PUPPET
FREE
Spring 2008
Cover. Rebecca Brewis 1. Contents 2. Editorial/Joshua Rant 3. Sinem Erkas/ Michael Taylor 4. Daniel Rawnsley/ Rebecca Brewis/Wi Mounir 5. Tom Costello 6. Elle Graham-Dixon 7. Meryl Trussler 8. Carrie Rose Guss 9. Fiona McKenzie/ Katie Warner 11. Laura Nellums 12. Carrie Rose Guss 13. Jackie Jacob-Marlborough 15. Lucas Whitworth/Sinem Erkas 16. Nima Amini/Meng Lu 17. Madeleine Corcoran 18. Nick Brown
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Puppet is back. Thank you for picking it up. If you haven’t seen it before, Puppet is for everything and anything. Filled with your contributions, Puppet is living hand to mouth.
This Puppet was made by Rich, Ossie, Fiona, Tom, Ottilie, Katie and Jack. Remember...too few cooks make the same broth every time.
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Sinem Erkas
d n a h m r a F he
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The farmhand wasn’t a bright man and had never pretended otherwise. His strength lay in his happiness and he carried it closely about him, wearing a foolish grin like the farmer wore his hat. When it wasn’t grinning his mouth tended to be pursed in thought. He liked thinking and would like to do more of it. But now was not the time for extra thinking. It was a time for walking and he walked briskly and purposefully because he had a purpose and it was a brisk day. In one great grubby hand he clutched a letter which he hadn’t read and would never read because he only knew four letters. They were good letters, though, and he liked them; the note seemed to him excessive and alphabetically greedy so he did not trust it. Yet he knew it had to be delivered and as such he picked up the pace of his great looping strides and burrowed forward into the biting winter air. Numbers, though, were something quite apar t from letters and something he liked more. He figured that numbers could not lie: 1 meant 1 in a way that one could never mean won. Glancing down he mouthed the first number he saw on the letter – a ‘one’ – and grinned oafishly. There were more numbers after but he thought he’d save them for a little later on in the journey. He hoped that would make the hike up to the farmhouse shor ter and more pleasant. He let his wide wondering eyes follow the valley’s shining little brook before dropping them to his feet. Mumbling a local tune in time with his footsteps could not hide the urge to read the next number: ‘nine’. He tried to stop himself but couldn’t help noticing the next number was another ‘one’. The act left him momentarily irritable and he scolded himself for his lack of discipline and his ill temper. With a simple determination he resolved not to read the final number until he was on the step in front of the farmer’s house. It was a struggle. The spring lambs provided a temporary distraction and he tried to think of their loveliness but it was no good. He didn’t like lambs anything like the mystery of numbers and the mud had soured their coats. Anyhow he liked eating lambs more than looking at them. Presently he arrived at the farmer’s house with the letter the courier had given him shaking in his eager hand. Standing on the door he steeled himself, and looked down: ‘six’. Beside the numbers was an impressive looking crown, but the farmhand knew little of kings and less of crowns so he quickly turned his attention to the door. The farmer’s wife answered and she looked like the sagging, grey clouds that smothered the sky. Old and worried she took the letter, and in a quiet little voice told the farmhand: “My dear, it’s for you. It’s from the King”. The farmhand smiled wider than ever and opened the letter. But the farmer’s wife wouldn’t read it to him and it was a mercy that she didn’t. In fact, it became clear, six months later when the farmhand’s oafish grin was buried where the men who had letters whispered ‘Wipers’, that not reading that letter then had been the last mercy that farmhand ever got.
