Re-post from 2009: A Buffoon Empiricist Manifesto

[This was originally posted on Lower End Spasm on 21 May 2009, in response to a debate which is now too old, dead, and settled (we won, lol) to be worth recounting... a few months ago Alex Bok Bok, Lower End Spasm proprietor, took the blog down to concentrate on Night Slugs, and I think I can safely say I've moved on too... but people keep asking to see this - for their uni dissertations, of all things - so here it is.]

Buffoon Empiricism is a response to the terrible perseverance and proliferation of information and music online. Everyone can access everything, all of the time. Every message board post has a download inside. Every riposte has another riposte. Club music has become more of a spectacle than ever in the last five years; regarded, consumed and critiqued from a metaphorical and physical distance.

FWD>> is now being streamed live around the world from Curtain Road.

We admire the futurist beauty of being able to smash great distances with technology, underground music seeping up through the global soil. We admire the fact that you can listen to one of London's most seminal club nights as it happens in your bedroom.

We admire all of this, but we'd prefer to admire it from the dancefloor of Plastic People.

RSI hurts. Dancing heals.

The Ten Commandments of Buffoon Empiricism

1) Thou shalt go to raves.

2) Thou shalt dance.

3) Thou shalt flash thy lighter.

4) Thou shalt give some serious thought to trying socaerobics.

5) Thou shalt invent ridiculous new skanks in funky dances (and in IKEA), if only to annoy the purists (and IKEA). Thou shalt put videos of yourself doing these skanks on the internets, but only if you've first performed them in a rave, or the food hall of a Swedish furniture store.

6) Thou shalt aim for a 35% reduction in the time you spend on internet message boards by 2012.

7) Thou shalt feel free to document the music you hear and the things you see in new and interesting ways. Tweeting from raves is okay.

8) Thou shalt also feel free not to document the music you hear and the things you see. Someone else probably is, in any case.

9) Thou shalt be justifiably proud of the long tradition of buffoonery that precedes you. Don't worry, you don't have to wear the jester's hat.

10) Thou may have other gods besides buffoon empiricism – theoretical gods, rational gods, scientific gods, gods with throats of fire and hair made of twine. Buffoon empiricism is not a jealous or vengeful god.

*****

Post script: DANCE OR GET EATEN BY TIGERS, a rather silly piece I wrote for the New Statesman in 2010 on a very much related subject.

Kettling 2.0: The Olympic State of Exception and TSG Action Figures

After the kettle, the cordon

The 2 million-strong public sector strike on 30 November was accompanied by a march of 30,000 through central London against pension reforms, and against government austerity; along the way many marchers, myself included, were surprised to see a 10-foot high steel fence erected across Trafalgar Square. ‘Met unveil revolutionary police barrier’ read the Daily Mail headline – they were the only newspaper to realise its importance. This is what counts as revolutionary in 2011 Britain: a revolution against free assembly, against freedom of movement, against the commons, and further towards a state of exception. (I advise clicking the link if you haven't heard this term before - I hadn't a year ago.) From the Mail article: “The police cordon was erected at the north end of Whitehall near Trafalgar Square yesterday afternoon in an attempt to stop anti-cuts protesters heading towards Parliament. The Metropolitan Police said the barrier of steel structure is put in place when a potential public order situation is likely to develop and they need a physical barrier to block cars and people.”



After the TUC march peacefully dispersed on the Victoria Embankment, I tracked back towards Trafalgar Square – there at the edge of the steel cordon, two uniformed officers were acting like bouncers, admitting tourists and office workers into the square in single file; admitting everyone, in fact, except the four women aged around 35-55 in front of me, carrying modest union-issue placards about teachers’ pensions. The cops were clear about the policy: if you discard your placard at the entrance to the square, you can come in. “That’s ridiculous”, the women objected. “We’re trying to prevent any potential protest from re-forming in the square” the cops explained. The women objected a bit more, and eventually, shaking their heads as tourists filed past us, they dropped their placards at the gate, and walked in as well.

While all this was going on, one young man who’d walked ahead of us, and was already past the cops, reached back and sneakily took a placard off the top of the pile – it was just a quick, cheeky kick against the pricks. One of the cops spotted him out of the corner of his eye, yelled “OI!”, grabbed him aggressively by the shoulder, dragged him back, and, with great force, yanked the placard out his hand, then shoved him back into 'the sterile zone' – having forcibly sterilised him, I suppose. Whether there was any suggestion that protest might “re-form in the square” is neither here nor there, but I hadn't heard any rumours to that effect. Heaven forfend someone should put a sticker on the Olympic clock again; an event which induced riot police to pretty much truncheon everyone on sight, on the evening of 26 March.

