The Song Remains the Same No 4: "It can call itself what it likes"

"When the Czech police use their truncheons in Wenceslas Square we describe this as an act of brutal repression consistent with the practices of a totalitarian regime. When the English police charge students on horseback on Westminster Bridge we describe this as a maintenance of law and order and are advised that it is a containment of essentially subversive forces. The Czechs use precisely the same language (as of course do the Turks, the Chileans, the South Africans, etc: the demonstrations are against the state and must be crushed. Here, as there, I believe we must assess a governing power not by what it says it is, or by what it says it intends, but by what it does. It can call itself what it likes."

Harold Pinter, from an article 'Eroding the Language of Freedom' published in Sanity in 1989.

Merry Xmas!

The Song Remains the Same No3: King's Cross

There's an interview here with PSB about coming up with this song, still one of their most moving for the way that it makes the personal and the political indistinguishable from each other, "I've been hurt, and we've been had" (because it's not just about the economics of it, we're dealing with crushed souls, defeated imaginations here), for its exquisitely mournful tone, the echo of fading promises, just the delivery of lines like "I've been guilty of hanging around"

For these purposes, the key lines are obviously about the "smack of firm government";"good luck, bad luck waiting in a line/it makes more than a matter of time."

Isn't the problem with the prized idea of social mobility that it's about exceptions that prove the rule, the dream of transcending your allotted station (which is why the Daily Mail are obsessed with it, with the idea that Kate Middleton is a beacon of hope for their readers' petit bourgeois desire for social advancement). You have the opportunity to move up in the world, you just have to take your chances ("someone told me Monday, someone told me Saturday"), and if you don't then you're to blame. The notion of social mobility is a symptom, and a salve.


Love the idea in the interview of King's Cross as "the end of the line, the place from which there is no escape but death", especially given the area in question's shiny 'regeneration'.

Sit Down and Be Counted

Student sit down protest in Cambridge's 'Grand Arcade'/Lion Yard yesterday.

The Song Remains the Same No2: I Still Believe

Ok, this isn't a song I've been remembering fondly, in fact it's pretty recent... and it might be one of the single worst songs I've ever heard. But it is something of a time-capsule in the way that it just sounds so defiantly... Evening Session-ish. It's like something Steve Lamacq fever-dreamed into being. Rock n roll is going to save us? From corporate soullessness? Fuck off mate, do you even know what's happening around you right now?

Possibly he doesn't - according to Wikipedia he attended Eton alongside Prince William and his father is a city investment banker. But I didn't know that when I first heard the song ant that didn't stop me gesticulating at the radio in mute rage.

It really gets you from the first moments this, that 'Hear Ye, Hear Ye'. Just there you've already got most of the ingredients that make 'I Still Believe' so diabolical. The words, which say "hey I'm just a rock n roll troubadour" - he even sings about "folk songs of the modern age" a little later on - the strident guitar strumming(which in Frank Turner's mind = truth), the lack of any melodic guile whatsoever (again, it's the simplicity of the message that counts) the strained and just slightly nasal (traces of commercial US punk mixed with early 90s shit-indie) vocals. And that's before the music-hall piano and skiffle beat kick in (thanks the Libertines!) and you listen in sick amazement (TM CC) to lines like "we're not just saving lives, we're saving souls, we're having fun."

But this isn't simple at all. Even trying to unpick what this song actually means now, in this place and time, about late capitalism; rock music; authenticity; rebellion and belief makes my brain cry. The idea of community it celebrates is as noxiously vaporous as the notion of the Big Society. The disconnection between what this song is saying and SELLING, and what's actually happening around us is so great that, to quote John Berger does in 'Ways Of Seeing', one can only say that "this culture is mad. Reality itself becomes unrecognisable."

The Song Remains the Same No1: Only Losers Take the Bus

Have been thinking recently about songs from previous eras (particularly the 80s, but not only) that seem to have taken on a renewed relevance, piquancy and poignancy now. The obscene 'Wacky Races' scenario of 'Only Losers Take the Bus' - "Get these dead bodies off my race track!" - was inspired by a quote attributed (perhaps misattributed) to Thatcher: "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure." There are echos if this in IDS's recent suggestion that the people of Merthyr Tydfil should "get on a bus" to find work. Now this sounds more like a recommendation for public transport than the first quote, but the suggestion is still that the bus is the mode of transport best suited to society's 'failures'.

Essential Viewing

..

Tom alerted me to this series, wolfed down in one sitting yesterday. Ubu web is fantastic resource (have watched films on Celine, Leonard Cohen and an arresting/uncomfortable TV interview with Lacan so far). The accompanying essay by Momus already goes a fair way towards describing what makes 'Ways of Seeing' so special, but it's perfect example of that kind of BBC paternalism that is also wholly unpatronising - Berger sets his ideas out clearly and the viewer is credited with the ability to understand them. The brilliantly devised second episode, 'Women in Art', sees Berger set out his thesis (and he's always at pains to point at that it's his thesis, encouraging the viewer to respond critically) in the first half and then have a group of women discuss and respond to a viewing of that first half of the programme. It's not just a token gesture, this takes up the rest of the running time of the episode. Episode 4, 'Commercial Art', also felt like the perfect companion to Mad Men. If the BBC still made programmes like this (Momus suggests they never did, that this was a one-off) it might actually deserve the 'lefty' label slapped on it by the Daily Mail.

The only programme I can think of in recent years which has encourage this kind of critical thinking about images is 'Newswipe'/'Screenwipe'. Obviously, the latter are in a more matey vernacular, because that's the only way that people will apparently absorb that kind of information now. 'Ways of Seeing' is not without its period trappings either, but those only enhance its appeal - as Momus puts it

" The Britain we glimpse in the films, already alienated by spooky BBC Radiophonic Workshop music by Delia Derbyshire, is alienated even more by the passing of time. Alienated usefully, in the Brechtian sense; we look at a capitalist society which is like, and unlike, our own."

I was also intrigued by the fact the last episode is in colour whereas the others are in black and white. I tried to imagine this was another audacious move on the part of the programme makers, but it must be down to how these recordings were captured (the series was in colour but eps 1-3 were from a b&w TV?)

More TV Debate

Interesting article that covers similar territory (and with greater rigourousness) to my post here but comes to a slightly different conclusion.

"BBC scheduling is just as much slave to the rigid demands of predictability as that of its commercial rivals, even though there are no commercial messages to insert. End credits are ruthlessly squeezed down beyond recognisability so as to promote a forthcoming viewing option – because that is what commercial stations do, and the BBC is competing with them for reach and share."

I agree, but my favoured (and perhaps unworkable) solution is to change the landscape and the terms of the debate entirely so that it's not just about what the BBC does and doesn't do but the conditions that all channels exist in (hence my 'license fee for publc service OR subscription and NO packages ' model).

EP

The first Kelvox1 EP is available to download free now from bandcamp here

It's basically a live recording; 'No Cave, No Pilot' was recorded slightly earlier and has a little post-production so is a bit less 'room-y' than the other three tracks, which were all recorded together the same afternoon - for better or worse! Whether we'll stay with this approach I don't know, I like the slightly more produced sound of 'No Cave, No Pilot', but then I can can picture the grotty room these songs were recorded in, which doesn't help.

