Phased and Bemused

Thoughts on the Manics

2011-09-27T17:42:00.000-07:00

On hearing the Manics announce another 'indefinite hiatus' recently, I thought of one of the many reasons why Bono is a tosser. On the release of one of their many interchangeable, pleasant albums, Bono remarked that he was "re-applying for the job of the Best Band in the World'. The thought that this role is something that one can apply for sums up everything that's wrong with Bono. You can imagine him, sat in some neutrally decorated reception somewhere, running over his just-affecting-enough lines, smoothing his sensible hair and polishing his rebellious shades (hinting at the morning after) before entering to a panel of elder statesmen and listing his merits. The Manics, in contrast, wanted nothing more than to be the Best Band in the World and failed. If only they'd not mentioned the Holocaust repeatedly in the interview, they might have been ok. The Manics really wanted to be the Best Band in the World, whereas Bono wanted to get the job to pad his CV when he applies to be Pope.

The Manics wanted to be the Best Band in the World because rock music really mattered to them, as it does to millions of people in derided backwaters all over the world. The openness and freedom matters when your horizons feel very near, the chord hangs on long enough to suggest a future and a far-away, a happy-ever-after. They added to this, a resolute refusal to patronise their listeners (which is why their fans adore them, and I'm writing this now).

Think of Bruce Springsteen, and the words he puts into the mouth of the protagonist of Thunder Road. Addressing his beloved, he mumbles "You ain't a beauty/but hey, you're alright". Now, the Manics' protagonist responds: "Life is full of cold made warm and they are just lizards"; "Anxiety is freedom"; "Rock and roll is our epiphany/of culture, alienation, boredom and despair". The mode remains the same, now weaponised by intellect, fortified by reading. The refusal to accept that living in a back end of arse-nowhere meant a focus on your own bubble, an ignorance of the rest of the world.

Of course, for Manics fans, the period where they meant that is long gone, and the above paragraph is mere jumpers for goalposts stuff. But even when the Manics changed course and turned inward, it was done with a lacerating lack of self-regard, another reason why they couldn't be the Best Band in the World. Their last truly great album, This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, dealt relentlessly with the possible suicide by drowning of their hitherto most important member. The perversity of naming songs "Ready For Drowning and "Tsunami" in this context is admirable. The specificity of this album makes it a fucking miracle it ever got the Number One. Everything must go, never say goodbye, drift away and die.

Except they didn't, and wouldn't. The Manics have trundled on for more than ten years making songs that sound a bit like ones that they made when they were great. The best album was based on the work of their departed comrade. Their best songs, Indian Summer and Postcard from a Young Man, have sounded like goodbyes. So, goodbye.

Album of the Week: Community Music

2011-04-29T18:05:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it wasn't the best idea to go on holiday the week leading up to the Royal Wedding. Watching BBC World on hotel television was like viewing a distant, strange culture. On my return, my workplace was filled with bunting and minature Union Jacks, like the inside of William Hague's mind. But unlike William Hague's mind, it was in no way uncritical, self-satisfied and smug. Cynicism was, as always in these instances, the default reaction of my collegues and most folk. An astonishment and grinding irritation, bourne of the entire media reminding you that you are, in actual, legal fact, lower than others. If a millionaire a commoner, what the fuck is someone on minimum wage?

Perhaps it doesn't help to live in one of the Kingdom's peripheries, where notions of national identity are dual, making an idea of a national celebration a conflict at least. Whatever it was, the Royal Wedding made me angrier than a lot of more justified causes. The Wedding seemed like the horseshit cherry on top of the bullshit sundae of a decades long handwringing panic on the part of our rulers.

Whether it's Thatcher's migrant swamp, Blunkett's concern that immigrants continue to speak other (oh so other) languages at home, Tebbit's cricket test, British jobs for British workers, old maids cycling past village greens pissed on warm beer etc. etc. etc., our rulers express continual concern that the British, or, whisper it, the 'British', aren't trying hard enough to be British. This is proposterous, in no way their role, and should be spat on whenever it rears its grotesque and in no small part racist head.

This absurd spectacle, with its preemptive arrests for anyone who dares criticise it in an excessively visual fashion, marks its high point. After a near half century of spurious attempts to define Britishness as based upon human rights, democracy, fair play and the like, the wedding of an unelected posh bellend (as opposed to all the elected ones), visited by war criminals and autocrats and paid for by commoners has supposedly united and defined us all as British.

Pass the sick bag, and if you can hear over the sounds of my wretching and ranting, listen to this, this, and this. It may, for a fleeting second, make you feel glad to be British.

Album of the 'Week': Graceland

2011-03-21T18:02:00.000-07:00

When does politics interrupt music? The short answer to that is: when you're listening to it in my presence. The interaction between politics and music fascinates me, and bad politics in particular. On hearing a bar of Billy Joel's 'Just The Way You Are', I will, regardless of circumstance or propriety, explain how it's a sexist Trojan Horse, sneaking in controlling impulses and a heavily gendered idea of what women are for under its calm-sea sheen ("I don't want clever, conversation/Just cook my dinner right you bitch). As for 10CC's 'Dreadlock Holiday', well, the problems with that really shouldn't need explaining.

However, those songs are politically dreadful AND shit. Graceland by Paul Simon is one of the first albums I ever loved, but on listening to it recently, it was interrupted by politics. A low level buzz of wan, patronising and ill-judged politics defines the album as much as beauty and lazy refinement. For the best example, see 'Under African Skies', a haunting melody, an earworm beyond compare. Now, take its lyrics. A protagonist named Joseph is introduced and it is established that he is black and African. That is all. "The roots of rhythm remain" indeed.

Yes, this is Paul Simon's Black Album. The international legal issue around its creation is less problematic frankly - the sheer amount of hairshirted gesture politics that followed his seemingly ignorant breaking of the UN Cultural Embargo on South Africa (playing gigs outside of SA with the cream of exile talent, playing for the ANC in exile in Zimbabwe, ending all shows with the ANC anthem - check, check and check) surely made up for that. The problem more the embedded power of going somewhere with the intention of picking its talent like the coolest kid in class, and the idea of specifically yoinking players on the basis of their cultural/racial heritage. Not exactly wrong, but disquieting nevertheless.

This disquiet pervades the album. The disconnect between Simon's aging hippy lyrics, a thoroughly different musical tradition and the now laughable hi-tech of yesterday's tomorrow creates an extra queasyness and leaves behind a genuinely uncanny music. 'The Boy in the Bubble', with its dislocated pump of accordion and bass, drums synthesised and shifting volume without logic, and a lapsed idealist straining for a political point, ranks #1 in my Oddest Records of the 20th Century. And that century contained 'Ride A White Swan'.

Of course, this is criticism masquerading as praise. The real reason why I love this political and musical experiment (apart from the fact that it's a political and musical experiment) is its humility. From 'Graceland', a rare break-up song that doesn't idealise or despise either party, to 'You Can Call Me Al' - wherein a person undergoing a mid-life crisis is redeemed by the horror of the Third World ("scatterings and orphanages") - the whole album is deep structured by the lack of confidence of its narrator, their crippling fears and very timid hopes. For that, and the bass playing, this album repays listening by anyone who may be put off because of 'Scarborough Fair', the subsequent hi-jinx of Bono and Geldof and the undignified parp of synth brass.

On Colonialism

2011-03-15T17:48:00.000-07:00

An upcoming cricket match has reminded me of a deeply illustrative bit of commentary from the 2009 test match series between the West Indies and England. In a West Indian innings during a limited overs match, the Windies were having one of their sadly all-too-rare periods where they surpass what is expected of the game, and begin scoring and hitting wildly for no loss. These are also the moments where cricket becomes the most entertaining sport on earth.

The English commentary team shifted in their seats for a few overs, audibly strategised, and decided that this was frankly disrespectful - to the bowlers, of course, but most importantly to the game. Grumbling continued, then, in one over, Kevin Pietersen achieved three successive wickets. The commentators could not have been more delighted. Order had been restored, and the underdog lay beaten.

It Gets Better: 'Left To My Own Devices'

2010-10-08T18:09:00.000-07:00

Mildly irritating and occasionally amusing US sex columnist Dan Savage has recently initiated a project named 'It Gets Better'. Basically, fully grown gays, lesbians and celebrities (including Paris Hilton) create videos boasting about how comfortable adult life is for the benefit of LGBT teenagers. This has the rare distinction of being smug and wonderful, a sacrament of boasting in the face of oppression.

Which brings me onto the song that has plagued my mind for much of the past few months, 'Left To My Own Devices' by the Pet Shop Boys. It's extraordinary. Firstly, the vocals. Johnny Rotten was famously happy to declare that he didn't care, although the tone of this pronouncement belies his actual level of care. Neil Tennant is unique in all of pop music in being able to sound as though he genuinely doesn't give a thr'penny fuck about all of creation. Languid, bored, lazy, distant - it's all there.

Why doesn't Neil care? Well it's hinted at in the music - a cold fusion of musicals, opera and early house - and suggested in the lyrics - "this friend of mine - he's a party animal", "maybe if you're with me, we'll do some shopping". Neil doesn't care because his Pink Pound and Wildean mind have transcended all limitations placed on him, all fetters on his artistic production and impeccable taste. Finally, he is everything he meant to be and anyone who disagrees can fuck themselves and enjoy it. It's a wonder, and anyone who finds this irritating or distasteful has their bread buttered on the wrong side.

Label of the 'Week': Warp

2010-05-11T17:15:00.000-07:00

This week, coming home from a job I hate, with a government being decided that I was sure to hate, I decided to indulge myself with something I love. And indulgence it was. Using Spotify's label search function I searched for 'Warp' and hit random. Given the much vaunted death of the record label, it's a miracle that I could think of a record label, but Warp sprung to mind

Warp is less a record label and more a style of music in itself - easily identifiable. Drum beats skitter, overlap, cut and stretch - none of the melodic instruments sound organic. Vocals, if present, are heavily distorted. In short, it's warped. Unlike the abacus experimentalism of 12-tone music, or the shapeless mass of free jazz, the vast majority of Warp's music offers just enough structure to box you in, then spends most of it's time bending the walls, wrapping space and time, unsettling. It is a music made almost entirely on computers, and in an era when every job seemingly involves staring at an often malfunctioning computer system for 8 hours, then travelling home past detritis (organic and man-made) it's a music made exactly for our time. Thom Yorke was not wrong in describing Autechre's grotesque and detailed masterwork 'LP5' as "the sound that's in my head". It's in all of our heads, whether we accept it on not.

The gateway to Warp is the music of Aphex Twin, who serves as a kind of Weird Al Jankovic comedy record producer and totem for the Warp ethos, having evolved from making slightly odd music for raves to making ludicrous drum'n'bass and pretty piano music. A lot of the music on Warp follows this pattern - this is a label that used to put out records by the cut-up artist Cassette Boy (who used famous people's words to make them say inappropriate things, a comedy trope surpassed only by old people swearing in its satiric power) and the avant-garde composer Mira Calix, who once performed live 'collaborating' with a tank of insects.

In short, childish and modernist, which is where the idea of the holy label comes in. Warp, for me, fits. This was the idea behind the independent music movement - to have a label that catered for a specific group of people - a social and musical sectarianism. Warp is my sect, and its haunting, fucked music speaks to me as Sub Pop and Rough Trade spoke to its secret following.

Well, I say 'speaks', it's more 'spoke'. In recent years, Warp has succumbed to what China Miéville refers to as the "idiot logic of capitalism", the drive to expand, the drive to accumulate. It has broadened its musical palette, taking in flesh and blood bands with actual instruments, Americans and becoming involved in film production. So once again, I'm left in a corner, demanding ideological consistency, barking at the moon.

The Democracy Ration

2010-05-05T18:09:00.001-07:00

It's hard not to get depressed around election time. In 2005, the choice was between an overtly racist party led by a vampire, a flapping husk of a party led by a war criminal, and a party led by and supported by over-earnest students. Little has changed since then, although to believe the papers, everything has changed. The nearly unconstitutional TV debates (well, in so far as Britain has a constitution, they seem to be at least against the spirit of the thing) have flipped many people disillusioned with the Husk Party and the Racist Party to support the Earnest Party, or so hype would have us believe. Behind all this looms a giant recession the size of which the majority of people have never experienced - with the concomitant 'necessity' of mindblowing cuts. It's enough to make you emigrate, either to some politically dubious nation where your accent might render you charming (Australia, the US...) or to another astral plain altogether.

Why is this the case? My argument would not be that politics is inherently worse than it was. Many politically engaged people hark back to the days when the parties were really parties - when the Tories were openly racist, rather than tacitly, when Labour supported strikes and provided free silver spoons to every poor unfortunate in the land, and when the Liberals were so bland that you had to take speed to prevent yourself sleeping whenever they opened their mouths. This is bollocks.

