Misc.

Before Christmas I wrote a piece for The Guardian's Comment is Free on a similar theme to my post 'Images of Reality and Student Surrealism', looking at the role of art in the protests. Speaking of which, I found an amazing image of surreal reality that I hadn't seen before, students inside the Tate Modern gallery on Day X3:

Also found this one of the Book Bloc raring to go (find out more about them here):

And I was interviewed for this pretty spot-on little film about the music criticism and the internet.

RIP Trish Keenan

Last week we heard the sad news of Trish Keenan's untimely death, which comes as a huge blow to British experimental music. She was the lead singer in Broadcast, a band I've been a fan of ever since someone at my school, having heard I was getting into unusual pop, lent me the excellent Tender Buttons. I don't need to argue that without Keenan and her band the music and art of hauntology so many of us appreciate today would not just be much the poorer, but probably wouldn't exist. The band was more than part of a movement, however - it was a movement of its own that elegantly took in the past, the present and a future, both cultural and personal. Tributes have been written by Joe Muggs (which includes a mixtape by Keenan), Richard King and Pete Paphides.

Images of Reality and Student Surrealism

Screenshot of the BBC News Website on Day X3.
The student protest movement that rose to sudden visibility a month ago with a 50,000-strong march through central London, culminating in an occupation of the buildings on Millbank housing the Conservative Party HQ, has not only persisted but dramatically diversified. The next major day of action, ‘Day X’, took place across the country on the 24th of November and saw dozens of university occupations as well as the first example of large-scale police response, with police containing or kettling protestors (whose ranks now included thousands of teenagers) in freezing conditions on London’s Whitehall for over nine hours, forced to remain within police lines without knowing when crossing them will be possible. Day X2 was on the 30th of November, and this time protestors largely managed to avoid being kettled by splitting into groups and moving at high speed through London in the snow, getting as far east as Bank and as far west as Hyde Park Corner. Thursday’s Day X3 was in many ways a climax of the movement, coinciding with a vote in parliament on tripling the cap on tuition fees and ending with kettling and new heights of violence from both police and protestors. The vote was won by a relatively slim majority, but with further cuts to higher education and to the public sector in general to follow in the coming months the groups and networks that swiftly emerged in the past month have vowed to continue the fight.
Horses charge the crowd of protestors trying to esape the kettle. The obvious artistic reference would be this.
I was out demonstrating on each of these occasions, and on Day X3 I was caught in a police kettle that enclosed 2-3000 protestors in London's Parliament Square. Upon attempting to leave at around 3pm, I was caught in a crowd that was battling against police lines and subsequently charged by police on horseback. At this point Alfie Meadows, a 20-year-old philosophy student, was struck in the head by a police baton, causing bleeding in his brain that required emergency brain surgery that evening. When this struggle died down, we waited in Parliament Square for five hours, with no more food or water than we’d thought to bring, and no more warmth than from the dodgy smoke of makeshift fires. After sunset many protestors, their anger exacerbated by being kettled, turned on the surrounding government buildings, causing riot police to further enclose us and using batons to do so once more. Just after Big Ben struck 9pm, the police surged forward with a roar, shepherding us onto Westminster Bridge. We assumed – and police officers had implied – that we were finally walking to our freedom, but instead we were kettled once again right there on the bridge for ninety minutes, this time packed together and with very little room to move. I regained my liberty at 11pm.
Protestors are kettled on Westminster Bridge at 10:30pm
The internet has enabled the proliferation of pictures and video from the protests to an unprecedented extent. A great, representative compilation of Day X3 pictures and video can be found here. Some of these images have reached the press and attained iconic status, such as the photo of a masked youth high-kicking the ground floor windows of the Millbank buildings highlighted in my last post. The most recent example of this is the photo of Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, a Duchess of Cornwall, panicking behind car windows as protestors who’d moved to Regent Street attacked their Rolls Royce. Dom Fox has written about this picture, which appeared on the front of most of yesterday’s national newspapers. Naturally it distracted the media from the rioting elsewhere – not to mention the cause of the protestors, which is apparently expunged at the slightest hint of criminal or irreverent activity – but it did give the day’s events a surprisingly old-school revolutionary flavour.
I can’t help but reiterate my slight nervousness about doing aesthetics – aestheticising – during a time like this. But this time, more than an exercise in getting our priorities right and speaking out or demonstrating rather than getting lost in analysis of the latest mp3s, it’s also a little erroneous to be aestheticising the events themselves beyond what is necessary. Aestheticising can publicise and galvanise a cause, but wallowing in pathos and rhetoric becomes complacent and inflammatory, colouring a representation leads to misrepresentation, and celebrating the thrill of conflict is outright dangerous. Yes, everything is aestheticised, life – that is, ‘real’ life – may be continuous with art and inseparable from it, but it isn’t a nineteenth-century Romantic painting, however the fors or againsts portray it.

