Angel Olsen Adds to 'Resistance Radio' with "Who's Sorry Now"

If you want a simple demonstration of the dribbling, dogmatic stupidity that necessarily precedes fascist, far-right thought, look no further than last week's backlash to The Man in the High Castle's Resistance Radio project. This is a playlist of songs commissioned by Amazon for a TV show that imagines what life would be like if the Axis powers had defeated the Allies in the Second World War. Artists cover songs written before 1962s, when the show is set, and radio DJs crop up in between tracks to discuss ways to defeat the "Reich."

When #ResistanceRadio spread across Twitter, right-wing doofuses (doofae?) responded by… well… defending the Reich. They honed in on the "snowflakes" who were covering the tracks, unaware or uninterested in the fact that The Man in the High Castle is a fictional show (albeit one that's extremely relevant to our terrifying political reality). For some, the simple suggestion that Nazis should be resisted—not punched upside the head, just resisted through yesteryear's ballads—was enough impetus to side with the Nazis themselves. They saw too much of themselves in the jackbooted, genocidal hoards of the past; they saw a critique of Nazis as an attack on their own warped thinking.

Far from being a distraction from the music itself, though, this fuckwittery has shone a brighter light on the beautiful tracks that the project has been meting out over the past couple weeks. Sam Cohen, who co-produced the 18-track album alongside Danger Mouse, has already released a stark and creeping "House of the Rising Sun." And Sharon van Etten's country-tinged cover of Skeeter Davis's 1962 ballad "The End of the World" captured all of the melancholy beauty of the original, adding a stunning, swung lilt to the glacial melody. The whole project can be streamed through an ongoing live stream of "broadcasts" right here, too.

Today, a third track from the project received a full release in the form of Angel Olsen's cover of Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby's 1923 track "Who's Sorry Now." First brought to ubiquity by Connie Francis's country version in 1957, Olsen's version retains the structure and cadence, adding a delicious hit of melodrama.

Listen to it below via NPR, keep an eye out for Resistance Radio, out April 7, and play around with the Resistance Radio live stream here. Oh, and remember, the Nazis were the fucking bad guys.

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