Strike While the Needle is Hot

The working-class records from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s labor movements that capture the power of music to galvanize and document a movement.

Workers have been producing culture for as long as they’ve been fighting for better working conditions, higher wages, and sometimes even revolution. One form this culture has often taken is song, and we’re lucky enough that many of these songs were captured on vinyl records between 1960 and 1990. Strike While the Needle is Hot takes the reader through these records one by one, providing both a broad overview of how militant unionists used music as a tool of struggle, as well as fine details about specific worker revolts that would be lost to history if they hadn’t captured them on small discs of vinyl.

Contributor Bio(s)
Josh MacPhee has created a composite work life that merges elements of designer, artist, author, historian, and archivist. He is a founding member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative (http://justseeds.org/), the author of An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels, and coeditor of Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture. He cofounded and helps run Interference Archive, a public collection of cultural materials produced by social movements (http://interferencearchive.org/). He regularly works with community and social justice organizations building agit-prop and consulting on cultural strategy.

Common Notions, 2025. Paperback, 240 pages, 8 x 8 in