Ice Age

In discussions/meditations on containerisation and container ships, I was surprised that this album didn't get a mention: Icebreaker International's 'Trein Maersk: A Report to the NATOarts Board of Directors'. I first picked this up in the music Oxfam in Ealing (one of the few things I miss about working there, interesting post-punk stuff cropping up a lot of the time, vinyl almost always in pristine condition)having heard nothing about it... the sleeve was so curious. It was clearly not some kind of straight sound-effects job - the image on the reverse (very much like the one at the top of this post) signalled that there was some kind of concept behind this, it was some kind of wheeze (I mean, the guy on the right looks like Sufjan Stevens or something...). The sleeve opens out to reveal the following

"On 6 January 2000 Alexander Perls and Simon Break boarded the container ship Trein Maersk at the port of Yokohoma, Japan. Their mission, as specified by the NATOarts board od directors, was to produce an audio report that would promote free international trade....

Trein Maersk... is intended not only for use by academics and policymakers, but also as a guide for artists, merchants and members of the public who wish to make connections between developments in contemporary art and international trade. Mr Break and Mr Perls hope that this document will serve as a tool to open national markets to free and unfettered global exchange."

Inside the sleeve is also a large global map showing the route taken through four major ports, plus statistics and other information on the ports and their development. Before having done a little internet research it was possible to believe that this whole story was a fabrication, a very well thought-out conceptual package, although even then by feelings about it were nicely poised: surely NATO endorsement would have to be official, they wouldn't allow this as a joke, surely? Anyway, they did undertake the journey, NATOarts is real.

The natural thing for me, and clearly for other people too, is to approach this as an act of subversion. I recently came across this interview, though, where they refute that reading:

A: And we’re not like Deep Forest, you know? It’s not like we’re attempting to… The whole point was we’re making a portrait of the world in which people from all over the world…
S: Essentially share the same culture.
A: Share the same culture, which happens to be the American-dominated one. That’s the kind of realistic portrait whereas hundreds of these World, like Douchy-Doouchy from Djibouti
S: And if you go to Djibouti…
A: They all drink Coke!
S: They drink Coke and listen to Destiny’s Child and they’re very happy. And we don’t want to say that’s good or bad but that’s the way it is. I mean we’re certainly not going to say it’s bad (like a lot of people, they say this is terrible) because that’s like saying that the people who like these things are stupid. We don’t think they are. The stance of this audio-document is very much in favour of globalisation and presenting an argument in favour. Now whether people want to see that as being in some way, you know, a stance that we’re taking, in some way ironic, is up to them; entirely irrelevant. But certainly from our point of view it’s entirely sincere. But the choice to not be trying to take cultural elements from these different places we visited was very very deliberate because we found… It’s not like we went out to tiny places in the countryside where we may have found whatever the kind of local folk-zither players were like. This was a journey around big big industrialised cities. And what we found was that what we saw in each one was mostly the same. There were variations, but they weren’t to do with local culture, they were more to do with shifts in political and economic geography rather than culture. Certainly the culture, the business culture would change from place to place but the actual artistic culture, for want of a better word, is very much now a sort of global dialogue.



Should they be taken at their word? Is this really a record promoting the benefits of global capitalism?

Perhaps better to take the quote "And we don’t want to say that’s good or bad but that’s the way it is" as the cue. It stands, it presents. But what do you make of it?

Musically, it purports to be representational - it's divided into two records, each with a side devoted to a port: so side (C), in three movements, 'describes' the leg of the journey that takes the duo to the Port of Rotterdam. Often, with its clean electronic sounds and guitar lines, its steady rhythms, this sounds like music that could work on some kind of high-class sales film or company induction video.

Peppered throughout are utterances like the following, disembodied, just capital thinking outloud:

"The good news is the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting richer too"

"Ten years ago, Ronald Regan was being toasted in Moscow"

"I believe that the genius of our system is that the founders set up checks and balances to limit our dependence on great leaders"

"Virtually every leading economic indicator is pointing in the right direction, the markets are up" (this on a song called 'The Long Boom')

Maybe the interview's part of the act, but in a way it's more interesting if they mean it. Because just by making you think about the big picture, this 'communicational sublime' as K-punk termed it in a Kraftwerk review, and which was developed here, it sets itself up to be investigated, challenged, thought through. Obviously, time and the global crash have magnified the Canute-like folly and pathos of that last quote from 'The Long Boom', but there's an undoubted Kraftwerkian melancholy about the (A)/Port of Yokohoma sequence. Then there's the exaggerated gameshow positivity of Port of Dubai, which sounds like the theme from Blockbusters.

Also as they acknowledge in the quote above, that music doesn't sound as though it necessarily needed to have been made in the part of the world it was recorded in, it isn't ethnographical. In fact, it erases ethnicity - 'local culture' just adds flavour to the business transactions, all you need to do is... break the ice?. This is relevant while the positives or otherwise of deterritorialization are being discussed.

This is the sublime of Capitalism - the lack of sense of effort, of manpower, everything glides, there's no hint of a human presence on the Maersk ship you see on the sleeve. The only struggle is to unblock the lines, maintain the flow.

"In order to continue to grow its economy, Dubai... must resist pressures to impose unnecessary regulatory burdens on corporations"

"The Port of Yokohoma... faces serious challenges in the long run. Hamstrung by restrictive Japanese labour laws, complex environmental regulation and a high federal tax burden, Yokohoma finds it often cannot compete with ports such as Manila and Taipai"

Everything must flow.

*****

Side D ends with just the sound of the sea.

"The busy tribes of flesh and blood,
With all their lives and cares,
Are carried downwards by the flood,
And lost in following years."

Obsolete

Cambridge, Gwydir Street

The Big Society 1838

Free meal for the poor on Parker's Piece, Cambridge, while the Cambridge elite admire their own generosity (at a safe distance)

Town Not Gown

We moved to Cambridge just over two months ago. Both myself and M had our reasons, not least among them being that it forced us to leave jobs neither of us could stomach anymore.

Cambridge is a place I know and I don't know. It was where I did my A-Levels and so it's the site of many formative experiences. When I was younger it was also a place that I would sometimes come to for the day with my parents. On some occasions, we would spend half a day or more in the Grafton Centre (pictured above). I'm sure I'm not alone in having parents (or even grandparents) who were in the habit of doing this (my Gran is always up for checking out a new branch of TK Maxx) and it usually left me feeling profoundly bored. Bribery with a CD or a magazine would help. The other members of the band are here too, so before the move I had been making the trip almost every Sunday from Peckham, frequently dealing with weekend delays, replacement bus services etc. So the main sites were already familiar, as was the Mill Road/Romsey area - the 'quartier populaire' as the French might call it - where we now live.

But I still feel very much an outsider (typical conversation: "Where's x?" "Just along from y" "Ah ok, where's y?" and so on) and that probably goes triple for M. One way in was to attend one of the famed walking tours conducted by Allan Bringham, which intrigued me as it was around the Grafton Centre a site which was, as I mentioned, one I associate with the boredom of a Saturday spent shopping. Around the Grafton is an area known as the Kite, simply because the original developments (which in the early 19th century were on the very fringe of town) formed a kite shape. The link there details some of the struggle over the fate of the area, and Bringham pointed out the way in which the victors appropriate and deploy the symbols of the defeated - the Grafton centre's logo is comprised of 'kites'.

