Dragon Teeth

DRAGON TEETH

WHEN THE PRISON DOORS ARE OPENED/THE REAL DRAGON WILL FLY OUT
--Ho Chi Minh

A column by JOHN SINCLAIR
Chairman, Rainbow People's Party

"Bringing It All Back Home"
ROCK AND ROLL IMPERIALISM
PART 1

"I ain't gonna work for Maggie's brother no more
No I ain't gonna work for Maggie's brother no more
He hands you a nickel, he hands you a dime,
He asks you with a grin if you 're having a good time
Then he fines you every time you slam the door
No I ain't gonna work for Maggie's brother no more"

Maybe the best way to start this whole rap, which might take me a few weeks to get down, is to talk about Maggie's brother for a minute. Now if you had ever been in a rock and roll band, or worked with one, you would recognize this creep right away -- he's the owner of the BIG record company in New York or Los Angeles, a real groovy dude who comes on super hip and "so glad to meetcha, I've heard so many great things aboutcha," and he wants to sit down and smoke up some joints with you, you know, and talk about all the great advances that are being made in the state of the recording art (harumph harumph) and other interestinp topics of conversation here in the West. Maybe he will even have his maid come in with drinks and some shrimp cocktail and stuff like that, "just ta make ya feel at home." He brings out the contracts and talks about how much freedom his company gives its artists and all, and you 're so happy to be dealing with a man (it's never a woman, of course) who understands so perfectly what you need. He hands you a nickel, he hands you a dime, he asks you with a grin if you're having a good time -- and then he gets down to business. By the time he's through with you you 're either just like him, with your own maid and your own drinks and your own offices somewhere in Babyion, or else you 're completely down and out, back on the streets with the people you started with, with only a couple plastic records and some gruesome memories to remind you of what you might have been, if only you'd gotten some "breaks" like those other bands.

Or he's the BIG promoter of pop concerts and all-star festivals who comes on the same way, with the same nickel and dime and the same hip grin on his face, talking about everything he's gonna do for you and how much money he's gonna make for you while your "act" is "hot" with the suckers out there in rock and roll land. He 'll use you here and he'll use you there and when he gets done using you somehow he's got all the money and you 're back where you started from because you just aren't quite so hot any more - ask Jim Morrison, ask Countrv Joe, ask anybody who ever got out of line for a minute.

Or he's the BIG booking agent with all the jobs for you all over the world, coming on with steady nickel and dime as long as he can get the quarters and halves for sticking you in the promoters' joings and fields to play your hot hits for the kiddies paying their fives and tens to get a chance to see you while your star is on the rise - and after a while he hasn't got a thing for you to do and he blames it on those same kids who loved you so much last year, "the public is so fickle you know, gee it's a shame, gosh I've got to run because there's this new band from England the kids are dying to hear and there 's somebody on the line, tough break kid but that 's the way it goes you know." And you walk out of his office wondering what the hell went wrong, but it's all too confusing and he must be right, after all he's been in the Business for a long time and if he wasn't right he wouldn't be making it, would he?

So it goes on year after year, some bands make it and most of them don't, and the ones who do are so caught up in the whirlwind of fantasy and instant riches that they don't have time to think about what happened to the rest of their comrades who fell by the road -- by the time they do manage to think about it they 're stuck out there on the junkpile too, and there 's nothing they can do about it. They 're all used up, spent, wasted, burned out, nobody wants to hear their music anymore because there 's all these new bands, see, that everybody's talking about, and sure we remember your Golden Hits but that was a long time ago, kid, I thought you were dead, in fact why don't you just die like you're supposed to, it sure would be a lot less messy that way. Beat it, huh?

But most of us aren't in bands, most of us are the audience, right, and this doesn't have anything to do with us - we don't know nothin about this dude Maggie's brother, we just buy records and go to concerts and have a good old time. We buy all the records and we're hip to all the bands and we dig it, besides this is the way it is and if it wasn't like this we wouldn't get to hear any music at all, so what does all of this have to do with us? We 're just the audience and we 're gettin what we want and we don't know nothin about no booking agents and record companies and promoters and we don't care as long as we get the music, because that's what counts and all this other stuff is just a buncha shit.

Well, ok. Sure. Except it's not as easy as that, brothers and sisters, and the sooner we all find out about all these Maggie's brothers on the set and what they have to do with our lives, the better off we'll be. Because you see, they control our lives right now, they control us as individuals and they control us as a people, whether we're million dollar rock and roll stars or whether we're just the people who pay out the money that makes the pop stars rich.