I would wager the reason it's depressing is that the act of voting, in Britain particularly, actualises your powerlessness. This is your democracy ration, handed out every 4 to 5 years. It won't really do anything, but it will do more than the other elections you vote in every year or so - Assembly, Council and European - which are, scientifically, less important than votes cast towards X Factor contestants. You can vote for the people you agree with, but it's wasted. Go home, watch Dimbleby for a few hours, sleep, then go back to having less than no power, just as before, but with a different monkey dancing on the organ.

Or you can agitate, educate and organise. It's the only real political choice you ever have to make, and the only one that matters a jot.

Magnificent Whining

2010-03-05T08:50:00.000-08:00

Britain in the 00s was a country besieged by grumpy old men. The TV series of that title was unaccountably popular, given that it consisted of pensioned comedians whinging with minimal commitment about topics lobbed by terribly dressed 20-something runners. One of the best selling non-fiction books was entitled 'Is it just me or is everything crap?'. They could all have been replaced by this, for the greater good.

The 1 Best Thing of the 00s

2010-01-03T17:12:00.000-08:00

The 00s, or 'the decade with no name' have been awful. There have been more, bigger wars than we saw in the 90s, the economy lies in tatters. The decade started with popular music being an all-American, frat-boy nightmare and ended with popular music being an all-American 'Happy Hour' nightmare, marginally better for being sung by women. Film became overwhelmed by inexplicable, cheap CGI shite.

As befits the end of a decade, a rash of lists has appeared in print media, detailing the decades best films, most important figures, least significant spoons and so on. In the interests of concision, I'm picking my favourite thing of all. We're all busy people after all.

'Malcolm in the Middle' or 'Malcolm', considering the length of its title, was an American family sitcom that ran from 2000-2006. Family sitcoms are generally insufferable, unable to tread the line between love and hate - 'My Family' and 'Married With Children' settled on making their family's relations poisonous to the level where a viewer might have been moved to contact Social Services. The Simpsons tread this line with hitherto unseen skill, but the 00s saw its terminal decline, which manifested itself in globetrotting and Homer's ongoing metamorphosis into a howling sociopath.

'Malcolm' is unique in family sitcoms in seeing the family as a fundamentally flawed but necessary institution, and in seeing the family in terms of power relations. The constant brawling and arguments are status games, pleas for attention, cash or respect. 'Malcolm' also deals with the question of child abuse between siblings. That it does these things while being beautifully written and hilarious is a fucking miracle.

As is usually the case with sitcoms which focus on one character (Malcolm, the title character, is the only player able to converse with the audience), the other characters end up being more fascinating. In particular, Lois, the screaming mother of Malcolm and Hal, his broken father, are masterpieces of characterisation - complete individuals, capable of spite, inconsistences and, most radically, lust. When Homer and Marge 'snuggle', it's as comforting as cocoa, whereas Hal and Lois's sex involves trips to their town's red light district.

The shows' portrayal of childhood is also glorious - showing the 5 stages of childhood, from the infant (Jamie), the pre-adolescent near-alien (Dewey), pre-teen know-it-all (Malcolm), teen thug (Reese) to rebellious early-adult (Francis), discreetly and fully. Childhood isn't romanticised, neither is adulthood, marriage or any other institution, because of my favourite thing about 'Malcolm' - its politics.

'Malcolm' is political in texture and content. The family lead a life helmed to the Permanent Debt Economy that preceded the Credit Crunch - they are sub-prime, 'Malcolm' is a sub-prime sitcom. Lois, despite her clear intelligence, works part-time at a out-of-town megastore, Lucky Aide ("The 'L' stands for Value"). Hal works for an unnamed corporation, but is laid off when it succumbs to Enronitis. This leads to a grimly comic moment - Hal is framed for fraud by his company directors, and is tasered by the arresting officers immediately after declaring "I have complete faith in the U.S. government!". The family's troubles arise from financial stress, overwork and fear - keeping the contrived plots of Family Guy and the modern Simpsons at bay.

But, the 00s made a Marxist out of me, and I'll love and miss 'Malcolm' for its overt politics. Hal, quoting Marx and leading an occupation of Lucky Aide, Lois using all her wit to rescue Reese from his deployment in Afghanistan, and planning for a working-class government. It's cold comfort, but for this shit decade, it'll have to do.

Album of the 'Week': 'Travels With Myself and Another'

2009-12-08T15:59:00.000-08:00

I am divorced from current music. Not something to be proud of - music is consistently of value (except for the period between 1985-1988 or so it seems). In this year, I've become interested in one 'new' band, the charmingly named 'Future of the Left', and even they fall into a micro-genre that I'm inordinately interested in, that of 'Welsh Bands - Too Clever For Their Own Good'. It's a genre that includes FOTL (who acronym beautifully), Manic Street Preachers and Scritti Politti.

What is irresistible about these bands is that they're open to politics. While not polemical, their music is inflected by political history, or the idea of politics. An album that begins with a song entitled 'Arming Eritrea' is all too easy to enjoy. FOTL also share with Scritti Politti and the Manics an 'Americanism' - all sing in American accents, play with American forms of music and probably have portraits of George W. Bush on their walls for all I know. FOTL are not however, going to write songs about Jacques Derrida or empowering libraries. They're far too fun for that. Even though they practice a form of punk which is close to the avant-garde and to heavy metal (the irritatingly named 'hardcore'), their music is packed with melodies and jokes.

The perversely serious 'Drink Nike' begins with a description of a crap act of terrorism - "Right in the centre of Hove/Next to an escalator/Somebody's planted a bomb/Underneath a plastic chair" - mocking War on Terror paranoia or farcical homegrown terror plots. 'Stand By Your Manatee', not content with being titled with a crap joke, goes on to tell the story of a suicide motivated by the suicider's parents using plastic forks - ending with the sage observation that "it'll never be a kingdom shared". The harrowing 'Hope That House Built' takes the always enjoyable perspective of an evil ruling bastard, intoning "In the end/Everybody wins".

But what I really love about FOTL is what I love about reggae and calypso - the alliance of miserable or disturbing sentiment with gleeful music. The harmonies on 'Throwing Bricks at Trains', alone, make this my favourite album for a long while.

Thick, White and Unsavoury

2009-10-19T18:19:00.000-07:00

The BNP, following their winning of 2 seats in June's European elections, have had unprecedented media coverage, particularly from the BBC. Radio 1's dumbed-right-down-to-the-ground 'wicked' news flagship 'Newsbeat' conducted unchallenging interviews with two young BNP cadres, one of whom, Mark Collett, was caught on a BBC documentary half-a-decade ago claiming that AIDS was a friendly disease because it kills Africans and homosexuals, or 'blacks and gays'. Radio 1 now has the unique selling point of being the only radio station on earth to have placed genocidal racists alongside Beyoncé.

This Thursday, the party's leader, Nick Griffin, is slated to appear on Question Time. When questioned on this, the BBC has claimed that his status as elected representative of a vast swathe of Northern England makes him a suitable candidate for debate. Fair enough, but Nick Griffin represents not just the most bigoted voters in the North West, but a party which adheres to the tradition of classical anti-semitism, historical fascism, and, most importantly, engages in street-fighting, racist attacks and intimidation.

The BNP are now at pains to deny these last two facets of their tradition, and no longer march and rally in ethnic minority areas, in the way which Nick Griffin MEP and Andrew Brons MEP used to as members of the National Front. The tactic they now use is as old as the political party - to do unsavoury things under a different name. And fuck me, quite how unsavoury was a genuine shock.

The above photo is of an event which I witnessed, the EDL (English Defence League) demonstration in Swansea. What are they angry about? What have you got? According to a farcical press conference held for the benefit of Newsnight, the swastika (which they burned). According to the above photo, and the evidence of my own eyes, 'No Swastika' flags being hung in their vicinity.

Less flippantly, they're angry about Muslims. This is the most acceptable form of racism in our time, as it is supposedly against an ideology rather than a specific racial group. The EDL powerfully demonstrated the idiocy of well-meaning liberals and leftists of a particular stripe (you know, those left-wingers who are terrified of Islamofascism and its swarthy practicioners?) who follow this line of argument by screaming abuse at a young Asian woman who dared look at their demonstration from a rooftop. They did not ask whether she was an adherent of Islam before kicking off.

The EDL claims from the BNP - hilariously, on one of their first demonstrations, they carried placards reading 'We Are Not The BNP'. This is only hilarious because of its demonstrable falsehood. Not only are many of the EDL's members (although this is hard to check, because it's more of a flashmob racist rabble than an organisation) BNP members, it is utterly connected by talking-point to the BNP. So, for example, the BNP has recently flipped to a position of support for Zionism, because of its focus on the Muslim threat - the EDL, on their Manchester jaunt, carried placards reading 'Defend Israel's Right To Exist'. Consider this in the light of their burning of the No Swastika flag, it's baffling. Then remember that the EDL models after the BNP, and it becomes obvious. The EDL is the BNP Boot Boy Corps - they protest too much for it to be otherwise.

I was there as part of the much larger counter-demonstration, and, despite the moments of terror, I'm glad I was. Although not of the school of thought that you should trek to the North Pole before claiming with confidence that it's cold, it was instructive to see fascism first hand. Seig Heil-ing, spitting, threatening fascism. Boggle-eyed, unthinking, hateful racism. The idea that the BBC would bring it into people's fucking homes, and treat a Holocaust denier as though he's a normal politician, is nearly beyond comprehension.

Album of the 'Week': Fear of a Black Planet

2009-10-01T17:01:00.000-07:00

Public Enemy are ludicrous. I possess the first issue of the Public Enemy comic, from 2007, in which Chuck D fires up a young, disillusioned black man to fight authority, and, I seem to remember, ninjas. The character voices awestruck approval at the revelatory and liberatory power of Public Enemy's music and Chuck D's public speaking before, during, and after fighting the power. All this would be fine if this was charmingly ill-thought out fan-fiction, but the author of the comic is Chuck D himself. Public Enemy have developed into a middling band of overly earnest, politically confused old men, which would be fine, if they didn't have the most musically radical back catalogue of any popular band of the last 30 years.

'Fear of a Black Planet' is often referred to as the first hip-hop concept album, but it is nothing of the sort. Politically confused, over-long and patchy, there is no concept that can be said to guide the piece. The driving force of the album is utter rage. Rage at the band's detractors, rage at homosexuals, rage at race mixers, at Hollywood, and, finally, 'the power'. Rage breeds incoherence, and, coming to 'Fear of a Black Planet' decades after its release, with its reputation as the apex of politically engaged hip-hop, the unpalatable depths of homophobia and (perfectly understandable) race-hatred were shocking, but not as shocking as the sheer fragmentation of Chuck D's lyrics. It's difficult to discern a thread in any of the lyrics. This is in no way a criticism, it renders his writing a collection of placard slogans and a mass of phrases, delivered in his college-trained radio announcer voice. It does however, get a bit much - Ice-T's verse in 'Burn, Hollywood, Burn' (which can be said, with fair confidence, to have predicted the L.A Riots of 1992) actually arrives as light relief, even when he shouts "don't fight the power/(gunshot) the motherfucker!".

The lyrics are the transcription of a riot of ideas, influences and emotions. They form new beats, get sidetracked, alternate between self-pity and bombast. One of the masterpieces of the album, 'Welcome to the Terrordome' begins "I've got so much trouble on my mind/Refuse to lose". The lyrics as a whole betray a seige mentality, following the controversy created by the band's conduct (particularly Professor Griff's claim that "Jews are responsible for 90% of the evil in the world today" a wonderfully precise bit of utter nonsense), and reflect the broader seige mentality of a black community seeing the gains of the civil rights era rolled back by Reaganomics. The shifting rhythm and shock phrase-turning ("brain game, intellectual Vietnam", "subordinate terror kicking off in error", "most of my heroes don't appear on no stamp") and the authoritative delivery make avoiding engaging with the lyrics impossible. They force debate. That MLK and various faceless nameless orators appear in sample makes this even more delicious.

This, however can be said of any number of earnest rappers. What gives 'Fear of a Black Planet' its continued shock power and enduring status isn't the healthy dose of Louis Farrakhan-era Nation of Islam politics or Chuck D's self-pity, but the mindblowing production of The Bomb Squad. As opposed to the fast majority of hitherto existing hip-hop, each track is through-composed, and the album contains thousands of micro-samples. At one point (the first 20 seconds of the gloriously titled 'Anti-Nigger Machine'), the level of abstraction resembles John Cage's 'Williams Mix'. This alone makes the buffoon I saw perform his rap version of Elton John's Tiny Dancer look even more like an arse. But there's more - the vast majority of the tracks have no tonal centre - no student will ever be able to perform 'Fight The Power' in an ironic fashion at an open-mic night.

But most importantly, the production embraces what devotées of anologue call 'the digital squelch' and computer sequencing (Chuck D even namechecks the Mac on which the album was presumably made). 'Fear of a Black Planet', despite its 'classic' status, belongs to an old school of hip-hop that purists and modern practitioners like to imagine doesn't exist - one that isn't identifiably old, and is directly politically confrontational. The wonder of 'Fear of a Black Planet is that not only has it not dated, but it sounds as though it could have been released in the distant future.

