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Peter Gabriel’s curious and provocative ‘Mao’s Little Red Book’ 1980 tour program
05.02.2018
11:37 am
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During Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway tour, Peter Gabriel told his bandmates that he’d be leaving the group at the conclusion of the tour. Two years later Gabriel began an adventurous and wildly successful solo career with the release of “Solsbury Hill.” Between 1977 and 1982, Gabriel released four probing, dark solo albums each bearing his own name and forcing fans to come up with nicknames for them, like “Scratch.” Robert Fripp played on the first three of these albums and actually produced the second one. 1980’s “Melt” is perhaps the best one of the four, featuring “Biko,” “Intruder” (which featured pioneering use of the gated drum effect), and “Games Without Frontiers.”

For the 1980 tour to support the third solo album, Gabriel decided to concoct a clever, subversive version of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, also known as “Mao’s Little Red Book,” which had done so much to solidify Mao’s grip on power in the People’s Republic of China in the 1960s. This is what it looked like:
 

 
True to its name, it really was little; it was about the size of the palm of a person’s hand. The 1980 tour program suggested a dystopic work of fiction, echoing Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in the name of the tour, which was Tour of China 1984, thereby confusing historians for all time: The entire fun of the program, one might say, was that Gabriel was not touring China and it was not 1984. Basically it was all a mindfuck. The tour was limited to the United Kingdom and North America.

Durrell Bowman supplies a solid description of the 1980 tour in his book Experiencing Peter Gabriel: A Listener’s Companion:
 

The tour for Peter Gabriel III began in February 1980, was strangely billed the Tour of China 1984, and its shows began with the performers carrying torches through the audience and Gabriel arriving from the back of the hall like a weird creature, as the unusual drums and sound effects from the beginning of “Intruder” were being played. Presumably to match the tour’s bizarre totalitarian China parody, the band wore black, over-all-like jumpsuits and each audience member was given a program booklet made to look like the 1966 book Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung. ... The booklet included Gabriel’s head superimposed over those of other individuals, as well as Chinese newspaper ads, political posters, and comic books.

 
On his SYNERGY website, synth player Larry Fast has a few pics from and comments about that tour, including the “boiler suits” while “they were still new and black” and his backstage pass—note the Chinese ideograms on the front:
 

 
Of the Mao parody, Gabriel posted the following comment on his website:
 

One of the things at that time was that a lot of bands were keen to get be the first to play in China. There was a lot of press about it. So I thought that I would do the tour merchandise for a fictitious Chinese tour and it was the Tour of China 1984. We used Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book which had had more copies of it sold, or at least distributed, than any other book, as the model for the tour programme. That was fun to do.

 
Gabriel has never played a concert in China, but in 1994 he did play Hong Kong Stadium on the Secret World Tour—but that was three years before the British gave up control over the colony, after which it became the “Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China.”
 

 

 
Much more after the jump…....
 

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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05.02.2018
11:37 am
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Jean-Luc Godard and the catchiest song ever written about a brutal dictator
10.03.2017
08:02 am
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A few weeks ago I signed up for a new membership at the Cinematheque in Cleveland, and I’ve been attending movies there at a far higher rate than I was before. One of the previews I ended up seeing several times was the utterly infectious trailer for Jean-Luc Godard‘s La Chinoise, which was until very recently unavailable on DVD and a new digital restoration of which has been making the rounds of the art-house circuit this year.

A bizarre adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novel The Demons, La Chinoise puts five French-speaking radicals in a tidy Paris apartment decked out in appealing primary colors and festooned with slogans, as they push forward their Maoist agenda. This movie came out a year before the widespread unrest in Paris 1968, and not unusually Godard had his finger on the pulse of something. Godard’s wife, Anne Wiazemsky, plays the most radical (i.e. most bomb-throwing) character, and the final act of the movie centers around a lengthy debate on a moving train about the utility of political violence with an actual professor named Francis Jeanson who had been tried for treason for his radical activities in connection with the Algerian War. Jeanson argues against political violence in La Chinoise, while Godard piped in his own retorts into Wiazemsky’s earpiece during the take.
 

 
The movie La Chinoise is diverting, but in all honesty it tested my ability to stay out of REM state. The movie poses the as-yet-unasked question of what would happen if Wes Anderson directed a script by Yvonne Rainer, whose movies (I find them compulsively watchable) sometimes include characters reading political tracts aloud as dialogue. (To be fair, it’s a testament to Godard’s prodigious gifts that he could plausibly anticipate both Anderson and Rainer.)

I saw that preview probably five times and as a result, the featured song, “Mao Mao,” sung by Claude Channes and written by Channes, Gérard Guégan, and Gérard Hugé, would always get relentlessly lodged in my head for days afterward. Part of the song’s charm is the French pronunciation of “Mao”—at least in this song—with two strong syllables, “Ma-Oh,” whereas in English it’s a one-syllable word. The decision to end every line in the verse with “MA OH MA OH” and the infectious chorus apparently sung by children (or at least recorded to give that effect) makes this one hell of a song.
 

