Music Pullout Template.indd 1
21/04/2009 20:09
by julian boys
by mica muscat
So you lure people in with the music and hit them with the politics afterwards! Does that make them unrelated in a way?
UNITE D’HABITATION MARSEILLE - LE CORBUSIER Roni Size or just rrroll into an infinite turbo-peacefulness
As the Junglistic ideals receded into fond memory for some, and were written off as a historic fad by others, the de-radicalisation of DnB progressed with characteristically pointless speed. Rhythmic innovation was rooted out and replaced by hasty monotony, nuance supplanted with one-dimensional expressions of set-defined emotions. The overwhelming desire to ‘please the dancefloor’ with simple drum patterns, blunt basslines and flawless production technique, highlighted a collective amnesia, the memory erasure of a period (only a few years before) where pleasuring the dancefloor did not involve a drive towards ever lower common denominators.
YAMANASHI PRESS AND BROADCASTING CENTRE - KENZO TANGE DJ SS - Rollidge.
Just as Brutalist architecture demonstrated the beauty that could be forged from the grey functionality of concrete, so Jungle did the same with the structural backbone of popular music, the drums. Jungle liberates the drums from the purely functional role they are assigned in rock, and freed from this percussive labour they assume a whole new existence where their true potential is spectacularly unleashed. Snares, kicks and cymbals resonate with tunefulness
Like Brutalism, Jungle was inherently at odds with the cultural and economic imperatives which were rapidly consolidating their influence. Their modernist drives towards collective progress and innovation were in direct opposition to the regressive culture of individualised consumerism.
TRELLICK TOWER - ERNO GOLDINGER Ed Rush - Force is Electric [Remix].
on architecture and the De-Radicalisation of DnB
SPENCER DOCK DUBLIN - SCOTT TALLON WALKER Pendulum - Another Planet. explode into spasmic chaos
ROYAL NATIONAL THEATRE - DENYS LASDUN Omni Trio Renegade Snares [Foul Play Remix],
As the vacuity of the DnB project became ever clearer to its followers (taking up to 10 years for some), many began to dissent. A sense of boredom prevailed (some tried to reinvigorate the sound by re-introducing rhythmic experimentation, but did so in the most po-faced and joyless way imaginable, repelling most prospective followers). The hollowness of what underground dance music had come to be was laid bare for all to see. The perfect time for change… And then dubstep emerged.
- Music Box. The drums become the melody, harmony, the rhythm and the atmosphere, their former aesthetic austerity supplanted by emotional charge and heightened sense-stimulation. This radical approach to the use of percussion throws everything up in the air, the unexpected permeates every second.
30 ST MARY AXE - FOSTER AND PARTNERS Mala - AntiWar Dub.
TRINITY CAR PAR GATESHEAD - OWEN LUDER Danny Breaks -Volume 3.
Billy Childish was a principle mover within Stuckism and is currently performing with Billy Childish And The MBEs
Billy Childish quips: “they tell you to follow a-b-c-d-e-f-g and I think that you should be allowed to go a-g when you fancy or a-z when you fancy and not have to follow designated routes or uncreative thinking.”
In terms of violence it’s hard to say... if you don’t act violently, it’s almost like they don’t even look towards the situation, and it shouldn’t be an excuse, but I think it’s wrong for the government to solve these problems only when they escalate.
Jungle and Brutalism are instantly polarising to the newcomer and the dilettante. Unlike techno or house, where the subject succumbs and ‘gets lost’ in the music, letting its inner rhythm descend to the tribal repetition of its ancestors, Jungle requires an active engagement, a wilful acceleration of the body’s rhythm, beyond the ‘natural’. To enter the Junglistic state requires both a commitment and a risk; once you adjust to Jungle’s accelerated state, you may not experience anything the same way again. Jungle and Brutalism demand and require belief; belief that culture and community can be better, that they will be better, provided a collective commitment to progress is made and honoured.
Cian M Collins aka Mentasms
Alec Empire was a founding member of canonic German digital hardcore band Atari Teenage Riot and runs Eat Your Heart Out records
It becomes increasingly evident that he could never adhere to any political doctrine. It is also not surprising that having been accepted at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design under the genius clause, he was expelled shortly after for writing “the worst type of toilet wall humour”.