Kyleology

2009-08-31T19:20:00.000-07:00

A judge once famously described the Jeremy Kyle Show as 'a human form of bear-baiting'. While critics of the show often cite this as a definitive and apposite description of its horror, it falls into a trap of the show's making. In order for Kyle's piece of shit to be broadcastable, its participants have to be made to seem subhuman, animalistic - at best childlike, requiring Kyle's care. In fact, if we're going 19th century in our comparisons, the Jeremy Kyle Show is a reincarnation of Bedlam, where damaged people are exposed for the entertainment of others. It is a form of pornography - a pornography of aggression and misery (not exactly the most fun kind).

What is interesting about the show is not the horror displayed, but the strategies used to legitimate the display of horror. Prime among these is a thin tissue of theraputic credibility. The entire show is framed as an attempt to reconcile warring parties. This is of course utterly unbelievable - even accounting for editing, the participants have at most 45 minutes of Kyle's shock therapy. Given that many of the participants have come to the show in an attempt to rid their lives of conflict, his abrasive style can be assumed to be of very little use.

The show implicitly accepts this, and so Kyle often speaks of the 'Aftercare' team headed by the gentle Northern 'Good Cop' Graham. Aftercare is an apology for Kyle's aggression, the flowers after the wife-beating. Interestingly, we're near as fuck never told how the participants fared during, or following Aftercare. Instead of any meaningful engagement with the guests and their experiences, Kyle spends around 5 minutes of his alloted hour making Graham's healing powers sound as profound and (we can assume) realistic as those of Jesus Christ.

The second and more politically interesting justifying strategy applied to make Kyle's Marvellous World of Madfolk acceptable is one of class. Kyle is a militant member of the middle-class. Kyle makes his class war obvious - the frequency with which he abstractly calls on the state to intervene against his guests ('This, Mr. Brown, is what's wrong with this country') is truly frightening. The entire texture of the show pits his ill-fitting business suits and recieved pronounciation against the ill-fitting (in a different direction) brightly-coloured sportswear and regional accents of his guests. Kyle's show used to largely consist of him screaming "GET A JOB!!!" at poor and/or drug addicted and/or mental ill guests - although this has wisely desisted since The Crunch hit and unemployment rocketed.

Ultimately, class provides the key to comprehending the Jeremy Kyle Show. The late Aneurin Bevan once wrote that 'around the meagre tables, in the small rooms of the poor, bitter hells of wounded vanity and personal acrimony arise'. Stuck in an ex-industrial town (so many of the guests are from Yorkshire, urban Scotland or South Wales that it's frightening) with no job and little prospect of gaining one, short of escape, turning to drink, drugs or a drastically destructive relationship is all too attractive. In fact, aside from these broadcastable vices, the poorer or more (whisper it) working class you are, the younger you will die, after having led a less healthy more miserable life. The Jeremy Kyle Show's 'Bad Cop, Good Cop' routine mirrors that of New Labour, faced with the ongoing misery of the areas destroyed by Thatcherism - an ASBO, then a chromed city centre. The cause of this approach is a fundamental, and wilful ignorance of the roots and horrors of poverty. If Kyle and Brown don't understand, it's our job to make them understand that getting beaten up and getting flowers is demeaning, disgusting and should fucking stop.

On Burma

2009-08-11T17:45:00.000-07:00

The international community (which as Chomsky has pointed out, simply means the US and UK, and subordinated NATO allies) has erupted over the extension of Aung San Suu Kyi's decades-old house arrest. By odd coincidence I've been reading an old John Pilger book named 'Hidden Agendas'. It's nice to bask in the World's Poshest Australian's glow, and magnificently portentous writing. It has also been nice to read about the islands of grotesque despotism that persist, despite the 'international community'. His account of Burma follows the pattern of his account of Cambodia, with well-meaning clichés about the beauty of the landscape, the humility and goodness of the people and so on. At one point, he refers to the deference of someone presumably terrified at the prospect of offending a foreigner during Burma's 'turn to tourism' as proof of an innate generosity. This isn't necessary - noone should have to live under a regime of slave and/or convict labour, in conditions of extreme deprivation, even if they're rude and live in a sequence of slimy caves.

The portrait given of Aung Syn Suu Kyi is more nuanced - having acquired a rare interview, he does the unimaginable and asks difficult questions. Solidarity with Third World oppositional movements often takes on a crude element of hero-worship - Mandela, the Dalai Lama - and it often feels like humbug to criticise this well-meaning projection. Pilger, having laid praise on thick, adds enough nuance to counter the cliché. In particular, he questions her on her proposal for a unity government with her jailers. John Pilger remains one of the world's great journalists, simply for the fact that he's conducted robust, critical interviews with two of the subjects (and my, what subjection!) in Gordon Brown's piss-poor, unsold book 'Courage'. In his greatest film, 'Apartheid Did Not Die', he has an actual argument with Nelson Mandela. It is impossible to imagine Andrew Marr doing the same.

However, what's been interesting about Burma is the issue's proof of how our politicians fall over themselves to criticise regimes in which they have very little interest. There's the simple propaganda argument, often heard around the time of the Iraq War, that Saddam's crimes were equivalent to the crimes of a myriad of other dictators, and thus he didn't deserve toppling. As solid as this argument is, it did lead to people who were opposed to the war saying things like "Well, why don't they sort out Mugabe?!". A narrow focus on human rights violations can lead to strange and contradictory statements - the 'comedian and activist' Mark Thomas wrote an article on Burma which praises, with massive qualification, America and the Conservative Party's stances on Burma. If you find yourself singing the praises of the armers of Indonesia and the bombers of Baghdad, you're missing the point.

The point is that horrors such as those committed by the Burmese junta are perfectly acceptable to major companies, smaller businesses and the 'international community'. Authoritarian capitalism is the norm for most of the world's population, from China to Honduras, and the horrors that the Burmese people suffer are entirely congruent with past and present horrors. The boycott and disinvestment campaign has been very effective, preventing whole American cities and states, and the EU to theoretical non-involvement with the Burmese government. Despite this, the regime persists. Aung Syn Suu Kyi, despite her Courage, will strive for national unity and the injustice that is 'peace and reconciliation'. The only action that will topple it is the action of the Burmese people themselves, battered and enslaved, and the only justice the Burmese people is that which they take in the heat of struggle, to the probable horror of the 'international community'. They have risen, despite their 'peaceloving' 'deference', and will rise again.

Album of the 'Week': 'Enema of the State'

2009-07-21T18:37:00.000-07:00

The notion of a guilty pleasure is a strange and degraded one. Obviously, there are things that you can't admit to in polite company, things that don't fit the criteria that society and you yourself set for enjoying things. But in admitting to a guilty pleasure, you are exposing these hidden passions - for this reason, people are squeamish about what they reveal. They might admit liking Eastenders or Desperate Housewives, but never Blink 182. Their bassist has a mouthful of fucking seaweed in the picture above, for crying out loud, and the album I'm writing about is called 'Enema of the State'.

Nevertheless, each of us has enjoyed music that seems repugnant in hindsight. Revisiting 'Enema of the State', the depth and breadth of sexism and puerility on display is truly shocking. Nu-metal, and the more sprightly and appealing pop-punk that developed alongside it at the beginning of this decade was in many ways the nadir of the macho posturing inherent in rock - a mixture of sweaty male bonding and inane self-pity that's truly off-putting to anyone with an ounce of decency.

However, I would argue that Blink 182's approach renders them a partially defensible pleasure. Unlike Limp Bizkit, Blink 182 have enough sense to make themselves the butt of the joke. The frat-house nonsense that infects the album is punctured by songs like 'What's My Age Again?', which demonstrates a degree of self-knowledge and self-doubt that makes the homophobia and sexism a bit more palatable. There's also a clear pop sensibility at play, which made the music an anathema to dull, mohawked punks and the traditional tween audience of pop. Their relative musical and lyrical idiocy also leads to the inclusion of a genuinely pathetic and upsetting song about teen suicide (appalling punks with the use of keyboards).

This was Blink 182's musical highpoint, and it's been downhill from there. The traditional cliché about American culture (oft-spouted by the BBC) is that the American Dream remains upstanding, despite the many disproofs that exist. The pop-punk version of the American Dream as presented by 'Enema of the State' seems closer to the fact - myriad flaws and disgusting attitudes, covered by a surface sheen that is, in my case, irresistible.

There's a good war!

2009-07-20T16:54:00.000-07:00

The War in Afghanistan, being the new focus of the US and UK, is quickly shooting up the agenda. Much of the debate recently has focused on the lack of equipment for our boys, primarily the lack of helicopters. There should be a massive increase in helicopters, and they should be used to lift 'our boys' out of a depraved war. The focus given to Afghanistan by President Obama and the increasing severity of the situation in 'Af-Pak' has led to a rather fine upsurge of oppositional literature on the topic. Firstly, Tariq Ali's general piece from 2007, in the beautifully presented, but ever infuriating New Left Review and his more Pakistan-focused 'diary' in this fortnight's London Review of Books. Hitting a more rabble-rousing and less self-obsessed note is Jonathan Neale's wonderfully simple overview of the issues, actors and factors that make up the situation. The feat of this piece is that an 8-year-old could come out the other end of it, and know more about Afghanistan than George W. Bush.

Finally, and on a more bloggy note, the magnificently named Lenin on the crassness of the inevitability argument - a kind of Vietnam syndrome of the left, where any war in difficult territory, with an opposition, will lead to US defeat. The comments section is, as always, worth reading - proof that, however problematic the anti-Iraq war campaign was, the left remains capable of losing its bearings faced with 'the Good war'.

Album of the Week: 'What's Going On?'

2009-07-06T16:00:00.000-07:00

A while back, I ranted, without much control, on the subject of 'New Atheism'. Listening to 'What's Going On?' this week, I realised that those words were wasted (well, more than usual) given that the stupidity of the New Atheists can be summed up by the fact that they refuse to recognise the difference between the Christianity of Pope Benedict XIV and Marvin Gaye.

'What's Going On?' is correctly considered to be one of the greatest albums ever made, and there is a narrative traditionally associated with it, usually featuring the unheard-of political radicalism of it, as a Motown release. The film Dreamgirls, about Diana Ross and the Supremes, features a subplot where a Gaye soundalike's vision rubs up against the boss of the Motown-alike record label - leading 'Gaye' down a path of heroin use, and towards death. The inanity of the music that the soundalike produces is hilarious - 90% of the lyrics being the words "peace and love" - and this is before we take into account that 'Gaye' is played by the foul Eddie Murphy - but I digress...

The real surprise of the album, after imbibing the traditional narrative, and hits used for the illustration of it, is the level of introspection, and religious content that 'What's Going On?' contains. The left-wing politics is wonderful - gloriously earnest, exalting "picket lines/and picket signs" and those whose "hair is long". These gems are sanctified and sillified by the inclusion of a recurring prayer that begins "Don't go and talk about my father/God is my friend (Jesus is my friend)", which puts one in mind of both Gaye spoiling for a pub fight with a trash-talking atheist, and Gaye's own father, who tragically shot his son, depriving the world of black music of one of its greatest stylists, and perhaps its greatest singer since Paul Robeson. The music is profoundly soft, unthreatening, with melotrons and flutes spiralling to the heavens, drums that resemble a babbling brook, and grand, simple strings.

Listening to the album, the picture that emerges (much like that of Thom Yorke's 'The Eraser') is of a troubled soul, projecting his crises onto a disturbing, broken world. But a continuity exists with his earlier work, which unlike that of Thom Yorke, is not entirely depressing. So the lush, swinging 'Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)' comes on like a love song, then begins "Oh, mercy mercy me/things ain't what they used to be/Where did all the blue skies go?/Poisoned is the wind that flows/From the North and South". On 'Right On', he bemoans inequality, and his own addiction to easy living and nightlife (and perhaps cocaine - I don't have a good Gaye timeline), despite the horror of the world.

The litany of apocalyptic scenarios contrasted with appeals to God's love present us with something more complex than simple love songs, or political tracts. We're left with love songs which accept a world where love is crushed under the jackboot, songs of beauty and ecstacy in a world of squallor, songs that appeal to our highest impulses, while accepting that the easy way out is very easy indeed. It deserves its status, and deserves better than Eddie Murphy.

Oh, What a Lovely War!

2009-06-30T17:21:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, US troops will 'pullback' from towns and cities in Iraq. Good taste surely dictates that the celebrations will be muted - throwing a giant parade, given the million dead and 2 million displaced, would be quite grotesque (I foolishly searched for an image for this post, using the terms 'Iraq War' - not a clever move). The Iraq War (or 'Iraq 2 - This Time, It's Protracted') is seen, by all other than the most ostrich-like supporters of the invasion, as an unmitigated disaster - the deposition and execution of Saddam being scant consolation for the utter destruction of infrastructure, the creation of a sham 'democracy' and the unleashing of inter-communal violence. All of the main governmental supporters of the war: Bush, Blair and Aznar, are now out of office.

