Strike While the Needle is Hot
Josh MacPhee and Kennedy Block
Songwriters in a Fiat factory. Miners in the local music studio. Workers on the radio and musicians on the picketline. Music can carry a strike from one factory to the next or bring it into living rooms across the globe. Record by record, this book unearths some of the biggest swings musicians, workers, and supporters have taken to co-create a popular culture of resistance.
Workers have been producing cultures of resistance for as long as they’ve been fighting for better working conditions, higher wages, and sometimes even revolution. One form this culture has often taken is song, and throughout the latter half of the twentieth century autonomous workers, musicians, and unions around the world honed it into a nearly forgotten form: the strike record.
Strike While the Needle is Hot takes readers through the militant sounds and rebellious rhythms of labor’s greatest hits preserved on vinyl, providing both a broad overview of how militant unionists used music as a tool of struggle, as well as an inspiring history from below about specific worker revolts that would be lost to the bosses’ tune of profit and production had they not been captured on small discs of vinyl.
PRODUCT DETAILS
Author: Josh MacPhee and Kennedy Block
Publisher: Common Notions
ISBN: 9781945335549
Published: September 2025
Format: Paperback
Size: 8.0 in X 8.0 in
Page count: 240
Subjects: Political Science / Labor & Industrial Relations; Music / Reference
About THE AUTHOR
Josh MacPhee has created a composite work life that merges elements of designer, artist, author, historian, and archivist. He is a founding member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative (Justseeds.org), the author of An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels, and coeditor of Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture. He cofounded and helps run Interference Archive, a public collection of cultural materials produced by social movements (InterferenceArchive.org). He regularly works with community and social justice organizations building agit-prop and consulting on cultural strategy.
Kennedy Block is an independent researcher and archivist participating in, documenting, and connecting contemporary struggles for control over our own lives.
