Interview with Jeremy Pine (1955) about his experiences with music during the Cultural Revolution and the effects of the Cultural Revolution on the acceptance of certain kinds of music.
Jeremy Pine was born in The Netherlands, but moved to England when he was twelve years old. He is still bilingual, but his Dutch isn’t what it used to be.
In the early 1980’s, the tension between the USSR and the West grew bigger and bigger. The entire world was holding their breath, because not only the Soviet Union, but also Europe and the US, had their nuclear weapons pointed at the sky. This constant fear of ‘who would push the red button first’ lead to enormous protests of anti-nuclear-weapons movements. For some, it was a safe feeling to know that their country had the ability to fire a nuclear weapon, but many more thought it was a matter of time before the east and the west would start firing and destroy the world as we knew it. Everybody was waiting for the ‘hammer to fall’.
The members of British rock band Queen, weren’t really into writing songs about society, the world and world peace. But that changed in 1984, when Queen released the song ‘Hammer To Fall’. On the same album, there is ‘Is This The World We Created’, also written with the wellbeing of the world on the writers’ mind.
Hammer To Fall focuses mainly on the cold war conflict between the Soviet Union and the US. The nuclear bombs were so immensely destructive, if they were dropped, an enormous area would be completed destroyed and life would be made impossible in that area. In Hammer To Fall, Queen guitarist Brian May writes ‘Rich or poor or famous, for your truth it’s all the same. Lock your door but rain is pouring through your window pane. Baby now your struggle’s all vain’. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor or famous, the bombs would destroy you anyway. May also seems to unify the world’s citizens in this verse. They’re all in it together, but only the men at the top can decide their fate.
‘For we who grew up tall and proud in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, convinced our voices can’t be heard, we just wanna scream it louder and louder and louder’, seems to tell the story of the protesters. Especially the youth of the early 1980’s protested against the nuclear bombs. They ‘grew up tall and proud in the shadow of the mushroom cloud’, they were born in a society that had a constant fear of a mushroom cloud, the bomb. When they started their vast amount of protests, they still had the idea that nobody was listening to them, making them ‘scream louder and louder’.
The last verse of the song shows the pointlessness of the cold war and the constant threat of a nuclear bomb: ‘What the hell we fighting for, just surrender and it won’t hurt at all. You just got time to say your prayers, while you’re waiting for the hammer to fall.’ For the common people, there wasn’t really an obvious reason to keep this cold war situation going. But even though there wasn’t, everybody just had to keep waiting and fear for the ‘hammer to fall’.
A song of opportunities and revolution for the middle class
The song Working Class Hero by John Lennon, had often been misunderstood. A lot of people think it’s a song about socialism and Lennon didn’t have the right to sing about the working class, because he wasn’t from the working class himself. Lennon actually was raised in the upper working class, so he pretty much knew what he was singing about. And it’s also, according to Lennon, not a song about socialism, but about ambition and hope for the working class people.
It was the year 1970, the Beatles had just split up and John Lennon was starting to build up a solo career. The Beatles had progressed from a group of young boys making cheesy music, into a group of revolutionaries, using LSD and singing about deeper states of mind and more complicating matters. The times were changing and the Beatles played their part. John Lennon took off where he had stopped with the Beatles, focusing more on society and all the problems society faced in his eyes. Not only society, but also religion is addressed in many of Lennon’s 70’s songs, think of songs like Imagine and God. Popular artists like Lennon had already reached the masses with their more superficial songs and used the fact that they had gained a lot of publicity with those songs to send out a message about society through their more ‘complicated’ songs.
Some fifty years ago, the children of the ‘working class’ were commonly treated like useless people at school. Middle class teachers were ‘imprisoned’ in their class and didn’t believe in opportunities to break away from their class. You just had to accept the fact that you were born in the working class and you would have to make the best out of living in that class. Children who were fantasizing about achieving more than their lives in the working class, were silenced and their dreams were shattered by adults, but mostly by their teachers.
John Lennon addresses those issues in Working Class Hero; ‘They tortured and scared you for twenty-odd years’ and ‘…they hit you at school’, referring to the teachers.
Not only the children of the working class, but also the adults were oppressed. Even though they didn’t always realize it, the adults in the working class were sort of brainwashed by society. Their secret dreams of achieving something big in their lives, were put away to a subconscious level. Easy satisfaction was just a few steps away, ‘doped with religion and sex and TV’ is a sentence in the song that tells that story. The fact that Lennon uses the word ‘doped’, illustrates the fact that the adults in the working class used those things to reach a higher level of satisfaction and therefore hiding away their misery, just like using drugs. For the working class people, it creates the idea that they’re actually free. Lennon sings: ‘You think you’re so careless and classless and free.’ But it’s just an illusion, because the working class people are actually just parts of a big machine, the country. They live to work and to keep the country running. ‘But you’re still f*cking peasants, as far as I can see’, is the way Lennon describes this bitter truth.
After describing the way the children and adults have been imprisoned in their own class, but also keeping their class intact by not accepting ambitious and smart children to develop any plans of getting out of the working class, Lennon starts to explain the way out of that system. ‘There’s room at the top they’re telling you still. But first you must learn how to smile as you kill. If you want to be like the folks on the hill’. What Lennon seems to say is; if you’re from the working class and you want to reach greater heights in the class-system, there should be room at the top. The only thing is, to be able to really fit in at the top, you’ll have to ‘learn how to smile as you kill,’ like when you are the owner of a big factory and you have to fire some employees, you shouldn’t really care. Or like a president who sends thousands of soldiers towards the danger, like it doesn’t matter at all. The ‘folks on the hill’ also illustrates Lennon’s disrespect towards those high at the top. They’re high and dry on a hill, but especially; they’re looking down on the lower classes, especially the working class.
Lennon wants to clarify that there is a way to get out of the working class, but it comes at a prize. It’s a difficult choice, both situations have got their pro’s and con’s. It requires a big change of mind to develop into someone who is no longer a working class man. But if you join the ‘folks on the hill’, that doesn’t make you a ‘working class hero’. It’s more like you’re a deserter who starts to help the high class, pressing down on the working class. Not really a hero. But there’s also an other way to work your way up. John doesn’t literally mention it in the song, but it’s clear at the end of the song: ‘if you want to be a hero, well just follow me,’
which refers to the way Lennon got ‘out of the working class’. It seems like Lennon wants to give hope to the working class by showing them it’s possible to make your way up, as long as you think ‘outside the box’ and cling on to your dreams and ambitions, as Lennon did. It may seem a bit arrogant of Lennon to sort of show off his achievements, but it seems like he did it to inspire those who are in the same situation as Lennon was in once.
Revolusic 
Recent Comments