The election of an American President who was opposed to the war, and the 'pullback', are drawing a line under the invasion - continued criticism of the war will henceforth appear to be, if not sour grapes, then an increasingly irrelevant irritant. Of course, US troops remain in Iraq, as will the aircraft that rain fire indiscriminately and the branches of KFC. The message is that it's over - the massage of the message from the pro-war crowd will be "we came with good intentions, but got it wrong. Better luck next time!". They'd prefer not to learn the lessons, as they didn't after Kosovo, as they won't after Afghanistan. It's a shame, as I maintain a sedentary lifestyle, and really hate marching, even against war, but needs must.

One problem for the anti-war movement is film. The director and critic Francois Truffaut argued that it is impossible to make an anti-war film, as film can't fail but make look war look exciting. I've always taken this argument as fact - if we look at Apocalypse Now!, all 'the horror, the horror' is balanced with wide shots of helicopters, Flight of The Valkyries and that. Platoon, despite Oliver Stone's pinko-commie ways, leaves us with a slo-mo death scene that makes the chemical squalor of US conduct in Vietnam seem like the greatest heroism. But the Iraq War, for all the horror it's wrought, has left us with a genuinely anti-war film in the form of Paul Haggis' mesmeric 'In The Valley of Elah'.

'In The Valley of Elah' achieves its stance against the war by not setting its film in Iraq - the battered country is only seen in cameraphone footage, grimly reminiscent of leaked footage of so much atrocity. However, Iraq has come home - the film is set on a sunblasted army base, as disconnected from the US as the troops stationed thousands of miles away. Tommy Lee Jones plays the protagonist, the father of an Iraq veteran, and the narrative takes the form of a police procedural. The heavy lifting of the piece is undertaken by Tommy Lee's face, shown in nearly perpetual close-up, and his face's performance is magnificent. It's been said of the jazz pianist Cecil Taylor that he's capable of playing different tempo, tone and volume on each finger. In 'Elah', Tommy Lee Jones does the same thing with each facial muscle.

The film is remarkable for its portrayal of soldiers as human beings. Despite the millenia old existence of armies, this remains a difficulty (see the film '300' if you don't believe me). Perhaps it's because the things which armies do are beyond human - it's hard to believe that the people who razed Fallujah are of made of flesh like ours. But they are - they drink, they fight, they cry, they grieve and love. In a sane society, we wouldn't need an Armed Forces Day, or a Veterans' Day. We'd simply remove these individuals from the hideous situations in which they are placed, and carry about our business.

In dealing with the aftermath of war, 'In The Valley Of Elah' makes war as unsexy as it should be, and by implication, makes the decision to prosecute wars of choice seem as psychotic as it truly is. The film is problematic in its almost exclusive focus on the suffering of Americans. This is an imbalance that we can presume will exist until Iraq becomes the Las Vegas on the Gulf that we are promised. But in its unflinching portrait of what becomes even of the prosecutors of war, it deserves attention and acclaim.

Album of the 'Week': 'Off The Wall'

2009-06-28T17:11:00.000-07:00

Amongst all the tearful tributes, Jackson radio marathons and sick jokes (my personal favourite being the most simple - "R, I, P - easy as 1, 2, 3"), a gradual chorus has emerged that regardless of his manifest personal problems, we should concentrate on 'the music'. This is easier said than done, because Jackson's musical decline was pretty much unsurpassed. The dull grandstanding of his later career was a product of one thing - the poor musical and lyrical instincts of the all-powerful Jackson. The greatest parts of his work were all the products of outside influences - the magnificent Jackson 5 records, with tiny Michael's breathtaking vocals backed by Motown session players fucking around on a slow day, and the first two albums with Quincy Jones, 'Off The Wall' and 'Thriller'.

For someone devoted to Top Of The Pops around the time of 'Earth Song' and 'You Are Not Alone', 'Off The Wall' was a genuine surprise - the largest surprise being the sheer aggression underpinning the best tracks. Not only is Jackson's singing not devoid of character, as it was to become, but he fucking goes for it. The insane falsetto of 'Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough' and the joyous shouting of the title track (with the lyric "living crazy/that's the only way" - a sentiment he took far too literally) are reminders that he was a truly great singer, although, in contradiction to what various cloth-eared pundits have been repeating over the last few days, nowhere near as talented a musician as Mozart and Beethoven. Despite the hyperbole, the soft cloud of harmonies on 'Rock With You' are the closest he, and probably pop music to that point, got to the ecstatic.

Musically, the album pre-dates Jackson's personal and musical flight from his race. The sheer funk of the album, is, again a surprise. The nervy, jumping bassline of the title track, and the iron grooves that pervade the album are a wonder, and mostly the product of Quincy Jones's invention. The subtle, sane use of electronics are probably attributable to this as well - the Quincy-less Jackson would end up sanctioning the terrible production of 'Man In The Mirror'. Strings are used as simply another element, and not the point of the song, as they are at worst.

Given the hundreds of thousands of words written about Jackson following his odd death (there are many more to come...), this post feels oddly truncated. But perhaps the greatest tragedy is that, from 'Thriller' in 1983, his story overwhelmed his music, and, in musical terms, he'd died a very long time ago.

Album of the 'Week': 'Journal For Plague Lovers'

2009-06-18T16:54:00.000-07:00

The Manic Street Preachers are, as Simon Price argues in his brilliant and infuriating masterwork 'Everything', the band that mattered the most to their fans since The Smiths. Arguably this title was wrestled from them by The Libertines, partially because The Libertines are more interesting in terms of narrative, but largely because of the Manics' truly staggering backslide in terms of musical quality.

From 1994's 'The Holy Bible' to 1999's 'This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours' (an album with a title long enough to merit a comma) the Manics made scythingly beautiful pop music, allied to gauché and memorable lyrics - their grandiosity and naivité making them the perfect antidote to Britpop's music-hall/football crowd stylings. Then came one of the worst albums ever made by a great band, and my personal departure from the Manics, 'Know Your Enemy'. Mere words cannot describe how shit the album is, but they can go some way. It was clattering, pretentious, ugly and stupid - it contained songs defending the former Soviet Union and attacking Royal Correspondents (how controversial!). This album was trailed as a return to form - it arrived as a terrible disappointment. I'd like to deride the albums released since 'Know Your Enemy', but I've scarcely heard them - they have some good songs, but that does not make them worth weathering.

So, another album, another return to form. 'Journal For Plague Lovers' re-engaged the music press and lapsed fans through a wonderful piece of grave-robbing, using for its lyrics notebooks bequeathed to the band by missing lyricist and guitarist Richey Edwards. The look and sound of the album is clearly based on that of 'The Holy Bible', the last Edwards-era Manics album, and it delivers on the promise. If it's merely an exercise in nostalgia, it's an exercise which has led them back to the well of decent music, from the lake of shite where, for a decade, they have pitched camp.

The lyrics of 'Journal For Plague Lovers', compared to their contemporaries used on 'The Holy Bible', lack density and focus. Whereas 'The Holy Bible' offers lists of demagogues, 'Journal For Plague Lovers' gives us jokes - "me and Stephen Hawking...we missed the Sex Revolution when we failed the physical". Some of the lyrics would have benefited immensely from being left in the book - Doors Closing Slowly's opening couplet "Realise how lonely this is/Self-defeating? Oh fuck yeah" is one of the worst lyrics ever committed to tape. There are still flashes of brilliance - "the Levi jean will always/be stronger than the Uzi" being a particular favourite - but the lyrics feel like what they are - the unwisely opened notebooks of a sadly insane man.

What has kept me listening to this album is what keeps all fans of the Manics listening to the Manics - the world-beating songwriting and singing of James-Dean Bradfield. On 'Journal For Plague Lovers' the discrepency in quality between the two elements of the songs becomes absurd. On 'Me and Stephen Hawking', James-Dean's giddy verses, sung at the edge of his vocal range, are a joy - the lyrics, including the phrase "Transgenic milk containing human protein", are an irritant. The anthemic 'Jackie Collins Existential Question Time' has a lyric which at first is amusing and becomes, through repetition, an annoyance ("if a married man fucks a Catholic"). But, give or take a few skipables, the Manics have made an album that repays listening, a fact as wonderful as it is unnerving.

"You're Fired!"

2009-06-04T16:43:00.000-07:00

The Apprentice, the most stylish and expensive of reality shows, is limping towards its yearly final, proud but bruised by what Sir Alan has referred to as 'harsh economic times'. It's already been noted by Private Eye that 'Britain's most beligerent boss' is one of the many victims of the credit crunch (an absurd title, which makes the economic crisis sound like an event, not a process, and a breakfast cereal, in one pithy stroke of the alliterator's pen). The Apprentice has been forced to reflect this, and as such the opening narration refers to Sir Alan as being worth millions, rather than putting a specific figure on his wealth, as this sum has been drastically decreased, due to Sir Alan's hasty investment in property, and property subsequently becoming worth less than a supermarket baguette. How he must cry himself to sleep...

It's a shame, because The Apprentice is the best reality show. To call it a guilty pleasure would be a lie - it's an outright pleasure. Perhaps it's an inverse pleasure, because what's truly thrilling about The Apprentice is that it demonstrates the injusticies, stupidities and vulgarities of capitalism, up close, in high definition, and in a way that no drama, written by even the most brilliant of left-wing writers, could ever manage.

The disgustingness of the process (one year, excluding a female candidate for her unwillingness to abandon her child) and the foul bullshit that Sir Alan spouts are all fun to mock and appalling demonstrations of the prejudices inbuilt in the system. But for the real proof of my theory, we have to look at the Apprentices (or Apprenti) themselves. Almost universally detestable - a quality which the business community mispercieves as honesty - they bluster through a sequence of relatively simple tasks, focused more on self-assertion than on the task in hand, leading them to fail so often that the impression you're left with is that they are simply failures. Maybe it's a symptom of these 'harsh economic times', but this year has been marked by how often the teams have made a loss under the rules of the programme - in fact, once or twice, both teams have ended up in this situation.

The level of personal and professional idiocy on display leads many people doubt the validity of selection process, but, going by the potted biographies of the Apprenti that we're offered, they are all successful in their respective fields. This demonstrates, I would like to think, that the premium placed on assertiveness and risk-taking under capitalism leads to a situation that used to be described, in less enlightened times, as 'lunatics taking over the asylum'. Given the offensiveness of this phrase, it's better just to call it what it is, which is people with borderline personality disorders, having positions that offer absurd power and wealth, despite their inability to succeed at the most simple tasks.

This leads us naturally to the ongoing implosion of the Labour Party. The massive decline in the membership has left the higher orders of the Labour Party resembling nothing more than a gaggle of Apprentices. Although the support Labour recieves from the poisoned dwarf that is Sir Alan should force each remaining Labour Party member to commit ritual suicide, the ultimate proof of this theory is the fact of Hazel Blears. With her robust regional accent and robotic delivery of utter nonsense, she's the perfect Apprentice, and that's not mentioning her propensity for tax-dodging. The elevation of figures like our Hazel, James Purnell, Andy Burnham and so many others was necessary, given the flight of left-wingers, or even soft-left wingers, from the Labour Party, but, as we've seen, the elevation of the Headboy Tendency has sown the seeds of its destruction.

The current Labour meltdown compares unfavourably to previous Labour meltdowns. The flurry of ministers now leaving, compared to the graceful, Titantic-like slow sink of the Callaghan government, resemble sodden rats fleeing a burning pedalo. The resignation of the benefit-cutting, blisteringly right-wing prick James Purnell, compared to the resignation of Aneurin Bevan over the issue of the introduction of perscription charges, looks like the pathetic, career-focused move it is. How ruthless, how assertive, how Sir Alan!

POSTSCRIPT: Ludicrous. Just fucking ludicrous

Album of the Week: 'Boy In Da Corner'

2009-05-18T16:47:00.000-07:00

Maybe I'm the kind of politically correct man that haunts the dreams of Richard Littlejohn, but I can't help seeing racism in places that you wouldn't expect to find it. Prime among these is the racism in the field of music writing and appreciation. The tradition of 'black' music is exactly as creative and proficient, and dull and deficient, as 'white' music, but Cecil Taylor isn't mentioned in the same breath as Olivier Messiaen, and, somehow, Charlie Mingus is shamefully denied the title of the King of Music. When it comes to rap, the combination of insult and ignorance is shameful. Although music writing has gradually accepted that rap is worthwhile, Public Enemy's Bomb Squad aren't regarded by most geeks to be the equivilents of Autechre and Stockhausen that they are. And Dizzee Rascal, the greatest living British composer, is wheeled out like some exotic curio on Jonathan Ross.

The Rascal's first album, 'Boy In Da Corner', released in the year he turned 18, is an absurdly dense, challenging work. Alternately poppy and nightmarish, always tense and angry, it reaches the heights of Public Enemy, but manages to be witter and more engaging. Also, it's just more radical - the spaces that Dizzee is prepared to create would give Dr. Dre a heart attack. 'I Luv U' punches the listener with disgusting music and cutting lyrics about a teen pregnancy, and has the rare distinction of being an overtly misogynist song which gives the female race a right to reply. The spat claim "That girl's some bitch you know" is met with a biting "That boy's some prick you know". The brilliant, sparse 'Cut 'Em Off' takes the skittering beats of UK Garage, places them in a giant echoic room, and slows them to the pace of a dying heartbeat, providing the ideal backdrop for his coherent whinging.

