Riffs - Volume 2, Issue 1

Riffs

EXPERIMENTAL WRITING ON POPULAR MUSIC

ISSN 2513-8537 1

Front cover image: Anna Palmer Ian Davies Photo Š 2012 - 2018 | All Rights Reserved

Riffs

Experimental writing on popular music

“THERE is NOTHING wrong with hating ROCK CRITICS”

Of Montreal, 2003

Vol. 2 Issue 1 July 2018

Riffs Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR), Birmingham School of Media, Birmingham City University, 5 Cardigan Street, Birmingham, B4 7BD, UK. Guest Editor

Laura Snapes - Deputy Music Editor, The Guardian

Managing Editors Craig Hamilton Sarah Raine

Editors

Emily Bettison Asya Draganova Stephanie Fremaux Matt Grimes Dave Kane Jasmine Morrison Ed McKeon Hafsa Naveed Richard Stenson Sebastian Svegaard Iain Taylor

Design

Rhiannon Davies Riffs is published twice a year.

A Call for Proposals are circulated before each issue. All written, audio, and visual contributions should be submitted in accordance with the editorial guidelines (provided at the end of this issue).

Send all contributions to info@riffsjournal.org

Copyright information

Contributors hold the copyright to their submitted piece. They may distribute their work in the journal format as they see fit. Contributors also have the right to republish content without permission from the journal.

Riffs: Experimental writing on popular music (online & print) ISSN 2513-8537 Funded by the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR).

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Contents

When Two Worlds Meet • Laura Snapes Brum Creatives Does Riffs • Ian Davies

Anna Palmer - The Write Club Remix • Lyle Bignon and the Write Clubbers Context is Everything • Simon Fox

Remix and Remixing the ‘Stem’s • Craig Hamilton

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Words and Guitar, I Got It • Camilla Aisa

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A Walk Through Music Forums • Santiago Fernández Sánchez

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A New Generation Forever • Aysa Draganova and Neli Nedeva-Voeva

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Welcome to Volume 2, Issue 1 of Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music. This is the third edition of the journal to be published, and I’m very pleased to have been invited to be your guest editor.

For this issue, the Riffs team aimed to explore ideas around the relationships between writers and musicians. As always, they start with a simple prompt. “There is nothing wrong with hating rock critics” is a line from a 2003 song by the band, Of Montreal. Setting my own ego aside, it seemed a useful, simple and – we hoped – provocative way in for prospective contributors. We were not disappointed.

This issue is informally organised into three main sections. Firstly we explore Ian Davies’ Brum Creatives project, which was extended to include the musician and cover star, Anna Palmer. Then we begin the bulk of this issue with a conceptual consideration of the interview process: a cornerstone of music writing that has been reconsidered here through a range of approaches that deconstruct the expectations and execution of the form, in addition to the roles of critic and criticism.

So, earlier this year we asked Birmingham music writer, Lyle Bignon to sit down with Anna Palmer.

Along with Ian Davies who was shooting her as the interview progressed, they had a conversation. Lyle asked questions, Anna answered. For all intents and purposes, this was the beginning of a ‘standard’ interview. This being Riffs, however, the team took that raw material – the transcript and recording – and used it to reconsider the idea of an interview away from its usual ties to promotional activity. As you will see, the Riffs Write Club team took sections of the verbatim interview transcript and – working in blind silos – wrote paragraphs that were then placed together as a composite piece. Building on this idea, two additional engagements with the interview text were undertaken by Simon Fox, a Birmingham-based musician, and our co-Managing Editor, Craig Hamilton.

Both considered the raw materials of the interview through frames they are familiar with. For Simon, the audio became a material to curate into a composition. And for Craig, the raw materials from the interview were considered through his research interests and analysed by machine learning algorithms. Each created new pieces and, alongside the Write Club remix of the interview, each engagement acts to shed light on the processes, tensions, and relationships involved between writer and musician that usually occur in the background, long before the final piece hits the newsstands.

The tensions between musicians/music fans and music journalists/journalism form the focus of the following articles by Camilla Aisa and Santiago Fernández Sánchez, but these distinctions are blurred by the photo essay that ends this issue: a collaborative project between Bulgarian photographer Neli Nedeva-Voeva and popular music researcher Asya Draganova. Through this issue’s provocative prompt – “There is nothing wrong with hating rock critics” – a range of work has emerged that questions and prods the preconceptions we have about processes, tensions, and relationships within writing about music.

Unlike many other academic journals, this issue brings together music writers, academics, professional photographers, and musicians to create and recreate pieces. And as an editorial team, the contradictions and frictions that exist within these overlapping ways of thinking and writing about popular music have not been smoothed over, but left as a range of engagements with a common text or prompt. Even if you don’t agree with an argument or an approach included here, we hope that this issue will challenge you to think a little differently than you did before.

Laura Snapes, Deputy Music Editor, The Guardian 7

W

BRUM CREATIVES DOES RIFFS

hile studying Media and Communication at Birmingham City University from 2005/2008, one of my mini goals after I graduated, was to be in a position to shoot the front cover of a music magazine.

Although I’ve assisted other photographers on cover shoots for NME and Q, and although the Riff’s journal is not currently on wider national release, I’m considering my cover shoot with them a goal achieved. Thank you to the Riffs team for inviting me to shoot Anna for the cover.

Over the last few years I have been working on Brum Creatives, a personal project focusing on creative professionals from Birmingham.

Working on Brum Creatives is highly enjoyable. Not only do I get to shoot an endless stream of interesting local talent but I’m also gaining access to some amazing locations whilst building a body of work that I’m incredibly proud of.

IAN DAVIES

These include a variety of Brummie musicians; Selwyn Brown of Steel Pulse, The Beat’s Ranking Roger, Pop Will Eat Itself and Bentley Rhythm Ace’s Richard March, UB40’s Brian Travers, Neil Jones of Stone Foundation and younger generation talent in Call Me Unique and Xhosa Cole. Other sitters include, Comedians Joe Lycett and Jasper Carrott, Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight and Michelin Chef, Glyn Purnell.

Amerah Saleh

Amerah Saleh is a spoken word artist, workshop facilitator, host, project co-ordinator and outspoken human rights supporter. Amerah won the Art Award at Youth 4 Excellence and become the Overall Youth 4 Excellence Award Winner in 2015.

Amerah champions the Birmingham poetry scene and her writing and performance has been stunning audiences for quite some time. She is an artist who mixes passion with fiery intelligence and an uncanny insight into what it is to be a human.

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Rhino & The Ranters

Rhino and the Ranters is a Cow-Punk Gospel Blues band based in Birmingham. This portrait of lead singer Ryan Webb was used by The Night Owl, a soul/retro club and live music venue in Digbeth, to promote the band. Flier Design: Adam Williams, Creative Director at Bread.

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CallMeUnique

CallMeUnique is a Brummie singer/songwriter heavily influenced by jazz, soul and jazz scat-singing.

She combines this with modern rap and soulful lyrics. She has opened for a range of international artists such as Beyonce and Nicki Minaj.

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Neil Jones

Neil Jones is co-writer and lead singer with Paul Weller produced and championed soul band, Stone Foundation and is originally from Sutton Coldfield. Their recent album, Street Rituals (produced by and featuring Paul Weller) realises Stone Foundation’s vision of a vibrant modern UK soul band, the kind who can play with the best of the genre’s American legends including Bettye LaVette and Stax’s William Bell while never losing their own distinctly British identity – the sound of Memphis, via the Midlands.

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Selwyn Brown

Steel Pulse formed in the Handsworth area of Birmingham in 1975. Selwyn Brown joined in 1976 and was present on their 1978 album Handsworth Revolution, a record that is considered hugely important in the evolution of British reggae.

Over a 41 year career with the band, winning a Grammy Award in 1986 for their album ‘Babylon The Bandit’ and having toured the globe headlining some of the biggest reggae festivals in the world, it’s probably safe to say that Steel Pulse are considered reggae royalty.

They’ve recently had a gold star placed on Broad St in Birmingham to mark their success.

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Pete Hammond

Pete Hammond was the drummer from Birmingham-based post-punk band, Au Pairs. He is now part of Rhino and the Ranters.

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Rachel Mayfield Rachel Mayfield is a singer, writer and mixed media artist from Birmingham. She fronted indie rock band Delicious Monster in the 1990s, and now performs solo. She also curates exhibitions and creates film and art installations.

Her short film, All Lovers Could Be Love featured in the BFI love season in 2015.

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Xhosa Cole

Xhosa Cole is a rising star in the Birmingham jazz scene. Xhosa collaborates with a range of musicians. His music is influenced by urban life, Birmingham architecture, jazz, folk melodies, African-Caribbean and South Asian rhythms, and contemporary urban genres.

Based at his Birmingham studio, Ian Davies produces striking imagery for a range of commercial, portrait, marketing and PR and event assignments.

Ian is a graduate of Birmingham City University.

Clients include Jaguar Land Rover, Bacardi, Global, Emo Ltd, NHS, Prostate Cancer UK and NHS amongst many others.

