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.

A Dialogue With Cunts

I like arguing on the internet. I like the buzz of righteousness, the “Ha!” of a thrust hit home, the smug parrying of an attack with the perfect put-down. I like it even though I pay the price for participating in ground-down teeth and frankly pretty impotent rage. But it’s a widely agreed-upon truism that arguing on the internet about feminism is the most teeth-grindy experience of all. There’s even a cartoon about it, which itself was triggered by a tweet-war involving a graphic artist who made some mildly irritated remarks about the way male fans reacted to her and which subsequently generated a tangled web-wide meta-conversation about sexism, and finally, with the frantic “What about us poor men!” hysteria raging on its own comments thread, ended up proving its argument that any cyber-debate about the oppression of women becomes an opportunity for men to bleat in outrage about themselves.

My experience of the Great Cyber Sex War is limited, but I can see what the cartoonist (a man, although that was an unpleasant surprise to those who whined about what a beastly, bitter, man-hating lezzer-who-would-never-get-laid the artist must be) was getting at. I threw up my hands in despair and signed out of a music-based forum the day another poster described me as “scary” because I tended to argue back as forcefully as some of the pack-trolls who stomped about in that particular male-dominated little world. Unlike my three or four most shouty opponents, I was very careful not to resort to ad hominem attacks, because I felt (ultimately pointlessly) I had to be on best behaviour to ensure that my points were taken seriously, so the scariness must have been solely down to the fact I, unlike any of the very few other female posters on the forum at that time, had a dogged relish for the arguments that flourished in the politics threads. How fucking sad that a woman who can hold her own in a political debate is seen to be something to be afraid of!

Today I read Suzanne Moore’s "Time To Get Angry?" on the Guardian’s website and felt properly cross enough to throw myself into the ring. Never mind the frustratingly par-boiled examples she gives and the general impression of incoherent rather than righteously focused rage; never mind the lack of clarity in her suggestions for progress; never mind indeed the bizarre fact that she fulminates about the lack of anger in the feminist movement (there are still whole seething Eyjafjallajokulls worth of anger to tap into out there, Suzanne: you don’t need to start your own crusade as you rather touchingly suggest), or the fact that she’d turned up at The Guardian having taken The Mail’s dollar for the past few years (co-option or fighting the enemy from within? Hmm. I can’t bring myself to give her anything like the benefit of the doubt on that one): it was the responses that came after which horrified me. Whatever Moore said and however effectively or otherwise she put her case, nothing reinforces her call to action like the unbridled hatred displayed in the comments section.

What a peculiar, exhausting, frustrating and depressing pile of muddle-headed nastiness it was to wade through. If anyone had any doubt about the depth and intensity of misogyny in society, reading that little lot would have convinced them it is alive and thriving on the Guardian (of all fucking places) website. The utter lack of comprehension about what feminism is sent shivers of despair down my spine: as far as the eye could see were hordes of pissed-off, hard-done-by men, furrowing their collective monobrow over being hated by the horrid wimmin. Hardly a pro-Moore “Yay! Go sister!” to be heard over the squeals of indignation. Depressing stuff. All feminists are apparently female furies, who view every male human being as a rapist or murderer-in-waiting and apparently every last one of them is motivated by bitterness rather than a considered ethical or political desire for justice and equality (though what they are so very bitter about remained elusive to their decriers: perhaps it’s an ineffable womany thing). Most infuriating and ignorant of all were the charges laid against feminism.

“Feminism is just female sexism”, says one enlightened soul. Really? Feminism’s project, as far as I am concerned, can still be summed up by the aim of the magazine The Revolution, founded in 1868 by Susan B. Anthony: “Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less”. How can that be sexist, the definition of which can be broadly agreed upon as being the practice of attitudes and actions which perpetuate the oppression of one gender by another? Women are not in a position to dominate men in this society, as is evidenced by their inferior social status, economic status, cultural, religious and political statuses. It’s a misunderstanding of order to equate women being apparently routinely bitchy or using their gender as some sort of a weapon against men as sexism. (Jesus fucking Christ, fishlike on a bike, being bitchy is the very least they can do, in the face of the relentless, demeaning, heartachingly mundane sexism that women encounter in some form or another EVERY SINGLE DAY.) Denigrating feminism by accusing it of sexism is as absurd as chucking the racism card at the anti-racist movement because people of one race get royally pissed off at being treated as second-class humans - or worse - by people of another and blame them, quite reasonably, for being the agents of their oppression.

