dan hancox

Re-post from 2009: A Buffoon Empiricist Manifesto

2011-12-23T17:17:00.000Z

[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

2011-12-07T17:29:00.005Z

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)

2011-11-11T10:21:00.004Z

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

2011-11-08T00:17:00.005Z

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

2011-11-06T08:52:00.004Z

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

2011-09-21T13:59:00.005Z

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

2011-08-18T21:34:00.001Z

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.

Kettled Youth: The battle against the neoliberal endgame

2011-08-03T14:35:00.001Z

It's out now! 12,000 words, available from Amazon for only £2 as an ebook: you can read it on a Kindle, or any PC, Mac, iPhone, Android, iPad, etc etc. Just click that link above, it's all there, easy as pie.

Feedback has been great already. It's been blogged on the heavily-trafficked Boing Boing, and if you want to know more about the contents - what kettling is, and why I think we are in the midst of a truly transformative period in British history, I've done an interview for Dazed&Confused here, and there's an absolutely brilliant review-essay by James Butler here, cross-posted to openDemocracy too.

The Independent are running a 1400 word extract in Thursday 4 August's paper, also online here. Stay tuned to my Twitter for more info, and hit me up if you want a review copy.

Long to reign over us

2011-07-19T09:13:00.000Z

English literature, like other literatures, is full of battle-poems, but it is worth noticing that the ones that have won for themselves a kind of popularity are always a tale of disasters and retreats. Sir John Moore’s army at Corunna, fighting a desperate rearguard action before escaping overseas (just like Dunkirk!) has more appeal than a brilliant victory. The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.

-George Orwell, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’

1am last night, and Lulzsec – which no-one above the age of 30 seems able to pronounce, let alone understand – have with casual ease brought down every News International website, mining their databases for passwords, replacing The Sun’s front page with a poorly punctuated story (kids ey?) about the death of Rupert Murdoch.

In the background, you have the full-throttle multi-institutional catastrofuck of our entire, forever-mocked, never-impeached establishment, developing with such breathless pace none of us can begin to keep up, nor look away for a minute without someone being arrested or tumbling from grace, and then, THEN, as the deep, deep sleep of England resumes, BBC Radio 4 wind up the day’s programming by playing what The Home Service have always played at the close of play, in times of war and in times of peace, hurtling headlong, eyes wide shut in total defiance of the inevitable, they punctuate their irrevocable decline with 'God Save The Queen'. It has honestly never sounded more poignant.

Fingers in ears, trumpets blaring louder than ever, as the ridiculous Britain which our ridiculous anthem represents charges half a league, half a league, half a league onwards, Crimean moustaches bobbing proudly as they gallop stoically into the jaws of death. I fuckin LOL'D m8

This is Britain, and everything’s alright. Everything’s alright. It’s okay. It’s fine.

Lithuania's Soviet nostalgia: back in the USSR

2011-07-12T00:23:00.008Z

A belated link to this piece, incredibly interesting to research and write, about Lithuania and its somewhat unusual attitude to commemorating its Communist past - via live role-play theatre in former nuclear bunkers, eerily peaceful Soviet 'amusement parks', Stalin impersonators, vicious Alsations, and Nostalgija Borsch. I also ate beaver and mashed potato, though sadly that wasn't relevant enough to merit inclusion. It was delicious though.

This feature landed in The Guardian's g2 section the day Osama Bin Laden died, so I figure a lot of people may have missed it.

Having failed to answer a question correctly in Russian, I get it repeated in broken, angry English. The interrogating KGB officer pushes me against a filing cabinet. "Where are y'fRRROM?" England, I say, cowering. He prods me in the chest, hard. "You are English? English spy! English spy!" In another "scene", a KGB doctor forces me to strip to the waist, in front of the other participants. "Jacket off! Shirt off! Strip to waist! Quick! Quick!"

Here are a few more of my pics...

Soviet Sports Hall, Vilnius. Just spectacular

Lenin mate, you've got something in your eye. The eerie splendour of Grutas Park

The 'Nostalgija' Menu in the restaurant at Grutas Park

Upstairs in the Soviet Bunker. I have never, ever known damp like this

Eating (Soviet-style) dinner in the Soviet Bunker, after our, erm, ordeal

Beyoncé at Glasto and other musical animals, radio programmes, etc

2011-07-11T23:03:00.006Z

A piece for The National on the head-spinningly perfect pop climax to Glastonbury's emotional rollercoaster, the ONE, the ONLY, BONCEYYYYYYYY.. The key line, sadly cut for propriety, from the teenagers standing next to us:

"Listen, Beyoncé is a fucking GODDESS!" - 14-year-old-girl to her sneery male friend

***

Three 800-word pieces for The Guardian's History of Music series, on key turning points in UK music:

1999: UK garage goes POP, with Craig David's Re-Rewind.
2003: Grime's 100 Club Moment - Dizzee Vs Crazy Titch.
2011: Katy B and London's ever-changing club scene.

***

You can listen to the BBC Radio 4 doc on sodcasting, based on my Guardian feature, here.

You can listen to me talking about riot music, grime, dancehall, and Vybz Kartel's 'Ramping Shop', along with the estimable Owen Hatherley on Pulp, on Domino Radio, here.

***

And here are a few PDFs of recent music review-essays for The National, on Kode9 and viral sonics, the history of emo and other teenage disorders, the controversy of 'world music' and post-colonialism, and Low and slowcore (all online, too; links elsewhere on this blog).

Beyoncé says ESCALATE

2011-06-03T23:05:00.008Z

TO THE LEFT - Beyoncé says STRIKE, ESCALATE, RETWEET: 30 June 2011

More info on the strike from Education Activist Network: "On June 30 nearly a million workers could be on strike together... Student protests alone caused a major crisis for this government. Students and workers together can take the resistance to cuts even further."

MORE: Escalate Collective, Deterritorial Support Group.

Some slightly less crucial ~events~

With, Laurie Penny, Dan Hind, and Jeremy Gilbert, down by the old school yard talking about The Age of Dissent, this Sunday 5 June, 4pm at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival.

With Owen Hatherley and Richard King on Domino Radio on the FM dial, Thursday 9 June, 4pm-5.30pm, playing riot grime and protest bashment and trying not to interrupt Owen talking about Pulp.

On BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday 14 June at 1.30pm, a documentary about sodcasting, inspired by my Guardian feature, featuring the poet Ian McMillan, me, and some frankly hilarious Hackney school-girls on the top deck of the 277 bus.

And a bit further off, my pamphlet Kettled Youth: The battle against the neoliberal endgame is published by Random House Thursday 28 July.

March 26 and all that

2011-05-10T11:47:00.002Z

Here's 3,000 words for American mega-site Alternet.org about UK Uncut, the tactical geniuses shot down by the Met's horrific, unapologetically political policing. The piece is an introduction to UK Uncut and the British protest 'movement' for Americans, and (among other things) a discussion of the potential power of networks versus hierarchies, after some of the reactionary nonsense spouted by Labour Party types after the protests and arrests on 26 March.

The flash mob, the 2000s’ post-ideological, apolitical updating of a situationist-style ‘happening’, was recuperated by capital with consummate ease, and co-opted into award-winning advertising campaigns. But now the flash mob is getting its own back in a massive way – repoliticized just like UK Uncut’s young participants, just like Britain’s gaudy, hyper-branded town centers.

And here's a comment piece for The Guardian about the grotesque, strategic brutality of kettling, a bit of its history, and the effect it's had on a generation of young protesters.

It is often observed that kettling is designed to dissuade people from coming out to protest: if anything, it has the reverse effect on those who've experienced it. As protesters finally shuffled out of the Westminster Bridge kettle in single file, after seven hours imprisoned in freezing temperatures without food, water, toilets or freedom of movement, I saw several of them look the police in the eye – for that was all they could see, beneath a riot shield visor and a raised black snood – and say, some with humour, some with anger – but all with total defiance, "see you at the next one, mate".

Freshly radicalised by these experiences, it is little surprise that on 26 March, so many young people chose to reject the police-approved TUC march and masked up, seeking freedom and solidarity in the anonymity of the black bloc. I say this to the police: why should protesters engage on your terms, when these are your terms?

I'm writing a 10,000 word pamphlet for Random House about all this, out in the summer. Watch this space, and keep following the #demo2011 and #solidarity hashtags on Twitter.

1980s world music, Kode9, protest singers

2011-05-10T10:51:00.000Z

A round up of some more longish music pieces for The National's Review section.

First, here's a piece I thoroughly enjoyed writing about a great compilation from a really problematic 'genre': world music - and the dramatic changes in attitudes since these classics were first released in the 1980s. There's so much to say about ghettoisation, orientalism, post-colonialism, fusion, and, er, the constant stream of absolute BANGERS on this double CD. So if you're only going to read one of these three articles, read this one.

Then, an interview with Dorian Lynskey about his brilliantly researched, highly entertaining history of western protest songs, '33 Revolutions Per Minute'. So many interesting dimensions to this discussion, not least the difference between 'earnest', overtly political protest music - which every was ragging on at our UeL Art of Protest seminar - and implicitly rebel music, where the 'protest' aspect is divined from the context. I've pulled out this quote, just because I find the chronological sweep really interesting, especially Lynskey's comparison of mainstream pop attitudes in the 1980s and 2000s. #capitalistrealism, anyone?

For all the continuous power of political pop, from Strange Fruit onwards, it is only in the final bit of the chronology that Lynskey observes a withering and disempowerment of the phenomenon. Green Day's American Idiot heralded "the protest song revival that never was". When protest pop existed in the 2000s, it never caught alight. Lynskey observes sadly in the book's epilogue: "I started this book intending to write a history of a still-vital form of music. I finished it wondering if I had instead composed a eulogy."

Finally here's a piece about Kode9 and The Space Ape's new record, drawing in some bits from Steve Goodman's book 'Sonic Warfare', about horrifying sound bombs and nerve-shredding audio itches:

While the sound-work on the likes of Black Smoke is fascinating, the album's peaks come when the queasy, poisoned synths Goodman uses on Love Is the Drug, Green Sun and the brilliant title track are married with a clinical, mobilising dance-floor-orientated beat. At these moments, tensions between nausea and ebullient physicality are evoked and then transcended. The gut response to this trio of tracks is "something definitely isn't right here - so why do I find myself really wanting to dance?"

Emo, Slowcore, and unexpected alienation in the bagging area

2011-04-11T06:59:00.000Z

Round-up of some recent non-Fight Back! related pieces (the book launched last week, here's a New Statesman column I wrote about the process of editing it).

A review-essay for The National on Bright Eyes, teenage malaises, and the history of emo:

"EMO Cult Warning For Parents" screamed a headline in the British Daily Mail newspaper in 2006... for harnessing the hormonal navel-gazing of economically comfortable teenagers, exaggerating it, caricaturing it, and selling it back to them, "Emo" may just be the quintessential 21st century western youth malaise."

A review-essay for The National on the quiet riot of Low, slowcore, and the power of restraint:

In the early 1990s loud rock reclaimed its place as the soundtrack of the youth zeitgeist in America, thanks to grunge - bands like Nirvana situated their guitar-heavy sound in cacophonic distortion, fuzz and reverb. Their denim jeans and checked shirts were ripped and torn, their politics were messy - a mixture of earnestness and utter cynicism - and musically too, grunge worked from an unashamedly shredded sonic palette, sublimating youthful angst by making an unholy racket. Against this backdrop, one band poked a tiny shaft of light through the clouds of guitar feedback.

A feature for The Independent on the final act of the self-service revolution, and unexpected alienation in the bagging area:

It took a while for Brits to come around to the idea of losing these personal relationships. The Times reported in 1972 that BP marketing men had seen a customer reading the instructions on their new self-service petrol pump several times, scratch his head, push a pound note up the nozzle, and shout at the pump through cupped hands: "Four gallons of commercial, please."

After UeL: zeitgeist music vs zeitgeist politics – and protest bashment

2011-03-18T18:24:00.002Z

(image by the brilliant Deterritorial Support Group)

Here’s the audio of the University of East London Fight Back! seminar on the sound and art of protest. Among other things you can hear me, Jesse Darling and Adam Harper talk about some amazing protest visuals and videos - which might lose a little in the translation I fear.. still, the mp3s are there if you missed out; sorry it had to be on a week-day afternoon. In Fight Back! news, we've had over 10,000 downloads of our free protest e-book in a month, 2,500 online Scribd reads, some Kindle purchases, articles across the mainstream press, several free events, and the proper book isn't even out til 6 April. Keep spreading the word: http://www.bit.ly/fightbackUK

One point Steve Goodman/Kode9 made in his response to our papers at UeL on 2 March was that overtly (i.e. deliberately, lyrically) political music was just boring. It was a usefully provocative suggestion, which everyone carefully picked holes in – thanks to Frances Morgan for being the first to do so, when she raised Fela Kuti. Steve also complained that British politics was boring: that’s something I answered from the platform in a couple of sentences, and I will soon be answering at slightly longer (10,000 word) length in continuous, less stuttery prose. Watch this space.

Back to politics and the London music scene. I’ll be honest: incredible spontaneous protest grime raves aside (see the 17 odd articles I've written on these already), I’ve been disappointed by the large swathes of the London club scene who don’t seem to have looked up from their Serato to even notice what’s happening. Now, I’m not John Harris – I don’t believe it’s a journalist’s role to didactically call for anyone with a musical instrument or cracked version of Ableton to gather round the camp fire and make a fucking 'Kum Ba Yah Refix' in the name of social justice. No-one wants that. No one wants cringey-earnest hand-wringing wrong-pop like The Agitator. Or, my god, my god, Scroobius Pip.

But when good musicians and DJs engage, and they get it right, it’s really refreshing. After a day of running (around) London in the snow, avoiding the kettles on the #dayx2 student protest, me and my boy Chris (DJ, producer, wordthecat.com) ran into The Heatwave dancehall collective's host/MC Benjamin D outside the Trafalgar Square kettle; he'd come down to see what was what, before heading off to the UCL occupation - though not until we’d had a pint and a chat about the crazy winter protests we were seeing and involved in.

Protest bashment

So how come the dancehall team are so on it, when everyone else involved in the London rave scene has expressed at best a passing interest?

"Dancehall speaks to the Bogle message of rebellion, which is why it is sometimes feared, scrutinised or demonised by our post-colonial masters and their subordinates" - Vybz Kartel, last week (Kartel was played in the Parliament Square EMA rave on #dayx3)

This fantastic section of the weekly Heatwave Rinse FM show aired the following week, 5 December 2010, in which the London-based dancehall team's chief DJ, Gabriel Heatwave, brilliantly re-purposed Jamaican dancehall for the UK protests.

The Heatwave - Protest Bashment - Rinse FM 5 December by mos dan

Serve and protect dem nahhhhhh

So much #solidarity to Benjamin D and Gabriel for the tunes, the commentary and the hilarious shout-outs in that clip above:

“Send it out to Philip Green, Top Shop boss man, you know his taxes aren’t rising – they’re nice, comfortable! He owes about 125 million quid mate! Tell you what, if he owed me that money I’d be going round to his house – not in a violent way, just to say ‘bruv, what’s happening? Where’s that 125 million pounds you owe me?’”

“This one’s going out to Nick Clegg and David Cameron” (Busy Signal - Bigger Heads)

“Send it out to everyone who thinks education is just about preparing for the job market” (Warrior King - Education Is The Key)

“Send this one out to the Metropolitan Police” (Busy Signal - Uniform Bad Bwoy)

See you all on #march26.

****

- dedicated to Smiley Culture, RIP

Fight Back! and 'The Art of Protest' Seminar at UeL

2011-02-17T12:53:00.005Z

So, I just finished editing this then.

http://www.bit.ly/fightbackUK

7 kettled editors, 43 writers (from a 15-year-old UK Uncut activist to Johann Hari to a rebel Lib Dem peer), 350 pages, £0.00 to download as a PDF - all telling the real story of the winter protests, and providing a theoretical and practical handbook for the next phase of the fight against Tory cuts.

We launched - softly - on Tuesday evening and have reached 1000 downloads already, never mind online reads, which are also available at the link above. A physical book and Kindle app will launch on 24 March 2011.

Here is the first of what will hopefully be several Fight Back! events, featuring four of its authors, the Associate Dean of the UeL Humanities School, and Dr Kode9 in his academic guise. All are welcome, please come along if you can!

The Art of Protest

A seminar to mark the launch of Fight Back!

