Militant tendencies feed music
http://www.newstatesman.com/music/2010/03/essay-world-change-songs-post
Mark Fisher
29 March 2010
As the Political Studies Association unveils the 20 greatest protest
songs [see below], Mark Fisher asks if music can change the world if
our songs remain the same.
--
The idea that music can change the world now seems hopelessly naive.
Thirty years of neoliberalism have convinced us that there is no
alternative; that nothing will ever change. Political stasis has put
music in its place: music might "raise awareness" or induce us to
contribute to a good cause, but it remains entertainment. Yet what of
music that refuses this status? What of the old avant-garde idea
that, to be politically radical, music has to be formally experimental?
The artist Michael Wilkinson's show "Lions After Slumber" (exhibited
last year at the Modern Institute in Glasgow) posed these questions
with a quiet intensity. The show was a kind of reliquary for a bygone
militancy. It was dominated by an enormous black-and-white print of
the photograph of Piccadilly Circus that had hung - upside down - in
Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's shop Seditionaries. A
stretched linen included the 1871 photograph of the Paris Communards
standing over the toppled Vendôme Column - but the image had been
turned on its side, so that it looked as if the restored emperor was
once again lording it over the Communards, who now resembled corpses.
There was no music to be heard at the show, but there were references
to music scattered throughout. A screen-printed mirror showed the
face of Irene Goergens, a member of the Red Army Faction - but the
image came from the album sleeve to Raw Macro, by the techno artist
Farben. More importantly, the title of the exhibition was a reference
to Scritti Politti's 1982 track "Lions After Slumber". Scritti had
themselves borrowed the title from Shelley's 1819 poem "The Masque of
Anarchy", which imagined a rising "like Lions after slumber/In
unvanquishable number" to avenge the dead of the Peterloo Massacre.
The allusion to Scritti Politti makes it clear that the vision of
politics that Wilkinson's show simultaneously mourned and invoked was
derived from post-punk - the outpouring of musical creativity in the
late 1970s and early 1980s that was in many ways Britain's version of
Paris '68. In line with the Marxist and situationist theory it drew
on and referenced, post-punk grasped culture as inherently political,
insisting on a version of politics that went far beyond parliamentarianism.
One of the most urgent tasks for any political music was to expose
the pacifying mechanisms that were already secreted in popular
culture - nowhere more obviously than in the cheap dreams of love
songs, which groups such as Gang of Four and the Slits deconstructed
in tracks such as "Anthrax" and "Love und Romance". In a world in
which people increasingly felt as if they lived inside advertisements
- where, as Gang of Four put it, at home they felt like tourists -
there was nothing more ideological than culture's claim to be
entertainment. That was the word that provided the ironic title for
Gang of Four's debut LP, and was also used in one of the Jam's most
bitterly sarcastic songs, "That's Entertainment".
Wilkinson's show was timely because post-punk was one of the spectres
that loomed over the past decade. Its history was extensively
catalogued in Simon Reynolds's book Rip It Up and Start Again; the
music was pastiched by lumpen plodders such as Franz Ferdinand and
Kaiser Chiefs, and served up again by originals such as Gang of Four,
Magazine and Scritti, all of which reformed. The return of the
post-punk sound had a double effect. At one level, it constituted the
music's final defeat - if conditions were such that these groups
could come back, 30 years after the fact, and not even sound
particularly out of date, then post-punk's scorched-earth injunction
that music should constantly reinvent itself must be as dead as its
hopes for a revivified politics. Yet even the most degraded
simulations of post-punk style carry with them a certain spectral
residue, a demand - which these simulacra themselves betray - that
music be more than consolation, convalescence or divertissement.
At the end of history, the impasses of politics are perfectly
reflected by the impasses in popular music. As political struggle
gave way to petty squabbles over who is to administrate capitalism,
so innovation in popular music has been supplanted by retrospection;
in both cases, the exorbitant ambition to change the world has
devolved into a pragmatism and careerism. A certain kind of
depressive "wisdom" predominates. Once, things might have seemed to
happen, but we won't get fooled again. Like the images in Wilkinson's
"Lions After Slumber", the world has been turned the right way up
again. The emperor is on his feet, power and privilege are restored,
and any periods when they were toppled seem like ludic episodes:
fragile, half-forgotten dreams that have withered in the unforgiving
striplights of neoliberalism's shopping mall.
In his study of the Sex Pistols, Lipstick Traces: a Secret History of
the 20th Century - published in the politically resonant year 1989 -
Greil Marcus impersonated this depressive wisdom. "By the standards
of wars and revolution," he conceded, "the world did not change; we
look back from a time when, as Dwight D Eisenhower put it, 'Things
are more like they are now than they ever were before.' As against
the absolute demands so briefly generated by the Sex Pistols, nothing
changed . . . Music seeks to change life; life goes on; the music is
left behind; that is what is left to talk about."
In fact, Marcus argues, the Pistols and those who followed them did
change the world, not by starting a war or a revolution, but by
intervening in everyday life. What had seemed natural and eternal -
and which now appears to be so again - was suddenly exposed as a
tissue of ideological presuppositions. This is a vision of politics
as a kind of puncturing, a rupturing of the accepted structure of
reality. The puncture would produce a portal - an escape route from
the second-nature habits of everyday life into a new labyrinth of
associations and connections, where politics would connect with art
and theory in unexpected ways. When songs ceased to be entertainment,
they could be anything. These punctures felt like abductions.
