family reading - the Redstockings Abortion Speakout; Stumpwork reviewed

Here's Joy Press with a fascinating - and heroic - tale of the first Abortion Speakout convened in 1968 by Redstockings, an offshoot of pioneering feminist outfit New York Radical Women. For Vanity Fair.  

The first time this has happened  - father and son convergence as firstborn Kieran Press-Reynolds weighs in with the Official Pitchfork verdict on Dry Cleaning's Stumpwork. 

reading matters: family + friends edition

Dispatch from the frontlines of 2020s music, a review of quinn's new album by Kieran Press-Reynolds for Pitchfork.

Dispatches from the frontlines of late '80s and early '90s music from David Stubbs, in the form of reminiscences of:

- an audience with Chuck D of Public Enemy 

- a trip to  Russia to follow World Domination Enterprises on a groundbreaking tour of the Soviet Union

Dispatches from the frontlines of cutting-edge TV (re)viewing, a.k.a our sofa, here's Joy Press writing about

-  the underrated Industry (a shared favorite, this - a raunchy, druggy glimpse into the real world domination enterprise, a.k.a international finance)  

- rewatching the pilot episode of Mad Men on the 15th anniversary of its airing 

-   Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal  

Inside the Process

Todd L. Burns - who many will remember as the founder of the excellent music webzine Stylus and subsequently helmed various important publications - puts out an unmissable missive, a weekly newsletter called Music Journalism Insider. One of the regular features is called Notes On Process, in which he invites a music journalist to go deep into the background (the writing, editing, etc) of a particular piece.  

Todd asked me to do a Notes on the news story I did about the Castlemorton mega-rave at the end of  May 1992.  I realised that the article that ran in Melody Maker's news section on June 6 was significantly different (more newsy) than the fevered rave convert / eye witness thinkpiece I submitted. So we have both versions up there annotated with queries and comments, discussing the circumstances of the piece, the workings of a weekly music paper, the traveler-raver movement / moment, and the larger question of "the politics of dancing." 

Here are the other earlier installments of Notes on Process. And you can subscribe to Music Journalism Insider here.

Oh and I just this minute noticed that Todd and MJI got  nominated in the Multimedia / English category of an international Music Journalism Award done by the Reeperbahn Festival.

(My kid Kieran is nommed in a different category - his second time of being nominated - will he win again?)

The missus with a piece from 1994 about the Crusty-Raver-Traveler-Squatters versus the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill.

stuff to read while cooped up for the foreseeable

For starters - a piece by my son Kieran Press-Reynolds on how TikTok is changing pop and the rise of no-melody rap

A little thing I did for Tidal on David Bowie's second album Space Oddity, which they now have up there in "360 Reality Audio"

Stuff to read and stuff to listen to too - for here's a radio show / podcast about The Sex Revolts - which is about to come out in Germany for the first time - produced and hosted by Klaus Walter, featuring interviews with me and Joy Press.

Quite a family affair, this blogpost!

Outside the immediate clan, here's some things worth a peruse:

From a few weeks ago, an interesting piece by Chal Ravens about a sound that has emerged in recent years on the UK club scene based in a transnational eclecticism that coheres through its vibe (percussive, jolting, lots of flashy deejay tricks) and by its relative lack of relationship to either the sound system / hardcore  continuum lineage or to 4/4 house / techno (it'll use elements from both here and there, but the groove feel is different - drawing more on gqom, Jersey club, etc).

major points: 

"sideways not forwards" is the axis on which this music moves i.e. it doesn't have a romance of the future, it has a romance of the exotic

"It’s music to stay on top of rather than music to get lost in" (a sharp description of how the juddering beats put you on edge, you don't trance out)

But unlike it's sort-of precursor deconstructed club, it's very much banging, slamming, hedonistic, exuberant, physical

Enjoyed also Chal's swipe at "the fusty-seeming legacy of the hardcore continuum," something the      nu-generation producers in the UK are keen to leave behind 

If there's a philosophical wrinkle in the project, it's the fact that the style is dependent on the kind of regional sounds that the UK itself is not able to generate anymore - all those African or US-city based genres it draws from