One thing that emerged from the tour was the origins of Town v Gown animosity in Cambridge. This tension between students and locals is familiar to many towns, of course, but in Cambridge (as it possibly is in Oxford too) it is rooted in the great power that was wielded by the colleges, which not only owned a great deal of land but also had their own police force and had the power to lock up 'loose women' in the University jail. Then you can factor in the exploitation that occurred in conjunction with the population explosion in the early 19th century, the most obvious being the culture of undergrads paying regular visits to prostitutes in Barnwell, or simply availing themselves of their maids (many of whom would be young teenagers). Unlike the undergrads, the prostitutes might then have to face the prospect of being 'saved' ie effectively imprisoned in the Cambridge Female Refuge that stood just behind the site of the Grafton centre today.

I Was Re-reading Proust When...*

...I happened to notice a copy of the Evening Standard lying on a seat near me. Since I've moved out of London, that hasn't happened for a while. And yet the compulsion is still there to pick it up.

In the London of the Evening Standard, we have the pseudo event, the feigned amazement (and a po-mo labyrinth.)

"A hedge maze appeared in Trafalgar Square today to the astonishment of office workers and tourists."

Reviewed by a 12-year-old girl on a school trip. Or maybe a fully paid up Standard reporter, impossible to be sure which.

"I was staring at two of London's iconic landmarks feeling as if I was standing next to a woodland creek. Surreal."

Little blue plaques along the streets in the maze, informing visitors that "Carnaby Street is said to have inspired Ray Davies to write the Kinks' hit Dedicated Follower of Fashion".

Real antagonisms are either geographically distant, or supplanted by illusory ones: Milliband v Cameron. All's well with the banks (just keep up with the contrite expressions for a little while longer).

Most strikingly, the Big Society in all it's glory:

On pages 8 & 9, a spread on the working poor taking the night bus to work, part of the Standard's Dispossessed Fund, which aims to raise £1 million for charities from its readers, which will be matched by the government.

On the front page, David Milliband's revival of the Mansion Tax idea will 'hit £2M house owners to help the poor.'

As the leader reminds us:

"People living in, for example, Kensington and Chelsea, where it would be easy for their house to fall within the scope of a mansion tax, are not necessarily millionaires." (My italics)

* A French friend told me that she'd encountered this example of disavowal when a French public intellectual (of which they seem to have quite a few in France, the right-wing mob - Alain Finkelkraut and the like - dominate in terms of media presence) was on the radio discussing a reality show that he happened to have seen. "I was re-reading Proust," he said, "when I happened to look up at the TV.."

Spartacus: Class War

Is Spartacus: Blood and Sand the most class-conscious series on TV? The last, and extremely bloody, episode ‘Kill Them All’ sees class solidarity between slaves calling each other ‘brother’ and overcoming interpersonal enmity, and a brutal uprising against the masters and supposed betters who have treated their slaves as pawns in their power games throughout the series. It’s not just brothers either; as the makers of Spartacus have been even-handed in their portrayal of sexuality (little fuss is made about the presence of a homosexual gladiator – he meets a tragic end but then so do plenty of others and it in no way comes across like a punishment for his preferences) and the deployment of nudity (everyone gets their kit off), so the band of brothers standing at the end of the revolt also includes sisters who have played their part. Ok, so it’s mostly brothers who have done the fighting, but each one has done what they could given the weapons and opportunities at their disposal.

On the one hand, Spartacus’s story was all about personal revenge - he would, naturally, eventually discover that his wife’s death was ordered by his Batiatus (played with relish by John Hannah, an actor I’ve never previously enjoyed watching) and respond with force. What was interesting, though, was that the other tension in the narrative was the wait for the moment when characters who, previously blinded to the bigger picture by their loyalty to the house of Batiatus or the reality principle (this is your lot, get used to it), would realise together that they had been systematically screwed by their masters (literally, in the case of tender beast Crixus), when the individual grievances that had built up over the series would be recognised as having a common cause.

Of course, this could just be a Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves-style case of American self-identification with rebels who band together to overthrow a ruling order (for Roman read English) or perhaps it’s just a safe enough fantasy, enclosed as it is in a highly stylised, CGI-dominated world. But it has been an intriguing series (actually, there are still a couple of episodes to run on Bravo I think) which, even with some hammy acting and pseudo-Shakespearean dialogue, avoided post-modern reflexivity and took itself seriously. Also, I’m not averse to a bit of creative swearing, and “Jupiter’s cock!” will live in the memory for some time.

But first, the bad weather...

In anticipation of Cathal Coughlan's forthcoming album 'Rancho Tetrahedron', here's an interview about the last one, 'Foburg', that I did on Resonance FM in 2006. I think I did an ok job, although the nerves definitely show through in a couple of places where I can't really find my words.

Suprisingly, A Post About Football

This is one of the fastest-selling issues ever of French sporting gazette L'Equipe apparently. The intrigue has even juicier elements than Anelka being sent packing after insulting his coach - the confrontation is said to stem from the fact that Zidane had undermined Domenech's authority by contacting the players directly to suggest tactical changes. These changes were then presented to Domenech, who rejected them (apparently also knowing full well where they came from).

One of the first things to note about the French coverage of the debacle and the performances put in by Les Bleus is that it shows up the fallacy that it is specifically the British media that heaps undue pressure on the national team. If anything the French coverage, at least in this case, is even more scathing. While our papers still evince a certain perverse optimism, the attacks on the French side are absolutely withering. The Ribery scandal and the fact that France look almost certain to not make it out of the group stage (putting them in a worse position than England) might be contributing factors here, though.

But what has struck me particularly is a comment quoted in the Independent:

"By the end of the match, I was supporting Mexico," said Alain, 43, a chef in a Parisian cafe. "They at least looked as if they wanted to play and that football was still fun for them. Our guys - what do they earn? Millions? - looked bored, miserable and as if they didn't give a damn."

You can argue that the deep-seated psychological terror suffered by our players when they pull on the shirt is something specific to England, but this schadenfreude on the part of supporters/impartial observers is something that transcends national boundaries. And it suggests a deep frustration with meritocracy. On the English side too, the amount of money these players are making is freqently raised. And why not? If Richard Seymour is right in 'The Meaning of David Cameron' to say that

"Class is not a status, a culture or an ethnicity. By class, I simply mean the relationship between the minority who own the lion's share of wealth and capital, and the majority who sell their labour to get by"

then the working class-or-not backgrounds of the players are irrelevant. The hugely inflated salaries for those 'at the top of the game' are hardly unrelated to the fact of fans being milked for their loyalty via Sky subscriptions and higher gate/season ticket prices. It's not just in the emotional sense that people are (or have) invested in these players.