Ian Davies Photo Š 2012 - 2018 | All Rights Reserved 19

ANNA PALMER The WRITE CLUB Remix This interview was conducted

by Birmingham-based music PR, consultant and journalist Lyle Bignon for this Riffs Vol. 2 Issue 1.

Discussing the topic of music criticism and Anna Palmer’s experience and opinions of being critiqued, this interview was undertaken during the cover shoot and was envisaged as being more of a conversation with disruptions and interventions, inviting contributions from both Anna and Ian Davies, the photographer. This disruption and reversal of the roles of photographer, interviewer, and interviewee facilitated the frank nature of the discussion. The relationships between the three – Anna and Ian had not met before, Lyle ‘There’s already a bit of… pre-emptive – a preconception there, a little pressure on the writer; whereas somebody who’s absolutely their own person, who’s got, you know, a Tumblr with three readers or three subscribers on it, but they can write honestly, they can write ambitiously if they wish…’ Write honestly. About music? Honestly? In my head, Bangs bangs his honesty drums. A demonic smile stretched across his face; he cannot believe that we are still enthralled by this errant foolishness – this junk food for the ears; scoff it down, belch it out, rinse and repeat. Then 20

and Anna had met briefly a number of times and bonded over a shared love of dogs – contributed to the dynamic of the interview.

At another level of translation, the transcript of this interview was then interpreted by seven members of Write Club, an experimental writing group run at Birmingham City University.

The interview below is communicated through seven different fronts, identifying the individual voices of these writers-as-translators.

In negotiating the transcript, processes of critique and of evaluation were made in the omission, emphasis and ornamentation of elements, yet each contributes to a fluid and distinctive recreation of the interview. there’s the weight; the infernal weight of expectation, criticism, ridicule and the rest. Wait for the weight to clog your arteries – merciful release.

And the prying eyes. Before, naivety could be buried; the stylistic tics borrowed and stolen lay undiscovered. Now, it’s shared, shared, shared. It’s out there, before you’ve finished your next coffee or cigarette. Ambition is limited to survival; a desire to not get torn apart by the jackals. Or, in moments of selfish reflection, to not be ignored. Honesty and ambition; unlikely bedfellows.

The first a pretence adopted

to mask the second by many a charlatan. Write honestly.

Ignore the fact that everybody now writes, honestly or otherwise. A sour milk sea of words.

‘Did you say you’ve written a review?’

The café was noisy when I arrived. Looked around, but no tables either. I should have thought about this place, never good for talking, especially on a weekend. Then I spotted her over by corner.

Headphones are on, she’s writing something, coffee cup in her hand, and looking like just don’t distract me.

Oh well, she’d said yes over the phone, and I was here, and she was there, so here goes…

“How did you get involved in writing about these groups?” Laughs. Uh oh.

“I went to a local show of a band that had played for Supersonic before, so it was kind of agreement,” pausing to look at her phone. “I’d come and review the show and it would go up on the Supersonic website and it’s helping us with our content, giving us stuff that keeps things going while we’re working towards the festival.”

Maybe I got this wrong?

Maybe she really didn’t want to talk to me. Pause again, sending a message.

Where were we? “Did you bring a conscious effort to it? I asked. “I quite enjoyed the writing side, and being creative – cause I do like writing and you know I like playing with words, so I found that enjoyable. But there was

an element of detachment in it I think.” Hmm, too much noise. I can’t hear what she’s saying now.

Coffee machine is blasting, speakers are on full bore, and the people next to us are breaking up.

Okay, pause again, glancing at a group of people having a really good time at another table.

“Yeah!”

“Yeah?” “Okay.” “Okay” “And yeah” “Again...”

Things are calmer now, and it’s easier to talk, to say things that matter. Confession. “But the thing is it… wasn’t too far from what I experienced… I’m not saying that I thought it was all shit and I said it was all great.

I still enjoyed all the bands I watched…”

Laughs. Laughs. “…It’s good cause it makes you opinionated and if we didn’t have that, everyone would just be…” I couldn’t think of what to say. Time to go I guess.

"Yeah. But it is important, I think to try and switch off from that inner monologue sometimes and just actually be there in the moment, whether its listening to an album or – I think it’s different actually. Being at a live performance – it’s more important to kind of look around and see the impact it’s having on the –" there is a moment of reflection, then "audience as the whole not just you."

I reflect on the reason we review, our motivations and drives for this work, and AP says that this changes as we

age. We become more cynical.

Maybe energy levels are not the same, I add, and we laugh.

Trying to get myself back on track, I ask about the validity of criticism, and if this changes over different media. Is a Facebook post the same as a newspaper review?

It is a tricky question to answer. "… depends, I think.

It can be, taken on board, but if you’re a working artist, and you’re gonna quote a critic of your work, it’s more likely that you’ll take a review from an actual trusted source as opposed to someone Face-[chuckle]-book status," AP says and follows up with an anecdote about quoting a respected musicians Facebook comment, making it clear that it is not that simple. In the end, it comes down to trust.

Trusted sources and trusted voices.

I ask what the worst piece of criticism AP has received was.

"For someone to say that, it was predictable and boring, cause that’s something that I strive to stray away from. Its formula and following trends.

Uh… yeah, so if, but I guess that’s quite – not to blow my own trumpet – but that’s quite easier for me to say because it’s not often that people would look at our music and see what we do and say it was the same thing that they’ve seen before – which is a good thing. So maybe I need to be more – go a bit deeper and say… on the other side, I don’t want people to think… a – a bad critique would be if someone was, saying the work was pretentious maybe?"

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Yeah. So, it’s the two ends of the spectrum, I think.

Saying, that it was boring or predictable… or basically just giving a kind of, mundane review. If – if somebody critiqued, but they weren’t either that bored or, annoyed!

I want to provoke a strong reaction from somebody critiquing [laughs], that’s the main thing. I don’t want somebody to give a middle of the road critique. And particularly at this point in the real formative years of a career…

Maybe bad publicity to some could be felt as – as – as, you know, not good and not constructive, but I think it is. I think, it’s important to re-evaluate or, if you don’t wanna take on board what that person has said, at least people are talking about you and, care enough to write something in response to what you’ve put out there.

I don’t think I’ve spoken to a lot of the music journalists. I guess probably the perception, is of, there’s a kind of “schmooziness” [laughs] everybody rubbing shoulders with one another, but that’s – that’s probably quite an old-fashioned opinion. That’s – that’s probably more of a general thing with the press. Of journalists in general being very good at networking and very good at publicity, and, but the thing is I’m generalising a bit because I know that there’s a kind of different way of critiquing now. Of being dry and self-deprecating. But the thing is, I’ve not met those people, I’ve only read what they’ve written, but then it 22

gives this impression that this person is gonna be like that in person maybe, and be like less of the kind of schmoozy, networky, stereotype you might have of a music journalist.

Criticism of the criticism: that’s what writing about music is like, always. Because music itself contains (the hardest of) criticism, even when it does not intend to: a criticism to the tangible, the one-dimensional, the trivial. Even when it says nothing new, seemingly, music makes a point out of its own depthlessness. And we get it, on some level, beyond the limit of translation.

Sound is an abstract space. The songs of the everyday are sites of interpretation: individuality, collective, resistance, celebrations living alike.

The criticism, both in music and in writing, can never be complete: like an overheard conversation, full of omissions and subjectivities. In the pauses and full stops – the recurring absence of detail - we find chances for the imagined, the nuance, the hopeful ambiguity. And in this sense, music and writing, writing music, music writing are together in their claim to timelessness. Yeah, I guess that answers your question by raising some more.

aimed at me directly for asking the question. Either way, I took that as a sign that she was cut from a different cloth to other classically trained musicians I had previously interviewed.

That moment opened up a revealing conversation into a dimension faced by all musicians, as to how one's ego deals with criticism from without, and the painful task of self-criticism and reflexivity from within.

‘That’s what I try and do in my music really’, Anna muses, shifting slightly in her seat, ‘- to combine elements of technical ability with the more intuitive and – perhaps popular culture side of music. That’s something we have within our band – we’ve got, you know, those of us who’ve studied, and those of us who’ve just come from the gig culture’.

For Anna, contemporary music writing is ill equipped to capture and express such meetings between pop culture and conservatoire; between the bland mediocrity of light entertainment and the polysyllabic jargon of academia. The key to refreshing music writing, she argues, is in bridging the stylistic gulf between these two poles.

It seemed fitting that we were sat in a quiet corner at the back of the café, as I was somewhat apprehensive about asking her the next question. Considering she had had a Conservatoire education, which in my mind always comes out as ‘posh’ or ‘privileged’ the question could go either way. It could open up a whole new avenue of discussion or completely close down the conversation.

‘What I’d like to see is a change in the way things are reviewed’, she challenges, ‘because if there was more, critique, like academic critiquing of that world, then, you know, the two worlds wouldn’t be so separate. Having the informed, muso side of academia, paired with the entertainment – the emotive, intuitive response.