2 March 2011, 14:00-17:00, University of East London

Papers:

Dan Hancox: "Pow! in Parliament Square: Riot music and the kettled generation"

Jesse Darling: "[Protest] Signs and the Signified: handmade propaganda in the age of the branded demographic"

Adam Harper: "The Art and Reality of Protest"

Respondents: Steve 'Kode9' Goodman, Andrew Blake

Chair: Jeremy Gilbert

Full details, directions, and biogs on the UeL website here. Facebook event page here if you like that kind of thing.

Riot Grime and the Kettled Generation

2011-02-17T12:30:00.001Z

Two features here following up - to a greater or lesser extent - on the extraordinary rave/riot in Parliament Square on 9 December. I will be speaking on these issues at UeL's Centre for Cultural Studies Research on 2 March 2011, separate blog post coming on that.

1) Pow! anthem for kettled youth, a Guardian Film&Music cover story on the extraordinary, exceptional history of Pow! (Forward) by Lethal Bizzle, and an interview with Lethal himself about why grime is the perfect riotous music. Bizzle used the opportunity to praise the use of grime in the protests as "beautiful" and spoke directly to David "still a donut" Cameron:
"We've got more power than you have on the youth. You're a millionaire guy in a suit, your life is good – you can't relate. These kids can relate to people like myself, Wiley, Dizzee, Tinie Tempah, Tinchy: we're from the council estates, we lived in these places where they live, we know what it's like. We're the real prime ministers of this country."

2) Government Grime and the EMA Kids for Mute Magazine, a 2000 word wide-ranging piece on media characterisations of multi-cultural British youth, misunderstandings of urban music, and bizarre government attempts to 'reach out' to disenfranchised young people.
The real problem is that serious attempts to engage with this demographic are extremely rare, and more often, they are dismissed with Britain's unique, unapologetic 21st century minstrelsy, which takes the form of media characterisations that revel in a vernacular they neither understand, nor wish to understand. There are few more revolting experiences in modern Britain than turning on Radio 4 to hear a middle-aged, middle-class, white comedy actor playing a generic urban yoof: ‘bruv', ‘blud', ‘innit', ‘yagetme', ‘brrap' and most of all, the fictitious patois construction ‘I is well... [happy/sad/angry]'. Sasha Baron Cohen has a hell of a lot to answer for.

The popular myth constructed around this generation takes the form of an unholy trinity: first, impressionable, pitiable urban youth; second, aggressive urban music, which might be called grime, rap, dubstep, garage... at the level the myth is constructed, the terminology doesn't matter one jot; third, violence, bloodshed and moral degeneracy. In this characterisation, the three are inextricably linked, and propel each another forwards into a dystopian horizon.

Royal Trux - too many notes, rubbish for rollerskating to

2011-02-17T11:55:00.001Z

Royal Trux review-essay for The National here. It's a response to the re-issue of their first four albums, a brief discussion of rockism and the avant-garde, and to their obsession with Ornette Coleman's free jazz theory of 'harmolodics'.
Their impact was such that they were seduced into a lucrative three-album deal with Virgin Records, a partnership which led to predictable unhappiness on both sides. The band were angry at being asked to compromise their sound and make more commercially viable rock music, while the label allegedly told them their work was "confusing", contained "too many notes", and best of all, according to Hagerty, that "children need something to rollerskate to". It's probably fair to say that rollerskating to Royal Trux at their most experimental could easily have left people hospitalised.

Bruce Springsteen, a visit to a Tea Party, America - and what the hell that means

2011-01-20T13:43:00.002Z

Two pieces on STUFF related to the meaning of the United States of America which I wrote for The National just before Christmas here. First, the online version of my review-essay on Bruce Springsteen's first six albums, heartland rock, the American dream, and how it connects to Barack Obama's presidency. Alternatively to download as a (small) PDF, which looks much nicer.

The all-too-rapid corrosion of Obama's promise fits in perfectly with Springsteen's worldview. Nothing worth fighting for comes easily, and nothing beautiful lasts forever. If Obama really is America, it should come as no surprise that he has suffered a similar fate. The question is whether he will keep going down to the river - though he knows that the river is dry.

And second, here's my reportage / column on the, ahem, Tea Party Patriots - back in late October I went to a pre-Midterms Tea Party rally in White Plains, NY (this is what I do for fun while on holiday). I heard the speakers warn of a creeping Sharia Law in America, literally make up quotes from Thomas Jefferson to support their batshit libertarian ideology, and call anyone and everyone to the left of Ronald Reagan a Stalinist. I was almost so busy being offended by everything they were saying/getting wrong about history, I barely knew where to start with contemporary politics and society. The Tea Party are not kind to history - I hope history will not be kind to them.

As the Islamophobic demagogue Pamela Geller knelt down to congratulate a dog wearing a stars-and-stripes tutu, one of her admirers, Merilyn, a middle-aged Italian-American in a royal blue "Tea Party Patriot" t-shirt, found an answer to my question from somewhere underneath her bouffant. "You wanna know who I want as President in 2012? Between Barack Obama and that dog, I'd vote for that dog."

Next Hype: EMA Protests, Wed 19 Jan

2011-01-17T12:48:00.004Z

The Conservative government's abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) is an unabashed assault on the education of the British working-class. Quite simply, large numbers of students from low-income backgrounds will not be able to afford to stay on in post-16 education if it is abolished. The Tories were going to push through the abolition of EMA without even having a vote in Parliament (their contempt for democracy matching their contempt for the poor, as usual) - but thanks to the protests, and the official Save EMA campaign (website), the House of Commons will at least be voting on EMA abolition, this Wednesday 19 January.

Following my blog post on 'riot music', grime, and the EMA kids, several videos have emerged which connect one particular track to the protest movement - some of them are footage of the song playing off mobile soundsystems (as I documented in my blog on the Parliament Square kettle, above). I'd be tempted to write reams about Tempz's 'Next Hype', but after asking Tempz himself what he thought of his tune being a soundtrack to the protests, I don't think I need to. Try and find a more perfect encapsulation of grime's power than this first sentence, this tune, and these videos.

"It's not about the content, it's about the energy and aura. The persona I portray gives a voice to those who use it as a way of expression, to combat the injustices of the immense increase in student fees." - Tempz, January 2011

On #dayx3, in Parliament Square (the track drops towards the end of this video):

Finally here's a montage of footage of the Millbank protests, set to Next Hype:

Assemble 4pm on Wednesday, Piccadilly Circus (Facebook event).

Yeah yeah yeah, we're still about...

Night Slugs 2010 and The Day Ikonika Made Me Cry Blood

2010-12-25T23:23:00.004Z

"We are passing from the sphere of history to the sphere of the present and, partly, of the future." - Lenin, 'What Is To Be Done?', 1902

"What is to be DUN?" - Greena, in conversation, 2009

This time last year, I was on holiday in the Canary Isles for the Christmas break. It was warm. It was weird. I was a bit unwell, though hardly dying - it's just a bit disorientating being a Brit with a woozy head-cold, while so close to the Equator, in the deep midwinter. I was trying to write something about the nameless genres that were being played at Night Slugs in 2009 - at this point Slugs was still just a club night, not a record label... I wasn't really getting anywhere. This music is fucking hard to pin down, and it's my friends who are making it, which really complicates things.

It's been a dizzying year for London club music, and in particular for this cru, its friends, and family. If you don't know why Night Slugs is the label of 2010, check out the incredible Night Slugs Allstars compilation CD, and have a read of this: me and Alex Bok Bok discussing some of the remarkable music that's come out on Night Slugs already, to celebrate the birth of nightslugs.net, and the entombment of our blog, Lower End Spasm... you can find the ~interview~ here.

Dan: there have been a number of moments this year where you've gone "MY GOD, WAIT TIL YOU HEAR THE NEXT ONE..."

Bok : yep!!!!! i genuinely felt like that all year

As a Christmas present (ha), here's a fragment of what I ended up writing back in December 2009, while wandering around Tenerife listening to Bok Bok, and Lil Silva, and Cooly G, and L-Vis 1990, and Jam City, and Ikonika, and Mosca, and various Oneman and Ben UFO and Girl Unit mixes and radio sets. It's the completely and utterly true story of the day I cried blood (my nasolacrimal duct was fine, thanks for asking).

The Day Ikonika Made Me Cry Blood
(December 2009)

....what ties these producers together is a renewed focus on encapsulating the ecstasy, melancholy, euphoria and better-or-worse, intrinsic beauty of just existing, late-night in the city. There’s also a striving to be organic – using the synthetic to create the real. The synth-washes are like blood flowing.

Earlier today, I went for a walk in the afternoon sunshine; hoping to refresh my pixel-dizzy brain with clean air, powerful Atlantic coastal breezes, and Bok Bok’s ‘Youth Blood’ Remix on my headphones. It wasn’t hot, but warm – about 22 degrees centigrade. I’ve been suffering from a stuffy headcold for a few days, and once again I blew my nose hard to clear it, like really hard - discarded the tissue, and kept walking along the sun-kissed Spanish pavements. Then, as the synths welled up in my ears, something happened. My left nostril was engulfed, flooded; warmer than mucus, thicker than water, an entirely strange but bizarrely pleasant sensation, like it was bathing in warm coagulate.

Before I could work out what was going on there was a shocking, vibrant red on my tropical yellow parrot t-shirt, and dripping on the pavement. For the first time since I was – what, 7 years old?! – I was having a nose-bleed. Jesus.

The blood kept flowing, and the synths kept running through my ears: warm, woozy, all-consuming. I got back home, nose pinched, feeling pale and dizzy, and cleared it out, washed off the dried blood, changed t-shirt, and sat down. This was refreshing, but I was still light-headed. Then, ten minutes later, it started again – by this time my mp3 player had got around to Ikonika’s ‘Fish’. I dutifully began pinching my nose and stuffing tissues up my left nostril again. But it just kept on flowing... if the first rush was big, this second drop was IMMENSE, the intensifying synths of Ikonika’s punch-drunk track rising higher and higher, spinning me around every bit as much as the blood-loss.

Failing to staunch the flow, dripping red on every surface, down my arm, onto my shirt, my eyes suddenly started to well up with liquid too. But it felt too warm to be tears somehow, not thin or salty enough. I ran into the bathroom to see what the hell was going on: I was, to my utter shock, crying tears of blood. Rich scarlet gloop was literally pouring out from the tear duct of my left eye – filling my eye, clouding my vision, then climactically breaking its own surface tension and flowing out, tracing the line of my nose.

Blood like this is too thick to just fall to the floor, like tears would do: it doesn’t drop, it glides.

I stood in front of the mirror and let it elegantly, dramatically, flow out of my eye and down my cheek.

Visceral as fuck, this music.

Lady Gaga's 'Telephone', the year 2010, Wikileaks, Bradley Manning, and the collision of literally everything that's ever happened into one postmodern pop cultural singularity

2010-12-22T15:54:00.011Z

Oh, THE GLUT

Wikileaks is too much. It's all too much. Since the world started leaking, it's become impossible to judge anything, to take it all in, to comprehend. Where do you start with this much information? The alleged Wikileaks source, a 23-year-old American soldier called Bradley Manning, leaked the info by burning it onto CDs marked 'Lady Gaga', listening and lip-synching along to her mega-hit 'Telephone' as he did so, in the way that a 1950s cartoon character might whistle tunelessly to give an impression of benign innocence. This is from the alleged transcript in which he explained how he leaked the data.

(1:54:42 pm) bradass87: i would come in with music on a CD-RW

(1:55:21 pm) bradass87: labelled with something like "Lady Gaga"… erase the music… then write a compressed split file

(1:55:46 pm) bradass87: no-one suspected a thing

(2:00:12 pm) bradass87: everyone just sat at their workstations… watching music videos / car chases / buildings exploding... and writing more stuff to CD/DVD... the culture fed opportunities

(2:12:23 pm) bradass87: so... it was a massive data spillage... facilitated by numerous factors... both physically, technically, and culturally

(2:14:21 pm) bradass87: listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga's Telephone while exfiltratrating [sic] possibly the largest data spillage in american history

Manning's instant messager chats - if they are real - reveal a deeply troubled young man. Troubled by what he's done, but troubled by everything he's seen - by its quantity, by its breadth, by the fact it encompasses the whole world. With unimaginable data, comes unimaginable isolation. And now, not just emotionally, but literally: Manning is in solitary confinement, where, friends say, his physical and mental health are rapidly deteriorating. If he's responsible, he's guilty of 2010's phenomenal information overload, but he's its victim too...

(12:21:24 pm) bradass87: say... a database of half a million events during the iraq war... from 2004 to 2009... with reports, date time groups, lat-lon locations, casualty figures... ? or 260,000 state department cables from embassies and consulates all over the world, explaining how the first world exploits the third, in detail, from an internal perspective?

(1:00:57 pm) bradass87: theres so much... it affects everybody on earth...

I AM SICK AND TIRED OF MY PHONE R-RINGING

(1:14:11 pm) bradass87: i've totally lost my mind... i make no sense... the CPU is not made for this motherboard...

I LEFT MY HEAD AND MY HEART ON THE DANCEFLOOR

(1:39:03 pm) bradass87: i cant believe what im confessing to you :'(

(1:40:20 pm) bradass87: ive been so isolated so long... i just wanted to be nice, and live a normal life... but events kept forcing me to figure out ways to survive... smart enough to know whats going on, but helpless to do anything... no-one took any notice of me

YOU CAN CALL ALL YOU WANT / BUT THERE'S NO-ONE HOME / AND YOU'RE NOT GONNA REACH MY TELEPHONE

"It was a massive data spillage"

MTV News: What is Telephone about?

Lady Gaga: Fear of suffocation... the phone's ringing, and my head's ringing. Whether it's the telephone, or the thoughts in my own head...

The video for 'Telephone', an exquisitely overblown exercise in pop cultural elephantiasis – a 3:41 second song stretched over NINE MINUTES – riffing on Tarantino, on Pulp Fiction and Thelma and Louise, riffing on arch-kitsch takes on 1950s Americana, that twist post-war pop culture into hedonism-through-amorality. Brightly coloured diners and brightly coloured costumes: America's long history of violence rendered through a mass media lens. Hacking off Marvin's ear in Reservoir Dogs while a pop song plays; taking pictures on digital cameras of torture victims at Abu Ghraib.

(2:26:01 pm) bradass87: i dont believe in good guys versus bad guys anymore... only a plethora of states acting in self interest... with varying ethics and moral standards of course, but self-interest nonetheless

Don't Ask Don’t Tell

I don't even know where to start with the 'Afghanistan remake' of the 'Telephone' video I posted above: its breathtaking campness, and its hectic, zealous, jaw-dropping DIY reconstruction of a multi-million dollar pop cultural product. The soldiers' remake has 6 million views itself (the Gaga video an astonishing 97 million). But for now, let's just say it is strikingly camp; meanwhile, Manning himself has become the subject of great attention in terms of his sexuality. Was there "a don't ask don't tell issue" for Bradley Manning, as BoingBoing put it - was he trans, even, as is mooted here?

I'm not sure I buy the trans stuff, it seems to be reaching a little, searching for deep meaning in surface conversation - much as we struggle to find deep meaning in a video like Gaga's 'Telephone'; when actually, for all the racket, here may be very little being said. Either way, there is a quite evident inner pain in those transcripts, a young man struggling to gain a sense of self.. whether it's being in the closet, or just the less specific existential insecurities of a young man in a very strange world.

The crazy, final, inevitable meme-collision here, of course, is that Don't Ask Don't Tell was historically, heroically, finally repealed by the US Senate four days ago. And who was the passionate, clear-voiced, uber-public public figure who has been repeatedly banging the drum to "end this most serious prejudice", and "be a voice for my generation"? Take a guess.

"It's funny that in this day and age, a soldier singing aloud to Lady Gaga while fiddling around on an army computer chock full classified government data is not considered to be suspicious at all"

No it's not, Mediaite. It really isn't. It makes absolute blindingly perfect sense. It's the story of our age. It's all too much.

SOMETIMES I FEEL LIKE I LIVE IN GRAND CENTRAL STATION

***

(out to Jen Paton for the constant conversation on this - and spotting the link in the first place)

Upon Westminster Bridge

2010-12-17T19:18:00.002Z

Upon Westminster Bridge - William Wordsworth

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear

The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky,
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

From Hansard
Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab): Is not the point of a kettle that it brings things to the boil? Is the Home Secretary comfortable that largely because of her Government's decisions on the education maintenance allowance, minors and other young people were caught up in the kettle? She says that those who remained peaceful and wished to leave Whitehall were able to do so, but can she confirm that the IPCC is investigating a number of complaints about young people not being able to leave?