As with captains of finance, though, we hear that the players are worth their salaries as that's what's necessary to retain the services of these most talented people. The trouble for footballers, as opposed to bankers, is that we actually get to watch the players doing what they do - badly. There may be differences of opinion on what the causes are for their woes and what the corresponding solutions might be (sack the coach, bring on Joe Cole etc) but there's widespread agreement on the fact that what we've seen so far in this tournament is a malfunctioning team. There's that truism that everyone's an expert when it comes to football. Of course there are difference levels of analysis, more acute points of view, but I maintain that we can all watch the England team and see that they are not only playing badly, but not even enjoying playing. It might not be true that everyone's an expert, but everyone can see and judge what these players are doing to earn their money. And whatever the supposed merits are that make them worthy of their pay packages, the sentiment abounds that, frankly, me and my crippled friend and my blind grandma playing our hearts out against Algeria just because we're overjoyed to be in the World Cup would make for a more edifying spectacle than what was witnessed.

We mutter about bankers not being worth their bonuses and all politicians being corrupt but since we don't have first-hand, visual evidence that ties their actions to our woes (and could such evidence even exist..?), we can still be convinced that this is only cynicism, that it's a judgement that only really applies to a minority. When there's a political scandal, a newspaper sting or a Channel 4 documentary catches someone in the act of abusing their power and influence, the initial sense of righteous indignation felt is quickly followed by a weariness and resignation - having your most cynical, kneejerk opinions confirmed is pretty depressing and we gradually, happily, and perhaps with some relief, revert to a the mildly optimistic default position, while the revelation that our betters are nothing of the sort is re-relegated to the status of a niggling suspicion. That was why at the height of the expenses scandal, the papers rationed their revelations, maintaining the high as best they could, to gradually diminishing effect and to the point where the attempt to relive the excitement of those heady days through the David Laws 'saga' (whatever the rights and wrongs of his position) was a dry, weary clusterfuck that left everyone involved feeling soiled and sorry - the press for going through the motions of calling for one more head, the coalition for going through the motions of 'accepting his resignation', and from anyone else for summoning interest in the news.

Back to the football... and between international competitions, when we don't get to see England in action, we 'forget' that they are a mediocre side and are (cautiously) optimistic again by the time the next one comes around. But while we're watching, the World Cup, perhaps partly for its scale (this is supposed to be the best team our country can produce) brings the reality of meritocracy very close. And we don't appear to like it.

Think You're Hard Enough

An excellent essay on Houllebecq by Ben Jeffrey, apparently writing the Zero book on Houellebecq, pinpointing very well the perversely invigorating quality of Houllebecq's prose.

Hysteria!

After watching Dario's Argento's 1977 horror classic 'Suspiria', the one with the Goblin soundtrack that's become hip in recent years, Justice sampling it etc, it occured that best equivalent in pop for Argento's brand of horror, at least in this film, is The Associates' 'Bap de la Bap'. It's in the luxuriant textures and the hall-of-mirrors sounds, but also the rising intensity, reaching a peak of hysterical, irrational but somehow totally lucid panic - too much lucidity, for in that moment you've grasped something terrible and it's even worse than you could have possibly imagined. The mouth gapes ever wider, the pupils dilate further...

"How does an antelope feel when it's getting chaaaased? The same as man with a geiger pointed in his faaace!

Folk politics, folk psychology and TV drama

David Simon:
“If we had anything right in the first four seasons as to the nature of the city, its problems, and why those problems seem so insolvable, why is it that we're not intensely aware of those problems?”



The montages that close each season of The Wire, although inseparable from the episodes preceding them where the relationships between these disparate scenes are explored, the “money” is followed and so on, they can also be viewed in themselves as pieces of popular art concerned with a Real that isn’t that of folk politics, of naïve-realistic cause and effect. It’s tempting to refer to The Wire’s attempt to map a more complex reality in terms of Metzinger’s ‘convolved holism’ in which “objects of experience are made up of other objects in a nested hierarchy.” In these montages it’s always an ‘individual’ who, momentarily, becomes the nexus of the events of the series. These montages mirror the opening credits, which are impersonal, depersonalised – no faces, no selves, just the money, drugs etc going round. On the most functional level, these moments end the series with a nice update of where the main characters are and what the state of play is in Baltimore. They can also be read in the conventional terms of character psychology as moments of realisation ie the character becomes conscious of the fact that they are caught in a web that is not of their making (with, in the Season 2 montage above, Nick Sobotka clinging to the fence with eyes closed, as if plugging into the network - I chose this one specifically because, via the container port, it has a scope that extends beyond Baltimore and the US). And yet the montages contain scenes which those characters could not have direct knowledge of, so that what we are also being shown is a sample, a taste of the what lies beyond an individual’s phenomenal experience. Simon’s “if we had anything right…” is an important qualification – although, as a journalist, I think Simon sees a lack of proper reportage as the most pressing issue to be addressed (the thrust of the fifth season) – it perhaps indicates a sense that, in philosophical and neurobiological terms, he and the other Wire writers were attempting to map the unmappable. But with its vision that ‘contains’ folk politics and folk psychology, The Wire’s message is that if we don’t try to look at the world in this way, we won’t learn anything. It also makes a serious case for fiction and art (albeit supported by a great deal of journalistic groundwork) being the best means of trying to apprehend the real of neo-liberal capitalism.

In a Sight and Sound article, the BFI’s Mark Duguid goes on the defensive for British TV drama, claiming that UK efforts have been overlooked in the rush to praise the American ‘golden age’. Some of his points ring true (the shallowness of British TV criticism for example) but is still forced to concede that “we might have to accept that sprawling, authored work isn’t a natural British form, just as our novelists don’t perpetually strive to write the Great British Novel. Anyway, how realistic is competing with America?” and mentions the budget for the latest HBO series. Budget issues aside (but see an earlier blog post for comments on how HBO is funded, and also hasn’t the quality of previous HBO projects then attracted big money producers like Tom Hanks?) but this relativist approach (ie both US and UK shows are good in their own ways) avoids the issue of whether it is precisely the scope of certain US dramas that accounts for the richness that so many admire, this sense of the form attaining a new maturity. Duguid also concludes “Though American drama may deal with universal themes, we also need drama that reflects our specific lived experiences and social problems, drama that can help to combat the alarming deficit of empathy that distorts public understanding of, say criminality, abuse or injustice (something that I’m not convinced much American television, however, sophisticated, does).

In other words, British drama should remain synonymous with social realism and kitchen sink psychology. Meanwhile, one of the defining features of the key US drama series is the way they transcend, or at least complicate, folk psychological (and by extension, folk political) interpretations of reality.

More is likely to follow on this subject.

Precision

"Clegg placed a reassuring hand on the prime minister's shoulder."

Since reading this line in The Guardian, I have been unable to view this 'climbing into bed' as anything other than an erotic scenario, with the fact that both are, for some some factions of their own parties, selling out their 'principles' (yuk yuk!) only adding to the frisson. The nature of the office romance and the explanation for why so many occur, apart from the daily proximity, is that professional boundaries (plus maybe the spouse/partner at home)and the fear of being discovered (or even having emails and phone calls monitored) only add to the tension, the intoxicating sense of risk. And the tease is slow and therefore more intense; since the stakes are high, you have to play your cards carefully, cloaking your flirtatious statements and actions in ambiguity as far as possible so that you have a position to retreat to, but always trying to push it a little further every time, waiting for a sign, a glimmer of recognition, the reckless twinkle in the eye. Did you imagine it? Did that smile mean what you thought it meant? Did anyone else notice the complicit glance, the squeeze of the hand?