About the new ring of steel

The revolutionary new steel cordon ‘unveiled’ on #30Nov in Trafalgar Square is not, in fact, new. From police blogs and various other sources, this is what I’ve gathered (quotes are from anonymous police blog comments):

* The portable steel cordons were designed to be used not for public order situations like political protests, but for dealing with CBRN incidents, “where they can obviously very effectively direct the crowd”.

* 200 of them were purchased by the Home Office in 2008 for CBRN preparedness, but they're now available for any police force in the country to use, for any purpose at all.

* From the small van-capsule, they open out like Transformers. Beyond what can be seen in the pictures I've found, they also have “a large screen which can be raised up above the top of the barrier to provide textual directions/instructions to people and a (very) powerful PA system with remote management, syncing. A fantastic bit of kit all in all. They're very robust and effective, even at their full extension (which is very wide).”

* While they’re portable, and that seems particularly alarming – the prospect of something as mobile as a group of TSG officers, but literally made of steel – they’re not that responsive. “They are extremely heavy and can just about be towed by a standard 4x4. They are very unforgiving and too much speed when towing one will destabilise the towing vehicle. I think the maximum speed for them is 30mph, therefore not easy to deploy in quick developing situations... but planned ones like the student protest they could have been used more effectively.”

* Prior to the Met ‘unveiling’ them on #Nov30, they’ve already been used by Leicestershire Police for separating the EDL and anti-fascist protesters, by South Wales Police to separate Cardiff and Swansea football fans (video), by Greater Manchester Police at Tory conference:



in south Yorkshire at a Sheffield derby:



I deliberately avoided spelling out what CBRN means above, because I think it’s pretty astonishing and worth emphasising here:

CBRN stands for Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear. These steel cordons were designed not for protesters, or football fans, but for the Britain of 28 Days Later. The reason they look so terrifying, is they were designed to be used in genuinely terrifying situations.

Here is your state of exception, already in place: steel cordons which were purchased to deal with the unthinkable, to deal with a nuclear holocaust or an erm, zombie apocalypse, are now being used to prevent middle-aged teachers from strolling into Trafalgar Square, because they're carrying a political placard.

The (ahem) performativity of the neoliberal balistraria



I used the word ‘unveiling’ above, and put it in inverted commas: as we’ve seen, these cordons are not new at all – but their ostentatious display in Trafalgar Square was, I’d argue, even more important than their stated practical function, ‘to prevent protest re-forming’ after the dispersal of the TUC march. I was recently sent an excellent geography paper entitled Rethinking Enclosure: Space, Subjectivity and the Commons about enclosure in the neoliberal age, about the way capitalism requires that “privatised, secessionary enclaves of infrastructure and services splinter from the city”, and about the way that inequality, and freedom, are manifested in a battle for space, a dialectic of enclosure and the commons. Here’s the key passage about capital’s very physical need to bare its teeth in – and against – the public:

“Neoliberal globalisation has undoubtedly prompted a shift in the way in which sovereignty is spatialised. The exercise of sovereignty increasingly depends on a more complicated geography of transnational assemblages, flows and enclaves. Walling is an anxious, sometimes desperate icon of this new predicament… what interests us with respect to walling-as-enclosure is its insistent performativity. Walls are often not particularly effective. If anything, they can serve as important theatrical devices.”

This relates directly to some of the key emerging, post-Millbank themes I wrote about in Kettled Youth: the physicality of protest is itself politically transformative, and radicalising – and its tactical antoganist, the kettle, provokes it further precisely through its demonstrative act of oppression. Kettling is designed to boil the blood, and walling is designed to make you feel trapped. Walling, of course, is not new – but has seen a marked resurgence across the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall (there's a cracking quote from Badiou about this in Rethinking Enclosure). The new walls have risen in tandem with their political economic analogue: neoliberalism. Like neoliberalism, which will soon return British wealth inequalities to those of the Victorian era, walls are erected to support inequality. The paper quotes Davis and Monk:

“modern wealth and luxury consumption are more enwalled and socially enclaved than at any time since the 1890s… the spatial logic of neoliberalism revives the most extreme colonial patterns of residential segregation and zoned consumption.”

