Blows Against The Empire

The Skids were a seriously great band, and I'll probably have to write about them at length, but firstly here's one of their big hits from 1979:



Hearing "Working For The Yankee Dollar" for the first time was a shock to my ten-year-old self because it introduced me to the concept of anti-Americanism, the unsettling fact that there were people who simply didn't like the country where everything good came from. In many ways this record felt like a watershed, because the decade that was to follow was to see a surge in antipathy toward Uncle Sam, from Greenham Common to Spitting Image's ceaseless mockery of Ronald Reagan. What had initially seemed an incomprehensible outburst was to become one of the ambient themes of the era, the "common sense" idea that the Leader Of The Free World was dangerously out of control, a gunslinging outlaw in the saloon of global politics.

Also, it's a cracking video, isn't it?