A rule was enforced that she’d only be able to perform it as the last song in her set, once the bar staff had called time and the room was darkened. But “Strange Fruit” became a show-stopper – quite literally. When Billie Holiday first began performing the song at Café Society, in 1939, she was afraid of retaliation. Juxtaposing idyllic, florid scenes of a Southern landscape with uncompromising descriptions of black bodies swaying from a tree in the Southern breeze, his words were blunt and had the desired effect of shocking and appalling listeners. Ultimately, the song is a reminder of how one's own freewill was (or is!) only to be thwarted by a shallow, financially oriented fate, and how often our materialistic compulsions led (or lead) to ruin.Written as a poem by Abel Meeropol – a white, Jewish teacher and member of the American Communist Party – and published in 1937 before he set the lines to music, “Strange Fruit” exposes the sheer brutality of racism in the United States at the time by way of a stark, powerful description of a postcard Meeropol had seen depicting a lynching. "They say we'll be your friends, we'll stick with you 'til the end / Oh but everybody's only looking out for themselves / And you say, 'Well, who can you trust?' I'll tell you, trust nobody else's money / Money changes everything." These few lines alone resonate a poignant concept of cliques formed on the basis of a shared financial stability, how they can't be trusted and how money inevitably fails us when pitched against the insurmountable power of greed and self-obsession. "We think we know what we're doing, we don't pull the strings / It's all in the past now, money changes everything," clearly illustrates the deterministic government of monetarism and how we are "puppets" manipulated by the strings of money's cruel seduction. With a premise grounded in both Platonic and sexual relationships, the song expounds the breakdown of these physical connections via the dictatorial rule of materialism. One could say it is equally revealing.ĭepending upon how it is construed, this innocent sounding effort could be perceived as a thinly veiled social satire of the financial obsession that infiltrated the masses at the turn of the 80s and beyond. Yes, on top of that, the song also blends in problems with media deregulation that led up to today's media concentration along with its practice of lambasting the populace into submission via a never-ending barrage of information. "Secret wars!-Take my money away!" - Once again, Oliver North and his Iran-Contra conspiracy, along with Reagan's illegal war in Nicaragua.
Gotta turn out-atomic lasers falling from the sky" The market crash led by the Reagan-Bush Savings and Loan scam followed by the government bailout of the conspirators under Reaganomics, the polar shifts that were starting by the lack of environmental regulations with the continual build-up of carcinogens in the atmosphere, the conservative build-up of power in the West, the proliferation of nukes, and the Star Wars programme of conquering space for imperial purposes. Gotta tune out-space junk Gotta tune in-bombs. Gotta tune out-polar shift Gotta tune in-narrow minds. Gotta tune out-PCB's Gotta tune in-market crash. "Good old boys-tellin' lies 'Bout time-I got wise" - References to the Iran-Contra conspiracy and Reagan secretly selling weapons to the Iranians in exchange for hostages while simultaneously knocking Carter for failing to find a resolution "Gotta tune in-pico waves. I believe it is worth mentioning that "Channel-Z" by the B-52s is more than just "vaguely anti-media." The song also identified numerous problems that were brought about during the Reagan regime: "Space junk-laser bombs-ozone holes" - references towards the United States Government's apathy towards the environment and its program to try and colonise space for military purposes with 'Star Wars' "Giant stacks blowin' smoke, Politicrits pushin' dope" - This was a reference again to the lack of concern for the environment, and more importantly to Peter Deutche's illegal drug trafficking in South America while Reagan was busy at home promoting "this is your brain" propaganda (and the irony of it) "Waste dumps-toxic fog-irradiate-and keep it fresh forever" - The continual build-up of nuclear waste in Nevada, the indifference of the US Government, the threat of catastrophe posed by nuclear power plants along with the never-ending threat of nuclear war.
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