A key problem for the relationship between aesthetics and political struggle, then, is that of realism. Realism and ‘reality’ are relative, selective and ideologically constituted. Tied to the necessity of social action (be it financial cuts or demonstration), reality is the political battleground, and ideas or images of it form horizons beyond which imagination of alternatives becomes difficult and discouraged. Few have articulated this better than Mark ‘K-Punk’ Fisher, whose recent book Capitalist Realism has described the rise of eponymous capitalist construction of reality and its attendant social and institutional imperatives in recent decades, which become unquestionable because they are ‘realistic’. The concept has become a valuable tool in challenging the similarly ‘realistic’ (i.e. ideologically motivated) necessities of cuts to institutions such as universities.
For me, the photograph above sharply stands out from the rest of the images to come out of Day X3 not just for its brutal presentation of evidence for violence, for police brutality (the word brutal often connotes ‘unadorned’, ‘naïve’, ‘raw’ - red raw), but for its equality brutal presentation of this problem of realism in political struggle itself. It was taken in the Jeremy Bentham Room at University College London (whose occupation by students since Day X had become one of the most successful and famous of the student occupations) and uploaded to Twitter by New Statesman columnist and student protest reporter Laurie Penny. It shows a student who’d managed to escape the police kettle with several bruises on her/his back and arms, but several extra dimensions of meaning are added to the image by the presence of that day’s copy of London’s free newspaper, the Evening Standard. Perhaps it’s there to attest to the date the photo was taken, as if the subject had been kidnapped, but it’s the headline that launches the image’s commentary on realism. Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the (formerly popular with students) Liberal Democrat party, the junior partner in the coalition government, is a particular focus of student anger, as he’d promised (signed a pledge, in fact) prior to the election not to raise the cap on tuition fees. Now on the day of the vote, he announces that those opposing raising the cap are ‘dreamers’, living not in the real world, but in a dream world. In the article, which can be read here, Clegg backs the plans because he’s dealing with ‘the way the world is’. Obviously, this begs the question as to what world, what reality he thought he was living in earlier this year. Clegg’s partnership with the Conservative Party has evidently ‘woken’ him from this ‘dream’.

The paper’s headline opposes capitalist realism with a student surrealism. But of course, what could be more brutally real than the naked body marked by signs of material rupture, the painful physical embodiment of struggle. The body is the first fact of human reality. The image is differentiated into the paper on the right – a world of relative abstraction, discourse, ideology, language, symbolism, thought, opinion, representation – and the flesh on the left – a world of relative corporeality, of bodily reality. Then our understanding of the political context tells a story. The students are struck because they’re in a dream world, punished for their bad, defective education, and forcefully woken by Clegg’s establishment, brought back to reality by the discouraging pain of the police batons. But at the same time it’s the student who attacks Clegg by revealing her/his wounds, saying ‘no, I live in a world of brutally real physical injury committed to my body, look, here it is, this is its most basic sign’. We can no longer tell which side is dreaming.

The ‘realist’ coalition’s projection of student surrealism has been playfully adopted and subverted by the student movement. One famous slogan from a Day X3 placard was the surely Situationist-inspired ‘Be Realistic: Demand the Impossible’, which I later saw scrawled on a wall in Parliament Square. This easily misunderstood sentence simply suggests that the borders of ruling class-sponsored ‘reality’ shouldn’t be considered absolute and final. One group of students carried thick polystyrene shields covered in cardboard and painted up to look like famous, over-sized books of philosophy, sociology and literature. The image below, which could have been a Neo Rauch painting, will appeal to fans of hauntology:
Also out in force were such thuggish texts as Negative Dialectics, Brave New World, Down and Out in Paris and London, Society of the Spectacle, One-dimensional Man, Phenomenology of Spirit, Being and Event and Just William.
The battle is for reality and for a new reality. Aesthetics must necessarily be a weapon in that battle, but like violence itself it is a dangerous weapon – readily abused. And most frighteningly in this case, nothing prepares people for seeing that tension between aesthetics and reality like higher education itself.
Sixth-form students occupy The Mound in Oxford on Day X2.
Lots of music criticism coming up here very soon. In the meantime, do look at Dan Hancox’s post on music in the Parliament Square kettle including a playlist, and Blackdown’s brilliant Grime / Dubstep / Funky end of year piece for Pitchfork.

