Fight the white: a look at racist music - The Daily Cardinal

Hunziker Like the Wolf Advertisers all over the world have long understood the marketing value of music. That’s why Coca Cola is paying Jack White to pen a tune for its commercials, and why Pepsi spent more than $80 million hiring Britney Spears for a promotional campaign (before firing her for drinking Coke). It is also why, in at least five continents over the last several years, white supremacist organizations have been shifting their focus from public rallies and camo-gear to CDs and band merchandising. Since the popularization of the Internet, international civil rights groups and anti-racist musicians’ fronts have noted a dramatic increase in the number of bands identifying with known hate groups in countries all over the world. These artists, though spread across a number of genres and dozens of languages, are linked together by the white supremacist sentiments they express in their lyrics, as well as the relationships, both philosophical and economic, between many of the bands and “white power” political organizations and leaders. The current trend of close association between the racist music scene and white power groups gained prominence in the United States in 1999, when Resistance Records (at the time our country’s largest white power music label) was purchased by William Pierce, the head of the neo-Nazi “National Alliance,” which was, until his death in 2002, considered the largest and most dangerous hate group in our country. Since the loss of its leader, National Alliance has declined in size and power to the point where it is nearly irrelevant.