Designed by Josh MacPhee to accompany the publication of Take Over the City by Neil Gray.

Kennedy Block & Josh MacPhee | Pound the Pavement #39/PIT Tapes #3

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 me (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.