Being Heard

The argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in modern politics. There is something that Governments care for far more than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy. - Emmeline Pankhurst via Laurie Penny
Lately I’ve been thinking harder and harder about the justifications for using my energy (and that of others) on musical aesthetics in times like these. Writing thousands of words explaining the exotic appeals of underground pop’s next best thing doesn’t come out as an obvious priority when vigorous collective opposition to the government’s horrifying attacks on social equality is urgently needed. Even expansive commentary on the politics of musical creativity and the musical imagination seems a little too much like an indulgence next to the tasks of raising awareness, organisation and action. As I gesticulate in front of people, ‘no, no, music really is an important part of our political lives,’ I suspect that I’m appearing a bit naïve at best.
All the photos in this post were taken by Bradley L. Garrett
While there’s a certain immediate practical truth to this concern, it’s also the case that to divide political action and art / aesthetics into wheat and chaff respectively is very close to the sort of reasoning currently being employed to eviscerate higher education in this country. The splitting of art from life in general is an arrangement that has suited capitalism’s commodification of the former very well. In this arrangement Art is that glorious winged escape from life into the meaningless heavens of emotion, fantasy and madness, a journey that can become the property of every sanctified individual for only 79p at the iTunes store. Or art can have ‘political themes’: messages preferably conveyed through a set of easily denotive elements (such as lyrics or images) while the mode of production remains essentially the same. In other words, Art may address and enhance life, but as a luxury or specialist commodity it stays at a remove from its practical concerns and present meanings.
This is exactly the ideology behind the government’s proposed destruction of arts and humanities in higher education, of course. Now not just art itself, but even learning about art – thought itself – becomes a luxury or else a pre-2008-crisis-style investment in a future career. It’s certainly not a natural entitlement any more. Individuals benefit, so individuals must pay for it. And when it’s all reduced to monetary value, an arts or humanities degree emerges as a relatively poor investment compared to engineering, economics or business studies, or even no degree at all. But hey, at least these people will eventually acquire the disposable income to buy whatever it is that the iTunes store recommends and listen to it after work. And in the meagre instances where artistic meaning gets a look in at universities, it may well resemble something like this.In turn the elite professionalisation of music-making (and the musical disempowering of the majority that goes along with it) will grow even worse as all forms of instrumental tuition come to be seen as a career investment, especially after secondary school. This won’t just apply to classical musicians, but in the coming decades it could have a powerful effect on the growing disciplines of music technology and popular music performance.
My own field, however, is music as a humanity. This often goes by the name ‘musicology’, but this term is often held to describe just one of a number of related discourses. I’ve just started a course of PhD research on the so-called ‘lo-fi’ aesthetics of popular music’s outsiders – those who swim against the prevailing current of musical professionalisation and the music industry – and my ability to do this is entirely reliant on funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, who may be looking at cuts of well over 50%. My research is unlikely to be decisively threatened by the cuts, but the future of research like mine is in severe peril. Having become aware of the value of my education and the opportunity of my research in a way that future generations of students may never be makes me all the more determined to protest.
It’s not just research itself that’s threatened, of course, but the benefits of learning that further education brings to individuals, society and social discourse as a whole. Take the idea that there is more to the meaning of music than its marginalised role in Western capitalist society, for example. When musicology was still a young discipline, many musicologists unconsciously towed the Western capitalist line that music had little to do with life, that it was meaningless but luxurious. Since then, the discipline has gotten wise and taken a more critical turn, becoming conscious of a deeply political sociology in music-making. It is just this sort of insight, this consciousness, this ability of future generations of students to imagine a subversion of the dominant social ideology and step outside of it to view society and humanity with a more critical eye that is so threatened by the rise in tuition fees and the cuts to higher education. Without it, society cannot improve, but can only suffer ever greater injustices ever more gladly.
This is why I took part in the demonstration in central London last Wednesday. With the minor damaging and occupation of the Millbank buildings housing the Conservative Party headquarters, it became a very significant, even historical event. There has been a huge wave of responses on the internet, among them:

