The Pinkerton Raid’s “Rebel Mama Blues” is a satirical slow-burner with a Bowie-meets-Black Keys feel- a blast of zeitgeist-capturing political garage-psych that explores how a whole generation of white hippie-boomer parents were unconsciously primed for late-life Fox News brainwashing by 1960s anti-authoritarian individualism.
When the Durham, N.C., band’s singer and guitarist Jesse James DeConto wrote the song- premiering exclusively today at The Big Takeover- he’d been meditating on how a steady diet of Right-wing propaganda has strained intergenerational family relationships for him and so many of his friends.
“I always thought of my parents’ generation as these hippies who stood up to The Man,” DeConto says. “Then when all the post-mortems came out after the 2016 election, it was clear that the hippies, the boomers, were the ones who chose Donald Trump. They thought of him as some kind of rebel because he didn’t have political experience, and he was supposed to be this outsider who would ‘drain the swamp.’