused” was written by Joseph and Jasira Olatunji and released just before the election last year. Much like IMC’s “Original Man,” it conjures up the personal work one needs to attend to in order to stay active politically over the long haul, this time with an eerily prescient line about neo-fascists actually pursuing those who resist. “You got to stay focused alright cause ya know they coming for ya/Babylon a try to come for you/Wanna distract I and the ghetto youth/But we stand firm on our square/We not goin’ anywhere for this fight, yes we are prepared.”
As Joseph observes, “If you see what’s going on the news and TV and everything, like obviously they’re trying to take our focus off some things that are going on in the world right now. We’re seeing trafficking even in our own backyard, in Memphis! This song is really a call to action. Like people, y’all need to stay focused because Babylon is out here!”
Meanwhile, on more punk note, his brother David carries on as the guitarist and singer of Negro Terror. Their latest release, “KKKaren Anthem,” features these lines, chanted over some very metal chords of doom: “Karen you just won’t quit/You say I fit the description when I ain’t did shit/Then you say you wanna stand your ground, telling me to go to my side of town/Back off trick we just wanna be free because the ugly side of me you don’t wanna see/All you can do is hope and pray because the real street justice is on its way.” If it reads like a threat, it’s also a forceful act of self-defense in the face of white privilege — another side of the personal, interior work one needs to carry on.
“Stand for Something” — Seize & Desist
Meanwhile, after Omar’s death, two original Negro Terror members, guitarist Rico Tha Akronym and drummer Ra’id Khursheed, went their own way to carry on the hardcore activist spirit. And their 2022 debut EP, The Cease and Desist Letter, is full of hard-hitting riffs paired with trenchant political lyrics. The kickoff track, like the tracks by IMC and CCDE, is not only a call to action, but an exhortation to adopt an activist’s state of mind. It’s something that many of us need to be reminded of. “No longer asking why/At this point it’s do or die/Stand for something, fall for nothing! Betrayed! Enslaved! Led history astray! The lies! Replies/No matter what we try.” It bears repeating, especially when, as Rico observes, “I’ve watched a lot of people stand on one thing, but then when it was gonna ruin their fun, or when it was gonna be uncomfortable, all of a sudden, no one’s talking anymore.”
“Hitler Lives” — Reba Russell Band
As a final note, a look backward. The great supergroup Mud Boy and the Neutrons had more than a few songs that conjured up the rebellious spirit of the ’60s, but one of their most effective was “Hitler Lives,” written by Red River Dave and Bill Crouch and first released by Rosalie Allen and the Black River Riders in 1947. Far from being a rallying cry for neo-Nazis (all too imaginable in this day and age), it’s actually a warning. It was revived in powerful fashion in 2010 by the Reba Russell Band, great colleagues of Jim Dickinson and the Mud Boy crew, who slowed it down into an aggrieved country soul ballad. And while it was originally meant to decry the plight of homeless World War II veterans, it rings ever more true for all of us today, on this very twisted Fourth of July:
“Is your memory so numb/You’ve forgotten ’41/When the world was all aflame from shore to shore?/You can count on this my friend/You let Hitler live again/If you should ever turn a hero from your door … Hitler lives … if we hurt our fellow man/Hitler lives … if you forget.”