“So what’s your favourite swear word” I blurt out. “You fucking shit-hole!” she exclaimed immediately and loudly, without a moment's pause or consideration. It led me to wonder if that was her favourite swear word, or a response

‘Now that would be a really interesting critique’.

With thanks to Rhiannon Davies, Jasmine Morrison and Hafsa Naveed for their help in transcribing this interview.

SF TP GJ PX

SFCPLMSRTUSABYFSRFNNB TPFCONTEXTXKISCPMLWQXP GJXAPZEVERYTHINGPQYMC PXQLGFQPLDCKGFTRXABHGSIMON FOX

‘Context is Everything’ plays with the notion of taking quotes out of context; a constant and fundamental issue for journalism, reporting and academic research. Using an audio recording of the Riffs interview with musician and composer Anna Palmer, individual comments and asides that had the potential to be provocative, thought-provoking or amusing were picked out.

Placing them out of their original context, the meaning of each quote subtlely changed. In the original recording, there were qualifying statements, retractions, interaction with the interviewer – all of which have been removed.

By manipulating the recording of the voice, three distinct characters appear; none of whom are recognisably Anna.

As the piece progresses, a conversation between the voices emerges, with the ‘personality’ of each becoming apparent.

Though the meaning and context of each comment remains somewhat ambiguous, the overarching piece drifts further and further from the original interview context and Anna’s original intentions.

In his composition work, Simon is particularly interested in drones, reverberation and textures, using a wide variety of unorthodox instrumentation, often in non-idiomatic ways.

Simon completed his MA in Each voice also triggers a series of Media & Communication at modulators and Birmingham City University in reverberations, forming the 2008. background ambience. The result is a slightly disorienting, meditative sound piece that also retains an element of humour.

Simon Fox is an acoustic meddler, with work ranging from solo songwriting and composition, to more challenging sonic experiments and collaborative performances.

Former leader of Birmingham post-rock pioneers, Grover, his current activity includes (but is not limited to) Some Some Unicorn, a 50-strong free jazz/drone/ electronic cooperative; trombone/ drums noise trio Kendo Nagasaki; and Independent Country, a country band.

Links to work

www.worldoffox.com • www.somesomeunicorn.co.uk •www.kendonagasaki.bandcamp.com •www.independentcountry.org

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R E MI X I N G the R E MI X #NOTES FOR READERS #This experimental writing piece for Riffs Issue 3 is presented as a coding script. #Lines starting with a hashtag symbol (#) mean code on those lines is not run. These lines are usually used to insert instructions and context into coding scripts so that people using the script can understand the steps within. The purpose of this piece is to explore the following question: # A machine will not question whether it is right or wrong to hate a rock critic (unless explicitly ‘told’ to do so), but can machine processing (such as that used in this script) help us think about that question? #The data set and this script has been provided at the following link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/yi8c536uoz1jgqi/AAAHx1rZTzeCuXie9nw66sAka?dl=0 #If you have an installation of the R Software on your machine, you can replicate this work. #STEP 1: READING IN THE DATA the interview (int) or the write up (write)) #The transcript of the original interview between unique(interview$person) Lyle Bignon and Anna #will tell us that the 11 Palmer, along with the remix individuals speaking/ provided by the Riffs team, writing in the dataframe has been inserted into a are: LB: the interviewer; dataframe. This can be read AP: the interviewee; ID: into the R environment as an the photographer; DK / NG object. / SS / SR / AD / MG / IT: the Riffs writers Sys.setlocale(‘LC_ALL’,’C’) ## - see http://r.789695. #To create some simple vin4.nabble.com/Strings-from- sualisations we can first different-locale-td3023176. must count the words and html characters in each entry: library(xlsx) interview <read. xlsx(‘riffs.xlsx’, 1, stringsAsFactors = F) dim(interview) #the database has 259 observations (rows), and 4 variables (columns) names(interview) #the 4 variables are:item_ num (the sequential number of each item); person (initials identifying the speaker/writer); text (the words said/written); int_write (whether the text is from

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library(magrittr) library(dplyr) interview$chars <sapply(interview$text, function(x) nchar(x)) interview$words <sapply(strsplit (interview$text, “\\s+”), length) #In order to perform some exploratory automated textual analysis, we need to prepare the data by first removing all punctuation, whitespace, and by stemming all words to their

roots removing commonly occurring ‘stopwords’, and then creating a Document Term Matrix library(tm) library(stringr) story_stem <- str_replace_ all(interview$text, “@”, “”) story_stem <- str_replace_ all(story_stem, “@\\w+”, “”) story_stem <stemDocument(story_stem) story_stem <- removePunctuation(story_stem) story_stem <- tolower(story_stem) story_stem <stripWhitespace(story_stem) interview <- cbind(interview, story_stem) dtm.control <- list( tolower = T, removePunctuation =T, removeNumbers = T, stopwords = c(stopwords(“english”)), stemming = T, wordLengths = c(3,Inf), weighting = weightTf )

a

and

‘ S T E MS ‘

but eventually the #We can now split the interviewee (red line) Interview data frame into began to talk more. two parts: A brief lull in transcript <- interview %>% conversation between the filter(int_write == “int”) two can be see by the interjection of the # = only the entries from photographer (green). the transcript This is perhaps what we may expect to see from an writeup <- interview %>% interview process. filter(int_write == “write”) The interviewer sets the # = and only those from the scene, gets the write up conversation going, before eventually settling back library(ggplot2) and letting their subject talk. #2: FIRST QUESTION: #We may also want to look at #Looking firstly at the the words each person used.

interview transcript, we may want to look at who talked, and when by visualising those word counts across the interview transcript %>% ggplot() + aes(x = item_num, y = words, colour = person) + geom_line() #We can see from the visualisation above that the interviewer (blue line) talked a lot more at the beginning of the interview,

We can do this in the first instance with some basic counts. We first create document term matrices for both the transcript and write up elements.

CRAIG HAMILTON #this creates a DTM of the transcript that has 243 entries, and 681 terms matrix <- as.matrix(dtm_ transcript) #to get the frequency of occurrence of each word in the corpus, we simply sum over all rows to give column sums: freq <- colSums(as.matrix(dtm_transcript)) #and then visualise these in descending order wf=data.frame(term=names(freq),occurrences=freq) ggplot(subset(wf, freq>15), aes(x = reorder(term, occurrences), y = occurrences, fill = occurrences)) + geom_bar(stat=”identity”) + theme(axis.text.x=element_ text(angle=90, hjust=1)) + coord_flip(xlim = NULL, ylim = NULL, expand = TRUE) + scale_fill_gradient2(low = “white”, mid = “pink”, high = “red”, limits = c(5, 75)) #We can also create a wordcloud of what was said between interview and interviewee. library(wordcloud) set.seed(42) wordcloud(names(freq),freq,min.freq=3,colors=brewer.pal(6,”PiYG”))

dtm_transcript <- DocumentTermMatrix(Corpus(VectorSource(transcript$story_ stem)), control = dtm.control) dtm_transcript <removeSparseTerms(dtm_transcript,0.999) dim(dtm_transcript)

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#Finally, we can run ‘Sentiment Analysis’ to get some idea of the emotional valence of the conversation during the interview, and during the write up. ###SENTIMENT ANALYSIS library(syuzhet) library(scales) library(reshape2) library(dplyr) mySentiment <terview$text)

get_nrc_sentiment(in-

head(mySentiment, 5) interview <- cbind(interview, mySentiment) syuzhet_sent <- get_sentiment(interview$text, method = “syuzhet”)

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interview <- cbind(interview, syuzhet_sent) bing_sent <get_sentiment(interview$text, method = “bing”) interview <- cbind(interview, bing_sent) afinn_sent <get_sentiment(interview$text, method = “afinn”) interview <- cbind(interview, afinn_sent) nrc_sent <get_sentiment(interview$text, method = “nrc”) interview <- cbind(interview, nrc_sent) sent_scores <- c(syuzhet_ sent + bing_sent + afinn_ sent + nrc_sent) interview <- mutate(interview, sent_score_ave = sent_scores/4) interview <- mutate(interview, sent_by_word = sent_score_ave/words) #By visualising these results…. interview %>% filter(int_write == “int”) %>% ggplot() + aes(item_num, sent_ score_ave, colour = person) + geom_line() + xlab(“Item number”) + ylab(“Sentiment Score”) interview %>% filter(int_write == “write”) %>% ggplot() + aes(item_num, sent_ score_ave) +

geom_line() + xlab(“Item number”) + #...We can see that – according to the combined scores of a number of different Sentiment Analysis algorithms, at least – the ‘mood’ of the conversation between interviewer and interviewee fell during the course of the process.

Interestingly, the Write-Club write up tended to follow and pick up on these ups and downs.

The ‘highs’ of the early part of the interview, then the fall during the second half, and finally the positive note struck at the end, are all reflected in these numbers.

