Crass
Bloody Revolutions

Not all singles are made to climb the charts or are inspired by current events, whether they are festive or tragic. Sometimes, the need arises from the desire to create something truly constructive, something you can see with your eyes and touch with your hands, so that you cannot separate that plastic disc from the things behind it.

In 1980, the Crass still believed in that anarcho-punk utopia promised by bands like the Clash who, while shouting "fuck the system!" were signing million-dollar contracts. Meanwhile, they were faced with the enormous task of scraping together the few thousand pounds needed to rent and adapt an old warehouse in London's East End.

The idea was to set up a social center, the Anarchy Centre, that would give everyone the chance to access a library of alternative texts they wouldn't find elsewhere, to organize fanzines and flyers on various topics, from vivisection to the Falklands War, and to attend concerts of the movement's bands, Rubella Ballet, Conflict, Dirt, Flux of Pink Indians, Poison Girls, and naturally, the Crass.

It was the Crass and Poison Girls with one track on each side, for their self-managed label, who released this single for the political price of 70 pennies, collecting the £10,000 needed to launch the center. It's always been debated how the Crass prioritized lyrics, to the point of considering music as mere support for spreading their ideas. And what ideas? War, peace, freedom. Stuff everyone talks about: the newspapers, television, politicians, rock bands, and even the pope, to exhaustion, but always using the same rhetorical and sterile words. The Crass instead manage to strike at the heart because they express spontaneous participation that makes you a protagonist, not a passive spectator, yet has nothing premeditated for a secondary aim, whether power, fame, or money. They strike at the heart because they speak truths and not prefabricated slogans detached from everyday reality. The reality of those who, like them, survive with work as a porter or painter.

But to underestimate the visionary power of Crass's musical expression means having limited views, i.e., not having matured one's own experience instead of running after stereotyped acronyms and the usual crappy music critics.

The six and a half minutes of "Bloody Revolutions" start with a radio tuning in to stations around the world before launching into a tirade rich in tempo changes that, had it been done by the early Clash, we'd all be left speechless. The harsh voice of Steve Ignorant alternates with the folksy one of Eve Libertine and then the jagged one of Joy de Vivre. When the guitar solo intones the Marseillaise à la Hendrix, the two female voices conclude with a martial duet in an immortal song that will conquer even those who usually don't turn the record's cover to read the lyrics. But for once, use your eyes as well as your ears, it can't hurt.
 
You talk a lot about your revolution,
but what will you do when it begins?
Will you play the big man with a gun in hand?
Will you still talk about freedom when the blood starts to spill?
Freedom is worthless if the price is violence.
I don't want your revolution, I want peace and anarchy.

You talk about overthrowing the state by force,
you talk about freedom and power to the people,
but if people can't have power now, what difference do you think it will make?
It's just another gang of fanatics with the spotlight on me.

And what about those who don't accept your new rules?
Those who disagree with you and don't abandon their beliefs?
You claim they're wrong because they don't agree with you
and so when the revolution comes, you'll have to get rid of them.
You keep saying the revolution will bring freedom for all
but freedom isn't freedom when you're against the wall.

Will you indoctrinate the masses to serve your new regime?
And will you just exile those with divergent views?
Transport details can be left to British Rail,
where zyklon b succeeded, North Sea gas will fail.
It's always the old story of man against man:
we need to find other answers to our problems.

Vive la revolution! Peoples of the world unite!
Rise up, brave ones, it's time for you to fight!

The game of revolution seems easy
but when you start playing, things aren't as imagined.
Your intellectual theories of how it should have been
seem not to have accounted for the harsh reality
because the reality of what you talk about comfortably quaffing beer
is pain and death and suffering, but obviously you don't care.

If Mao did it, you can too!
What is everyone's freedom compared to some suffering?
It's precisely this type of self-deception that allowed the killing of millions of Jews,
it's the typical false logic adopted by all power-hungry people.
So don't think you can trick me with your political tricks:
right politics, left politics, I don't care about your politics.
Government is government and every government is force:
left or right, right or left, it's the same pantomime.
Oppression and restrictions, regulations, and laws:
your revolution only serves to redesign the boundaries of this power.
You idealize your martyrs, you quote Marx and Mao
but today their ideas of freedom are just oppression.

All the deaths caused by their ideas haven't changed anything.
They're always the same fascist games even if the rules aren't clearly defined.
Nothing has really changed because all governments are the same:
they may call it freedom but the correct name is slavery.
You have nothing to offer except the shadow of heroes from the past.
The truth of the revolution, brother, is year zero.