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Michael Taylor
What He Saw After the fire, after the ice, after the three-headed dog snapping at the damned with jaws stronger than the gales whipping about them; after the burning tar, after the giants, after the men torn in two, the flaming tombs and the lake of shit; after that old adversary tearing bodies with his teeth; after hell, Dante saw the sky and there was only one thing it was like, it was like seeing the sky and it was good. Daniel Rawnsley
According to Wikipedia, Tokelau doesn’t have a capital. Never heard of Tokelau? There’s a facebook group for that you know Nelly says there’s no equal Only she says it in Spanish, or Por tuguese I think she’s por tugese So she’s probably singing Por tuguese Those flowers are alive In the awful sense of the word Don’t look too hard or else they’ll get eyes But they already have them, didn’t you know? And we come to the hidden tracks Hidden in the metaphorical sense So well hidden you’d need a magnifying glass The wrong way around Rebecca Brewis
Don’t find something that isn’t there. Tokelau doesn’t have a capital Wi Mounir
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STILL HUMAN STILL HERE Campsf ield Dentention Centre. A tangled tower Of twenty foot high razor wire Secretly coils all the way From Oxford - The Bogus Woman
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hese words are spoken by the protagonist of Kay Adshead’s award-winning play The Bogus Woman: a baff led asylumseeker f leeing a war-scarred continent: Based on testament collected from Oxford asylum seekers, the play char ts an ordeal not uncommon for those seeking asylum in Britain: the humiliation of imprisonment followed by the harrowing conditions of forced destitution. Nestled in the towering privilege of the dreaming spires, we rarely realise that we share a city with hundreds being brutally punished for daring to ask for our protection. Take the City 2 bus nor th from Magdelen Street for about six miles and you’ll f ind a totally non-f ictional Campsf ield House Detention Centre, home to up to 250 asylum seekers. But it doesn’t necessarily take barbed wire to keep refugees invisible. Down the Cowley Road, the volunteer organisation Asylum Welcome deals with hundreds of refugees who are the unseen victims of the government’s vindictive policy of enforced destitution, stripped of rights, benef its, accommodation and permission to work and left incapable of suppor ting themselves. Ashead’s play will be per formed towards the end of this term as par t of Still Human Still Here, a campaign run with STAR (Student Action For Refugees) seeking to raise awareness of the treatment of failed asylum seekers in the UK. The policy of forced destitution is an unsurprising product of a political culture that seems to consider refugees at best a statistic and at worst a plague. Pressured by the hate mongering of a bloodthirsty right-wing press, our government fulf ils only the bare minimum of our international obligation to assess and offer asylum to those f leeing persecution. After the lottery of being assigned a lawyer, dragged through a decision-making process designed
for speed, and with an increasingly limited right to appeal, two thirds of applicants are eventually refused. They are then expected to leave the country in 21 days. If they do not, they lose every thing. Access to healthcare, their accommodation, the measly £36 a week benef its and still denied the right to work. This is not just pover ty, or vulnerability: this is destitution. Estimates suggest that there are 283, 500 people living like this in the UK. In some contex ts, the idea of an ‘awareness’ campaign can betray activism with a banal lack of focus. But in this case the idea of awareness goes right to the very core of what this policy is. The head of the Refugee Studies Centre, here at the University of Oxford calls this ‘the stereotype for the government’s hard-line on migration’. In other words, the government is not responding to social or economic problems, they are responding to the public’s badly informed perception of problems. Asylum seekers make up only 0.5% of immigrants to this country: they barely register. And yet, in cracking down so hard on them in a bid to appear tough, this policy is actively minting real social and economic problems. Alongside the homelessness and pover ty, issues such as addiction, prostitution, unregulated and dangerous employment and depression are endemic. Depor tation of such a large group of people would be legally and practically impossible so the government do the nex t best thing: they forget they exist. Denied access to healthcare, work and benef its and too terrif ied of the authorities to be protected by the police or social ser vices, these refugees are condemned to a sub-social existence, forced to live out a dingy existence at the margins of society. Mass awareness is so crucial to this campaign because it is only through the recognition of this underclass that they’ll ever be able to come out of the shadows, become citizens, earn a wage and, yes, pay taxes.