Like another great rap innovator, Eminem, Dizzee subverts the traditional content of rap lyrics. 'Cut 'Em Off' and 'Round We Go' take the boasts of criminality and virility that make up most rap lyrics, and render them as whines. 'Cut 'Em Off''s chorus of "Socialise - negotiate" is wrapped in numerous voices, slapping into each other, mocking the competition of the 'Game' so beloved of ghetto folklorists. Just in case we missed the point, the song ends with a muttered, lonely instance of the word 'cunt'. 'Round We Go', while it features some truly ill-judged boasts (try to remember that "bend her over and I leave her limpin'" are the words of an 18-year-old), has a chorus refrain "ain't no love thing here - it's just one big cycle here", delivered in a tone that sounds remarkably like crying.

No wonder it won the Mercury Prize. Artists this inventive are very few and far between, and Rascal's demonstrated his flexibility by moving from the hard, abrasive style of 'Boy In Da Corner' to being one of Britain's most inventive pop stylists. Long may he make his thrillingly mental music

On Positive Thinking

2009-05-07T18:39:00.001-07:00

In one of Peep Show's many pithy, quotable lines, Super Hans outlines his basic views on humanity. "People", he says "like Coldplay, and voted for the Nazis". If the universality of bad taste was a fact, Peep Show would have sunk like a stone after one series. But, given that the mass of people are often capable of telling shit apart from dirty clay, it's one of Channel 4's most popular shows.

It's also the best sitcom of the last ten years, and one of the best British sitcoms of all time. At the heart of its success is the writing. Unremittingly bleak, profoundly well observed, with its unique device of having access to the darkest thoughts of the protagonists ("I wonder if I'm capable of murder?"), it often resembles a play by Brecht or Sartre. Except the jokes are better. One scene involves Jeremy, the self-obsessed air-headed poseur declaring that "Honey Nut Cornflakes are just Frosties for wankers", to which the downtrodden, middle-management nothing Mark replies "Well, Frosties are just Cornflakes for people who can't handle reality". An infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters could maybe write Shakespeare, but they could never sum up characters through their choice of breakfast cereal with such skill.

Mark and Jeremy (and their ever-present internal monologues) aside, Peep Show has a beautifully drawn characters. Prime among these is the grotesquely thrusting and high-powered Johnson, the kind of black man that David Cameron has wet dreams about, but also deserving mention is the Christian hedonist Nancy (seen here as Sally, the most beautiful girl in the room) and Mark's frumpy yet cute ex-wife, Sophie. The focus given to the perspective of the two main characters allows the characters to fully develop and emerge, as rarely happens in conventional sitcoms, with multiple stories and a third person viewpoint. I know that Johnson and Mark share a taste for The Lighthouse Family because I've been in Johnson's car, and heard what's on Mark's iPod. With this level of detail, Peep Show makes other sitcoms look artificial - the cast of Friends and Coupling seem to live in a world without music, unless you count Pheobe's ten second punchline songs.

So far, so gushing. But the ultimate reason for Peep Show's success is its relentless realism, and the grimness that actually follows. Before the Credit Crunch, when Gordon Brown's skill at maintaining economic growth seemed almost magical, Jeremy was arguing that in the new economic climate "we don't make tractors out of pig iron any more - we chill out, fuck around on the Playstation...", while Mark, the hero of Peep Show, was reminding us of the need to "log in, and grind out" and that you can't, in fact "make money by drinking margharitas through a curly straw". The constant defeat of the main characters fits with lived experience, as opposed to the absurd, workless lives and surreal happy ending of Friends.

Peep Show has many admirers, but it has a core of fans - people who have been over-educated due to the massive expansion of higher education, and understimulated in work because of the subsequent glut of graduates in the labour market. The twin fates of Mark, in his soulless data entry job ("I can pretend I'm entering data for MI5...") and Jeremy, a 'creative' who can find no post in the 'knowledge economy' ("I'm dangerously bored") chime with millions. The continued success and resonance of Peep Show are proof of the power of negative thinking, and the hilarity of hearing the truths that we dare not admit to ourselves simply stated.

Album of the Week: 'Radiator'

2009-05-04T17:06:00.000-07:00

Brit-pop is dead - most of its stars are no longer musicians. In fact, most of those who are still producing music are no longer musicians in any meaningful sense, Oasis being a CBBC version of The Rolling Stones and Damon Alburn being a wide-ranging credibility vampire with Tony Allen and Dangermouse as his quarries. Neither as politically radical nor musically radical as punk, there's a tendancy to write it out of history, and to accept the clip-show version of its history as fact - Liam Gallagher at Knebworth, 'Roll With It' vs 'Country House', Geri Spice's Union Jack dress, and, to mark its death, Tony Blair schmoozing the ambassadors of Cool Britannia like only a groupie can.

Of course, this is bollocks - Brit-pop produced many great songs (I may have been of an impressionable age, but watching Top of the Pops from 1994-1997 was a profound, gleaming thrill - remember Top of the Pops when you were a kid?) and bore aloft various bands that still produce great music to this day. Some kind of cosmic balance ensured that for every Shed Seven there was a Radiohead, for every Menswear there was a Pulp and for every Dodgy there was a Super Furry Animals.

Unlike Pulp or Radiohead, the Super Furries were clearly of Brit-pop. Bankrolled by Creation Records' Oasis-gotten millions, with jangling guitars and sunglasses/haircut combinations trademarked by Ian Brown, they were ideally suited to creating uplifting summer hits. But, regardless of their physical and spiritual proximity to the tenets of Brit-pop, the music they made was simply too divergent and odd.

Radiator, their second album, while it contains anthemic and pensive songs, full of sweeping guitar chords, and singalong melodies, also contains absurd fitful sketches, slightly over 2 minutes in length, called things like 'The International Language of Screaming'. Actually, even if we disregard the wilfully awkward pieces of music - the little keyboard pieces, the song in Welsh - even the 'hits' are difficult. 'Demons', with its sense of purpose and sweeping chords, has one of the most abrasive guitar tones in the history of recorded music, and the lyric "and in the year three million/our skins will be vermillion". 'Mountain People' asks you to digest, along with its singalong melody, a perpetually stretching verse and, to finish, a wall of electronic noise. These were not songs made for 'I Love The 90s'.

This is bad enough faced with the button-down style of Oasis and their friends, and the even more straight-laced members of the sub-group 'Cool Cymru'. But, the Supreme Crime of the 1990s Furries was their adherence to a non-personal lyric style. So 'The Placid Casual', as well as having the gloriously memorable chorus-marker "Fuzz/Clogs up my video", has a second verse about an unsuccessful coup in Sierra Leone. 'Mountain People' could be a eulogy for any number of culturally distinct mountain folk - the Kurds, the Chechens or, at a push, the Welsh - and heavily implies conflict - "two short blasts followed by one longer blast". The two love songs of sorts come laden with irony and history. "Hermann Loves Pauline" tells the story of a love affair between two socially odd people, in the third person, throwing in absurd references to Che Guevara, Marie Curie and 24-hour combination petrol stations and supermarkets. "She's Got Spies" does what it says on the tin, imagining a relationship destroyed by the interpersonal secret services of mistrust, eventually collapsing under its own tension. This is Brit-pop bent by history, an imaginary Oasis where one of the Gallaghers has read a book.

As such it was ignored. But like the other square-peg Britpop bands - Pulp, Manic Street Preachers, Radiohead - history has been kind to the Furries, and they continue to record challenging, witty music, long after Tony Blair committed some war crimes and Geri Halliwell became a UN Goodwill Ambassador.

Budgeting for the past: The Hauntology of Labour

2009-04-27T16:54:00.000-07:00

Given the scale and profile of the current recession, the recent budget, traditionally the most trying of times for commentators (a great deal of numbers and infinitesimal changes in the price of fags do not a good 'angle' make) has become a goldmine for the boosters and gravediggers of 'New' Labour. The Guardian's Polly Toynbee alternates, with alarming frequency, between these two positions, but for a swift kick up the arse to the government, hers, with its close detail and wounded tone, is one of the best. In general, the conclusion drawn by commentators of the soft left and right is that the increase in tax for people earning over £150,000 a year is the death of 'New' Labour, given that not increasing tax on the rich was one of its key policy positions.

The tax raise is tiny, and largely symbolic. Labour has lost its funding from the very rich, as the hyper-rich now see Labour as an unsafe investment. As a result, 95% of its current funding comes from the trade unions, and with wage freezes/cuts and job losses clearly on the cards for the public sector, increasing tax a fraction on 1.5% of the population is considerably easier way to curry left favour than, well, raising wages and creating jobs. This symbolic murder of 'New' Labour is also an attempt to re-create the 'Brown bounce', when horror at the style of government of Tony Blair led people to hallucinate that Gordon Brown was authetically 'Old' Labour. The political problems of this are compounded by the fact that any hope in Brown as 'Old' Labour are an hallucination of 'Old' Labour as being a model of social democratic government.

If we take an actual appraisal of the last Labour government of 1974-1979, rather than a thumbnail one (beer and sandwiches, unions running the country, ill-fitting suits and regional accents), Brown is inarguably 'Old' Labour. Wage freezes, spiralling unemployment, global economic crisis - all very retro. The major discontinuity is the fact that, way back when, Labour hadn't dragged us into two absurd and disgustingly bloody wars. Brown has spent considerably less than fuck all on protecting jobs and wages, trillions on bankers and this is a 'left budget'?

Margaret Thatcher said her greatest achievement was 'New' Labour - undoubtably that is the case. But just as true is the fact that the greatest achievement of the pre-Thatcher Labour government was to soften the unions through collective bargaining, legal restriction and the argument that the unions should accept cuts in the 'national interest'. Maybe history the legacy of 'New' Labour will be to have killed, or at least critically wounded, the idea that Labour works for the working class. Sparks of resistance to the notion that the crisis is above and beyond control (we regret to inform you that we have to let you go) are burning. Let's hope Labour have lost the power to snuff them out.

Album of the Week: 'Grrr'

2009-04-23T17:31:00.000-07:00

One of the stupidest ever aphorisms is "don't judge a book by its cover". You only have to look at the cover of say, 'Articles of Faith' by Russell Brand to know it's going to be a lot of cobbled together, self-obsessed shite. Albums covers are the same. An album covered with a picture of members of a band, soberly dressed, staring in various directions, will generally be directionless and plodding. However, an album with a cover like that above, can only be good. It has a trumpet, and a fucking LION!! (Cub).

So I bought it. It didn't disappoint. By the radical anti-aparthied South African (lion) trumpeter (trumpet) Hugh Masekela, it's constantly sunny, and a reminder of a tradition different to the dour blues funk of most feted African artists - Fela Kuti springs to mind. Partly out of necessity (Masekela was exiled in the US for his opposition to aparthied), it mixes traditional African rhythm with more conventional jazz musicality. If North American music is Europe saying "hello" to Africa, what Masekela provides us with is Africa saying hello to a mixture of Europe and Africa.

So far, so nice. But where the 'Grrr' of the title comes in is with Masekela's trumpet playing. Absurdly overblown, the notes bend, warp and growl, providing a childish thrill - sometimes it resembles that most comic of instruments, the trombone. Of course, being a trumpeter, Masekela, can't ramble like Fela Kuti about the injustices done by his government, but the vehemence of his playing leaves us in no doubt that he's absolutely furious.

Approaching Gore Vidal: Part 2, 'Selected Writings'

2009-04-17T18:16:00.000-07:00

Gore Vidal's politics are probably the most intriguing thing about the man. An odd kind of Democrat, he has vehemently opposed America's intervention in all wars including WWII, correctly regards the US an empire, and believes in the legalisation of all drugs. When his personal life is factored in, it is impossible to believe that he was a friend of the Kennedys and Clintons, and a congressional candidate. But, class counts in the States, despite the lunatic pronouncements of pro-Americans on the subject of the American Dream, which is, and has always been a dream.

'Selected Writings', never less than entertaining, collects Gore's writings on books and politics, largely sidestepping Gore's name-dropping, aristocratic side. Of course, these are more than one side of the man (probably nearer 2/3rds), and they creep in - an eyewitness account of 50s Egypt is by turns a travelogue of the kind popularised (?) by Michael Winner and a breathtakingly detailed exposition of superpower rivalry, coming to the then radical conclusion that money, not politics, was the determining factor. A brilliant, before-its-time (1981!) attack on the homophobia and racism of one of the original neo-cons, Norman Podhoretz, 'Pink Triangle and Yellow Star' (exerpt here), is marred by Vidal's compulsion to mock Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter, for being nouveau riche, of 'the new class' - not Mayflower originals like the Grand Old Gores.

