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Ronald Reagan as an anti-hero of pop music

would be today, former U.S. President Ronald Reagan turned 100 years old. Through its political and historical importance is for this reason enough been said, here etc. , here and here . Less I have read that has probably played no American president ever such a large role in pop music, not even John F. Kennedy, who was praised by the others after all Byrds, Lou Reed and Adam Ant and after one of the most important punk bands of all time is named: the Dead Kennedys.

The Dead Kennedys and Reagan devoted one of the first hymns of hatred and "We've Got a Bigger Problem Now" it is logically abused and demonized as well as ever. I do not know if it given any positive and friendly song about Reagan - perhaps in the country music. The Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra wrote the texts in any case in December 1981: "I am Emperor Ronald Reagan / Born again with fascist cravings / Still, you made me president / Human rights will soon go 'way / I am now you Shah today / Now I command all of you / Now you're gonna pray in school / I'll make sure they're Christian too / Chorus: California Uber Alles / Uber Alles California. A year earlier he had still been working on another politician who Democratic California Governor Jerry Brown . Now understand the liberal anarchist Biafra that he had chosen the wrong person may first target. And he tried his previous mistakes by over-compensation to repair. Also in 1981 the Dead Kennedys released on the band's own label Alternative Tentacles a punk compilation, titled "Let Them Eat Jelly Beans", the title of Ronald Reagan (who was later beheaded) French Queen Marie Antoinette equated, which is alleged to have said if the poor had no bread, they should eat cake. Jelly Beans are a type of sweet, loves the Reagan declared intention. With

a "fascist god in motion" was in the spring of 1981, Reagan took office that year and frankly by the British group "Heaven 17" equated. Your "We Do not Need This Fascist Groove Thang" is rightly regarded today as classics of electronic dance music:


fact that Reagan is known here as "president elect", one can see that the song has to the turn of 1980/81 must have originated when Reagan already selected, but was not yet in office. Equating Reagan with fascism and racism was in the early eighties so common that in America, was a music initiative that "Rock Against Reagan" called - after the model of the British campaign "Rock against Racism" in the late seventies. On the tour of "Rock Against Reagan" in 1982 was attended by almost all the important American hardcore punk bands - such as MDC that Minutemen and Bad Brains

"Rock Against Reagan" in Los Angeles 1982 © Marshal Astor

In the same year, the British Fun Boy Three that had emerged from the epochal ska band The Specials, "and Reagan in his (from their perspective) English vicarious agent Margaret Thatcher her also wonderfully danceable classic "The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum" is intimately Korn.Darin of a clinic (the world) the speech is taken over by cynical insane, and it is, with clear reference to Reagan:

No nuclear the cowboy told us
And who am i to disagree
'Cos when the madman flips the switch
The nuclear will go for me

The unknown tereren anti-Reagan hymns heard the song , Harry Belafonte at the big demonstration against the NATO decision retrofitting in May 1981 in Bonn Hofgarten intoned. To the tune of "Down By the Riverside" Belafonte sang: "Hey Mr. Reagan, lay down your neutron bomb, lay down your neutron bomb, lay down your neutron bomb!" I was there and it was great, very American. Unfortunately, the performance is nowhere preserved in a video, but the former employees of the U.S. Embassy in Bonn, Robert M. Beecroft, reported in this interview that he had the song still belongs to its few hundred meters away Residence: Harry Belafonte sang in front of people 100,000, mainly students, in a big field not far from our house, "Lay down your neutron bomb ..."

Harry Belafonte and Coretta King, 1981 Bonn

Another classic of the eighties in which the hated president plays the role of the anti-hero, "Bonzo Goes To Bitburg" by the Ramones, which in the beginning of their career because of song titles like "Blitzkrieg Bob" himself once fascism were suspected. But in reality, hidden behind dark sunglasses throughout the classical left-liberal Jewish intellectuals. And as such, the Ramones were truly outraged, when Reagan by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was tempted, on 5 May 1985 on a German military cemetery in Bitburg to hold a reconciliation show - although in the tombs also were members of the SS. They made their outrage Air with the single "Bonzo Goes To Bitburg," which was published in June 1985. In 1986 the singer Joey Ramone, said in an interview :

We had watched Reagan going to visit the SS cemetery on TV and were disgusted. We're all good Americans, but Reagan's thing was like forgive and forget. How can you forget six million people being gassed and roasted?



the epithets "Bonzo" had the Reagan Gegern him it missed because he had played in his time as an actor in 1951 starring role in a small, unimportant film called "Bedtime for Bonzo" , whose second Actor a chimpanzee was named Bonzo.

While one can not be politically agree with the artists, so you can actually all their songs still sound fresh and well anhören.Sie unpeinlich. It can not claim not berühmteten of German anti-Reagan song. 1982 was the really highly intelligent artist Joseph Beuys as far as to be accompanied by BAP musicians sing to really be completely infantile song "sun instead of Reagan," in which he of an ex-army pilot the president's "final victory" lust in Nicaragua, the Middle East and Poland assumed. The video of the performance at the "Music Palace" is one of the beloved icons of the trash culture. Note just how Beuys at the end totally clumsy attempts to make as much of a rock star, the "Lasso" by the microphone cord around his swing - and he then breaks off the action, probably for fear of choking, to himself.




This is the list of pop music, which is processing in the eighties to Reagan, not nearly complete. But as a bonus track I'm still a nice Reagan Verungllimpfung from the time when he was governor of California nor after. Joan Baez played at the Woodstock Festival in 1969 the song "Drug Store Truck Drivin 'Man". They came here with Jeffrey Shurtleff and Richard Festinger two members of a conscientious organization that you Founded husband David Harris, had to Shurtleff dedicated the song is about a Klu Klux Klan member, Ronald Reagan. (how he ray-gu n - pronounced ray gun). He added an extra verse to Regan somehow incorporate into the song.