The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mrs Theresa May): The police did ensure that it was possible for peaceful protesters to leave Parliament square on Thursday. They put those arrangements in place, and a significant number of protesters took advantage of that and were allowed to leave by the police.

Kettle tactics risk Hillsborough-style tragedy – doctor
Crush of student protesters on Westminster Bridge compared to 1980s stadium disaster
The Observer, Sunday 19 December 2010

A senior doctor has warned that police risk repeating a Hillsborough-type tragedy if they continue with tactics deployed during the recent tuition fee protests.

The anaesthetist from Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, who gave medical assistance to the protesters, said that officers forced demonstrators into such a tight "kettle" on Westminster Bridge that they were in danger of being seriously crushed or pushed into the freezing River Thames.

The 34-year-old doctor, who set up a field hospital in Parliament Square, said that people on the bridge suffered respiratory problems, chest pains and the symptoms of severe crushing.

"Police had us so closely packed, I couldn't move my feet or hands an inch. We were in that situation like that for hours. People in the middle were having real difficulty breathing.

"It was the most disturbing thing I've ever seen – it must have been what Hillsborough was like. The crush was just so great. Repeatedly I tried to speak to officers, telling them that I was a doctor and that this was a serious health and safety risk," said the doctor, who did not want to be named.

Student Danielle Smith, 21, from Dagenham, studying creative and professional writing at the University of East London, said she was squeezed so tightly during the kettle that the day after it felt "like I'd been in a car accident".

"I couldn't move, and it hurt to laugh, breathe, sleep, sit down and eat. To do anything just really hurt. For days after I took as many painkillers as I could a day. I had real trouble standing in such a tight space. Again people were getting crushed. I had a shield in my face a few times. The police just hit those closest to them, they weren't really thinking about who was in the wrong or right."

She said it was incredible that none of the hundreds of protesters sandwiched between two lines of riot police fell off the bridge: "The people around the edge, they were screaming, saying they thought they were going to fall off."

This is our riot: POW!

2010-12-10T16:34:00.003Z

(sorry about my crap phone pics - this is the 'dancefloor' in parl sq)

Newsnight is very lucky to have Paul Mason: he’s consistently departed from what seems to be the news media's modus operandi, by actually bothering to find out what’s going on; rather than making smug, reactionary assumptions grounded in total ignorance (hi/byebye James MacIntyre), or being entirely fixated on fripperies like some posh nob's car being scuffed – when across central London young people trying to defend their rights to an affordable education are being bludgeoned by truncheon-wielding riot police. I saw a lot of blood yesterday, and a lot of defiance. I also spent seven hours in a police kettle, 90 minutes of which was on Westminster Bridge, after cops repeatedly lied to us that we were finally about to be let go (Alex Macpherson, who I was with, did a write-up here.) Here's what Paul Mason wrote about yesterday's Parliament Square rebellion:

The man in charge of the sound system was from an eco-farm, he told me, and had been trying to play "politically right on reggae"; however a crowd in which the oldest person was maybe seventeen took over the crucial jack plug, inserted it into a Blackberry, (iPhones are out for this demographic) and pumped out the dubstep.

Young men, mainly black, grabbed each other around the head and formed a surging dance to the digital beat lit, as the light failed, by the distinctly analog light of a bench they had set on fire. Any idea that you are dealing with Lacan-reading hipsters from Spitalfields on this demo is mistaken

While a good half of the march was undergraduates from the most militant college occupations - UCL, SOAS, Leeds, Sussex - the really stunning phenomenon, politically, was the presence of youth: bainlieue-style youth from Croydon, Peckam, the council estates of Islington.

We were with this crowd for hours yesterday, just as we had been the week before. Paul Mason is sadly one of the few journalists to have noticed that this isn't a movement exclusively spearheaded by undergraduate students, but by 'the EMA kids' from the poorer parts of London. And as a pedantic music hack who cares about these things, I've got to correct the one area where he is (forgivably) wrong. Specifically: this ain't dubstep. As fellow Parliament Sqaure kettle-ee @rougesfoam points out, the word ‘dubstep’ has become the musical equivalent of British politicians' notion of ‘fairness’ – in that it’s become utterly denuded of meaning by repeated misuse. Unlike fairness, I am quite sure I know dubstep when I see it – and it is not the definitive sound of this movement. With the caveat that various other things were playing yesterday in parts of Parliament Square (lover's rock, trance, samba, even ambient techno apparently) - this was the protest's main soundsytem, and it only played one dubstep tune. This is what we can recall between me and @lexpretend (cheers Alex!), a 2010 Riot Playlist, if you like:

Giggs - ??? (all Giggs tunes sound the same to me)
A.N.Other UK road rap MC... - Hold Yuh riddim
Gyptian ft Nicki Minaj - Hold Yuh
Benga and Coki - Night
JME - Serious
Tinie Tempah - Pass Out
Rihanna - Rude Boy
Elephant Man - Bun Bad Mind
Vybz Kartel ft Spice - Ramping Shop
Major Lazer - Pon Di Floor (twice)
Nicki Minaj ft. Eminem - Roman's Revenge (they only played Nicki's bit though)
50 Cent - Just A Lil Bit
Princess Nyah - Frontline
Donae'o - Party Hard
Sean Paul - Like Glue/Get Busy
Rihanna ft. Drake - What's My Name?
Lethal B - POW (Forward) (x3 reloads)

After I tweeted something admittedly flippant about dubstep being too middle-class and undergraduate (key age and class gap here, again) to be the sound of this moment, Dan Trilling wrote to me:

a plea: don't write anything saying dubstep is "middle class"! it's not that simple, no music genre is ever that easily linked to class. and even more so, London class/taste relationships do not map onto the rest of the country... i guarantee you that working-class kids in places like derby who are into dance music will be listening to dubstep. in smaller towns and cities music scenes are often too small to have such fine distinctions between genres (which, as it happens is why they have traditionally been musically very creative places).

And Dan knows Derby - and nuance. I wrote back, agreeing with his caution, but saying:

the london ema kids who were brucking out at the soundsystems yesterday are not on dubstep, trust me - they know what it is, they will and indeed did dance to benga and coki's night, but that was literally the only dubstep tune i heard all day - it was rnb, bashment, road rap, american hiphop and - albeit only once or twice - grime they were going off to... if you're 14, you're not going to clubs anyway - and tbh you're as likely to be into US stuff as UK stuff - pon di floor, sean paul 'like glue' and tinie tempah got the biggest responses.

Well, not quite the biggest responses. Because then there was 'POW'. This tune deserves an essay to itself, but suffice it to say that a track that was BANNED from clubs in London and Essex earlier this decade for being too rowdy, which is the perfect exemplar of grime's incendiary energy - an energy snuffed out by racist, youth- and class- phobic authorities via Form 696 - well.. to see several hundred young people gleefully raving to this in the dark, in an occupied Parliament Square, outside the Treasury, was pretty damn special. Here's my so-crap-as-to-be-almost-pointless phone-video-clip of the event, followed by the original.

Pow. See you at the next one.

Mariah Carey for The National

2010-11-29T16:37:00.001Z

My most recent essay for The National's Review, in which I argue that Mariah Carey in a sexy santa outfit represents the Platonic ideal of late-Christian festivity. Here it is to download as a PDF. (The National website is a tad ropey at the moment)

The video to Oh, Santa, the album’s stand-out track and lead single, tells its own story. Set in New York’s Radio City Music Hall, the video begins with an avuncular voiceover saying that the song is “brought to you by Lollipop Bling, from the Mariah Carey Fragrance Collection”. (This perfume actually exists.) Like the rest of the video, the ad is a 1970s homage – a pastiche, really – invoking American TV Christmas Specials of yore (and childhoods of yours, more importantly). Most striking is the fact that the ad for Lollipop Bling is woven into the fabric of the video, the footage of the bottle flickering as if weathered with age. Even branding is allowed sepia-tinted moments.

Rihanna for The National

2010-11-29T16:21:00.001Z

Rihanna 'Loud' review for The National, as a PDF. The stand-out track is this wicked bit of pop-reggae, 'Man Down': the campaign for a full-on Bajan pop album from Rhirhi starts NOW.

On Cheers (Drink to That), she sings herself self-help messages in fridge-magnet snippets: “Life’s too short to be sitting round miserable / People gonna talk whether you’re doing bad or good”, while a slothful drum-beat pitter-patters woozily like it’s had one many too drinks itself. It’s supposed to be a defiant, good-time anthem, a silencing of her demons with liquor, but when she wails to raise your glasses, it’s utterly – and tellingly – unconvincing.

Juke for The National

2010-11-29T16:09:00.000Z

Here's my review-essay for The National's Review about Planet Mu's recent juke releases as a (small) PDF, most notably the 'Bangs and Works Volume 1' compilation. I got into levels of racial segregation in American cities (Chicago ranks fifth worst in the US: I BET you can't guess the other four worst without reading the piece first), etymology and slave 'joog houses', geographical dislocation and, er, The Lion King.

"...all the congruent energy and avant-garde creativity of juke’s global peers looms into view, like separate battalions coming over the top of the hill and converging on the battlefield. The superficialities of form and tempo may differentiate Chicago juke from, say, kuduro in Luanda, or baile funk in Rio, but their commonality of spirit is undeniable. Scenius is not confined by geographical limits, and it does not mark the death of grassroots music that disparate underground sounds can now seep up through the global soil."

Darkstar - North

2010-10-11T09:49:00.001Z

By drawing on the shadowy side of 1980s pop, Darkstar recall an era when musical futurism - then exhibited in stabs of now-redundant synthesisers - offered imaginative respite from conservatism, both political and artistic.

...[they] make sure you hear the words that matter. In one memorable line, Buttery sings: "When it's late there's only you." If anything encapsulates the album's character, it is this. It might not always be clear whether any optimism exists in these washed-out evocations of 21st-century love and loss, but the truth is that it's always there somewhere, drifting on ripples of crackling interference.

Darkstar's debut album is out, then...

Here's my interview for The Guardian.

And here's my review-essay for The National's Review section.

Inside The Radio 1 Playlist Meeting

2010-10-11T09:33:00.000Z

A few weeks back I was lucky enough to be the first journalist to sit in on the Radio 1 Playlist Meeting in... well, as long as anyone at R1 could remember, anyway. The playlist process was shrouded in secrecy for so many years - and its consequences are still as influential as ever.

The resulting feature is in the November issue of Q Magazine, along with my full-page review of the Magnetic Man album.

There is a light that never goes... out?

2010-09-17T10:30:00.003Z

Earlier this year, there was a mass grass-roots campaign to rescue what is pretty unarguably London's best club, Plastic People, from the utterly spurious claims of Hackney Council that it ought to be closed to rescue the area from anti-social behaviour. If you've ever been out in Shoreditch you'll know what a joke this is - closing Plastic People to improve the tone of the area is just re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic - there are genuine offenders there, clubs which vomit onto Old Street drunken, bottle-smashing, coked-up twats in want of a fight every weekend. Plastic People is the least offensive out of about 20 late-night venues in the Shoreditch triangle. "Save Plastic People - CLOSE 333!" as one friend of mine commented at the time. In the spring, 16,000 people joined the Save Plastic People facebook group, 8,000 signed the petition, and there were blog posts and heartfelt testimonies as far as the eye could see, from America and beyond. I can't be bothered to enumerate what makes the 200-capacity club the best in London at this stage, this isn't the time - if you know, you know.

Since it re-opened - and London's forward-thinking dance fans breathed a huge sigh of relief - there have been some good nights there, and FWD>> has returned to its spiritual home on Curtain Road. They seemed to forget to re-install the ventilation at first, making it a de facto bikram rave, but that's tolerable, for the unmatchable joys of that system, that room, that ambience. What isn't, is the conditions imposed on the license-holders in terms of security and crowd-control. Queuing for 15 minutes just to get outside for a breath of fresh(-ish) air or a cigarette is not the one. Nor are police hovering outside in a massive van every night, interrogating the crowd. Nor is airport-style security for the only fucking club in Shoreditch that NEVER HAS ANY TROUBLE.

I understand why they've had to do it, that it's a condition of the license renewal, that PP are walking on eggshells now - and this is just hearsay and rumour, but I've heard a lot said about pressure to close the venue coming from the people who have recently chosen (god knows why) to live on Curtain Road. If you have more concrete info on this issue, the connection with the gentrification of Shoreditch, please let me know - and apologies for my conjecture. But none of the other clubs on Curtain Road seem to have faced uber-harsh license conditions, from what I can see. So this isn't to criticise Ade, the venue's legendary owner, or FWD>>, or Sarah Souljah, or anyone else trying to put on great music in a great - now compromised - venue. But unless something drastic changes soon, fuck Plastic People, and fuck Shoreditch. I'll give it one or two more goes, but realistically, it seems like the dream is over.

Why? Here's why. This is now becoming a familiar story - from DJ Oneman's Twitter last night:

"Just got turfed from plastic people now I'm only allowed in for my set some airport security shit fuck shoreditch"

"@mrroska I had weed in my pocket even tho I confessed and said I would put it in my car. Don't care that they took it - no entry is a par"

"Ok so I've been banned for life and this will be my last ever set at plastic people kinda sad but happy to see the back of it tbh"

Well done Hackney Council/the Met, you let us save Plastic People, but killed its spirit - the London rave scene's most heart-breaking pyrrhic victory. Sad times.

In the elegaic conversation that followed last night, badgyal Mz @Jodelka sent me the following message:

In 1598 the management of The Curtain theatre in Shoreditch ran into trouble with their ground landlord, so the players dismantled the whole building, transported the iron work and timbers across the City, and across the river, where they re-erected it.

The re-erected theatre became The Globe.

Time to move FWD>> again?

Jammer for The National

2010-09-08T09:31:00.004Z

Another long piece for The National's 'Review', in which I introduce grime to the UAE, chart Jammer's history, discuss the zeitgeist trade-off between grime's underground and the charts, and - somewhere in there - review his debut album.

To concentrate on grime’s darkest reaches is to miss out on at least half its raison d’être. It was – and still is – a style of contradictory extremes; situating squalor and glittering aspiration side-by-side. In its flush of youth, songs detailing lurid acts of violence would be performed in opulent clubs with strict dress codes; brutally avant-garde rhythms accompanied by sugar-sweet female vocals and baroque melodies.

Guardian Music Weekly Podcast

2010-09-08T09:28:00.000Z

I did a couple of these over the summer with Live magazine superhero Emma Warren and muy affable Guardian hosts Rosie Swash and Alexis Petridis. So, er, follow the links below if you can stand to hear me wittering.

13 August - Dubstep special, with Skream, Mount Kimbie, and The Dream's 'Yamaha' as the song I brought in for show and tell (guests bring in their favourite songs of the moment for a section called the singles club).

27 August - Carnival special, with Norman Jay, The Jolly Boys, and JW & Blaze's insane 'Palance' (seriously, watch the video).

Mobile Disco: Sodcasting for The Guardian

2010-09-08T09:25:00.002Z

3,000 word cover feature for The Guardian's Film&Music about 'sodcasting', mobile phone music, and the battle for public space, featuring Dexplicit, Wayne Marshall (who started this whole ball rolling), and a million angry Guardian commenters.

This bit didn't make it into the paper, but the stuff about the mosquito - and its specifically high use in the UK - is astonishing, and significant:

The last two decades have seen scores of playing fields 'realigned' for housing development, a rapid growth in the number of gated communities, and now even sound is being used to alienate young British people from public space. A report by the Council of Europe published in late June condemned as "degrading and discriminatory" the use of the 'mosquito', a high-pitched sound which can be heard "only by children and people into their early 20s," The Guardian reported, "and is used to prevent teenagers congregating outside shops, schools and railway stations". 5,000 of these devices have been sold across Europe since 2006: 3,500 of these were in the UK.

Wiley Zip Files - The Interview

2010-07-15T13:05:00.003Z

If there's one thing world-weary Wileyologists have learned, it's to never be surprised by anything he does.

*Here’s the ~breaking news~ Guardian blog post I wrote about Wiley’s incredible Zip Files give-away.

*Here’s the interview I did with Wiley for today’s Guardian g2.

*And here’s an interview out-take where Wiley seemed to be describing the hardcore continuum for a minute, before sullying its ideological purity with ragga and Rick Astley. D’oh!

British music evolves so quickly doesn’t it?

“Yeah – and I like all the elements that we’ve got. When I go to the studio now I stop and I think ‘right, I’m in England’. The music in this country that I’ve been a part of is hardcore, drum ‘n’ bass, jungle, it extends onto garage and then into grime. And if you go back before any of that my dad’s just flooded my brain with reggae, ragga, soul, jazz… so obviously if I’m going to go and make music, I am surely allowed to touch every one of those elements that has been clubbed into my soul.”

