It is better
To die on our feet
Than to live on our knees
If we fight as one
Then the fight is won
Til that day we’ll keep keeping on yeah
Anthems tend to be upbeat, and full of empty inspirational poster platitudes of the sort of that terrible Keep Calm And Carry On poster (I thought of one alternative today: “Fuck Cupcakes And Riot On” but even Keep Calm spoofs are overdone now). Here’s an upbeat song I heard today about something – the fight of the workers against the bosses. The biggest example of that in British history was the miner’s strike of 1985, where the coal miners went up against Thatcher who wanted to close the coal mines down. Whole communities were lost in the end – something still felt acutely today.
The video from The Tube is interesting as they give the stage to a striking miner who gets muted by the program makers, making it rather odd. Not the first time we’ll see such strangeness from television bosses in this series. But like I prefer righteous anger, I do prefer righteous upbeat anthemic music – something with a message. Otherwise it just comes over as inoffensive and ‘aspirational’ as a Coke commercial.
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