Abduction was what it felt like on first listening to Public Enemy.
Like the post-punks, Public Enemy implicitly accepted the idea that a
politics which came reassuringly dressed in established forms would
be self-defeating. The medium was the message, and PE's astonishing
militant montage was remarkable for both its rabble-rousing
sloganeering and its textural experimentalism. When the group's
music, produced by the Bomb Squad, looped fragments of funk and
psychedelic soul into abstract noise, it was as if American history -
now cut up into a science-fiction catastrophe, a permanent emergency
- was made malleable and ripe for rapid-fire retelling from the
perspective of a post-Panther black militancy.
Or there was the very different approach of Detroit's Underground
Resistance: in contrast to the data-density of the rap of Public
Enemy's Chuck D, they offered a largely voiceless take on techno,
pursuing a strategy of stealth and invisibility, drawing listeners
into a suggestive semiotic fog created by track titles (such as
"Install 'Ho-Chi Minh' Chip") and sleeve imagery that combined
political insurgency with Afrofuturist science fiction.
What Public Enemy and Underground Resistance had in common was a
rejection of the idea of music as entertainment. Instead of
minstrelsy, they conceived of music in the militaristic terms
explored in Steve Goodman's recent book, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect
and the Ecology of Fear. In this model, the use of music to subdue
populations - the "psychoacoustic correction" directed by the US army
against the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega; "sound bombs"
deployed over the Gaza Strip - is by no means unusual. All music
functions either to embed or to disrupt habituated behaviour
patterns. Thus, a political music could not be only about
communicating a textual message; it would have to be a struggle over
the means of perception, fought out in the nervous system.
Underground Resistance saw their mission as fighting against
"mediocre audiovisual programming". Yet the problem is that the
controllers have been all too successful in propagating this
mediocrity. Where Public Enemy and Underground Resistance conceived
of music as education, the dominant culture has been reclaimed by a
Tin Pan Alley populism that has once again reduced music to
entertainment. The internet and the iPod are part of a new economy of
musical consumption in which, thus far, the possibilities of being
abducted seem attenuated. In a world of niches, we are enchained by
our own consumer preferences.
What is lacking in the age of MySpace is the public space that could
surprise or confound our understanding of ourselves. Where, today, is
the equivalent of the Top of the Pops stage, which could suddenly be
invaded by the unexpected? Ironically, it is something such as The X
Factor; the campaign to get Rage Against the Machine to the Christmas
number-one slot was evidence of a hunger for music that was not just
entertainment.
We are in a time of transition. Jacques Attali once argued that
fundamental changes in the economic organisation of society were
always presaged by music. Because, as a result of downloading,
recorded music now seems to be heading towards decommodification,
what does this suggest for the rest of the culture? And we are yet to
hear the impact that the financial crash and its aftermath will have
on musical production. The collapse of neoliberalism has already led
to a simmering, renewed militancy on university campuses and
elsewhere - how will this translate into sound? Perhaps soon we will
once again hear new music that aims to turn the world upside down.
--
Mark Fisher is the author of "Capitalist Realism" (Zero Books, £7.99)
--------
Top 20 Political Songs
http://www.newstatesman.com/music/2010/03/top-20-political-songs
Ian K Smith and Jennifer Thompson
Published 25 March 2010
Read the story behind the songs, listen to all 20.
--
The 20 songs below were voted for by New Statesman readers and
members of the Political Studies Association. http://www.psa.ac.uk/
Listen to the songs here. http://www.newstatesman.com/podcasts/index.php?id=35
The list, published in this week's magazine, features spoken word,
punk nihilism and folk protest. To listen to the songs, together with
a commentary by Jonathan Derbyshire and Professor John Street from
the Political Studies Association, go to newstatesman.com/podcasts.
Meanwhile, we take you through the top 20 political songs, looking at
the ideas that gave rise to them and the reasons for their success.
Please feel free to comment on our inclusions, and to point to
anything or any songs that we might have missed.
1. Woody Guthrie - This Land Is Your Land
2. The Special AKA - Free Nelson Mandela
3. Bob Dylan - The Times They are a-Changin'
4. Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit
5. Claude de Lisle - La Marseillaise
6. U2 - Sunday Bloody Sunday
7. Eugene Pottier - The Internationale
8. Robert Wyatt/Elvis Costello - Shipbuilding
9. Sex Pistols - God Save the Queen
10. William Blake - Jerusalem
11. The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again
12. Rage Against the Machine - Killing in the Name
13. Tracy Chapman - Talkin' 'bout a Revolution
14. Nina Simone - Mississippi Goddam
15. Marvin Gaye - What's Going On?
16. Gil Scott-Heron - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
17. Bob Marley - Redemption Song
18. John Lennon - Imagine
19. Pete Seeger - Where Have All the Flowers Gone?
20. Tom Robinson - Glad to Be Gay
.
0 comments:
Post a Comment