Up Against the Wall Motherfucker

Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, often shortened as The Motherfuckers or UAW/MF, was an anarchist affinity group based in New York City. This "street gang with analysis" was famous for its Lower East Side direct action and is said to have inspired members of the Weather Underground and the Yippies.

History

The Motherfuckers grew out of a Dada-influenced art group called Black Mask with some additional people involved with the anti-Vietnam War Angry Arts week, held in January 1967.[1] Formed in 1966 by painter Ben Morea and the poet Dan Georgakas, Black Mask produced a broadside of the same name and declared that revolutionary art should be "an integral part of life, as in primitive society, and not an appendage to wealth".[2] In May 1968, Black Mask changed its name and went underground. Their new name, Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, came from a poem by Amiri Baraka. Abbie Hoffman characterized them as "the middle-class nightmare... an anti-media media phenomenon simply because their name could not be printed".[3]

  • Dumped uncollected refuse from the Lower East Side into the fountain at Lincoln Center on the opening night of a gala "bourgeois cultural event" during a NYC garbage strike (an event documented in the 1968 Newsreel film Garbage).[7]
  • 1969 – Organized and produced free concert nights in the Fillmore East after successfully demanding that owner Bill Graham give the community the venue for a series of weekly free concerts. These "Free Nights" were short-lived as the combined forces of NY City Hall, the police, and Graham terminated the arrangement.[8]
  • Cut the fences at Woodstock, allowing thousands to enter for free.[4]

Associations

Valerie Solanas, a radical feminist and would-be assassin of Andy Warhol, was friends with Morea and associated with the Motherfuckers.[2] In the film I Shot Andy Warhol, the gun used in her attack is alleged to have been taken from Morea.

When Morea was asked in a 2005 interview by John McMillian of The New York Press how he had been able to rationalize supporting Solanas, Morea replied, "Rationalize? I didn't rationalize anything. I loved Valerie and I loathed Andy Warhol, so that's all there was to it." He then added "I mean, I didn't want to shoot him." He then added: "Andy Warhol ruined art."[9]

Prior to becoming the Motherfuckers, the Situationist International accepted Morea's group as its New York chapter.[10]

Influence as a slogan

The phrase was taken from the poem, "Black People!" by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): "The magic words are: Up against the wall, mother fucker, this is a stick up!" This, in turn, was a reference to a phrase "supposedly barked by Newark cops to Negroes under custody."[11] The poem had appeared in The New York Times in 1968 and Mark Rudd, an organizer for Columbia University's Students for a Democratic Society, provocatively quoted the line in an open letter to the university president.[12]

Most of the lyrics for the 1969 song "We Can Be Together", by the acid rock band Jefferson Airplane, were taken virtually word-for-word from a leaflet written by Motherfucker John Sundstrom, and published as "The Outlaw Page" in the East Village Other.[13] The lyrics read in part, "We are all outlaws in the eyes of America. In order to survive we steal, cheat, lie, forge, fuck, hide, and deal... Everything you say we are, we are... Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker!" The song marked the first use of the word "fuck" on U.S. television, when the group played it uncensored on The Dick Cavett Show on August 19, 1969.[14] This song also helped popularize the phrase as a counterculture rallying cry, over and beyond the immediate impact of the anarchist group.

At various times, the line became popular among several groups that came out of the sixties, from Black Panthers to feminists and even "rednecks." In 1968, David Peel and the Lower East Side included the song, "Up against the Wall, Motherfucker" on their album entitled, Have a Marijuana. In the 1970s, Texas country singer-songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard adapted the famous phrase for a song he wrote entitled "Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother". The phrase was also used as a song title on the album Penance Soiree by The Icarus Line.

The line was famously shouted by Patty Hearst during a bank robbery.[15]

Simulation game

In 1969, Columbia University history major Jim Dunnigan, who would later found Simulation Publications, Inc., published a simulation game in the 11 March 1969 edition of the Columbia Spectator[16] named Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker![17] The game was based on recent disturbances at Columbia University and allowed the players to play either the protestors or administration with victory determined by winning over various stake holder groups.

References

  1. ↑ Neumann, Osha (2008). Up Against the Wall Motherf**kers: A memoir of the 60s with notes for the Next Time. Seven Stories. ISBN 978-1-58322-849-4. , p. 43
  2. 1 2 Hinderer, Eve. Ben Morea: art and anarchism Archived 2009-04-25 at the Wayback Machine.
  3. ↑ Quoted in Jezer, Marty (1993). Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel. Rutgers University Press. ISBN 0-8135-2017-7. , p. 131–132
  4. 1 2 McMillian, Jon. Garbage Guerrilla. New York Press
  5. ↑ DAVID GREENBERG (5 July 2018). "Here's What Happened the Last Time the Left Got Nasty". Politico. Retrieved 6 July 2018. In 1967, when Secretary of State Dean Rusk tried to attend a banquet of the Foreign Policy Association in New York, a radical group called Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers (often called “the Motherfuckers” for short) threw eggs, rocks and bags of cows’ blood
  6. ↑ Neumann, Osha (2008). Up Against the Wall Motherf**kers: A memoir of the 60s with notes for the Next Time. Seven Stories. ISBN 978-1-58322-849-4. , p. 5
  7. ↑ Roz Payne Newsreel Archives
  8. ↑ Black Mask & Up Against The Wall Motherfucker pp 133–140
  9. ↑ Ben Morea – Garbage Guerrilla
  10. ↑ Haden-Guest, Anthony (1998). True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World. Atlantic Monthly Press. pp. 30–. ISBN 978-0-87113-725-8.
  11. ↑ Perstein, Ron. Nixonland (2008) P. 238.
  12. ↑ Bradley, Stefan M. (2010). Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s. University of Illinois Press. p. 63. ISBN 978-0-252-09058-5.
  13. ↑ Lee Tusman (ed.), Really Free Culture: Anarchist Movements, Radical Movements and Public Practices, p.166.
  14. ↑ Song Facts: We Can Be Together
  15. ↑ "American Experience—More about the film Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst—Transcript". PBS. Archived from the original on 2005-02-16. Retrieved 2016-07-18.
  16. ↑ "Columbia Daily Spectator, Volume I, Number 10". Columbia University. March 11, 1969. Retrieved February 11, 2015.
  17. ↑ "Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker!". modcult. December 16, 2014. Retrieved February 11, 2015.

Further reading

  • Black Mask & Up Against The Wall Motherfucker, ISBN 1-873176-70-8, Unpopular Books, 1993
  • The Brown Paper Bag Theory of Affinity Groups, Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, available online at
  • Casey, Caitlin (2017). "Up against the Wall Motherfucker: Ideology and Action in a 'Street Gang with an Analysis'". In Goyens, Tom. Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City from Schwab's Saloon to Occupy Wall Street. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. pp. 161–179. ISBN 978-0-252-08254-2.
  • McMillian, J. (2005) Garbage Guerilla, New York Free Press, available at
  • Osha Neumann's book Up Against the Wall Motherf**ker: A Memoir of the '60s, with Notes for Next Time (Seven Stories Press)
  • Luca Benvenga The cultural workers. Fenomeni politico culturali e contestazione giovanile negli anni '60, Bepress, 2014.
  • Ben Morea's blog
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.