Strike Anywhere: Working Class Punk

Richmond, Virginia's Strike Anywhere are one of my favorite bands. The band incorporates elements of 77' punk, 88' hardcore, and folk music with progressive and class conscious lyrics to make some impressive working class punk music. Their 2006 release, Dead FM, was one of my favorite releases of the last twelve months.

The lead singer's grandfather worked at the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in the early 1940s. This is the site in which the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were created; of course, the workers only realized they had been creating death and destruction after the bomb had ben dropped. Many poor, proud Americans realized too late. They and their families often became sick as a result; the lead singers father was born with life threatening birth defects. This isn't the history we learn in school.

The song 'Sedition' is about the the millions of working poor who were exposed to environmental damage during the nuclear arms race and the pain and sacrifice of the war economy. The linear notes talk about the 'industrialization of death and the militarization of life.' With war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the war economy is booming and the industrialists who profit from it are in control, and the working poor continue to suffer. The generals, stockholders, and corporations remain in control now, much like they have always been. The song is dedicated to all the victims and all the survivors of war. Please check out Strike Anywhere; here are the lyrics to 'Sedition'...


Which lie is the one
that will take me
and which war
Generations of wage slave data
family stories they said don't matter
when the last breath burns
in the throats of Bhopal
will I feel the blade
when they bury them all
Hiding from us
all this time
ghosts flickering
and outof my mind

Dead End Streets
We walk by
No Retreat
Staring at the sun
Dead End Streets
the blast shadows
are waiting for an answer
all this time

I'll give them mine
If I could
walk in my grandfather's footsteps
while they glowed in the dark
on his way back from the yard
where the train was parked
I'd say
Don't turn your back
Don't you trust those bastards

I wish I could say this now

Don't Walk By
No retreat
Staring at the sun
Dead End Streets
the blast shadows
are waiting for an answer
All this timeI'll give them mine

Into our history…
Not even a letter
to fake a smile
to say 'I'm sorry'

Our trust in this system's dead
what will it take
to make you sorry?

Hiroshima started in Tennessee
Let it end with me
Let it end