the dirt is temporary

Top Ten Tracks of 2011

Colin Stetson – The Stars In His Head (Dark Lights Remix)

Just look at the size of the man’s sax FFS. Probably the most original album of the year. This is a pulsating beast of a song, layers of looping, howling brass. Not quite sure how he does it, which is not a question much music asks of you at the moment.

Kurt Vile – Runner Ups

The magic of Kurt Vile is that he somehow takes a load of done-to-death influences which in other hands would be crushingly dull and derivative – Springsteen, Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac, classic 70s stoner rock – and turns them into something that is completely his own, and utterly wonderful. Which is an extraordinary feat.

 Tim Hecker – In The Fog I, II, III

In three parts, as a song this good should be. Tim Hecker made Ravedeath, 1972 by playing a huge organ in a church, feeding the sound into a computer programme which then digitally ate away at it, turning it into a deformed, shuddering drone. As uneasy to listen to as it is beautiful.

Kuedo – Scissors

Apparently he took the helicopter-style whirling drums from chi-juke, which I find mostly unlistenable as a genre, but is probably worth revisiting if its capable of contributing to a song as good as this. My favourite of all the many, generally pretty great post-dubstep albums to come out this year.

PJ Harvey – The Glorious Land

Most singers are happy enough to write lyrics about meeting/losing some girl/boy or the joys of a dancefloor on a Saturday night. Peej takes you straight to the blood-soaked fields of the Somme. Amazing to think she’s still producing stuff as good as this 20 years after her debut.

Peaking Lights – Tiger Eyes (Laid Back)

Takes all that Animal Collective wishy washy stuff and adds a fierce dub bassline to it, which is an idea that is at once both completely obvious and total genius. It removes it from lapsing into aimlessness and grounds it with hypnotic loops of King Tubby-style bottom end.

Sandwell District – Falling The Same Way (Regis Mix)

LA/Berlin/Birmingham collective who mix drones, synth loops, and ambient into the best techno I’ve heard for ages – a bit like Tim Hecker collaborating with Shackleton, and probably even better than that sounds.

Julia Holter – Try To Make Yourself A Work of Art

Super late entry which blew my ears off on first listen. It’s almost classical in places, before developing into something that sounds like Einstuerzende Neubauten backing Kate Bush. Both delicate and terrifying at the same time.

Low – Especially Me

C’Mon didn’t exactly break new ground for Low, keeping resolutely within their epic slowcore formula, but it’s as good as anything they’ve released. There’s a nursery rhyme, almost anthemic, simplicity to this one, but as with most Low songs, there’s an ever-present sense of dread lying just beneath the surface.

Holy Other – With U

It was a battle to the death as to whether this one or ‘Touch’, another track from the With U EP, made the grade. The whole EP is fantastic basically, mixing Burial, Joy Orbison and Teengirl Fantasy into a whole world of dreamy goodness.

BONUS

Kurt Vile – Downbound Train

Kurt does Bruce, and fucking nails it.

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The War on Drugs: a wrestle to the death

If there’s one adjective which has almost entirely dropped out of the lexicon of music criticism over the past couple of decades, it’s ‘Dylanesque’. It’s perhaps not unrelated that the albatrossian concept of x or y singer-singwriter being billed as the ‘new Dylan’ seems to have died a death too – the last one I can think of is Willy Mason, and that already felt like a bad joke at the time. I don’t think it’s just down to the vagueries of fashionable references, or even to the average age of today’s music writers – ie coming of age during post-punk and so in the main turning to that era for comparison rather than the 60s, which was the automatic point of reference for their predecessors. No, it genuinely feels that on an absolute level, there have been way fewer bands and singers using Dylan as a obvious influence during the past 20 years than at any time since Blown’ In The Wind was released in 1963.