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his is an awareness campaign rather than a fundraiser because we have to stamp out the clumsy idea that these people need,
“ This is not just poverty, or vulnerability; this is destitution.” or are even asking for, our charity. According to The Institute For Public Policy granting amnesty to just London’s asylum seekers would raise one billion pounds in extra taxes. Even now, Britain’s cities would cease to function if it were not for the miserably paid, illegal work of those left destitute. The undying smear of the right that asylum-seekers come to leech off our benefits system is clearly, demonstrably ridiculous. They are already at the foundations of our economy, and would only become more impor tant if granted status as full citizens. And equally, uncomfor table as it is, we must keep in mind the fact that Britain and its economic interests are hardly free from blame for the creation of refugees in the first place. The majority of those who seek asylum in this country are fleeing from countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, The Democratic Republic of Congo and the Sudan: hardly states that have been untroubled by human rights abuses. The war on Iraq alone is responsible for the displacement of 4.2 million Iraqis, or 1/6 of the entire population. The genocides in Darfur and the Congo are the products of conflicts disfigured and exploited by the activities of unregulated and unscrupulous multinational corporations. And yet, as our war in Iraq has been killing up to 1,000,000 civilians, the Home Office have continued to forcibly
depor t Iraqi Kurds who have made it to Britain, back to war and devastating outbreaks of cholera. We cannot tout the rhetoric of human rights to justify military aggression abroad, whilst at the same time leaving destitute those who make it to the UK. The Still Human Still Here campaign is not asking for good Samaritans, it is urging the government to adopt humane practices that will fulfil our obligation under international law as well as our moral obligation to help those who live in terror. The play will be performed around Oxford, in community centres, colleges and finally at a mass sleep out in the centre of Oxford on March the 5th: the culmination of the term’s campaign. Finally, awareness is our weapon because our target is not just legislation, but the culture of fear and xenophobia that is shaped by the right and goes unchallenged by the government. Join the campaign, come to the sleep out, write to your MP, see the play and we can star t a movement to welcome asylum seekers not only as a statistic, but as neighbours and citizens. stillhuman.org.uk/ refugeeresource.org/ star-network.org.uk/
Tom Costello
Elle Graham-Dixon
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Genesis in Blue A Short Story
But I could see it so clearly. But I could see it all so clearly, Eric, and that is why I am holding your arm like I am a nineteen-fifties movie star of granite, shaking you, my bride, saying For God’s sake, Angela And then, Eric, of course we’d embrace and the hearts of the audience would double flip. But yes, this isn’t Manhattan, and you’re no woman, I realise - they used to make us shower bare in that one room at school. You’ll remember that, Eric, how appalled we both were, not yet at the age at which it was hilarious, rollicking - more like being stamped across the face with our awkwardness, the ink smudged over our eyelids. But that’s beside the point. As I was telling you. While I was smeared across your dining room table tonight, I had a vision. I’d puked so hard my stomach felt like a used tube of toothpaste. I felt bad about it, honestly, in my exhausted half-second way. I thought you’d be yet angrier to have found me on your couch, your floor - I try and pass out on wipe-clean surfaces - and honestly the bright fake wood was so cool against my face, the shape so open to being sprawled upon. And I closed my eyes and I had this vision - or a dream, I suppose it was that, a dream. I was in my old classroom, the walls vibrating with knowledge, detached letters and numbers shouting from the walls. The room was thick with these barely memorable child-entities called Josh and Ryan and Billy. Maybe you were in there, Eric, although I didn’t know you then. I was awkward and old on the plastic kiddie chair. And Miss Heath was definitely there. She had this pop-icon face that has never shifted from my memory. Unforgettable. Che Guevara. Sit down and drink milk with me. This won’t take long. Yes. Miss Heath. Set in stone. Turquoise blouse, black skirt, black hair. Rouged. And she said: *Guys. Saddle up. Today we’re going to learn about God.