To attend to music in the postwar era is not to leaf through a catalogue of aesthetic trends but to read a seismograph of the political unconscious. The dancefloor, in its myriad incarnations, from the smoke-choked juke joint to the strobe-lit warehouse, has consistently functioned as a laboratory for social possibility, a battleground for emancipation, and a sanctuary for the undesirable. It is where the abstract yearnings for freedom are rendered physical, where the body politic learns to move in new configurations. This history is not one of mere accompaniment; it is a record of active, often disruptive, co-evolution between sound and society. To believe otherwise is a luxury of the dominant, for whom politics is a choice rather than a condition of existence.

The map of this territory is drawn in scars and ecstasies. Its origins lie not in pleasure but in the alchemy of pain. The Blues, emerging from the brutal calculus of slavery and sharecropping, was the first great modernist art form of the Americas precisely because it refused consolation. It was a music of profound, unblinking interiority that, by naming a specific, personal grief, a missed train, a lost love, the relentless sun, encoded the collective trauma of a people. As Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) insisted in Blues People, this was not folk art; it was a sophisticated ‘chronicle of the race’, a survival strategy that turned anguish into a tough, witty, and resilient poetry. Its ecclesiastical counterpart, Gospel, took this same raw material and forged it into a collective, ecstatic demand for a promised land not in the hereafter, but here, now. The Freedom Songs of the Civil Rights movement, like ‘We Shall Overcome’, an amalgam of a gospel hymn and a labor anthem, were not morale boosters. They were tactical infrastructure. As activist and scholar Bernice Johnson Reagon of the SNCC Freedom Singers knew, the act of singing together in the face of police dogs and water cannons was a somatic act of solidarity, a way of singing a new, fearless body into being.

If Gospel organized the body, Jazz proposed a model for the body politic. Its central principle, individual virtuosity operating within a negotiated collective improvisation, was a sonic metaphor for a radical democracy. It was a complex, demanding art that celebrated Black intellectual sovereignty. But by the late 1950s, metaphor was no longer sufficient. The music had to scream. Artists like Max Roach and Charles Mingus moved from implication to indictment. Roach’s 1960 album ‘We Insist! Freedom Now Suite’, with Abbey Lincoln’s vocalizations ranging from mournful to furious, was an unflinching musical document of apartheid in America and South Africa. It was music that refused to be background noise. And then there was Nina Simone. When she responded to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and the murder of four little girls with ‘Mississippi Goddam’, she discarded the subtlety of the jazz standard for the searing directness of a protest song. "This is a show tune”, she told the Carnegie Hall audience in 1964, her voice dripping with sarcastic fury, “but the show hasn't been written for it”. The song was not entertainment; it was an act of testimony, a raw nerve exposed on stage.

The folk revival of the 1950s and 60s, though often a whitened, commercialized facsimile of protest, understood music’s power as a carrier for ideology. It was obsessed with authenticity, a fraught and often sentimental concept, but one that connected the struggles of the moment to a mythologized past of grassroots resistance. Bob Dylan, the movement’s reluctant prophet, soon grew tired of its sanctimony. When he ‘went electric’ at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, the cries of "Judas!" from the folk purists were not just about acoustic purity; they were the sound of a political subculture realising that the next revolution would not be strummed gently on an acoustic guitar. It would be amplified, distorted, and ungovernable.

Rock and Roll was that revolution’s first shockwave. A mongrel genre born from the illicit, racially transgressive union of blues, country, and gospel, its initial politics were visceral: the politics of the body. It was integrated dancing, the backbeat, the hip-swivel - a direct challenge to segregationist laws and puritanical mores. But by the late 1960s, it had expanded into a full-throated, if often incoherent, countercultural critique. The music of The Doors and Jefferson Airplane became the soundtrack for anti-war protests and the hippie movement’s flirtation with communitarian living and psychedelic exploration. Festivals like Woodstock were sold as ‘utopia realized’, a temporary autonomous zone of mud, music, and free love. In reality, it was often a mess of bad acid and gendered naivete, a spectacle that Susan Sontag might have described as the ‘politics of ecstasy’ devolving into a ‘culture of narcissism’. The revolution was, as always, being packaged. The machinery of capital proved adept at selling the iconography of dissent, the Che Guevara t-shirt, the peace sign, back to the dissenters themselves.