Craig Hamilton is a Research Fellow in School of Media at Birmingham City University.

the

His research explores contemporary popular music reception practices and the role of digital, data and Internet technologies on the business and cultural environments of music consumption.

This research is built around the development of The Harkive Project (www. harkive.org), an online, crowd-sourced method of generating data from music consumers about their everyday relationships with music and technology.

Craig is the co-Managing Editor of Riffs: Experimental Research on Popular Music.

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WORDS AND GUITAR, I GOT IT Recollections,excerpts, reflections and lyrics on two countercultural eras and their defiance

Camilla Aisa

One of the two main focuses of this article is the production of music zines. Reflecting the format and aesthetic of zines, the writing has not been provided with notes - they would have been seemingly endless, possibly distracting. Instead, a list of cited works and a bibliography can be found jointly in the last page. Also, typos and grammatical errors of cited works have been left as they were in original publications. era right about to dawn.

We’ll call this place in time Place #1.

Now picture this: the States, again. The Pacific Northwest, mainly.

Survivors of the 80s, of the Reagan presidency, Words and guitar: now boiling under Bush.

A Spotify playlist by the author New peaks for a War on – a soundtrack to the essay that Drugs and last vestiges of follows a Cold War. For students Picture this: United States, and outcasts, you’d say, California, possibly San there’s punk rock. And yes, Francisco. But, most punk rock is here, it’s been importantly, the mid around for more than a de1960s. Just out of the Eicade now, and it still seems senhower era, of like the obvious answer.

McCarthyism, of the plas- But punk rock is looking tic 50s. Vietnam and Seldifferent, it’s all muscles ma’s Bloody Sunday. The by now. It’s gaining immaculate violence and losing American white fence is inventiveness. We’ll call slowly starting to crumble. this place in time Place #2.

LSD is here, it’s new, both mysterious and tempting Now, I’d like you to keep - above all, it’s not illegal. your feet in these two Not yet. And rock and roll different places at the is giving signs that are same time. We’ll go back louder and louder, its most and forth, we’ll alternate absurd and prosperous glances. 60s and 90s and 28

one more time 60s, and then again 90s. I’m not asking you to draw parallels, I’m just setting the scene for a double, synchronous trip.

Place #1: Consider all we said so far. Now locate it in the intersection of Haight Street and Ashbury Street.

Colourful Victorian houses, as beautiful as cheap, and the very first head shops.

Quicksilver Messenger Service and Moby Grape are rehearsing a few streets away, while over here Janis Joplin is joining Big Brother & the Holding Company. The Grateful Dead have turned 710a Ashbury Street into a communal house, while members of the Jefferson Airplane share a majestic mansion at 2400 Fulton Street. You see the greatest new bands in the world (plus astonishing light shows) at the Avalon Ballroom, or the Fillmore, or the Matrix. There are

,

kaleidoscopic posters, split fountain prints, tie-dye shirts everywhere. The Diggers give out food, plays and parties for free. It’s a circus, isn’t it? One of its prominent contortionists, Allen Cohen, will eventually write: “the media loved the circus but were confused by it”.

Place #2: The exact date is 1990, and if you find yourself around the Evergreen State College (Olympia, Washington) you might be given a copy of a new zine, Bikini Kill - named after the emerging, loud Kathleen Hanna fronted band. One of the first pages catches your eye: “I’m so sure that lots of girls are also in revolution and we want to find them.

Sure our revolution has a lot to do with making ourselves important enough to start a revolution, but we also don’t care about this… Because what makes us feel good without hurting others IS good.

This society isn’t my society cuz this society hates women and I don’t.

This society doesn’t want us girls to feel happy or powerful in anyway”. Punk rock (call it hardcore, call it the moshing parade) also seems to hate women.

But there’s a bunch of girls ready to pick up a guitar and start screaming about it. And writing about it.

And supporting others who will sing and write about it.

Let’s go back to the zine, look at the end of the page: “ENCOURAGEMENT

IN

THE FACE OF INSECURITY is a slogan of the revolution”.

Place #1: Remember Allen Cohen? One morning he dreams of a rainbow newspaper being read all over the world. Shortly after that his dream becomes reality and the San Francisco Oracle comes to life. Many other cities in the psychedelic States welcome their own oracles: people want to read about rock music without the usual paternalism, they want to discuss the mind-opening properties of acid and find visionary works of art in the centerfold of their newspaper. It seems like all they’re interested in cannot be found in existing magazines and papers. According to Cohen, “the newspaper format was one of the vehicles of the oppressions and materialism of the past”.

When you realize that, when you believe that, what do you do? Do you find a new vehicle, your own invention full of potential? Of course, and here’s rock psychedelic rock - for you.

But you can’t resist the incomparable pleasure of taking possession of that very format, subvert its very principles and create a revolution out of it.

Place #2: Zines always have that appearance, it always looks like they

have just been invented.

It’s the never-aging medium, and you feel tricked to believe you’re one of the first to know.

But disillusioned connoisseurs will know zines were really that young and that new perhaps for our grandparents only. They came to life in the 1920s thanks to science fiction fans, they came of age with Dada, Fluxus and the Beat Generation, they flirted with politics incessantly, and they found their ultimate vocation with punk. Since the 1920s, they have been summoning geeks, outcasts, misfits and underground agitators.

Riot Grrrls add two more definitions to the mix; they call themselves dorks, bidding farewell to the good old punk cool, and they profess to be common, not special.

Place #1: The mightiest principle of traditional journalism is perhaps that of objectivity. Or, of course, that’s what traditional journalism wants us to believe. Likewise, the inherent purpose of, say, posters is to give out a piece of information, to communicate something specific. Now, the hippies couldn’t care less for any of this. What is the truth, if there is one?, they keep asking themselves.

There’s no such thing as THE truth, acid trips suggest: there’s yours, there’s mine, there are millions of 29

angles and the boundaries that keep them distinct are not as defined and certain as we were taught to believe. Here they come, then: the newborn psychedelic newspapers favour personality over rigor, curiosity over gloat, stimulating the expression of individualities and undercurrents that reflect a living community of originals and originators. Similarly, \psychedelic posters bury the informations they're supposed to thoroughly give under an hypnotic sea of colours and shapes.

Objectivity finally finds itself unclaimed. And for the first time, author and user overlap.

Place #2: Perhaps this is the great distinction of the riot grrrl zine, what really sets apart the 90s Pacific Northwest zine from the illustrious tradition of punk zines. If you read one and you find yourself thinking “I could do that”, here it is.

That's the point. With punk zines you never had to be particularly gifted either, of course, but now you're not supposed to be well-connected or knowledgeable either. The hectic music geeks you found at every possible underground concert since the late 1970s are old history. Knowing every single band of your scene of choice is old history. It really doesn't matter. What really matters, Chainsaw and Jigsaw and Bikini Kill and Girl Germs suggest, is your 30

own voice. You set scene.

Your little, utterly crucial vision of the world. Are you special? Yes obviously personality cannot be shared, or replicated - and no, anyone could do it. It's all about concocting a revolution that is a thousand voices strong. The second issue of Bikini Kill provides a clear manifesto: “BECAUSE us girls crave records and books and fanzines that speak to US that WE feel included in and can understand in our own ways. BECAUSE we wanna make it easier for girls to see/hear each other’s work so that we can share strategies and criticize-applaud each other. BECAUSE we must take over the means of production in order to create our own meanings.

BECAUSE viewing your work as being connected to our girlfriends-politics-real lives is essential if we are gonna figure out how what we are doing impacts, reflects, perpetuates, or DISRUPTS the status quo”.

Place #1: So, how do the intrigued media narrate the circus? Well, first of all we will have to ask ourselves when the intrigued media starts narrating the circus.

And the answer is after a while. The mainstream seems to love being late, and the Haight Ashbury revolution keeps rolling almost on the sly in its most decisive years.

Newsweek, Life, Time, Look, all eventually arrive though. They report news of an incipient Summer of Love where, they imply, drugs will abound and the streets of San Francisco will open their arms to any rambler’s twisted desire. And they actually succeed in merchandising peace & love. In June “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” conquers the charts: its author is John Phillips, the South Carolina born leader of the Los Angeles based Mamas & Papas, while its singer is Phillips’ old friend Scott McKenzie, born in Florida, met in Virginia.

The infamous Summer of Love, meanwhile, ends up being a colossal disaster for the original spirit of the Haight. The Death of the Hippie is soon announced: “The media cast nets, create bags for the identity-hungry to climb in. Your face on TV, your style immortalized without soul in the captions of the Chronicle. NBC says you exist, ergo I am.

Narcissism, plebeian vanity. The victim immortalized. Black power, its transcendent threat of white massacre the creation of media-whore obsequious bowers to the public mind which they recreate because they too have nothing to create and the reflections run in perpetual anal circuits and the FREE MAN vomits his images and laughs in the clouds because he is the great evader, the animal who haunts the jungles of image and sees no shadow, only the hunter's gun and knows sahib is too slow and he flexes his strong loins of FREE and is gone again from the nets. They fall on empty air and waft helplessly to the grass”.

