Album of the Week: Community Music

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.

Label of the 'Week': Warp

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 1 Best Thing of the 00s

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: 'What's Going On?'

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.

"You're Fired!"

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

Budgeting for the past: The Hauntology of Labour

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.

Every Little Helps

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'.

"You will drip rubies"

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.