A G I T D I S C O

1. Paul Robeson – Ch’I Lai (Chinese National Anthem in Chinese) from a Topic 78RPM 1952

I’m including it because I want to draw attention to the label as much as anything. Topic are a really interesting British label in that they essentially grew out of a Socialist theatre company and the Workers Music Association. They were set up to educate people in communist/socialist thinking through music and performance and draw attention to British urban (as oppose to rural) folk music history. Working class balladeers and historians ran the label and it and went on to spearhead the folk music revival that took place in the 50′s in the UK (simultaneously in the US) that contributed significantly to the 60′s countercultural activities. This track is really interesting now, as it highlights a certain romantic (or even fetishistic) attachment  to the Socialist cause. Given the history of imprisonment, murder and violence against the  people of China and the USSR by Mao and Stalin this early Topic recording seems rather dainty and naive in a very British way – almost twee. Whereas previously (upto the 1950′s) the perception of working class “folk” music as a lowly artform was reinforced by a culture of high classicism that perpetuated class distinction, now it was being used as a vehicle for political change.

2. Angelitos Negros – Roberta Flack – 1969 Atlantic

A poem that dates form the 1940’s written by Andres Eloy Blanco (Venezualan mixed race). First recorded in Spain in 1947 by singer Antonio Machin (black Cuban). An empassioned cry for multiracial unity. It asks of the church – Where are the black angels, and asks of artists – Will you not paint black angels? A powerful evocation of the responsibilities of all to be inclusive, sung at the height of the 1960’s counter-cultural revolution by a black African American.

3. Rape – Peter Wyngarde – 1970 RCA Victor

Not avoiding difficult areas of language and topics is politically active. To do this through humour is a common amongst comics, but not musicians – and especially not celebrity musicians such as this. Powerfully perverse, it’s a reminder of the darker recesses of humanity, and a path right in there.

4. Throbbing Gristle – Very Friendly - orginally recorded 1975, released 2001 Thirsty Ear

The personal is political. This track has curious resonances throughout my adult life. Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV were the first band that made me realise that politics (although I didn’t call it that at the time) could be an active experience. I didn’t know this track at the time, but knew about their Church and activities as mail artists. It was a punk nihilism that was very attractive to a teenager because it was going out and setting things up and creating experiences for oneself and others. Doing shit. I moved to Manchester and got to know exactly where they were talking about. It’s a window into that time, a straight forward but hallucinatory monologue that is really brutal. This was another difficult subject given another dimension through sound. Later, after we had our first child, I met David Smith (who was responsible for bringing the Hindly/Brady pair to justice) running a B&B in Ireland. He was very friendly. As an aside, one of the first music mashups (a copyleft political musical statement in itself that became known as Bastard Pop in the UK), it was a piece that used this track as part of the samples. It was by an artist called Shackleton – who went onto create some of the most politically subtle dance music to emerge in years under the banner of Dubstep with his Skull Disco label. One of which appears later.

5. I Don’t Like Mondays – Tori Amos – 2001 Atlantic

Once again it’s the news given another dimension by a musician. The Boomtown Rats were big in Northern Ireland (where I grew up) and this track was there in my childhood. I only found out later as an adult that it was about a massacre in a school, but seen form the point of view of the murderer. This moving version helps you understand that we are all capable of this kind of insanity, and only by avoiding the special circumstances that make it happen do we remain sane. It’s a lesson in not judging. This track was first performed about two months after the incident that “inspired” it.

6. Major Moments of Instant Insanity – Theo Parrish - Oct 2001 – Sound Signature

Similar, this track came out one months after the events of the 11th of September 2001 in the USA. It captures the shock of the moment like no other I’ve heard and playing it reminds me of the undiluted experience, when you know nothing will be as it was before. It changed the world – and everybody in it.