The inevitable hangover from the 60s dream gave birth to Punk’s glorious, corrosive nihilism. If the hippies sang of love, Punk offered the liberating grammar of disgust. In the UK, it was the sound of white working-class youth with “no future” spitting at the monarchy, the state, and the bloated remnants of prog rock. Bands like The Clash were the accessible face, but it was the anarcho-punk of Crass that took the ideology to its logical conclusion. Operating from a dial-up commune in rural Essex, they merged music, art, and direct action into a totalizing project. Their records, on their own label, were accompanied by dense manifestos. Their song ‘Reality Asylum’ was a blasphemous scream against all forms of control. As chronicled in Maximumrocknroll, Punk’s DIY ethos, the three-chord song, the photocopied zine and the squatted venue wasn't an aesthetic; it was an anti-capitalist praxis. It was the creation of a parallel economy of meaning, a ‘counter-public sphere’ (theorized by Oskar Negt & Alexander Kluge) built with xerox machines and safety pins.

While Punk was staging its guitar-driven insurrection in the dilapidated clubs of London and New York, a different, more luminous revolution was unfolding in the marginalized, queer, Black, and Latino spaces of those same cities. Disco was Punk’s mirror image: equally rebellious, but in its embrace of glamour, pleasure, and collective euphoria. It was a direct refutation of the rockist cult of the individual, white, male guitarist. Disco celebrated the producer, the DJ, and the anonymous, ecstatic crowd. It was, as musicologist Richard Dyer argued in his seminal essay ‘In Defence of Disco’, fundamentally utopian. Its soaring strings and four-on-the-floor beat offered ‘glimpses of a better world’ through rhythms of effortless grace and lyrics of emotional survival. Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ ain’t just a campy banger; it is a feminist and queer manifesto set to a string arrangement, the anthem of a community that would soon need that resilience to face the AIDS crisis.

The mainstream’s response was the racist and homophobic ‘Disco Sucks’ movement, a pogrom of record-burning and baseball-bat-wielding machismo. But the vibe did not die; it went underground, mutating with ferocious creativity. In Chicago, it became House music, pioneered by Black gay DJs like Frankie Knuckles at The Warehouse. You couldn’t call this mere entertainment, it was sanctuary-building. The repetitive, hypnotic beat was a spiritual technology, a tool for ecstatic rupture where the self could shatter into the collective. In Detroit, the Afro-futurist response to deindustrialization was Techno. Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson used synthesizers and drum machines not to sing about escape, but to build the escape pod itself. As Mike Banks of the militant collective Underground Resistance famously proclaimed, their mission was "sonic warfare". The DJ was not an entertainer but a guerrilla tactician, using rhythm to reprogram consciousness. The dancefloor, finally seen as a ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’ (TAZ), was the utopian experiment in real time, a space of radical inclusion, free from the social constraints of the outside world.

While the electronic pulse of the TAZ was being forged in American warehouses, a different, more literal manifesto was being written on the streets of the Bronx. Hip-Hop, born from the same post-industrial neglect as Techno but with a Jamaican sound system ethos, weaponized the breakbeat and the spoken word. It was, from its inception, a form of territorial claim in a city that had abandoned its non-white youth. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s ‘The Message’ was a seismic shift - no longer just party music, it was a stark, cinematic report from the front lines of Reagan’s America, a direct heir to the social realism of the Blues. This evolved into what scholar Tricia Rose, in Black Noise, calls a ‘black cultural expression’ that ‘prioritizes black centeredness’ and acts as a ‘form of counter-discourse’. Rap became the CNN of the ghetto, but also its courtroom, its pulpit, and its academic journal. Public Enemy didn’t just make albums, they produced audio manifestos, with Chuck D’s baritone serving as a master of ceremonies for a radical pedagogy that sampled Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. The genre’s global spread proved its political potency; from the banlieues of France, where groups like IAM and NTM rapped against systemic racism, to the townships of South Africa, where Prophets of da City used hip-hop to dismantle the legacy of apartheid, the music provided a universal lexicon for the marginalized to analyze and resist their conditions.

