Paradoxical Undressing - Kristin Hersh

Six-year-old Kristin Hersh, in the way of small children told not to touch something because it’s not a toy, imbued the guitar belonging to her university professor dad (whom everyone called Dude) with mysterious and magical powers. She used to creep up and gaze at it longingly, imagining the thrilling sounds it would make when played.

Eventually Dude teaches her tiny hands to make E/G/A around the guitar’s huge neck but little Kristin is bitterly disappointed: the chords are boring.

“But Bob Dylan plays these chords. And Neil Young.”

“Mm-hm.” I looked at my hands, willing them to play better. “They’re probably nice guys.” Handing the guitar back to Dude, I stare at it, perplexed. Why doesn’t it sound as cool as it looks?

I complained that the chords didn’t sound magenta enough. “ … You know?”

“No”, answered Dude, bewildered.

“Well, red, I mean. I’ve heard red before. A million times. That chord was red. And boring.”

“E major’s red?” he asked. “E never sounded particularly red to me. You mean it’s a primary color?”

“Yeah. We didn’t even play green.”

“What chord is green?”

I shook my head and glared impatiently at Dude. “Mix a blue chord with a yellow one. Duh-uh. It’s stronger and prettier that way. Like those fish.” The fish I meant were African cichlids, who change color when they lose too many fights. They get their asses kicked enough times and grow pale, while the winning fish develop bright colourful scales and beautiful patterns … “If you play too many wimpy chords, you’re just asking for wimpy scales.”

“Are you calling Bob Dylan a loser?”

“No, just a pale fish.”

Dude looked at me sideways. “Are you calling my scales wimpy?” I shrugged and he handed me the guitar. “It’s yours,” he said. “Play colors”.

*

And so she did. The songs Kristin Hersh wrote with her band Throwing Muses are kinaesthetic wonders, flashing bright with fire and fury. Her autobiography, Paradoxical Undressing (Rat Girl in America), covers the frenetic year in which the 19-year-old Hersh is hospitalised with manic depression (“They don’t call it that anymore”), signs to British label 4AD, gets pregnant and along the way writes some of the most extraordinarily affecting, astonishing and inventive pop songs that have ever been recorded.

It does make me wonder how people who’ve never heard Throwing Muses experience this book. (Fuck knows what they imagine the band sounds like but I’d love to hear the music a forensically-minded reader might make, reconstructing Throwing Muses solely from what Hersh has written. It'd be awesome.) But if you do know their self-titled first album from 1986, the Chains Changed EP (1987), second album House Tornado (1988) or the In A Doghouse cassette of demos from 1985 (released on CD in 1998), then you can be sure of a hundred little epiphanies and the mental clicks of puzzle pieces fitting together. The narrative colours-in the recollection of familiar songs, and imagery that might have struck one as purely cerebral is revealed as having its feet set in concrete reality; not altogether an expected situation, given that Hersh has always been so clear that her songs drop from the ether, in a process not so much of being written as transcribed.

So the lyrics of ‘Fish’ (from In A Doghouse; also on the 4AD Lonely Is An Eyesore compilation (1987) : "I have a fish nailed/To a cross/On my apartment wall/It sings to me with glassy eyes/And quotes from Kafka") are revealed to be about an actual scaly crucifix on the wall of the squat the teenage Kristin sometimes sleeps in, rather than hallucinogenic word play. (The story about 'Hate My Way' is far too good to quote now: you’ll just have to find it for yourself.) This demystification manages to be simultaneously delightful, satisfying and alarming, not least because the hallucinations, when they do appear, are all too real: Jesus Christ, she slept alone in a haunted apartment under a fishy, donut-headed Fish Jesus? Oh, little homeless Kristin...

Alongside the pleasurable ‘Oh!’s of recognition you get when spotting the genesis of well-loved songs, Hersh has left snatches of lyrics scattered throughout the text, which widen the book out into an extra, noisier dimension, so that cached songs burst out from memory-banks at appropriate moments, a self-generated soundtrack. It’s lovely. Startling. Discomforting. So, after describing the dressing-up wigs that the band, all sleepy and snuggled up against each other in the front seat of Kristin’s unheated car, take to wearing on the way back from late-night gigs (both to keep their heads warm and to provoke non-boring conversation), she drops a lyric from ‘Carnival Wig’ (from Red Heaven, 1992), into the mix and suddenly there it is, a riot of crashing percussion broken up with that sinuous, heartbreaking guitar line. The disconnect between the image of tired kids in their funny wigs and the triggered memory of the song itself is positively unnerving: her voice all jagged on the urgent one-note central line ("That looks like a carnival wig/And two shiners") then sliding into raw sexual desperation: "It looks like your left hand/Don’t love me. Don’t love me." The kookiness wiped out in an instant.

The sound in one’s head that accompanies the reading of the book, along with the startlingly vivid images that Hersh employs (New song is done. It’s burgundy and ochre with a sort of Day-Glo turquoise bridge – another tattoo on this pathetic little body) and regular vignettes of life from her hippy childhood (Allen Ginsberg wrote me a poem … it wasn’t a very good poem) foster an entirely appropriate sense of overload, given her own of experience of the world as a constant assault of sensation, colour, sound, emotion.

She’s an innocent abroad, candid to a fault, observing the world and its peculiarities with wide-open eyes: sometimes sitting out, sometimes indulging people’s demands of her to go along with rituals she barely gets the point of, sometimes consciously (though not contrarily) sticking to her own eccentric ways in order to survive. So she won’t wear her contact lenses when they play gigs, despite being nagged to do so, and she won’t wear a coat in winter:

Dave and I always believed that coats were for wimps who couldn’t handle seasons: “coat slaves”. Gee, people, get a grip! Seasons happen! And that vision was for wussies: people who couldn’t hack the rough-hewn, fuzzy life we lived – slaves to their glasses – when we could play entire shows without seeing anything. It was the only thing we were smug about, really, our ability to live blind and cold.

At least until Dave (Narcizo, the drummer) finally caves in himself and then drags her off shopping to a thrift store and buys her a small, blue, woollen overcoat: Dave unzips his coat to show me how it works. “See? We can still wear our T-shirts, but if we wear out T-shirts underneath coats, winter won’t hurt!”