Vidal's radicalism is absurdly wide-ranging, ranging from attacks on what he calls The Family to ending an essay on 9/11 with a simple, and gigantic, table of US interventions in the 10 years preceeding the attacks. In the same essay, the pre-9/11 Bush is compared to Hitler. Reading Gore's more recent work, the motivation behind his surreal election night face-off with David Dimbleby becomes blindingly clear.

Vidal has bitten off a large chunk of extreme libertarian thought - during the Clinton years, he famously associated with the survivalist convicted of the Oklahoma Bombings. He therefore expresses his anti-imperialism in the tones of one who accepts the Israel Lobby thesis, with touches of New World Order 'theory'. Added to this a fierce (and inexplicable) support for the Democrats, Bush became, to Gore, a fascist dictator, clamping down on dissent, launching criminal wars. While Bush undoubtably did this, Gore saw Bush and the Republican party as cancers on America, and not a logical outgrowth. When the Republicans were defeated at the polls, all the totalitarianism that had been determined by Gore - the theft of the 2000/2004 elections by Republican 'criminals' vanished into smoke. A fascist party that gets peacefully replaced by its rivals, isn't a fascist party.

Album of the Week: 'Armed Forces'

2009-04-15T15:38:00.000-07:00

Elvis Costello is perhaps the most respected songwriter to emerge from the punk era - a status he has achieved by spending the last 15 years or so behaving like an apprentice Paul McCartney. He has recorded albums with string quartets and Allen Toussaint, written orchestral music and, most recently, acted like King Music on his good but grating 'chat show' Spectacle. Much of his more recent work has involved carefully rounding off the razor-sharp edge that his music previously had, and re-presenting himself as an all too conscious 'musician'. He is not, however much he may like to think he is, a middle-of-the-road tunesmith - his music is not made for wedding receptions. Costello famously remarked, around the time of the release of his first 3 albums, that he was capable of two emotions - guilt, and revenge. 'Armed Forces' deals with these, brutally and relentlessly.

One reason 'Armed Forces' stands apart from the other early Elvis albums, is hinted at in its title, and blugeoned home in the thankfully discarded provisional title, 'Emotional Fascism'. As well as referring to snatches of broken, destructive relationships, the ghosts of World War Two and the stasis of the social contract that emerged following are pressed into service. In perhaps the album's weakest track, 'Chemistry Class' - a poor, disjointed song of obsessive love and heartbreak - the chorus runs "Are you ready for the final solution?". Fortunately, this disgrace is a rare blip - the interplay between the political and personal is more stylishly done in the glittering 'Oliver's Army', which draws a parallel between the drunken rambling of an old soldier and the decline of the British Empire. The political extremity of the coming Thatcher revolution and the rise of the NF is dealt with in the itchy, fearful 'Green Shirt' and the fabulous 'Sunday's Best', which imagines a particular British seaside fascism of "Songs of Praise and Reader's Wives", where natives "beat up strangers who talk funny - take their greasy, foreign money".

Of course, this all sounds rather worthy, which is where the other half of the album's content comes into play. During the recording of 'Armed Forces', Costello is on record as having been under the influence of Abba. Unlike the dry, clattering, Americanised rock of 'My Aim Is True' and 'This Year's Model', 'Armed Forces' is a lush, harmonied and synthesisered work. This explains the enduring status of 'Oliver's Army' and 'Accidents Will Happen' as his most recognizable songs. It also acts as a glorious counterpoint to the grime and sweat of the subject matter - the peppy sequencing and cut glass chords of 'Green Shirt' makes lyrical punches like "better cut off all identifying labels/before they put you on the torture table" easier to weather. The grand horror of the lyrics next to the horror of the subject matter fits into the famous 'Peep Show' framework of brown toast for dinner, and white toast for dessert. The joke is on him, because I actually love brown toast.

Something to believe in.

2009-04-13T08:49:00.000-07:00

The 'New Atheist' movement - Dawkins, Hitchens, assorted others - is thoroughly detestable. Using all the insight that they acquired in Smug School, they blandly condemn religious beliefs, and religious believers, without considering the reasons why such belief might exist. Well, sometimes they do consider why, but the shit they come up with is less than pathetic. Hitchens blames the ever shifting sequence of rituals, the Notre Dame cathedral on "our idiot monkey brains".

Atheism is not a mirror image of religious belief - not believing in that which cannot be proved is not the same in believing in that which cannot be proved. However, New Atheism can be hilariously similar to an extremist religious belief. Common to all religions is the notion that the evil that exists in the world is due to erroneous belief, which leads to sinful action. At the core of the particular criticisms of religion put forward by the New Atheists, is the idea that bad things are caused by religious belief - terrorism, war etc. - and that these would disappear if religious belief was exorcised, and rationality reigned.

Dawkins departs us before our next stop, but Hitchens' New Atheism has a millenium - 9/11 provided the pretext for an overtly religious war - and Hitchens argues for the destruction of religious believers - describing cluster bombs used against the people of Afghanistan as having a "heartening effect". But of course, the 'anti-theist' beliefs of Hitchens, are in no way comparable to those of Abu Hamza. They are rational, if fucking insane - scientific, if profoundly anti-human.

As such, I enjoy people sticking the boot into these idealist swines. So, Brendan O'Neill, flaying Bill Mayer's terrible-sounding film Religulous, and, more skilfully, John Molyneux mapping the Marxist response to religion.

Album of the Week: 'Dark Side of the Moon'

2009-04-06T18:19:00.000-07:00

Having attacked the 'Holy Album' school of music appreciation, it seems absurd to focus on perhaps the holiest of holies, Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side of the Moon'. However, 'Dark Side of the Moon' is as much a victim of the 'Holy Album' way of listening as any number of stellar soul singles and non-Bob Marley reggae tunes. Its particular myth entirely precedes and overshadows it - stoners' plaything, synchronises with Wizard of Oz etc. etc.. If anything backs up the argument that the worship of the album puts commodity over content, it's the pants pictured above. You cannot listen to them.

Were you able to listen to the album through those pants, what would assail you would be music that is rocking and 'spacy' but also harsh and experimental. The alternating vocal parts of David Gilmour and Roger Waters' sum up the two different poles that tracks veer between. The sequencing of the heroic and absurd 'The Great Gig in the Sky' next to the biting, aggressive and not very good 'Money' make it obvious. In their inept, hippish way, 'The Floyd' strive for the transcendent, but the mundane and the downright awful keep exercising a pull.

The Syd Barrett-era, and post-'Dark Side' Pink Floyd albums, are packed with lyrics, which are not their forté - just thinking of the phrase "shine on, you crazy diamond" should make you shudder. But on 'Dark Side of the Moon', the lyrics are, for the most part, sparse - it's over 2 minutes into the first track that singing makes its first appearance. The lyrics that are left to stand in this space are better than most - the peerless 'Us and Them', deals with the horror of war in a way that's distant, tragic, and far from the idealism of 60s pacifism. In gloriously effette tones, the line "With, without/Who can deny it's what the fighting's all about?" sounds as though it comes from a suicidal, non-interventionist god. 'Time', while dealing with wasted lives and shattered dreams, as all good songs do, notches up one gem and one clanger - "hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way" and "the Sun is the same, in a relative way but you're older".

'Dark Side of The Moon' is not trippy, and not appropriate for the branding of novelty underpants. It is a measured, beautifully recorded, ambitious and stylish rock album. It created a synthesis between classical music (experimental and conventional) and popular music that was the well-spring for the self-conscious ambition of Radiohead (perhaps a mixed blessing), and its lyrical razing of the British post-war consensus laid the foundations for punk. It is not a relic or an icon, it's an album that remains relevant, and deserves consideration.

Approaching Gore Vidal: Part 1, 'Palimpsest'

2009-04-05T07:36:00.000-07:00

Approaching Gore Vidal is no easy task, as David Dimbleby recently discovered. He's the last man standing from the era of the mega-celebrity author, Norman Mailer and Truman Capote having died. He's also older than most American houses, if not the Sun. Reading his autobiography, 'Palimpsest', you would not be surprised to read a withering put-down of Jesus, or an anecdote about Julius Caesar cruising for rough trade.

Given Vidal's absurdly interesting life story, 'Palimpsest' is a pallid, sporadically interesting work. In large part this is due to Vidal's aristocratic background, and the tiresome focus on family (or family tree) that follows. One of the best anecdotes in the book is of Princess Margaret watching a film about the fall of the last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia, and exclaiming "They're so ordinary. They're just like us!". When Vidal is in aristocratic mode, the book becomes tiresome - clearly, nobody ever told him that an Upper Class name dropper is not a thing to be. This mindset also leads him to effectively end the book with the assisination of JFK, in 1963. The book was written in 1994, and Vidal, seeing himself as the sum total of the company he keeps, considers very little of the 30 intervening years to be worth recording.

More's the pity, as the first half of the book, dealing with his adolescent love affair with a boy named Jimmie Trimble, his ongoing homosexuality and World War II, is riveting. Vidal's style, alternately acid and profound, suits the subject matter perfectly. Jimmie dies in WWII, and Gore undertakes a pre-AIDS marathon of loveless casual sex, etching over a thousand notches into his proverbial bedpost. Despite the evidence to the contrary, Vidal is reticent to consider himself homosexual - one of his most famous aphorisms being "there are no homosexual or heterosexual people, there are homosexual and heterosexual acts". In Gore Vidal's case, there are an epic amount of homosexual acts, and next to no heterosexual acts.

Animating the section is Vidal's dedication to creating an historical record of an existing homosexuality (or homosexual acts) in the mythic past beloved of American conservatives. In Vidal's alternative history, WWII becomes a festival of enforced homosexuality, which demobbed soldiers re-enact with glee. The emergence of the USA as the world's hyperpower provides Gore and his contemporaries with more places to cruise. Allusions are made to the homosexual leanings of both JFK and RFK.

The aspect of the autobiography that is most striking is the distance with which he views his friendships. He draws a scathing comic sketch of the author Anais Nin, drawing on his dislike for her prose, her rampant lying and narcissism. All very amusing, but obviously posing the question of why he was a very close associate of hers for several years. Tennessee Williams has a slightly less sharp assessment, but then they were friends for decades, and the portrait is still cutting. The last years of his life story as he tells it, spent as a courtier in the JFK White House, follow a similar pattern - Bobby Kennedy and Jackie Onassis bearing the brunt of his spite. Ultimately, the impression that Vidal creates is of the consumate observer-writer - dispassionate, non-interventionist and not averse to shaping a narrative to his greater glory.

"Ask not what your country can do for you"

2009-04-01T17:28:00.001-07:00

The BBC have recently been showing a profoundly disturbing advert, as part of the promotion for their thoroughly ill-judged 'Britain's Got Talent' style search for the next great orator. Disturbing, first, for the shift between the ordinary voice of a child and the voice of the corrupt mayor of Springfield, Joe Quimby. But also disturbing in its content - the end of John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, in which he beseeches his citizens not to ask him for things ("ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country).

JFK is seen by some as a lost liberal hero - his assassination an attack on a reforming politician by the forces of reaction. The unimpeachable Marvin Gaye and Bill Hicks fell down on this camp (in fairness, Hicks had reservations). He was none of these things. Like Tony Blair, he took it upon himself to be more hawkish than the hawks, sending troops against Cuba and Vietnam. Two major invasions in just shy of 3 years is an impressive record.

The section of his speech chosen by the BBC to highlight great oratory is in fact apocalyptic, nonsensical and platitudinous. He tasks himself with "defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger", assuring the audience that "I do not shank from this responsibilty". Of course, this proved not to mean the freedom of Cuba and Vietnam to determine their own futures, although both of them managed to achieve an impressive degree of self-determination faced with the greatest military force the modern world has known. Aside from these churlish objections, what can Kennedy mean about freedom being in its hour of maximum danger in 1961? Surely we can agree that was, in modern history, when Hitler's armies had an iron grip over the vast swathe of continental Europe, with Kennedy's father's full support?

After dropping this millinarian clanger, he tries to sweeten his audience by praising their generation - "I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation". This is, over human history, largely true - the fact of technological progress, and the impossibility of time travel make exchanging places with other generations both undesirable and impractical.

But the most arresting phrase, and the most infuriating, is his call for Americans not to ask what their country can do for them, but what they can do for their country. The state behaves, at its most basic level, as a parasite. In the feudal era, the state acted as a protection racket, demanding taxes, and punishing those who refused to cough up. Fortunately, things are less one-sided now, following demands on the state to provide essential services, and a degree of security. Arguing for self-sacrifice in the name of the glory of the nation, must have, should have, sounded slightly kamikaze to an audience of people, many of whom had been detrimentally impacted by the struggle against oriental despotism.

Given that the rise of Obama is clearly the impetus for the BBC's search for an orator, the choice of this speech is highly ironic - Obama's arguments are almost opposite to those of Kennedy. Obama argued against fearful patriotic fervor in the form of the Iraq War, and for state intervention to help create jobs and widen health-care provision. Not counting the incongruity of JFK's nasal, Bostonian tones issuing from the maws of clearly British children, the speech hits the wrong notes.