* *God, kids, is not “up.” Nor is he particularly down, left or right. Nope.* *God is everywhere, more everywhere than the sky and the sea and the air put together. And he’s tangible.* She looked right at me, through the force field that separates dreams and reality, I felt the light from her teeth bounce into my retinas. Miss Heath plunged her hand into an ice-cream tub, fiercely, as if grabbing for a human heart. She then pulled away some plasticene, marbled green and navy, and held it before me and the children in an impassioned fist. *For today I want you children to imagine that this is God.* *Make whatever you will. Just know this is God you’re working with.* She handed us our tubs. This excited me. I pushed my fingers in, clasping, feeling as if for an emergent baby’s head. The gummy wad clung to my fingers and I pulled it out of the tub, placing it cautiously on the
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Carrie Rose Guss
desk before me, stumped. You have cookies, Eric? God, yes. Prodigious! Cookies and milk at our age. Anyway. I started tentatively, with frail chipolatas, peanut shapes, feeling guilty that God was in my hands and I could make nothing with Him. The colouring basted my hands in blue, my arms becoming TV-morgue victim. I made a pancake. A snowman. A cube. It was absolute fucking futility. The dead limbs found each other, reformed into a ball again. I punched the mass, and it spread, seeming to moan. Its jaws widened and suddenly I saw something. An oddly nostalgic curve. A gorge. I scooped at it, sculpting steep walls, coaxing up scrub with dirty blue fingernails. I crosshatched a path through the gorge, pushed in some animal tracks. The plasticene was expanding, crawling on hundreds of doughy hands and knees out into the classroom. And I was making the world! And Miss Heath smiled. *Well done Zeke. Keep going.* I was shaking with excitement and moving at the speed of light, carving out blue trees and flowers, rolling long vines that swung back and forth through sunbeams, I was creating roots and stigma, flora, fauna, and I dropped to the ground to paw at it, tilling and making energy, fertility. My hands began to move upwards, patting at mysterious shapes - when did I lose control of what I was creating? What was this Then my hands crawled into my own hands and I felt furious digits scrambling in my brain like flashing fruit machine spools - *ching ching ching ching* *You’re done. You’re knitted, risen like bread - Zeke - you’re made from God.* Then I woke up crud-eyed and cold and this has to be a sign. And since then, in these last ten minutes, your couch feels so good, Eric. Is this pure cotton? It was too real - it was sent to me. No, I don’t mean *I’m* God. God, Eric, you and your literal mind. Feel my hands. Feel my hands. Just for a second. Like ice, right? I never before appreciated your cheap ugly woodchip wallpaper, Eric, and now I see those fingers and tentacles all made from light rubbing at your walls all made from God. Touching your hair is like falling through the shrubbery. This shirt Get off the fucking stairs! Don’t treat me like your crazy Aunt Mae. Eric. Eric. Eric? I’m going back to your dining room table.
Meryl Trussler
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wardr o be st o ries
Woody wears jeans and shoes from a market in China; scarf he knitted himself. “It was meant to be a jumper but then I turned it into a scarf.”
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Elle wears dress by Versace she wore as a bridesmaid. “It was the only thing we could find that looked right. My relatives all clubbed together to buy it for me.”
Ed wears scarf from a charity shop in St. Albans; jacket from Zara. “I bought this jacket because my maths teacher had one just like it and I wanted to be like him.”
Fiona McKenzie
Ollie wears shoes he found; t-shir t he found; shir t he found. “The only thing I’m wearing of my own are my pants.”
Ottilie wears dress bought for her by her twin from a vintage shop in Leeds; hat from a second-hand shop. “This is my Keira Knightley hat, when I walk down the road I feel like I’m in Atonement.”
Katie Warner
Holly wears belt from a car-boot sale somewhere near the seaside in Norfolk; dress passed down from her grandmother. “My nan used to wear this dress in like the sixties.”
