lennon’s REVOLUTIONS 50 years on
[This post originally went up at my PATREON: subscribers get to read posts and hear podcasts early — and help offset costs and time and help me do more of this kind of thing]
“The blues are beautiful because it’s simpler and because it’s real. It’s not perverted or thought about: It’s not a concept, it is a chair; not a design for a chair but the first chair. The chair is for sitting on, not for looking at or being appreciated. You sit on that music.” (John Lennon to Jann Wenner, 21 January 1971)
When Jack Hutton quit Melody Maker in 1970, to set up what became Sounds, he told Richard Williams, who stayed behind, that it would be a “left-wing Melody Maker”. Hutton’s no longer with us, so I suppose if I get the chance I’ll have to ask Williams one day what exactly was meant by “left-wing” here. My guess — based on what Sounds actually turned out like — is that Hutton meant the new paper would be centred on rock. Even though both papers covered rock and pop and everything else, MM’s moral centre was arguably still jazz at that point. Even though the jazz fan-base always had a left-wing in the UK, with old-school communists solid among its supporters and chroniclers, it was a music (or so many seemed to feel) whose time was past. Rock was new and rock was now, the very voice of youth — but beyond this, rock had had, for a while by then, a tangled relationship with politics, radical left politics in particular. Continue reading “no longer a debate?
re-litigating the 70s: what we wanted, what went right, what went wrong, where do we go from here?
“During the Conservative government of Edward Heath there were five declarations of emergency under this Act [viz the Emergency Powers Act 1920], by far the most any government. The first was in July 1970 over a dockers strike, the second in December 1970 over an electricians strike, the third in February 1972 over a miners strike, the fourth in August 1972 over another dockers strike and the fifth time in October 1973, which lasted for four months”
So for last 18 months, my plan had been to launch the kickstarter for the book of the conference I ran at Birkbeck on the politics of UK rockwriting (1968-85). That’s a mock-up of the cover on the left (illustrations by the marvellous Savage Pencil): you can click on it to see a larger version, but if you don’t the title and subtitle read A HIDDEN LANDSCAPE ONCE A WEEK: how UK music-writing became a space for unruly curiousity, in the words of those who made it happen. Originally I had the kickstarter launch scheduled for May, exactly 12 months on from the symposium itself — but there were a lot of things to get ready, and, well, events intervened (it went live on Monday 27 June, just four days after the results of the eurovote sent everything in the UK into spiralling chaos). No one’s said so directly — most people have been very supportive — but if someone were to suggest it was frivolous or decadent or impertinent to be promoting such a project during such a crisis, well, I wouldn’t be entirely startled. And I wouldn’t feel they were entirely wrong.
Despite this, I still think it’s right to carry on: and here’s why. The book will be an anthology — meaning that a variety of voices will speak (it will contain extracts from the panels on the day, with additional essays from those involved). It is a regathering of people involved in an informal, improvised cultural space that came into being at some point in the 60s (perhaps even earlier), coalescing around 1970 out the counterculture and other existing sources, some radical, some fannish — which existed in real time for some years, with ripples that continued to travel long after that. In its multiform, provocative, naive way, it was something that stood somewhat athwart the grim turbulences of the 70s, even if (from time to time) it also reacted to them and expressed them. It was about possibility, and about community: about how a community gets to define itself and to move out into the wider world.
The kickstarter is here: and what I say about it on that page is this (click through for further detail, and to support it to make it happen):
Once upon a time — for a surprisingly long time— the UK music-press was a lot more than just the place to catch up with singles or album release news, with interviews with chart-topping figures and the antics of gobby rockstars. Week on week in its heyday — the mid 60s to the early 80s — a young reader could also go to it to find out about everything from comics to cult films to radical politics, as well as an extremely wide range of non-chart musics from all over the world. Hiding in plain sight, it was the communal improvisation of ways to process an unprecedented tumult from every quarter, of new sounds and dances, startling ideas and visions all battling for attention. It took place in such high-street titles as NME, Melody Maker, Sounds, Record Mirror, Echoes, Street Life, Let It Rock, Zigzag, Black Music; but it had fermented in the undergrounds — Oz, IT, Frendz, Ink — and a significant alt/free/listings press including Time Out, City Limits, the anti-racist agit-prop paper Temporary Hoarding, and the redoubtable feminist magazine Spare Rib. As well, from the mid-70s, there was a burgeoning underfelt of fanzines, notably Nick Kimberley and Penny Reel’s legendary reggae zine Pressure Drop, plus Bam Balam, Sniffin’ Glue, Ripped and Torn, London’s Burning, London’s Outrage, Out There, and many many more.