And what of Pop? The seemingly apolitical, bubblegum confection that spans from The Ronettes to ABBA, from The Beach Boys to Take That? To declare this vast engine of culture apolitical is the most political position of all - it is the tacit endorsement of the status quo. The production of apathy is a strategic, and monumental, achievement. Pop’s common denominator is its engineered accessibility: earworm choruses, foot-tappable rhythms, and uncomplicated lyrics designed for mass consumption. This is music as a lubricant for the machinery of daily life. Phil Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’ was the archetype of this industrial formula, a dense, orchestral texture designed not for depth but for sheer, overwhelming sensation, a euphoric antidote to the psychic drudgery of the rat race. Of course, pop musicians have occasionally channeled subversion into their lyrics or sound, but these gestures are invariably metabolized by the celebrity-industrial complex, a hypercapitalist nightmare that monetizes every flicker of dissent. When Britney Spears sang ‘Oops!... I Did It Again’, she was not drafting a political manifesto. Yet the entire apparatus surrounding her, the money-focused, virgin-whore complex of late-90s teen pop, the patriarchal control of her image and body, constituted a dense political text on gender, capital, and agency. Her subsequent, very public breakdown was not a personal failure but a systemic symptom, the logical outcome of this crushing machinery. To consume pop uncritically is to silently dance to its embedded ideology: that pleasure must remain passive, personal, and utterly divorced from power. Much like reality TV, it can be simple, silly and much needed fun, a welcome tonic in the neurotic heaviness of the 21st century, but the industry behind it carries so much rot that the final product is simply too politically suspect.

And to the charge that this analysis may be a tedious act of Debbie Downer-ism, a refusal to “just relax and have fun”, the only retort is that this is the very language of capitulation. The command to relax has always been the first tool of the powerful, an insistence that we unclench our fists and accept the comforting lie that serves only those already in command.

This dynamic was not confined to the Anglo-American axis. Across the globe, music genres have served as potent vehicles for political resistance, often at great personal risk. In 1970s Nigeria, Fela Kuti’s creation of Afrobeat was a direct sonic assault on the corrupt post-colonial military junta. Tracks like ‘Zombie’ mocked the mindless obedience of the Nigerian military with such devastating effect that the army retaliated in 1977 with a thousand-strong attack on his commune, the Kalakuta Republic, which Fela had declared an independent state. His band, Africa '70, was the logistical arm of this revolution, and his lyrics, sung in Pidgin English for maximum accessibility, gave voice to the ‘suffering and smiling’ masses, transforming a musical genre into a militant political party. Across the continent in apartheid South Africa, music was the lifeblood of the liberation struggle. While the world later heard ‘Graceland’, the true sound of resistance was Miriam Makeba’s powerful voice, exiled for her activism. But the most potent weapon was Toyi-Toyi, a dance-like protest that combined rhythmic stomping, chanting, and whistles. Not a performance but a terrifyingly unified display of people power, a sonic & physical force that shook the foundations of the regime.

In Chile, following the US-backed coup that installed Augusto Pinochet, the guitar of Víctor Jara became an enduring symbol of resistance. Before his brutal murder, Jara sang ‘El Derecho de Vivir en Paz’ (‘The Right to Live in Peace’). His folk music, part of the Nueva Canción Chilena movement, which drew from indigenous Andean melodies, became a clandestine language of memory and defiance, a direct challenge to the regime’s attempts to erase cultural identity. Then came the folk music of Violeta Parra, a lifeline of memory and dissent. In ‘La Carta’, Parra writes about the suppression of a strike and the brutal treatment of the poor, with the powerful giving bullets to those who ask for bread. In ‘Arauco Tiene Una Pena’, Parra concludes each verse with “levántate" (rise up), calling the Mapuche people to stand up to both the Spanish colonizers and the Chilean government.

Similarly, in West Bengal, the Gana Sangeet (people's music) movement, drawing from poets like Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam, was integral to the communist and anti-colonial struggles, using mass singing to forge a powerful, revolutionary solidarity. Kazi Nazrul Islam was revered as the Bidrohi Kobi or ‘Rebel Poet’, who provided this movement with revolutionary fire. Nazrul’s songs were incendiary, openly challenging colonial authority, religious orthodoxy, and social hierarchies. In Poland, as the Solidarity movement challenged communist rule in the 1980s, it was not Punk Rock but the solemn hymns of the Catholic Church, sung by thousands of workers in the Gdańsk shipyards, that provided a unifying spiritual and political force.

