About the book:

Songwriters in a Fiat factory. Miners in the local music studio. Workers on the radio and musicians on the picketline. Music can carry a strike from one factory to the next or bring it into living rooms across the globe. Record by record, this book unearths some of the biggest swings musicians, workers, and supporters have taken to co-create a popular culture of resistance.

Workers have been producing cultures of resistance 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 throughout the latter half of the twentieth century autonomous workers, musicians, and unions around the world honed it into a nearly forgotten form: the strike record.

Strike While the Needle is Hot: A Discography of Workers' Revolt takes readers through the militant sounds and rebellious rhythms of labor’s greatest hits preserved on vinyl, providing both a broad overview of how militant unionists used music as a tool of struggle, as well as an inspiring history from below about specific worker revolts that would be lost to the bosses’ tune of profit and production had they not been captured on small discs of vinyl.

About the tape:
Strike While the Needle Is Hot! is a 60-minute cassette collecting 24 songs detailed in the book Strike While the Needle Is Hot: A Discography of Workers' Revolt (Common Notions, 2025), mixed from vinyl records by Josh MacPhee and Kennedy Block, and mastered to tape by Jim McHugh at The P.I.T. in Los Sures, Brooklyn.

Workers have been engaged in a culture of resistance for as long as there have been bosses. Across every movement and in every language, we have joined our voices together in rebellion and solidarity, singing songs that still echo through the history of organized labor. But in the last hundred years, new technology has allowed these militant rhythms and rebellious melodies to be recorded as they were sung–the voices of miners in Northern England, fieldworkers in California, autoworkers in France, and many others–etched into wax, shellac, and vinyl as strike records.

The oversized j-card is 2-color printed, contains a complete track list, as well as a short written piece on strike records.

This cassette is an edition of 300. It is Pound the Pavement #39/P.I.T. Tapes #3.