The Revolution Will Be Scored: 'Soundtrack to a Coup d’État' Strikes a Chord at PAFF

By Natalie McCarty

History is often told through speeches, inked in treaties, or burned into the memory of those who lived it. But what happens when history is orchestrated, when global power struggles play out in rhythm and melody? Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’État unearths a forgotten but insidious truth: music has long been a weapon of political warfare. 

Seeing the full-length screening of this documentary at the 33rd Annual Pan African Film Festival felt less like watching a film and more like being dropped into a time capsule of Cold War-era subterfuge, where jazz, imperialism, and rebellion collided in ways most history books conveniently omit.

Grimonprez constructs a staggering narrative that weaves through the 1960s, a decade teetering between liberation and control, where newly independent African nations found themselves caught between the ideological chess moves of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. At the heart of this battle? Music—specifically, jazz, a genre born from Black American struggle and now repurposed as a tool of diplomacy, deception, and dominance.

The film meticulously lays out how the CIA and other Western operatives infiltrated cultural movements, using jazz tours, festivals, and record deals as a form of soft power to win hearts and minds. Figures like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington became unwitting (or, at times, willing) ambassadors in this war of influence, their performances in places like Congo and Ghana carefully orchestrated counterpoints to the revolutionary voices rising from the continent. The U.S. government understood that music had the power to inspire—but also to pacify, redirect, and neutralize radical thought.

One of the film’s most electrifying revelations is the parallel between how music was wielded by both oppressors and revolutionaries. Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister, harnessed the power of song and radio to galvanize his people, only to be silenced by a CIA-backed coup that replaced him with the dictatorial rule of Mobutu Sese Seko. In contrast, American jazz musicians were being sent as goodwill ambassadors while, behind the scenes, their own government was destabilizing the very nations their music sought to uplift.

Grimonprez doesn’t just tell us this—he lets us feel it. The editing pulsates with archival footage, hypnotic soundscapes, and interviews that place you directly in the tension of the times. The soundtrack itself becomes a character, swelling with a concerto of defiant brass notes and melancholic strings, a reminder of how art can be both an act of defiance and a tool of manipulation.

Beyond its historical excavation, what makes Soundtrack to a Coup d’État so arresting is the way it reverberates into our present. The methods of cultural imperialism explored in the film aren’t relics; they are still in play today, shaping narratives, movements, and even our understanding of democracy. From the commercialization of protest music to the co-opting of cultural symbols by corporate and political forces, the legacy of this covert jazz war lives on.

As the credits rolled at PAFF, the audience sat in a moment of collective rare, weighty silence. This was a confrontation with history’s unsung score, a challenge to listen closer to the soundtracks of our own time. Because, as Soundtrack to a Coup d’État masterfully proves, music is never just music—it’s a weapon, a witness, and sometimes, a warning.