Gated communities are little more than the geographical reconstruction of medieval city states, the paper continues – in fact, the word medieval crops up on numerous occasions to describe the processes of enclosure now being used. And in quite a profound way, this links back to the police cordons. Responding sarcastically to the Daily Mail story about the ‘revolutionary new wall’, one cop from a rival police force said: “Excellent, I am pleased that the Met have finally caught onto the tactical advantages of the medieval balistraria.” Except, instead of firing arrows through the holes, the cordon serves as a panopticon for surveying the protesters (as if it wasn’t enough that we are already the most CCTV heavy country in Europe).


“The beneficient Oz has every intention of granting your request”

One aspect of the performativity of the 'unveiling' of the #Nov30 wall stands out: its timing. It marks the end of a year of unrest, in which the Met have been accused by the right in slacking in their response to the student and 26 March protests, and accused by the liberal left of slacking in their response to the riots. More importantly, it marks an authoritarian escalation ahead of a 2012 which promises more poverty, more inequality, more unemployment and more unrest: and with it, a state of exception of truly Olympian proportions.

London 2012, aka jesus fuck, the fucking Olympics



I took this picture in the Official 2012 Store in Heathrow Airport last month (on my way to a conference about protest music and freedom of speech). It is of course a kettle line of Wenlocks: Wenlock the London Olympic mascot, dressed as a police officer. Little commentary is needed. Here, for only £10.25 (not including shipping), is a FUN! toy version of your instrument of discipline, already equipped with a single panopticon eye. Water cannon and steel cordon sold separately. Baton rounds may be unsuitable for small children. A more perfect visual metaphor for 2012, I cannot imagine (not even this).

Think this is hyperbole? Here’s how Westminster is planning to defend your much-lauded democratic right to protest during the Olympics, from The Independent:

“Ministers are planning legal action to restrict public protests during the Olympics... plans includes identifying “exclusion zones” around key locations, and fast-tracking the removal of protests that do not have the blessing of the authorities... Police have been given enhanced powers to act against protests at the Olympics since the Games were awarded to London six years ago, including the right to enter private homes and seize political posters.”

And here’s what the Olympics will bring to London at large, from a stunning piece in the Financial Times by Philip Stephens:

London is promised an exercise in authoritarian elitism to rival Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union. The people’s games have been turned into the apparatchiks’ Olympics. The stadiums and arenas will overflow with politicians, bureaucrats and corporate sponsors. More than 1m ordinary families have failed to secure a single ticket even to the opening stages of the most obscure Olympic sports.

Civil liberties are to be suspended for the duration of the games. David Cameron’s government is promising draconian penalties for anyone who dares jeopardise the exclusive rights of commercial partners such as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. Advertising sponsors have been promised what is chillingly called a “clean city”, handing them ownership of everything within camera distance of the games. Wear a T-shirt expressing a preference for Burger King and Pepsi and you may be thrown into the Tower. The crackdown extends to what the Olympic Stasi call “advertising on the human body”.

All this is to one purpose: to make life comfortable for the 40,000 Olympic bigwigs, national bureaucrats, commercial sponsors, hangers on and politicians who are preparing to slip into all the best seats at all the best events. These oligarchs of sport will whizz from their Park Lane suites to the Olympic venues along 100 miles of dedicated Zil lanes carved from an already congested road network. Traffic lights will be programmed to turn green as the limousines approach and red again as they pass. Ordinary folk who inadvertently stray into the reserved lanes will face draconian fines.

The march of the dead: the wanderkessel

This post is probably already too long, but I can’t not mention the response to the 9 November student march, as it further demonstrates the same pre-2012 escalation. #Nov9 was supposed to see a rebirth of the spirit of Millbank (“ANOTHER MILLBANK IS POSSIBLE” said one superb placard). Instead, it saw such a heavy deployment of police, relative to the student marches of November and December 2010, that the entire day felt less like a civic swarm and more like a slow-step drudge to the gallows – with riot cops all around us, literally herding us to the end location, it felt like we were being marched, not marching. Indeed, #Nov9 was essentially what is known in German as a wanderkessel (the TOTAL FREEDOM pics are from Hamburg in 2007):







The Olympic State of Exception

Let’s go back to the day of the strike, to 30 November, and the shocking story of the 40 odd people kettled, "beaten up" and violently arrested by riot cops with dogs, on a picket in Dalston. A full account is here, and well worth reading - but it's this witness statement in the Daily Mail, from the owner of a nearby cafe, which perfectly articulates the logic of the Olympic state of exception:

“It seemed quite heavy handed but it contained them well. People were upset because they didn't think they had done anything wrong, but it did stop things escalating.”

