Lately, I've been digging through the Oddity Archive, er... archives, a great Youtube channel about obsolete media and other weird things, like oddball music. I was reviewing the bits about the Max Headroom Incident, which still fascinates me, then saw the link for something I had totally forgotten he had recorded: a show about right wing folk music.
Yes, right wing folk. We tend to think of folk music as the genre of the left wing singer, people like Pete Seeger or Billy Bragg, singing about the union and the rights of workers. But, yes, the right wing establishment did try to make folk music to lure the people listening to folk away from the commies on the left. And it's equally hilariously inept and infuriatingly ignorant.
With Trump monopolizing the right wing dunce demographic right now, it's easy to dismiss him as a simple moron. With some of these songs, recorded back in the 60s, you can hear that Trump's ideas, or the ideas of the Tea Party and Free Republic, aren't that new.
With Janet Greene's "Fascist Threat", we see her framing the argument that fascism isn't a right wing idea, but a communist idea. Because Benito Mussolini, that guy was a total socialist and bleeding heart, right? The same shifting of the goal posts like the Tea Party claiming the KKK was created by the Democrats and that they are the real racists, save that the Democrats that gave rise to the KKK were people like Strom Thurmond.
The music is horrid in its craftsmanship, and completely inept in it's political framing. But it's a very strange and interesting listening. These are the records that I truly cringe and grin at, and the one's I really want in my collection, because they're so weird, not in their musical styles, but in their place in history. The type of records you say, "Really? Someone recorded this? I need to hear that!"
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