“It’s all part of it – Rebel MC, Ragga Twins… even Rick Astley, Kylie Minogue; any pop music that came out in the days when I went to school. Whatever I’ve heard is a fusion of what I give back.”

He also admiringly described Tinie Tempah's 'Pass Out' as "an Eskimo moment" (albeit mostly for Labyrinth's production on the track), i.e. an agenda-setting new 4 minute paradigm for how to make pop music.

Christina Aguilera for The National

2010-06-29T15:54:00.001Z

Lengthy review of the new Christina Aguilera album for The National, reflecting on cyborg-pop, electroclash, riot grrl, and how the female pop zeitgeist has changed since Xtina's debut...

...in the work of someone like Gaga strands of consumerism, spirituality, physical pleasure, love, art and politics are woven into mass-produced tapestries that show almost everything yet tell almost nothing. While they may look fully formed from a distance, the closer one gets, the more they pixelate into meaningless synthetic threads. Aguilera can give so much more than that. Her most memorable work is finely crafted, her talents organic and gloriously human.

Historic announcement: Rinse FM goes legal

2010-06-29T15:37:00.003Z

Big news a long time in gestation for London's leading (former) pirate radio station. Here's a piece welcoming the historic Ofcom announcement on the Guardian music blog.

There is so much that makes Rinse FM special: having to slow-dance around the room with an aerial in search of a better signal, the beguiling patter of the shout-outs, the adverts for raves voiced by MEN WHO MUST HAVE SOME KIND OF HEARING IMPAIRMENT, THE WAY THEY'RE SHOUTING.

Oh and here's a longer piece on Rinse I wrote for the New Statesman in 2007, foreshadowing the station's move towards legitimacy.

why it's okay to support england

2010-06-11T12:39:00.000Z

"For my niece and nephew - two mixed-race kids who grew up in London - supporting England is a no-brainer because English football looks more or less like the England they inhabit... "The imagined community of millions," wrote the historian Eric Hobsbawm, "seems more real as a team of 11 named people." That they feel part of that community in a way that I could not makes me want to join it now."
Gary Younge - Why I’ll be cheering on England this year

"Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same. It is the bridge between the future and the past."
George Orwell – The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius

Omar Souleyman for The National

2010-05-28T15:09:00.002Z

I was lucky enough to meet Syrian pop superstar Omar Souleyman when he toured the UK recently, and interview him on The Scala's tiled mezzanine floor. Here's the piece.

The crowd soon realises that a lack of knowledge of the right steps is not a problem, and begin to make up their own: a mixture of naive attempts at dabke, flamenco, Bollywood hand-flourishes, fist-pumping, foot-stomping, rock moshing, even the festive footwork of an Irish ceilidh. It’s a mess, but a glorious one. Denuded of context or comparative experience, shorn of the arch judgements normally made by music lovers in a city with a lot of music to judge, the only option left is to enjoy.

why capitalism and art is complicated

2010-05-28T14:09:00.010Z

because despite the admittedly compelling wails of disgust at sex and the city 2’s celebration of rampant consumerism, viz roger ebert here

“Some of these people make my skin crawl. The characters of "Sex and the City 2" are flyweight bubbleheads living in a world which rarely requires three sentences in a row. Their defining quality is consuming things. They gobble food, fashion, houses, husbands, children, vitamins and freebies.”

well, despite those wails, this was the best song of last year:

The-Dream - Fancy

check the incredible final 60 seconds in particular, its intense, ramped up climax of brand fetishisation. 'fancy' perfectly encapsulates the consumerism-run-amok archetype - and it's fucking brilliant. i must have rewound those final 60 seconds about 100 times last year. in other carrie bradshaw-related news, i hear sex and the city 3 is going to be loosely based on brecht's 'rise and fall of the city of mahogonny', so that should redress the balance a bit.

Poplar and Limehouse: The Fight For Broken Britain

2010-05-10T11:34:00.001Z

I spent a lot of time walking around Poplar and Limehouse in the first three months of this year: some of it with the local Conservatives, some of it on my own. It's a very, very strange place. Here's the fruits of my wandering: a chunky piece of reportage for Five Dials, Hamish Hamilton's superb free literary magazine. Issue 12 is the one you want, 'The Utterly Broken Britain Issue' - download it, print it out, read it in a park somewhere. Then subscribe for future issues.

Halfway down the promontory lies Millwall Outer Dock, a sort of inland lake bordered by houses and warehouses. Chained-up canoes sit stacked by its side, buildings lie dormant, one light in every ten turned on. The spring gloaming casts a beautifully dim light over the water as dusk falls, and to my amazement the only sound is a very distant murmur of traffic, and the somnolent squawking of seagulls – literally hundreds of them – drifting off to sleep on the water. Not one person passes me in half an hour sitting by its shore. For a place teeming with the ghosts of empire, hard labour, hard liquor, sailors and prostitutes, it’s almost unbearably tranquil. This Britain isn’t broken: it’s just quiet to the point of being unsettling.

Ikonika for The National

2010-05-10T11:15:00.002Z

An ~essay-length~ review of Ikonika's debut album, 'Contact, Love, Want, Have' for U.A.E.'s finest, The National.

The album’s first peak is another single, Fish: a building synth drama that weeps intensity. Clean and pared down, it is also, thanks to its crisp woodblock percussion, comfortingly human. For all the supposed cyborgisation of the computerised composition process, this is assiduously fleshly music – warm muscle tissue in motion, a rush of blood to the legs.

The Tories: A Warning From History

2010-05-09T13:29:00.003Z

O Cromwell! O Ireton! How hath a little time and successe changed the honest shape of so many Officers!

-The Hunting of the Foxes, John Lilburne, 21 March 1649

They undertook merely to quiet and please us (like children with rattles) till they had done their main work… that so they might have no opposition from us, but that we might be lulled asleep in a fool’s paradise with thoughts of their honest intentions till all was over…

-The Legall Fundementall Liberties, Lilburne, 8 June 1649

#dontdoitnick

Take Back Parliament

Numbers and Glasgow club music

2010-04-14T11:29:00.005Z

I went to Glasgow (and Clerkenwell) to write about Numbers and the Weegie rave scene for The Guardian

As talk turns to Numbers' hectic upcoming release schedule, the pub's landlady comes over and says something in Revill's ear. "Ah – we'd better round things up, we've got to go downstairs to check out Chez Damier." Pardon? Glasgow's level of credibility is itself stretching credibility. Detroit techno legend Chez Damier is playing a DJ set at 5pm in the afternoon, in a city-centre pub basement? The Numbers crew shrug and smile: of course he is.

This is what we have to look forward to

2010-04-07T00:34:00.002Z

Since the election is finally underway, it's about time I posted this: undercover at the Conservative Future Christmas party for Prospect

“Yah but your surname is Jenkins,” his friend says through a mouthful of teeth. “That’s such a butler’s name!”

“Jenkiiiiiiins!!” They all boom happily at once, summoning an imaginary servant and the ghost of Conservative past at the same time. The declamation falls away into the West End night, nullified by the bright lights of nearby Piccadilly Circus.

“Where’s Bollinger?” someone wonders, idly.

“Bollie? She’s left I think.”

This piece got me some considerable stick from one unintentionally hilarious young Tory blogger.

Party Election Broadcast

2010-03-22T07:57:00.003Z

There's going to be a general election on Thursday 6 May then, and it'll be called in the next couple of weeks, maybe after Easter weekend. As you brace yourself for the quiet tumult of 60 million people murmuring "they're all the same" in unison, I think a little bit of Chris Morris et al from 1996:
On the Hour - Party Election Broadcast

"Forward with the future time" indeed.

Publish, damn, and be damned: Hyperdub, Woebot, and the death of negative criticism

2010-03-18T03:36:00.007Z

[Ikonika by bildungsr0man]

This is a tale of two blog posts.

Part one: Ikonika and Confused Uncle Syndrome

Music blogging legend Woebot jumped back into the pool recently after some time away. Heralding his return was a piece on Ikonika’s debut LP ‘Contact, Love, Want, Have’, which started with this delightful paragraph:

To that from a Dubstep release by, not a white bloke, but a black girl. Am I being unnecessarily controversial by suggesting that Hyperdub is practicing reverse sexism with this and the Cooly G records? Shouldn’t race and sex be irrelevant? Do these releases prove or disprove that? Does anyone care?

Now, contrarianism - that ol' chestnut, provoking debate - that's one thing. But this is just bafflingly lost. Some of Woebot’s peers from the blogosphere's old guard now paper over the cracks in their knowledge (and interest) in club music with confused, confusing dismissals of these 'ere new-fangled sounds. Simon Reynolds' dismissal of Jam City and Joy Orbison was a particularly laughable example of Confused Uncle Syndrome: out-of-touch bloggers briefly looking up from their post-punk reissue packs, like retired army generals aroused from slumber by the sudden arrival of a hyperactive child in the members' lounge.
I’m going to take that paragraph one bit at a time:

a Dubstep release

Barely. I just wrote a 1,000-word review of Ikonika’s album yesterday, so you’ll forgive me not repeating it here – but 'Contact’ spreads its wings far, far beyond what we know as dubstep. The sparse stoner half-step of 2005 is one of many audible influences on her sound - but so is UK garage, house, emo/hardcore, r'n'b, hip-hop, and, er, Madonna. The mid-range wobblers of 2008-10 that have come to define the genre render the term 'dubstep' reductive at best - it's a useful starting point for discussing Hyperdub releases, but no more.

by, not a white bloke, but a black girl

Wow. If it matters, Ikonika’s parentage is half-Filipino, half-Egyptian. This isn't difficult to find out.

Am I being unnecessarily controversial by suggesting that Hyperdub is practicing reverse sexism with this and the Cooly G records?

Well, yes. And not an interesting way, not in a thought-provoking way. Crying "reverse sexism" at Hyperdub over these two producers is both baffling and offensive. Since 2008’s ‘Please’ Ikonika has been widely regarded as one of the brightest new producers to emerge from the dubstep scene (which she did - though her ship has since sailed far from those bassy shores), and the hype around Cooly G last year was extraordinary – on the UK funky scene, among denizens of Dissensus and FACT magazine, jaded dubstep fans – even in the broadsheets. Hear ‘Love Dub’ in a club in the right, er, narco-sonic mood at 2am and it’s not hard to see why. Subjectively, Kode9 signing albums by Cooly and Ikonika fits perfectly with his irrepressible enthusiasm for producers pushing at the genre-boundaries of UK club music. Objectively, it just makes good business sense, since everyone's all over them.

Shouldn’t race and sex be irrelevant?

They should be irrelevant to the criteria on which artists' music is judged, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be discussed at all, when there's something to say about them. The next hack to ask Ikonika 'how does it feel to be a female producer in a boy's world?' is - quite rightly - going to get a slap from her though. So I hear.

Do these releases prove or disprove that?

They don’t prove anything.

Does anyone care?

I doubt it. This is the blogosphere, remember.

[screenshot of Pitchfork's Hyperdub-girl confusion, yesterday: using a pic of Cooly G to illustrate an (excellent) piece on Ikonika. Full interview by Blackdown.]

Part two: 'No one says anything bad about anything'

Having read the blog post, I registered my consternation on Twitter, which was echoed by various DJs, bloggers, and fans (of Woebot and Ikonika alike). Then the Ikonika post disappeared completely, even from the internet archive, and this post cropped up instead. It’s clearly about the Ikonika post and the backlash, a lament for the death of negative criticism:

Nowadays it seems that there is no such thing as bad press. No one says anything bad about anything. They either say nothing or they say it’s great. Certainly it’s a lot easier that way for all parties – no need for journalists to be hunted down in a fatwa, no need for label bosses and artists to be confronted with depressing copy. However what it does mean is that Music Journalism in the press (and now online) is a sea of empty platitudes and that writers (and consequently artists) are completely ghettoised, ring-fenced in by a cabal of sympathetic organisations.

And the thing is, I completely agree with this. Well, almost completely; ‘empty platitudes’ is reductive and unfair: there’s a lot of great music criticism being written. But presently, very little of it is negative; it may be analytical, gushing, musicological, theoretical, indulgent, silly, serious or sociological - but it's rarely negative. Behind this is the dramatic drop in the number of staff writers at music magazines since the 1990s - because there are only about two of the fuckers left to work at. It's simply that journalists are never called upon to write about music they dislike - and they're unlikely to actively seek out such a task, even if the opportunity were there. As a freelancer I fall into this category: with limited time and money, I pitch articles about the music I’m interested in, i.e. the music I like. And while me and Alex Sushon used to do a bit of this on Lower End Spasm, I simply don’t have time in the day to be blogging negative criticism of music anymore. It's genuinely frustrating, there’s a lot to hate out there... (check out Alex Macpherson's great invective against Animal Collective). Ironically, my angst tends to come out on Dissensus, the forum Woebot runs.

But it is a problem for music journalism. And there’s a problem with Hyperdub in particular: the discourse around 2010’s most interesting producers, UK garage’s nameless musical heirs, suffers a bit from the culture of relentless critical positivity about the label. This will sound like sycophancy in itself, but Kode9’s discoveries have been so consistently good that a chorus of hype upon a new Hyperdub release feels almost inevitable now. I'm aware I’ve written a lot of very positive things about acts on the label (on Burial, Darkstar, Kode9 himself, and soon, Ikonika), so here, for what it’s worth, are my five least favourite Hyperdub releases:

Flying Lotus - Disco Balls Like purple wow if it was plodding, colour-blind, and didn't make you say 'wow'.
Samiyam - Rollerskates 'Off-kilter' really, really shouldn't be regarded as a compliment as often as it is.
Zomby - Gloop See above. At his best Zomby is incredible - but 7/8ths of this double EP leaves me cold, bored and itchy.
Cooly G - Weekend Fly A UK funky riddim that barely even starts, let alone makes you want to dance. Irritating vocal too.
DVA - Natty An uninspired, aimless track by a normally inspiring, focused producer.

As off-the-mark as it was, I’m disappointed Woebot’s deleted the first post discussed here (I had to ask a Power-Googler friend to track it down for me). The problem with it was not that he was refusing to join in the critical circle-jerk about the internet's favourite record label, not at all. It wasn't a question of the positivists launching a witch-hunt against a dissenter – it was that he seemed to have entirely misunderstood Ikonika, and dubstep, and Hyperdub, and was using provocation as a substitute for insight; I was worried he'd caught whatever it is Reynolds and K-Punk have been suffering from. I speak as someone who used to love the old Woebot blog – and on the basis of his other posts, he’s still well worth reading. Another little excerpt here:

In the old days when I used to read NME and Melody Maker one would come across bad press quite often. It was always amusing and edifying to read. When you read bad press you would also put considerably more faith in good press.

True enough, of course. Although, in the old days, writing in a physical magazine, Woebot wouldn’t have been able to delete the blog post so many people complained about.

Publish, damn, and be damned.

Lost Treasures of the Black Heart

2010-03-08T00:03:00.005Z

(flyer by the superb Anna Saunders)

Tomorrow at The Black Heart pub in Camden, I will be reading selected extracts from Fearne Cotton: The Amazing Story of Britain's Brightest Young TV Star. This is part of Josie Long's comic homage to unacknowledged heroes and delightful obscurities,

The Lost Treasures of the Black Heart
£5/£3 if you come dressed as Lil Bow Wow or Charles Bukowski

Alongside proper actual performers like Josie and Robin Ince. Yes, yes, shurely shome mishtake, I know.

Salt-N-Pepa

2010-03-07T23:01:00.004Z

Feature for The Independent about Salt N Pepa's return, and their legacy as feminist pop cultural icons - informing everyone from Destiny's Child to Electrik Red.

It has become received wisdom that a major millennial power-shift saw rap and R'n'B become the most anti-feminist music there is. Beyoncé, in particular, is derided by feminists as the ultimate in male-objectification fantasies – but there is another interpretation, around the idea that black women at the forefront of popular culture continue to – albeit subtly – subvert gender roles. Beyoncé's huge 2008 hit "Single Ladies", ostensibly a re-establishment of modern woman as passive wife, is arguably pure parody – Beyoncé is no longer a mortal woman but a cyborg, as her robot-arm in the video demonstrates. In the words of the superb It's Her Factory blog, "the song isn't an ode to marriage and property and heterosexuality, it's an Afrofuturist feminist critique of heterosexual courtship."