Imagine what it's like with the whole country watching, with the paps lurking outside your door. Surely the temptation becomes almost unbearable.

Everybody's Always Talking 'Bout Who's On Top

Post Punk New Wave-y Riffs

For what it's worth...Edith Nylon's is surely textbook

Violator: Stadium Weird

So apparently ‘Violator’ is 20 years old. I’ve never found much that was ‘sexy’ about it; I think when Americans say they find it sexy they mean something else, or they’re confusing the album with the people who made it (I’m not going to argue with that - if I could look like Dave Gahan when I’m his age, and he basically killed himself once…)

Depeche Mode’s ‘Violator’ was the second album I ever bought (on cassette – the first was Queen’s ‘The Miracle’.) It was an album that did all it could to weave itself into the fabric of my life at an age (12) in a place (Italy, where I was staying with relatives) and in circumstances (my first proper holiday away from home) that undoubtedly made me highly impressionable. As with holidays that followed, I was shuttled around between my mum’s four brothers and would spend a little time with each. While staying with the second youngest (or third oldest) uncle, my routine would involve him taking me to the condominium he worked in and having a swim in the pool there while he went to the office. Then, at lunchtime, he would take me back home again. Early in the day I would be the only person at the pool apart from the lifeguard who took me under his wing, and into his confidence, from the first morning. He was in love with the boss’s daughter, he said. The boss was my uncle, of course, and the daughter in question was the elder of my two cousins. He asked for a favour: could I give her a message from him? It was very important that I delivered it only to her, in private – no-one else could hear it. What was the message? This was exciting, I was being entrusted with something very important. What he wanted me to say to my cousin was “enjoy the silence.” She would know what it meant.

I was determined to help, and to execute the task properly. Back at my uncle’s flat, before lunch that day, I took my cousin to one side and whispered the message to her. She smiled and thanked me, but didn’t say much more. After lunch, she announced that she was going out with ‘someone’. My Aunt, giggling, said we should go to the balcony and watch her leave. I had recently been diagnosed as being short-sighted but didn’t have my glasses to hand, so all I could see as we peered at my cousin from the fourth floor was that she was getting into a car with a man. I immediately felt sorry for the lifeguard, nursing this passion for my cousin while she was going out with someone else. It seemed unfair of my cousin to be interested in someone else when the lifeguard was so likeable.

It didn’t take long for me to find out that the man with the car was the lifeguard. ‘Enjoy the Silence’ was their song. They had played a game with me; I was a little disturbed at having been so gullible but I didn’t mind that much. As the go-between, I’d been given privileged access to a more interesting and still somewhat mysterious adult world.

‘Policy of Truth’ was the video of the week on Videomusic during that time, which was the first Depeche Mode song I was genuinely aware of (although of course I would have heard earlier songs). I hadn’t actually heard ‘Enjoy the Silence’ at that point (a fact that only served to increase its mystique). ‘Policy of Truth’ intrigued me.

Marin L Gore has had a fair amount of stick for clunky rhyming and the naïvety (or faux- naivety) of many of his lyrics. Some of his lines do have sing-song-y gracelessness and moon-in-june rhyming schemes, it’s true. (one famous example: “Promises me I’m as safe as houses/as long as I remember who’s wearing the trousers.” - part of the problem with lines like that is Dave Gahan’s delivery and the music’s air of seriousness – as a T-Rex lyric it might be taken differently). But that naivety has be taken in the context of what was a genuine attempt, coming out of the post-punk era, to try to look at human relationships with fresh eyes and find new and better ways of living together. That impulse underlies even the largely maligned (in the UK) likes of ‘The Meaning of Love’ and ‘People Are People’. The insights aren’t always particularly insightful, but on the likes of ‘Master and Servant’ and ‘Lie To Me’ (“lie to me/like they do it in the factory”), DM succeed in depicting the inter-personal and the political as being two sides of the same coin. They obviously weren’t alone in that but, as Simon Reynolds pointed out in ‘Rip It Up…’, they were the ones to take these ideas (as well as ‘industrial’ approaches to music making, sampling themselves bashing bits of metal and so on) to the largest audience.

By the time of ‘Violator’, Depeche Mode was a somewhat different animal though, the most overtly political phase of their career was over, and the American stadium phase was just peaking. The lyrical concerns were becoming more metaphysical (or vaguer, you might say, more open to whatever you might want to project onto them) but ‘Policy of Truth’ is one of the songs to still work on that personal/political level (just the use of the word ‘policy’ for starters). As a 12 year old I remember being drawn to it because that’s an age where you’re starting to be aware of the hypocrisy of adults but you’re still told by parents, teachers (and priests – raised a Catholic, I was) that lying is wrong. So to hear a song that pointedly delivered the opposite message was something of a revelation. The fact that it didn’t give you all the details made it more fascinating – what could the person being addressed in the song possibly have done to make lying preferable to telling the truth, for the consequences to be so bad.

“It used to be so civilised/you will always wonder how/it could have been if you’d only lied.”

And to cap off the intrigue, I remember it also occurred to me to wonder what was at stake for the person delivering the advice – “hide what you have to hide/tell what you have to tell.” What was his relationship to the addressee? Was this the voice of bitter experience – had he been in a similar situation? Since he was someone advocating not telling the truth, could he himself be trusted?

Again, this seemed like an insight into the stranger, darker world of adult feelings and relationships – simultaneously attractive and unsettling, a description which also applies to ‘Violator’ as a whole. It’s weird enough just through being such an anomaly: the band’s one great album. It was their seventh album and yet there’s little indication even on its predecessor, the solid but largely dull ‘Music for the Masses’ (that nevertheless accompanied their big US breakthrough) that the quality would improve so sharply, and the fall-off afterwards is fairly steep.

The difference, aside from it being Gore’s most consistent batch of songs, is in the details and the textures, courtesy largely of Alan Wilder (a listen to Recoil albums like ‘Bloodline’ supports that) and the production team that included Flood, François Kevorkian and Daniel Miller. In places, the textures are as smooth and blankly suggestive as the monoliths in 2001, on ‘World in My Eyes’ and ‘Clean’ for example (which is another candidate for ‘precursor to the BBC News music’ along with Leftfield’s ‘Song of Life’). The sticky, three-note electro riff that basically constitutes the chorus of ‘World in My Eyes’ dominates the song, which was a hit single, with its oddness, an oddness that is as much about the sound itself – which I sometimes think is a flashback to Hot Butter’s ‘Popcorn’ (!) – as the notes (it's a sound that was echoed in Roisin Murphy's excellent 'Overpowered'). It’s an oddness that just a notch below that of the irrecuperably odd equivalent part in Roxy Music’s ‘Angel Eyes’, or those staccato ‘pips’ at the end of the chorus of ‘Open Your Heart’, or the ‘chorus’ of ‘On My Radio’ – where the hook is partly the wrongness itself. The main riff from ‘Policy of Truth’ is similar in that respect, with its tape-warp decay that recalls another Human League song, ‘(Keep Feeling) Fascination’.