Nina Power in the Guardian - 'Student Protest: We Are All In This Together'

Laurie Penny in New Statesmen - 'Inside the Millbank Tower Riots'

Laurie Penny in New Statesmen - 'The Power of the Broken Pane'

University of London Union Clare Solomon's high-octane debate with Tory MP Roger Gale on BBC Radio 2's Jeremy Vine Show

Richard Seymour at Lenin's Tomb - 'Just the Beginning'

Neil Roberts in Londonist - 'Student Fees Protest: A View From the Front'

Paul Sagar at Bad Conscience - 'In Praise of Riots'

... and its follow-up - 'Seconds Out, Round Two'

Liberal Conspiracy - 'The Occupation of Millbank: What the Press Missed'

London Evening Standard Editorial: 'Expect More Rage if the Rich and Poor Divide Gets Bigger'

History is Made at Night - 'The Battle of Millbank' (includes footage)

A must-read in a more satirical vein - Trifling Offence - 'National Day of Mourning for Windows of Millbank Tower'

... its follow-up - 'We Are All Windows Now'

... and the Facebook group - 'Become a Window'

And the next outing - Guardian: 'Student Protests Planned on a National Scale on 24 November'

That day music stepped out of the record collection paradigm and played a role in raising morale, coordinating chants, and most importantly cohering and drawing attention to ourselves as an organised collective. Just south of Trafalgar Square as the march was starting I was near the back and still stationary, tightly packed in and shivering with hundreds of strangers from dozens of different universities. Eventually a sound system started up and boomed out Cee Lo Green’s ‘Fuck You’, a powerfully catchy, upbeat song and a perfect choice at that moment.

Press play and turn the volume up nice and high...
Recognising the sentiment we all turned, smiled, and started dancing and singing along, our eyes meeting with a strong and implicit sense of mutual understanding and agreement. There were performers on instruments too. The music of drummers and samba bands contributed to the sense of a shared mood. Outside the Houses of Parliament a student brass band were playing a characteristically old-fashioned and very English sort of music, and yet it only enhanced the atmosphere of diverse voices contributing in every unique way to one cause. By the time I arrived at the Millbank buildings, sound-systems were playing techno, dub, and if I’m not mistaken, Aphex Twin’s ‘Come to Daddy’. Together with our reasons for being there, the sense of collectivity that music instilled that day was ten times as strong as that whipped up at the very best of raves, and I’ll never forget it.
But of course it wasn’t the disrespectful, insubordinate swearing of our singing ‘Fuck You’ or the sonic warfare of Aphex Twin that outraged most of the mainstream media. It was the ‘Battle of Millbank’, encapsulated in that one image of someone kickboxing a window on the ground floor of the Conservative Party headquarters. The photograph has swiftly reached iconic status. Shame to say it, but over 50,000 young people standing together in central London are relatively easy for the public and the powerful to ignore, especially in an ideological climate stoked by the propaganda of taking the bitter pill. But some broken windows, some graffiti and thousands of young voters chanting ‘Nick Clegg, shame on you for turning blue’ and ‘Tory scum’ and all the clear symbolism that goes with it cannot be so easily ignored. So the protest had to become something else in order for it to be ignored. It had to cross a threshold of excess in which it becomes different in kind. The moment windows were broken, a valid protest was transmuted, ‘highjacked’ into ‘mindless violence’, perpetrated by (take your pick) criminal anarchist yobs or arrogant, selfish kids as threathened commentators attempt to claw back the power to ignore and blot out the protest.
But every aspect of the protest – both the acceptable banner-waving at the march and the anger on Millbank – were continuous within the same historical moment and cannot be divided. Just as music and aesthetics isn’t outside of life, the literal and symbolic destruction of government property was not outside of the protest. The apparently unbearable truth is that it is only a tiny and natural step from giving anger a voice and giving it more material consequences. The two are not different in kind. The only difference is that this ‘violence’ is bolder and less readily ignored. The real anxiety underneath the outraged reaction to the Battle of Millbank isn’t the rationalizing lie of ‘shame on this mindless, invalidating violence’ but ‘how dare you take the step of trying to stop us from ignoring you’.
As so many have already pointed out, the destruction of a sumptuous lobby is nothing compared to the infinitely more serious violence about to be inflicted on society’s ability to think and imagine. Music can be a part of that fight, a way of cohering and celebrating it with a single passionate voice. If you are angry, make music using whatever you have, music strange and unique to this historical moment. Plug it into an amplifier. And be heard.