She and Dave also puzzle over other people beyond their Musey bubble, like “the aliens” in their shared house, and grill them about the ‘normal’ music they play, incredulous that there are people in the world who put their feet up on the table while they play guitar, don’t get hot or feel electricity when they make music, who strum strings to relax: they might as well be sitting there doodling. While passages like these occasionally teeter on the verge of disingenuousness, overall the impression is of genuine teenage insularity rather than retrospective faux-cutseyness.

Her innocence, curiosity and wit are surely not only what makes her writing so appealing, so fresh, but also the reason why Kristin Hersh has a reputation as one of the very nicest musicians to work with. She’s both interesting and interested. Not that common a trait in the biz. And it’s obvious how very fond the band are of each other, not just Kristin and Tanya Donelly (‘Tea’, her step-sister with whom she started the band at the age of 14), but also Leslie Langston, the dreadlocked hippy chick Californian bassist and Dave, the afore-mentioned snare-prodigy. They are entangled in the joy and awe of playing together, rehearsing in the attic of a giant Victorian house that belongs to Dave’s parents (who sit in comfy chairs at the bottom of the stairs and listen to the band practise), playing gigs several times a week, and eventually all moving in together, away from the ocean and the small-town comforts of Rhode Island, to a shared apartment in Boston.

When I first started reading about Throwing Muses back in 1988 I was concerned, as was my earnest wont back then, that Hersh’s frankness about the unusual way she ‘wrote’ her songs would have her pegged as just another crazy woman, reducing the extraordinarily muscular inventiveness of her music to mere kookiness; such an easy, diminishing, write-off for the boy journos. What I wanted was to celebrate the unconventional accomplishment of her music, to group her talent in a girl’s gang of underappreciated musicianship, with the likes of Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell. You can’t very well do that with music if its author refuses to credit herself with its creation.

If you haven’t already come across Hersh talking about the way her music comes to her, then the passages in which she describes the process will be enlightening. She calls herself “a lightning rod for songs”: not a songwriter, not an inventor, but some kind of psychic secretary uncomfortably possessed by music which is an entirely separate entity to herself. She writes of being haunted by songs, battered and tormented and bullied until she can get them down and safe. It’s not craft, it’s alchemy. The story of this strange phenomenon begins when she is knocked off her bike by a car and badly hurt. She hears her first song recovering in hospital:

Soon, the song began organizing itself into discernable parts that sounded less like “machines”. Instruments played melodies rather than disembodied tones in the bed of ocean waves: bass, guitar, piano, cello. Punctuated clanging became drums and percussion. I guessed that my brain was making sense of something, turning this sonic haunting into vocabulary with which I was familiar.

… every few weeks, song noise will begin again, and when its parts have arranged themselves, I’ll copy them down and teach them to the band, making them hear what I hear. As soon as I give the song a body in the real world, it stops playing and I breathe a sigh of relief, in precious silence …

… It’s not me. A song lives across time as an overarching impression of sensory input, seeing it all happening at once, racing through stories like a fearless kid on a bicycle, narrating his own skin.

(How good is that phrase, “racing through stories like a fearless kid on a bicycle, narrating his own skin”?)

One of the great things about reading Paradoxical Undressing is that I can finally lay my qualms about the ineffability of that process aside, daft as they were anyway. The skill is there all right. They were an immensely clever lot, those Muses kids, and worked phenomenally hard to get their music right; they deserve every bit of credit they get:

Leslie never misses a beat. Never. Dave never misses a beat either; he smashes delicately, the deep sound of his kit punctuated by the metallic knocking of cowbells, mixing bowls, hubcaps and busted tambourines. It’s beautiful. But Dave never messes up because he can’t be distracted. He’s just as nearsighted as I am and lost in his own world back there behind the drum kit. If he looks up, it’s like a mole digging his way up from the underground, squinting in the sunlight.

They rehearse and play and rehearse and play, Kristin’s years of classical guitar training and child-genius Dave’s precocious talent aiding the songs’ troublesome journey from insistent disembodied furies to definite pieces of music, although even then Hersh is self-deprecating about her part in it and the otherness of the song’s own voice:

I can start a song just sorta, you know, singing along, and then, before I know it, inflatable words fill my rib cage, move into my mouth. I gag on them and they fly out, say whatever they want, yell and scream themselves.

And bleech, that voice – it’s wretched. My speaking voice is low, husky and quiet. The song’s voice is loud, strangled and wailing: thin and screechy. A squashed bug might sing like this.

Going away is my only talent.

I wouldn’t say so. Not least because she is such a fine writer of narrative, which surely she can rightfully claim as all her own work, as much as any writer can. It’s such an engaging story, this year in song of hers. She’s a baby-faced urchin in old woman’s clothes, running from place to place, hardly sleeping, swimming to burn off energy (I’ve never tried to make it through a whole day without swimming. Water temporarily washes off song tattoos, so I made it my drug), sleeping in abandoned apartments and in her unreliable car and on the beach. She goes to classes at the university where her father teaches (she enrolled at 15) and where she meets her friend, a very elderly Betty Hutton (in her time a great Hollywood movie star, although Kristin, in her naïveté, doesn’t know whether to treat Betty’s stories of tête-a-têtes with Judy Garland as yet more fantastic eccentricity). I love the idea of Betty and her priest, Father McGuire, coming along faithfully to every Throwing Muses show, standing at the back behind the junkies and the painters and the punks, smiling fondly and giving Kristin advice about the big time show business career Betty feels sure is round the corner.

And so it is, in a way. Hot-shot A&R men wine and dine them, the teenagers revelling in all the free food but puzzled by the attention, because they truly don’t understand why anyone else would like the noise they make. And they won’t sign to any one of those labels because they know they’re not cool and they don’t want to play the game.

But when Kristin’s bi-polar disorder kicks in hard and she starts to come apart, the reading gets more painful. The narrative falls into little fractured bits: more snippets of lyrics, less coherence, horrifying descriptions of Kristin’s tortured thoughts and hallucinations, disintegration. It’s disjointed and almost unbearably sad to read:

Music’s making me do things, live stories so I can write them into songs. It pushes my brain and my days around. A parasite that kills its host, it doesn’t give shit about what happens to a little rat girl as long as it gets some song bodies out of it. It’s a hungry ghost, desperate for physicality.