Album of the Week: 'Early'

2009-03-29T17:33:00.000-07:00

One of the most off-putting aspects of serious engagement with popular music is the myth of the Holy Album. From the people who neglect the shuffle function on mp3 players, to stoners reverently listening to vinyl, worshippers at the shrine of the Holy Album put the commodity before its content, and neglect the fact that, in the bad old days, bands would churn out any old shit to fulfill a contract. Alan Partridge was right to say that his favourite Beatles album was 'The Best of the Beatles'. Aside from being sometimes far better than the albums from which they are compiled, some compilations enable listeners to hear music that was otherwise inaccessible to everyone except a core of devotees.

Green Gartside, the only constant of the 'band' Scritti Politti, is one of the oddest musicians working. Aside from being a 50-something who does a mean rap cover version live, his musical career has bewildering shifts, usually related to what seem to be mental breakdowns. In the 80s, he made disgustingly lush, lyrically obtuse pop, while looking like a shell-suited Princess Diana. After a decade's silence, he returned with the same, but with rap added. Another decade passed, and he made an album of singer-songwritery wonder, which was correctly nominated for the Mercury prize, called White Bread, Black Beer (a testament to his apparent alcoholism). But, before this, Scritti Politti were actually a band, and made some of the most broken, disturbing punk of its time. Due to either a breakdown, or a speed-induced heart attack, they folded before recording what Mojo would call an album. Luckily, in 2005, Rough Trade collected these lost songs, and made an album of them.

'Early' starts in with a jolt, with the terrifying 'Skank Bloc Bologna'. Terrifying sounds like hyperbole, but it isn't - the music is absolutely fucked, and the lyrics are all limited horizons, ruined potential and, most of all, unknowing. Slipknot would have to have ten guitarists, six drummers and five DJs, masturbating, to induce this bewilderment and dislocation in their audience. The general mood of the album is fearful. In fact, punk can be seen as a fear reaction to the social crisis of Britain in the 70s - with Sex Pistols being the fight, and Scritti Politti being the flight. Of course, the Sex Pistols are more fun, but Scritti are more interesting.

This is an album that can only be understood in its historical context. It's funky, tuneful and all that, but lyrics, like those that appear in the brilliant 'Bibbly-O-Tek' - "secondary picket, Eastern Bloc" - are wonderfully, laughably of their time. In general, the album has more to chew on than most others. Voices overlap, speaking different words, songs stutter, restart, change course. Even when their pop future can be glimpsed, there are little phrases, musical and lyrical, that raise a smile. 'The "Sweetest Girl"', the most punkless song here, has Robert Wyatt playing dissonant keyboards, and the best rationalisation for a break-up ever - the Girl left "because she understood the value of defiance". Like the music M.I.A. now makes, these songs are funny, political, funky and beautiful. And to think that they all could have been left on authentic, decaying vinyl EPs, never seeing the light as a joyous, inauthentic CD album.

Every Little Helps

2009-03-25T18:53:00.000-07:00

A lot of political hatred is directed towards Tesco, for often wrong reasons - for all the social cohesion supposedly fostered by 'local shops', food is cheaper in Tesco than in a corner shop, and shopping in Tesco takes considerably less time than seeking out the most ethical carrots in a 20 mile radius. But, surely something must be done about their adverts.

In case you live in a cave and/or have no television, most of them go like this: blank screen, food item appears, a national treasure's voice is heard. Firstly, this isn't enough - they are the most successful retailers in Britain, and, had you or I their cash, we'd go hog wild and film Will Young being thrown into a barrel of ferrets while a 100-strong vegetable orchestra played 'Light My Fire'. Secondly, and most importantly, there is something blankly terrifying about the tone of their adverts. The texts and delivery are exceptionally patronising, explaining to you, in the laboured tones of the 'Good Cop', the reasons why you should shop in Tesco. This, combined with the half-arsed nature of the ads, leaves us with the impression that their message, though it reads 'Every Little Helps', is, in fact, 'There is Nowhere Else'.

I Knew I Was Right

2009-03-23T07:38:00.000-07:00

The Julie Burchill lookalike and New Statesman contributor Suzanne Moore, has resigned, and come out with views similar to mine, decrying the decline of its content, which has hit a new low, getting the detestable Alastair Campbell to guest edit. Presumably, this is a marketing ploy on their part, but it's still ridiculous - not only is he hateful and wrong, he's also dull.

Album of the Week: 'Fear of Music'

2009-03-22T18:28:00.000-07:00

Talking Heads were unique among their punk contempories in their childishness and playfulness. This fizzled out by the time of their most acclaimed album, 'Remain In Light', and lead to some of their output being unlistenable cock ('More Songs About Buildings and Food' being useless). Luckily, they had a last fun hurrah with 'Fear of Music', which also contains their most enjoyable music.

'Fear of Music' is 'a Brian Eno Production', and those who wonder where his unblemishable reputation comes from, this and David Bowie's 'Low', from the same period - staggeringly different, both wonderful - are the place to start. The man can churn out as many Coldplay and U2 albums as he inexplicably wants to, with these in the bank. Unfortunately, all the links available are live performances, but see 'Drugs', the closing track, which is like no guitar music before or since.

Aside from 'Drugs' and 'Heaven', the songs on 'Fear of Music' are funk, or at least funky - a path they followed with ever diminishing returns - but here, it sparkles with energy and invention. Eno adds another dimension, spinning synthesisers and wrapping tape around their spindly, excitable funk, highlighting the quirk of the subject matter and the oddity of David Byrne's breathless vocal.

The songs, named with idiot simplicity ('Drugs, 'Animals', 'Cities'), have lyrics that take off at right-angles from their blank titles. It's easy to imagine, say, a Motley Crew (why should I spell their name wrong, like they choose to do?) song named 'Animals', boasting of their rock and roll lifestyles, with a video featuring motorbikes somehow. Talking Heads, however, give a first person monologue from someone who anthropomorphises, then detests animals, claims that "they're making a fool of us" and that "they're setting a bad example" by "[shitting] on the ground". You could imagine into existance a song by Manic Street Preachers named 'Cities', grandiose and bestringed, with James Dean Bradfield wailing about the alienation and beauty of large conurbations. In the hands of David Byrne, 'Cities' becomes a young adult fantasy about moving to different cities, noting of Birmingham, Alabama, that it has a "dry ice factory - good place to get some thinking done!". Childish enthusiasm is the main emotion you're left with, something which, when feigned by adults, is usually grating. Here, it's just glorious, and seemingly sincere.

"Up some jungle, up some tree": Kala, Fame and Poverty, or how I learned to stop laughing and love M.I.A. part 2.

2009-03-18T18:19:00.000-07:00

M.I.A. has described the difference between Arular, her first album, and Kala, her second, as the difference between masculine and feminine - the first being made to honour her father, the second, her mother. In fact, the difference between the two is the difference between bad music and good music. While Arular is intriguing - lyrically dense, sporadically melodic, politically bracing - Kala is an unironic joy, over-stuffed with melody, sharply shifting rhythms and laugh-out loud lyrics. The album shimmers with the unheard opinions and wasted potential of the several billion people who live in dire poverty (a guess-timate based on the billion that live in slums - call me old fashioned, but if where you live is called a slum, you're pretty poor in my book). It hits like we can imagine a gap-year does.

Which makes the choice of 'Paper Planes' as the calling-card single for this album absolutely inexplicable. The song is still wonderful, and it being a hit is perhaps the greatest thing to occur in the hundred-odd years of electronically recorded music. But nevertheless, it's atypical of the album - stable, even sedate. It is, maybe, a fitting end to the album, energetic and colourful - it serves as Monday morning to the album's weekend. Its best lyric is "Sometimes I sing sitting on trains/Every stop I get people clocking my game". Paired with the New York backdrop of the video, this conjours the image of the people that stand out, to terrifying effect, on mass transit systems - the insane, the factor of risk that must be present when millions of people co-exist and commute.

Hearing the first track (the dreadfully titled 'Bamboo Banger'), you notice significant continuity with Arular. We're back in Galang territory, the sparse arrangement, the monotone delivery, the air of threat. But the break comes at 1.57 (in the linked video), when we hear a shrill sample - from then on, the album is awash with voices, through the tropical traffic jam of 'Boyz' to the wonderful novelty of 'Mango Pickle Down River'. M.I.A.'s vocal delivery is hugely improved, with the lyrics thankfully comprehensible, and she even sings, to great effect, on 'Jimmy'.

With Kala, M.I.A. filled the nonsense position to which she was appointed by critics at the time of her first album - 'The Voice of the Developing World'. The simple listing of place names is deployed to this effect, with the album opener giving a 'shout-out' to Angola, Burma, Ghana, India, Somalia and Sri Lanka. That's one song. As tiresome as this sounds, she's clever enough to subvert this later. Jimmy - the only love song she's ever recorded - begins "When you go/Rwanda, Congo/Take me on your genocide tour/Take me on a truck to Darfur". Here, she resembles a Tamil Peter Kay - cataloguing facts for comic effect. In effect, she's going "Remember genocide, yeah? Remember genocide, when you were a kid?".

On the stunning 'Hussel', she again front-loads her best joke: "We do it cheap/Save our money in a heap/Send it home and make them study/Fixing teeth". It's worth stepping back and marvelling at this - over Hoover synths, with clattering percussion, someone is rapping about remittances. Not just here, but particularly here, a whole sequence of transactions, a whole way of living, an immigrant experience, that falls under the radar for most, is being recorded, and being funky.

M.I.A.'s career is currently at a high-point, with serendipity intervening to construct another great work of art in the same mould as her work - the justly acclaimed Slumdog Millionaire - that raised her profile even further through her soundtrack work. Kala is an album of such absurd density and vibrancy, that it's hard to imagine an improvement upon it, but if it is improved upon, it will probably destroy stereos on contact.

Stylish German Boffins Having Fun

2009-03-17T18:24:00.001-07:00

This is very very charming. It's often forgotten how funny (in an airless, alien way) Kraftwerk can be. Also, an education in how entertaining live electronic music can be when it's not just one man behind turntables, or four men behind laptops.

Album of the Week: 'Vintage Slide Collections from Seattle, Vol. 1'

2009-03-15T17:52:00.000-07:00

There are a few reasons to hate the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. They're 'quirky' (see above), and put one in mind of those students (female) who neglect to throw away the childish things, and prance about with Tigger pencil cases, making people watch Disney films. They're a family band, and there are few good examples of this almost-defunct genre. And, most annoying of all, the music is deliberately shoddy - the daughter, who plays drums, can barely sing. But, when you get past this, you're left with some of the best comedy music of the decade.

The album contains 5 'pop' songs, and a concept album based around slides from a McDonald's conference in 1977. This sounds like a hard-sell, but the songs are all pearls. The music is reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen and ABBA, but, as they write songs based on found slides, the lyrics necessarily veer between subjects in a jarring way. The opener, 'Mountain Trip to Japan , 1959', draws a line between the behaviour of tourists and capital punishment in post-WWII Japan. 'Eggs' looks at the American 1970s in the round, taking in the Brady Bunch and the brutal end of the Vietnam War. 'Fondue Friends in Switzerland' and 'European Boys' deal with the strained relationship between Europe and America, the latter ending with the staggering couplet "European wars, are American wars/Going to France, do you gotta wear those trousers?". Each of the songs mentions the problems of the late-20th/early-21st century's 'hyperpower' in a way that becomes in itself comic - you listen, waiting for them to return to the subject, and without fail, they do. By the time Jason Trachtenburg notes "Agent Orange, Blue, and Red" in 'Eggs', the point is well and truly made.

'The McDonald's Suite' provides a grimly comic experience - hearing the woes of one of the world's most ubiquitous corporations and their plan to dominate the market for crap food, you feel uncomfortably close to the inner workings of what was to become grand power. Most of the songs in the 'Suite' are funny because of the juxtaposition of grandiose pop with garbled CEO speak (one of the lyrics in 'What Will The Corporation Do?' is "We need more advertising to tell our story and keep hamburgers before our customers"). But the song 'Together As a System, We are Unbeatable', while a toe-tapping, good-time tune, is genuinely unnerving. It gives us, through a filter, the multi-national's private self-image, something that McDonald's keep well hidden, prefering nowdays to talk about the 'bits of real chicken breast' in their nuggets, which begs the question of what the fuck was in their nuggets before.

Oddly for this post-vinyl age, the album itself is worth owning, as it contains some of the slideshows used in their live performances, which helps make sense of the music (YouTube is a decent substitute for some). Some of the jokes are lost without these - the sadly unlinkable 'Fondue Friends in Switzerland' contains frequent references to pictures of a parade, which, without having seen the pictures, falls flat. All that, and only a penny on Amazon.

