“Ding! Dong! The Witch is Dead!”: Mrs Thatcher and Yip Harburg

How can the experience of economic and political collapse find a voice and a language? How can new kinds of language and new kinds of relations between people – new ways of thinking and acting, new strategies to rebuild a life out of the ruins of economic depression – be created? Using what kinds of cultural resources? Can contemporary popular music offer anything here -- something comparable to, say, the Punk reaction to the instabilities of the mid-70s in Britain, or the role of popular music in the anti-war protests in the USA in the 1960s?

One piece of music immediately comes to mind – a brief 51-second song from the 1930’s musical, The Wizard of Oz. In April 2013, Margaret Thatcher, the Cruella De Vil of neoliberalism, finally shuffled off the stage. “Ding! Dong! The Witch is Dead!” was seized on as the anthem of the moment and within days this brief chorus had reached number two in the British music charts, selling nearly 53,000 copies. The Youtube version must have been played in even larger numbers. (I have to confess to sending it to half a dozen friends. Tut.)

This was a cause of excruciating embarrassment for the BBC. It could neither broadcast “Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead!” in the days preceding the very public funeral of a former Prime minister with very powerful friends – but nor could it entirely ignore it. Instead, two short clips of the song were played during a brief discussion of why it was so popular. Maintaining its painful impartiality the BBC also included two comments from members of the public on the controversy; one saying it was “quite funny”, the other describing it as “disgraceful”. It was of course, splendidly, both.

Government Minister Francis Maude MP, one of the organizers of Mrs Thatcher’s funeral, thought the campaign to get “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” to the top of the charts was “extremely trivial” and said so on BBC. One can only imagine the mournful head shaking and muttering going on in the private circles of the great and the bad in the Clubs along Pall Mall. Horse whips and National Service may have been mentioned. “I just think that doing it in the wake of an old lady’s death doesn’t reflect terribly well on us,” Maude went on to remark. The “us” is surprising here. But I suppose its evocation of antique notions of the nation as not just community but even family – us – was part of his script for the obsequies a few days later – “a nation mourns”, etc. Margaret Thatcher was, of course, an old lady – one ravaged by dementia and the pains of old age. There was visibly little in the way of hostile public demonstration on the day of the funeral, though there were a few parties and sing-songs in the north of England, especially in the coalmining districts which had suffered the full blast of her acrimony. In London some people turned their backs as the funeral procession passed by. Somebody painted on a wall: “Iron Lady: may she rust in peace”. But many who detested and despised the woman and everything she represented retained their dignity by going about their ordinary everyday business, as if this was indeed the funeral of an old lady who was not in any way connected to them by personal ties.

It was the state that made it quite obvious that this was not just the death of any old lady. The chimes of Big Ben were silenced for several hours during the military procession that accompanied the coffin from Westminster and during the ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral. The Queen was chief mourner and the Dean of St Paul's, the Bishop of London, and the Archbishop of Canterbury conducted the service. Among the congregation (invitation only) of more than 2000 the Prime Minister, David Cameron, rubbed shoulders with Tony Blair and Henry Kissinger, former South African President FW de Klerk, actress Joan Collins, Lord and Lady Archer, BBC director-general Lord Tony Hall, former US Vice President Dick Cheney, Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, Sir Terry Wogan and many more.

In the face of this public spectacle the dancing munchkins joyfully singing about the death of the wicked witch (of the South) was brilliantly transgressive – as the BBC’s embarrassment and inability to either play or not play a song from a 1930s Hollywood movie illustrates. It was not the political content of the song that mattered; it was the poking of fun at a state funeral, the indignity of laughter at these Christian mass murderers at prayer, the joyful puncturing of the inflated bubble of pomposity at St Paul’s Cathedral. It was 51 seconds of scandalous silliness weighed against hours and days of sombre hypocritical public mourning. Guy Debord and his Situationists would have appreciated this act of detournement – the appropriation and transforming of the meaning of any cultural artefact in a new context, like ‘culture jamming’ or Punk misappropriation of “God Save the Queen”.

The author of the song lyrics of the Wizard of Oz, including “The Witch Is Dead”, would also have appreciated the hijacking of his song. Yip Harburg was a lifelong socialist, author of that great anthem of the Depression in the US, “Brother can you spare a dime.” A child of Russian Jewish immigrants, brought up in poverty in New York, he was, according to his son, “a full, deep-dyed socialist who did not believe that capitalism was the answer to the human community and that indeed it was the destruction of the human spirit.” For his troubles he was blacklisted by the House of un-American Activities from 1951 to 1962 and excluded from work in Hollywood. There’s a moving television appearance of Yip Harburg in his later years (see Youtube again) in which he discusses his song “Somewhere over the Rainbow”. He was of that generation, he says, who wanted to change the world and make it a better place. He regretfully acknowledged that they had failed and he breaks into a moving performance of the song so that we can hear, for the first time perhaps, how it represents a longing for a different and a better world – a longing painfully unfulfilled. His son commented on how “Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead” expressed “a universal liberation” and “a cry for freedom”. Apparently after a particularly tyrannical boss of an American airlines company stepped down, the firm’s employees broke into a spontaneous chorus of “Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead.”

The reappearance of “Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead” as an accompaniment to the funeral of Margaret Thatcher was not, then, such a radical detournement after all. So homage and salutations to old Yip Harburg! And a reminder that the kinds of popular music that can provide cultural resources for political opposition can turn up in the most unexpected places and can be thoroughly joyful and funny and quite disgraceful.

John Seed, February 2015