Despairing little note

[fpb]

The greatest cartoonist alive is probably Alan Moore. The greatest pop musicians I know are Bruce Springsteen and Francesco Guccini. Popular music and comics are the least corrupt arts still being practiced, living on the love of their fans, not getting one penny of public subventions and academic nonsense. So why the Hell should three such giants be still tied up in various ways to the murderous nonsense of half a century or more ago? By which, of course, I mean Communism.

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[fpb.livejournal.com]

Springsteen absolutely left me speechless a couple of years ago when he started talking up an obscure late 1930s folk-and-protest group called the Almanac Singers, of which Woody Guthrie had briefly been a part. Obscure to others, but not to me; and I knew that the group was an absolutely typical Communist front of the kind the Soviet secret services had become expert in setting up and manipulating during the thirties. The group nearly collapsed, and was re-established with a fully and undisguisedly Communist membership, when the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact opened the eyes of a lot of people; that was the common destiny of many such groups in 1940. I find it hardly conceivable that Springsteen should not be aware of that. For the rest, you may be interested to hear that Howard Zinn is his favourite historian.

Links to two Amazon reviews of Guccini by me:
http://www.amazon.com/DAmore-Di-Morte-Altre-Schiocchezze/product-reviews/B0000084OP/ref=sr_1_14_cm_cr_acr_img?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
http://www.amazon.com/Radici-Francesco-Guccini/product-reviews/B0000084OZ/ref=sr_1_5_cm_cr_acr_img?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

Unfortunately you cannot really enjoy him without knowing Italian, but here are a few Youtubes of some of his best songs, anyway:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJVpZ790Pl0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi9_b9jNnLs&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwcJiuBW6gY&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywzztLHKCs&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73qnXxwZ98E&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wfI5fk8zBw