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Revolutionary Culture: Prairie Fire Tour

By VVAW

Since February, Prairie Fire, a revolutionary musical group from the San Francisco Bay Area has been on national tour, sponsored by the Revolutionary Student Brigade and Revolutionary Union. Though musical groups tour the US all the time, there is a big difference between most other groups and Prairie Fire. In the first place, Prairie Fire is a working class couple: when they aren't performing, they're working in factories. In the second place, the music which has grown out of the daily struggles being waged against oppression and exploitation the world over. Not only do their songs expose the nature of the imperialist system--a system which is based on making profits for a small class of parasites off the labor and sweat of working people--but their music also speaks to the fact that people are uniting and taking matters into their own, hands in order to change the society we live in.

Prairie Fire is more than a couple of song-writers. They are not "super-stars," but cultural workers whose music is serving people and building struggle. When we hear the word "culture," we often think of things like opera, dull poetry readings, high brow discussions of literature and art, etc. But culture is an expression of ideas, and it represents the view point of one group of people or another and can be a powerful tool in creating opinions among people. Through culture, we are daily bombarded with the viewpoint of that small class of people who rule this country. Just as this class of people owns all the factories, plants and mines, they also own the TV and radio stations, publishing houses, movies, etc. and through these, it pushes its own view of the world. The ruling class promotes ideas of individualism, cynicism, defeatism, drug usage, and tries to divert the righteous anger of the people who are pissed off at the way things are being run in this country by trying to get us to blame one another for the problems. In doing this, it hides the real cause of people's suffering--the imperialist system. For example, we daily hear songs on the radio which spew out such garbage as, "Life is so hard and I'm so down and out; if only my baby would come back, we could escape from all this and life will be groovy." Lyrics like this further ideas of escapism and defeatism and try to make people believe that nothing can be done about the hard times we're going through these days, except maybe to run off somewhere and try to hide.

In contrast to this kind of trash, we have the lyrics of a Prairie Fire song:

"Hard times are fightin' times for me;
Times were hard enough in what they call prosperity.
I'll be damned if my belt's gonna tighten;
Let the bosses do the bullet biting, cause Hard times are fightin' times for me."

This is the language of struggle expressed in music--the expression of an idea that we're not going to sit back and accept the economic crisis that is currently making it hard for people to survive. Instead, we're going to fight back against the bosses who are bringing down the lay-offs, the cut-backs, the speed-ups. The economic crisis was caused by the bosses and the ruling class as a whole as they try like hell to increase their profits, and we're going to make them pay for it!

It is important for the people of this country to develop more cultural forms which express our idea, our experiences, and our aspirations. The ruling class put out their ideas daily, through the media, and tried to make us think that they've got everything under control, and that if people do resist their exploitation, we'll all be punished because there is nothing that can be done to challenge the rule of the government. But we know different. We know that people are uniting and fighting back against the lay-offs, against the police attacks in our communities, against the rotten treatment given vets by the VA. And there's something else we know and that is that the people united will win what they're fighting for. We need cultural forms to express our view of the world, our view of the struggles being waged by the people, and our view of the power that a united people have.

Prairie Fire is developing this kind of culture, as are many other poor and working people around the country--not only in music but in art, poetry, and theater. Ours is a culture that belongs to that class of the exploited--not to the exploiters. It is a culture which pushes our struggle forward, builds our unity, and serves as a powerful tool in our hands as we broaden the struggle to defeat the imperialist system. In the words of Prairie Fire, "We can shake, rattle and roll in the concert halls' till our spirits are as high as the sky, but it's in the street, on the picket lines, in direct battle with the bosses that the real war is to be waged and won." The music of Prairie Fire is one weapon we have in that battle.