Elsewhere, though, and this is Alan Wilder’s speciality, there’s a clammy, bio-mechanical feel (that often puts me in mind of Aliens… all that ‘matter’ in the places where they’ve nested that is the product of something sentient, but not human), as with the techno-organic throb of ‘Waiting for the Night’ and ‘Blue Dress’ or the passage between ‘Blue Dress’ and ‘Clean’ where harmonious moaning is offset by unsettling noises that in my mind’s eye could the sounds made by ant mandibles, amplified and treated, and the equally insectoid, rising and falling electronic signals that you could imagine coming from robot crickets. Elsewhere, voices are processed to sound less human – there’s that cyborg “sometimes” on ‘Clean’ and the post-tracheotomy utterance “crucified” between ‘Enjoy the Silence’ and ‘Policy of Truth’. And then there are all those uses of human breath (or emulated human breath) as part of a percussive or rhythmic loop, fused with scrap metal samples and drum machine hits, which is a recurring motif in Depeche Mode’s recordings up to ‘Violator’ (cf: the outro for ‘Master and Servant’, ‘Blasphemous Rumours’). It’s in the breakdown in ‘Personal Jesus’, ‘Halo’ (the ‘hoo-hoo-hoos’ in the intro loop), the breathing in the “and when I squinted…” section of ‘Waiting for the Night’ that feels so close it almost leaves a little condensed moisture in your ears.

Whether by accident or design, David Gahan does little to humanise the songs he sings on, that deal almost exclusively in abstracts, archetypes and metaphors (Gore brings a more torch-y feel to his turns). By this point the baritone has got stronger and a little richer, but it’s still fairly inflexible, he’s not getting all throaty and choked liked on the pumped-up follow up ‘Songs of Faith and Devotion’, which brings in the gospel choirs and the ‘soul’ and has almost none of the strange power of its predecessor. Frequently on ‘Violator’ Gahan sounds like a disinterested deity trying on human ‘feelings’ for size, turning them over in his hands in a bid to understand what they do, what they’re for. At the very least, this helps to elevate ‘World in My Eyes’ above the level of a corny “why don’t we make a little room in my BMW?”-style come-on.

Apart from ‘Policy of Truth’ I haven’t given much space yet to Gore’s song writing. The overly worn themes of devotion, obsession, redemption etc are crystallised rather than ossified. At least four songs – ‘Sweetest Perfection’, ‘Personal Jesus’, ‘Waiting for the Night’ and ‘Clean’ work as drug metaphors, but obviously ‘drugs’ can stand in for a lot of other things. There a magnificent chord changes in ‘Enjoy the Silence’ and ‘Halo’, and ‘Blue Dress’ is a lovely Euro-ballad (again, it’s the sonics that take the song into stranger territory.)

On ‘Halo’, he casts Gahan in a role that could, as with ‘Policy of Truth’, be taken as satanic, a tempter – “all love’s luxuries are here for you and me” he tells the guilt-shackled addressee – but the mood is more tragic-heroic. I’d say it was humanist except its protagonist appears to accept that there’s a higher justice and that retribution will come: “when the walls come tumbling in/though we may deserve it/it will be worth it”. But it’s certainly on the side of the fallen; again, for a boy with a Catholic education, this was (and remains) a provocative idea.

‘Halo’ is a sympathetic performance, but for the most part, I agree with people who find there’s a coldness, an emptiness at the core of Depeche Mode. I’ve seen ‘Violator’ referred to as a synth pop ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ (Pink Floyd also = soulless) – I can see that, it’s definitely very hi-fi friendly, and there are some very Floydian passages, like the section linking ‘Enjoy the Silence’ to ‘Policy of Truth’, although a couple of moments remind me more of the beginning of ‘Meddle’ actually – with the bass sound going to ‘Clean’ and the organ stab ending up on ‘Waiting for the Night’.





However, this lack of a mushy human centre, of ‘soul’, as some people might call it, only adds to the unnerving effect of the music on ‘Violator’ because its surfaces are undoubtedly suggestive, but what of? Even ‘Enjoy the Silence’ is moving less for the subject matter than for its poise and uncanny architectural perfection, its flawless design demonstrating an abstract intelligence beyond that in evidence in the actual lyrics. It’s that sense of a beyond-human guiding intelligence at work, transcending the individual talents involved, that marks out ‘Violator’ from the rest of Depeche Mode’s work, and also as a truly weird (and stadium-sized weird at that, before U2 copped the move with ‘Achtung Baby’) artefact. I know that it made an Extreme-loving friend of mine that I lent it to uncomfortable – I still remember him trying to articulate what it was about it that had that effect on him. As a 12 year old I thought this secret knowledge, this alien logic, was proper to the world of adults, but I know better now.

Observe, a new Conservative paradigm!

Boredom (Badum Badum)

To chip in on the discussion of boredom and Graham Hon’s post:

“Boredom on the other hand is not tedious or flat - it is a free floating state of restless potentially dangerous energy. Boredom is systematically annihilated by ‘keeping busy’ with tedious tasks or having ‘experiences’ in museums or being ‘entertained’ by enervating 3D risk-free spectacles…”

This immediately put me in mind of Beckett – the impact of his plays is undoubtedly bound up with boredom, or at least the potential (or the fear) of boredom. Watching ‘Happy Days’ in a theatre you share the virtually featureless landscape with Winnie. I think maybe it’s an underdiscussed feature of Beckett, but the fact is you know that you’re going to be stuck there for a while and the surprisingly powerful dictates of politeness will probably keep you there. In that position, you’re as reliant on distraction as Winnie is – boredom creates a tension, and you’re hyper-focused on any occurrence, anything that comes to relieve it. But of course, the silences, the longeurs are also there – you know it’s there, the sense of futility, you feel it (or at least you do in a good Beckett production).

Of course, it’s a difficult thing to accept now that boredom can have a function like that in a play/film/TV series – boredom is simply not allowed, it can’t even be risked. Imagine if for a second we had to reflect on the implications of that silence, that boredom, in our own lives.

In Happy Days (and other Beckett plays) it’s also crucial that there’s always an ‘other’ being performed for that is supposed to acknowledge this activity, and the strength of belief in the fact that this ‘other’ really exists, or is really listening and isn’t indifferent, waxes and wanes (mostly wanes) throughout, even if it cannot be renounced completely. The various audiences: ‘us’ the theatre audience, ‘Willie’ (who may or may not give a toss), ‘God’ or any Big Other (or the ‘self’ performing for the ‘self’ – as problematic as that binary is). Which links to Wayne Blackledge’s response to K-Punk’s Alice post (and my own feelings about the ideas that guide the production of TV programmes) when he mentions ‘what the people want.’ The ‘people’ (this nebulous concept that is the product of fear, received wisdom, condescension and market research – the results of which, of course, are always shaped by the questions that are asked) are who this constant, cheap stimulation is supposed to be catering for (the new Doctor Who looks to be an improvement on the previous era, but that continuous, pumped-up, overbearing soundtrack remains), the imagined audience for this prattle. But who are ‘the people’ really? Not the people making the programmes/films/papers/music etc (since they know better – just ask David Yelland) and not the actual, existing viewers/readers/listeners either who are only getting what it’s assumed they want - but since it’s all supposedly created for them they end up thinking it’s what they deserve, or that this is just the way these things are supposed to be. It’s for no-one, but the belief that it’s for someone persists, cannot be renounced.*

Beckett dramatised this prattle and in doing so actually takes us close to experiencing the ‘real’ in which it takes place; now all we have is Winnie’s chatter, accelerated and virtually ceaseless. No gaps=no ‘boredom’ as we once might have understood it - but without boredom there is no relief (in more than one sense).