Under António de Oliveira Salazar’s Estado Novo dictatorship (1933-1974), Fado was intentionally curated and sanitized as a national symbol of saudade, a mournful longing that dovetailed with the regime’s conservative, fatalistic ideology. It was turned into a tool of what Foucault would call "biopower", shaping a national psyche of melancholy resignation. However, the genre’s true political eruption came with Amália Rodrigues, who while initially a regime darling, would later in the 1970 album Com que voz, smuggle subversive lyrics of social critique past the censors. Her voice became an archive of unspoken collective pain. The 1974 Carnation Revolution that overthrew the dictatorship was famously soundtracked by ‘Grândola, Vila Morena’, a banned folk song by Zeca Afonso that became the radio signal to launch the coup. This moment marked a tectonic shift for music which was no longer the state’s opiate; it became the revolution’s direct, organizing signal.

In the neighbouring Basque Country, the radical folk group Zea Mays used traditional instruments and lyrics in Euskara to assert a cultural identity suppressed by Franco’s regime, their music a direct act of linguistic and political preservation. Even in the dancehalls of Jamaica, the rise of Rastafari and roots reggae in the 1970s, with artists like Bob Marley and Burning Spear, turned the sound system into a pulpit. Songs like ‘War’, setting a speech by Haile Selassie to music, and ‘Marcus Garvey’ were sermons of African redemption, black pride, and pan-African solidarity, decrying ‘Babylon’ (the oppressive system) with a spiritual and political fervor that resonated globally.

The Unceasing Frequency

Music will always be political because sound is a force that acts directly upon the body and organizes bodies in space. The gathering of bodies to listen and move is, by its nature, a political act. The question is never if music is political, but for whom and to what end does its politics serve? The pop song that insists on its own innocence is advocating for the perpetuation of the present order. The folk song that mourns a lost past is making an argument about tradition. The national anthem is a tool of state discipline. The silence of a festival on a pressing moral issue is an endorsement of the status quo (yet we gotta pick our battles).

This betrayal is particularly profound given that the music festival format itself, from the blues juke joint, the seedy jazz bar, the sound system dancehall, illegal rave and outdoor psychedelic concert, has historically been the bastion of musicopolitical history: a crucial site for high density cultural crosspollinating and sonic experimentation of people’s yearning for freedom. For such a space to nowadays stand mute, is to actively dismantle its own revolutionary heritage and become a tool of the very forces it was created to escape.

And it is precisely for this reason that music festivals, despite their corporate capture, will (ought to) remain at the forefront of musicopolitical experimentation. They are (or can be) the modern agora, the potential site where the ‘multitude’ can physically convene. The future struggle will not be to abandon the festival form, but to continually pirate it back, to create ‘Critical Raves’ and ‘Critical Prides’ where the vibe is harnessed for cognitive liberation, where lineups are curated as manifestos, and where the dancefloor becomes, once again, a rehearsal for a world yet to be born.

The beat is not a neutral entity. It is a pulse, a weapon, a sanctuary, a demand. There is no opting out. To listen is to take a side. To dance is to vote for the world you want to inhabit.

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Stay tuned for part two: The Simulacrum of the Rave: Notes on the Festival Industrial Complex.

writing: ivan march
editing: sayfen895

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References

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Bey, Hakim. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Autonomedia, 1985.

Dyer, Richard. "In Defence of Disco." Gay Left, no. 8, Summer 1979.

Frith, Simon. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock 'n' Roll. Pantheon Books, 1981.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Verso, 1993.

Lawrence, Tim. Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979. Duke University Press, 2003.

McKay, George. Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties. Verso, 1996.

Monson, Ingrid. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge. Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Translated by Peter Labanyi et al., Verso, 1993.

Pelly, Liz. "The Problem with Muzak." The Baffler, no. 39, 2018.

Reynolds, Simon. Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. Faber and Faber, 1998.

Reagon, Bernice Johnson. "Nobody Knows the Trouble I See." In We Who Believe in Freedom: Active Faith and the Future of the South, edited by Althea Smith et al., South End Press, 1999.

Sontag, Susan. "Notes on 'Camp'." In Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966.

Savage, Jon. England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond. St. Martin's Griffin, 1992.

Thaemlitz, Terre. "Terre’s Talk." (Lecture series and writings on the politics of house music, queer identity, and the demand for "unity").

Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Translated by Isabella Bertoletti et al., Semiotext(e), 2004.

Zines: Maximumrocknroll, Burning Times, Crimp. (Primary source material for DIY and punk ethos).