7. Blood on my Hands – Shackleton vs Villalobos – 2007 Skull Disco

A follow on to the above, a number of years later. The new global political environment meant new musical forms emerged in response. One of these in dance culture was the development of the dark, urban, heavily Arabic influenced Dubstep scene. With titles like Hamas Rule, Dubstep Halal and Death is Not Final, this was clearly reflecting contemporary thought patterns amongst newly nihilistic youth – regardless of their cultural background (which remained resolutely private). Microtonal remix by an artist at his peak. Utterly absorbing it effortlessly carries you on waves of complexity. What any good speaker should do.

8. Dem a Bomb We – The Bug featuring Warrior Queen – Oct 2005 Ladybug Records

A straightforward declaration to “bombers” to stop targeting innocent people. A response to the London tube bombings by one of Jamaica’s finest new voices.

9. Philosophy of the World – The Shaggs - 1969 private pressing, re-released Rounder Records 1980

The bottom line in nihilism, absolutely singular in the punk tradition and completely guile-free. These three women would be in charge of the planet if I had my way.

Discussion on tracks

Notes on track 2 – Rape – Peter Wyngarde

SS: ‘Rape’ is chilling in its jolly evocation of rape as fun, but then Wyngard had been tortured in a Japanese camp in WW2 and was apparently into violent sex. (Peter Wyngarde was an actor rather than a musician). a UTube comment says:
“Seriously screwed up, possibly from his formative years of torture by the Japanese and an unstable family background, he gravitated to acting and never looked back. His homosexuality was accepted in acting circles, where in 1956 he had a long sado masochistic relationship with actor Alan Bates.” This song, and being caught cottaging, caused the end of his career in mid Seventies.

RmcK: These topics are the stock in trade of folk music, along with schoolhouse fires, the devil and alcoholism. They tend to reflect the nature of news and what goes on rather than being purely about entertainment. I’ve always been attracted to folk music because of this storytelling aspect, and see this selection of tracks as an extension of that. I’m suggesting here that these artists – with the exception of Wyngarde (controversy is something that is relative to the medium – as I said, comedy uses offense constantly – most famously in The Aristocrats - in much more extreme ways than this song, yet is more than tolerated – because it releases and airs deep fears and insecurities by proxy) are in fact a continuation of that folk tradition – all be it by different musical means.

SS: I still can’t feel the Wyngarde track as comedic…

RmcK: Get to watch the Aristocrats if you can, its based around a single joke that comedians tell to each other. It’s shock value is critical in this context. Its themes are generally rape, incest and depravity. A very simple reading of this joke is that the severity and ingenuity with which these themes are employed is seen as the measure of how good the comedian is. One telling moment is at a comedy awards where a joke (told not long after the event) about the Twin Towers attack tanks. The comedian proceeds to tell the Aristocrats joke. Its the first time its been told in public, and the place falls about in hysterical laughter. This in front of an audience of comedians.
There is also a great documentary recently on TV about Russia and humour called Hammer and Tickle. 10s of thousands of people were imprisoned in the USSR and China for telling jokes, yet ironically both Gorbachev and Reagan used comedy as a weapon in the Cold War and that, the programme argues, comedy was instrumental in the Soviet states decline.
There is a lot to consider when thinking about the liberal attitudes to comedy in the West and the distinct lack of those attitudes towards music. This could be because of the effects of oratory on listeners (ask any politician about this), or the hypnogogic effect that music can have, the vulnerable state listeners can be in to suggestions in the lyrics of music and so on. Wyngarde falls foul of this fear I think. Essentially I believe that the piece is comedic (in the most powerful sense of the term) in that it deals with this taboo in a way that gives it a culturally specific focus – this is born out by the rest of the album too (reference the album…). Comedy can be a very powerful coping mechanism and I think it too simplistic to dismiss it as a personal manifestation of his (presumed) psychotic response to experiences as a POW.

SS: I’d put the effect of oratory in a more positive, complex and ordinary context of oral culture as against literary culture rather than the negative associations of political rhetoric.

R McK: I think that the difference between rhertoric and oratory is that of negative connotations – that why I said oratory, which is more pertinent to music because of its poetic associations. Its a classic area of study that I always thought shoud be available to everybody through school.

