Blows Against the Empire

All the secessionist talk in Anthony Lewis’s The Third Revolution inspired me to stick Paul Kantner’s sci-fi rock anthem Blows Against the Empire in the Accord’s CD-changer this week. In my junior year of high school (1970-71), when Murray Rothbard, Karl Hess, and Paul Goodman were starting to stir my political thinking, Blows stoked the revolutionary inferno in my gut. Jefferson Airplane had always been an explicitly anarchist band, but this Airplane spin-off LP (the first to use the “Jefferson Starship” moniker) moved beyond Old World politics. It was what we called back then a “concept album” (a la Sgt Peppers and Tommy), and its scenario included dodging the government jackboot, hijacking a starship, launching ourselves into space, and freely colonizing the stars. Here’s an especially poignant lyrical bit:

A child is coming,
A child is coming,
A child is coming to you.

What’re we gonna do when Uncle Samuel comes around
Askin’ for the young one’s name,
And lookin’ for the print of his hand
For the files in their numbers game?
I don’t want his changes for freedom to ever be that slim,
Let’s not tell ’em about him!

More than three decades later, Blows Against the Empire might seem fanciful as hell, but gee, we were all fanciful as hell in the early ’70s, and the music still sounds great. And you know, with secession movements now dotting the landscape (and books like The Third Revolution leading that charge), maybe Blows ain’t all that fanciful anyway. We could do worse than share Kantner’s rock manifesto with younger libertarians, or re-experience it ourselves.
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