Place #2: It’s an anonymous flyer, undated. “What is a riot grrrl?”, it asks loud and clear on the top. Most importantly, it argues: “BECAUSE in every form of media I see us/myself slapped, decapitated laughed at, objectified, raped, trivialized, pushed, ignored, stereotyped, kicked, scorned, molested, silenced, invalidated, knifed, shot, chocked (sic), and killed”.

Place #1: “Hallucinogenic drugs like marijuana and LSD, they believe, are the knives that cut those knots.

Once unleashed, most hippies first become insatiable hedonists, smoking and eating whatever can turn them on

in a hurry; making love, however and with whomever they can find (including "group grope") that "feels good and doesn't hurt anybody"; saturating the senses with color and music, light and motion until, like an overloaded circuit, the mind blows into the never-never land of selflessness. The middleclass ego, to the hippie, is the jacket that makes society straight, and must be destroyed before freedom can be achieved” - “Youth: The Hippies”, Time Magazine, July 1967.

Place #2: “They do things like scrawl SLUT and RAPE across their torsos before gigs, produce fanzines with names like Girl Germs and hate the media's guts. They're called Riot Grrrls and they've come for your daughters” - Kim France, Rolling Stone, 1993.

INTERLUDE: Imagine what it is like to be portrayed for what you're not. Or just by the appearance of it. Or not portrayed at all - just trivialized, when you cannot be unseen. An esoteric fanatic with flower beads, an angry failed paper doll.

Questions are being asked about why you don't follow the norm, why you don't make sense, or smile more. What do you do? The obvious answer would be: you complain.

Cry, weep for

incomprehension. Our two places suggest a different solution, though. Perhaps, you tell you own story, your way. And perhaps, you disrupt your detractor’s own medium. For good.

Place #1: The psychedelic newspaper is ready to permanently divorce its content from the conventions of traditional journalism.

Be ready to say goodbye to censorship, and even to editing.

Take the Oracle’s interviews, for example: they are all printed in full, except for stuttering and repetition; “all Oracle interviews are printed as they were spoken even if we had to continue them in small print to fit. Interested readers might have to squint, but what they read was everything that was said, warts and all”, Allen Cohen would later recall in 1990. As for ads, underground papers - in 1967 finally allied as the Underground Press Syndicate - will freely choose whether to accept a proposed ad or not. Books and LPs will be favoured - promoting them is still a good way to “undermine the corporate state”.

Place #2: The unknown author of the flyer we were reading earlier concludes: “BECAUSE every time we pick up 31

a pen, or an instrument, or get anything done, we are creating the revolution. We ARE the revolution”. And the unthinkable is about to happen: we’ll stop talking to the media at once. (See? It's so convincing I'm starting to write in first person - and I am writing for a journal). A media blackout is initiated in 1992: riot grrrls don't want to be interviewed by the press or photographed by the mainstream media. Three years later, Sleater-Kinney sings: “Sold out do do you wanna it/ On a magazine cover / Take it, its my body / Oooh, oooh I don't wanna”. Meanwhile, zines are being copiously produced.

is important to me. RIOT GRRRL is a total concept. There is no editor and there is no concrete vision or expectation, or there shouldn't be. In the tradition of the NEW Modrockers and Hypocrobats, we riot grrrl are not aligning ourselves with any one position or consensus, because in all likelihood we don't agree. One concrete thing we do agree on so far is that it's cool/fun to have a place we're we can express ourselves that won't be censored, and we're we can feel safe to bring up issues that are important to us. To me riot grrrl along with other angry grrrl zine’s, exists in the face of boring nowheresville fanzinedom to confront as well as to be something fun. Those of us who have been working Place #1: We witness the ef- on these past four facement of another issues might not do them journalistic dogma: the again, but this name us bit editorial line. Messiness is copywrited (sic)…so take the the word, as a plethora of ball and run with it!”. interests, undercurrents, curiosities flourish through Place #1: And then... the pages of psychedelic “Funeral notice. HIPPIE. In papers. After all, the Haight Ashbury District of psychedelic rock is busy this city, Hippie, devoted son mixing folk with electric of Mass Media”. The marvels, eastern un-devoted sons and influences and blues daughters find new homes, or adaptations, theremins new skies, and mainly leave and sitars. As the first vol- San Francisco to the ume of the Haight Ashbury ramblers. It's the beginning of Tribune commences, the end, somebody says. “incomplete and inade- Maybe it's all because of quate, but a good Altamont. Or maybe it just beginning”. Meanwhile, the seems like it isn't worth it Berkeley Barb alternates anymore, without Janis. articles on “How to Handle Maybe those two men on the Your Friendly Neiborhood pickup truck at the end of Fink” to passionate Easy Rider had to seemingly political rants. win.

Place #2: “Clarity of agenda Place #2: And then... is not really something that “It's a privilege, it’s a 32

background / It’s everything that I own / It's thinking I'm the hero of this pretty white song / It’s thinking I'm the hero of this pretty white world. / White girl / I want to change the world / But I won't change anything / Unless I change my racist self”.

(IN)CONCLUSION: Battling with the media isn't fascinating per se. Long haired hippies and angry girls, they both led their own battles picking the possibility of an innovative self-narrative as their weapon of choice. When all the annalists you see are telling a wrongful, obtusely biased story, you tell your story yourself, you become the historian - they seem to recommend. And time, time seems to prove them right. Fifty years ago they had to face a disdainful Times Magazine, twenty-five years ago they were minimized by a jaundiced Rolling Stone. This is when it gets fascinating: fifty or twenty-five years later, I’m not studying psychedelic culture or the riot grrrl movement through the outworn pages of old Times and Rolling Stone magazines.

I'm listening to the very voices of artists, visionaries, activists and common participants of those communities. Of course, that makes the possible investigations almost endless.

How can you read, or let alone retrieve, every page of every 90s grrrl zine, when everyone - anyone - was being encouraged to produce their own? And above all - isn't this beautiful? You grapple as

much as you can, you don’t keep your hunger quiet. And you follow stories - wherever they go-, even when they take the form of messy parallel recounts of cultural eras that seem so distant.

faced have not been resolved. The problems are still out there But the temptation of - I think we should write, sing confronting them with about it. nothing but complaints is “Words and guitar, I want it weaker. Those stories have Words and guitar, I got it proved action - creative, Way way too loud, I want it relentless, ingenious action - is Words and guitar” much more satisfying, and Here’s Place #3, then. London, effective. A few methods have (Sleater -Kinney, Words and 2018. Let’s say it, the problems been illustrated, a few visions Guitar, 1997) Place #1 and Place #2 have have been shared.

CITED WORKS / BIBLIOGRAPHY Cohen, A. (1990). The San Francisco oracle: A brief history. Serials Review, 16(1), pp.13-46.

Fateman, J. and Hanna, K. (2015). The riot grrrl collection. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York.

MOIST, K. (2010). Visualizing Postmodernity: 1960s Rock Concert Posters and Contemporary American Culture. The Journal of Popular Culture, 43(6), pp.1242-1265.

Perry, C. and Weir, B. (2005). The Haight Ashbury. New York: Wenner.

Seeger, A. (1983). The Berkeley barb. New York, N.Y.: Irvington Publishers.

Spencer, A. (2008). DIY: the rise of lo-fi culture. London: Marion Boyars TIME.com. (2018). Youth: The Hippies. [online] Available at: http://content.time.com/time/ magazine/article/0,9171,899555,00.html [Accessed 10 Jan. 2018].

SONGS: Heavens to Betsy, “White Girl”, from Calculated, 1994 Sleater-Kinney, “Sold Out”, from Sleater-Kinney, 1995 Sleater-Kinney, “Words and Guitars”, from Dig Me Out, 1997

Camilla Aisa is an MA candidate at London South Bank University. She is currently completing a project on psychedelic rock and psychedelic visual arts and is the creator of the blog Feed Your Head – psychedelic side trips.

Camilla previously graduated with a degree in Art History and a thesis on psychedelic art. She has written for different websites and social media pages, both for music artists and record companies. She plays bass and is an avid music researcher (and, above all, music lover), her favourite genres being psychedelic rock, modern-day all-female trios and bands of sisters. camillaaisa@gmail.com aisac@lsbu.ac.uk www.psychadelicsidetrips.wordpress.com

33

A Walk Through Music Forums And get AP, UPI, and Reuters To tell everybody, news news” Husker Dü - Divide and Conquer (1985) We are the children of the internet. We were raised on a diet of a trolls, sockpuppets, avatars and signatures. We stayed awake until 4 am discussing why Radiohead's In Rainbows was a step beyond or a living proof of their decadence.

Rock critics were a matter of criticism themselves, sometimes an argument of authority, sometimes a laughing stock. In internet forums, anyone could become a respected expert and a followed creator of opinion, subverting the canon of rock music that has been vertically imposed by critics in mass media (Jones, 34

2008).

