DAN I E L BAKE R Wo rkin g peo ple are happy peo ple The following is an auto-improvised prose poem confessional cut n paste assemblage about music and labour and mental health.
“Working people are happy people”
have had panic attacks about this. I’m serious.
said Dr Flint. He’d know that. A GP’s wage would probably make me pretty happy.
“We are not in the business of handing out sick notes”
I’d been working for the last year inside this enormous glass and steel thing. I was in the worst shape of my life. I found no solace in music or art whatsoever. Anxiety and depression and over work completely remove any sense of perspective anyway. Nothing took music’s place but I didn’t care. This is about music and about labour and mental health. I think. Looked like it might take off any second the glass and steel thing. The whole hod of nowt used to be all mildly attractive flatlands of nothingmuch-at-all greenery. Aggressive. Mundane. The payroll software market leader made a model village and it bubbles up in patches. The ideal choice for families–flexible, spacious, Midford, bay windows, spacious, flexible, Lavenham, French doors and useful storage closets, almhouses without altruism, flexible and spacious, Eynsham, utility rooms and two en suite bathrooms, walls thin as fuck no bother though, detached, Downham. Bournville for the immaterial labourer. HELP TO BUY AVAILABLE We were outsourced, obviously. I had to do three two-hour-long phonecalls every day training customers in how to use software for minimum wage while the rest of the directly employed workforce were on a starting salary of 18 grand. It cost me 40 pounds a month to get to work. Inbetween phonecalls we operated the switchboard. I drank at least a bottle of wine every night and smoked a lot of weed. I would sleep on the bus on the way to work and have panic attacks in the toilets at lunch time. I ate chips and beans from the refectory every day for lunch. “Negative thinking patterns can start from childhood onwards. For example, if you didn’t receive much attention or praise from your parents or teachers at school, you might’ve thought “I’m useless, I’m not good enough.” I couldn’t drag down all this music I had put on a pedestal by associating it with a life as unfulfilled and turgid as my own. I didn’t want to have to confront the fact that experimental music wasn’t making me feel anything anymore. It was more than that though. I realised music, more specifically music culture, had come to be associated in my head with anxiety–the anxiety that I wasn’t as smart as the theorists who write about it or that the horribly sober people at performances would think I was worthless because I’d enjoyed it but had no studied critique of it. I don’t buy records any more because I can’t afford them and I knew they’d frown on that. I
said Dr Flint. CBT is the mental health equivalent of a consumer boycott–it individualises horrors of existence under capitalism and sells you the lie that modes of oppression and hierarchies of dominance can be explained away through bourgeois appeals to rationale and logic. They can’t. Structural power relationships cannot merely be unthought. They cake your entire existence like actual shit. “I don’t think you are listening to me.” Experimental music, noise music, improvisation, vinyl fetishism, deluxe reissues, handscreen-printed limited edition lathe-cut prints can fuck off. By which I mean, I’m delighted that the underground, with its toxic apolitical cultural gatekeepers with their down-with-allthe-’isms! sixth-form philosophy class bullshit, is dying. Speaking of death, the death of ideology is the default underground apolitical orthodoxy for far too many people. I have no interest in your bland individualisms. I believe in pragmatic personal and collective politics. There is no bullshit dichotomy between the two. “As if any one viewpoint can explain the world”–no, it can’t, but that doesn’t mean the labour theory of value isn’t a thing, it doesn’t mean I’ve got nothing to learn from black feminism or trans liberation theories or queer activism. Ignoring the intersections between forms of oppression by disregarding ideology entirely in favour of your own hermetic fantasy Utopia makes your art worthless, I’m not interested. I don’t care whether it’s a lovely weight on the vinyl, or if its sold out at source. Stop making me feel bad. STOP MAKING ME ANXIOUS. I worry that I’ll not understand it. I know I’ll forget it. Or at least forget its meaning. It’ll be transient, it’ll recur at best as a dim memory I have to snatch at. No permanence. After 2002 I can’t tell you the name of a single track on any record I like. I can’t even remember the records I was listening to last month. Don’t suffer for your art. You suffer enough at work. Don’t suffer to buy art, either. If all the underground can do is reentrench the economic rhythms of capital, then dig up its corpse and kill it again. “This medicine contains citalopram hydrobromide.” Let me explain: our class exists under capital. We fight it. Fuck your cultural separatism if being “true to your art” stops you from identifying with anyone marginalised. You’ve read Aleister Crowley? And you took it SERIOUSLY? Individualism is still an ‘ism, bros. I’m an individual in a society. I make 7.50 an hour working 37.5/40 hours a week and after I’ve paid the
rent and bills on my housing association one bedroom flat I have about 90 quid a week to live on. I don’t have the economic privilege to be able to rail against file sharing. It’s happened, it’s done, it’s over. I’m not paying 22 quid for that Dead C reissue. I don’t care if that means they have less time to focus on their art. Good. Fuck them. They have money. Yes it does fucking matter. Yes money can make you happy. Money would make me happier and I hate myself for that. I hardly ever focus on my art. I make music maybe a handful of times a year, and only then if I have a vague idea of what it is I actually want to do. I need to spend at least half of any week completely in my own company. I can be a very anti-social communist. When I do make a track I can finish a track in about half an hour. So can you. It’s a piece of piss. Don’t worry about it. Just upload it to your Bandcamp and concentrate on something else for a bit. It can’t possibly be shit. Don’t worry if you think it is. It isn’t. I think I might hate improvisation, while we’re at it. I hate the idea that improvisation is something fucking noble because you are doing it with other people. Improv units are just cliques anyway. For over thirty years now boring white European men have been attempting to “create a dialogue” between each other by sitting in rooms and solemnly parping out exclusionary, dull, insect-scuttles-on-floorboards improv that’s drier than a camel’s arsehole. This one night though I went to see Hijokaidan perform as Hatsune Kaidan–to cut a long story short it’s their real-world realisation of what a collaboration between themselves and a J-pop idol who is actually a projected hologram would be like, with Le Chat acting as a real-life version of the hologram (seriously, the hologram it’s based on is apparently massive in Japan). It was the most joyous thing I’ve seen in ages and the only thing that was on all night that managed to cut through my emotionally preoccupied current state of mind and make me feel something. It was like all three of them were playing separate sets all at the same time, one deliriously oversugared set of N-Trance synths on CDJs, a full blown cosplay idol singing Nico covers and Jo Jo just being Jo Jo and decimating shit with sheets of noise, except they’d come together completely by accident and make you feel like life is meant for fucking about and going down waterslides on your belly. Creating a dialogue is well boring. If you have to play together just play separate shit and do it at the same time. It feels more honest. Be alone together or together alone. “I really don’t feel like I’m fit for work, I need you to know this.”
DA N C E H A L L 12 | Image overleaf: Pascal Nichols