Here’s a slightly more rabid comment on Moore’s article, to demonstrate where that dislike or distrust (of feminism in particular but of women in general) can lead:

“When, not if, but when, this country fails, because its men and boys have been so demonized by feminism and women in general, and the invaders move in because there the men are so disinfranchised with how they've been treated, see then how womens lives regress. British men did everything they could do make the lives of women in this country better, and what did they get for it?

Hate and demonization.”

Poor lambs. (I could lay on the “sic”s, but let’s allow him his dignity: love that nicely ironic misuse of “disenfranchised” there.)

Here’s another, from the same spluttering hound, but echoed by many others: “Women in this country have been given rights by men. They are the most looked after women in the whole of human history, and yet they still kick and scream asthough they are 'opressed'. Its simply not true, and I for one, and I know that Im not alone, am developing a hardend attitude toward women. You've been given the best lives of anyone, and yet your totally ungrateful. Men are, in greater and greater numbers, withdrawing our support for women. Lets see how you fair when men we men stop working for you.”

So it really is war, isn’t it? Every word takes great, stonking, black marker-pen strokes and underlines the undeniably concrete effects of sexual inequality, from "women have been given rights by men" and "we men stop working for you" to "your totally ungrateful". Of course we're ungrateful, you patronising fuckwit. What exactly gives people who have cocks the authority to give or take human rights from people who have cunts? Absolutely nothing. You can't squawk about men being used or accused or having horrible things done to them while maintaining a position of superiority over women: it totally negates your - and this is an overly-generous term for it - argument. Work out the difference between structural misogyny in society and general injustice and I might take you seriously. Until that time I say rock on ingratitude!

What I want to bang into every last one of those dull heads (and not just those of the clearly racist-with-it mental cases) is that feminism is not a bunch of indiscriminately-man-hating women, it's a project (undertaken by both men and women) critiquing and seeking to dismantle an oppressive power structure that blights lives the planet over.

Anger about the structure that feeds misogynist practices is, of course, blatantly very much needed and being enraged about what Suzanne Moore calls “the horrible, horrible things” that are done to women by men obviously does not preclude fury over the horrible, horrible things that are done to Muslims just because they are Muslim or to any other group of fellow human beings that is stigmatised, attacked or oppressed simply because they belong to that group. Or indeed the injustices that ordinary men suffer under the current system: here's a neat summation of the privileges of patriarchy, or how getting shat on as a man is still better than being a woman.

I'd like to live in a world where girls could grow up without being regularly belittled or bullied or abused or mutilated or stoned or raped or jeered at or given shit jobs for less pay or imprisoned or beaten or publicly derided just because they were born with the wrong genitalia. Where it doesn't matter which sex a person is. Where freedom applies to all the various shapes and sizes of human. This is far from the case and I cannot get my head around any rational, humane person wanting anything else, which is why, in a way, I find the slightly less spittle-flecked anti-feminist posts the most problematic.

Feminism has an almighty PR problem at the moment, even from the more, er, kindly-disposed, if ragingly paternalistic, critics: “If you do get 'angry' then you are going to lose support from sections of society who can emphasise with your position" Assuming he meant empathise, there’s that argument again, wheeled out against the recent student demonstrators: don’t get angry, because you’ll scare people off. It’s bullshit. Nothing (see my previous blogpost) ever got changed by people being NICE. Disobedience is the only way.

Which brings me to the question of having dialogue with cunts. Or not. The particular cunts referred to by Situationist slogan “No Dialogue With Suspect People. No Dialogue With Cunts” are those wanting to sneak their way into the movement rather than combative interlocutors, but to borrow the words rather than the intention: is it worth arguing about feminism with the knobheads that populate the internet? In my experience these are people with entrenched views, who have a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of feminism as well as deep personal resentment and distrust towards women (understandably enough: they’ve grown up in a misogynist culture). The likelihood of anything I or anyone else says being taken seriously and changing their opinion is remote. But I do think that an oblique dialogue with them is necessary: taking every point that is made and deconstructing the nonsense might bring others into the debate and make a dialogue something busier. Might make people think. Might unearth one an opponent who has something opinion-changing of their own to add. Otherwise the argument is already lost. One of the reasons you get such hateful and misinformed crap as I’ve quoted above – I can’t imagine it being stood for two decades ago – is that complacency has won out over anger. Despite the infuriating twattishness of people who don’t read properly and end up arguing against straw Dworkins, it’s very clear that vast swathes of the population have missed out on their Feminism 101 starter-packs. 