They're part of an international criminal conspiracy called Amerika Incorporated and they're out to get rich off our culture, which is our most important product as a people just as diamonds are a national product in South Africa, or oil in Saudi Arabia, or copper in Bolivia. They rip us off for our music and then sell it back to us, after they've adulterated it and diluted it and made it weak, and they take our artists and milk them dry and then throw them away when they're done with them. They tell us what we want. and then they sell it to us, and when they've got as much as they can get they tell us we don 't want it any more, and they sell us something new. Our only function is as consumers of whatever they put out for us to buy, and if we don 't like it then we can just do without, because we haven 't got anything to say about it anyway. And if we start gettin uppity and talkin about we don't like it like this and we want it to be different, then Maggie's brother steps into the wings and Maggie's old man comes out to teach us a lesson.

You remember Maggie's pa, right? He puts his cigar out in your face just for kicks, his bedroom window it is made out of bricks, the National Guard stands around his door. I ain't gonna work for Maggie's pa no more either, but the only problem with that is that he owns everything and if you wanna work at all you gotta work for him, or for his son who you will remember as Maggie's brother from up above. And I don 't know what to say about Maggie except they say it's her farm, but what they probably mean is that she does all the cooking and housework and washing and stuff like that so her brother and her pa can run around acting like big shots controlling all the people in the world. That 's what they probably mean because that 's the way it is on Maggie's Farm, or Amerika, or whatever you want to call this big plantation

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DRAGON TEETH

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where they make us scrub the floor. And us, we're just Maggie's sons and daughters, and here on the farm they don 't let us say anything at all.

Now that's what I wanted to talk about when I started out, the way this whole thing is like a plantation and we're just a bunch of slaves. I wanted to talk about Rock and Roll Imperialism, because that's just what it is, the way we're exploited and our energies are suppressed and whatever we create out of the brilliance of our lives is ripped off from us by the imperialist vampires and sold back to us for prices we can't afford, the way they use chemical and biological warfare against us to keep us from realizing our full potential as individuals and as a people, the way they use naked force against us when they can 't keep us down any other way, but most of all the way they use more subtle means on a minute-to-minute basis so we don't even understand what 's happening. Television and newspapers and billboards and movies, insidious products and millions of mind-rotting advertisements to get us to buy those products without being conscious of what we're doing, schools and brainwaahing to fill us with inhuman stereotypes and preconceptions so we're slaves to them all our lives and can't even remember where we got them from or how it all started, men go to work and bring home the money and women stay home and cook and clean the house and never speak unless spoken to, little girls play with dolls and little boys play soldiers and sissies are little boys who act like girls -- all the horrible shit they stuff us full of before we can protect ourselves from it, so when we grow up we're just the way they want us to be no matter how hard we're trying to be different.

Whew! Think about it! Imperialism is a disease. it's more than just ripping peoples off for their natural/national resources and their wealth, it's poisoning people with imperialist culture and draining all the humanity out of them, making them into robots and mindless consumers who subsist on plastic and chrome and never get a chance to grow into their full human potential - imperialism is the Euro-Amerikan death culture smeared all over the planet, oozing down into people 's lives and deforming them, spreading the control virus and the junk virus and the VD virus everywhere, competition and lacklove, muzak and morphine, the nuclear family, possessiveness , war, fear and trembling in the face of the holy universe, control and more control until the people are whipped into line and the vampires who own everything, all the Maggie's pas who run the plantation, can keep sucking their blood and keeping it all to themselves.

But you know all this already, right? You know all this and now you want to know what to do about it, because the natives are getting restless all over the world and it's time to bring the power back to the people and drive the silver stake through the evil hearts of the vampires once and for all. For our people the move back home starts with rock and roll, because that's where we started, that's what made us a people in the first place, or what made us realize that we're a people with a new life of our own, and that's what can finally give us the strength to start fighting back -- not just the spiritual strength, but the economic power as well, to make us strong enough to make a start toward determining our own destinies. We have to get our bands back from Maggie's brother, we have to bring our music back home and purge it of all the imperialist filth it's been pumped full of, we have to make it strong and pure and full of the highest possible energy so it can carry our most powerful visions to all our people, so it can push us and drive us once more to make a whole new life for ourselves like it did before the vampires and vultures got their claws around it and perverted it and started using it against us, to keep us down where they could control us. We can do all this, we have to do all this, but we have to understand what 's been happening to us before we can move the way we should, and that's what I'll try to get into a little deeper the next time I write you. Imperialism is the problem, and self-determination is the solution, in rock and roll as in everything else. Life to the Life Culture! Death to the Death Culture! Long Live Rock and Roll!