Another interesting piece is this one by Ryan Alexander Diduck (author of Mad Skills: Music and Technology in the 20th Century) in which he attempts to identify what sonically defined the 2010s.  Starting with the observation that "the sound of the decade was … processed...  The electrical signal of almost every recording...  was to some extent rendered synthetic. Pop music of the 2010s was dripping wet with all manner of effects, plug-ins, pitch correction, equalization, delay, reverb, time manipulation... " Diduck suggests that although Auto-Tune is the most well-known and ubiquitous form of this plastic-fantastication of pop, side-chain compression was "equally omnipresent," if less easily apprehended by the layperson listener.  You're hearing it constantly, but you don't necessarily know that you're hearing it.  Diduck further argues that side-chain compression constitutes not just a recording technique (squeezing "the volume of a.... specific instrument or track [let’s say, the bass guitar] to the input of another instrument or track [say, the kick drum]") but that it carries with it and imbues a techno-politics. "Technologies enact, technically, analogous cultural logics.... [they] act out our shared understandings and expectations about how things could or should be in the world." 

The argument is quite intricate, but the gist is that sidechain compression represents a kind of regulation of noise, allowing for disruption but channeling and constraining it. "Each time any sound too aggressively enters into the sonic field, other sounds drop out to absorb the potential trauma of a distorted signal."  This happens automatically. "Side-chain compression can therefore be read as a kind of sonic risk management system" - one that parallels the "algorithmic, artificially intelligent, and ideally automated functioning of global capitalism. Our system is built to absorb, redistribute and even to foresee shocks of all stripes: economic, political, social, environmental..."

Towards the end, Diduck - writing some weeks ago, before the current crisis - wonders whether there could be a "a shock that cannot be conceived, much less compressed, yet to come?" Well, events overtake: it could be that it is now upon us, a catastrophic shock to the system that can't be assimilated, absorbed, and turned to profit....  an abyss of pure loss.  

(Incidentally, Diduck starts the piece referring to my series of end-of-decade pieces on conceptronica, the resurgence of ambient and new age, and streaming in music and TV' , which he describes as "each more contentious than the last". [He missed one, though - the feature on trap and its globalisation].  Weird -  I don't feel there's anything hugely contentious about any of those pieces - I mean, they each have an argument, but they're hardly inflammatory or willfully contrarian. If people's tolerance for "opinionated" has weakened that much.... ooer missus)

WHEN YOUR MATE MAKES A BOOK

A very special edition of "When Mates Make Books"!

Because it's my best mate, my life-mate in fact - Joy Press - who has made a book. 

       

A book that's out in a couple of weeks on Atria/Simon & Schuster in America, and on Faber & Faber in the U.K. 

                                                   
It's a bloody good book too. 

But don't take my admittedly biased word for it. 

Here's some advance reviews for Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television from the American trade press - where Joy has pulled off the book-writing equivalent of a Grand Slam with three starred reviews.

"Women have run successful TV shows for decades, but they still routinely face bias and unreasonable obstacles in the industry, as Press details in this powerful narrative that expertly weaves reporting, analysis, and anecdotes. ...Press’s chronicle of a pop-culture movement should inspire a new generation of women creators"  
- Publishers Weekly, starred review. 

"Press draws from decades of interviews, research, and reporting to create a vibrant behind-the-scenes look at the some of the most prominent women creatives in the industry and the role they played in bringing women-focused narratives to the forefront of modern TV and culture... An urgent and entertaining history of the transformative powers of women in TV" 
- Kirkus, starred review. 

"The book is well-organized chronologically and is an absorbing read with some politics thrown in. There are fascinating interviews with female showrunners such as Roseanne Barr, Amy Sherman-Palladino (Gilmore Girls), Jenji Kohan (Weeds/Orange Is the New Black), and Shonda Rhimes (Scandal). ...Highly recommended for those who enjoy reading about the entertainment industry, how their favorite TV shows are created, and women" - Library Journal, starred review

Joy has also received ringing endorsements from leading members of the punditocracy:

"Please read this book immediately. It is sharp, funny, and gorgeously researched, a satisfying blend of inside dirt and critical illumination. It also places female creativity on television exactly where it belongs: dead center in the cultural conversation." 
- Emily Nussbaum, television critic  at The New Yorker

"A roaring tour of women's professional, artistic and political impact on television and on popular culture. By turns invigorating and sobering, Stealing the Show maps the progress of the expanded voice, vision and reach of women on television and behind its scenes."
- Rebecca Traister, author of All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of An Independent Nation

"Stealing the Show is essential reading for anyone interested in women gaining power, in how edgy storytelling comes to screens, and in brilliantly talented females taking the reins of a once-derided-as-secondary-to-movies medium.... I relished their stories--and was inspired by them, too." 
- Sheila Weller, author of The News Sorority and Girls Like Us

For further information about Stealing the Show, head over to Joy's website - where you can find details of book events in New York and Los Angeles and details about the book's scope and content.