Notes on track 2 – Throbbing Gristle – Very Friendly

SS: Very Friendly is awfully long and depressing… You say that the track has “curious resonances throughout your adult life” (different from the nihilism attractive to you as a teenager?) what are they? What was going on in Manchester!? Are we really ‘all’ capable of, or harbour desires for extreme sado child murder!? And I always mistrusted GPOs attraction to shock as a short cut to getting attention and fame.

RmcK: I don’t think that TB ever had that much fame really, at least not until they were taken up recently by the art world and elevated to a kind of significant performance action group.
The resonances with the TB and this track throughout my adult life are convoluted. The first I mentioned that as a teenager the ideas behind Thee Temple of Psychick Youth was fascinating to me – it opened my eyes to the possibility of action, communal living, art and experimentation (with everything). Then I moved to Manchester (where the track is set). My mother talked to me as a teenager about Hindley and Brady and the Moors Murders (she was a young girl living in Oldham at the time the story was unfolding).
On a trip to Ireland years later I ended up talking to some locals in a nearby B&B I was staying in with my wife and young son and they mentioned the Moors Murders. We had got on really well with the owners and had in fact only managed to secure the place by another co-incidence – we were passing and desperate, as it was getting dark. It was a beautiful and quaint to the point of twee thatch cottage, the door was open, we went in and sat by the fire. Later, Mary and Dave  - who ran it – came back, drunk, and we sat up for hours talking to them in the kitchen about Manchester and Galway. The gossiping old woman who had mentioned the murders wouldn’t be drawn any further. We went back several times until another friend opened up their own B&B nearer Galway City.
Shortly after, another freind (who I hadn’t seen since moving to England) sent me a CD with this track on it. About two years after that I happened to turn on the TV and caught a program about the Moors Murders as writtten by the brother-in-law of Myra Hindley (Dave Smith). It was Dave Smith that called the police to bring the pair to justice – a quick internet search confirmed it was the same Dave that ran the B&B and who is featured in this track witnessing the murder.
RmcK(later) The TV programme was mostly based from the point of view of his wife, Hindley’s sister.

HYPERLINK

So you can see how convoluted is the story…The reason for including this track is not that it is a good story, or a good track, but that it is simultaneously personal and political in the way that it humanised one of the most horrific events in the UK of the 20th Century. It’s easy to see these kind of events as negative holes, anolomlies in the general movement towards a perfectly moral and good society, whereas in fact the events and people involved in these events are often at the mercy of a perfect storm of coincidence, psychosis, insecurity, mania and perversion.
It indicates to me that vigilance is always necessary when judging events in the news, that people who are involved in events in the news are not two-dimensional and that we are probably not on a trajectory towards world peace because of this vulnerability to chance. Being on the receiving end of media attention is equally illuminating. I should tell you about the experience my wife and I had regarding the IRA bombing of Manchester sometime…

SS: There is obviously a global community of pain, from all kinds or war and abuse scenarios that can relate to acute cultural expressions of suffering and human cruelty. I guess the expression does not have to be the same as exact personal experience of the listener to work.
There is knowledge crucial to humanity to be gained from the experience of torture, the minds of murderers, rapists and terrorists. And our current literary academic methods are really not capable of entering into such territory. In spite of all the theorising of the body you don’t scream and cry in seminars. It tends to be walled off into ‘therapy’ or study of the effects of combat stress etc. To my mind every abuser or sado-masochist has suffered extreme abuse when young. How to be break the cycles of abuse? That seems to be the central ‘personal is political’ question to me.

Notes on track 5 – I Don’t Like Mondays – Tori Amos

SS: Would you say your youthful experiences in Northern Ireland, considering what was going on at the time, could be behind some of these choices? I have some inkling about how brain/body searing it was for young people during that time when communities and friendships were being torn apart. I don’t think people in Britain appreciate just how bad it is for people and especially young people when a civil war is kicking off. Put against that background the selection makes more sense to me, but I may be wrong.