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BODIES AS
B AT T L E F I E L D S K orea, Liberia, Somalia, Croatia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Serbia, Kenya, Bangladesh, Rwanda, Bosnia
Herzegovina, Ethiopia, Vietnam…This incomplete list can only begin to do justice to the sheer predictability of the role rape has played in conflict situations. A few examples: In World War II, between 100,000 and 200,000 Korean women were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army. In Bangladesh’s war for independence in 1971, between 250,000 and 400,000 women were raped during the conflict. Between 1991 and 1995 an estimated 50,000 women were raped in Croatia, BosniaHerzegovina, and Serbia. 535,000 women are now repor ted to have been raped during the genocide in Rwanda; and in the current conflict in Kenya, the number of rape victims repor ted by hospitals has doubled. These lists of digits and descriptions are sickening. But statistics don’t offer an accurate picture; they don’t tell the whole story. Rape in warfare is not only the inevitable product of a breakdown of law, not merely the natural behaviour of aggression-fuelled soldiers far from home. It is a tool deliberately employed as a means to achieve a larger political or military goal. Sexual violence is a weapon used on a battlefield of bodies. Within countless conflicts, rape has been an intentional, organized, planned tactical procedure. Its deployment is strategic and systematic, whether for the humiliation of an enemy, the usurpation and colonization of human ‘territory’, the destruction of social structures, the dispersion of communities, or genocide. As American journalist Amy Goodman poignantly asser ts, “We are not talking about normal rapes anymore. We are talking about sexual terrorism.” But sexual warfare doesn’t end when the predator finishes. For each woman and community behind these statistics, there are catastrophic long-term consequences: rape establishes fear and humiliation within the victim and those associated with her; it is an effective strategy for dispersing entire groups because it demoralizes those it encounters. Former Time journalist Alexandra Stiglmayer writes that “the effect of rape is often
to ensure that women and their families will flee and never return…Rapes stifle any wish to return.” Cleansing an area of a group, however, is not only achieved through their exile. Forced pregnancy is another way in which rape is used as a genocidal tool. As Serbian feminist Stasa Zajovic ar ticulates, “The female body as a spoil of war becomes a territory whose borders spread through the ‘bir th of enemy sons.” The woman is no longer a being, but a container utilized by the enemy to infiltrate her ethnic group, a Trojan horse. The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide stipulates that genocide includes the prevention of bir ths and the forcible movement of children of one group to another, effectively achieved by the bir th of an ‘enemy son’. The physical damage many victims experience is often irreparable. A hospital employee in Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) repor ts that “the destruction of a woman’s vagina is now being considered a war injury and recorded by doctors as a crime of combat…We are talking about new surgery to repair the women, because they’re completely destroyed.” This damage has been repor ted on bodies as young as ten months and as old as 73 years. It’s not only the front lines that are infiltrated by sticks, knives, guns, bullets, and molten plastic. The dissemination of disease is a fur ther strategic consequence of this pillaging of the flesh. What better way to penetrate enemy lines and ensure detonation (of the instrument and the biological weapon) than through this violent tactic: open wounds – damaged genital tissue, more specifically - are the most likely cause of an increased risk of HIV transmission. This strategy is made more effective because the infected soldiers in the position of power as aggressors, have better access to care and treatment than their victims. Women have limited access to medical care as victims and members of the targeted group, and are often unable to safely come forward and reveal their abuse. When refugees from the conflict in Rwanda returned, HIV in rural areas increased from three to eleven percent. These contaminated victims were the residual mines that ultimately
BOTCHED AFRICA.
