In a recording known as “Back to the Commonwealth” or “The Commonwealth Song,” the band blasts the politician by name. The Beatles, however, did not share this view, and Powell became the target of several songs the band recorded for their new album, which eventually saw release as "Let It Be" in 1970. Accusations of racism led to his cabinet ouster by Prime Minister Edward Heath, but some citizens maintained that “Enoch was right” – a slogan that became a commonplace of racial resentment in the following decades. The so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech caused the media firestorm that Powell had wanted.
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“As I look ahead,” he said, “I am filled with foreboding like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’” For maximum poignancy, he told the story of a gloomy constituent who wished he could afford to leave the country, because the influx of immigrants meant that “in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.” A friend recalled that Powell expected the speech to “go up ‘fizz’ like a rocket,” and a local TV crew rushed down to tape what they expected to be a much-discussed news item after seeing an advance copy of speech. Enoch borrowed the words of Virgil to describe the threat of continued immigration to the United Kingdom. The immigrant-bashing ex-congressman, though, cannot be said to share Powell’s capacity for a Latinate flourish. named Enoch Powell – the Tancredo of his day. Into this heady atmosphere walked a British M.P. The year, of course, was 1968 – a time of race riots, political assassinations, and social ferment. (The white supremacist band Battlecry even recorded its own clueless version of the tune.) If released today, a similar song would likely ignite controversy, regardless of the songwriter's intentions. Many who hear the song today are startled to hear this sort of cranky posturing from the Beatles, the lovable moptops who told us that “All You Need Is Love.” Bootleg versions of "No Pakistanis" have even won the hearts of neo-Nazi groups like Stormfront, who believe that the Beatles were really on the side of the white man's cause all along. Brits are also familiar with such rhetoric, seeing the British Nationalist Party ride their slogan of "British jobs for British workers" to prominence in the last decade.
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The strange story of "Get Back," its politics, and its bootlegs tells us much about the limits of what musicians, even hugely popular and politically engaged ones, can say in popular music - and what's at stake in the battle over file-sharing and free culture today.Īn early version of the song, known to bootleggers as "No Pakistanis," began with Paul McCartney muttering, “Don’t dig no Pakistanis taking all the people’s jobs.” Many Americans have heard similar complaints, having listened to the anti-immigrant invective of Joe Arpaio and Tom Tancredo for years. This was the situation that the Beatles faced in 1969, when they first concocted the song that would become “Get Back.” Better known as a playful take on counterculture, starring the gender-bending Sweet Loretta Martin and the grass-smoking Jo-Jo, the song originally dealt with South Asian immigration to the United Kingdom. Though the song was meant to satirize xenophobia, “No Mexicans” could be easily interpreted as an anthem of racism. The chorus recommends that they go back to their countries of origin, where they really belong.
There are too many of them, the lyrics suggest, and they take jobs away from native-born workers. Imagine that a popular American rock band – say, the Black Keys – wrote a song about immigrants.
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