Hadda Be Playing on the Jukebox
"Hadda be Playin' on the Jukebox" is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1975. It has been performed live, with accompanying music, by the band Rage Against the Machine, appearing on their album Live & Rare.
The poem frames various events of the 1960s and 1970s, including the Kennedy assassination and the Kent State massacre, as part of a larger trend. Ginsberg refers to the Cold War as "gang wars across oceans", and calls capitalism a "vortex of this rage" and a competition "man to man."
It had to be flashin' like the daily double
It had to be playin' on TV
It had to be loud mouthed on the comedy hour
It had to be announced over loud speakers
The CIA and Mafia are in cahoots
It had to be said in old ladies' language
It had to be said in American headlines
Kennedy stretched and smiled and got double crossed by lowlife goons and agents
Rich bankers with criminal connections
Dope pushers in CIA working with dope pushers from Cuba working with a big time
syndicate from Tampa, Florida
And it had to be said with a big mouth
It had to be moaned over factory foghorns
It had to be chattered on car radio news broadcasts
It had to be screamed in the kitchen
It had to be yelled in the basement where uncles were fighting
It had to be howled on the streets by newsboys to bus conductors
It had to be foghorned into New York harbor
It had to echo onto hard hats
It had to turn up the volume in university ballrooms
It had to be written in library books, footnoted
It had to be in the headlines of the Times and the mind
It had to be barked on TV
It had to be heard in alleys through ballroom doors
It had to be played on wire services
It had to be bells ringing
Comedians stopped dead in the middle of a joke in Las Vegas
It had to be FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and Frank Costello syndicate
mouthpiece meeting in Central Park, New York weekends,
reported Time magazine
It had to be the Mafia and the CIA together starting war on Cuba,
Bay of Pigs and poison assassination headlines
It had to be dope cops in the Mafia
Who sold all their heroin in America
It had to be the FBI and organized crime working together
in cahoots against the commies
It had to be ringing on multinational cash registers
World-wide laundry for organized criminal money
It had to be the CIA and the Mafia and the FBI together
They were bigger than Nixon
And they were bigger that war
It had to be a large room full of murder
It had to be a mounted ass- a solid mass of rage
A red hot pen
A scream in the back of the throat
It had to be a kid that can breathe
It had to be in Rockefellers' mouth
It had to be central intelligence, the family, allofthis, the agency Mafia
It had to be organized crime
One big set of gangs working together in cahoots
Hitmen
Murderers everywhere
The secret
The drunk
The brutal
The dirty rich
On top of a slag heap of prisons
Industrial cancer
Plutonium smog
Garbage cities
Grandmas' bed soft from fathers' resentment
It had to be the rulers
They wanted law and order
And they got rich on wanting protection for the status quo
They wanted junkies
They wanted Attica
They wanted Kent State
They wanted war in Indochina
It had to be the CIA and the Mafia and the FBI
Multinational capitalists
Strong armed squads
Private detective agencies for the rich
And their armies and navies and their air force bombing planes
It had to be capitalism
The vortex of this rage
This competition
Man to man
The horses head in a capitalists' bed
The Cuban turf
It rumbles in hitmen
And gang wars across oceans
Bombing Cambodia settled the score when Soviet pilots
manned Egyptian fighter planes
Chiles' red democracy
Bumped off with White House pots and pans
A warning to Mediterranean governments
The secret police have been embraced for decades
The NKPD and CIA keep each other's secrets
The OGBU and DIA never hit their own
The KGB and the FBI are one mind
Brute force and full of money
Brute force, world-wide, and full of money
Brute force, world-wide, and full of money
Brute force, world-wide, and full of money
Brute force, world-wide, and full of money
It had to be rich and it had to be powerful
They had to murder in Indonesia 500000
They had to murder in Indochina 2000000
They had to murder in Czechoslovakia
They had to murder in Chile
They had to murder in Russia
And they had to murder in America
Organisations referenced
Events referenced
People referenced
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