VA – Listen, Whitey! The Sounds of Black Power 1967-1974 (2012, FLAC)

tracks

1. Shahid Quintet / Invitation to Black Power, Pts. 1-2
2. Stokely Carmichael / Free Huey
3. Gene McDaniels / Silent Majority (Live at Newport)
4. Elaine Brown / Until We’re Free
5. Bob Dylan / George Jackson (Acoustic Version)
6. Watts Prophets / Dem Niggers Ain’t Playing
7. Marlena Shaw / Woman of the Ghetto (Live at Montreux)
8. Dick Gregory / Black Power
9. Kain / I Ain’t Black
10. Roy Harper / I Hate the White Man
11. Gil Scott-Heron / Winter in America (Solo Version)
12. Eldridge Cleaver / Tim Leary
13. Yoko Ono / Angela
14. The Lumpen / Free Bobby Now
15. The Original Last Poets / Die Nigga!
16. Amiri Baraka / Who Will Survive America

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———- Post added at 03:04 AM ———- Previous post was at 03:04 AM ———-

Pop’s fading power to shock is thrown into stark relief by this compilation, conceived as the soundtrack to a new book of the same title that charts the black power struggles of the late 60s and early 70s. It’s not as if anyone wants Ed Sheeran to start dressing like a French revolutionary, but he could do worse than listen to something like Roy Harper’s I Hate the White Man, which envisages a happy future ‘where the crazy whiteman and his teargas happiness/ Lies dead and long since buried by his own fantastic mess’. The premise of Pat Thomas’s handsome book is that this was an era in which revolutionaries such as Bobby Seale and Angela Davis were treated as pop cultural icons, while musicians became revolutionaries – meaning Gil Scott-Heron, the Last Poets, Bob Dylan, John Lennon and more. In fact, the pleasure of this compilation lies in its breadth, with those white musicians standing alongside spoken-word contributions from figures such as comedian Dick Gregory. Then there’s Eldridge Cleaver’s fascinating condemnation of the alliance that LSD evangelist Timothy Leary tried to forge with the Black Panthers, a reminder of the cracks and contradictions in the movement, it also serves as a timely notice that these cats were as serious as your life.
(Caspar Llewellyn Smith, guardian.co.uk)

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