Grime: banished from physical London

2010-02-21T10:40:00.007Z

It's a measure of how busy I've been lately that I still haven't managed to pick up a physical copy of the RBMA's Daily Note newspaper with my story on the cover. Some people will be familiar - perhaps wearily over-familiar - with the Met's systematic campaign to shut down London's urban music scenes. After pieces in Woofah and The Guardian (twice) I had hoped I wouldn't have to write about Form 696 again; I was wrong. Even if those of us who care about grime (and bashment, funky, and other verboten genres) know all too well about police transgressions against it (with a little help from certain venues), the 80,000 commuters who were handed the free Daily Note paper probably didn't.

This is about bureaucracy as a blunt but powerful weapon, but it's also about the pyrrhic victory of web 2.0 democratisation of underground music scenes. It's a grim state of affairs when you can watch a grime DJ playing a set online from their bedroom (via u-stream) but you can't see them in the club round the corner. Full article is here, or in PDF here.

In London itself underground black music has been forced into the private sphere, away from the clubs. Grime was always meant to be club music: inheriting its BPM from garage, it was that bit too fast to simply be the British hip hop. Yet in 2010, the music has been relegated from clubs to be heard mostly through the pale grey beehive of PC speakers, or in the solitary isolation of headphones. In this context, common experience, enthusiasm and debate occurs globally on internet message boards, but not communally, locally, in the bars and clubs of the capital. Grime has been banished from real, physical London.

--
PS as an aside i am so so proud to have a piece headlined with a line from my favourite clash song EVER

Bruce Forsyth, Anish Kapoor, The Nutty Professor, etc

2010-02-08T10:29:00.003Z

Quick round-up:

Glow sticks, superclubs... and Bruce Forsyth in the New Statesman: dance manias, Barbara Ehrenreich, skanking in IKEA, and why, in strictly Darwinian terms, wallflowers get EATEN BY TIGERS.

Bread and Roses in Middlesbrough in the New Statesman: "Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses" - why the arrival of the world's most expensive public art project in Boro is very poorly timed.

Some free old skool Geeneus riddims on Lower End Spasm.

Interviewed on The Lepanto League about writing, London music, and political reportage. Also I told the story about winning a competition to review Dragonheart when I was 13 - the prize was a long-sleeve Nutty Professor t-shirt.

2010: looking forward

2010-01-02T13:39:00.004Z

Nice start to the new decade...

Grime takeover on the cover of The Guardian's Film&Music supplement.

Last time I interviewed Tinchy Stryder's Ruff Sqwad crew, we met on a gusty flyover in the east London district of Bow, and talked in the flat MC Fuda Guy grew up in, sitting on the bunk beds he shared with his brother, grime producer XTC. This time around, Tinchy is being ribbed for requesting orange juice "with bits in". "You're such a diva now!" his manager chides, "you've changed!".

Foreign Beggars on the cover of The National's 'M' Magazine.

Beneath the gusty 4pm dusk of a London winter lies Mindloop Studios, a subterranean, soundproof haven from the noisy streets above. It’s a plush set-up, with fancy espresso machines, comfy sofas and framed platinum discs belonging to Whitney Houston and forgotten Irish megastars The Corrs. It’s not the most likely environment for hip-hop, but then neither, arguably, is Dubai: rap music has come a long way in its three decades to become the international lingua franca of a globalised popular culture.

2009: looking back

2010-01-02T13:03:00.004Z

Some tidbits from the long-tail-end of 2009 I never blogged:

Only a teenage genius with nothing to lose would start their debut with ‘Sittin’ Here’, one of the harshest musical and lyrical descriptions of modern Britain imaginable, like a grime version of La Haine.

A write-up of Dizzee's Boy In Da Corner for FACT's 100 Albums of the Decade list. BIDC was number 3 in their list, which immediately qualifies it as a bit less idiotic than all the other decade lists. I also wrote a blurb about the (cough) unimpeachable DJ-led rollage of Slimzee's 2002 Sidewinder bonus tape, which was number 50 in the list.

***********

The Foley sounds reveal one of the most important science fiction themes: transformation. In this case, the sound design deals with transformation of forms, specifically, human and machine.

A Darkstar interview for FACT. This is the obscure Human League b-side they've covered on their debut (as yet still unnamed) album, 'You Remind Me of Gold':

***********

And finally my 20 records of 2009, also for FACT. The-Dream's 'Love Vs Money' album was at number 1, everything after that is in the random order it came to my head. Apparently The-Dream is making a video for 'Fancy', which is very exciting news indeed; how insouciantly brilliant do you have to be to have the drums crash in SIX MINUTES AND SEVENTEEN SECONDS into a song only six minutes and thirty seconds long? This brilliant.

To my east-side crew, get paper: more Sinogrime

2009-12-18T12:36:00.006Z

I recently wrote a Sinogrime primer to accompany an exclusive Kode9 mix on Lower End Spasm.

Sinogrime is a sub-genre that barely ever existed, a momentary glitch in the supposedly predictable sonic geography of London dance music. Around 2002-3, with garage crumbling and the cement still drying on grime as a genre, a few producers in E3 suddenly lurched further east than they ever had before. This is the sound of Shanghai towerblocks and the millennial promise of a new superpower, refracted through the scuffed windows of Crossways Estate in Bow.

Grime at its best is sonic futurism incarnate, rejecting the clutter of live instrumentation in favour of empty space, dehumanised synths and detuned basslines. I was unlucky enough to see Roll Deep play with a live band at the Stratford Rex in 2005, and it was all kinds of wrong - the wholesome twang of the live bass guitar the complete antithesis of grime's aesthetic.

The Rise of China: Wiley the Financier

"London could be pushed into third place as a global financial centre by Shanghai in the next decade", according to the BBC earlier this week.

Grime is situated in the future aesthetically, musically - and perhaps embedded in Sinogrime is a sort of intuition about where the future lies, geo-politically. Canary Wharf is the 'stainless steel obelisk' honouring 20th century western hyper-capitalism, a totem to Thatcherism that looms over grime's spiritual epicentre, the Isle of Dogs and Bow. In looking east beyond its 50 stories to China, Sinogrime producers were engaged in socio-political prophecy, taking grime's aspirational, acquisitional tendencies and sending them east on a journey beyond Britain's deflating post-industrial bubble.

Sinogrime reflects the current, gradual shift in superpowers from west to east, incorporating China, and rejecting America: in terms of the US, it's notable that grime has always been not hip-hop.

This isn't to say the likes of Wiley and Danny Weed have been moonlighting as financial speculators, or that in 2003 they explicitly predicted the burst of the bubble and the global downturn. But then let's face it, nor did the actual financial speculators.

Dizzee Rascal - I Luv U Remix

Wiley and Danny Weed - Blue Rizla

Monument Park, the House of Terror, and Soviet Memory

2009-10-29T12:09:00.003Z

A web exclusive for Prospect magazine, to commemorate 20 years since Hungarian independence on 23 October 1989.

After the England Writers' Team secured a satisfying 1-1 draw against the Mighty Magyars (match report here), I spent several days wandering around socialist realist theme parks, taking Communist Walking Tours, and accidentally stumbling on neo-fascist paramilitary groups honouring their nationalist heroes.

The red-and-white striped badges worn by the group were the colours of the Árpád dynasty of Hungarian kings; tellingly, the Arrow Cross party were also fond of this flag. Later that night, I returned to the statue, where a candelit vigil had begun for the execution of Count Batthyány and the 13 martyrs of Arad, the rebel generals who died with him. In attendance, along with the tattooed bikers and youths in combat trousers, were smartly-dressed middle classes. After the speeches, as the people dispersed, Árpád flags tucked under their arms, two young men gave out small slips of paper adorned with the names of those 14 icons of Hungarian nationalism.

Hyperdub 5 feature

2009-10-29T12:03:00.002Z

In Guardian Film & Music on Friday. Acoustic water-cannons, voodoo rituals for Sun journalists, tonal representation of colour, the usual fun from Kode9, Darkstar, Zomby et al..

"There's a history of music, particularly dub and reggae, being described as a virus – Hyperdub is a mutation of British electronic music, infected by Jamaican soundsystem culture: from dub and reggae, through jungle, right up to grime, dubstep and funky. It's a way of thinking about how musical change and evolution takes place."

On the buses: sodcasting and mobile music culture

2009-10-23T13:42:00.011Z

In response to Wayne Marshall’s excellent series on ‘Mobile Music and Treble Culture’. From the abstract:

Today most people — in the overdeveloped world, that is — have a cellphone, an iPod, a laptop on their person, much of the time. These digital devices have become, for many, the primary interfaces with sound recordings, especially in the form of mp3s, compressed music files that allow for easy circulation and storage by adding a further layer of frequency range constraint (albeit mostly out of the range of human hearing). While some bemoan the social isolation symbolized by Apple’s white earbuds, remarkably, especially among young people, these personal portable technologies also enable the sharing of music in public. It is not uncommon in major cities such as New York or London to observe a crowd of teenagers clustered around a tinny piece of plastic broadcasting a trebly slice of the latest pop hit.

So many of the developments in music technology in the era of web 2.0 is driving it to become a more private experience. While this affects everyone, it has particular resonance for under-18s: people with less private space and income at their disposal, and more of a need and evolutionary drive to be out and about developing their social skills. With a soundtrack.

But the impulse to enjoy music together is innate: it’s an integral part of what human beings are. Barbara Ehrenreich argues that dancing and playing music were vital evolutionary imperatives for early humans – it encouraged them to bond together in groups larger than that of a small family (the optimal size was about 15), and in doing so, be better prepared to ward off predators. Most studies of cave paintings indicate that collective festivity precedes the evolution of speech as a social glue.

'Sodcasting'

In this context, it’s not far-fetched to argue that the public playing of trebly mp3s off mobile phones on British public transport – mostly buses, mostly in London, mostly by teenagers, often non-white teenagers – is a clear and important attempt to correct the drift away from literally millennia of human public festivity. It’s been called ‘sodcasting’ in the press a few times, which is a pretty horrible, New Labour-esque neologism. Generally, the kneejerk reactions of little Englanders have been kept to a minimum, simply because little Englanders don’t use the bus, so they’d never know these out-of-control rowdy teenagers were pissing on everyone else’s metaphorical privet hedge. A couple of socially-constipated thirty-somethings from Enfield felt strongly enough to start a Music Free Bus campaign, however:

"People think they can sit on a bus and blast music out, and when you ask them to turn it down you get the abuse, especially from teenagers. I am not surprised people do not say anything because if I saw a group of seven or eight people playing music I would not go up to them, but if TfL advertised it on the bus, we could point to the sign to show them it is not permitted."

The campaign website now appears to be down: another victory for Broken Britain, eh?

On the London buses

From my haphazard gathering of anecdotal evidence on sodcasting (if we must call it that), the comments on Wayne's blog, and my own experience of hearing everything from minimal techno to South American pop on London's buses, I’ve heard it's common on public transport from Coventry, to Bristol, to Aberdeen – though there is less evidence of the practice outside the UK, so far. It’s two joyful examples from friends in London which stand out, illustrating sodcasting as much more than just sonic territorial pissings:

Alex Macpherson on Kanye West’s ‘Gold Digger’, on the 277

It was years ago, on the 277, in the middle of the afternoon. Three schoolgirls obviously skiving school (hurrah), playing it off their phone, and singing it in rounds: two singing the looped sample while one did the rap, and switching for each verse. Interspersed with giggles, obviously. It was an incredible moment.

Tom Lea on Fire Camp’s ‘Forward 2’, route unclear

I was quite drunk on a night bus in north London – couldn't tell you the number for the life of me- two girls playing ‘Forward 2’ off a phone (the one with Bruza, Kano and JME on it), and I sung the Bruza verse with one of them. In case you had any doubt, its not just a London ting, in fact it was more prevalent up north when I was at uni, but because it's Scotland they played hard house, bonkers, trance et al.

Recently I was on the overland from Cambridge Heath to Seven Sisters, and some girl played Donaeo’s ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ off her phone, to which someone who I think was her little brother exclaimed 'this song makes me want to dance right here!'. That was just quite cute.

No Bass?

Anecdotal tales of London bus-music have long pointed towards the ever-growing popularity of road-rap: Giggs’ infamous ‘Track 9’ freestyle is possibly the most sodcasted track ever (this is more guesswork on my part, do please suggest alternatives for the title). Either way, it's not really contentious to moot Giggs as the first crossover star who owes their success largely to plays on mobile phone speakers. While road-rap may hold sway on the buses now, it's grime which has the best fit for the context – clear in grime's low-bitrate, badly-mastered early incarnations, which carryied that rawness and DIY energy of punk, as Alex Bok Bok and I argued in our Bloggariddims post:

Tracks like the insane, taut Ruff Sqwad anthem R U Double F – one of the few vocal tracks we've included [in the mix] – is a 64kbps, straight-off-Limewire, never-released work of genius. It's an mp3 dubplate, and the grooves have been battered into submission by repeated compression: we've included many low-bitrate tracks in this mix, because for us fucked-up sounding mp3s were a massive part of listening to music from this era.

Grime suits mobile phone speaker technology, or lack thereof, perfectly. The glorification of treble culture in grime reached a peak of forthrightness with the Slix Riddim 'No Bass', rinsed by the likes of Ruff Sqwad, Bossman, and scores of mobile phone DJs throughout 2005/6. Does grime need bass weight to back its beef? Let’s ask Chronik about that:

Chronik - No Bass riddim

Sodcasting may 'fucking annoy' more private souls, but it’s so much more than anti-social territorialism. The Metropolitan Police have just announced that actually, yes, they will be unashamedly, explicitly targeting black music in London, leaving its fans marginalised into the private sphere by technology on the one hand, and the authorities on the other. In this context, sodcasting represents a vital, politicised re-socialisation of public culture, through the collective enjoyment of music; an agency of human interaction so ancient that it predates speech.

***
Edit: In my haste to post this, I forgot to mention Owen Hatherley's post on the subject from last year. He lauds this same idea of young people attempting to recover the public space that they've been alienated from - a strike back against privatisation which also comes up in the conclusion to Hatherley's 'Militant Modernism'. I missed the Militant Dysphoria event, and haven't read The Cold World yet, so I've only a few blog posts to go on, but isn't this assertive re-engagement with the public sphere, this flag-planting in the increasingly private terrain of public transport... isn't this entirely contrary to the idealised retreat-from-view of militant dysphoria? This comes back to my confusion about how dysphoria can be rendered militant in the first place, I need a good explanation of why the phrase is not oxymoronic. Any links gratefully appreciated.

Panic on the streets of Dalston; cardiac arrest on the streets of Boro

2009-10-09T12:27:00.003Z

Dalston Sainsbury's were giving away free panic alarms to all of their customers today.

I feel like maybe there's a point to be made there about the inextricable and mutually self-propelling drivers of fear and consumerism in late capitalist society.

But it's almost too easy, really.

On Teesside dysphoria is medicated with protein:

'The parmo goes national' on the Observer food blog

The 'Meat Feast Parmo' I ordered for £6.50 consisted of a chicken escalope marginally smaller than a satellite dish, deep fried in breadcrumbs, covered in béchamel sauce and melted cheddar cheese, and then topped with pepperoni, bacon, more cheese, and ladles of creamy garlic sauce. The one bit of protein the parmo does not seem to contain is parmesan.

This extraordinary beast of a late-night 'snack' is served with a mountain of chips and the most sarcastic portion of salad you've ever seen in your life. I ate a third of it with gusto, paused, came up for air, and suddenly felt quite ill.

My Fellow Americans in Sheffield

2009-09-24T08:49:00.004Z

It's 20-odd months since Tom Humberstone and I hitched our way through sub-zero temperatures to see prospective Democratic Presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama speak at a rally in the snow-caked fringes of Iowa City. Fuck it was cold that day. Few thought it would be possible on 3 January 2008, the day of the Iowa Caucus, but yesterday President Obama addressed the UN about his vision of a multilateral American future, about leaving the Bush era behind, and everyone nodded. Of course he said that; we knew he was going to say that. It's funny how quickly extraordinary events become normalised. The New Statesman's myopic, Clinton-obsessed US editor decided (from the comfort of his desk, naturally) Obama was finished within a week of the Iowa rally. Ha.

