"Red Elvis"
Dean Reed: Death of
a Comrade. Radio 2,
11 July. Presented
by Mark Lamarr. |
For a time in the 1970s, Dean Reed
was probably the best-known American in South America and Eastern
Europe. Though, as he sang, "Nobody knows me back in my home town."
Born in Denver in 1938, Reed was a rock singer who never quite
made the big time in the US. Understandably enough, he felt that nobody
who worked in Hollywood could keep their integrity.
When one of his records became a hit in Chile, he travelled there
to perform and was struck by the obvious inequalities in power and
wealth. He later settled in Argentina, but after some unwelcome
attention from the dictatorship he moved to Europe.
His left-wing views attracted the attention of cultural bosses in
Russia, and he was invited there. He became a great success with young
people in eastern Europe, who were keenly interested in Western popular
music.
In 1973 Reed decided to move to East Germany permanently. The
secret police or Stasi were initially suspicious of him and spied on
him, but they later tried unsuccessfully to recruit him as an agent. By
the
1980s, however, he was no longer a star in Eastern Europe, as younger
musicians from the West were touring there. He considered returning to
the US, but remarks on radio and TV chat shows (e.g. comparing Reagan
to Stalin and defending the Berlin Wall) led
to him receiving hate mail. In June 198 he was found dead in a
lake near his home in East Berlin - officially an accident but probably
suicide.
Mark Lamarr's programme contained interviews with people who
knew Reed and excerpts from his (unexceptional) music. It also made the
point that he failed to see how ordinary East Germans felt about the
regime that governed them and how they viewed
him as an establishment figure.
So the rebel became another apologist for the Bolshevik
dictatorship, one who certainly would have had no place in a unified
Germany.
PB
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Canned
Laughter
Some people, including some
socialists, used to get quite irritated about the way that recorded
laughter was inserted into, first radio, then television, shows that
went under the generic heading of comedy.But we have slowly got used to
this feature of modern life in capitalist society.
It is almost universal now. It is applied to quality comedy and
poor comedy; those with real audiences and those with no
possibility of an audience at all in the location of the action. Like
antidepressant drugs, canned laughter is prescribed for nearly
everybody. Because, let's face it, much of the time, if you didn't
laugh, you'd cry.
Many aspects of living in this increasingly dysfunctional world
society are moving in the same direction. In Japan, as well as North
America and Europe shopping has become the diversionary
avenue of seeking feel-good factors. Clothes, to make us feel good
about our appearance; various types of car, to make us comfortable
about our status among our neighbours; health foods, to make us feel
healthy; exotic foods to make us feel opulent; gyms, to make us feel
confident or even superior about our
physical fitness and sexual attractiveness.
Houses, gardens, kitchens, etc., etc. Our electronic gadgetry, from
mobile phones and digital cameras to MP3 recorders and players, offer
us more power to do things we hadn't even thought of and probably will
never try.
The planet is being pillaged, plundered and polluted to make
commodities for us to buy, partly because we need them and capital must
have the flow of profit, but increasingly in the effort
to obliterate our basic hunger for freedom, the one thing we cannot
have. Like canned laughter, the temporary lift we get from commodity
gratification is artificial,false. It hides a bad joke.
R.C.
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