The Battleground / 08 Oct 2021
Music Opens Your Mind
Listening for the Future: The Charlie Bertsch Interview
In the 1960s, they called it consciousness-raising. The idea was that popular music is about social change.(...)
Politics
The Battleground / 24 Sep 2021
Introducing Left To Burn
The Battleground’s New Podcast
In the debut episode of Left to Burn, John Foster and Josh White discuss the fallout of US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the analogy with Vietnam. But that’s not all.(...)
Charlie Bertsch / 30 Jun 2021
The Art of Listening
This is What Europe Sounds Like, by Joel Schalit
This is What Europe Sounds Like makes for uneasy listening. Not because of strident guitars, disturbing lyrics, or aggressive atonality, but because it refuses to meet the expectation of music at all.(...)
The Battleground / 29 Jun 2021
The Cultural Front
The Battleground’s Summer Book List
It's 2021, not 1917. Yet, when you read as much progressive media as The Battleground does, you'd be forgiven for mixing up the dates.(...)
Charlie Bertsch / 16 Jun 2021
Strictly for Catholics
Prayer to Pasolini, by John Waters
Though short – the entire digital recording clocks in at seventeen minutes – and somewhat haphazardly put together, John Waters’ Prayer to Pasolini makes a meaningful contribution to cinematic history.(...)
Drasko Duranovic / 15 Jun 2021
The Urine Stench of Freedom
Montenegro in Crisis
His name doesn't matter. He is from Niksic, but he could be from any city of this new "liberated" Montenegro.(...)
Duncan Simpson / 04 Jun 2021
Cold War Steve
The Rebirth of English Satire
In Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), English writer Robert Burton offered a precise explanation for the phenomena of laughter as that which seeks to "condemn the world of folly". (...)
Charlie Bertsch / 05 May 2021
When the Tough Get Softer
Solo Tutto, by Massimo Pericolo
Unlike so many of the records that fall under the rubric of rap these days, Massimo Pericolo’s Solo Tutto remembers what the term originally meant.(...)