 
Not surprisingly, the song is about .... uh, Chairman Mao, supreme leader of China for a generation, known then in English as Mao Tse-Tung and today universally as Mao Zedong. It’s tempting to try to figure out whether the song is pro- or anti-Mao….. it’s a fool’s errand. The lyrics make references to both “renouncing” and “following” Mao and the song should most clearly be seen as the taking up of Mao as a pop subject. One might say that it’s postmodern in the sense that the status of Mao’s pluses and minuses take a back seat to his incomparable there-ness—as the leader of Communist China during the Vietnam War and having recently overseen the Cultural Revolution, Mao was there to be discussed, debated, apprehended no matter what.

La Chinoise is worth a look but what remains is the song (which does appear in the movie). I’ve seldom found a ditty about a brutal dictator as engaging as Channes’ masterpiece, and I had to pass it on to the faithful Dangerous Minds readership. Here are the lyrics in French and an English translation, followed by the trailer, which is a must-see for those who like odd, catchy songs.
 

Le Vietnam brûle et moi je hurle Mao Mao
Johnson rigole et moi je vole Mao Mao
Le napalm coule et moi je roule Mao Mao
Les villes crèvent et moi je rêve Mao Mao
Les putains crient et moi je ris Mao Mao
Le riz est fou et moi je joue Mao Mao

C’est le petit livre rouge
Qui fait que tout enfin bouge

L’impérialisme dicte partout sa loi
La révolution n’est pas un dîner
La bombe A est un tigre en papier
Les masses sont les véritables héros
Les Ricains tuent et moi je mue Mao Mao
Les fous sont rois et moi je bois Mao Mao
Les bombes tonnent et moi je sonne Mao Mao
Les bébés fuient et moi je fuis Mao Mao
Les Russes mangent et moi je danse Mao Mao
Giap dénonce, je renonce Mao Mao

C’est le petit livre rouge
Qui fait que tout enfin bouge

La base de l’armée, c’est le soldat
Le vrai pouvoir est au bout du fusil
Les monstres seront tous anéantis
L’ennemi ne périt pas de lui-même
Mao Mao
Mao Mao
Mao Mao

========

Vietnam burns and me I spurn Mao Mao
Johnson giggles and me I wiggle Mao Mao
Napalm runs and me I gun Mao Mao
Cities die and me I cry Mao Mao
Whores cry and me I sigh Mao Mao
The rice is mad and me a cad

It’s the Little Red Book
That makes it all move

Imperialism lays down the law
Revolution is not a party
The A-bomb is a paper tiger
The masses are the real heroes
The Yanks kill and me I read Mao Mao
The jester is king and me I sing Mao Mao
The bombs go off and me I scoff Mao Mao
Girls run and me I follow Mao Mao
The Russians eat and me I dance Mao Mao
I denounce and I renounce Mao Mao

It’s the Little Red Book
That makes it all move

 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘You’ve been acting like a shit’: The Godard-Truffaut blow-up of 1973
Radical Schick: Jean-Luc Godard’s 1971 TV commercial for men’s aftershave

Posted by Martin Schneider
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10.03.2017
08:02 am
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The Revolution will be Glamorized: Sharon Tate models Mao Tse-tung, 1967

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What exactly glamor-modeling has to do with revolutionary consciousness isn’t explained - other than making it fashionably chic to the bourgeoisie. Which is ironic, for it was the perceived, pernicious influence of the bourgeoisie (and its revisionist view of capitalism) that led Chairman Mao to instigate his Cultural Revolution in May 1966. While the ad men, magazine stylists and Beatles co-opted Mao’s revolutionary sentiments, the reality for millions of Chinese was a brutal and murderous oppression.
 

A Beginner’s Guide to Mao Tse-tung

The little red book which contains hightlights from The thought of Mao Tse-tung is the most influential volume in the world today. It is also extremely dull and entirely unmemorable. To resolve this paradox, we, a handful of editors in authority who follow the capitalist road, thought useful to illustrate certain key passages in such a way that they are more likely to stick in the mind. The visual aid is Sharon Tate and, to give credit where credit, God knows, is due, she will soon be seen in the Twentieth Century-Fox motion picture, Valley of the Dolls.

 
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6.
‘Whoever wants to know a thing has no way of doing so except coming into contact with it, that is, by living (practicing) in its environment

...If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear by eating it yourself.’
“On Practice” (July, 1937)

 
More retro revolutionary chic, after the jump…
 
Via WFMU
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.23.2013
05:39 pm
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Mountain Men action figures: Mao, Marx, Lenin, and Thoreau


 
Imagine the conversation amongst these gentlemen during a leisurely trek in nature!

These Mao, Marx, Lenin, and Thoreau figures come in a set of four and retail for £145. Check ‘em out here

Each mountain figure is dressed in hiking outfits with rucksacks and hiking boots. They come carefully packaged in printed Mountain Research box.

(via Super Punch)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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05.23.2011
12:48 pm
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