I remember well the strange little person she appeared to me in 1988, a couple of years after this book is set and a couple of years older than I. She was wearing an A-line khaki skirt and a neat blouse and I remember thinking “Why on earth would you wear that to a gig?” Especially in a dirty, glassy, glitter-balled punk rock club in Birmingham, on tour with inkie-darlings and fellow Bostonians, Pixies. Inexplicably, she looked like the me I was trying so hard not to be: dark blonde hair cut in a wavy bob; round, childish face; sensible outfits … but transmogrified when she played into something mesmerising. A she-wolf. A snake. She was like no one I’d ever seen before, playing music that seemed beamed from an alternate universe, tethered to recognisable shapes of pop and rock by only the most tenuous of lines.

“Well, geez, look at me,” I said, pointing at the screen. “I really don’t blink.” We watch. “Golly, that’s creepy.” I knew I stared into space when I played; Betty never stopped giving me shit about that. She should have been giving me shit about the thing I do with my head. It swivels from side to side in a figure-eight pattern while I play. What the fuck? “I think of it as an infinity symbol,” said Dave kindly.

Tremendous, she was. Those songs snagged at me, painful and demanding, Kristin’s squashed bug voice the perfect vocalisation of all the jumble of emotions my teenage self was experiencing, the switchback ride they took - roaring through cowpunk frenzy via dischord and ecstasy to sweetness and charm - an apt representation of where my head was at, where haywire teenage heads tend to be at. And those words that I could barely grasp at understanding but which made total sense to me, all blood and rage and impotence and self-loathing, here they are again, sewn through the story of a real girl

So I have to acknowledge that the sadness that lurched in my gut when reading my way through that bit of the story is much about the strange little person I was in 1988 as the extraordinary/ordinary girl I was watching on stage. The feelings that Throwing Muses provoked in me then came roaring back at me full-throttle with the account of Kristin’s breakdown and I ended up reading through tear-bleared eyes, surely a measure of just what a remarkably eloquent writer (ahem, conduit) Hersh is, both of songs and of stories. Because of the way that so many of her songs rage and fume, gurgle with ugly (self)hatred then liquefy into beauty and tenderness, hold themselves on achingly lovely melodies, then turn on a penny and then come crashing back into chaos and mania, even those of us who didn’t have hotwires to genius in our heads, who haven’t lived the awful/amazing/brave life that Kristin did as a teenager, even bog-standard youth, can hear those things and say, yes, that is what it feels like to be young and confused. Nothing ever spoke to me of being a nineteen year-old-girl, torn between being good and being furious, between romance and horror, between sensible shoes and razor blades, quite like Kristin Hersh’s remarkable, terrifying, goddamn gorgeous rollercoaster voice.

There’s so much else here to relish besides: the off-beat small-hours trans-Atlantic phone conversations between Kristin and 4AD's Ivo Watts-Russell; the wonderfully astute descriptions of the recording process (rats running round the night-time studio when they record their demos; the agonising multiple attempts to re-capture the manic verve of their live performance when recording their debut for 4AD); the snort-inducing interviews with well-meaning but dim journalists who ask endless variations of the ‘why did you decide to be girls?’ question (“Why didn’t you hire a woman to play the drums?” she asks me accusingly. I’m at a loss. “Because Dave’s not a woman,” I answer. “I didn’t hire him anyway; he doesn’t get paid.” “I’m a volunteer!” Dave chirps happily) and of course, the sweetly-written course of Kristin’s pregnancy, culminating in the birth of her first son, marking the beginning of her career as working musician and mother, someone who puts her babies to sleep then walks on stage to scream and holler; who is articulate and charming on TV interviews while being infinitely patient with the sleepy toddler on her lap. She’s amazing.

But really you just need to read the book. And if it doesn’t make you run back to ‘Call Me’ and ‘Soul Soldier’ and ‘Rabbits Dying’ and ‘Vicky’s Box’ (yes, there’s a Vicky. She has a box. A wooden box.) and ‘Delicate Cutters’ (oh, my god, ‘Delicate Cutters’!) just as fast as your ears can take you, then nothing else will.

I made the other Muses hear what I heard. Now we can make everyone else hear it.

(First published on Collapse Board)

Who Gives a Fuck?

I read this article today. It’s good. It points out the fact that, never mind the bloody cuts, the irreparable damage that the privatisation of higher education will do to the country’s brain, the disgraceful dismantling of the NHS, the hideously inequitable taxation priorities of the current government, never mind all those awful attacks on the infrastructure of our community, there is longstanding, deep-rooted poverty in this country that hardly anyone is challenging. Or being righteously furious about. And I don't mean the rearranging-of-the-deckchairs type campaigning that would have us call for a slightly fairer unfair system by making the super-rich dig a little deeper when they chuck us their loose change: I mean snarling, offensive, powerful action against what should be an intolerable situation.

None of the three main parties have much to distinguish between themselves politically on this issue, mind you, so this isn’t a case of let’s all hate the Tories. Though do be my guest if you fancy it. The ridiculous referendum that no-one except the conniving little traitor Clegg asked for is a cynically-manipulated distraction and the outcome will not make an iota of difference to the long-term unemployed, who will continue to be ignored, belittled, demonised, blamed for their own situation.

No-one, for that matter, ever asked us to vote in a referendum on really important matters, like whether or not we should allow babies and toddlers to be bombed in the name of peace-keeping. This is only the second national referendum in the UK ever: you'd think it would have been worth the wait. 'Course, you can see why they wouldn’t bother: the quasi referendum that was the huge national outcry against the war in Iraq a decade ago was very successfully blanked by the government and the media, but it served as a useful lesson in the toothlessness of popular opinion for both politicians and public alike.

What the Independent article also points out is that the acceptance of poverty as a fact of life is evidence of a cultural and moral sea change in this country:

“Now a new credo, rooted in social apartheid that starts in schools, struts by the nation's slumdog neighbourhoods – elitism, exclusion, prejudice, greed and despair.