It stopped things escalating in the immediate short-term, anyway.

Have a great 2012.

Japan 3: Udon't even know me (or my udon cat)

On the way from Osaka to the art islands of the Seto Inland Sea - a journey which took two boats, two trains, and two buses - we had a two hour stop-over in Takamatsu between ferries, at 5-7am in the morning.

We knew exactly what we were going to do with this two hour break. Takamatsu is legendary across Japan for its udon - known as the 'Udon Kingdom', in fact. The thick, chewy white noodles prepared here are, it should go without saying, a different animal altogether to the slobbery tentacles you might have had in Wagamama's or similar. We went into this place the minute it opened, at 6am. The head chef had udon-coloured clothes and an udon-coloured cat.

      

To make the noodles (fresh, on site, obvs) they mix the flour and water in big buckets, before tipping it into a big rectangular machine (on the right in the picture below). The resulting balls of dough are then placed on plastic sheeting on the floor, and - donning his special white udon socks - the chef then flattens them out with his feet, doing slow 360s to ensure the shape is perfectly even.

Once the noodles have been flattened, cooked and cut, they are left just sort of sitting in a big crate on the side... and when you want some, they are dunked in a hot bath to heat them up (everything in Japan gets a honsen), then rinsed, then served up in a bowl. The soup, a broth made from dried sardines, comes from a big urn on the counter. The topping options are numerous - including tempura octopus, pumpkin, white fish, mushroom or aubergine; a soft-poached 'honsen' egg, or a raw egg (!) broken into the bowl and then stirred in; half-moons of sweet tofu; and then bowls for scattering chopped spring onions, chopped ginger, sesame powder, chilli, soy sauce, wasabi paste, and tempura shavings.

I had mine fairly simple, with raw egg, chilli and spring onion.

The chewy, slime-free noodles, the refreshing, fresh fishy broth and the combined package together made for an absolutely superb breakfast. Then we went to catch the 7am ferry to Naoshima, the first of the art islands.

Japan 2: Kyoto and The City of Dead

High up a steep hill, overlooking Kyoto, we found another, much quieter city.

The only break from the stillness was the occasional sorties of the graveyard's sentinel-crows.

It was like a terrace in a huge stadium, the dead silently watching over the city below, making sure everyone in Kyoto behaves themselves.

When you get to the very top, you get an incredible view over the city of the dead, and the city of the living beyond it, with only a thin layer of trees separating the two.

Forgive the pretentiousness, and my ignorance of appropriate Japanese cultural references, but it made me think of 'The Dead' by James Joyce (minus the snow).

Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.


Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Japan 1: Rokko Mountain

I've just been to Japan for two weeks. One day, we went up a mountain near Kobe in dense fog.



The funicular ride up Rokko Mountain trickled through the fading light and hazy tunnels. The machinery grinding loudly and slowly, to let you know how hard it was working, was kind of reassuring - is there anything more unsettling, more phantom, than car adverts boasting of noiseless vehicles? It was late afternoon on a week-day, off-season, in driving rain - so unsurprisingly, this tourist attraction was almost completely deserted. Everything in Japan has a theme or audiologo, and on the funicular a soft but cheesily emotional tune played, stirring strings straight out of a David Lynch film (advance warning: everything felt like it was out of a David Lynch film).



At the top we got to a kind of half-way house, with look-outs and coin-operated telescopes. We could see nothing but rain, in any direction. "The view is normally really beautiful" laughed Junichi, as we looked out on an ocean of grey sky.



In a cafe by the view-point, they were preparing for a gig later that evening, and playing a cover version of 'Wonderful Tonight'. This welling emotion in a well-lit building, isolated warmth amidst such sparse, unpopulated space creeped me the fuck out. It sparked the same kind of unease as the use of 'Llorando', the Spanish version of Roy Orbison's 'Crying', in Mulholland Drive. Meanwhile, the sonic effect of the downpour outside was like the muffling effect of snowfall: the heavier the rain, the more silence it generates, drowning out all other natural noise.



With nothing to see except our reflection in the puddles, we took another bus, even further up the mountain. Here we found a hill-walk garden with a path through the middle, which you can see in the next video. At the bottom of the hill was the lodge from Twin Peaks.

"This is perfect light for cinematography" Chloe told me. "The light is completely flat. There are no shadows."