On the face of it, this is quite a blessing. For such a immensely important artist, Dylan’s influence has been pretty fucking hideous. Either its a pointless facsimile (like this actually rather brilliant but shameless ripoff by Mouse), crushingly banal (the Byrds’ endless jinglejangle cover versions), or fist-chompingly embarrassing (almost every god awful protest song ever, a litany of which is provided by Dorian Lynskey over here). It’s now got to point where the artists themselves have learnt the valuable lesson from the classic scene in the 1966 documentary ‘Don’t Look Back’, where Dylan, who throughout the film has become increasingly irritated by reviews comparing Donovan to his own pre-electric incarnation, finally snaps. After Donovan, who has turned up in Dylan’s hotel room for an aftershow party, has forced the assembled audience to listen to his asinine song ‘To Sing For You’, Dylan grabs the guitar, and with a look of visceral contempt, starts singing ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’. It’s one of his meanest songs anyway, but the moment he leers at Donovan while singing ‘You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last’ easily ranks as one of the most uncomfortable in ‘rock history’. It took a few decades, but it now feels as if most bands and songwriters have decided that the safest reply to Dylan’s offer is a simple ‘thanks, but no thanks’. Perhaps this is the sign of a truly great artist – that it’s almost impossible to take direct influence from them without making a fool of yourself.

So when the first blogposts and reviews of The War on Drugs’ debut album ‘Wagonwheel Blues’ started cropping up in 2008, liberally sprinkled with words like ‘mouth organ’ and ‘nasal sneer’, it came as something of a surprise. Somewhat refreshing too: certainly a contrast to the watered down post-punk or ‘new rock revolution’ that had dominated the decade’s guitar music thus far. But the warning signs were flashing – the last thing the world needed was another artfully-constructed but fundamentally artistically-empty retro band, let alone one aping Dylan.

But while, from the very first harmonica line of first track ‘Arms Like Boulders’, the reference to Bobby was clear, it was such an obvious nod that it must have been deliberate – the band letting us know that they knew that we knew what they were saying here, and that unlike Donovan et al, they would not be bowed by the comparison. And the record, while not flawless, achieved something which very few bands who consciously reference one of rock’s A-listers manage. It took a classic, instantly recognisable sound, and pushed it on. Wagonwheel Blues grabbed the Dylan template and coloured it in with a sonic palette (yuck) that could only have been created by a band who had taken onboard the lessons of the music created after him. Unlike most ‘retro’ bands, The War on Drugs did not aim to replicate their hero and then act as if music stopped with him. This was a band who had listened to post-punk, to Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, who knew their way around the post-rock canon, and were not afraid to inject that 80s and 90s experimentalism into a sixties framework. When it succeeded, as in ‘Needle In Your Eye’, it was nothing less than thrilling. As the now defunct (so I paraphrase) blog A Little Electricity put it – ‘the wonder is why no-one had thought of doing this before’.

Founder member Kurt Vile left the band soon after the release of Wagonwheel Blues, to concentrate on his equally superb solo work. So it was left to singer Adam Granduciel to carry the weight of the follow up record. It has now arrived – Slave Ambient is released this week. Remarkably, he has succeeded in repeating the trick, to such a great extent that I think it has singlehandedly resurrected ‘Dylanesque’ as a term of praise, rather than contempt. But even more impressively, it has managed to reduce Dylan to the position of ‘just another influence’. Rather than the echoes of the Dylan sound towering over everything else, making it impossible to listen to without the image of his curly mop laying waste to anything in its path, Slave Ambient has integrated the influence so successfully that it is now barely discernable. Tracks like ‘Brothers’ and ‘It’s Your Destiny’ have distilled mid-60s Dylan down to such an extent that it has become a kind of atmospheric presence surrounding the songs, something that you know is there but find difficult to put your finger on. Added to the mix are melodic bits and pieces from Springsteen (the opener Best Night in particular), instrumental drone interludes that take their cues from Spritualized’s early records, and throughout it all, the insistent motorik rhythms of the great kosmiche bands (best heard on the spectacular ‘Your Love is Calling My Name’. And oddly, despite these debts to past bands and records, Slave Ambient does not sound like an overly obvious retro record. The literary critic Harold Bloom wrote of how the weight of the achievements of past greats bear down upon the shoulders of those who follow, and of how artists must “wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death”. The War on Drugs may not have dealt Dylan the killer blow, but they have surely landed a punch to the jaw that few have previously even attempted.