Yet pity was always one of the fundamental virtues of British life. It travelled easily, crossing class borders without a passport, informing every level of the nation's cultural life. In 1966 Jeremy Sandford's BBC film Cathy Come Home created an uproar about the homeless and made the charity Shelter into a major player which no politician dared ignore. In 1982 Alan Bleasdale's Boys From the Black Stuff reduced my generation of TV critics to tears of rage.”

Whatever you might think of the virtues of pity as an emotion to stir the political will - it certainly wouldn't be my first pick of the feelings chorus line - at least there's a picture of a country with a coherent moral sense; the abandoned and the destitute provoke compassion, but more importantly, demands for change. So where are the playwrights, filmmakers, songwriters who would challenge the current state of affairs? There are scrums of privately-educated bands who blithely brush away questions about their privilege with “class doesn’t matter anymore” and who, in their beards-and-jumpers-and-hurdiegurdies nostalgia, have quite supressed the dissident impulse of their socialist, republican, hippy-era progenitors. Tears of rage, uproar, outrage: these would be totally appropriate responses to the situation at this precise moment in history (I liked the fact that the author of the radgeek blog referred to above confessed to taking a while to write out his thoughts on the unfussed-over murder of Gadhafi's grandchildren because he was so distressed about it. Appropriate, see?): it would be good to see the music that would, could, do that, because it sure as hell isn't being made by the mumbly men with their humble guitars that so abound in 2011.


I have just been educated in Crass lore, which included listening to this startling and furious song for the first time (I know, I’m slow):

Quite apart from having the balls to be properly offensive (offensive these days seems to mean making some wildly un-PC snarky crack about paedophiles or rape in order to cock a snook at the po-faced feminists: woo, clevah), the song is explicit and angry and heart-breaking. It stirs feelings. It points fingers. It is UPSETTING. Crass make me feel like the ignorant, posh, privileged, complacent, white dabbler that I am.


And so they fucking should.

No More Mr Nice Guy.

Someone said to me the other day "Yeah, but Obama is a nice man. I'd have a drink with him" and my first thought was "Sure. He's cool. I bet he's a lovely dad; I bet he's good company. We could talk Bruce Springsteen and healthcare reforms and snork over his fucking brilliant Trump slam-down last week."

But then I remembered that none of my other friends (and I checked, NONE of them) have ever given orders that resulted in the deaths of other people. Let alone of children. Conscious directives, never mind yer collateral damage. And I though, "Not such a regular guy after all. In fact, an entirely un-regular guy."

And that made me shiver.

After The March: Complaints and Complicity

All this complaining about “spoiling the march” and “mindless violence”. As if the black bloc were the enemy. They are not the enemy. Let me repeat that: THEY ARE NOT THE ENEMY. The enemy are the men with the suits in Westminster and their pals in the City and what should be being complained about – over and over, again and again – is the vile things they are doing in order to keep themselves in money and power. The black bloc are not closing libraries. The kids in balaclavas are not cutting disability benefits. The ones who threw paint bombs and flares are not the ones closing youth centres and privatising higher education and dismantling the NHS. They are not giving tax breaks to huge corporations or happily waving multinationals through neonlit tax loopholes or spending public money on bail-outs only for the guilty parties to reward themselves with bonuses that would pay for the nurses and teachers and midwives needed for society to function in a humane way. They are not the bad guys here.

Add to this the fact that these same interests, these same politicians, are continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have brutalised the populations of those countries in ways that we over here, protesting righteously about our library closures, can scarcely understand. Every day that we allow our elected representatives to get away with making monsters out of young British men in uniform, turning them with ruthless efficiency into haters and murderers and rapists and torturers, every single day that we allow ‘our’ forces to bomb and terrify and oppress countries that are not threatening us, we are complicit in that horror. It is utterly disgusting. Of course I am angry. Of course I loathe the people in power who are doing these things. Of course I loathe the people who enable them to continue to hold that power, and that includes the wilfully dim BBC as well as the boys in blue and yellow.

So here are some facts about yesterday’s protests to balance out the bias:

1.  UKUncut are not the same people who chucked paintballs and smashed windows. Anyone with half a brain and Facebook can work that out. So any newspaper or television station that muddles the two is either terminally stupid or has an agenda. They are complicit in a misrepresentation of the march that suits the status quo down to the ground. I am not particularly impressed with the target that UKUncut chose – occupying a tea shop, however posh, is hardly going to shake the foundations of capitalism – but I can see that they had good intentions and were careful not to compromise themselves. Good for them and their disobedience; disobedience is the only way that anything will ever change or ever has changed. As much as I wanted to stand up and be counted by being on the march, direct action is so much more effective than trudging.

2. The people who DID throw paintballs and smash windows are not “mindless yobs” as some high-up copper claimed. And as countless people have been repeating, from UKUncutters, to MPS, bloggers, comedians, journalists and anyone else who fancies disassociating themselves from the taint of ‘violence’ and ‘criminal damage’. Firstly, violence against property is not the same as violence against people, and it was pretty clear that there was no indiscriminate bashing of bystanders by the black bloc (the same cannot be said for the police). Secondly, it is not mindless to target the banks, when it is the government’s inhumane solution to the banking crises that the wider march was protesting. They also smashed a Starbuck’s windowpane and chucked paint at the Ritz. Pfft. So what? Good on them. Those paintballs are joining the dots: they’re making it a class war, rather than the subtle re-shuffling of resources and closing of loopholes that most people are meekly asking for. This is the way that capitalism works: it works for profit not for people. It is a bad, unfair and destructive way of organising resources. People suffer. Many die. A few, a very few relatively speaking, gain immense wealth. And horrible, violent, prolonged war is part of the deal at the moment. I don’t want it. I don’t want to have anything to do with it. But I am complicit in it because I am not stopping it. I am not going to apologise for the thrill I felt on seeing the broken window at the Ritz or the splattered paint running down the front of RBS and Santander: I wasn’t alone in feeling it either, judging by the number of people laughing and snapping pics on their phones. I’m glad that there are kids who are also so angry about it that they have the guts to express their rage like that. They are not demonstrating stupidity or yobbishness by protesting in the way they do, however much spin is put on it. May they continue to rage.