IN WHICH THE CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC IS NEXT TO UGANDA, AND RWANDA AND BURUNDI FAIL TO EXIST Carrie Rose Guss
fueled the AIDS epidemic in Rwanda. Militaries may be able to deny their mandates of these tactics, but what is undisputed is the prevalence of HIV among soldiers. These heroes may be stand-up citizens for their patria, but their honor is clearly not what is erect on the battlefield. The unfor tunate hesitancy by the international community to interfere with or condemn these abuses is inadmissible. Both during and after the genocide in Rwanda, the United Nations and the international community took very little action. The United Nations peacekeeping mission was ordered not to get involved by a mandate made by the UN Security Council in New York. The United States did not only resist becoming involved in the conflict, but did not even acknowledge the conflict as ‘genocide’. According the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, all forms of ‘genocidal rape’ are constituted as crimes. Regardless, rape is rarely recognized as a crime within conflict. Although rape is not formally legal, it occurs and is often ignored because it is not specifically recognized or condemned under domestic and international law, especially within conflict situations. Within the Geneva Convention, for example, rape is not explicitly labeled as a ‘war crime’. Anita Ravi, a specialist in reproductive
health, criticizes this evasion of the sexual violence committed against women. Neglect and inaction fur ther compromise women’s health and well-being by ignoring them, ostracizing them, or even punishing them for the abuses committed against them. The first step necessary for the rehabilitation of these women, and the healing of their communities, is the disclosure of gender based violence and the acknowledgement by communities, and eventually, the international community, of the atrociousness of the violence that occurred. Victims have given some clear signals of strength in the effor ts towards the recognition, repair, and eradication of rape warfare. In Goma, hundreds of women united in the city center, stripped naked, and protested the sexual abuses so many have faced: “If you are going to rape us, rape us now, because this must stop today.” This devastating and sickening violence can no longer be labeled and consequently dismissed as irregular, individual, and inconsequential. It is strategic, systematic, and tactical and those responsible can no longer claim their actions as mistakes. There is no morning after pill for rape warfare. Naomi Klein is inspiringly patronizing when she insightfully points out what is too straight-forward for those with real power to perceive: “When the same mistakes are repeated over and over again, it’s time to consider the possibility that they are not mistakes at all.” Laura Nellums
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Yoni, centre, with Why?
Y oni Wolf Yoni Wolf An Interview
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In naming him so, the parents of Yoni Wolf cannot have expected a normal life from their son. He is living up to their predictions, currently front-man of indie hip-hop crossover band Why?. The band blends the two genres instinctively, as Yoni’s voice hovers between speaking and singing- a polar opposite to the cutting and pasting of a Dizzee verse into an Arctic Monkeys’ song. It is what comes naturally, as he has the C.V. to prove. He was involved in the bir th of the hugely influential hip-hop label Anticon and a member of cLOUDDEAD, possibly the most intriguing alternative hip-hop band there’s ever been. Much about Yoni fits the slacker rock star stereotype: ‘Interview? Oh yeah, I forgot,’ he drawls when I try to get in touch, ‘I’m free though so we might as well do it.’ A character slightly more complicated is betrayed through little quirks: he interrupts
himself mid-flow to exclaim ‘What a beautiful cat.’ With Why? he has just released a new album, Alopecia, that seems set to get his name on a few more tongues. It feels much more deliberate than previous releases with driven and coherent tracks rather than two minute numbers that flit between elevator trance and dir ty suicidal rap. He describes it as having ‘a bare bones honesty in writing where each element occupies a larger space,’ in contrast to the previous record, Elephant Eyelash, that is ‘super filled up’. Despite being simpler, it has an inventiveness lacking in so much modern music. The vocal lines are constantly varying rhythmically, and Yoni has that rapper’s ability to ride the beat so that his timing is effor tless and surprising.