Over a year since we published (and sold out of) the book version of My Fellow Americans, Tom and I have been invited to Sheffield's 'Off The Shelf' literary festival to talk about what it's like to be cornered by deranged Mike Huckabee supporters in San Diego, or to be stalked by minor Presidential candidates in small towns in New Hampshire. In such luminous company as Peter Hook, Vic Reeves, Tony Benn and Hilary Mantel, we're doing two events: an afternoon workshop on DIY reportage for young people, and an illustrated talk about our experiences. Tickets and full details are here:

My Fellow Americans @ The Showroom Cinema: Monday 26 October 2009, 7pm

I'm also going to Budapest to play football for the England Writer's XI against the Hungary Writer's XI next week, so do let me know if you have any Hungarian tips. Please don't mention the International Goulash Festival, which I'm distraught to discover I will be missing by a matter of days.

Middlesbrough

2009-09-22T12:41:00.002Z

New Statesman Middlesbrough piece

After Corus, we weave through bizarre Disneyesque regeneration projects - all pastel colours, soft edges and bullet-pointed promises - and steer past the tucked shirts and short skirts of the high street to St Hilda's, the oldest and most maligned part of Middlesbrough. This is literally the wrong side of the tracks: the railway is the dividing line and "over the border", as local people describe the area, is eerily quiet, with half-demolished social housing standing isolated on large patches of brown-green scrub, waiting to be put out of its misery.

The New York Times tackles dubstep...

2009-09-22T12:30:00.003Z

...and comes off sounding a little bit like a Radio 4 sitcom featuring a 45 year-old character actor playing a 15 year-old member of da yoof:

The only thing more disruptive than a dubstep bass line is an outright break in the music, which also happened plenty of times in the small hours of Sunday morning, as Benga and Skream, both originally from Croydon in South London, D.J.’d as a tag team, each playing a record, or three, before passing off the headphones and controls.

Sometimes the transitions were a little sloppy, and sometimes this impromptu duo and everyone else onstage with them — several dozen at the night’s peak — were so thrilled at the first few seconds of a song that the D.J.’s stopped it and let the crowd shout until they started it anew.

Someone explain to them what a rewind is: these poor New Yorkers have clearly never had Craig David all over their boing.

Labour's past talks to its future

2009-09-14T09:33:00.002Z

From a 1945 Labour election pamphlet targeting Liberal voters:

"When the slump comes you Liberals will have either to abandon your reforms and ‘economise’ or else go forward to crush the financial sabotage, i.e. become Socialist. Why not do it now? Why not forestall the hour of peril when a reforming government is faced with an ‘economy ramp’ worked up by the millionaires?’ If your nerve fails then, and very regretfully you join with the Tories to "keep the country solvent," you will be swept away by the flood of political reaction and unreason. You will provide the "all-party" cloak to cover the ugly deformity of a Tory majority. That is what happened before, so you have been warned!"

O hai, Lord Mandelson, speaking on this morning's Today Programme. Plz can 2 hav nationalisation of commanding heights of industry as only feasible way of saving Labour Party from complete obliteration? Kthxbai!

Wombles, blitzkriegs, droughts and burritos

2009-09-10T10:05:00.007Z

I've been shockingly busy recently. Well, it's come as a shock to me anyway. Here's a brief round-up of things I forgot to mention:

I finally got around to writing a piece for the New Statesman about The People’s Republic of AFC Wimbledon: an oasis of socialism in the hyper-capitalist world of 21^st century English football. Oh south London (oh south London) is wonderful (is wonderful).

I spent a couple of months in the British Library for The Guardian digging up primary materials for their Second World War supplement series, which are free with the paper every day this week. Along with many soul-crushingly harrowing accounts of genocide and torture – in Europe and beyond – there were a few less grim moments. Ed Murrow’s evocations of London in the blitz for American radio audiences were particularly captivating.

I’m currently editing some ground-breaking research by the BBC World Service Trust into attitudes to and knowledge of climate change in Ethiopia, Senegal, Ghana, Uganda and Kenya. African countries are among the least culpable in the world for the effects of climate change, but in many cases lives are already being destroyed by climatic changes, droughts and floods - and it's only going to get worse. More on this project later, but for the moment here’s the Africa Talks Climate website.

I’ve been writing a series of articles about Mexican food for The Discovery Channel. That’s right muchachos, it's chimichanga time.

I dimly recall a time when I used to write about music... I'm hoping to revive this at some point.

'Cupid ain't got shit on me'

2009-09-07T10:59:00.003Z

A lengthy cash-point queue in Stoke Newington, 6pm on a Friday afternoon in early September. A good-looking 20 year-old guy in crisp street-wear is being told off by a woman who seems to be his older sister: she’s wearing a business suit and a disapproving expression, probably in her late 20s.

Girl: you need to sort it out and stop treating her like this...
Boy: pshh... I don’t need to sort anything out. She knows wha gwan.
Girl: you make me ashamed, haven’t you heard of romance?
Boy [kicking heels, hands in pockets]: Ha. Whatever. That stuff is bullshit.
Girl: haven’t you ever heard of Romeo and Juliet?
Boy [petulantly]: yes. So what? She knows wha gwan, that’s the end of it.
Girl: haven’t you heard the story of St Valentine?
Boy [who clearly hasn’t]: ... yes. Whatever. What’s that got to do with me?
Girl: you need to fix up. Haven’t you heard of Valentine? Well?
Boy [getting fed up with this, still kicking his heels]: ...
Girl: don’t you know about Romeo? Hmm?
Boy [looking up, having seized upon a comeback]: yeah but listen, you know what? You know what happened to Romeo? He got killed over that shit. He died! He was a fucking idiot.

*********

The-Dream’s ‘Love Vs Money’ finally, finally comes out in the UK on 28 September. It's been the album of the year for about six months already, whatever guys at cash-points in Stokey might think. Watch out for an interview with the latter-day ATL legend by Alex Macpherson in The Guardian soon.

Bad Dalston fiction

2009-08-04T12:57:00.003Z

It started with a kiss. A kiss of death.

"Welcome to Dalston, now the coolest place in Britain", ran a Guardian headline back in April, sitting atop a litany of parodic-sounding hipsters and hipster quotes that turned out to be all too real.

More cringeworthy words came in a short story in Saturday's Guardian Weekend magazine - a story by a middle-aged man about a 23-year-old fashionista girl, that was (of course) set in E8. Spurred on by this, we set up a blog for bad Dalston fiction: here's my first contribution, 'To Dalston we shall go', and here's the blog:

http://baddalstonshortstories.wordpress.com/

Btw here's something sincere (it's a fine line, admittedly) I wrote about Dalston a little while back.

The Essential Wiley + trimmings

2009-07-30T14:04:00.006Z

I could write about Wiley for pages and pages and pages: I wouldn't for a second argue with the notion that he's the most important British musician of the decade.

'The Essential Wiley' for FACT magazine

And a follow-up post with a couple of downloads in it from Mr DJ/Rupture. Also, if you've never seen it, here's mine and Alex Bok Bok's epic interview with Wil from early 2007.

****

Warp Records/Bleep.com recently asked me to name my album of the year so far, which wasn't easy, since my favourite music of the year (so far) doesn't really reside in album format. But any opportunity to evangelise the Omar S Fabric CD I will happily take.

****

Finally, this little tidbit recently re-emerged: it's the transcript of a (2006/7?) round-table discussion with Geeneus, Plastician, Martin Clark and several others about how underground music scenes evolve, and the compromises that have to be made in seeking mainstream recognition. All of the quotations attributed to me about drum 'n' bass were actually courtesy of Del Dias: I know eff all about d'n'b, of course.

That's me listening to MJ Cole, alongside Del. MJ Cole, who is very much back, all of a sudden - he has a brand new FACT mix out that's well worth a look.

All Tomorrow's Parties: NS Travels piece

2009-06-15T12:35:00.002Z

Morning, campers - in the New Statesman

They looked like refugees from an indie war, the duffel-coated huddled masses, sheltering ineffectually behind pin-badge amulets, under sheets of British summer rain.

I went to All Tomorrow's Parties in Butlins Minehead for the NS, and somehow avoided reviewing a single band all weekend. Huzzah.

Purple wow: bonus level

2009-06-15T12:08:00.006Z

(L-R: Gemmy, Joker, Guido, outside The Bell, Stoke's Croft)

The other day I went to Bristol to meet the new purple wave, Guido, Gemmy and Joker, for a piece that ran in Friday's Guardian:

Bristol fashion: the rise of purple

This was quickly picked up by The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones, who mentions that all the dubstep DJs he's met in the US have been women. 'Maybe it's different in England,' he suggets - it is Sasha. It is. I'll post a paragraph of the original piece that had to be cut for space, just because I think the Joker-Roni Size connection will interest some people:

It’s a school night in a cosy pub beer garden in Bristol, and three grown adults are humming different Sonic the Hedgehog and Street Fighter theme tunes at each other and downing cranberry sambucas. It’s not a scenario that screams out ‘the future of British dance music’, and the students and local misfits drinking in The Bell pay them no mind. No-one notices when the retro computer game eulogies mutate into slightly more candid clues: one of them, Joker, is on his way to Roni Size’s house after the pub: “Roni asked for a remix from me. I think maybe he expected to hear BRRRRRRRRRR, the generic dubstep wobble-bass sound, so he was kind of surprised by what he heard. But he gets it... he gets it.”

And here are a few bonus bits we didn't have space for in the purple text-box, a few tunes I arbitrarily decided would help to 'explain purple':

Gemmy – Sonic The Hedgehog theme remixes http://bit.ly/sonic1
Blackstreet – ‘Don’t Leave Me’ http://bit.ly/blackstreet1
Nate Dogg – ‘G Funk’ http://bit.ly/nate1
Skream – ‘Midnight Request Line’ http://bit.ly/skream1
Mr Fusion – ‘On Da Block’ http://bit.ly/block1

The great cultural entropy: as prophesised by Bis

2009-06-11T10:51:00.007Z

Are we reaching a deceleratory endpoint, in terms of cultural productivity? Are we 'running on empty'? Mark Fisher/K-Punk thinks we are - in the New Statesman a few weeks back he followed up Alex Williams' thought-provoking blog post with the same gloomily menopausal dismissal of contemporary dance music we heard at the nuum debate. (On which subject: I wrote a Buffoon Empiricist Manifesto on Lower End Spasm, putting the apparently controversial case that dancing is preferable to RSI.)

While jokingly mooting a riot grrl-Europop-grime club night on Dissensus, I was reminded of 'Eurodisco' by Bis, and looked it up on YouTube. Well I'll be damned if the Scottish trio haven't accounted for so many aspects of the hardcore continuum debate, years ahead of time. In a minimal, looped lyric - it is disco, after all - they deal with genre taxonomy and the 'wot do you call it' moment ("a style is named and it's dead"), and quite succinctly account for the idea of post-modern cultural entropy ("there is no latest trend / the party's at its end / i thought music was dead") and the terrible persistence of information in the web 2.0 era ("i'm just so sick of listening"). It's really quite extraordinary:

Bis - Eurodisco

the party's at its end
a style is named and it's dead
there is no latest trend
the party's at its end
if it's a new beginning, then i don't want to know
if it's not worth pretending, then i don't want to know
i'm just so sick of listening, why should i want to know
i lost my 15 minutes on eurodisco
the music's in my head
i thought music was dead
give me the words i'll sing
but i can't feel a thing...i'm singing
pump it up pump it up pump it up...
just don't stop just don't stop just don't stop...
the party's at its end
a style is named it's dead
there is no latest trend
eurodisco
you're so disco

J'accuse K-Punk: biting your ideas off an 11-year-old Bis single? I'm surprised.

Junior Spesh

2009-06-08T08:00:00.002Z

Last summer Elijah from the Butterz blog/Rinse FM and I were talking about the lack of imagination in music blogging – oh look, here’s another grime blog which offers embedded YouTube videos and nothing else: great.

So while the whole of the grime scene was on its summer holidays in Napa, I jokingly suggested we use Red Hot Entertainment’s brilliant ‘Junior Spesh’ ode to budget fried chicken shops as a jumping off point to start a blog on the subject. Elijah called my bluff and registered the name , and the Junior Spesh Blog was born. After a flurry of initial activity and a bit of a break, the blog is now back with a vengeance, with a host of contributors from the grime and dubstep scenes – at least half of our writers are leading DJs.

Chicken and chip shops are the pirate radio stations of the culinary world. Their starting point is the mainstream corporate legitimacy of KFC, the chain that has exported a culinary staple of the American south to the whole world – indeed our blog features a review of KFC in Cancun, Mexico, and its peculiar ‘curry sauce’ option. But what we’re really interested in is not KFC but the pirates: HFC, SFC, Dollar Fried Chicken, Alabama Fried Chicken, Kennedy Fried Chicken.

Just like pirate DVD sleeves, mistakes are made in the plagiarism of the original model: so you end up with such abominations as New York Fried Chicken (the very thought would upset southerners a great deal), Chickpizz (which serves pizza too), and New Taxas Fried Chicken (which managed to make up a new American state and spell it wrong too).

The names are silly and the chips are greasy, but in an age of global fast food brands, this pirate fried chicken stands against brand homogeneity and for devious ingenuity – it’s dirty, creative local capitalism at its best.

MPs do the right thing; predicted cold snap fails to materialise in hell

2009-05-20T22:55:00.004Z

Since last year the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee have been hearing evidence about the 2003 Licensing Act, about Form 696, and about how bureaucracy has come to shackle live music, clubs and even circuses. Astonishingly, the cross-party Committee of MPs has done the right thing, and called on the government to scrap 696 and re-liberalise small-scale music events. It’s a rare fillip for the image of MPs in these dark times: evidence of a switched-on, liberal parliamentary democracy, heeding popular feeling (the anti-696 petition), common sense (unlicensed live music does not result in orgies of violence), and expert witnesses (like Feargal Sharkey of UK Music, who I also interviewed for the Guardian piece on 696 and black music).

Politicians in acting-for-the-public-good SHOCKA. It does happen. Full story on The Guardian Music Blog.

Subsequently the Met Police have gone on the defensive, claiming 696 has helped reduce violent crime in this BBC interview:

"A co-ordinated effort, and 696 assisting the process of identifying potential gang conflict, is undoubtedly contributing towards that reduction of shooting incidents in licensed premises."

How 696 assists with identifying potential gang conflict is not made at all clear. The viability of the Met's stats are also unclear, with no proof of causality, and especially given they've been summoned specifically in response to criticism. What is increasingly clear is that the often-rumoured Police blacklist of artists - musicians whose names will get a rave shut down immediately - must exist. UK Music are trying to find out more about this issue, do get in touch with them if you know more.

Hardcore continuum debate: Aftermathematics

2009-05-20T22:33:00.000Z

Just a quick update to say the Hardcore Continuum discussion at UeL last month was good fun (not least because of the opportunity to 'drive' the DLR, above) - thanks to everyone who came. A few people have done write-ups or responses, including Alex Williams, Martin Clark, Melissa Bradshaw and Simon Reynolds, who I guess has been listening to tapes of the debate - I’m still not clear if mp3s are being made public or not, I've been told different things at different times.

I wrote this follow-up on Lower End Spasm, which was basically a long-winded way of saying ‘okay, this has been fun, I want to get back to enjoying music again now’. In Melissa Bradshaw's case, this mentality led her to flee to a socaerobics class half-way through the debate (see the link above). Alex Bok Bok pretty much ran home to get on with making beats. Friends in the audience who I spoke to afterwards (among their number promoters, DJs, producers, musicologists, bloggers, and broadsheet journalists, fwiw) responded in the same vein: "okay, that was that. Can we go raving now?" A bit of theory is indeed the spice of life, but too much of it and you end up choking.

The revolution at home

2009-03-04T12:28:00.003Z

Tony Benn spoke at a public meeting in Stoke Newington on Monday night, and I seized on the opportunity to see the big friendly giant of the British left in the flesh, sidestepping the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea on the way in. There's a write-up of the event here, so I won't bother reiterating everything that was said - but there was plenty of compelling pacifist rhetoric, calls for justice for the dead and displaced of Gaza, and enriching historical context, delivered Grandpa Simpson-style by Benn ('I remember being in London during the Blitz when...').

I just wanted to account for one of the audience members who spoke at the end. He was about 22 or 23, and spoke with deliberate, learned passion about the need to "shut down" the G20 when it comes to London on 2 April this year, to loud applause. He said it was the responsibility of young people like himself - like myself - to stand up and resist, to crush the international capitalist system that has brought the current economic crisis upon us. He spoke with anguish of his own personal plight, being without work for months, struggling to get by in recession-hit Britain after finishing his degree last summer. Our blighted generation are suffering the most, he said, and it will only get worse.

