Hadda be Playin' on a Jukebox by Allen Ginsberg

Hadda be Playin' on the Jukebox is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1975. It has been performed live (with music) by the band Rage Against the Machine, appearing on their album Live & Rare.

The poem frames various events of the sixties and seventies, including the Kennedy assassination and the Kent State massacre, as part of a larger trend. Ginsberg refers to the Cold War as "gang wars across oceans", and calls capitalism a "vortex of this rage" and a competition "man to man."

It had to be flashin' like the daily double It had to be playin' on TV It had to be loud mouthed on the comedy hour It had to be announced over loud speakers

The CIA and the Mafia are in cahoots

It had to be said in old ladies' language It had to be said in American headlines Kennedy stretched and smiled and got double crossed by lowlife goons and agents Rich bankers with criminal connections Dope pushers in CIA working with dope pushers from Cuba working with a big time syndicate from Tampa, Florida And it had to be said with a big mouth

It had to be moaned over factory foghorns It had to be chattered on car radio news broadcasts It had to be screamed in the kitchen It had to be yelled in the basement where uncles were fighting

It had to be howled on the streets by newsboys to bus conductors It had to be foghorned into New York harbor It had to echo onto hard hats It had to turn up the volume in university ballrooms

It had to be written in library books, footnoted It had to be in the headlines of the Times and Le Monde It had to be barked on TV It had to be heard in alleys through ballroom doors

It had to be played on wire services It had to be bells ringing Comedians stopped dead in the middle of a joke in Las Vegas

It had to be FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and Frank Costello syndicate mouthpiece meeting in Central Park, New York weekends, reported Time magazine

It had to be the Mafia and the CIA together starting war on Cuba, Bay of Pigs and poison assassination headlines

It had to be dope cops in the Mafia Who sold all their heroin in America

It had to be the FBI and organized crime working together in cahoots against the commies

It had to be ringing on multinational cash registers A world-wide laundry for organized criminal money

It had to be the CIA and the Mafia and the FBI together They were bigger than Nixon And they were bigger than war

It had to be a large room full of murder It had to be a mounted ass- a solid mass of rage A red hot pen A scream in the back of the throat

It had to be a kid that can breathe It had to be in Rockefellers' mouth It had to be central intelligence, the family, allofthis, the agency Mafia It had to be organized crime

One big set of gangs working together in cahoots

Hitmen Murderers everywhere

The secret The drunk The brutal The dirty rich

On top of a slag heap of prisons Industrial cancer Plutonium smog Garbage cities

Grandmas' bed soft from fathers' resentment

It had to be the rulers They wanted law and order And they got rich on wanting protection for the status quo

They wanted junkies They wanted Attica They wanted Kent State They wanted war in Indochina

It had to be the CIA and the Mafia and the FBI

Multinational capitalists Strong armed squads Private detective agencies for the rich And their armies and navies and their air force bombing planes

It had to be capitalism The vortex of this rage This competition Man to man

The horses head in a capitalists' bed The Cuban turf It rumbles in hitmen And gang wars across oceans

Bombing Cambodia settled the score when Soviet pilots manned Egyptian fighter planes

Chiles' red democracy Bumped off with White House pots and pans

A warning to Mediterranean governments

The secret police have been embraced for decades

The NKPD and CIA keep each other's secrets The OGBU and DIA never hit their own The KGB and the FBI are one mind

Brute force and full of money Brute force, world-wide, and full of money Brute force, world-wide, and full of money Brute force, world-wide, and full of money Brute force, world-wide, and full of money

It had to be rich and it had to be powerful They had to murder in Indonesia 500000 They had to murder in Indochina 2000000 They had to murder in Czechoslovakia They had to murder in Chile They had to murder in Russia

And they had to murder in America

Events referenced in Poem

 * NKVD - CIA
 * OGPU - DIA
 * KGB - FBI
 * Bay of Pigs Invasion
 * Cold war
 * Kent State shootings
 * Attica Prison Riots

(removed) Entire Poem (taken down) Youtube Video

Hadda Be Playing on the Jukebox Hadda be Playin' on a Jukebox