For this piece of work, I draw on my (subjective) memories of belonging to Spanish music-related internet communities, such as message boards, during the noughties. I scrutinise how these living entities that are forums reproduce or rebel against the discourse of the mainstream critics, how they shape tastes, how its members became what they (we) are as music fans, and how the fragility of internet servers erase the memories of a collective virtual experience.

First there was Google. I barely remember how the world was before Google. I was born in 1991, the year that punk broke1. By the time I reached the age in which I developed a conscious awareness of the world of sounds that surrounded me punk was well buried, but I didn't know it. I date the beginning of my obsession

with pop music, as, more or less, 2004. There was not an epiphany. The majority of autobiographical narratives relating to musicians, critics or fans of pop music mention a magic moment when something clicks inside a teenage mind. Years ago the Spanish music journalist Nando Cruz had the habit of asking all his interviewees a very simple question: “Why do you make music?”.

Depending on the generation the majority of the musicians, tended to mention a song on the radio, a Top of the Pops broadcast or a recorded cassette tape that a friend gave them. For me, there was not a single life-changing moment. My approach to pop music was gradual and cerebral.

It was through words, and not through sounds. It was reading music forums.

One of the biggest paradoxes of the –let’s call

Santiago Fernández Sánchez

“We’ll invent some new computers Link up the global village

it- virtual era is that, by having access to an infinite archive of the history of pop music, one can virtually live in a mental 1967, 1979 or 1994, depending on your choice. You can immerse yourself in the back catalogue of Shed Seven in a way that no-one could even dream of (or fear) in 1996.

Simon Reynolds (2010) famously analyzed this phenomena using the concept of retromania, and while his words addressed the subsequent revivals of diverse underground genres (from post-punk to shoegaze) in the noughties, they perfectly describe the general discourse in music forums around 2005. I registered for the first time on elotrolado.net in May 2005. I was 13 years old.

After years of internet presence, I have been able to perceive changes in the ways of expression.

These changes were not just due to the appearance of new platforms, the take up of social media or generational gaps. Between 2005 and now, the amount of internet users in Spain has tripled. In the mid noughties, users were still virtually internet illiterates, precisely because there were not any rules on how to express yourself. The grammar of internet discussion on music (or any other topic) was being written, while the discussions were happening. Users were identified with a nickname, an avatar (a small image appearing at the left of the screen) and a signature (which could be either an image, a short text or both). Holtz (2012) dismisses this visual information as irrelevant for the study of forums,

but in the context of the forum itself it was a essential signifier to introduce yourself. In similar ways to the ways youth subcultures used clothes as an essential signifier, forum users needed these to explain who they were and establish status within the online community.

2

2004 had been the year of the release of “Gasolina”, an extremely successful reggaeton single by Daddy Yankee. Gallucci (2008) defines the essence of the genre as highly sexual lyrics over repetitive, aggressive beats.

Reggaeton has proved resistant to the constant backlash of specialized music media. The harsh media reception of the genre has even been analyzed as a racist expression by Lenore (2014).

I heard reggaeton for the first time, as did many people in my generation, from the giant speakers of the bumper cars in a small town fair: reggaeton has been, since its inception in Spain, a music for celebrations and festivals. Music forums emulated the canonical values of rock (Jones, 2008): complexity was celebrated over simplicity, technique was regarded as the objective measure of quality in music3. Metal and rock were celebrated, rap was judged as poetry, the “disco sucks” discourse of Steve Dahl was still alive. The arrival of reggaeton was consensually judged as a disaster, an evident proof of the terrible decadence of music since the golden age of rock music, the purest, the “most authentic” (using Frith’s (1996) terms).

“Reggaetonto” (reggaedumb) was coined as the term to define the new genre, and it was depicted with graphic emoticons that expressed the shared feelings for a phenomenon that did not fit the rockist canon. We learnt how to hate reggaeton without listening to it. It was not “real music”. It had “no instruments”.

“I heard reggaeton for the first time... from the giant speakers of the bumper cars in a small town fair”

35

4 Lists are an obsession of rock culture. Anyone who has been a regular reader of any music zine has been exposed to a wide variety of lists. Von Appen and Doehring (2006), in their analysis of the “best albums ever” lists from major music magazines found out a huge amount of coincidences, regardless of the geographical or temporal origin of each list. In my forum we decided to create our own list. We fought, we insulted each other, some people were even banned.

This was the result: 1.The Beatles

Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

2.Pink Floyd

Wish You Were Here

3. Led Zeppelin IV

4.Pink Floyd

Dark Side of the Moon

5.Queen

A Night at the Opera

6.Dire Straits Brothers in Arms

7.The Beatles Abbey Road

8.Nirvana Nevermind

9.Guns N' Roses

Appetite For Destruction

10.Iron Maiden

The Number of the Beast

36

Democracy had fallen in a repetition of the most obvious stereotypes of rock lists. We mimicked the rock critics we used to criticize.

The (poor) dialectic struggle in which we were immersed used to end up using critics as an authority argument.

Music forums (which were overwhelmingly masculine) were a mixture of a community and a competition, of saccharine and testosterone. There was an element of competition in the discussions and critics were our guides in that macho world. We used critics as an objective proof of how our masculine tastes were superior to those genres that were dismissed as “for girls”.

Eurodance, “flamenquito” or reggaeton were not part of the critic canon, so they were instantly regarded as second-tier styles of music.

By the year 2010 my forum had declined. On one hand social media had changed, and platforms such as Facebook or Twitter had become central to virtual interaction. On the other hand, discussions in forums had become boringly circular, and the majority of the users had sophisticated their taste in peculiar ways, by overcoming references that seemed too “basic” or, in internet slang, “normie”.

Exclusivity and rarity of artists were being used as an argument of authority, as a way to climb in the forum hierarchie. The Beatles, Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin had become too obvious.

We can say that Rolling Stones were just another British R&B band, you can say it if you are aware of the Birds, Downliner Sect, The Pretty Things, Remo Four, The Yardbirds, Small Faces, Chris Farlowe, Georgie Fame, etc.5 We needed to overcome the critics, we had to invent our own canon, express a perfect individuality which showed how far we were from our previous arguments of authority. We had to show that we had become diggers, unique individuals.

Japanese psychedelia, harsh noise, tropicalia.

Obviously Phil Ochs is much better than Dylan6 We had become the online, and unpaid, parody of a rock critic.

Again.

And that is how we learnt to love music.

y

Bibliography

Frith, S. (1996). Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Holtz, P., Kronberger, N., & Wagner, W. (2012). Analyzing internet forums: A practical guide.

Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications, 24(2), 55-66.

Jones, CW. (2008). The Rock Canon: Canonical Values in the Reception of Rock Albums Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series.

Lenore, V. (2014). Indies, Hipsters y Gafapastas. Madrid: Capitán Swing Reynolds, S. (2011). Retromania: Pop culture's addiction to its own past. London: Faber & Faber.

Styvén, M. (2007). The Intangibility of Music in the Internet Age. Popular Music & Society. 30.

53-74.

Von Appen, R., & Doehring, A. (2006). Nevermind the Beatles, Here's Exile 61 and Nico: 'The Top 100 Records of All Time': A Canon of Pop and Rock Albums from a Sociological and an Aesthetic Perspective. Popular Music, 25(1), 21-39.

Waldron, J. (2013). YouTube, fanvids, forums, vlogs and blogs: Informal music learning in a convergent on- and offline music community. International Journal of Music Education. 31.

91-105.

Santiago Fernández Sánchez currently studies the MA programme in Hispanic Studies at the University of Sheffield, focusing his research in the intersection between Spanish pop music and politics. He has worked in several roles in secondary education and music journalism. He also plays in the indie pop band Autoescuela.

[1]This is a reference to the VHS box set directed by Dave Markey, 1991: The Year Punk Broke.

[2](online)https://www.elotrolado.net/hilo_canciones-de-reggaeton-favoritas_898356[seen 5th May 2018] Creative Commons Licence.

[3]Examples of such artists are Joe Satriani or Steve Vai. These musicians, in addition to many others, were praised by musicians and fans alike because "objectively" they had a better technique than no-one else, as they could play more musical notes than other guitar players in the same amount of time.

[4](online) https://www.elotrolado.net/hilo_a-nadie-le-gusta-el-reggaeton_554600[seen 5th May 2018] Creative Commons Licence.

[5](online) https://www.elotrolado.net/hilo_grupos-sobrevalorados_1228180_s150[seen 5th May 2018] [6](online) https://www.elotrolado.net/hilo_vuestra-cancion-favorita-de-bob-dylan-de-los60_1798732[seen 5th May 2018]

37

A New Generation Forever The (Bulgarian) revolution goes on

Photographs: Neli Nedeva-Voeva Words and translation: Asya Draganova

The 1980s: A time I will never be able to remember, yet, at the same time, will always remain incapable of forgetting, as it keeps capturing my imagination.