Surely it's very simple: if you believe that all human beings, regardless of their gender (or sexual orientation or race or class), should have equal access to justice, financial reward, resources, services, freedom etc., then you agree with the project of feminism and can call yourself a feminist. If you think women should not be treated equally in these areas, then you're a sexist in what is demonstrably a sexist world.

Pick your side. The fact that this battle remains to be won more than two centuries after Mary Wollstonecraft's passionate and rational attack on sexual double standards is a just and reasonable cause of utter fury. The internet is full of hate-spouting idiots who need to be challenged and have their dangerous views demolished piece by piece. Go argue. Viva rage!

(Pictures reblogged from the very cool Anarcho-Feminist)

Just Say No To Nice

There’s a new gang in town: the unsettingly-titled Cabinet Office's Behavioural Insight Team. Their activities so far seem benign and sensible enough – making it automatically an option to give to charities when using an ATM; signing new drivers up to the organ donation scheme by default: basically using psychology and habituation rather than legislation to modify the country’s behaviour – but they leave me with a nasty taste in my mouth. A taste that makes me rant and rave rather than act anything like the good girl the government seems to want me to be. For a start, why would the Tories be interested in coaxing people into making more charitable donations precisely when a great chunk of the population is having an appalling time financially, if not to save itself the job of paying for cuts fallout? Charitable funding being, after all, one of the areas to feel the Osborne axe. (Scrape away at the surface and there’s some nasty sexism going on with those cuts: let’s not forget that it is women who make up the majority of the public sector workers who will see jobs and incomes cut by Tory policies as well as traditionally being the biggest donors to charity both in terms of money and time. Ideally, I think, the ConDems would have all women working for free, rings on their fingers and back at the stove, Valiumed-up à la Betty Draper, because apart from anything else it would save a packet on the childcare vouchers.)

This Orwellian psy-ops team is developing clever ways of making us behave better by exploiting, in the deliciously pointed words of the Independent, our “shame, vanity, laziness and the desire to fit in”. (Who needs hellfire when you’ve got Cameron with his combination of dangling moral carrots and psychological pigboards? He’s making the fundamental raison d’être of the C of E utterly redundant and will leave it as merely the provider of rather stately venues for communal sing-a-longs. Which, on reflection, would be no bad thing.) The sheer cuntarded arrogance of the political class in assuming that the general public is so dumb and apathetic that they need to be tricked – “nudged”, in the terminology of the special advisors to the unit – into altruism is one thing but what is more astounding is the fact that none of this is the business of the government anyway. The morality of the state, its laws and its governance, is the work of the people who comprise it, not their temporarily elected representatives. (On the subject of morality, there was a perceptive article recently, arguing that UKUncut represented a sea-change in political activity because although the tax loopholes exploited by big corporations and non-dom billionaires may be legal, they are not, by any measure, right:  it’s up to us to make that different.)

The unpleasant aftertaste continues to fire up when I think about the government using “normative behaviour” to shame people into behaving how they’d like them to. Whose norms would those be? Cameron’s? Nick “Integrity” Clegg’s? Ha! Or even those of the new New New Labour leader, Ed Milliband, who fudged pathetically when asked why he wasn’t married and, instead giving it a bit of self-respecting “marriage is an outmoded, unnecessary, essentially misogynist institution and state intrusion into my private life is both irrelevant and oppressive”, mumbled that he would get round to it eventually? Cop out. It’s not as if a single one of those Westminster weasels is going to be worthy of any kind of trust: you wouldn’t let George Osborne babysit your tortoise, let alone give him dominion over your morality. I certainly don’t imagine that shaming or guilt-tripping people into behaving according to Tory-prescribed norms is going to end well for anyone who isn’t the two-point-five kind. These are people who have demonstrably lied and conned their way into power, who have let their wealthy pals get away with tax murder and whose troops bomb villages and kids and parties and journalists and thus get away with yer actual blood’n’guts murder as well.