3. The police aren’t neutral bystanders in the events. They may well be working class men and women next in-line for job cuts, but they are also the people who allow the state to continue to exist. They allow it to work in the crap way that it does. Of course those kids in their hoodies were spoiling for a fight: I saw them hopping about with pent-up frustration, aching to go chuck something at those tooled-up riot cops, just as I saw the police twitching to go after the kids. I saw them throw placards and firecrackers after the riot police got heavy-handed, but they weren’t the ones with the batons and the armour. The police were there on the streets of London yesterday to curb disobedience and dissent; they were there as the physical manifestation of State repression and I make no apology for sounding like a polytechnic Marxist: it's true. The ones with machine guns I saw in front of Downing Street more obviously so than the genial PCs who gave us directions to the loos in Hyde Park, but I also clocked the heavily-armoured police protecting De Beers and the Ritz and the riot cops kicking their heels in huge numbers behind Burlington Arcade. Their complicity in the system is noted. I’d have loved a full-on defection to the cause, as happened in Wisconsin, when the police sent to turf out the occupiers of the Capitol joined the protesters, saying that they knew who the worked for and it was the people, not the politicians. But it didn’t happen yesterday. Shame.

4. The violence in Trafalgar Square wasn’t anything to do with UKUncut or the class warriors, although there may have been some overlap in the people who attached themselves to both and then were in the square later. It was the riot police being inappropriate and twitchy and wanting to teach a few lessons to uppity kids. People were hanging about having a party, enjoying the feeling of being in possession of the city. It’s a wild feeling, being able to stroll across Hyde Park Corner and down the Strand in crowds of thousands; watching the limos getting turned around; stopping the traffic: I remember it from the anti-Poll Tax demo. Of course people wanted to occupy Trafalgar Square for the night: if I’d have been their age I’d have stuck around too. We stopped there during the afternoon and chatted and listened to London Calling booming out over the big black lions; it was as if worlds had temporarily flipped over and all that city stuff, all that pomp and marble and space, was ours. All your base are belong to us. So, come nightfall, the police wanted to clear the square, nip that proprietorial delirium in the bud, make all the kids, partied-up and high on righteousness, go home and be good. THAT’S why there was violence. Watch the videos, read Laurie Penny’s tweets from inside the kettle: if you get hundreds of riot police charging at unarmed people and start battering them, you are going to get some fighting back. Wouldn’t you resist? The fact that some bins were turned over and set on fire is really neither here nor there compared to the fact that there is a video on Youtube showing several huge great men with shields and helmets bundle up and arrest a girl with tears running down her face, who is trying, ever polite, ever hopeful that logic and decency will work on them, to tell them that she hadn’t done anything wrong.

I watched John Pilger’s film about the media’s part in the Gulf War not long ago; it was illuminating and heartbreaking in equal measure. What struck me most were the chuckled denials from the heads of news at the ITN and the BBC that they could have been expected to know that what the government was feeding them was lies. Never mind any tradition of incisive investigative journalism, how could they possibly have known that there were no weapons of mass destruction? That the dossier was false? That war was going to be a mistake of epic proportions and that it needed to be stopped, not justified? And I remember marching for hours on a similar spring day to yesterday, I remember my feet aching then as they do today, I remember the same jubilation in being part of such a colossal show of feeling, the buzz of the mass, the shouting, the singing, the placards – witty and articulate or brutally plain – that were waved by the same colourful variety of people as I saw yesterday… Then I am forced to recall also that despite all the marching and chanting, despite the million voices raised against war, the government went ahead anyway and bombed a relatively peaceful and prosperous country to bits, then compounded the bombing with sanctions that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of children. We all fucking knew what was coming, in essence if not the mindboggling severity of the reality. We knew. We protested. We were ignored.

So don’t be telling me than a few hundred kids in balaclavas have spoiled anything for anyone. If the media and the government chose to use firecrackers and burning bins as an excuse to smear the entire movement against cuts, refuse to be any part of it. Ask yourself: who are the bullies? Who are the criminals? Who are the destructive thugs? There is so very much to be truly, deeply, burningly angry about at the moment; if a march of half a million doesn’t force the radical change that is needed to fix the situation (and reports now suggest very strongly that it won’t) then something else will have to be done instead. It’s up to us. It’s up to you.

Lykke Li - Wounded Rhymes

What I really expected was for Wounded Rhymes to follow the usual second album taming process. Sure, I was ready to take it to my heart, hungry as I was for more, but with wistful backward glances at Lykke Li’s remarkable debut, Youth Novels. It’s the way these things work.If you need an example, look to The Unthanks, whose unpolished mixture of strangeness and simplicity (plus those gorgeous voices, as unpop and earthily creamy as you like) made their first album, The Bairns, a masterpiece (I'm conveniently ignoring their real first album, 2005's Cruel Sister, mainly because I haven't heard it and I'm pretending no-one else has either, so the ascent from obscurity schtick I'm playing with here doesn't yet apply), but who were renamed, tidied up, fiddled about with and produced into a more straightforward, Mercury Prize-friendly proposition (2010's Here's The Tender Coming) next time round. It was almost as if someone with a suit/beard combo had sat down and transcribed faithfully what the Northumberland clog-dancing folkies sounded like, but hadn’t the gumption or imagination to articulate their utter, fantastic wildness. It’s not that Here's The Tender Coming doesn’t have perfectly lovely moments, and of course it has the larynxes of Becky and Rachel, but it’s not stumbling over the moors any more with burrs in its hair and the tears streaming; it’s dressed-up and pretty and presentable to the grandparents.

A similar thing happened to Laura Marling’s second offering (2010's I Speak Because I Can), after her first album of songs of startling, youthful originality (2008's Alas I Cannot Swim). It’s something to do with the naivety of the newbie that can make a first album that special; some kind of raw awkwardness that, prehaps inevitably, dissipates with record deals and budgets, age and status. (It may or may not be a coincidence that the three examples I’ve picked are by women. And, of course, I’m sure that anyone could find me three good counter-examples of second albums which have made the progression from generic to remarkable. But.)