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The riots and the brooms

The pictures of local residents in Clapham gathering, brooms aloft, waiting to help clean up their destroyed high street have been for many an uplifting counterpart to the images of burning buildings and pimp-rolling hoodies clutching their swag (the best picture in lolz terms, by the way, being the guy proudly holding up a giant bag of Tesco Value rice). The Guardian had a double page spread of the Clapham crowd in the paper yesterday . A lot of people are smiling, some cheering, others taking pictures of the scene on their phones. It is a strikingly middle-class looking crowd: well-groomed, a range of ages (but mostly mid-20s to 40s from the looks of it), dressed in bright coloured t-shirts and sunglasses, proud that their community has come together to make the best of a dire situation. None of them look like they’ve visited a JD Sports in their lives.

The contrast between this crowd and the one that features in Sky News reporter Mark Stone’s remarkable video, shot in the same area on Monday night, could not be starker. The people failing to wrench a Ladbrokes television screen off the wall and smashing up a upmarket hairdressers are nearly all in their teens or early 20s (again, from the looks of it), most wearing tracksuits and hooded tops. There is a palpable atmosphere of adrenline-fuelled exuberence, bordering on mania. People seem to be bouncing off the walls, and off each other, egging each other on. They look like they’re enjoying themselves, and it is not stretching things to say that there is a sense of community here too. Just like the broom holders, this crowd may not know each other personally, but they have all come out on the streets for a common purpose, and they seem pretty happy about it.

These two images of two communities, utterly removed from one another, but sharing the same high street, the same space, appositely illustrates the point James Meek made in his excellent recent LRB blog post. Meek uses Broadway Market, rather than Clapham, as his example of what he calls the ‘spectactor-inhabitant’ tendancy of much of London life, but the point remains the same. Anyone who has visited the Broadway Market or London Fields on a weekend must get some sense of the dislocation between the two communities who inhabit the area. The freelance graphic designers BBQing on the park, or the media publishers browsing the artisan cheese stalls exist in a hermetic bubble which floats above the world which is revealed by a quick walk down any side street. Controvesy over the gentrification of Broadway Market is nothing new – the arrival of second generation gentrifiers pushing rents up and forcing long running businesses to close in favour of the new boutiques is documented here, but it has certainly increased in pace in the past decade. The number of people who live in the estates surrouding the market who can afford to buy a load of homemade bread from £4 must be even fewer than the number of regulars at the Cat and Mutton who wear tracksuit bottoms without irony. There are two planes of lived existence in Broadway Market, two versions of the same space that rarely if ever meet or even acknowledge the existence of the other. The only time the two communities interact in any form is when the middle-class BBQers get accidentally caught up in the crossfire of violence that forms an undercurrent of working class Hackney life – such as when a picnicker was shot on London Fields in 2010. As the inestimable Paul Lewis again documented, part of the shock felt by those present was that the violence normally projected internally amongst the local working class community had broken out of its usual boundaries and affected ‘one of us’ .

This pattern of spatially concurrent but utterly removed planes of existence is one repeated across the capital. My work place in White City is almost literally an island of almost entirely middle-class ‘media-types’ in a sea of council estates. The bottom floor of my building is taken up by a Tesco’s, which is virtually the only place where the two communities – the media workers and the local residents – have any interaction at all. But there is no real interaction here, even when we’re standing in the same queue. It is almost as if the horn rimmed glasses gang (of which I am a member, naturally) and the pale elderly women, tracksuited teenagers or Somalian mothers squeezing their kids through the aisles are actually physically unable to see each other. In fairness, the company does run a mentoring scheme, in which employees meet with local schoolkids every so often, but apart from that, the only reference that is made to the world outside our wall-to-wall office windows are emails warning of recent muggings and offers of self-defence classes.

In normal circumstances, this juxtaposition of worlds that are physically on top of one another but on a completely different plane in financial and cultural terms is only able to survive by a kind of societal form of Freudian repression. For most people pictured in the Clapham broom scene, picknicking on Broadway Market, or shopping in White City Tesco’s, the world of the estates which is woven through their own with invisible thread is one that only comes into view when there’s reports of a teen stabbing, shooting or mugging. For the rest of the time, the social plane on which the rioters exist on a day-to-day level is driven out of the conscious mind entirely (or perhaps, as the easy way people have reached for the word ‘scum’ or ‘sick’ (see D Cameron), dehumanised, in a logical extension of the ‘chav’-bashing Owen Jones documents in his recent book). This has to be a factor in, or perhaps a consequence of, the continued tolerance of record levels of inequality in London (and indeed the UK) – to reheat a legal term used in the Murdochs’ appearance in front of the Home Affairs Select Committee, it is a form of willful blindness.

