Rage e Ginsberg contra a Máquina

Pelo menos na minha geração, a banda que conseguiu estabelecer a melhor junção entre música e contestação sociopolítica foi Rage Against the Machine. Através de um som porrada, para o qual contribuíram diversas vertentes do rock e do hip hop, a banda californiana projetou sua raiva contra a máquina imperialista americana, engajando-se, entre outras, na causa dos guerrilheiros zapatistas e na defesa de Mumia Abu-Jamal, membro dos Panteras Negras, e de Leonard Peltier, índio da tribo Sioux (sobre o caso de Mumia você lê aqui, e sobre Peltier, aqui).

Embora o guitarrista do RATM, Tom Morello, fosse graduado em Sociologia pela Harvard (além de sobrinho do primeiro presidente do Quênia), as letras da banda sempre foram compostas pelo vocalista Zack de la Rocha, filho de uma antropóloga e de um artista de um grupo político ligado a agricultores mexicanos. Os de la Rocha entendiam bem o que significava ser chicano na “América”, uma realidade tratada em letras como People of the Sun e Without a Face.

Uma música, entretanto, chamou-me a atenção por não ter tido a letra escrita por Zack. Isto porque a tal canção, de título Hadda Been Playing On The Jukebox, é na verdade a declamação de um poema homônimo do beatnick Allen Ginsberg, escrito em 1975.

Em Hadda Been Playing On The Jukebox, Ginsberg narra diversos eventos ocorridos nos anos 60 e 70 – incluindo o assassinato de Kennedy –, fala de americanos poderosos como Rockefeller, Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover e Frank Costello, afirma que a KGB e o FBI pensam da mesma maneira e brada: “It had to be the CIA and the Mafia and the FBI”; “One big set of gangs working together in cahoots”.

Abaixo reproduzo o poema, conforme cantado por Zack no disco Live and Rare, lançado pela Sony Japan em 1998.

Hadda Be Playing On The Jukebox

It had to be flashin' like the daily double
It had to be playin' on TV
It had to be loud mouthed on the comedy hour
It had to be announced over loud speakers

The CIA and the Mafia are in cahoots

It had to be said in old ladies' language
It had to be said in American headlines
Kennedy stretched and smiled

and got double crossed by lowlife goons and agents
Rich bankers with criminal connections
Dope pushers in CIA working with dope pushers from Cuba
working with abig time syndicate from Tampa, Florida
And it had to be said with a big mouth

It had to be moaned over factory foghorns
It had to be chattered on car radio news broadcasts
It had to be screamed in the kitchen
It had to be yelled in the basement where uncles were fighting

It had to be howled on the streets

by newsboys to bus conductors
It had to be foghorned into New York harbor
It had to echo onto hard hats
It had to turn up the volume in university ballrooms

It had to be written in library books,
footnotedIt had to be in the headlines

of the Times and Le Monde
It had to be barked on TV
It had to be heard in alleys through ballroom doors

It had to be played on wire services
It had to be bells ringing
Comedians stopped dead in the middle of a joke in Las Vegas
It had to be FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and Frank Costello
syndicate mouthpiece meeting in Central Park,
New York weekends, reported Time magazine

It had to be the Mafia and the CIA together

starting war on Cuba, Bay of Pigs

and poison assassination headlines

It had to be dope cops in the Mafia
Who sold all their heroin in America

It had to be the FBI and organized crime

working together in cahoots against the commies

It had to be ringing on multinational cash registers

A world-wide laundry for organized criminal money

It had to be the CIA and the Mafia and the FBI together

They were bigger than Nixon

And they were bigger than war

It had to be a large room full of murder

It had to be a mounted ass- a solid mass of rage

A red hot pen

A scream in the back of the throat

It had to be a kid that can breathe

It had to be in Rockefellers' mouth

It had to be central intelligence, the family, allofthis, the agency Mafia

It had to be organized crime

One big set of gangs working together in cahoots

Hitmen

Murderers everywhere

The secret

The drunk

The brutal

The dirty and rich

On top of a slag heap of prisons

Industrial cancer

Plutonium smog

Garbage cities

Grandmas' bed soft from fathers' resentment

It had to be the rulers

They wanted law and order

And they got rich on wanting protection for the status quo

They wanted junkies

They wanted Attica

They wanted Kent State

They wanted war in Indochina, yeah

It had to be the CIA and the Mafia and the FBI

Multinational capitalists

Strong armed squads

Private detective agencies for the oh so very rich

And their armies and navies and their air force bombing planes

It had to be capitalism

The vortex of this rage

This competition

Man to man

The horses head in a capitalists' bed

The Cuban turf

It rumbles in hitmen
And gang wars across oceans

Bombing Cambodia settled the score when

Soviet pilotsmanned Egyptian fighter planes

Chiles' red democracy

Bumped off with White House pots and pans

A warning to Mediterranean governments

The secret police have been embraced for decades

The NKPD and CIA keep each other's secrets

The OGBU and DIA never hit their own

The KGB and the FBI are one mind

Brute force and full of money

Brute force, world-wide, and full of money

Brute force, world-wide, and full of money

Brute force, world-wide, and full of money

Brute force, world-wide, and full of money

It had to be rich and it had to be powerful

They had to murder in Indonesia 500.000

They had to murder in Indochina 2.000.000

They had to murder in Czechoslovakia

They had to murder in Chile

They had to murder in Russia

And they had to murder in America.

E pra quem não conhece, é bom lembrar que Ginsberg não estava sozinho. Além de seu livro de poesias Howl (1956), outros pilares da geração beatnick são Jack Kerouack, com o clássico On the Road (1957), e o alucinado William Burroughs, com seus Junkie (Drogado, 1953) e Naked Lunch (Almoço Nu, 1959).