The pre-dusk greylight was even more powerful than the rain, drowning all its victims – though this didn't stop the life beneath it trying to fight back. A brown ferret type creature darted under the raised wooden walkway, the leaves sprung back under the weight of the raindrops. In the distance, at the bottom of the hill, fog rolled across the path. To the left, a couple of lights from the lodge glow dimly in the mist. 'The Hall of Halls' is a rococo relic from another world, crafted with deliberate Japanese care, a spaceship from 19th century Switzerland which has (gently) crash-landed out of the blank sky.



It only got more creepy when we got inside - The Hall of Halls is, we discovered, a music box museum: celebrating self-playing-pianos, wind-up music-boxes, and other weird, weird stuff from 19th century Switzerland, Austria and Germany. In Japan. In 2011. When it first hoved into view my main thought was ‘we’re definitely going to get killed here’.

Here's a bit of what it sounded like:



They really didn't miss a beat making sure everything fitted the theme just right: from the cafe serving chicken schnitzel, to the postcards of medieval European banquets and maps of Austria in the gift shop.



In the high-beamed main exhibition room (presumably The Hall of Halls for which it was named), the museum attendants, all young Japanese women, wore round-toed fat black sandals with black stockings and festive green and red fin de siecle German smocks and aprons. It had player pianos, harpsichords, a ‘maccordian’, a ‘polyphon’, about 20 in all, ranging from modest liquor cabinet-size, to grandiloquent church organ. The baroque wooden ornamentation and stately church organ pipes stood out against the high beams and the plain white gloves of the museum attendants operating them. From the machines came The Carpenters ‘On Top Of The World’, 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow', and a Sound of Music medley, plinking and plonking with barely disguised aggression.

     

Outside in the corridor, there was a framed black and white billboard reproduction of an old advert from a periodical called The Music Trade Review: ‘THE AMERICAN PLAYER PIANO IN THE HOUSE is the Delight of the AMERICAN GIRL’

It was accompanied by a drawing of an American girl, looking Delighted.

In another room there were frayed-edged black and white pictures of children, with one or two features of each coloured by hand – a red flower here, and a blue trim on a night-shirt there: flashes of life in a time-worn cadaver of another period. Artificial attempts to bridge life and death ringing out everywhere. Next to them in the display case were several big blueprint-style drawings inspired by the music boxes, with phrases like ‘phantoms of premonition’, ‘unknown memories’, and ‘at the tarminal, the extention of their paradoxical rhythm’.

“In Japan, tapirs eat your nightmares”, Junichi chipped in as we looked at a pencil line-drawing of a tapir.



The question that was bothering me was just 'why?' Why this particular museum, up a mountain in Japan? In 2011? I worked it out while trying to sleep on the floor of a ferry later that night. Some of Japan's main obsessions: with cuteness, with the literal mechanics of progress through technology, with the futurism of miniaturisation, meant it made perfect sense. Japanese innovation in technology – especially entertainment technology – defined the 1980s and 1990s, and did wonders for the country's economy and presence on the world cultural stage. So of course they'd want to look back fondly on a time when another culture sought to do the same.

Why would you play the piano when it can play itself? Why would you play tennis when you can play Wii Tennis? Dead labour, live entertainment.

We were the last ones to leave.

Deja Vu: pirate radio and digital decay

This grainy recording of a grainy recording of an illegal transmission - south London's finest, Essentials, on Deja Vu 92.3 FM - has almost 2,000 views. A tape cassette recording of a pirate radio show, filmed with a lo-fidelity camera, compressed and now hovering spectrally on YouTube.

It's the essence of grime unspooling over its decade-long history; a decade of exhaustingly fast technological progress, each development finding a new source of completely unpolished, unofficial peer-to-peer technology (pirate radio -- tape sharing and copying -- youtube). And to my ears at least, it sounds fucking brilliant. For best effect listen through your laptop speakers (kidding - sort of).

Amidst several dazzling performances crammed into 9 minutes, not least from Kidman and Jendor, there's something unsurprisingly poignant about New Era's contribution, especially his catchphrase: "I might not be the best / but I'll merk any crew who come try test". Years later I still can't quite get over the idea of a grime MC who's lyrical punchline acknowledges his relative mediocrity compared to his peers - but like this video, it's a testament to the power of passion over perfectionism. I think you can almost hear an actual echo when he hits his rewind, around 2:00-2:30mins. “I’m the man, N.E. is the man, New Era’s the man...” The vinyl is wound back; the cassette just winds on.

RIP New Era, still haunting the magnetic tape.

Here's my Guardian Film&Music feature on Tape Crackers, the DVD about these very same pirate radio echoes.

