If you lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and wanted to listen to vinyl records that reflected the anti-racist, anti-war, anti-imperialist revolutionary left politics of the 1968 student rebellion on Columbia University's Upper West Side campus (but were not produced by the record company subsidiaries of corporate media conglomerates), you generally could not hear tracks from these vinyl records played on the airwaves of the Big Apple's FM radio stations.
So you had to successfully hunt for such vinyl records, in small vinyl record shops in the Village or around Times Square, in larger stores (like Sam Goody's, in Korvette's vinyl records department or at the Tower Records store on the Upper West Side) or in one of the few leftist party-run bookstores in Manhattan, and purchase them yourself. Or else hope that you could find copies of such vinyl records (at either the Donnell Public Library branch in Midtown Manhattan or in the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center branch on the Upper West Side) to borrow for free--to be able to listen to them.
What Josh MacPhee's ground-breaking, great book, An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels, reveals, however, is that only a small percentage of the politically left-motivated vinyl records produced between 1970 and 1990, by record labels that weren't subsidiaries of U.S. corporate media conglomerates and which received little FM radio station airplay, could generally be found in Manhattan record stores, department store record departments and leftist party-run bookstores or on the vinyl record circulation stacks of the Donnell or Lincoln Center public libraries.
In the third edition of his An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels, which Brooklyn's Common Notions publishing house published in 2019, Josh MacPhee provides readers with one-paragraph capsule histories and the visual label logos of around 795 record labels that attempted to use music as a tool for revolutionary left democratic social change between 1970 and 1990, by producing many vinyl records.
Most fans of protest folk music and Movement-related music of the 1960 to 1990 era of U.S. history (especially Upper West Side residents who may have subscribed to Sing Out! magazine in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s or to the Upper West Side-based Broadside magazine in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s) would probably be familiar with some of the political record labels that are briefly described in An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels. For in this book--which reminded me, somewhat, of the American Folk Music handbook that was contained in Folkways Records's early 1950s Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music vinyl record album set--capsule histories and descriptions of record labels like Folkways, Broadside, Paredon, Topic, Rounder Records, Flying Fish and Blackthorne, for example, are included.
But most fans of protest folk music and Movement-related music who lived in the USA between 1950 and 1990 would likely not be familiar with most political record labels described in this book or with most of the vinyl records produced by these same political record labels.
Of the around 795 political record labels described in this book, around 365 were North American and European labels that produced and distributed politically left folk music vinyl records. And 320 of the labels that produced politically left-motivated vinyl records between 1970 and 1990 of all types of musical styles, mentioned in this book, were based in either the United States, the UK, Canada or Ireland; while 343 of the labels described were based in Southern Europe, Scandinavia or on the continent in Western Europe.
But, in addition, An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels also contains entries for 59 label which were based in Latin America and the Caribbean, 43 labels which were based in sub-Saharan Africa, 15 labels which were based in Asia and Australia, 13 labels which were based in the Middle East and North America and 12 labels which were based in Eastern Europe--that all, also, produced and distributed politically left-motivated vinyl records between 1970 and 1990.
Of the around 795 political record labels mentioned in this book, 147 were labels of leftist political parties, politically left Movement organizations or of leftist state organizations that produced and distributed vinyl records between 1970 and 1990; and 65 were the labels of international solidarity organizations that produced and distributed vinyl records between 1970 and 1990. In addition, 53 record labels which were union or labor movement-related that produced politically left-motivated vinyl records between 1970 and 1990 are described in An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels.
MacPhee, a long-time New York City artist, curator, designer and activist, who previously edited the Feminist Press's 2010 Celebrate People's History: The Poster Book of Resistance and Revolution book and co-edited the book Signs of Change: Social Movement Culture, "grew up enmeshed in the do-it-yourself punk music scene of the late eighties and early nineties," according to his Introduction in An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels.
But in 2014, MacPhee became interested in folk music and, in the summer of 2015, he organized an exhibition at the Interference Archive in Brooklyn related to political folk music. As a result, MacPhee writes in his introduction, "the exhibition launched me into a...collecting spree of political albums and singles released around the world;" and "this interest in socially conscious music has reengaged all the record-collecting switches in my head."
Although MacPhee chose to be "ecumenical" and non-politically sectarian in deciding which of the most active politically left record labels that produced vinyl records between 1970 and 1990 merited entries in An Encyclopedia of Political Records, he also chose to just focus on including entries for smaller, independent labels and omit entries or descriptions of the major corporate record labels that may have marketed or profited from the release of some vinyl albums which politically left music fans may have purchased.
Because MacPhee's book focuses only on labels that produced vinyl records, descriptions of labels that just produced politically left-motivated cds in the post-1990 period, following the end of the heyday of vinyl records, are not included in An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels.
In the 21st-century, as MacPhee notes in his book, "sales of vinyl records," ironically, have again now continued "to rise" in recent years; "with 16.8 million" vinyl "LPs sold in the US in 2018...up 94.6 percent compared to 2006." But, as the An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels author reminds current vinyl record U.S. music fans, "while vinyl has returned, it feels strangely hollow without a connection to movements, unions, community groups, and music acts that privilege content over stardom."