So Youth Novels had all of that big-eyed gawky freshness, it tottered about on shaky foal legs, and was just absolutely humming with the alarmingly mercurial self-confidence of a teenager. I loved it at first listen. Especially for the way it constantly teetered on the edge of being wrong. Some of Li’s peculiarities of phrasing, her lispy infantile vocals, her whispered lines, were almost odd enough to be painful to listen to (see Bjork for someone who’s made a career for herself out of such tics, also Joanna Newsom, or CocoRosie, a band whose vocal eccentricity is well past the point of unconventional, is teeth-grating but marvellously so): but that almost-wrongness, of course, was precisely what made it brilliant. Youth Novels throbbed with inventiveness, with its minimal backing, brassy synths, primal percussion, blips and bloops and abrasiveness and the scuffed sweetness and unexpected turns of Li’s grainy vocal lines; it was an extraordinary piece of work.

It’s no surprise then that Wounded Rhymes is not as extraordinary as Youth Novels. But it is wonderful. Triumphant. And bigger. Much, much bigger. Of course it’s more polished. Of course it’s more produced. The kitchen-sink clattering of Youth Novels has been replaced by enormous thunderous drums, multi-tracked heavenly choirs, and melodies that come in great trembling reverberations. There’s ‘Jerome’, the huge melancholic ballad of a thousand broken hearts, with its rolling timpani, bereft wails and handclaps. There’s the pounding, prowling, un-PC booty call of ‘Get Some’, its leers and shrieks and wanton promises (“I’m your prostitute; you gon’ get some”) capturing the dirty of the album’s ferocious sex n’ love n’ obsession theme. Or the closer, ‘Silent My Song’, with its booming echo-chambers the size of subterranean caverns and mournfulness to fill the lot of them, howling out in witness to the murderousness of love.

Of course, there’s defiance in there too: this singer has not been muted, quite the opposite, and the pain of love and the delirium of sex instead of stifling her has filled these songs to bursting. The whispering has gone; Li belts out the tunes with the full-throated retro verve of an Amy or an Adele, and if it’s not with their virtuosity, then that doesn’t matter one jot: there’s always the drums to beat up a storm beneath her. Where Youth Novels seemed at times to have been beamed in from an alternative universe, Wounded Rhymes dances its way into an appropriately exalted place in this world with sure-footed references to Pop Past, all shoo-wops and rock’n’roll riffs. She seems to be fulfilling in spades the promise of sheer pop stardom that she oozed from the stage when I saw her play a couple of years ago. There was quite a disjunct between the small, dark venue, more used to being thumped about on by middling level rock outfits, and the fantastical whirling figure throwing shapes up on the stage, who was quite obviously already a fucking STAR.

My guess is that as the acclaim for Laura Marling and The Unthanks’ less extraordinary sophomore releases far surpassed that for their debuts, this album will be widely seen as Lykke Li’s moment; polished, produced and grown-up is where the wider world gets its kicks after all, however much more strange and marvellous the first hatchings might seem. This time, because what Li has produced has made such a success of the inevitable, has ramped it up and maxed it out so much that a positive virtue is made of the necessity of maturation, I think that it’s worth applauding the process. Maybe this time there will be a fitting correlation between the levels of attention heaped on a less unconventional second album and its quality. And perhaps kohl-eyed, birdlike Swedish girls with armfuls of bangles and wild stares can be the megastars they should be in this world.

I hope so.

(First published on Collapse Board)

Radiohead: The King Of Limbs

It’s a slight thing. Eight tracks, quite as pale and wan as a Thom with an H should be and certainly nowt to do with last year’s big ‘n’ bashy alterno drama queens, the never-knowingly-understated National and Arcade Fire, although it’s likely to get - has already had - quantum amounts of furore even compared to their comprehensive lauding. And it’s pretty much what you thought it would be.

If you loathe Thom Yorke’s toothached keening, you’re not going to love this. If you want something as awkwardly fruggable as 15 Step, the geek glitch dance par excellence, you’re going to be disappointed. If you wanted hairpin changes of direction: this freewheels straight down the line. I speak as someone who long ago caved in to loving Radiohead. I started off with hate: obvious, white boy guitarery with misery dripping out the sleeves of their raggedy shirts, when what I wanted was ferocious girls making space music. But they grew on me, because they were very good at the misery and, despite the Yorkeian whine, their songs clicked, from the early whole-hearted anthemic gush to In Rainbows’s bitttersweet computerics.

What I like about the best Radiohead tracks is that they have tunes, whether they’re to be found in post-OK Computer wispy numbers like House Of Cards, or muscular oldies like The Bends’ Black Star. So that’s what my ears are yearning for on their first introduction to King Of Limbs. That’s what my ears always yearn for. Of course, any other jonesing for rock’s traditional components on the part of my ears would be dashed, since this is, as Everett True pointed out, rock eviscerated. No gutsy groove. No verve. As free from swagger as cabbage. I don’t think that necessarily has to be a problem, unless that’s all that you look for in music: some of my favourite bands have been quite as bloodless as Radiohead and probably half as clever. There are some tunes here, despite the exsanguinated chittering: some that are even hummable. Just about. Codex, a plaintive puppy of a track, has a melody that winds itself up slowly with brass and piano until you could just about hug it. Or drown it in a sack. Give Up The Ghost layers the wails prettily enough but sounds so like much of In Rainbows for it to be not worth the bother, not even for the extra-achey loop pile-up it makes of itself by the end of the song. (And fuck knows if he’s singing “Don’t hurt me”, “haunt me” or “hate me”: eminently kickable all three.)

The odd thing about The King of Limbs being released all of a journo-confounding sudden is that we’ve had blurbs  the world over stumbling over themselves to apologise for the rough draft reviews, all the while panting that this is a record that needs consideration, time, repeated listens to pick out the speeshulness: nice work, Radios. And while it’s true that on my TWENTIETH go round, I am hearing the bones of it better, the fact is I don’t want to have to do this. I don’t want to wait for the click. I don’t want to have to listen on Bang & Olufsen speakers in order to hear the genius: I want the genius right up the front. I want a bit of flash and grab. I want swoon. How bleeding shallow.

