Tag: Hearts

Now known more for his political activism and writings on subjects as diverse worker cooperatives, animals liberation, environmentalism, prison abolition, police brutality, anarchism and general alternative economic models to capitalism including mutual aid and disaster relief, scott crow was also a member of political industrial dance acts Lesson Seven and Audio Assault. One might compare Lesson Seven’s music to EBM and electronic industrial groups like Skinny Puppy, with whom the project toured on the latter’s 1988 VIVI Sect VI tour sharing a similar political ethos. At the time most of those industrial and adjacent bands, a good number with whom Lesson Seven shared the stage with over the years, had an outlook critical of a political and social order that had become entrenched in the USA and more or less globally starting in the mid-1970s and dramatically throughout the 1980s with the Reagan and Thatcher regimes in America and the UK respectively: a crypto-authoritarian and austerity policy agenda that has worked to dismantle environmental, labor and civil rights laws and regulations hard won by over a century of grassroots struggle and a brief window of relative political openness to change. The music crow and his bandmates and likeminded artists made commented on this state of affairs with insight and gave it an accessibility that dance-oriented music can, perhaps echoing the famous words of Emma Goldman from her 1931/1934 autobiography Living My Life: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.” Meaning the austere and joyless, inhuman and uncompassionate, revolutionary culture she observed regularly throughout her lifetime that missed the point of human and non-human liberation broadly.

As an author crow reflected on his life and work in his first book Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy and the Common Ground Collective (2015) and published selections of his work in Emergency, Hearts, Molotov Dreams (2016). The record label Emergency Hearts crow started to release new music with a similar ethos to that of his own early time in music that resonates through to today and to reissue some of the older albums that have been neglected for decades. Releasing work and collaborations between artists such as Dead Voices on Air, Laibach, Lee “Scratch” Perry, the recently passed Mark Stewart (The Pop Group), Del The Funky Homosapien, Angelo Moore, Mark Pistel, Time (the Denver-based rapper and political writer), Stephen Mallinder (Cabaret Voltaire), MDC, Sole and a host of others has brought crow and not only his sense of the fusion of music, culture and politics but his ear for music that is and can be impactful to a modern era of music at a time when it can spread more rapidly and not merely serve as background entertainment due to its vital content.

Listen to our interview with crow on Bandcamp and for more information on the artist, writer, filmmaker, father and organizer, please visit scottcrow.org and for Emergency Hearts releases, take a look at the label’s Bandcamp.