The Mary Wallopers’ ‘Paddywhackery’: an antidote against pessimismIn a recent interview with Spill Magazine, Charles Hendy – founding member of the Irish folk band The Mary Wallopers – had this to say about creating folk music today: “People like to think folk music is really people just sitting around singing ‘Kumbaya’… The folk songs of antiquity up until now are not like that. Folk music is not meant to be soft. It is hard music. It is social, political and it is aggressive. We want to inject a bit of that into it.” Ironically, today it’s the leaders of the official ‘left’ who are doing little more than sitting around singing ‘Kumbaya’ while the world burns. The Mary Wallpapers, meanwhile, are releasing their third and best album to date, Paddywhackery. This album isn’t just a criticism of capitalism, but a powerful antidote against pessimism – a clarion call to the working class and the oppressed to recognise their collective power.
https://communist.red/the-mary-wallopers-paddywhackery-an-antidote-against-pessimism/The Uprising Wastes a Good Class-Struggle StoryIn 1381, more than a hundred thousand poor English people rose up demanding an end to serfdom. During the uprising, they killed a coterie of hated government officials, and, in turn, the fourteen-year-old King Richard II massacred thousands of them. The best-remembered figure of the English Peasants’ Revolt is one of its leaders, John Ball, whose speeches and sermons captured the spirit of what would eventually, centuries later, develop into socialism. “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” he famously asked, meaning that in the Garden of Eden, the Bible’s first people labored only for their own sustenance, with no concepts of lords and serfs. As a socialist and fan of medieval period pieces, I was excited to see the new film The Uprising, which dramatizes the English Peasants’ Revolt and stars Andrew Garfield as a fed-up farmer-rebel. The subject matter has the makings of a thrilling class-struggle movie — and indeed, Garfield and director Paul Greengrass (Captain Phillips, two films in the Bourne trilogy, and Bloody Sunday) promoted the movie as a tale of resistance to oligarchy. As The Hollywood Reporter writes, “The Uprising feels strikingly of the moment. M
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