I believe this might be true for a whole generation of Bulgarians: us, the “flowers from the ending of the 80s” to cite Vasil Gurov’s lyrics from new wave band Revu. We grew and blossomed in the difficult transitional era that followed the communist regime. The decade which ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, to many, 38

has an aura of authentic rebellion and struggle for social change; it has become, in the context of Bulgaria, inextricably linked with the emergence of prominent, distinct local subcultural scenes.

Sights and sounds contribute to the character of place. On a warm summer night, as you walk on the beach somewhere on the western coast of the Black Sea, or through the parks of Sofia or any other Bulgarian city, you are guaranteed to come across many free-spirited

young (and maybe not-soyoung) people with guitars, goblet drums, and unapologetically loud singing voices. Many, in these situations of spontaneous expression, perform contemporary “classics” by bands and artists like Nova Generatsia (New Generation), Revu, Klas, Kontrol, Vasko the Patch, Milena Slavova, and others, who emerged in the 1980s with their sounds and lyrics, incongruous to the cultural politics of the then-totalitarian Bulgarian state. Not only have many of these artists continued to create music, they have also

participated in the construction of cultural and aesthetic continuities, influencing the formulation and consolidation of diverse contemporary Bulgarian music scenes within the broader constellation of rock genres.

Imagination can be provoked and nurtured in all sorts of ways. The sounds and words of Bulgarian subcultural scenes of the 1980s are rich with the metaphorical illustrations of alienation from the repressive realities of Eastern Bloc Bulgaria, and with the outlines of a new, culturally different, and rebellious generation. This generation had an avid thirst for change. The photographs of those key artists, bands, fans, and communities, are indicative of the formulation of a coherent, distinctive phenomenon in Bulgarian popular music and history.

Neli Nedeva-Voeva, is a photographer who – from the perspective of an insider – captured on film key moments of Bulgaria’s youth revolution. Her photographs record the visual aesthetic of 1980s subcultural scenes, their artistic expressions and everyday practices of protest through music, poetry and style. Despite being mostly in black and white, Neli’s photos show clearly the contrast between a colourful 1980s Bulgarian youth and their grey surroundings. These surroundings were incompatible with the

energy of creative enthusiasm and talent – impulses which emerged despite of, or because of and in opposition to, the contexts of repression.

The photographs in this essay are a collective portrait of an era that produced “a new generation, forever” which has “questions to ask, to a whole nation, forever”, in the words of legendary figure Dimitar Voev (1965 - 1992), a poet and lyricist who fronted bands including Kale and Nova Generatsia.

During the processes of “perestroika” and “glasnost”, the years in the second half of the 1980s were marked by reform and opening-up.

In addition, youth cultures were finally being acknowledged in academic research and popular publications (controlled by the organs of the state) across the Eastern Bloc. In Bulgaria, the terminology and interpretations around the notion of youth “informals” – neformali – developed. While in research and media there was a strategic focus on the harmless, leisure nature of expression through youth music and style, it was indeed those “informals” that became the core of the re-emerging, liberated Bulgarian consciousness, moving towards an active and critical engagement with processes of change.

In 1987, the first Bulgarian rock festival took place in Sofia’s largest park, Borisova Gradina, then called “Park of Liberation”. One of the

bands performing was Kale, which included drummer Kiril Manchev and two bass guitar players and singers Dimitar Voev and Vasil Gurov.

Manchev recalls: “When we appeared on stage, all other musicians started wondering – what will those guys play with two bass guitars, will it be jazz rock or something… I was repeating to myself: “Wait until we show you what we can do.”

As we got on stage – “one, two, three, four” and our song “Chicho” (“Uncle”) began. I had come up with this cool beat and after the 5th or 6th bar the audience was very much into it. But the greatest surprise was the second song, when we were taken off the stage.

Dimitar started singing the song “Epitaph”: “don’t give me your hand to hold, it is covered in pimples, you look like a grey building, that’s how deformed you are…” We heard some voices shout: “What is he singing?! turn down his microphone!” A minute later we were forced off the stage. And what else could I ask for? This was the greatest reward! I felt like a member of the Beatles, taken off the stage! For months I felt like I had wings. Yes, this was one of the greatest success stories of the time.”

Kiril Manchev; Featured in exhibition interpretation by Dorothea Monova, The Revolution Goes On 2017 39

Around the same time as the first Bulgarian rock festival, Dimitar Voev and his friend Georgi Marinov worked on an amateur film together. At the time in Bulgaria, there was a mass campaign celebrating 70 years since the Bolshevik coup in Russia, which was referred to as the Great October Socialist Revolution. The capital Sofia was “decorated” all over with slogans such as “People and Party are One”, “Forward to the Bright Future” and many others.

One of the propagandist slogans read: “The Revolution Goes On”.

Subverting the meaning invested in this phrase, Voev and Marinov incorporated it into the subcultural discourse of resistance to the politics of the state. Petar Milanov, a journalist who became involved with the musical scenes of protest at the time, recalls the film and the significance of 1987: “The film featured everyday scenes from the city, parodies, absurd performances such as an erotic kiss between Voev and a rain gutter, rehearsals of bands and… the striking slogan placed all over building facades and street lights “The Revolution Goes On”. The film also featured scenes from the first rock festival in Bulgaria, ground-breaking for Bulgarian rock and underground scenes, both for artists and fans. Young people openly demonstrated they did not accept the official culture and music 40

imposed by the dictatorship.

The year 1987 is key for the clash of generations between totalitarianism and democratic change.

So, indeed, Mite (Voev) and the Gesh (Marinov) invested a great deal of sarcasm and irony in the title of their film. Thirty years on, we also named a festival and an exhibition The Revolution Goes On. Yet, remember that the revolution goes on not where we are told it should; but where we believe it should be. In the minds, hearts, and souls of young people, and in their songs. In their hopes and dreams for a better life to be lived with dignity.”

The revolution goes on, against the contemporary incarnations of injustice and repression: the meanings formulated through its early sounds, images, and words, remain relevant and inspiring.

“ ...the revolution goes on not where we are told it should; but where we believe it should be. In the minds, hearts, and souls of young people.”

Petar Milanov, Director of the Foundation Dimitar Voev-Nova Generatsia (in conversation with Asya Draganova, January 2018)

Top Image: The audience: a moment from the first rock music festival in Bulgaria, Sofia Indeed, the revolution goes 1987. The festival was organised on. Thirty years after the first by the Club for Aesthetic EduBulgarian rock festival and cation at Sofia University and, Voev and Marinov’s more precisely, by its president at the time the student Maya subversive film experiment, Svetoslav Draganov and Ste- Stamenova, the founder of band Subdibula, Ventsislav Drefan Kutsarov, using many of nikov, and other students who Neli Nedeva-Voeva’s images, released the updated at the time were also involved with the creation of the first documentary The Revolution Bulgarian rock club.

Goes On 2017. Photographs

by Neli have featured in many other film, book, archival, and exhibition projects.

The visuals have allowed the 1980s subcultural scenes to become an important aspect of this alternative Bulgarian popular music heritage and a broader historic memory.

More importantly, they present not only memory, but also a future.

Bottom Image: The band Trotil (which translates as TNT) rehearsing in an unlikely environment with a logo in the background, promoting the XIII Congress of the Bulgarian Communist Party, whose rule could not be questioned at the time.

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Above: Kiril Manchev, Vasil Gurov and Christian Kostov pictured around the time when Kale evolved into two new bands, Nova Generatsia and Revu. The picture was taken at Vasil’s birthday in 1988 at a friend’s semi-abandoned house in the outskirts of Sofia.

Below: Rehearsal of the newly-formed Nova Generatsia. They are being carefully “watched” by singer Rositsa Kirilova, pictured on the poster on the wall behind them. This could be read as ironic, highlighting the contrast between the “official” popular music (Estrada) nurtured by the state, and the organically emerging rock music-derived subcultural scenes.

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above: A rehearsal or a guerrilla performance? Despite staying reasonably underground, in their basement by the major boulevard “Stamboliyski”, punk band Kontrol – not concerned with sound proofing - seem to have attracted considerable audience interest. The year is 1985, and according to Vlado Popchev from the band, the song they were about to play when the picture was taken is called “Born in Bulgaria” (what would Bruce Springsteen say?) which was later recorded in the same basement.

Below: Hard rock band Trotil performing at the first Bulgarian rock festival, Sofia 1987. Others with similar styles of performance were at the festival, including Ahat, Atlas, Era, Apocalypse etc. Boundaries between fans and artists were minimal, and many fans got onto the stage of the Summer Theatre to head bang and dance to the music.

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Above: Mission impossible in the small town of Ugarchin in 1988.

Nova Generatsia performing at a work party of mechanical engineers. While the state restricted musicians who did not comply with “official” Bulgarian popular music from recording, the Komsomol (the state’s official youth organisation) devised all sorts of inappropriate tours where musicians played in front of perplexed and bewildered audiences who had come along to have a traditional feast, rather than an evening of experimental music and lyrics.