So how fucking dare these immoral scum suggest that the country’s ills could be cured if only people could just be gently shoved into being nicer to each other? If all the freely-given, un-nudged voluntary work parents, for example, do now were added up in woman-hours and paid at minimum wage, I wonder how large a bill would be presented to the Treasury? And they want MORE. Make no mistake, these people are bastardly in the extreme and no amount of getting McDonald’s to coax people to eat more broccoli is going to change that. They want to make up for the fact that hospitals are underfunded and understaffed by allowing family members to stay around and help out: wouldn’t it be better, really, to cough up the funds to make hospitals safer, more humane places to be ill in first? Otherwise it’s arse-covering rather than progress.

It’s almost as if communities didn’t already exist, people didn’t already volunteer their time and energy, wouldn’t look after each other anyway… Even if you believe (go on, try it) that the Tory cabinet were being sincere rather than devious with these proposals, they must live in an almighty bubble of selfishness and greed if they think that by covertly steering the herd into being nice everything will be OK. Because, of course, your poverty and ignorance and ill-health is YOUR fault, you lazy gits, not ours, so YOU fix it.

What is going on is a smoke-and-mirrors diversionary tactic: it shifts the blame onto people (particularly the working class, all broken as they apparently are) and their flawed ways whilst letting the industrialists continue to pollute and the bombers bomb and the politicians lie and the tax-exiles bathe in Martini. And it’s crap. Because, really, who is need of behaviour modification if not the Eton Rifles?

Here is a deep-rooted (disingenuous, hypocritical, Daily Mailoid) misrepresentation of society by a bunch of rich, powered-up twats who boast about loving the Jam and the Smiths while their whole being shouts out Huey Lewis And The News. And that’s being ridiculously generous. Society functions on so many levels beyond the financial and the legislative: musicians and artists and writers know this perfectly well because they do what they do for the sheer heart-swelling love of it. Yes, wages would be nice, but the lack of them hasn’t stopped the flow, doesn’t prevent people from writing blogs or putting on gigs or setting up record labels. They certainly don’t need sticks or psychological trickery to make them contribute (ugh, vile word). Likewise those who help out at Macmillan day centres or man helplines for charities.

It boils down to the fact that if you think of society as mudlike and manipulable, you’re doing the individuals who constitute it a great disservice and scoffing at the phenomenal amount of vigour and love and creativity that powers the wheels of community. If that lot in Westminster really wanted to make the world a better, healthier, more enjoyable place to live in, then instead of conning people into false altruism or covertly-improved nutrition, they would modify the behaviour of the Capitalism-sanctioned nudge-merchants that we all have to negotiate daily, with their grubby paws in every area of life from advertising to schooling. Because, if you look at it that way, it’s a great big mediated bread-and-circuses con trick, all of it, from national newspapers to rubbish TV, from deceitful, dangerous governmental reports about WMD and drugs to unheeded police codes of conduct. Even the implicit decision of the government to allow its sinister little team to be publicised by the papers should furrow a brow or two. In the age of Wikileaks everything gets to be questioned: stuff that was once the realm of conspiracy whisperers is out in the open, the lies palpable; Big Society, Big Brother, whatever, it’s time to dig our heels in, get nasty and say no.

Those Dancing Days

(First posted on Louder Than War)


Last month I saw Those Dancing Days at All Tomorrow’s Parties - the Butlins-hosted Ee-Zee fest for the middle-aged indie-kid - and they blew the gathered Scottish popocracy off its collective stage. If you haven’t heard (of) them yet, they are five girls from Stockholm who play ferociously bouncy pop. They turned up on stage at some eyelid-drooping hour of the night, a whirl of gold sequins and pouts, and played their hearts out for a crowd of soon-besotted aging Belle & Sebastian fans. And what struck me first – other than the sulky glances the bassplayer was throwing out at us from under her hoodie and behind her glasses – was how breezily proficient they were.

OK, so proficient has never had much of a history as a successful come on. It’s the prefect’s pin of the pop badge collection; a goddamn boy thing. Draws admiration rather than the urgent twist of the guts and the groin you want from your music. It’s possibly, even, the absolute antithesis of the anarchic curve-balls genius throws, especially if you believe the theory that creativity comes from the ability to make mistakes. Training fucks this up: if you abide by the rules, you might get really really good at following them, but you’re not going to do anything miraculous.