RmcK: No, I think it would be naive to suggest that. Growing up in Northern Ireland certainly left me with an acute awareness of the sense of responsibility (this can mean life or death) that comes with engaging with politics. I would say that generally friendships and communities were galvanised by the situation, which had the perverse side effect of perpetuated division in hardline areas . A narrow band of the middle-income political classes were responsible for keeping ideological divisions going, but in general this filtered down as a perpetuation of clichés. I gave me some insight into that WW2 generation cliché that it was the best time in their lives.

RmcK (later): Apologies for this – naive may be a bit strong. It’s a common misconception that the people of Northern Ireland who grew up in the Seventies were traumatised by the events unfolding around them. In my experience this was not the case. I had many Catholic and Protestant friends, went to Orange parades and drank in traditional Irish pubs with fiddle music. I had a great time!  Throughout my life I have had friends and met people who had been brought up in conflict zones – and generally have to say that they are the most dynamic and positive people I’ve met.

SS: Good to read you experience of ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland
was personally ‘positive’. I was basing my view mainly on the
harrowing account of a design student I tutored some years ago.

RmcK: Of course some personal experiences would have been horrific. I was speaking generally of a cultural psyche. You have to remember that throughout the whole period Northern Ireland had the second (to Belgium) lowest crime rate per head of population in the whole of Europe. The streets were, ironically, very safe.

SS: This experience I heard was not ‘horrific’ in the way you might expect. It was about close friends being forcibly separated and kept apart by terror.

RmcK: It’s curious that you don’t mention Don’t Like Mondays as macabre. After all it’s about child killing too, and from the point of view of the perpetrator.

Notes on track 7 – Blood on my Hands – Shackleton vs Villalobos

RmcK: Strictly speaking the Shackleton Track I sent you is a remix by dance musician Richardo Villalobos – so not actually Dubstep, but dance. I’ve always like the social space of dance, its liberating and elevating effect on the self, the curious way it makes people look like wasps in bottles. I sometimes lament the lack of physical touch in dance music though. I have a lot of Dubstep material too – but thought that this would bridge the dance divide.

RmcK (later): “Dance” music is obviously too vague. I was rushing. Villalobos is more commonly associated with “Techno”. Although in mind ears this is more “Minimal” or “MicroMinimal”. Labels all, but just to say that it’s not “classic” “Dubstep” this track.
Simon Reynolds work on the Hardcore Continuum is really interesting in its scope. His blogs cover a lot of ground in this area. Steve Redhead is also good on the subject, though I haven’t read this stuff for years.
HYPERLINK 1
HYPERLINK 2
SS: my own contact is via Datacide and specifically Dead by Dawn

SS: I spose the core of this project for me is that it is about working class music and culture and the way we communicate about it. My idea is that working class culture cannot focus or forge itself in some way at present. It cannot tool-up to start dismantling oppression. How we communicate cannot just be writing, or even talking, but needs the disco. A kind of update of Habermas’ coffee shops. A darkened space where you can respond how you like, and with others. Its a visceral kinesthetic level of communication that gets beneath words and holds the promise of full sensory contact between humans.

RmcK: Rave music of course was probably the most covertly political art form of the modern age. It was such a threat that it brought about the criminalisation of repetitive beats, stopped the right to gather for fun and harnessed police powers to permanently remove legitimately owned property from citizens. All within a couple of years. Brilliant. I think we communicate best not through direct action, but through the pursuit of lifestyles and ways of behaving that might inspire others or at least question others behavior. I think pubs are a good start in terms of social spaces to air views. The later in the evening it gets, the more you get beneath words (though hopefully not beneath tables). More people should open their own little micro-bars maybe!? Any place that encourages the free mingling of cultures is a place with potential to change things for the better. Just talking to people on trains helps too.

SS: Working class music was always bowdlerised as it came up to the dominant media. ie gutted of threatening political and sexual content. So an emphasis on the political is a shorthand for making working class music whole again.

RmcK: Exactly the point I am trying to make in the selection. Except I wouldn’t call it working class - just human.