It would be absurd to argue that its ideals — insofar as it even understood them clearly — have come to be irrevocably enacted: incorrect, if sometimes tempting, in the late 90s; simply fatuous in the light of recent weeks, when everything that it was not has broken back hard against it. It was always fragile: a serendipity, a moment. I want to argue that it was something more. That something useful to us right now can be drawn out of it. I’m not even sure yet what this is — I have ideas, which I might write more about, but for now I just want to make it possible to re-open the conversation.
“To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was’. It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger… The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”
Author sukrat OTIPosted on July 10, 2016 Categories Activism, Clarity, Class, Connexions, Conversations, Crowd-sourced institutions, How Value Happens, Music Writing, outgroups and in-crowds, The Co-operative Archive, to live outside the law you must be honest, Trollheim, us versus us versus them, what will become of usTags Birkbeck, Black Echoes, Black Music, Echoes, Frendz, IT, Kraftwerk, Let It Rock, Liz Naylor, Melody Maker, Nick Kimberley, NME, Oz, Penny Reel, Pressure Drop, Record Mirror, Savage Pencil, Sniffin' Glue, Sounds, Spare Rib, Steel Pulse, Street Life, Temporary Hoarding, The Slits, Val Wilmer, ZigzagLeave a comment on re-litigating the 70s: what we wanted, what went right, what went wrong, where do we go from here?
whalers on the moon: curious despatches from an old dream
“It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.”
… a kingdom called not, which although it is, yet is not…
In 1989, I was flown to Germantown in Phildelphia to interview Sun Ra (for The Face). Ra is long gone now, and so’s The Face: and while a couple of longish quotes of the interview ended up in the piece about Black Science Fiction I wrote in The Wire just before I became editor, there was a lot of the (quite one-sided!) conversation that ended up on the cutting-room floor. A while back, Conor Gillies of WBUR in Boston, MA, got in touch to tell me about a new series he was helping work on — it sounded my kind of thing but I was super-busy and the only thing I could think might fit one of their projects was to send them the audio for the Sun Ra interview. I’ve been lamentably slow to publicise this — still super-busy is my only excuse — but the series, Stylus, has already started: you can hear Ra towards the end of this ep.
Author sukrat OTIPosted on May 4, 2015 Categories Black Science Fiction, Conversations, Important numerology, Music Writing, to live outside the law you must be honest, Trollheim, Words as WeaponsTags Philadelphia, Sun Ra, The FaceLeave a comment on … a kingdom called not, which although it is, yet is not…
you can never go back back BAACK!
In which I take a break from organising a quasi-historical not-very-academic (but very exciting) conference (at Birkbeck, 15-16 May) and reflect on the ways your personal backpages as a hack begin to intersect with the public record etc etc.
A few weeks back, Marcello asked if I had any thoughts on this TPL post (about, among other things, Johnny Hates Jazz and The Wire as it was in 1986/87). Well, I did and I didn’t: I did because this era of my mentor Richard Cook’s project is very much the making of me, and I absorbed an enormous amount of his sensibility and thought a lot how to advance it best (whether or not I did is for others to judge; sadly he’s no longer with us for his perspective). But I didn’t (at least tactically, for now) because I have for most of this year been organising a conference on UK music-writing in the 60s, 70s and early 80s, trying to focus on how things had evolved from roughly 1968 (and the discussion of rock in the underground press) through to maybe 1985, when (in my judgment) Live Aid hit the inkies hard sideways, and changed their political ecology for good (Geldof’s revenge, you could call it). The serious social potential of pop began to be more and more of a topic for the tabloids and the broadsheets: the inkies began more and more to fold in into their own niche, exploring less and less. In this they were reflecting changes in the world, to be sure — but they were also amplifying and accepting these changes. Continue reading “you can never go back back BAACK!”