What I haven't told you is that this poor, impoverished young man, struggling just to survive in a country brought to its knees by global capitalism, had just graduated with a degree from UCL (one of the best universities in the UK), and was wearing crisp new Adidas pumps, a new Nike sweater, expensive looking jeans, and Georgio Armani frames to his glasses. I actually felt like punching him, but I didn't want to get moron on my knuckles. God I despise the left sometimes.

As Alan Parker Urban Warrior put it: "ignorance is a weapon: use it".

Nasty, Londonist and Short

2009-03-01T10:51:00.003Z

He's actually neither nasty nor short, it's just a silly pun on one of my favourite blogs.

Asked by the New Statesman last year "Do you love your country?" Roots Manuva replied: "I love London so much it should be a country. London, love you until you die."

Roots Manuva @ Koko for the New Statesman

The Hardcore Continuum? A discussion.

2009-03-01T10:40:00.001Z

Presented by the Centre for Cultural Studies Research, University of East London
In association with The Wire.
UEL Docklands Campus (Cyprus DLR)
April 29th 2009 2:00pm-6:00pm

Simon Reynolds' commentary on the "hardcore continuum" - the mutating sequence of dancefloor music to have emerged from the breakbeat hardcore matrix of the early 1990s - has recently generated intense debate in the musical blogosphere. What is the value of this concept? Does it still usefully describe the context from which dynamic new beat musics emerge? Can the conditions of creativity in the 1990s be replicated in the era of web 2.0? Should we even want them to be?

Speakers: Mark Fisher (K-Punk), Alex Williams (Splintering Bone Ashes), Steve Goodman (Kode 9), Lisa Blanning (The Wire), Dan Hancox (Guardian, New Statesman), Kodwo Eshun (Author of More Brilliant than the Sun), Joe Muggs (Mixmag, The Wire), Jeremy Gilbert (Co-author of Discographies)

Attendance is free but pre-registration is recommended. For info or to register contact J.Gilbert@uel.ac.uk

'Buffoon empiricism'

2009-02-20T14:48:00.003Z

some replies and follow-ups to my 'generational resentment' piece about the hardcore continuum in fact magazine: from k-punk, simon reynolds, alex williams, kode9, and mixed biscuits off dissensus.

*thanks to sara manara for the image and sophie heawood for the drunken meme

Wrap up warm

2009-02-14T03:53:00.005Z

(photo brazenly stolen from wordthecat)

The Triumph of Grime Music in The Guardian

Generational Resentment, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ignore the Hardcore Continuum in FACT magazine

DJ Maximum: Building a Funky Igloo at FWD>> on Lower End Spasm

Public Enemy No. 696 in The Guardian

Trouble The Water

2009-01-13T20:03:00.005Z

Last night I went to see Trouble the Water, a documentary about Hurricane Katrina, filmed largely from inside New Orleans when the storm hit. Kimberly Rivers Roberts, a sweet, sensitive, god-fearing, communitarian, drug-dealing 24-year-old, living with her husband in one of the poorest parts of NO, bought a $20 camera the day before the storm hit, and this brilliant, hugely affecting film is the result. "One of the best American documentaries in recent memory." said the New York Times, which sounds about right.

There are so many tragedies in the world, and most of them don't get the attention they deserve; I can't quite work out why I'm particularly obsessed with this one. I think it could be because of the sheer, bare-faced simplicity of it. When so many conflicts, atrocities and 'government malfunctions' are so fiendishly complicated, there's something about the rare, straightforward horror of Katrina that hits us post-ideological leftists right between the eyes: such unambiguous wrongs, visited on the poorest members of society by a country that - at so many different levels of state authority - couldn't give a shit as its citizens lay dying.

I spent most of the film with my jaw open, or swearing quietly under my breath, shocked by the pictures of first world streets under deep, deep water, shocked by the hubris and cowardice of those in uniforms, shocked by the fortitude of those citizens who picked their lives up and swam to shore.

Here's what N'Orlins looked like when My Fellow Americans (i.e. me, Tom and Rachael) passed through it in January 2008:

beyond the French Quarter, some areas remain entirely un-populated for whole blocks, family houses are still left as crumbling wreckage, with flotsam-ridden yards, almost every street is scarred with pot-holes that could swallow your whole wheel, and crime is still a major problem. Last month three guys with AK-47s held up an armoured bank truck outside a middle school playground around the corner from where we were staying - in the middle of recess. Their getaway was aided by the fact that the NOPD literally could not carry out a proper Police chase: the roads are just too messed up for that, thanks to a combination of neglect, Katrina, and the army humvees that pounded the streets in the aftermath of the hurricane.

Watch the trailer for Trouble The Water here, and go to the film's official site to find out how you can help with the rebuilding of New Orleans' still ailing infrastructure.

Essentials, crack squirrels and The Office

2008-12-28T17:25:00.003Z

Some of my festive scrawlings:

Our office across the pond
On The Guardian website: a response to the ridiculous, provincialist idea that The Office (US) is inferior to The Office (UK) simply because it's different/American/bigger/isn't suffused with ennui.

A Lower End Spasm Christmas
Some south-London themed musical rarities on the Spasm, courtesy of Essentials, DJ Oneman, and the crack squirrels.

London Gang Culture on Newsnight: Know The Levels

2008-12-13T15:32:00.003Z

On Newsnight on Thursday there was a report into gang culture in London. I don’t want to get into all the issues I have with the media’s extraordinary coverage of this subject over the summer, because we’ll be here all night. There is just one issue for now: one segment, 34 minutes into the episode that you can watch here, featuring an interview with a young gang member from Walthamstow. BBC reporter Angus Stickler’s apparent misunderstanding of the word ‘ratings’ led to what I suspect might be a truly Chris Morris-esque bit of storytelling.

I am no expert in gang crime, not a bit of it. And I’m not going to go into the worthy (and less worthy) bits of reporting in this Newsnight piece, and some of the horrible things that do happen, infrequently, to young people on London’s streets. What I do know is that in this parlance, if you’re “getting ratings”, that means you’re getting an entirely abstract type of respect from your peers. Abstract. Not marks out of ten, not grades on a report card. I’m absolutely willing to be proven wrong on this, but I just wonder whether this is a teenager’s fiction, given credence by news media who are all too keen to believe his hype-talk. See what you think:

Angus Stickler: “When you first joined the gang I presume you were at the bottom level? You work your way up?”

Teenage Gang Member: “Yeah you work your way up. What you do, and how you are… the more stuff you do, the more ratings you get.”

AS: “More.. ratings? So you’re actually rated? What rating did you have?”

TGM: (slight pause) “Like, level five I would say.”

AS: “You actually have different levels?”

TGM: “Yeah different levels.”

AS: “And you were level five – out of what?”

TGM: “Out of ten.”

AS: “So you were middle ranking?”

TGM: “Middle ranking yeah.”

AS: “What did you have to do to get to level five?”

TGM: “Prove that I can do a lot of stuff.. do whatever, when it comes to it.”

AS: “Stab people?”

TGM: “Yeah.”

It seems intuitive that where they exist in a coherent form, street gangs are likely to be somewhat hierarchical. But the semantics above deserve closer attention: the BBC journalist is the first person to introduce the word “level” to the conversation, which is picked up a few lines later by the teenager. The idea of stratified, numbered levels suits Stickler’s theory: the introduction to the segment begins with a voice-over assertion that "the Walthamstow gang is organised". My question is, where is this notion of organisation coming from?

So. Farewell Then...

2008-12-12T15:55:00.007Z

I popped into Woolworths this morning. You may've read the stories of frantic bargain-buying as the historic chain of general stores crumbles into crunchy dust, with 27,000 job losses likely. As I stepped over the threshold into the busy but forlorn Stoke Newington branch, something wonderfully inappropriate came on the PA: Ricky Martin's mindlessly jaunty Livin' La Vida Loca.

The horrendous, rather shocking bridge-line "she'll take away your pain / like a bullet to your brain" ricocheted around the uniformly unhappy shoppers, who were queueing 15 people deep. My friend Sara has done a lot of research into the anthropology of queueing in the past, and I wonder if she can explain why it is that more working-class orientated shops have longer, sadder queues. Primark, Matalan... it's always the same.

When the news of the chain's demise first broke, a friend's Facebook status ran as follows: "RIP Woolworths: heaven needed some shears, a sandwich toaster and a big bag of cola bottles". And that's the nub of it: there just isn't a commercial point to its overly-broad remit anymore; Woolworths is a relic, its outdated place in the British consciousness reflected in the battered, cold, grey linoleum that lines its floors.

Whoever chooses the music playing over the PA seemed to understand its obselescence: first the blackly ironic Livin' La Vida Loca, then, equally bizarrely, Geri Halliwell's 'Mi Chico Latino'. Why were they playing second-rate chart pop from 1999? Pop hits of the 60s would have seemed less dated, somehow.

Even the closing down sale itself was dripping with pathos - half-empty shelves supporting cheap, broken produce, attended to by poor, unhappy customers. 20% off a wilting mug tree? You're alright, thanks. The signs advertising "10% OFF" explained how much of a saving 10% worked out as, on prices of £1, £2, £3, £4, etc. If you can't work out 10% of £1 I'm not sure you deserve a mug tree. Your mugs can bloody well sort themselves out.

How To Be Alone in Dalston

2008-12-08T16:09:00.007Z

I was re-reading Jonathan Franzen's excellent collection of essays How To Be Alone last week - in which he touches on the difficulties of maintaining subtlety and complexity amidst the deafening clatter of the information age, of the paradox of needing to be alone, while fighting capitalism's tendency to atomise us into lonely individualism. Technology, the theory goes, merely drives us further into what situationists thought of as capitalism's suffocating pod-like lifestyle (home-pod to work-pod to social-pod, then back to home-pod).

And then I went out shopping in Dalston.

As I returned with my weekly grocery haul from Ridley Road's wonderful market on Saturday afternoon, I came across a substantial huddle of people gathered around the Islam stall opposite Dalston Kingsland station. You will almost always find Christian, Muslim and socialist evangelists on Kingsland Road, standing behind their pulpit-like trestle tables hawking inky flyers, gamefully hectoring amidst the chilly weekend bustle, each hoping to save us in their own way.

You will always find them there, but people usually don't listen to what they're saying. Religion and socialism are equally hard sells in 21st century London, little more than evocative relics from the era of ideology.

But on this occasion, the Islam stall had somehow morphed into Speaker's Corner. "What's going on?" I asked the west African guy next to me. "Theological debate" he said, grinning broadly. We chatted a bit, then tried to turn back to the locus of the debate - but there wasn't really a single focus anymore. Initially everyone was watching as three Christian women debated with one of the (male) Muslim stallholders about Islam and gender ("if you respect your wives and sisters so much then why aren't they here?"), but already the crowd had started having their own debates among themselves. 20-30 people of all different ages and races - an ageing corduroy-hippy guy, a few Brit-Turk teenagers idling away their weekend, several mums carrying bags of shopping - having at least five or six different discussions about religion, politics, gender, and god knows what else, with people they'd never met.

This cracking open of our hermetic pods brought back memories of the summer in Dalston, when a group of us spent some wonderful evenings at the Fenerbahce Social Club supporting Turkey with our 'fellow' Turks, dancing in the street afterwards, banging on bus windows, and so on.

It says 'MEMBERS ONLY' in big blue letters outside the Fenerbahce Social Club. And we ain't members. Or even Turks. But you know what? We asked - slightly nervously - if we could join them to watch the game, and they said yes with more enthusiasm than we could ever have imagined.. "here, please have my chair! Can we get you a beer..?". At its best, London proves you don't need to look very far to find a sense of community with people you've never met. Atomised? Little Jonny Franzen needs to get out more.

To the left, to the left

2008-12-03T15:09:00.004Z

Everything you own in the box to the left.

Let's reimagine FDR with a bit of imagination shall we Gordon? Can haz unemployment-busting public works projects demonstrating a genuine commitment to renewable energy? 10,000 sacked city workers turning Surrey into one giant wind-farm? Flood the west London congestion charge zone and make Borisland hydro-electric? If only we could find a way to harness the formidable power of Tory cynicism as a renewable energy source.

The Wire, hope and the New Statesman

2008-11-17T18:59:00.003Z

I have a piece about pirate radio, www.grimetapes.com, and transience in the new issue of The Wire. For once I've been given the editorial leeway to explain the music's power properly - rather than having 'the essence of grime' squeezed into one short, unsatisfactory intro sentence, as usually happens. Big up The Wire, you don't know how much difference this makes (or perhaps, you do).

Two recent blog posts from me on Lower End Spasm, one very silly and one slightly more serious state-of-the-scene business... Grime: Thee True Historie and Hessle Audio: Going on 'Deep'.

Meanwhile, here's my review of This Isn't For You, a new experimental classical night, in the current issue of the New Statesman.

Finally, there was some election or other Tuesday before last. Tom and I saw Mr Obama speak the day of the Iowa Caucus, 3 January 2008.. I've been thinking back to that evening a lot recently.. still can't quite believe it. Any of it.

Gordon Delano Roosevelt

2008-09-30T15:30:00.004Z

I don't officially use this blog anymore, preferring to blog about music on Lower End Spasm as ever, and various other bits and bobs on The Guardian's Comment is Free blog (In Defence of Hipsters and In Defence of Musical (ahem) Miscegenation).

But I just wanted to express my consternation that so few people are connecting the whole financial apocalypse/end of the world as we know it to some of its historical forebears:

In particular, that so few commentators saw fit to connect Gordon Brown's fantastic Labour Party conference speech calling for a "new settlement" to FDR's 1933 speech calling for a (the) New Deal. The latter called for cross-party unity and grand public works projects to raise up a poverty-stricken nation. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" he said; a message the spiralling markets could do with heeding today. In April 2007 The Guardian published a series of Great Speeches in pamphlet form, and one of them was FDR's 1933 new Deal speech. Here are some timely words from the introduction to that pamphlet:

"The old order had collapsed; the old certitudes were as bankrupt as the countless companies that had gone under. Roosevelt... would discard one of the clearest pledges of this inaugural speech - that the cost of government would be "drastically reduced" - when he saw that the only way forward was for government to stimulate the economy, invest in great public works, feed the hungry and for a time employ millions who had nowhere else to turn."

And who wrote this elegy to FDR back in April 2007, just before things began to go belly-up? A man you may know called Gordon Brown.

It's summer, what's happening?

2008-06-12T23:11:00.002Z

Well, mostly, Tom Humberstone and I finished a whole entire book of my words and Tom's pictures from the campaign trail - new ones, fresh ones, and the best ones from the blog, beautifully designed by Tom on lovely thick matt paper. It's been lauded by Jesse Armstrong, the writer of Peep Show, Jeffrey Brown, creator of superb graphic novels, Iain Dale, political blogger supremo, Justin Webb, BBC North America Editor, and just about everyone in-between these diverse points.

Our launch was tremendously successful, and now the book is available to buy on PayPal here, with details of shop sales and cheques and such here. The limited-edition, individually-numbered first print run is almost GONE, so get it while it's hot - or else spend months crying in front of eBay later.

Other recent excitements:

Me (and Jay-Z) Vs Noel Gallagher for The Guardian

Me Vs the BNP for the New Statesman

Me being surprised and impressed by an ageing Public Enemy for the New Statesman.

Tom and I interviewed by BBC Radio Five Live about My Fellow Americans.

My Fellow Americans - the book!

2008-05-06T14:56:00.005Z

Tom Humberstone and I are pleased to present My Fellow Americans, the book of our election blog, the first book published about this election, which will be available to buy for the first time on Wednesday 28 May at our launch party in The Cross Kings in (you guessed it) King’s Cross:

My Fellow Americans Book Launch
Wednesday 28th May from 7pm
The Cross Kings, 126 York Way, Kings Cross, London
Free entry
Live music from: Le Tetsuo, Plug, Beacons, Left With pictures
DJs: Nik Void, Word the Cat

Click here for a pdf of the flyer.

Click here for a pdf of the press release.

The book will be available to buy online from www.myfellowamericans2008.com and www.ventedspleen.com after the launch party. Selected stores in the UK will also distribute the limited edition first printing but if you would like to pre-order and reserve a copy please contact us at press@myfellowamericans2008.com.

My Fellow Americans

2007-12-17T18:56:00.000Z

Please spend the next eight weeks of your life here:

http://myfellowamericans2008.com/

I will be.

Quick ones

2007-11-09T18:37:00.001Z

***Burial interview-profile for The Guardian

***Grime lives! for The Guardian

***Durrty Goodz interview-profile for FACT

Lots of stuff on www.dot-alt.blogspot.com, keep checking that.

Exciting news coming very soon.

