Soundtrack to a coup d'état
Soundtrack to a Coup d’État shows brevity & efficacy in it's editing which melds politics & jazz. As American and Belgian imperialism brazenly intensifies in the lead-up to Patrice Lumumba’s assassination, the music itself grows discordant. What begins as cohesive rhythms; then ruptures, mirroring the violence and hypocrisy of Western “freedom” narratives pushed through organizations like the UN.
One of the film’s most compelling themes is around cultural recuperation. Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong are depicted here in their own words & art, but also as unwilling actors of empire. Both are sent to Africa on U.S. State Department backed tours meant to obscure covert operations through the soft power of co-opted African American culture. Armstrong’s own description of these performances as “smokescreens” cuts through any liberation narratives interventionist Americans try to tell.
The German philosopher Walter Benjamin writes extensively on the use of culture & aesthetics to reinforce hegemony. When Benjamin writes "The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life", we can understand how images & spectacle are used to create a mirage that gives space for fascism to develop through culture. The later French writer Guy Debord expands on this concept of the spectacle, "The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive" & "opposition is integrated". The cultural domination of the American empire allows itself to co-opt the cultural output of even it's most revolutionary citizens for imperialist purposes.Rather than offering a clean historical lesson, the documentary stages a kind of audiovisual dialectic: music against propaganda, solidarity against spectacle, liberation against containment. In doing so it unexpectedly rehabilitates figures like Khrushchev, who bangs his shoe to a greater rhythm on a UN desk.