Below: A new formation of musicians – Oblatsi (Clouds) – got together to perform at the festival Rock Under the Stars in 1988 in the seaside town of Primorsko. The first night ended with a clash between militia and festival audiences; on the second night, the festival was discontinued as the electricity was switched off during Oblatsi’s performance of the song “Nai-dobroto” (“The best”).

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Singer/songwriter Milena Slavova in action in a typical performance situation from the 1980s. “Fed up with walking on ropes”, as she sings in her song “Haha”, she prefers to climb on a chair instead. Milena performed with the band Revu in the late 80s; in the 90s she began developing her solo career, which is ongoing.

Denis Rizov from the band Ahat describes her: “Milena Slavova is an alien. She is out of the ordinary. One night, at 4:30 am, we were staying in the same hotel room, and she got up, turned the light on, and under the background noise of my “heavy metal”-style rude swearing, she wrote four verses and a chorus for a song which she still sings today… all of that happened at once, with no changes made later, not even a comma or anything crossed out.”

Nova Generatsia looking “happy” on the Bulgarian National TV (the only TV at the time) show ‘A Lesson in Everything’, which aimed to attract young audiences. One of Nova Generatsia’s songs, “A Patriotic Song” with lyrics by Dimitar Voev, describes the alienation of young people in the 1980s and problematise this TV appearance: “We are an ill product of our times and your labour; 45 urbanely-structured our empty fates, with our trousers lowered and our heads down.

In shame.”

Above: Hard rock band Ahat following the conventions of the style when performing at Universiada Hall, 1987. Denis Rizov on the left, and Zvezdomir Keremidchiev – Zvezdi on the right. Their song “A Tree”, with lyrics by Bozhidar Glavev, alludes to the relationship between Bulgarian subcultural scenes and environment-related activism: “Every person is a strange tree, with branches-hands stretched to the future and roots-memories stretching far behind, so who will understand my language oF leaves? As they will cut me down anyway.”

Right: Front of stage: Ivan Nestorov The Ameba and, in the background, Lubo Malkovski from the band Era, performing the song “Bureaucracy” in Universiada Hall in Sofia, 1988. The opening lines of the song are: “Folded in the corner, in slumber, you mourn the time that’s lost.

In waiting rooms, on stairs, and floors, you expect for bodiless mirages.”

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ABOVE:Sharing is caring: Vasil Gurov and Kiril Manchev sharing a light in Primorsko, at the festival “Rock Under the Stars”, May 1988. In their cult song “Flowers from the ending of the 80s”, Revu’s vocalist, Milena Slavova, sang Vasil Gurov’s lyrics: “… Wings strapped in squares, wither, one by one.

Below:Control vs. Kontrol: A member of the The meaning of light, militia at the front of the picture is will die with the first feather lost. complemented with a DiY poster celebrating Thanks for all the flowers!” punk band Kontrol, at a concert organised by the music magazine Rhythm held in the small town of Troyan in October 1989.

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The emergence of digital photography is a new challenge for Neli Nedeva-Voeva as it has become a key method for communication and self-expression. Over the last few years, Neli has photographed actively with her mobile phone, allowing her to capture images instinctively, free from her previous worries about saving up to buy film.

Photography has evolved from a profession into a leisure activity, a return to the carelessness and freedom and the amateur photographer. The world and our everyday lives are, according to Neli, full of beauty, humour, and the absurd which, once caught with the camera, can be shared, and re-lived endlessly. Neli, in her new VJ projects, has created strong bridges between her infatuation with cinema and music and photography.

She dreams of a camera, which can be controlled with one’s own eyes, in a way that allows us to capture every moment we find worthy.

Asya Draganova met Neli in 2013, during the most prominent “summer of discontent" and protest against corruption and politically-engaged oligarchy in Bulgaria’s recent history through their mutual friend, the journalist and cultural intermediary Petar Milanov.

A friendship was established quickly and 48

cemented through musical performances, participation in photo exhibitions, and various newcreative initiatives.

The relationship with Neli, an insider of the pre/post-1989 subcultural scenes, became significant for Asya’s research and publications, dedicated to Bulgarian popular music. Asya now holds a PhD in Media and Cultural Studies.

She works as a researcher and lecturer at the School of Media, Birmingham City University.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Dorothea Monova for allowing us to access materials she had developed for Neli Nedeva-Voeva’s recent exhibition Revolution Goes On 2017. This has been essential for providing informative captions for each photograph and grasping some of the spirit of the 1980s Bulgarian subcultural scenes.

We would like to thank Petar Milanov, Director of the Foundation Dimitar Voev-Nova Generatsia, for all his remarkable efforts in celebrating Bulgarian subcultural and popular music heritage and providing young musicians with artistic opportunities to perform and gain confidence.

Links Draganov, S. (director) (2017) The Revolution Goes On 2017; Available at: https://www.bnt.bg/bg/a/1987-revolyutsiyata-prodlzhava-17052017 Neli Nedeva-Voeva © 2012 - 2018 | All Rights Reserved

Riffs

Experimental writing on popular music

Riffs: Experimental writing on popular music is an emerging and exciting postgraduate journal based at and funded by the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR) at Birmingham City University. Riffs provides a platform for the publication of experimental pieces on popular music and was launched in February 2017.

The contributions are made available through the journal website (www.riffsjournal.org) and a limited edition printed run.

Riffs has a strong DIY and experimental ethos. We aim to push the boundaries of academic research, communication, and publishing in the area of popular music research. The next step for the editorial board at Riffs is to develop a creative and experimental space for not only publishing finished pieces, but also offering an online forum for thinking through the ways in which we analyse, understand, and communicate.

As one of the largest centres for popular music research, Birmingham City University offers a wealth of global networks and potential readership. Our editorial team and wider researcher community expand our reach further, with active participation in a range of international research networks to include IASPM, MeCCSA, the Punk Scholars Network, and the Jazz Research Network. Through these connections, we aim to develop an international and active readership of postgraduate researchers and academics at all stages of their career.

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Contributor Guidelines Riffs: Experimental research on popular music welcomes pieces from all disciplines. Each issue will be based on a prompt, but responses can vary dependent upon the contributor’s interest and experience. As the journal title suggests, we are most interested in pieces that take an experimental approach to the consideration of popular music. For examples of previous interpretations, please visit our journal website.

All contributions published by Riffs will be considered by the whole editorial panel, and peer reviewed by two specialist editors before publication.

Word Limit: 2,000-4,000 (excluding references) Please do not submit full dissertations or theses. All contributions should respond to the prompt and take an experimental approach to undertaking and/or communicating research on popular music. We also welcome shorter written pieces, audio, and visual pieces to include photo essays.

Abstract: Please provide an informal, blog-style abstract (under 300 words) and a profile picture. This abstract will be hosted on our journal website and social media platforms. As ever, links to external websites and the use of images, audio and video clips are also welcome.

Format: Please email submissions as attachments to the editorial contact given below. All articles should be provided as a .doc or .docx file. All images and web-ready audio or video clips should also be emailed as separate files, or through a file-sharing platform such as WeTransfer or Dropbox.

Bio: Please include a short (up to 300 words) bio with your name, institutional affiliation (if appropriate), email address, current research stage within your article, and other useful/interesting information, positioned at the end of your piece.

References: If you refer to other publications within your piece, please list these in a ‘References’ section at the end. All clear formats of referencing are acceptable. Discographies and weblinks can also be detailed at the end of your contribution.

Submission: Abstracts for our bi-annual prompts should be emailed to info@riffsjournal.org Please note: Riffs shall be entitled to first use of the contribution in all the journal’s different forms, but the author remains the copyright owner and can republish their contribution without seeking the journal’s permission. Riffs reserve the right to decline to publish contributions, if they are submitted after the agreed deadline and without the assigned editor being informed (and agreeing to) a new submission date.

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Next Issue

Riffs

Experimental writing on popular music

Vol. 2 Issue 2 – Autumn 2018

“Get the frequency up....”

Reggae, sound system, and music scenes Guest edited by Simon Jones, author of Scientists of Sound: Portraits of a UK Reggae Sound System.

Heritage Hifi, built as part of the Let’s Play Vinyl exhibition tour (Let’s Go Yorkshire) and photographed at the Birmingham leg of the tour at the Parkside Gallery, Birmingham City University.

Image credit: Lyle Bignon

Follow Us Twitter - @popmusicjournal Facebook – Riffs Journal Instagram - @popmusicjournal

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ISSN 2513-8537 Vol. 2 Issue 1 July 2018

Contents When Two Worlds Meet: A Riffs Editorial Laura Snapes

Brum Creatives Does Riffs Ian Davies

Anna Palmer: The Write Club Remix Lyle Bignon and the Write Clubbers

Context is Everything Simon Fox

Remixing the Remix and ‘Stems’ Craig Hamilton

Words and Guitar, I Got It Camilla Aisa

A Walk Through Music Forums Santiago Fernández Sánchez

A New Generation Forever: The (Bulgarian) Revolution Goes On

Neli Nedeva-Voeva and Asya Draganova

Riffs is supported and funded by the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Birmingham School of Media, Birmingham City University.