To buy the US edition go here. 
To buy the UK edition go here.

                                 

"Eloquent Rage"

A fascinating oral history convened by Joy Press of New York Radical Women: the Sixties feminist thought-cell and guerrilla theater unit, born in flames of rage 50 years ago, who pioneered consciousness raising, who coined concepts and slogans like "the Personal is Political" and "Sisterhood is Powerful," and who launched absurdist-satiric attacks on the Miss America pageant and Wall Street. Featuring the voices of Robin Morgan, Ellen Willis, Susan Brownmiller, Alix Kate Shulman, Shulamith Firestone, Kathie Sarachild, and more, this is an exhilarating memorial to a group whose ideas + spirit are more timely + urgent than ever in this savagely polarized political-cultural moment.

  New York Radical Women hurl cosmetics and feminine 

    accoutrements into the Freedom Trash Can at the 1968 Miss 

America pageant. Pic by Bev Grant. 

Protesting Miss America again, 1969. 

Hexing Wall Street, 1969. Pic by Bev Grant.

The Shock Doctrine

Coming out late October on Zero, Punk Is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night is an anthology of punk texts edited by Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix. Participants include Simon Critchley, Judy Nylon, Tony D, Tom Vague, Jonh Ingham, Penny Rimbaud,  Barney Hoskyns, Nicholas Rombes, Jon Savage....  our lost dear boy Mark Fisher ....  and yours truly. My contribution is an essay looking back at punk, but not from the present: "1976/86" was written in spring 1986 for the final issue of Monitor and simultaneously participated in the spate of 10th Anniversary retrospection (mostly hand-wringing: what happened, where did we go wrong?) while also examining the retrospective discourse itself. Far from punk being something long-long-ago and absent, I felt it still loomed over the landscape of British music, which if anything was over-determined by punkthink. In a way that essay is the acorn that after a long interval grew into Rip It Up and Start Again, although "postpunk" as currently understood was just one of  many after-punk pathways traced in the piece. 

           

"Punk as outrage" was another of the trajectories pinpointed and dissected - the vileness and Vicious-ness lineage, a/k/a "I killed a cat" = Doing It My Way *. Thinking about that reminded me that I've been remiss in not flagging up here another very interesting Zero publication -  Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right -  although it's got so much attention this summer you've almost certainly heard of it already. Indeed it's rather a controversial book, with some on the hardcore edge of the Left seemingly viscerally offended by its thesis, which asserts that there is a commonality of psychology in the desire-to-shock, whether manifested on the far right or far left of the political-cultural spectrum. 

In Nagle's words, "the ideologically flexible, politically fungible, morally neutral nature of transgression as style" - tactics of outrage and taboo-testing provocation - gradually migrated from the old counterculture to the new   contra-culture of far right trolls. That shift represents both "the co-opting" and "the triumph of 60s left styles of transgression." The scabrous truth-telling and refusal to self-censor of the Yippies, Lenny Bruce, counterculture publications from The Realist to Oz,  and pretty much everybody in that entire Fifties-Sixties gang, which then evolved through punk (especially the Malcolm McLaren wing) to become the Sixties-turned-inside-out of industrial culture - these attitudes and techniques have found a new home on the far right. The target is the same as it always was - the prudish / prudent bourgeoisie - but the nature of the taboos and the ideas of what is bad conduct have shifted: there are new norms to break, new normies to appall. As the most infamous exponent of the new style - now disgraced for going too far - has put it, the dominant culture to be countered is "the nannying and language policing and authoritarianism of the progressive left - the stranglehold that it has on culture." **

In the horrendously polarized, high-stakes moment that is now, you can kind of see why Nagle's thesis might offend; it does slightly resemble the old wet-liberal canard "you can go so far to the left that you end up on the right".  But I have actually had a couple of conversations in the past year with online strangers who claimed that they know people on the radical left who have switched to the right - not because they shared the values particularly but because that's where the new cutting edge was, in terms of irreverence and iconoclasm. The buzz of shocking, the rush of causing offence - this was more important than the actual political positions and their real-world implications. This is the punk of today, in other words.