I might not quite go as far as this post when it describes the scenes in Clapham as a ‘strikingly middle-class, broadly white efforts to sweep issues of inequality under the carpet of a simulated big-society photo-op’ - I’m sure many people in Clapham were local community activists, although i’m also pretty sure the widely photographed woman wearing the ‘Looters Are Scum’ vest top, nor the Ealing shop owner who kept on referring to ‘feral rats’, weren’t. But it seems clear that the ‘community spirit’ people keep extolling is not one that includes the type of people who were rioting, and, more importantly, didn’t before the riots began. The community of the Clapham broom sweepers is one where people went to decent schools, can go to university, can afford a home, have got a job, can afford a certain standard of living (let’s face it, they wouldn’t be living in Clapham otherwise). The community of the rioters is one that has been systimatically excluded from all of those things, and as a consequence has removed itself (or been removed) from the social contract which enables membership of the broom community. Hence the absolute incomprehension of the political, media and middle-classes at the rampant destruction and looting. As this superb piece by Camila Batmanghelidjh argues, in the alternative commnuity constructed by the rioters, ‘the individual is responsible for their own survival because the established community is perceived to provide nothing. Acquisition of goods through violence is justified in neighbourhoods where the notion of dog eat dog pervades and the top dog survives the best.’

Whatever the causes or motivations of the rioters and looters – and there’s no need to line up the arguments on the left or the right here, they’ve been rehearsed endlessly elsewhere – no one can pretend not to have seen them. If nothing else, the riots are a forcing together of the two planes of lived existence in London: in a very real sense, this is the return of the repressed. The riots are an impossible-to-ignore announcement of the existence of the people living in the estates and areas most of the rest of us pass through as quickly as possible or pretend we don’t see. It’s telling that for the past few days London Fields has almost become a no go area for the middle-classes who, up until last week, hegemonically dominated the area – as if the people who are normally completely cut out of the elite social scene which has colonised the place over the last decade are wreaking a twisted revenge.

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This is not politics as usual

Soon after seeming to congratulate police for not shooting protestors, Boris Johnson told this morning’s Today programme that he hoped the student fees protests would soon be at an end.

‘People will understand that democratic procedures have taken place and they cannot adjust this by taking to the streets,’ he said.

This is no doubt what Nick Clegg was hoping for too when he begged Lib Dem MPs to ‘walk through the fire’ with him earlier this week. Suffer the pain, get the vote through, and things will calm down. 

From what I saw at the protest yesterday, if that is what the politicians are expecting to happen, they have sorely misjudged the situation. The coalition leadership are treating this movement as if it is just another political protest campaign - a more violent one, yes, but one that has arisen in response to a particular policy, and that will now dampen down as that policy is voted through parliament and people realise they can’t do anything about it.

But this is categorically NOT just another political movement. In fact, I’m not sure that it is political at all - certainly not in any way that has been previously thought of in this country. And it is that very lack of a coherent political structure (in Westminster terms) which is both the movement’s strength and its weakness.

The protestors can be split into three groups. First, the mainly middle class students who are involved in the occupations. Second, the small number of ‘usual suspects’  - the anarchists, swp and hard lefties. The rest - and possibly the majority - are mainly schoolkids, and drawn from working class backgrounds. Paul Mason writes about this group on his blog, describing them as Britain’s answer to the banlieues of Paris. He says that dubstep is the soundtrack of this group. He’s wrong, it’s not the avowedly middle-class dubstep that was being blasted out of sound systems yesterday, it was grime - the harsh, aggressive sound of east London council estates that has been virtually banned from clubs in the capital. For this group, it is the removal of EMAs which was the catalyst for protest, even more than the increase in fees.

But a catalyst is all that the EMAs are. For these teenagers, the education cuts are only a confirmation of what they already know: that they exist on the very edges of a society that doesn’t want them. Condemned to poverty-stricken estates, in schools that that face huge social problems and a lack of resources, their music, cultural life, even their manner of speech and dress is routinely demonised in the media and by the political class. And now even if they do ‘play by the rules’ – go to school, try to get to university, find a job – they find the door slammed in their face.