Structurally, though there are recurring themes, the sections vary rather than sticking to the hackneyed verse-chorus-verse technique and have been put together very carefully so that transition makes real musical sense. Lyrics are of great impor tance to Why?. They focus on mundane details and draw from them beauty and profoundness. Rubber Traits gives a recipe for fulfilment, ranging from ‘I wanna dump early then be empty the rest’ to ‘unfold an origami death-mask… pull apar t the double helix like a wish bone.’ Though grounded in personal experience, they are original and striking: ‘If you grew up with white kids who only look at black or Por to Rican porno, so they have something their Dad don’t got then you know where you’re at.’ is very different from your average indie kid’s ‘Got pissed, got off with a girl, ate some chips.’ They also navigate between the cliff of posturing and the whirlpool of cheap angst and reveal an honest and mature discomfor t‘I’m not a lady’s man I’m a landmine,’ he sings in The Vowels pt 2. Yoni is not too for thcoming in explaining his inspiration, merely saying they ‘strike me as something to write down.’ Whereas The Editors and co. are keen to talk endlessly about the meanings of their opaque and empty metaphors, it seems he writes these things because they are the only way to express his ideas. Wolf isn’t your typical hip-hop head and he admits that his love it wasn’t innate, that ‘as a kid I wasn’t really into that stuff, if it didn’t have real instruments I wasn’t interested.’ However, at one summer camp a skater friend suggested he listen to a Midnight Marauders’ album and, he says turning into Jack Black, ‘It fucking blew my mind, I listened to the whole thing through and never looked back.’ For a while he ‘just messed about with a four-track [recording device]’ and it was on meeting maverick MC Doseone he star ted taking things seriously. He saw him freestyling at graffiti festival Scribble Jam and was inspired by how different yet practiced he was and decided to make a go of it himself- youtube ‘doseone peace’ to see Dose attempt to outdo a much bigger and more experienced opponent through a combination of stripping, making weird sex threats and generally unsettling him. A few days later, Yoni ran into Dose at Cincinnati University, which they both attended. He raised the suggestion that the two of them form a band, to which Dose assented saying ‘come round and we’ll fuck
around.’ Wolf turned up that very night armed with bongos and Greenthink was born. He says of this that they would ‘dick around and get stoned’ whist recording stuff but the music is still of wor th. To be sure, the songs are ‘interesting’ but they’re also interesting, combining spacey beats with odd and amusing samples. Things star ted to progress when their agent, from the label Mush, convinced them to form a band with electronic ar tist Odd Nosdam. This really helped the music since he was a lot more knowledgable about the equipment being used, Yoni explains, so they could make the sounds they wanted to. The combination proved potent: the songs jump from theme to theme like a musical stream of consciousness with perfect beats and mesmerising walls of sounds. Vocally, the boundaries of hip-hop were pushed beyond recognition as they rap a cappella, counterpoint and in call and response. The lyrics of Wolf and Doseone are a pleasing combination with the former’s wry observations balancing the insanity of the latter- ‘I taught myself to survive a four story fall, wearing a spacesuit and a dead English man’s socks,’ he claims in one track. The eponymous album that resulted met with much acclaim. Yoni tells me that this was unexpected, ‘we just got a phone-call that star ted “Are you sitting down?”’ The record had been liked by people in the label and was commercially released. It was successful, the most famous album put out by either Mush or Anticon, and has even made it onto the Guardian’s 1000 albums to hear before you die. Despite this, Yoni grew dissatisfied. He says that while touring his first album with Why?, he realised he didn’t really want to do the same thing with the second cLOUDDEAD release, Ten, hinting at band infighting. So he rang up his manager to say ‘Man I don’t want to do this.’ and cLOUDDEAD were no more. With Why? he found a more flexible outfit in which he could ‘try to do something true.’ Though influenced by hip-hop, its clichéd egotism is avoided, ‘It doesn’t seem like real life,’ he explains. ‘I’m not trying to write comic books.’ Now of course every little Jimmy claims possession of an honesty in approach but this conflicts with their copying the same old formulas in every song. Why? does not have great pretensions in its approach to making music, it just has something to sayinspiration for real. www.myspace.com/whyanticon Jackie Jacob-Marlborough
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“The old-fashioned principle of the rich getting richer while those at the bottom of the pile working even harder for even less applies as much in music as it does anywhere else.”
