album cover Prussian Blue
The debut album cover for folk-pop duo Prussian Blue, once popular among the white-power set.
In “The Times They Are a Changing Back”—Billy Bragg’s recently released remake of the sixties Dylan classic—the British protest singer offers a much less optimistic take on the direction our culture is headed.
“Come Mexicans, Muslims, LGBT, and Jews,” sings Bragg, “Keep your eyes wide for what’s on the news / For President Trump is expressing his views / And I fear the mob that he’s inciting.”
That concern was freshly borne out this weekend, as torch-bearing white supremacists again marched through downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, en route to the tarp-covered statue of Robert E. Lee in the city’s Emancipation Park. Unlike the much larger-scale “Unite the Right” rally, which was held at the same site two months ago and resulted in the death of one counter-protester and injury of several others, Saturday’s rally was peaceful. But the hateful message remained the same.
“We’re going to come back, and we’re going to keep coming back,” Richard Spencer, the ultra-rightwing organizer of both rallies, shouted through a bullhorn. “You’re going to have to get used to the alt-right, you’re going to have to get used to white identity, you’re going to have to get used to un-cucked young men who are willing to stand for our future.”
Spencer then led his followers in chants of “the south will rise again,” “you will not replace us,” and, less predictably, “Harry Potter is not real.” They also joined together in an off-key rendition of “I Wish I Was in Dixie,” a song that dates back to the blackface minstrel shows of the mid-19th century.
In fact, white supremacist audiences have a wide range of musical options to choose from. Well more than 200 CDs by white nationalist acts are currently being sold through the National Socialist Movement’s website. They range from the well-known Skrewdriver to acts unknown to even the most enthusiastic hate-music aficionados.
In the wake of the Charlottesville tragedy, the digital music provider Spotify made headlines by banning dozens of white supremacist bands from its service. But there is simply too much of this kind of music for Spotify, which carries an estimated 30 million songs, to purge.
Spotify made headlines by banning dozens of white supremacist bands but it continues to stream tracks by a number of white-power acts.
In fact, the Stockholm-based corporation is continuing to stream tracks by a number of its country’s own white-power acts. Among them are Swedish singer-songwriter Saga, a.k.a. “the Madonna of the far right,” and extreme-metal band Bathory, whose repertoire includes a song called “Blood and Soil,” named after the Nazi slogan the torch-bearing white nationalists chanted in Charlottesville.
One band now banned from Spotify is Prussian Blue, a Bakersfield “white pride” act featuring two blond-haired, blue-eyed twins who were 11 years old when they recorded their 2004 debut album of sweetly sung folk-pop for the National Alliance-affiliated Resistance Records.
With sisterly harmonies and strummed guitars, they included versions of songs by Skrewdriver and other white-power bands alongside original songs like “Aryan Man Awake” and “Hate for Hate.” The duo’s name was a nod to the color of Zyklon B residue in the Nazi gas chambers. (The twins have since had something of a change of heart, and now identify as pot-smoking liberal hippies.)
It’s worth noting that Nazi-related band names are not the sole province of white-power groups. Post-punk icons Joy Division took their name from the sex slave divisions of Nazi concentration camps, and, following the suicide of frontman Ian Curtis, reinvented themselves as New Order. Nazi imagery also found its way into the early British punk movement, with well-known scenesters like Sid Vicious and Siouxsie Sioux using swastikas as shock-rock fashion accessories.
The proliferation of racist music is especially problematic at a time when alt-right extremists have become so enamored with the First Amendment. The line between creative expression and hate speech is often blurry and subjective.
There’s also the question of what can be done about it. Many of the bands who’ve been thrown off Spotify can still be found on music sites like cdbaby, while the ones who can’t are just one YouTube click away.
There’s the very real possibility that attempts to restrict controversial music will backfire: When Tipper Gore co-founded the Parents Music Resource Center in the 1980s to fight offensive and, in their view, potentially dangerous music, they made their case by widely disseminating the most outrageous lyrics of bands like W.A.S.P. and Body Count, two acts who otherwise might have faded in relative obscurity. That was, of course, long before cable news and the internet have made it far easier to share racist music and messages.
Perhaps the most powerful remedy will be for new protest singers to embrace the kind of ideals that inspired a whole generation back in the 1960s. As Billy Bragg sings, “Martin Luther King is spinning in his grave to see a bigoted bully taking the stage/And he calls upon us to be faithful to the ideas he died for in another age/For the times they are a changing back.”
Bill Forman is the music and film editor of the Colorado Springs Independent.