Nagle references The Sex Revolts a couple of times during her thesis. That book is a bit of an orphan in the oeuvre, indeed there have been quite long periods when I've completely forgotten that Joy and I ever wrote it.  While I can't quite reconstruct the head that came up with the over-arching thesis on which the thing is scaffolded and which I'm not certain stands up anymore (that was the peak / swan-song of my infatuation with French theory), whenever I've looked back at a specific portion or patch of it  - the stuff on grunge, or Siouxsie, or the whole section on psychedelia - it still seems on the money. 

Probably the sharpest part is the stuff that relates to Nagle's book - which apart from anything else is a very handy quick-read recap of recent history / guided tour through the online sewers of discourse, from the social injustice warriors of the alt-right to the anti-feminist virulence of the manosphere (or should that be men-of-fears?). That is the Revolts chapter that dissects the masculinism of all the immediate precursors to rock rebellion - the Beats, the Angry Young Men, James Dean, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, et al - during which we bring up "Momism", a concept coined by Philip Wylie in his 1942 book Generation of Vipers.  Wylie identified a form of new American decadence in the growth of consumerism, mass media entertainment like radio, and suburbia, which he linked to matriarchy and domesticity: American virility, the frontier style of rugged martial masculinity on which the nation was founded, was being smothered and enfeebled by over-mothering, comfort and niceness.  The Sex Revolts mentions Robert Bly's Iron Man as a modern-day, therapeutically tinged and New Age-y resurgence of the Momism critique, a sort of Jung Thug Manifesto. But, published in 1995, our book was a year too early for Chuck Palahniuk's  Fight Club: angry young men reacting against metrosexual consumerism and sensitivity, an insidious decadence weakening them from within, and coming up with solutions that recall Nietzche's "in a time of peace, the warlike man attacks himself."

Fight Club was the book that coined the term "snowflake," and the novel has proved to be a prophetic parable. The ugly contorted face of anti-Momism today is the paranoid impatience with political correctness, safe spaces, trigger warnings, etc - the new proprieties that are felt as intolerable constraints, restrictions on the male right to spite. Hillary Rodham Clinton, with her uncatchy catchphrase "America is great because America is good," is Momism incarnate for the new angry young men, the symbol of a stifling virtuousness, a tyranny of good behaviour. So instead of Nurse Ratchet, they elected Andrew Dice Clay as President, on a ticket of Tourette's as a style of governance, reactive as much as reactionary.  

Underlying it all is the crisis of a masculinity that doesn't know what it's for anymore, in a demilitarized and post-industrial era where women provide for themselves or are the high-earning member of the family. Hence the fixation on imagined threats to gun ownership, on rapacious extraction industries like coal and the removal of protections for Mother Earth (always struck by how "fracking" sounds like the violating act that it is - how's that for "libidinal economy"?).... hence the hankering for macho foreign policy postures (waving that big "stick" around) and Theweleit-on-the-Freikorps redolent Walls and dams against contaminating floods.....  these and so many other psyche-fortifying issues are all of them proxies, props, displacements, compensations for an eroding and increasingly irrelevant style of manhood.   


                                     

* The really acute essay on punk in that issue of Monitor is the piece by Hilary Bichovsky (then writing as Hilary Little) on a recent retrospective exhibition of Jamie Reid's art, including his work for the Sex Pistols, in the course of which she wryly but implacably picks apart the impulse-to-outrage from an unsparing feminist perspective. One of the things she comments on is the "Who Killed Bambi" artwork - the slain deer, an actual living thing sacrificed for an edgy concept, for a image that will shock. As with Vicious's "to think / I killed a cat", as with names such as Stiff Kittens and Kill My Pet Puppy, the underlying idea is that softy furry things made you soft inside.  Killing soft weak things, even symbolically with sick humour, makes you hard.

Sex Revolts actually started with a sick joke. We went out for dinner with a friend - this is early Nineties, East Village NYC - and he'd brought along a friend, someone who'd been in various noise bands (including this one).  During the meal, the musician told a joke:

Q: What's the worse thing about raping a child?

A: Having to kill her afterwards.

I guess it was a cool test - if you laughed, you passed. We flunked the test. Later, walking home, Joy and I started talking about why, at that time, there were such a lot of underground-rock bands with songs about killing women. Three hours of fevered discussion later, we had a book mapped out.   

**  For further Nagle reading, try this Baffler essay about the breakdown of manners and self-restraint in public discourse.