Just don’t randomly throw fire extinguishers.

on returning

No relation.
Well hello. I've finally finished the first draft of my book Infinite Music - I'm pretty pleased with it and its first readers have made noises of approval. No release date as yet, but it won't be before Christmas. In the meantime I'll be swatting away the cobwebs and cranking this old blog back into life, hopefully returning to its former levels of activity and longwindedness. I'm aiming to have a Rouge-classic size post up in the next few weeks.

Until then there's a few things to be pointed out. Firstly I've updated the links on the right-hand side of this page after untold months of neglect. There's a load of great sites in there now, many of them should by rights have been up there at least a year ago. Have a gander.

While up to my neck in infinite music I took an afternoon off to visit London's Handel House museum with John Maus and chat to him on a bench for Upset the Rhythm TV. The resulting video touches on harmony and melody in song-writing, film music and the role of music in society, and contains excerpts from that evening's jaw-dropping show. Try to ignore my habit of incessantly pinching the end of my nose, of which I was shamefully ignorant until seeing the video. Having admitted I have a problem I'm now taking steps.

Paul Morley did several pieces on Dubstep (and the genre formerly known as) a month ago. His video interview with Ikonika is particularly worth your while.

Over at her blog Popular Demand, Anwyn Crawford has asked some very pertinent questions about today's pop.

This amazing little documentary follows Terror Danjah around his ends and includes footage of 'the godfather of grime' working on beats.

It's probably got to the point where I should make the customary apology for lack of blogging: sorry about that. I've been busy with a number of things, but it's mainly been researching and writing Infinite Music that's kept me away. Got a few chapters down now and I'm really pleased with it so far. Once it's finished it'll be back to normal here, but in the mean time, I have a few morsels to offer.

Firstly, the picture above. It's by William Daniels, part of the new Saatchi exhibition which I haven't been to see yet. Sort of interesting isn't it. Apparently Daniels made a paper effigy of that portrait of William Blake and painted it in oils. This summer, upright 'Street Pianos' have been left in public places in London and last week I had loads of fun playing one of them in Bunhill Fields, northeast of the City, where Blake's grave is. After this pic and my A flat ninth chords, he's probably having even more of a spin in it this year than usual.

Secondly, Juke music from Chicago is making waves in London. I had a go at the footwork dance that goes with it and I fell over. But these guys don't, they really, really don't:


Thirdly, if you haven't read the first two parts of Blackdown's 'Greatest Rhythms of Dubstep' series yet (first one: Exemen, 'Far East', second one: Mala's incredible 'Learn'), then do. Great insight, and an important reminder that great dubstep can never be reduced to bass.

Finally, as much as it pains me not to have the time to write thousands of words on these, here are some of the highlights of my listening over the last few months (some of them aren't so new, many of them aren't very surprising, but they're all worth a good look):

Actress: Splazsh
American Men: Cool World
Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti: Before Today
Bugskull: Communication
Charles Trees: The Dream EP
Downliners Sekt: Hello Lonely Hold the Nation EP
Dubbel Dutch: Throwback EP
Flying Lotus: Cosmogramma
Girl Unit: I.R.L. EP
Jneiro Jarel (Dr. Who Dat?): Beyond 2morrow
Lil Silva: Night Skanker EP
Lone: Ecstacy and Friends
Lukid: Onandon
Matrix Metals: Flamingo Breeze
Mount Kimbie: Crooks and Lovers and the two remix EPs on Hot Flush
Mowgli: 93
Onra: Long Distance
Oscar McClure: Compost EP
Oval: Oh EP (and) O
Ramadanman: Glut / Tempest
Rangers: Suburban Tours
'Shangaan Electro: New Wave Dance Music from South Africa'
Shlohmo: Shlomoshun Deluxe (and) Camping EP
Wiley: Avalanche Music
Woebot: Moanad