For this group, these protests are more than an expression of dissent within the narrow confines permitted by a parliamentary democracy. They are the physical manifestation of an inchoate rage that has been building for a long time. It’s the same thing that provokes the endless disputes over postcodes, and respect, and often ends in fights and stabbings. It is a lashing out, not just at the political process, but at society itself.

This is why the protests are such fluid, amorphous events – they have no easily defined political aim or demand, apart from a need for confrontation (and be in no doubt that many there yesterday wanted the confrontation with police, which is why confining people for hours and aggravating them with horse charges and beatings was even more stupid than normal). This is why they spread, seemingly randomly, from Parliament Square, to attack shops in Oxford Street, and good old Charles and Camilla. And it’s why they are much more dangerous and powerful than the politicians seem to realise.

In 2007, Slavoj Zizek wrote that the Iraq war protests were “an exemplary case of [the] strange symbiotic relationship between power and resistance”. He wrote :

“Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protesters saved their beautiful souls: they made it clear that they don’t agree with the government’s policy on Iraq. Those in power calmly accepted it, even profited from it: not only did the protests in no way prevent the already-made decision to attack Iraq; they also served to legitimise it. Thus George Bush’s reaction to mass demonstrations protesting his visit to London, in effect: ‘You see, this is what we are fighting for, so that what people are doing here – protesting against their government policy – will be possible also in Iraq!’” 

Johnson and Clegg (and, it seems, Aaron Porter) believe that these protests will fulfill the same function – let the students ‘save their beautiful souls’ with protest, until they understand that this is all for the best. But these protests are of a completely different nature to the Iraq war marches. There is no leadership stewarding people to Trafalger Square to listen dutifully to speeches and then trudging home (again something Porter can’t get his head around). It’s a much more instinctive thing, a reflex action, and all the more effective for it.

But this amorphous, indefinable nature is also why any political group hoping to harness this explosion of energy will face considerable difficulty. The usual channels of political discontent – the unions, the dinosaurs of the hard left (SWP, Stop the War etc) – are nowhere here. The 15 year old Asian kids I saw shouting ‘one solution – revolution!’ at the TV cameras yesterday aren’t interested in top-down direction by white middle-aged union officials. They’re doing their own thing, driven by motivations that are a million miles away from the usual union piecemeal fare of higher wages and better conditions. Ultimately this could be the downfall of the nascent anti-coalition movement, because, as Sunny Hundal writes , without organization, the energy and anger could soon burn itself out or turn inward – much like it did with the banlieue protests of 2005.

But whether it does that or not will have virtually nothing to do with the Parliamentary process. This is an extra-political movement which cannot be analysed or viewed through the usual prism of Westminster politics, the predictable push and pull of government and opposition. What has been released in these past few weeks is a force that is much bigger, and runs much deeper, than anything this generation of politicians has seen before. It won’t be long before they begin to realise that. 

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Millbank Tower and the failure of the ‘Innocent Smoothie’ generation

Just before heading down to the Millbank protests on Wednesday, I read a couple of interesting tweets. One was from @_richardking, who works at Domino Records. He wrote: “Hats off to everyone marching today, especially young people - showing the innocent smoothie generation how it’s done”.

The other was from @wdjstraw of Left Foot Forward. He wrote “Good luck everyone on #demo2010. We failed u in 2002/3 when Lab introduced top up fees.” Will was one of the leaders of the student protests against the introduction of fees in 2002 – protests that I attended, and which I left thoroughly disillusioned.

Innocent Smoothies was founded in 1998, and although I didn’t go to university until 2001, I still pretty much fall into the generation King was talking about. And I was certainly one of the people who ‘failed’ today’s students in 2002. I remember the soggy march through London to Kennington Park, and the feeling that this was all a sorry charade. I remember looking around at my fellow marchers and doubting their motives for being there, and then in turn doubting my own motives. Halfway through the march, as it snaked past council tower blocks in Lambeth, I couldn’t hack it any longer, and left.