Overall Childish’s discourse has strong political undertones that are often highly critical of market-logic. Would he consider himself to be a political animal? “I believe in religion not politics - creativeness is next to godliness,” is his blunt reply. Childish is quick to inform me that he does not care for politics and has certainly never studied it. “My least favourite thing is Stalinism followed by Fascism followed by Liberalism. I am not interested in political party positions. Although I have met people who are didactic Marxists and they are some of the most irritating people that I have ever met, so maybe I am a bit like them.”
We decided to use these kind of beats in the past because it kind of stirred things up. Breakcore and hard Drum ‘n’ Bass makes the heart go faster and has this dangerous atmosphere that goes with it. If you march through the centre of the city and there’s this kind of music being played, people tend to take it more seriously I find. It’s good if there’s some sort of energy being sent off to the people who just watch the demonstration, they pay attention in a different way. I think if you just play a Bob Dylan song people would say ‘oh I saw that so many times on TV’. Also, people are more angry about the situation right now than most of that music can even express.
At the G20 protests people were playing drum‘n’bass to get psyched up, and it seemed to be almost a violent thing, do you think that’s a general feature of the relationship between electronic music and protest?
With the internet it’s much easier to get out other information. I remember when we put out the first ATR record, a lot of people outside Germany didn’t even know that these problems existed, then the records became very important. Now of course information travels fast and its different.
There’s always a limited space of lyrics you can use. A song always forces you to come up with simplified ways of saying stuff. Almost like when politicians make a speech, people will say it’s really simplified. It can be a negative thing, but on the other side how else would you do it, would you listen to a speech that was ten hours long?!
And this misery can produce tragic circumstances. “You get people like Angus Fairhurst who committed suicide because of stuff like this aspirational society. It is what causes the difference between who you are and what you should be- it is an evil not a celebration.”
Childish attributes part of the dishonesty, delusion and greed in the art-world to the art and music schools. When teaching music at university, he found it ridiculous that people were forming groups in order to become famous “and go somewhere in the music industry”. The stupidity of doing the same thing for art is obvious, he argues. “It would be better for people to do these things as hobbies rather than careers. There’s simply not enough room for more Tracey Emins and Damien Hirsts, and anyway it’s not a thing to aim for. I think that one of the problems with art is that people see it as a career option, mainly to try become more special than somebody else. If you make a huge distance between who you are and who you should be it will only create misery; which will beget far more misery.”
The great thing with the internet now is that you can link a lot of stuff to the music and have information or sources go with it. I don’t feel the need to force everything into a 3 minute track, because you can really have that network thing going on. You can get music to trigger something in people and then they can go from there.
I found that with the Iraq war and America over the past few years people assumed that I would be the kind of guy who would write a song saying ‘fuck Bush!’. I never did that because I felt it would be just too simple, because it is a much more complex problem.
As far as Childish is concerned, the antidote to this “greedy-guts behaviour” is for artists and musicians to be honest with themselves and what they choose to engage with, and not choose to engage with delusion. “It’s about noticing what you do and what you think and how to behave, that gives you the intelligence of understanding and reality rather than what you prefer reality to be, and this delusion extends to the way that society is running our art. The art world is delusional and so they engage with delusion wholeheartedly and our society promotes delusion. That’s why I’d expect economic meltdowns and crass rubbish sold as meaningful and informative art.”
Yet he sees some intent behind the creation of consumer debt. For Childish the 15 or 20 years of inflated houseprices were key in enabling certain people to lend more money, and trap others in spirals of profitable debt. “I suppose some people think that life, art and music are a game that you play to win, rather than something that you can engage with seriously.”
The Neo-Nazi movement is rising, it’s getting bigger over here in Germany, and it’s not necessarily the easy opinion to say ‘oh the Neo-Nazis are really wrong’. People think, ‘well wait a minute, they didn’t do all bad stuff back then’. In Germany it’s scary how right-wing a lot of people are and how dangerous their thinking is.
Atari Teenage Riot confronted a direct threat in Neo-Fascism which people agreed needed eradication, whereas many issues today seem a lot more complicated. How can electronic music respond to that?
