April 01, 2026
Abstract:
THE DANGER OF THE REFRAIN: how art can unintentionally support things that the artist did not intend
"Art can unintentionally support things that the artist did not intend." Composer Georg Friedrich Haas's warning becomes urgently concrete when we trace the afterlife of Which Side Are You On? (1931).
Written by Florence Reece during the Harlan County coal miners' strike—after armed deputies raided her home searching for her union organizer husband—the song has traveled far beyond its origins. Nearly a century later, its simple refrain circulates through labor strikes, civil rights movements, anti-fascist organizing, concert halls, and corporate media.
Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the refrain as territorial marker, I trace how Which Side Are You On? deterritorializes and reterritorializes across struggles—from the SNCC Freedom Singers to Billy Bragg's miners' strike anthem, from Frederic Rzewski's piano variations to The Homobiles' queer anti-fascist version, and finally to HBO's Succession, where a workers' anthem becomes emotional underscore for a billionaire's heir.
I distinguish between reterritorializations that maintain material stakes and name concrete enemies and those that reduce political struggle to aesthetic contemplation. The paper asks: What must remain intact for a political refrain to resist becoming generic struggle ambience? And how do we, as composers and scholars, track what our refrains are doing when they leave home—who they're interpellating, and on whose behalf?
#writing
#composition
#theory