Ostensibly, the main thrust of the 2002 protest was that fees would deter poorer students, undoubtedly a commendable political aim. But my experience of meeting students in that period made me more cynical. I went to Cardiff – a decent enough, middle-ranking university.  After a couple of years there, two things stuck in my mind. One, the number of cars parked on the streets all over Cathays, the main student area, during term time. Nearly all belonged to students: these were not poor people. Second, the complete lack of political engagement from the vast majority of the student population.

Cardiff couldn’t even scrape a full coach load of students for the 2002 march. In total, between 5-10,000 marched (maybe more, police estimates are notoriously low). Given the national student body at any one time numbers around 2 million, it would seem likely that Cardiff’s disinterest in politics was one that was replicated across the country.

The majority of the early noughties student body were apathetic in that singular way that only the truly pampered can be apathetic. An economy that grew through the entirety of our adolescence meant that we didn’t even have to think about our job prospects. Of course there would be work. A booming housing market might mean it was hard to get together a deposit yourself, but it also meant that most people’s parents had plenty of equity to put one together for you. Top up fees were just another bill for their parents to pick up. Annoying yes, but just the way it was. Mum and Dad could afford another couple of grand anyway. We were a generation of victors. No wonder politics was an irrelevance – who thinks about changing the rules of a race when they’re winning?

This luxurious state of affairs directly translated into the cutesy pie brand of capitalist conformity represented by Innocent Smoothies and the like. The message was ‘as long as we’re having a lovely time and we’re healthy and not harming anyone, what’s the problem?’. Economic comfort created space for a newly ethical consumerism. This was a form of sanitised political engagement, in the sense of demanding the right to choose healthy fruit smoothies, or to be able to buy fair trade and eco-friendly produce, and even to oppose the Iraq war. All of these issues were wrapped up in the consumer credit model, just a better, friendlier model: consumerism with a human face. They did not require any wider analysis of political or economic structures – even Iraq, which was an issue that was easy to separate from any wider socio-economic context.

It’s no coincidence that it was around this time that the hipster movement really started to gain momentum. This was and is a movement whose (admittedly sometimes) beautiful art and music not only signifies nothing beyond itself, but is actually defined by its lack of significance. An artistic world was created in which any expression which wasn’t ironically self-referential or obsessed with childhood became an embarrassment.

The students who did engage in politics were not immune from these forces either. All of the issues that did get people out protesting were focused on how our (or the government’s) choices affected ‘someone else’, whether it be poorer students, African coffee farmers or Iraqi civilians. Commendable causes, no doubt, but causes that we had the luxury to choose. Ultimately, it wasn’t us who would be affected.

This is what, I think, made the anti-fees protests of 2002 – and even the giant anti-war march of February 2003 – feel so anodyne. There was some anger at the Stop the War march, but it was the anger of ‘Not In My Name’, anger that our country’s agency in the world was to be used in a way we didn’t like. There was some irate rhetoric at the student protest, but it felt hollow – as if we were going through the motions, protesting because ‘that’s what students do’. It was inevitable an overwhelmingly white and middle class event: I doubt most of the marchers had even been to state school, let alone knew anyone poor enough that the prospect of debt might put them off going to university. In one sense, this should mean that the fact they turned out at all is worthy of more congratulation. But in reality it lent the whole event a distasteful noblesse oblige, lifestyle-choice tone. This kind of mood is not one that leads to people smashing windows, or storming political party offices. Nor is it one that governments find hard to ignore.

The contrast with the protests at Millbank Tower could not be starker. It was as middle-class as ever, but there was a visceral undertow of resentment in that crowd that I had not felt before. The people at the front who were smashing windows, grappling with police, and scaling the roof were being supported by the thousands at the back – this was not the ‘extremist minority of outsiders’ that the NUS leadership and media is trying to portray. And the signs and placards that were on display were not just about fees – there were messages of support for schoolchildren’s EMAs, and raging slogans denouncing the banks, the coalition government and the forthcoming demolition of the public sector.

This was not a protest of the ‘ethical consumer’. It was the protest of the furious dispossessed, defending not just their own status but an entire model of social organisation. It is an anger that is not a simulation, is not going away, and cannot be ignored. My generation was mollycoddled, complacent and, ultimately, complicit – our happy position in a bloated economy ensured any sharp edges we might have had were sanded down to nothing. We helped to dump this generation in the mire, and it is the least we can do to join in the battle to get them out.

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