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t has now been over half a year since The Zodiac, which, though far from perfect, many of us had grown to love, became yet another Carling Academy. The Academy Music Group (AMG) which now owns it put £2 million into the project which involved buying up neighbouring buildings and increasing capacity to 1,350. In a typical gesture of industry altruism, they kept a smaller room, just as The Zodiac originally had, “for encouraging and developing new bands and ar tists to play in professionally equipped venues.” A glance at the lineup for the so-called Zodiac Room reveals that these acts which need “developing” are mostly signed to major labels or offshoots. The bands have got more famous, the capacity and turnover has rocketed and the prices have shot up. But at least the toilets are cleaner. The point is that if a company with the financial backing of AMG comes calling to any medium sized independent venue, then it is vir tually impossible to turn them down. And they are continuing to grow. Here’s what we know: in this city alone, two theatres (Old Fire Station and The New Theatre) are intents and purposes owned by one company, Live Nation. Beyond this, Live Nation also holds a majority stake in Mean Fiddler and Festival Republic, meaning that numerous national venues and all major festivals which they do not actually own, such as Reading/Leeds, Glastonbury and Wembley Arena, are in fact run and managed by them. Live Nation, along with Gaiety Investments, acquired a 56% interest in AMG last year, leading to Academy having a vast amount of fiscal muscle, and to Live Nation having control over the company. The obvious point to make here is that the corporate world is now vast, and an inevitable par t of our day to day lives - and indeed our nightlife. But you already know this. Instead, it is wor th thinking beyond: a form of mainstream monopoly and the unavoidable cultural homogenisation that follows is becoming a reality. Therefore, star ting with brand, then the venue management, then the real owners and powerhouses of this business, it is impor tant to understand just what we are dealing with and contributing to every time we go to an Academy venue. So often the target for the disdain and anger of discerning concer t-goers, Carling is the best-selling beer in the UK, with an astonishing 1.126 billion pints a year sold. The reason for this gargantuan figure is the ubiquitous nature of the brand. In Glasgow, both Rangers and Celtic are sponsored by Carling
and they were the original sponsors of that most cynical of money-making organisations (it was formed with the explicit intention of maximising the profits of the country’s largest clubs), the Premiership. Until recently they also sponsored Reading and Leeds, ensuring that only Carling and Strongbow (some concessions for choice must be made) were sold on site, at premium prices. Their par tnership with AMG began in 2003. John Nor thcote, head of AMG, is in fact from Oxford. He left his apprenticeship as an Engineer in order to set up his own record shop in the city and was eventually snapped up and bought out by Richard Branson, working his way up the Virgin music ranks until he became powerful enough to set up his own company, AMG. They now have nine individual Academy venues, all of which are called Carling Academy apar t from Shepherd’s Bush, and are developing three new ones in Brighton, Sheffield and Leeds. He claimed that setting up an Academy in Oxford was par t of a long-term dream of his to give his city a mainstream music venue. Despite Nor thcote’s rhetoric about having “vinyl in his veins” and a duty to provide “an outlet for live music” in otherwise culturally barren towns, everything he says comes with the subtext of his desire to make his company grow and grow. The buzz-word is the “roll-out” of Academy venues. Of course, in an age where 75% of major ar tists’ revenue is accrued through live performance, it is unsurprising that the major area of growth for the music industry is in a company that specialises in it; that company is Live Nation. Clear Channel set up the company in 2005 in order to run live events with a completely separate team, and CEO Michael Rapino has developed the company into the most formidable prospect in the current mainstream music industry, generating $4.4 billion in 2007. It is therefore surely inevitable that Rapino has no interest in signing or promoting young ar tists. Madonna was the first to sign to Live Nation’s new plan of exclusive rights to everything: recordings, concer ts, merchandise, and publicity. She pocketed $120 million as she was lured away from her label Warner Bros. The old-fashioned principle of the rich getting richer while those at the bottom of the pile are forced to work even harder for even less applies in music just as much as it does anywhere else. The aim here is not quite to monopolise, and Rapino does not want to own everything; he just wants to ensure that there is no meaningful opposition, offering vast sums of money to already wealthy superstars, while making cer tain that he is receiving some sor t of profit from the not so successful here in the UK through his company’s majority stake in AMG. The simple fact is that Rapino and his company, though they may not be the industry superpower they eventually will become, are putting in the groundwork to make the mainstream cultural movement the only really significant one, and they will make an absolute for tune out of it This is inevitable large-scale capitalist homogeneity, and it genuinely threatens to irrevocably damage the aspects of music which really matter.
LIVE NATION Lucas Whitworth
Sinem Erkas
15
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