Woofah to Elderado in Seven Steps

2007-09-08T02:36:00.000Z

***People who act to rectify their disappointment always impress me. John Eden and Paul Meme have done just that - they wanted something more than just blogs and limited mainstream coverage for the music they love, so they sold some old records and used the money to launch a magazine. Issue #1 of Woofah is out now, and features my almost-impossible-to-obtain interview with the elusive, brilliant Skepta, who of course is every mother's favourite (video). It's not going to be online, you have to BUY IT, and since it is a wonderful, tangible thing to own, and hold in your very own hands, this is not a tough decision to make. 44 pages of the best writers, illustrators, and photographers in the UK on reggae, grime and dubstep, not an single advert in sight, and all delivered to your door for £3. Sod yer glossy PR-dictated hype bibles, here be beauty.

***Everyone's got an angle on Amy Winehouse. My contribution to the canon is - quel surprise - sillier than most: Observations on tenuous claims to fame in the New Statesman. Now you too can discover the nature of my personal connection to Winehouse, not to mention Neutrino from Oxide & Neutrino. Except of course I tell those stories about three times a week, so you've probably heard them all already. For more tenuous claims to fame see this wonderfully entertaining thread on Dissensus on the same subject. There really is nothing like a good anecdote. Remember that kids.

***More worthily, and interestingly, I was asked to step in and write the New Statesman's radio review column on Rinse FM last week. Great fun to be writing about people like Vectra and Little Dee in the political magazine of the left - Orwell would approve, I just know it, arf - and hopefully Alistair Darling will be tuning in before too long.

***Because - and a few of you may have heard me say this before, haha - GRIME'S NOT DEAD. Ignore the pretty shameful treatment of the g-word by Dizzee Rascal, Lethal Bizzle, and Kano this year (Dizzee is definitely the most culpable here - disowning your past is so summer 2007 it seems), and let the facts speak for themselves. The only grime show on legal radio is also the most popular on the FM dial in its time slot in London. 48,000 people listen to Logan Sama's show on Kiss 100 every Monday in London alone (compared to 21,000 listening to Radio 1 in the same time slot). Click the link above for my elegiac response to this news on Dazed Digital. Click here for the latest crazy shenanigans in the Elderado-esque soap that is grime.

***Talking of Kano (as I was at some point), here's my interview with him for the June issue of Dazed&Confused. He was very pleasant considering he'd just woken up when I arrived in his backstage enclave. At that point in time I hadn't heard his new album; given the compulsory Kate Nash collaboration this was probably for the best - for all concerned. Here's the piece on Ruff Sqwad I wrote for Dazed in November 2006, while we're at it.

***Here's a piece I wrote ages ago about Scottish indie stalwarts Chemikal Underground (Part 1, 2) for a sadly-defunct magazine called The Lip. Stewart Henderson, former Delgado and label co-owner, did all the hard work: it's a great interview, just because Henderson gave me some truly inspirational answers. Reflecting the fantastic response to Woofah Issue #1, Henderson confirms that blood, sweat and tears are the least you should give up for what you love - if you ever wondered whether starting that magazine/band/label/club night would be worth all the hassle... it is.

***Finally, I posted loads of vital grime mp3s, news and comment here on the always essential Lower End Spasm. If you want to know what all this bassline/niche/4x4 business is about, then let Alex bring you up to speed.

What's new pussycat?

2007-08-02T01:17:00.000Z

***Monkey: Journey to the West review-feature in the New Statesman. That was a larf. I met Simon Price too, which was nice, for the Manics fan still lurking somewhere in me. I didn't ask him to analyse the lyrics of 'Dead Yankee Drawl'.. maybe I should have done.

***Some of my chinadialogue features:

Green celebrities
Green nightlife
Green rock music
Green.. er.. one-off festivals, I guess. What it is is an interview with Live Earth's official spokesman about how their event wasn't going to be a waste of time and carbon. I just wanted the link to start with the word 'green'.

Please go and join the debate with real-life Chinese people, speaking Chinese!

***Here's what's good in grime right now: Durrty Goodz. Go get the mp3s, they're still there and they're AMAZING.

***Alex's slot in the 'Dazed Digital 50' - the interview isn't online though.

***The most recent Offender Learning And Skills Service newsletter (woo).

***Umm, there's my Kano feature in Dazed&Confused. I haven't scanned it in because I don't have a scanner. Kano was very affable but him and grime are basically distant cousins that don't talk anymore.

Another rather ad hoc update

2007-05-29T12:28:00.000Z

***I interviewed Wiley for The Guardian. The original pre-edit piece is here.

***I took the Euston Manifesto authors to task in the New Statesman for rather letting the side down, in light of the left's strong historical roots in stirring, inspirational writing.

***I wrote a piece for The Guardian about MySpace's attempt to horn in on the US Presidential Election.

***I interviewed Amy Ferguson for Nylon magazine, which my sister has rather helpfully scanned in for me.

***I interviewed some random guy called Alex Sushon (arf arf) for Dazed&Confused's upcoming 'Web 50' issue. Watch out for that.

***I have been working for a website called chinadialogue.net, writing about green celebrities, and Live Earth, and generally making the world a better place. It's been very useful to have my suspicions and fragments of knowledge about climate change solidified by the experts, and also learn about the Chinese heavy metal scene in the process. My pieces haven't gone up yet, but they will do when 'Cooler Living', the yoof section of the site, launches later this week.

***I went to HMP Wandsworth last week, which has got to be one of the strangest experiences of my life. Prisons are right there, in amongst us and our hustling, bustling, workaday lives... but they define 'other' more than anything else in modern civilisation can. As memorable experiences go, it was up there with visiting Springfield Psychiatric Hospital.

The Wandsworth visit was for an education event I'm going to document in the Offender Learning And Skills Service (OLASS) newsletter, which I'm still editing. It's quite niche I appreciate, but if anyone wants to read it the latest issue is here.

***One final thing... check out this fantastic book about the art of writing edited by my good friend Phil Oltermann. He was interviewed on Radio 4 about it you know!

Stopgap Upd8

2007-03-21T15:25:00.000Z

So there's going to be some changes around here soon. Nice changes. But for now here's where most of my writing's at:

Lower End Spasm

New Statesman articles

Guardian articles

Guardian blog posts

Dazed&Confused blog posts

Random review for The Independent

You can also check out some of my stuff in The Word and the Dazed&Confused print edition.

What I have been doing lately

2007-01-25T13:22:00.000Z

Writing a couple of pieces for Dazed&Confused's new blog
Interviewing Logan Sama for Lower End Spasm
Editing the OLASS (Offender Learning And Skills Service) e-Bulletin

I have also been eating quite a lot of chorizo, and some magnificent stilton. No change there then.

Single issue parties

2006-12-06T18:45:00.000Z

Another little something I knocked up in that idle part of Sunday evening between The Westminster Hour finishing and The Ashes (don't get me started) coverage beginning... couldn't get anyone to take it on Monday morning and before you could say 'news angle' the news angle had passed...

--------------------------

Gil, the Israeli pensioners party, shocked everyone when it won seven seats in the Knesset earlier this year. In Canada, the Bloc Québécois was formed solely to argue for Quebecois independence, and has acquired more than 10% of the vote in the five elections since its birth. The Referendum Party, meanwhile, disappeared in ignominy, and there still hasn’t been a referendum almost a decade later.

Now a new party is hoping to realign the British political landscape with their own audaciously parochial agenda: they are Animals Count, and the clue is rather cleverly embedded in their name. They want to “establish a voice for the animals through a dedicated political party, which focuses on respect and compassion for all living beings”.

Launching last Sunday (Dec 3), Animals Count marked the occasion with an event at Kensington Town Hall, and Jasmijn de Boo paid a visit to BBC Five Live to explain her cause. Challenged over whether a single issue party would ever be able to get a significant foothold in British politics, de Boo pointed to the increasingly successful Green Party, whose External Communications Co-ordinator Jim Killock was also in the studio.

“We are not a single issue party” Killock objected. “That’s like saying the Labour Party started off as a single issue party with the issue of workers rights and social justice.” The Green Party has demonstrated how central tenets can be broadened to a more holistic political philosophy: few would contest that ‘green’ issues are ones also pertaining to health, education and the economy. It is difficult to see how Animals Count might achieve a similarly wide-lens focus. What could their Defence Spokesperson possibly have to say about the invasion of Iraq? ‘Please try not to bomb any porcupines’?

It is tempting to toy with the idea of a Private Members Bill about pelicans (think about it), fishcal policy, Pre-Budgie Reports, the European Common Meerkat, or even the jettisoning of Claws Four at the party’s Con-fur-ence. But that would be unfair. And it is understandable that Animals Count want to reinvigorate the animal rights movement in a nation of animal lovers, where, let us not forget, the RSPCA supposedly raises more money than the NSPCC. In the wake of some devastating publicity caused by transgressions by animal rights extremists, a high-profile push for political credibility would at least tip media coverage back in the right direction.

In purely electoral terms however, Animals Count seem to have made a miscalculation. Israel’s Pensioners Party obtained their position in the Knesset with the backing of thousands of pensioners at the ballot box: until Fido and Tibbles get the vote in the UK, it is difficult to see their political advocates gracing the House of Commons.

Or so I had thought. In the Dutch general election two weeks ago (Nov 22) a four-year-old political party made a major breakthrough, gaining the first two seats in its history. Its name? Partij voor de Dieren, The Party for the Animals.

Yesteryear's hepcats

2006-12-01T11:54:00.000Z

Last week the NME published its annual Cool List, providing zeitgeist hunters everywhere with a dowsing rod for locating this year’s hippest guys and girls (this year, Beth from The Gossip, which is almost vomitously behind the times). The NME has always been the yardstick for what’s hot and what’s not, as this recently-unearthed document proves: it is the first ever NME Cool List, drawn up by the magazine’s writers in 1892.

1. Queen Victoria
She may not be an obvious choice, but Victoria once again proves that being cool is not about being obvious – her frumpy frocks and moody looks are quite simply so hot right now. She has confounded expectations ever since she first picked up her sceptre in 1837, and her no-nonsense attitude to the Crown takes no prisoners. Vicky proves you can wear a tiara and still rock as hard as the boys.

2. Jack the Ripper
While he may not be as fresh as when he first emerged on the scene, he’s fresher than the corpses he leaves behind! Saucy Jack worries parents the length and breadth of Britain, and his bad boy image and stylish ‘Gladstone bag’ means he’s still the favourite of our nation’s youth. He’s also made East London the place to be and to be seen once again this year. “He’s a bad influence”, wails the Police Gazette, but his dalliances with the law and flagrant disregard for human life are as cool as Jacob Perkins’ vapour-compression refrigeration system.

3. William Gladstone
With his trademark mutton chops and devil-may-care approach to the question of Home Rule, ‘Billy G’ does his thing without worrying what the Liberal Party think – a true maverick in the old school style.

4. Karl Marx
The thinking woman’s crumpet even in death, Red Karl didn’t get the nickname ‘the Rhineland Renegade’ for no reason. Das Kapital may have put the ‘difficult’ into ‘difficult second album’ syndrome, but who doesn’t want to get inside this guy’s mind?

5. Arthur Conan Doyle
All the boys want to be him, all the girls want to be with him. The Byron of Baker Street has made mystery sexy again.

6. Thomas Edison
Edison practically invented music – he certainly invented the phonograph, and he keeps innovating while the competition are still fumbling around with lutes and sheet music. Get with the program, daddio!

7. Benjamin Harrison
The 23rd President of the USA. His idiosyncratic take on civil service reform, not to mention the reciprocity provisions he has forced into America’s new tariff legislation mean he’s sure to be one of America’s best-remembered Presidents: definitely not just a flash in the pan, Benjy’s here to stay.

8. Johan Julius Christian "Jean" Sibelius
Crazy name, crazy guy.

9. Friedrich Nietzsche
The success of Freddy’s ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ proves Superman is still a summer blockbuster. Not using your will to power is sooo 1891.

10. Edvard Munch
Bipolar disorder is chicer than chic this year – this Norwegian painter is one to watch: his new work should be a scream.

Been away too long...

2006-11-28T16:37:00.000Z

A little update, just so you know I'm still alive:

How to speak hyphy (The Guardian)
How to write surrealist football chants (New Statesman)
How to, um, interview Fuda Guy from Ruff Sqwad (dot-alt.com, edited highlights in Dazed&Confused)

Various other bits and bobs on their way.

Gotta have faith-a-faith-a-faith

2006-10-18T10:18:00.000Z

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Tony Blair told his monthly press conference faith schools were a "difficult" issue.

Which is odd, because about a year ago two-thirds of the British public polled by ICM/The Guardian told Tony Blair that faith schools were a "difficult" issue - they told him they didn't want any government money in it whatsoever - but our evangelical leader kept on diving headfirst into the God pool.

Faith schools are in the news today because they may be asked to take up to 25% of their intake from other backgrounds, but why the hell has Blair invested so much money and intellectual weight in them in the first place? If a veil is a 'sign of separation' then Christ knows (haha) what a school system where 5 year olds are delineated on the grounds of their parents' religion is.

DC won't wash-ington

2006-10-03T14:02:00.000Z

I positively implore you to watch Armando Iannucci's thoroughly satisfying use of splice-and-dice that has Blair and Cameron dueting on David Bowie's 'Changes'. For once the playful editing shtick really works, and it's all the more telling that the montage is compiled from only two speeches, one by each leader, made within a week of each other. Singing from the same hymn sheet, as it were.

I'm actually less convinced of DC's ability to edge Brown off the centre ground this week than I was last week. Ending his speech with a rhetorical turn that included the phrase "let sunshine win the day" made him seem more like Barney the Purple Dinosaur than Benjamin Disraeli. If gravitas has an antonym, he managed to acquire it at that moment.

One thing's for sure, we're going to have a great new blood sport to play over the next two years: watching disaffected rightist Tories peel off as they realise that Cameroonian Conservatism won't necessarily get them into government. John O'Farrell once said that the most integral principle for Tory MPs is that of winning power, but there'll be a few 'send em back, lock em up, string em up' voices calling after Cameron before too long. This is the rousing finale to his conference speech:

"Let optimism beat pessimism, let sunshine win the day and let everyone know that the Conservative Party is ready - ready to serve, ready to fight, ready to win, ready to have a nice picnic on the lawn, ready to get our shopping from Fresh 'n' Wild, ready to sign up to become a Friend of Kew Gardens, ready to go for a family bike ride in the country, ready to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, and ready to inhale deeply, letting our lungs fill with hope and birdsong and sugar and baby kittens whose eyes haven't even opened yet..."

Return of the twat

2006-09-13T12:11:00.000Z

"Six months ago, I began writing a blog entitled bonfireofthebrands.com. I announced on the site that I was going to destroy every branded item in my possession, having concluded that I was suffering from an addiction to the status and aspirations surrounding brands. As a former editor of youth lifestyle magazines, I had caught a glimpse of the inner workings of advertising and marketing, and found some practices distasteful. Furthermore, I felt rather cheap that I had used my position to champion these brands, almost as if they were gods. So in order to cleanse this addiction and highlight some concerns surrounding advertising and consumerism, I vowed to burn all my stuff and start again, brand free."

Marketors engaged in distasteful practices?! As if! Thank God our Messiah has arrived to open our eyes, maaaaan. These attention-seeking ramblings are from Neil Boorman, former editor of Sleaze and general twat-about-Sugartown. He actually sums up what's wrong with his retarded idea fairly well himself, saving me the trouble:

"...here was another middle-class London journalist moaning on about the luxuries that many around the world cannot afford. Instead of burning these things, why not give the lot away to charity or, better still, just count my blessings and keep quiet?"

Well, quite. This guy's got previous as well. Check out Sleaze: A Warning From History which I wrote for Dot-Alt when it was still a zine. In essence: the magazine he edited espoused anti-brand rhetoric as a style thing, while carrying ads-a-plenty for all the usual brands. The man could teach Hypocrisy 101 at the time, and there's no reason to think he'd be any worse at teaching it now he's had his life-changing epiphany.

In October 2004 he stuck the boot into the light-hearted fun and games of Pillow Fight Club, lying through his teeth in The Guardian by claiming to report on an event he clearly didn't attend (I can explain how I know this, it's not massively interesting). This cynical hatchet-job-for-cash saw him express his:

"profound disappointment that the best we can do with freedom of speech and a spare afternoon is an exercise in extreme futility"

Speaking of which, he's burning all his stuff in London on Sunday. The event is followed by a 'reception', and has a number to RSVP to on its flyer. I'd suggestion turning up and barracking him, but why on earth would you want to give him the satisfaction?