By the way, did anyone catch ITN’s coverage of the election campaigns getting underway? Where to even begin?

How about with this example of bad faith:

Reporter’s voice-

“Oh look, here’s another politician trying to establish a ‘relationship’ with a voter. It’s enough to make you want to go down the pub.”

(Yes, yes, you’re with us, the ‘people’, aren’t you? You see through the charade, right? You’re as tired of this as we are? So why the fanfare? If it’s so boring, then why are you showing us? And why, of the footage you had, have you chosen to air the bit where a politician called a member of the public who turned out to be unwilling to engage in conversation? Weren’t there a number of other phonecalls with more positive outcomes? Or was that single phonecall set up in the first place to be filmed by the news cameras…?)

Also amusing if depressing:

Interviewer hectoring Gordon Brown: “But how can you say business leaders have been deceived? How could they be deceived? These are some of the most intelligent people in the country.”

*Underlying this is also hatred. Don’t those media tycoons, those mass media producers, hate ‘the people’ with their whims and their fickleness, always having to keep them entertained, keep them watching? Don’t ITN’s producers and reporters hate these viewers they have to condescend to? Doesn’t Winnie want to kill Willie, kill the audience, and annihilate herself in the process?

Camberwell Then

The Possibility of a Book About Houellebecq

It looks as though Zero have a book on Houellebecq in the pipeline - makes perfect sense, after all it he was he who identified very clearly the way in which 'business ontology' had come* to dominate even interpersonal relationships in 'L''Extension Du Domaine De La Lutte' - lazily translated into English as 'Whatever' when it really translates as 'the extension/broadening of the field of struggle'. It'll be interesting to see whether it just tackles his work or his public persona as well (those comments on Islam etc). I suspect (and hope) it will largely be the former - but will that include the film of La Possibilité D'une Île (which I've only managed to see a few clips of on YouTube), his dabbling in 'erotic' film and that album on Tricatel where his poems are backed by Bertrand Burgalat and his house band (mostly lounge-y, Air-y vibes that work well with Houllebecq's images of consumer-business classes 'enjoying' their leisure/travel time)?



* and that tense right there is very important in Houllebecq, 'Atomised' begins with it. In both that and 'The Possibility of an Island', the Last Men in their near-obsolescence (like Island's 'shock' comedian Daniel) are observed from a future standpoint - "I am in a telephone box, after the end of the world. I can make as many telephone calls as I like, there is no limit. I have no idea if anyone else has survived, or if my calls are just the monologues of a lunatic. Sometimes the call is brief, as if someone has hung up on me; sometimes it goes on for a while, as if someone is listening with guilty curiosity. There is neither day nor night; the situation is without end." Houllebecq is someone who actually does envisage the end of Capitalism, either through the genetically engineered arrival of the post-human in Atomised, or through immortality equalling the elimination of desire/'self' in The Possibility of Island.* In the latter, it's hardly an image of human collectivity (only very loose kind of future-internet-based one)... but then there is that 'possibility', which in Houllebecq's work isn't much, but it isn't nothing either.

*What is the island? A place where the miserable desiring machines of the past, and the desire-less clones that persist for the rest of forever, could be reconciled.




NB On closer inspection I just imagined that thing about the tense - it's just the simple past he uses after all... maybe the pluperfect/past perfect just feels like the right tense for Houllebecq.

Kicking a Cold Corpse

Recently for the Rockfort French music website I asked electronic producers Hypo and EDH to interview each other. The full result can be read here and I think makes for a great read, but this part from Hypo about postmodernism really stuck out for me. The clunky translation from the French is mine:

"I liked playing with the codes of postmodernism. That’s really the background that I’ve come from, like V/Vm (that's the Caretaker, for the hauntologically inclined) and several others among my contemporaries. We took great pleasure in wringing music’s neck. It was good, necessary and healthy. And I still do it to a certain extent. But at a certain point, our generation woke up next to a cold corpse that everyone had been sticking their boot into, and we really had to decide what to do with it. Since then, many people have carried on thumping on cold meat as if nothing had happened, with others retreating to very conservative, classical forms, and yet others cultivating some form of revival of all sorts of genres, with the ‘mise-en-abyme’ of ‘revivals of revivals’."

I also like him on live vs recorded music.



You can get pretty much the whole of Hypo's back catalogue here for free

lyndhurst grove

Accentuate the Negative

I attended Mark Fisher’s Kafka 2000 talk at King’s with M. yesterday. Apart from anything else, we both enjoyed the feeling of being back at school, and I felt myself in the shoes of those engaged, questioning mature students at University that my listless, apathetic self (as it was at that time, for some more, and less, common reasons) had looked at askance – I’d actually read the book, for heaven’s sake! The material was familiar though it was nice to have it reactivated, but it opened up a bit more when it came to the questions afterwards. One question was about how art can respond to capitalist realism, and one answer was naturally the hauntological approach – but what tweaked my antennae was the idea that artists should reclaim ‘negativity’. It struck a chord as it’s something I’ve been trying to work through myself – what ‘negativity’ could mean when applied to music-making.

(I haven’t read Cold World yet, but I guess some of what follows might be creeping onto the same territory).

Initially, I think it’s possible to define the negativity by what it isn’t. The first point is that, in itself, this negativity runs counter to pervasive compulsory affirmationism. Also, it needs to be distinguished from the fossilised James Dean, rebel negativity of, say, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club or The Kills or groups like that, which isn’t even “I wear black on the outside because that’s the way I feel on the inside” but “I wear black cos it’s, like, cool.”
On that note, it’s also a negativity that shouldn’t be so much ‘misery me’ as ‘misery us’ – the point of view presented should be depersonalised, de-self-ised (NB overheard as a response from one woman to another’s woes on the train: “You should be more selfish.”) In lyrical terms, for example, this wouldn’t have to mean not using ‘I’, but it’s important that the ‘I’ is not the Romantic one of the artists typically eulogised in Laura Barton’s reliably toe-curling ‘Hail Hail Rock n Roll’ Guardian columns, and more of a meta ‘I’.

Thinking more now about the positive properties of this negativism: the post-crisis moment can give artists of this generation a moment and a subject. What I suppose is a standard-issue existential-artistic dissatisfaction with what is sold to us as reality can take on an added resonance now that some people (including artists themselves, perhaps) are waking as if from a slumber. If there’s a small chink here, the work of anyone sensitive to it, in any walk of life whatever their aptitude, must be to keep it open in themselves and in others, and to – at the very least – contribute to and cultivate the ambiance of negative feeling towards neo-liberal realism as the psychic foundation for genuine social change. This ‘negativity’ must be, in K-Punky terms, ‘libidinised’, and music is an excellent medium for through which that can happen - This is not just an argument in favour of sonically impoverished sloganeering, though.