One of the most poignant scenes sees Finch cue up a recording of one of his favourite unreleased happy hardcore tunes ("straight away I'm getting goose bumps"). He proceeds to tell the camera he never heard it again in a club or on the radio, never found out what it was called, who made it, or which DJ was playing it. There's a lot of romance to pirate radio, as anyone who's ever waltzed across their bedroom floor with a radio aerial trying to get a clear signal can testify.

Yesterday I was in the weird position of playing an mp3 of a 2005 Deja Vu Ruff Sqwad radio show to Rapid and Dirty Danger, who were on the mic during that very set. They loved hearing it, quite frankly, it was clearly such a memory-shock to be put back in that place, when grime has come (or gone?) so far since then. They wanted to know where they could get these mp3s; Rapid mentioned something about going back through them for inspiration for the crew's new material. Deja Vu all over again: http://bit.ly/grimetapes.

British riots 2011: grime, history and the big picture

A lot's happened in the last two weeks. Here's my cover story for The National's Review section on the riots, trying to explain the context for overseas readers, or indeed for British residents who don't understand what 'context' means (there are a lot of them in Britain, it seems, many of them working in the media). Here are a couple of key passages:

Historically, austerity measures in times of crisis provoke this kind of upheaval. An almost eerily timely analysis published last week by the Social Science Research Network, entitled Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe, 1919-2009 found "a clear link between the magnitude of expenditure cutbacks and increases in social unrest. With every additional percentage point of GDP in spending cuts, the risk of unrest increases."

..."Keep Calm And Carry On" is an exemplary piece of modern British myth-making. A propaganda poster created by the British Ministry of Information in 1939, the slogan sitting beneath the crown, it was intended to provide reassurance in the event of a Nazi invasion. Incredibly, given its total ubiquity in British pop culture since its rediscovery in 2000, it was never officially put on display during the war.

The message speaks to centuries of national self-delusion peddled from the top down - the stiff upper lip in times of crisis, the stoical acceptance of one's fate and the Whiggish history popularised in the colonial period, which sought to write British history as a smooth, peaceful progression towards enlightened liberal democracy, eliding and gliding over foreign and civil wars, grotesque imperial brutality and domestic revolutions, riots, uprisings and repression through the ages.

Its popularity is situated in the long history of the British iconography of denial but its recent popularity is somehow especially worrying, particularly in the face of a second financial crisis in three years, devastating austerity measures and now riots on the streets.

Appropriately, in 2011, "Keep Calm and Carry On" has a consumer edge - it is possible to buy the poster image on clothing, mugs, tea cosies, deckchairs, cuff-links, even a First Aid kit. After all, why treat the disease when you can just cover it up with a sticking plaster? Sweep up the broken glass and, with it, sweep the underlying causes of the riots under the carpet.

And I want to quote Alex Hoban about looting and the free market, because it's very pithy and alas got cut from The National piece (I wrote too much, unsurprisingly):

Point on Newsnight about rioters' anger being expressed in acts of 'violent consumption.' I'll buy that. An articulation of some sort of distilled capitalist spirit, torn from the hands of its Faustian creators, themselves stripped of authority as it's usurped by those who were denied it longest. The ultimate neoliberal return of the repressed / the truest expression of the consumption ideal which, for rioters, culminated in a market that truly was 'free'

And here's my 3,500 word piece for The Guardian talking to Wiley, Professor Green and Lethal Bizzle about the relationship between grime, rap and the riots, and looking at the incredibly quick musical response of the grime scene in documenting and responding to what was going on.

"They want to know why there's all this anger, all this pain/ They want to know why I talk that violence, talk that slang …" Rival spits, before moving into a chorus that is sung with such stymied emotion that it's all the more poignant, because it's so flat: "I just say, 'It's all I know."

It's an age-old argument – one that most will never change their views about – but the case that music with morally unpalatable messages merely reflects reality, rather than glamourises or incites amorality, needs to be reaffirmed more than ever. If, as Martin Luther King wrote, "a riot is the language of the unheard", a result of "living with the daily ugliness of slum life, educational castration and economic exploitation", then this is Dr King's language rendered as art, and set to music.

Novara Tuesday 9th August 2011 by guydemaupassant

Finally here's an hour - all that we could fit into an hour - of discussion of the riots on Aaron Peters' Resonance FM show Novara, with the excellent James Butler/Pierce Penniless - read his response to the riots, with some great 18th Century insights into the judicial crackdown that is now underway.