I wouldn’t judge someone who’s listening to music that doesn’t deal with politics. But what I criticise is the mainstream media, which makes political decisions as to what music is being played. The problem is that people who make these decisions, for example for the audience at festivals, make these decisions against political music and I think that’s just to be able to control things. To exclude this form of music, I think it’s wrong.
People who are very politically aware and thoughtful in their everyday lives may use electronic music as an escape, could that be why they don’t want to engage with politics in that sphere?
Childish contends that if a dyslexic artist from Chatham with barely any formal schooling could understand that the financial bubble was bound to deflate eventually, then so could the experts. Or as he puts it: “I’m a stupid boy from secondary school and if I could figure that out than so could the economists, but they simply didn’t care.”
He insists that either way, material concerns should not impact on creativity as people have the will to make the choices in life and no one has to give in to the demands made by the art establishment and the market. “I chose not to go with what they dictated regardless of the situation being like that, and some people might need to have that limitation. It’s best to discipline and choose limitations for yourself; not be disciplined by the world and economics. Some people might not be able to do that but might need the outside world to do it for them. Immature people need to limit themselves by experience as opposed to being limited by intellect, but that shows a lack of wit.”
I think it’s both. You really have to decide as the musician where you go, if something doesn’t quite have that effect any more on people, you have to find a different way of saying things. What I don’t like so much is people who are cynical, who go ‘everybody’s just in it for taking drugs and having fun’, because that’s not really how I see it. There are so many people I’ve met who don’t look at life like that, you know, and to reduce people to that kind of level, and go ‘oh nobody wants to know anything’... I doubt that.
Is the political power of electronic music limited by the audience rather than the medium?
For a second he looks disconcerted, as if completely unaware of the turmoil within the economic and political realms As it turns out, the crisis is not high on his list of priorities, although Childish does concur that the recession might have some relation to creativity. “Creativeness is what makes knowing each other and the experience of being alive worthwhile, so it’s not my life’s vocation to be sucking up to orthodoxy in the music or the art or the writing world. When things get too overblown it’s best to trim back a bit and it certainly was a bit over-gorged and horrible, although presumably the top bit will stay like that anyway.”
I ask him about the impact that the credit crunch will have on the arts. Does he think that the current economic situation will serve to trim the excesses in both art and music, as it will do in other spheres, or will it simply serve to hinder artists and musicians?
Childish is renowned for his rejection of anything restricting his pursuit of creativity and authenticity or what he describes as a: “genuine response that does not dictate correct thinking. A route that is not dictated by anybody else and which comes through striving from doing something that is worthwhile and not striving for novelty.”
On what appears to be another ordinary evening in Whitechapel, I am waiting for Billy Childish to finish his soundcheck. He is the cult artist and musician who inspired Tracey Emin, Graham Coxon, PJ Harvey, Beck, Jack White and Kylie Minogue, yet eschewed fame and fortune for what is by today’s standards a frugal and ascetic lifestyle. An artist’s artist, he has published over 40 collections of his poetry, recorded over 100 full-length LPs and produced over 2000 paintings, yet is still virtually unknown outside fringe art and music circles.
interview with billy childish
Yes, I think that within a certain genre you can still get that political message in there, that energy even. For example you can take an acoustic guitar and write something really powerful, and it could have an effect on the people who hear it. So you could make Breakcore records which are really confrontational and exciting, and have that political effect on people. I think it depends really on how you do it. I find that when you can hear in their music that a musician really means something, that’s when it gets important and is really powerful.
Do you think that electronic music has other places to go, to be as shocking as it has been?
When a music starts it’s fresh and people don’t know it. Because it’s not predictable people question things, it makes them think and they have to make up their own minds. That’s why music can have that function when it’s new. Of course, Breakcore is quite an old genre now and it lacks energy, it doesn’t have the effect that it had fifteen years ago.
With Atari Teenage Riot you used very fast, aggressive music to make people take action. But with Breakcore now being received in a more sanitised club environment, do you think it can still have the same impact?