And then there’s the Lotus Flower video; a video of just Thom, just dancing, and best watched with eyes closed, as someone astutely put it. It is extraordinary in the obvious respect that Thom Yorke Superstar looks like a complete twat in it. He knows he looks like a twat. Either he doesn’t give any kind of shit about the godawful cringe of it all, or he does but is self-hating enough to welcome the shame. What he makes of the Dad-dancing is nudging beautiful in its compulsive terribleness and its peculiarity. I can’t imagine Bono doing the twisty spazzballet moves that Yorke pulls there. I can’t imagine Win Butler doing them either, no nor Matt Berninger (he can't resist a wink to the camera: aw, vulnerability fail, Matt) ; not a single one of them earnest big band megacunts would be able to ace the commitment to twattery that Yorke has managed here. Because they are far too self-consciously cool. Too armoured by half. Too much in with the beautifuls whom Thom Yorke is never going to crack. He, bless him, is still the weirdo. And for that, at least, I admire him.

But the truth is that I don’t really want any of this. I have enough already. It doesn’t make me want to dance or shout or fall in love or howl to the moon or fling myself about (not even in a gimpdouche Yorke style. Oh no.): it makes me wanna mope. And here we are in 2011, the world burning, the new and unprecedented and stupendous all around, and the very last thing I want to do is mope.

First published on Collapse Board

For What It’s Worth: File-Sharing, Art and Noise.

Is illegal downloading killing music? Are file-sharers mean-spirited, tasteless fools who despise the musicians they are callously ripping off? Is music worth nothing in this day and age? Should the wide-open seas of the internet be bounded so that pirates cannot pilfer precious data with such casual ease? It’s a widely-held opinion that Google should shut down torrent sites, even on the old-style liberal left where in any other circumstance the idea of censorship and of the restriction of information by state or corporate forces would be greeted with the sound of righteous alarm bells going off like fox-stalked geese. It shouldn’t surprise me, but exactly how un-punk can you get, calling for Google to block internet highways? Can you imagine Ian MacKaye begging help from the police or from Sony? Clamouring for tighter laws, more and harsher penalties, ferfuckssake? It’s scary how constrained by reactionary suppositions the debate is…

 

So here’s a thought experiment to recontextualise all that heartless piracy: think about music as being just one of many art forms that are first and foremost activities and experiences. Its status as commodity is secondary to the fact that people like playing music or drawing pictures or watching films or reading books. Never mind any churchy nonsense about edification: art is made and consumed because it feels good to do so. For thousands of years music has had very little to do with money and lots to do with life: people played music because they could and were rewarded because other people valued it; some of those who played music earned a living doing so but plenty of others just played for the hell of it. I could expound at you here to the point of nausea about how the need to create and enjoy and think about art makes up a fundamental chunk of the human animal, but I will spare you before the vicar comes calling; suffice it to say that taking pleasure and solace in music, or in fact any Art with a capital “Ahh”, seems to be woven into the lives of human beings as inextricably as the enjoyment of sex or food or staring out at the sea. Looking at it that way, it is odd and disturbing to think of music – MUSIC! - as tradable stuff, like bacon or Barbie dolls or plutonium.

It’s not as if the pro-file-sharing Pirate Party’s stance on freedom of information is utterly alien to current culture: I give you libraries. Similarly Piratical in some ways, the fundamental principle that libraries stand on is that knowledge is beyond normal concepts of ownership and that equal and free access to these things is desirable. Elementary stuff, but worth repeating when you’re talking about putting artificial, legally-enforced restrictions on the circulation of art. Here’s Philip Pullman on the wonder of a world’s worth of knowledge and intellectual stimulation being yours for the taking and the utter horror of the prospect of market forces (stupid, inhumane, blind market forces) destroying the project of enlightenment and pleasure that set them up for everyone, a National Health Service for the heart and mind, because, wait for it, they don’t make money. The fucking shame of it. (And, and, they’re selling ancient woodland that despite having been held in common for thousands of years is now to be bought and sold as if it were vacuum cleaners. It will be air next; water already having been packaged and marketed and sold back to tap-owners the world over. Pfft.)

It seems obvious to me that it is A Good Thing that books be distributed as widely as possible, that they can, totally legally, be swapped for free through sites like Book Hopper (the Napster of paperbacks) or sold second-hand for fifty pence. That postcard reproductions of extraordinary (and in all likelihood extremely expensive) works of art are bought cheaply and pinned on bedroom walls. And that music made in Manchester can be heard in Kalamazoo or Timbuktu – and vice versa - regardless of the economic or social status of the ears that are hearing it. Is that not a positive thing, something miraculous that the internet has enabled and has enriched the sum total of human experience? I consider the mega-library that the entire world wide web makes out of itself, the wonderful, massive, almost entirely uncommercial project of digitalising knowledge so that it is held in common for anyone to access for free (from Wikipedia to Project Gutenburg and including Wikileaks), to be a wonder of this freshly connected world: stop for a minute to consider how head-stretchingly amazing that is. Deliberately restricting the free flow of music files is entirely at odds with that endeavour.

So to the uncomfortable reality of file-sharing: the itch that the music biz can’t resist scratching. Only very recently in the big scheme of things have people sold their music by making it into bits of plastic: the bits of plastic cost money to make and therefore have monetary value. These days people don’t want or need to buy quite so much plasticised sound. That particular bit of history is pretty much over, gone the way of Top Of The Pops and Smash Hits. I don’t want to be glib about the impact that the downwards trend in physical purchases might have on those who have built their lives and careers around the idea that discs were saleable, although it’s debatable whether sales of actual records has ever been responsible for that much of an average musician’s income: of course it’s utterly shit if you’re losing your house or can’t pay for recording time or have been dropped by your record label, but the reality of the situation is that infinitely copiable digital files that cost nothing to reproduce and take up no physical space have, on one level, no value at all. No labour was involved in their reproduction and there is no scarcity to measure their value against; selling something that can be got, endlessly, for free is always a bit of a challenge. (Not that it is entirely without precedent: here’s a sharp and illuminating dissection of how Western financial and cultural mores have managed to sell the apparently unselleable, from yoga to baby milk to megabytes. Whatever the value of an MP3, it needs to have a price if i-Tunes is going to sell it, although determining how much it’s worth is apparently quite a random business. A single track might cost 79p to buy, but in a US file-sharing case last year, the judge decided that someone who had downloaded 30 songs from Kazaa should pay recompense of $22,500 per song. It’s now been reduced to $2,250 on appeal, but is that how much the bytes were actually worth? Is that a true representation of what the record company might have lost in sales? Impossible to tell: they’re plucking these figures out of thin air and taking no account of the income actually generated by increased fandom from things such as concert tickets or merchandise or follow-up (physical or digital) purchases (anyone who snorted at the idea that home-taping was killing music can tell you that it did precisely the opposite: it generated fans by the thousand).