Notes on Adam Ant (the “paper” I gave at EMP in Seattle this year) and the Spice Wars (feat.Russ Meyer and Buffy and the Powerpuff girls and early ilx); a long note on Lady Di and the old weird England in the Popular thread on Elton John and Candle in the Wind ’97 — and the beginnings of a response to the various questions Frank Kogan asked in comments on the Oasis post, a response which is VERY LONG (9000+ words) and RUMINATIVE and SEMI-THOUGHT-THROUGH, and covers Burke, Keats, Wallace Stevens, the internalised bureaucracies of the institutionalised intellect (and where music fits into them); and what we mean by the words “thinking” and “clarity”.
schoolroom vs hallway vs hallway
or, Maybe this is the best place for my mean little joke about why they called their fanzine “monitor” hoho
Little essay for FT on art, class and autodidacts: featuring Oasis, Joseph Beuys, Arthur Scargill and Richard Jobson, among others. Tom Ewing and Frank Kogan are already arrived in the comments on excellent form: my fantasy thread would eventually also include Mark E. Smith, Robin Carmody and Robert Christgau duking it out with Liam and Noel Gallagher and maybe even one of the Appleton sisters…
Author sukrat OTIPosted on March 30, 2014 May 26, 2014 Categories Art writing, Books, Connexions, Conversations, Cultural gulfs, How Value Happens, Long-form crit, Music Writing, us versus us versus them, Words as WeaponsTags Appleton sisters, Arthur Scargill, Frank Kogan, Joseph Beuys, Liam Gallagher, Mark E. Smith, Noel Gallagher, Oasis, Richard Jobson, Robert ChristgauLeave a comment on schoolroom vs hallway vs hallway
“shtick fur-balls revisited” (= proposed titles in my head so far)
It was called Virtual Space and there was just one issue, “issue zero: place-kicks”. We made less than 20 copies, mostly by hunting round town for a photocopier with an A2 bed. It was an experiment, a mockup for a magazine, and it had no date appearing anywhere on its pages. (But it was early 1989, I’d just quit NME and wasn’t on-staff yet at The Wire.) We were serious: we went looking for funding. The other of the two being designer Paul Elliman, who’d just left The Wire. (Note to self: I haven’t seen Paul in an age and must call him up.) Continue reading ““shtick fur-balls revisited” (= proposed titles in my head so far)”
Author sukrat OTIPosted on December 31, 2013 December 31, 2013 Categories Activism, Art writing, Blogging, Connexions, Conversations, Crowd-sourced institutions, Cultural gulfs, Ethos, Music Writing, Politics, strategy, tactics, The Co-operative Archive, Trollheim, us versus us versus them, what will become of us, who gets paid, Words as WeaponsTags Abba, Alex Harrowell, Britney, Frank Kogan, Hazel Robinson, Isabel Cole, Marcello Carlin, Paul Elliman, Richard Cook, Seth Edenbaum, Tallita Dyllen, The Wire, Victoria deRijke2 Comments on “shtick fur-balls revisited” (= proposed titles in my head so far)
everything is art while you’re talking about it
My friend Tallita just started a blog with me, about art, basically: we go to shows and talk about them and I write up some of what we talked about. (We made the decision to do this at the Yayoi Kusuma show at Tate Modern last year, hence the picture.)
[Update: blog.com seems have been having server trouble the last few days — hence the images all appearing as broken-image symbols… ]
Author sukrat OTIPosted on June 10, 2013 June 15, 2013 Categories Art writing, Blogging, Conversations, Cultural gulfsTags Tallita Dyllen, Yayoi Kusuma2 Comments on everything is art while you’re talking about it
Of cats and critics and curiosity
The discussion Rob White and I had about Chris Marker’s film essay Le fond de l’air est rouge is now up at the Film Quarterly site. My original piece about it is here (but needs a JSTOR sub).