So many of the bands I’ve loved have been good at doing the wrong thing, have embraced the axiom that if you make a mistake you play it again and you play it LOUDER: I’m thinking of another all-girl band, Ut, who picked up the instruments that came to hand – violin, drums, guitar – and dragged whatever notes they could out of them. And glorious it was too, strings scraping gorgeously errant harmonies you’d never dream up if you knew what the hell you were doing. The alchemy of wrong worked especially well for women back then, who’d been out of the boys-with-guitars rock’n’roll loop for so long that they had to make their own. Mix in naïveté and chuck away any maps and, picking names from the hat that informed my musical tastes, you get a band like Pram, with their xylophones and toy pianos and unearthly space lullabies; Throwing Muses with their backbone of American demotic shapes, traditional folk songs and military band rhythms (and, oh god, Kristin with her wild ideas of how guitars play); whole hives of riot grrls who, like their punk and post-punk sisters before them, just wanted to play and weren’t going to let something as tiresome as musical expertise stop them, bum notes all over the place, loud and proud and thrilling. Yup: guts and groins, a shivered feel for what sounds right rather than what should be, that’s where it’s at.

So the fact that Those Dancing Days wear their competence so well was somewhat surprising, especially since the only recording I’d heard at that point had fostered a general impression of blissfully shambolic, foot-tripping ingenuousness. But not only do they wear it with casual grace, they make it something to celebrate, something icy cool. Perhaps girls can bank a certain amount of proficiency credit simply by virtue of their gender: boys being clever-clever is nothing new but technical skill isn’t generally much admired in women (for an example of how absurdly low the stakes are here, see the Elle magazine list of, er, the best female guitarists OF ALL TIME, which inexplicably includes Kelley Deal among the twelve it manages to dig up. But, to its credit, if we must spare it some, the list does rate Marnie Stern, whose frenetic guitar lines are a resolutely ungirly bloodrushed whoop in the face of boy-centric virtuosity). But never mind their cute-cool capability, there’s a whole lot more going on which elevates Those Dancing Days way beyond the kooky-girl-backed-by-boys-in-skinny-trousers formula that women at the Pitchfork end of the market usually get to be allowed to slot themselves into.

For a start, they’ve been playing together professionally for five years. And not just any old five years, but the half-decade from mid-teens on, when neurons are snapping and hormones hustling and brains re-wiring themselves in a stew of self-belief and iconoclasm. What they make with that is a headlong rush of stabby synths and furious beats (the tiny sweetly-smiling Cissi batters at her drum kit like it’s an annoying little brother needing to be taught a lesson or two: she’s mesmerising) beneath a sure-footed vocal that belongs somewhere else entirely. Wigan, maybe.  Linnea, with her untamed mop of curls, is channelling those precocious big-voiced girls of Sixties pop - Sandy, Petula or Ronnie perhaps - soaring and sweetly abrasive, as un-indie as cigars. The combination of brash youthful inventiveness and utter sortedness is extraordinarily engaging, particularly in a bunch of girls who, whoever winsome, are recognisably ordinary kids, all pinkly enthusiastic and stylistically unpolished (in pitiful contrast to the poor X-Factored newbies of tellyland pop, who go from awkward to Auton without passing Go) and thus the epitome of insouciant cool. Zooey bloody Deschanel they are not.

I first heard their song Those Dancing Days (taken from their EP Those Dancing Days: go for the all-out name bombardment, why not?) a couple of years ago. Built around a squelchy keyboard riff, some high-speed scattergun drums and gloriously self-absorbed teenage lyrics - “High on life/ In love with me/ Dancing in the night/ Dancing through the days” - I liked it but was obviously not paying enough attention. The fact that live they stomped over an entire festival weekend gives me great hope for their forthcoming second album. As does the poundingly fierce new track, Fuckarias, which, whether through teenage gawky genius or second-language-itis, has lyrics as wrong as you like:

“You're an uninvited clown
A foolish puppy with a too long tongue
You stumble and fall, you're the worst of them all
You're in my space, get out of my face.”

Ha! I love them. Fuck ‘right’, let’s dance. Go download the song for free here http://www.thosedancingdays.com/blog/2010/12/8/free-download and you can fall for them too.