Josh MacPhee & Kennedy Block: Strike While the Needle is Hot

Common Notions, 2025, Softcover, 240 pages, 20 x 20 cm

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.