"You will drip rubies"

2009-03-13T17:01:00.000-07:00

Part of the oddity of Red Nose Day is that, between the pallid comedy and gesticulating celebrities, there are appeals on behalf of those going through Capitalism's people mincing machine. The millions suffering malnutrition and woefully inadequately healthcare in the developing world are given their moment in the sun, between David Walliams dressed as a lady and newsreaders swearing. Communities who've suffered the sharp end of capitalism in our comparatively wealthy society are patted on the back and given some cash, then Adele sings one of her many 'hits'. As Gramsci said, the fact that people starve when there's no need should be of some importance, and certainly more importance than one day every however-many years affords it. With this in mind, I feel that the musical Sweeney Todd deserves further attention.

Most people (those of us who haven't done time in community theatre) have access to Sweeney Todd through Tim Burton's relatively successful recent film version. Burton's film is wonderful, building the Victorian London of myth, and making the correct decision to cast actors instead of singers. The central performances are great, with Johnny Depp managing to convey the absolute destruction of the title character's sanity, and his absolute numbness at the world around him better than you would expect from a man who's spent a large part of the last decade doing a rubbish Keith Richards impression for a living. Helena Bonham-Carter is absolutely endearing as Mrs. Lovett, making the audience sympathise sincerely with a character complicit in serial killing. The other actors are of musicals stock, and manage to varying degrees of success - I felt the urge to punch the actor playing the role of Anthony hard in the back of the head, whereas the boy playing the role of Toby sings and acts absurdly well for someone who's younger than some working socks.

I've avoided musicals, although 'South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut' is unaccountably my favourite film. The songs are too catchy, even when they're rubbish, the acting is generally poor (these people are usually singers) and they're always too long. However, comedy and music being my two favourite things, I've started to find them irresistable. My entry point (after South Park) was Brecht and Weill's Threepenny Opera, which is hilarious in a way that David Walliams couldn't even concieve - although you could argue his inexplicable performance as an incontinent woman in Little Britain series 3 derives chuckles from the horror of every day life, and the inhumanity of man to man (or, in Walliams' case, the inhumanity of himself to an imaginary old woman). Although Brecht was inarguably of the left, the Threepenny Opera shows the working class or dispossessed as either victims or bastards.

'Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street' fits the description 'left musical' better than the Threepenny Opera. It's more 'musicalish' than the Threepenny Opera, although, in fairness, I'm too ignorant to know whether musicals were a thing when the Threepenny Opera was written. Class antagonism runs through Sweeney Todd, as it does society, and gets expressed in the most brutal terms - there are two kinds of people, "there's the one they put in his proper place, and the one with his foot in the other one's face", and "the history of the world...is those below serving those up above".

The central metaphor is (sarcastic SPOILER ALERT!!) of a people mincing machine - Sweeney Todd kills his patrons and Mrs. Lovett makes them into pies. It's easy to forget, in these times, when our leaders declare their ethical foreign policies and boast of the sustainability of their economic models, just how much blood oiled and still oils the cogs of capital during industrial revolutions. The hideous indignities that left our country such a stable and prosperous place are wheeled out in turn. Child labour, slavery (in the form of the workhouse), deportation, hanging - all there, and what's more, there's Johnny Depp! The metaphor is hammered home - looking around London, Todd hears the sound "of man devouring man", and declares it the way of the world. Mrs. Lovett, as a small business woman, is nearly ruined by conscientiousness and legality, and only when she decides to embrace violence, do her pies sell.

Of course, these facts remain. While profit rather than need drives production, those below will serve those up above, and man will devour man. When faced with the philanthropic outreaches of the very rich, however well intentioned, we must remember that behind those distended stomachs are people - Presidents for Life, oil barons and associated bastards, whose bellies are equally distended through greed. Sweeney Todd is not going to end this injustice, but it has undoubtably given us some great tunes to hum while we imagine what we could and should do to end it.

The Enemy Above

2009-03-11T17:37:00.000-07:00

Today, fifteen Islamic anti-war protesters foolishly descended on a parade held for soldiers returning from Afghanistan. This miniscule action was enough to distract the editors of the Sun and the Daily Star from their quest to find the most photogenic pair of tits in the world. HATE FOR HEROES thundered the Sun, while the Daily Star went for the more stylish, and more unnerving THE ENEMY WITHIN. (Amusingly, searching for 'Enemy Within' on their website brings up two stories, both about radical Muslim sentiment, showing that originality eludes them as much as proportionality). Normally, this would be cause to gently tut and smugly chuckle at venal stupidity of the tabloids, but there is another dynamic at play here, and one that's worth exploring further.

The above picture comes from the work of the artist Steve McQueen, made while he was artist in residence for the British Army, 'Queen and Country'. It shows three of the 324 soldiers killed as a result of our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (179 and 145 respectively). These people need not have died, each of their deaths was avoidable.

Needless to say, the stamps didn't get made. Who wants to face the human costs of geo-strategic cockwaving while paying a gas bill? Of course, this poses the question of who wants to look at the Queen's increasingly heavyweight boxer-like features , but you get my point. To put these people, who died young, for a set of lies, in front of the populace, might cause a bit of thinking - about blood sacrifice made for mysterious reasons, hidden cabinet minutes, missing terrorist masterminds and WMD. And Her Majesty's Government can't risk us thinking, when there's a crunch on.

For the Sun and the Daily Star, soldiers are not people to be protected, but to be possessed and infantalised ('Our Boys'). They're simultaniously living and breathing embodiments of Great Britain - Blitz spirit, bulldogs staring nobly out from the White Cliffs of Dover, wondering which country to invade next - and instruments for use.

The bluster of the Sun and Daily Star at the activities of a tiny contingent of protesters at this parade would hold more weight if they didn't fulsomely support throwing these young men and women to the lions for the most slender of reasons - the paper invasion of nearly unoccupied islands in the South Atlantic, a tiny civil war in 'Europe's backyard'. As it stands, the Stop The War Coalition has done more to protect British soldiers than these wank-merchants ever have, and if any of the 15 protesters have ever marched against their government endangering these soldiers and their fallen comrades, they've shown greater respect (if not love, the presumable opposite of Sun HATE) for human life than the tabloid press and the government.

But, just to finish, it's interesting how the increasing severity of the recession, and the promise of a summer of rage has led to the brushing off of the notion of 'the Enemy Within'. The Miners, 25 years ago, faced a similar label, and similar conditions. Let's hope we can avoid the temptation to strike horizontally - at Muslim radicals, striking workers, the unemployed - and instead strike vertically - at the fuckers who see soldiers' deaths as a part of a cost-benefit analysis, at bosses turfing workers out potless into the harshest labour market in a generation, and at the fascists and profiteers yelping about 'an Enemy Within'. There is just an enemy above, and we forget that at our peril.

"Massa day done"

2009-03-10T18:14:00.000-07:00

The New Statesman is a fixture of university libraries and the recycling bins of people still inexplicably members of the Labour Party. It features pullouts sponsored by Pfizer, the TUC and the Home Office, good arts coverage, and heartbreakingly unjournalistic interviews with New Labour ministers. Darcus Howe is a Trinidadian immigrant, and sometime mainstay of the British Black Panther Party and the Race Today Collective. The nephew of the Marxist writer and cricket theorist CLR James, he has devoted his time on our fair isle to unabashedly railing against white supremacy, capitalism and police brutality, getting hauled in front of a jury for riot and called "a cocoa shunter" by Chris Morris for his troubles.

From 1998 to 2008, Darcus Howe had a column in the New Statesman. While the New Stateman moved through avuncular advice to Blair, support for the Afghan War, lukewarm objection to the Iraq War, disillusionment with Blair, disbelief at Blair, hope in Brown, faith in Brown, disillusionment with Brown, and fixation on Clinton and Obama, Howe's column stood, seemingly immovable and utterly incongrouous. Though sometimes boastful, dumbly autobiographical, and solopsistic (he, or a subeditor, titled an article "Antigua: I am treated like a dog and given cold food", for fuck's sake) there is enough meat here to keep the devoted gnawing away.

A proper, old fashioned libertarian Marxist, with a focus on revolt from below, Howe takes obvious glee in puncturing the bubbles of idiotic grandees and professional shit-stirrers. He states the obvious with as much skill as Julie Burchill at her best, but uses his powers for good, not evil (well, sometimes 1/3rd evil). The rage he feels at the petty attempts of our leaders to control, to project and to patronise leads to an Enlightening blur - in his hand, the frequently spat aphorism "politicians are all the same", actually takes on a pleasing shape. Thus, Howe is the only person ever to compare bow-tie wearing wrong man Louis Farrakhan and war criminal/peace envoy Tony Blair, and with some success. Sometimes, it's actually laugh out loud funny the hate and scorn he pours on the featherweights who blunder into the race relations debate - I will never be able to look at arch-neo-con and cat-that-got-the-cream lookalike Denis McShane without imagining Muslim leaders, heeding his dog-whistle call for integration and praising the "beneficent bwana Denis McShane".

Sadly, Howe's column has gone, along with that of Mark Thomas, and although I didn't notice at the time, the New Statesman underwent something of a radical florish in the period when I was an enthusiastic reader. Now, it's a pitiful husk, with only John Pilger's prose-from-on-high, Owen Hatherley's art criticism and Rachel Cooke's reviews enlivening copy largely inspired by, but sometimes just nicked from government press releases. On top of this, the nearly century old bastion of the soft to hard left is facing a barrage of criticism for refusing to recognise trade unions. As long as it maintains its editorial coziness with the Labour Party, its fortunes are condemned run alongside those of the Labour Party, and right now, the prospects for the New Statesman and the Labour Party look terrible.

"I'm a Soldier, in a War" - Arular, Taste, and Shame, or how I learnt to stop laughing and love M.I.A (part 1)

2009-03-09T17:52:00.000-07:00

We all miss bandwagons, and it's a fair bet that the most common behaviour following these missteps is to chase the bandwagon, frantically attempting to persuade the driver to let you join. The tragically unhip, the rear-guard, are left professing their love for the creed with the gauche devotion of the recent convert. In extreme cases, they may start blogs just because they feel the urge to write about them.

The first time I heard M.I.A was around the time of the release of her first album, Arular, on an end of year compilation put out by a probably-defunct-by-now music monthly. The song was 'Galang', and it seemed to my unknowing, mocking ears, to be some kind of elaborate joke. Reading on, it seemed the vast majority of critics were in on the joke, praising this farce - that managed to be clattering, atonal and boring all at once - as the work of a brave new voice from and for the developing world. The lyrics were at worst outright non-English, but generally vague, slurred exhortations to resistance. It was just hilarious.

Nevertheless, over the next few years, the refrain of that one song, the word "Galang" - which remains for me, meaningless - stuck with me. I'd find myself singing it, rolling it around my mouth in her weird, contemptuous way, knocking the syllables into each other, and into other words: "lazy days" "purple haze". Something about its oddity jammed it in my brain, along with this and this.

Without a doubt, praise for M.I.A. at this time was distorted through a number of filters. As a political refugee, her mere presence in the public realm was utterly unique. Animus towards asylum seekers has to a certain extent subsided, but at the time, with riots in detention centres, and accusations of swan eating, the Tories were capable of running a campaign based on an absolute cap on immigration, controvening international law regarding refugees (the young imbecile on work experience who wrote the Conservative Party's woefully misguided 2005 general election manifesto, David Cameron, was later to die of massive head trauma following a similarly misguided attempt to fly). Added to this, the fact that her father was a leading member of the Tamil Tigers (the group which it is claimed pioneered the suicide bombing) and that she was willing to make wonderfully cavalier references to terrorism, left her with the interesting USP of being, to paraphrase James Brown, "the Funky Terrorist".

Listening to Arular, the first thing you notice, after the immediacy of the beat, and the heartbreaking poverty of the farting Casio keyboard lines, is the constant references to terrorism. In 'Pull Up The People', she refers to herself as "a fighter" - indeed - "a nice, nice fighter", and "a soldier in a war", oddly presaging 7/7 bomber's Mohammed Sidique Khan remark in his 'martyrdom video' that "we are at war, and I am a soldier". 'Sunshowers' wonderfully overplays her hand, striking a comic, and utterly historically inaccurate note with the exuburantly delivered "like PLO I don't surrender!", and then a genuinely chilling note with "it's a bomb yo, so run yo, put away your stupid gun yo". These lyrics go part way to dealing with the question, blurted from Americans following 9/11 - "why do they hate us?". Well, actually, they don't really answer, but they present the opposite position - incomprehension, turned on its head. They imagine what the voiceless are saying, they list the places they live ("from Congo, to Colombo").

Going back to 'Galang' after years of treating it like a childhood crush - throwing rocks at it while wishing I could get to know it better - I found it was better than I remembered. Then, at around halfway, it stopped. For a while. Something made me leave it on. The song unfolded from the taut knot it had been into a boxer in the 12th round, and started assailing me with the least ironic political statements so far, all about 'followers', 'leaders', and, most wonderfully "Bush getting ready for takeover". She was proved very wrong about the Bush administration, but the promise offered by the last few minutes of 'Galang' and the glimmer of melody in 'Sunshowers' was proved wonderfully right with Kala.