I noted with great pleasure that Poetix (aka Cold World author Dominic Fox) has a nicely detourned quote from Cathal Coughlan/The Fatima Mansions atop his blog at the moment (from The Door To Door Inspector “You made your choice when mocking the ways of true grown men.”) since, when I was a teenager, the Coughlan of The Fatima Mansions (and we can argue about the sonic shortcomings or otherwise of Coughlan’s various musical formations another time) was one of the first people to make attractive a certain negativity (as outlined above) and seriousness, one that was on speaking terms with musical surprise, absurdity, grotesque humour and invigorating language-mangling (Coughlan and Chris Morris are strangely twinned in my mind). At the time I perhaps didn’t even take Coughlan as seriously as I should have – after all, an album like Valhalla Avenue which then seemed thrillingly paranoid and bilious now reads, from ‘Evil Man’ to ‘Be Dead’, like a pretty sane and reasonable state of the world address. That is not to argue that The Fatima Mansions should be taken as the model (they just might not work in that way for you), or that words-in-music are the only way of expressing negativity (this would be a terrible, unmusical straightjacket). The expression of negativity vis-à-vis neo-lib realism perhaps doesn’t have to be as literal, as literary, as Coughlan’s.

The great thing about the Zero Books project is the manner in which it libidinises thinking against and around capitalist realism, or it has certainly had that impact on me (although the economic crisis itself also played a large part in that…). And one interesting aspect of the Michael Jackson tome was that it demonstrated how this kind of thinking can be the background hum, the bassline mood of a work even if it isn’t its ostensible subject. I think this is relevant to other forms of artistic/cultural production, including music.

Ah...

So it was Lime Headed Dog we saw that day, James...

Peckham or Atlanta: Don't go there...

From the Pecknam blog

'Shot in Atlanta and Peckham'

Black Hole Sun

Probably one of the most spine-tingling sequences in recent TV history. The more you stare at this picture, the more you realise you're staring into two bottomless black holes in Don's face. The black hole in the sky is the black behind Don's eyes (those ridiculous, cartoonish 'pupils', those 'windows into the soul' that are really nothing but the reflection of the sun.)

Burt Cooper asks later: "After all, when it comes down to it, who's really signing the contract, anyway?"

Crow Calling

Until now I'd only ever heard the Martin L Gore cover of this on the Conterfeit EP. Don't know anything much about Joe Crow himself except that, according to a review on his MySpace page, it took him a mere 28 years to follow it up with an album!

One of the things I like about the song is that the restless, circular nature of the melody creates the imperative that drives the lyrics. "Finding the right words, can be a problem/How many times must it be said/There's no chance/It had to happen." It's not an 'emotional' outpouring, but more like automatic writing. The lyrics both dramatise the process and are process.

this man has my flask

After Your Health (Sketches from a song)

I

Middle class emotion is always muted or modulated. The compulsion is to put on a brave face and carry on as usual, so sadness is preserved, internalised - becomes part of the fabric of things, the background hum; the family home is retained, the ritual of Sunday lunch continues but rooms are hollow shrines now the children have moved out and the spouse has passed on, and there are empty places at the dinner table. But it must continue for it’s all about family, even though family and its aspirations (for itself, for the world, for its posterity) are also the greatest cause of suffering. These homes are haunted by the spectre of the successful, healthy family unit; melancholy slips into the silences and slender gaps between the ideal and reality, settling there like sediment. No major disasters, nothing alarming, just a slight falling short of expectation, of what was promised. Quiet defeat, entombed.

II

“Old age isn’t nice” my grandmother tells me on a regular basis. This is not just because of the physical deterioration, it’s also because it seems the longer they are alive, the more people become depositories or vessels for distress, sadness and disappointment. Not just their own, but those of their extended family, of friends of friends, of all the people they have known and outlived. Via my grandmother, I’m just a short step away from the War; from poverty on Clyde Bank; from a sibling who never made it out of childhood; from my grandfather’s glancingly acknowledged mental problems and their reverberations; from his mother, a hard Irish woman “incapable of love”; from another mother (herself) feeling no connection to her youngest son, viewing him as some sort of alien perhaps; from a boy I’m related to in some distant way who suffered from paranoid delusions that he was being monitored by malicious agents and eventually committed suicide, and whose parents subsequently separated (I’ve listened to that sequence two or three times). So many stories that have unfolded, played out to their conclusion. Identity is memory, and so many memories end in… well, where does anything end, if the long view is taken? A typical trigger – “I went swimming today, grandma” – leads to the same recollection every time, of going swimming with a good friend, a good friend who died many years ago. Always: from swimming, to death.

treats of the eye

brilliant interview with gil scott heron as he defends himself against a hardboiled power suit inquisition:
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=925627437

eloquent smackheads in swansea have a 'dig' in close up

Andre tarkovsky's masterpiece starring the singer from these new puritans

Straight Outta Pecknarm

At a party some time last year, M. and I met a policeman working in Peckham. I said that when I’d first moved there from East London I’d bought an album by a local rapper because I’d heard it was good, and I was curious about musicians in the area. Lyrics were along the lines of “if you’ve been in a gun battle in Peckham, you know me.” (I haven’t, as it goes…). The policeman said “Ah, you mean Giggs.” Giggs is well known to the local force – although this particular member of British law enforcement seemed more keen to see him succeed than some representatives of Operation Trident (according to this article, anyway), as it would mean his not having to fall back on other “businesses” (quote from this Paul Morley interview). The picture the policeman painted was of detectives spending a lot of time on YouTube watching clips of local rappers to glean names, faces, details of incidents, in a bid to build up knowledge of the area’s gang members. (SN1, the name of Gigg’s shop, is also known to be a clique of local gang The Peckham Boys.)

I like about half of ‘Walk in Da Park’, beats-wise and for Giggs himself. Giggs is not a rapper you admire for his acrobatics – he’s a ‘grain’ or ‘presence’ rapper, one you love for the sound of their voice more than for their speed and rhyming dexterity. I’m not sure in what way he could be seen to be “fighting free of clichés” while at the same time “thickly eulogising vengeance and violence”, though, unless it’s just through the very fact of him having a voice at all, or being charismatic and articulate. Which clichés are we talking about, exactly? Judging by an episode of Silent Witness I watched recently (a repeat I think), the white, middle-class Other can countenance a black yooth from a 'bad area' being self-aware and blessed with wisdom beyond his years, as long as the character explains that gang violence is caused by rappers and computer games.

What is certainly interesting is that, despite the apparent obstacles, Giggs has got this far without tempering the music or his ‘real’, which is (and also addresses) the intertwining of “thug” fantasies (capitalist fantasies in the raw) with social and specific local concerns. So it seems strange, then, to worry about Giggs “dissolving into posture” when a lot of ‘Walk in Da Park’ is simultaneously about a posture that needs to be maintained, and a posture being maintained. Concerning Giggs’s further success, the question – which is hardly unique to him – is more: will he have to adopt new postures and, if so, will it be possible for him, for others, to reconcile them with the earlier ones?