Art is a problematic commodity in general, there’s no doubt. For all its glorious, multiple layers of value (piled on top of the mundane monetary ones) it’s a slippery beast; squeezing it successfully into a market-based economic system is going to involve constraints and trickery on behalf of those who would profit from it. It’s bad enough making stabs at defining what is or is not art without trying to figure out, for example, how sculptors can make a living when they might take a year over the creation of a single piece. And how about my friend who makes intricate site-specific installations out of pretty, prickly, plastic tags that be-web a vacant room: how on earth can she sell that? How do writers earn their daily bread? Some do get paid (more or, ah, usually less generously) per review or article, or have readers who will buy paper copies of their poetry and novels, but thousands of copies of their books may be leant out by libraries for minimal reward or sold by second-hand bookshops for no reward to them at all, borrowed, shared and given away until their leaves come unglued. Countless others write anyway and share the product of their hours of labour on blogs or zines for nothing. Photographers? They don’t get paid per view; all those images on Flickr or in galleries, gorgeous, clever, touching, thought-provoking, laboured-over, life-enhancing stuff: it’s mine to pore over for free. It’s obvious that artists do whatever they can to make a living, labour that may or may not be directly or indirectly related to their art work. Don’t they, like musicians, deserve recompense for all their hard work, as the anti-p2p brigade protest? “Deserve”, of course, is a tricksy concept, almost as tricksy as “hard work”: what does Patrick Gale deserve to get in return for my enjoyment of his novel that I bought in Oxfam last week and spent three achey-eyed nights devouring? Deserving or otherwise, he got not a penny from me, poor dear.

So most musicians are not alone in finding it difficult to make money (any money at all, let alone a living) from what they do. It’s a hotch-potch of strategies wherever you look, and there’s not even the cushion of the dole or the blessed Arts Council Grant to put lentils on the table any more. Add the imminently breaking thunderhead of Tory cuts to a couple of years of recession and it’s obvious that file-sharing is only one piece of the economic puzzle. The disc-selling game is up and the lumbering megacorporate beasts that are the major labels are all but obsolete, middle men without a cause. They know they have to diversify, into the games market, into streaming, into merchandise, into selling experiences and services rather than records and they will have no compunction about dropping the bits of their edifice that don’t serve profitability. Like bands that turn out not to be Kings of Leon. Or notionally independent subsidiary labels. This is, after all, The Man we’re talking about. What’s left for musicians is the age-old problem of getting their labour rewarded fairly and adequately.  Same old chestnut that Marx and co. grappled with.

The analogy that springs to mind is that of the coal industry. Yes, really, it’ll work, I promise. Coal became unprofitable; pits got threatened with closure; miners went on strike. But keeping the pits open just because the miners needed work was never going to happen. The REAL problem was not the fact that mining coal was no longer profitable, but that the massive crunching teeth of industrialism chewed up and spat out PEOPLE. People who had families and hungry stomachs and feelings and lives. (Why would we do that to ourselves? Why comply with a system that treats us like fuel? Another story… ) But plenty of people, including yer standard lefty types in well-intentioned solidarity with those whose jobs were disappearing down capitalism’s chomping maw, argued passionately to keep things as they were, to stick with coal, instead of demanding that energy and ingenuity and compassion be spent on finding equitable, humane ways to make sure that people weren’t chucked on the scrap heap along with the redundant pits. That’s how I see those who are trying to force the music business to stay as it is by treating the sharing of etheric bytes as straightforward theft: they’re clinging onto coal for dear life, when there’s wind power and waves to harness, as Luddite as you like.

You need to zoom out considerably to see the wider picture: the fight that’s worth picking is on a much grander scale than imagined by those who nit-pick about the selfishness of file-sharers. The problem is not to do with the motivations of p2p users (who are as likely as anyone else to be musicians themselves and, it seems certain, buy more music the more they download for free) or the ease or not of making music without the backing of labels or state-of-the-art studios or sharp-eared engineers (of course you can make fantastic music on your computer or a cheapy four-track; doesn’t mean you should have to) or even the quality of pop music in 2011 (alive and kicking: some dross, of course, same as it ever was, but a good fistful of pearls): it’s about the undeniable fact that new technology means times have changed for ever. Maybe Bandcamp will soon be turning uploaded and shared tracks into hard currency by the (virtual) shedload; maybe the examples of Kristin Hersh or Amanda Palmer (both of whom fund their music-making in very direct and ingenuous collaboration with their fans) will serve as inspiration for countless new strategies; maybe Spotify or LastFM will actually start turning a profit. Who knows? This is a transitional period: in a decade’s time it will probably be face-palm obvious how musicians can get paid for the work they do. And the Sisyphean enforcement of anti-filesharing regulations will surely be viewed as the heavy-handed, hopeless, reactionary, tunnel-visioned task that it is.

I’ll end with a quote from John Philip Sousa (an American composer who lived from 1854 to 1932 and after whom the sousaphone is named). Despite his predilection for new and interestingly-coiled brass instruments, he was a neo-Luddite, deeply suspicious of how new technology would affect his art and particularly worried about the effect of mass reproduction on music. He predicted the phonograph would cause "a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestation, by virtue - or rather by vice, - of the multiplication of the various music-producing machines.”

Sounds familiar, if not exactly a popular view of the advent of mass-produced recordings. I’ve seen enough comments about the dire state of the charts today and the bleakness of a downloadable future to sniff out the same smell of fear in the arguments of the similarly Luddite anti-p2p-ers: their good-hearted intention to protect and preserve ordinary people’s livelihoods turns to ill-focused anger at change and mass society in general. Maybe it’s time to blame something other than the use of new technology for crap working conditions and see the accessibility of digitalised music as a liberation rather than a threat.