I’m quite disappointed at the music scene because there hasn’t been more activism. People always tell me that music shouldn’t be too political, but I think it’s really important to express your opinion and not just write songs about love and drugs and parties. Also as a music fan I think it’s just boring if you listen to records which don’t have anything to do with what’s really going on. It’s not just for political reasons, I think it’s really important for the quality of the music itself.
How do you feel about the current role of music in political activism and what role should it play?
interview with alec empire
HABITAT 67 - MOSHDE SAFDIE Dr S Gachet - The Dreamer
Dubstep is about bass, drums relegated to formality, their purpose no longer evident other than as a stabiliser anchoring the flows of low frequency soundwaves in a metronomic channel. For former DnBers, Dubstep projects an endless sequence of reassuring signifiers, it feels different, but familiar. It lures with its opulent infinite sub-bassic pleasure, and comforts with well-worn Drum and Bass tropes; growling techstep basslines and bleeps, head-nodding dubwise grooves and the obligatory sampled rasta-vox; the symbolic order of DnB re-arranged into novel familiarity. The insurrectionary edge of DnB-boredom is now dulled, the army of discontented Junglist soldiers mollified, their revolutionary burning doused by vats of thick immobilising bass. Bass is now reactionary; it feeds the underground libido just enough to suppress the mind-body-souls’ desire, its need, for more, and for better. By tweaking the formula just barely enough to feel kind-of-new, dubstep has pacified the latent sonic-proletariat.
However, in jungle, the stark contours of the drums are always tempered by the bass. Even the most alien and weird basslines will enwrap the subject in an arousing tickle of low frequency soundwaves, a libidinal compromise to the Junglist biology.
Music Pullout Template.indd 2
poster on reverse by John Lurie Title:”Some animals Noah only had one of. The ones that had come by two put on a musical. Which like most musicals was bad.” Date: 2004 Medium: watercolor, oil pastel, pencil on paper Size: 14 x 20 inches
Protest Songs by John Peel Enthusiastic vagueness passes for scholarship in the twilight world of the disc-jockey. This profundity, which I am having embroidered on a set of tea towels, has come to me during three weeks writing researching and recording a four-part series on protest music for BBC Radio 1.
The first problem I encountered lay in attempting to discover when protest music could sensibly said to have started. Sleeve notes on the Peggy Seeger and Ewan McColl LP The Angry Muse were helpful here, chatting warmly of the Anglo-Latin satires of the twelfth century, the works of Wireker and his contemporaries, the Goliadic satire of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
In the face of such erudition I beat a hasty retreat to our own century and the seedbed for what most of us understand as protest music, the murderous early years of the American labour movement. Familiar with, and much affected by, Jack Elliott’s recording of a song describing one of the grisliest of many grisly events connected with early attempts at unionisation, Woody Guthrie’s ‘1913 Massacre’, I spent several days lost in the trades union section of the BBC record library. I emerged with such gems as Gene Autry’s presinging-cowpoke tribute to Mother Jones, recorded in 1931, and ‘Poor Man, Rich Man’, by David McCarn, a millworker, recorded a year earlier during an especially grim strike.
This first programme brought in a wealth of criticism. Too scholary, said one listener – a criticism rarely, if ever, levelled at disc-jockeys – and not scholarly enough, sniffed others. Several other correspondents suggested that the programme was little more than a party political broadcast on behalf of the Socialist Party. I countered that we have no Socialist Party in Britain, so imbalance in an election year was not an issue here.
Furthermore it is in the nature of things that the Right does not, except on its lunatic fringes – programme two included a record in justification of the My Lai massacre – bother to write songs of protest. Records which concern themselves with the uncertainty of pricing in the claret market or the hardship engendered by careless dabbling in copper futures are in pretty short supply.
Programme two brought in further complaints. My favourite came from a listener who objected to the fact that all the records were against something. Hard to avoid this, I pointed out, in a programme about protest songs. The protest instrumental is, as a form, still regrettably in its infancy.
The melancholy conclusion I have reached, after listening to much stirring music, is that ultimately it has little effect beyond reducing the feeling of helplessness experienced by singers and audience alike. Has any government been overthrown by song? Or any wrong righted? I doubt it. Meanwhile we dance on. taken from the anthology of Peel’s writing ‘Olivetti Chronicles’
21/04/2009 20:09