Rhythms of Rebellion part II

Why Joe Strummer’s Passion is Still in Fashion - Mark Bedford Turin and the ‘Collettivo Punx Anarchici’- Giacomo Bottà Moroccan Music Festivals - Moulay Driss El Maarouf Hungary’s Indie Music Scene - Emília Barna Biography - Marvin Gaye - By: Ruth Charnock Book & Author - Dorian Lynskey - By: Elke Weesjes

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EDITORIAL

CONTENTS

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ARTICLE ONE

This is Joe Public Speaking: Why Joe Strummer’s Passion is Still in Fashion By: Mark Bedford

08

ARTICLE TWO

Articulating Punk in an Industrial City: Turin and the ‘Collettivo Punx Anarchici’ in the early 1980s By: Giacomo Bottà

32

ARTICLE THREE

Undressing the System: The Rituals of Madness and Badness in Moroccan Music Festivals By: Moulay Driss El Maarouf

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ARTICLE FOUR

Musical Identity and Social Change: Articulating the National and the Translocal in Hungary’s Indie Music Scene 70 By: Emília Barna

BIOGRAPHY

Things ain’t what they used to be’: Marvin Gaye and the Making of “What’s Going On” 88 By: Ruth Charnock

BOOK & AUTHOR

33 Revolutions per Minute - A History of Protest Music, From Billie Holiday to Green Day - Dorian Lynskey By: Elke Weesjes 102

PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS

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3

July/August

Politics and music: a double edged sword

EDITORIAL

25 years ago, Paul Simon released his platinumselling and critically adored album Graceland.

For the album’s anniversary Paul Simon, together with filmmaker Joe Berlinger, travelled to South Africa, where the singer revisited the making of the album from an artistic standpoint, as well the controversy it generated. During the making of Graceland, Simon was accused of breaking the United Nations’ cultural boycott of South Africa, which was a major part of the UN’s strategy in the fight against apartheid.

A remarkable part of the documentary - which is titled “Under African Skies” - is Simon’s meeting with Dali Tambo, the founder of Artists Against Apartheid (AAA) and son of ANC president Oliver Tambo. Back in the early ‘80s when, against many people’s advice, Simon decided to go to South Africa, he was not only struck by the extreme racial tension - what greeted him as well was the backlash from the ANC and the African freedom movement. The African media criticized him for breaking the cultural boycott. One of the loudest voices of criticism came from Dali Tambo. Over 25 years

Rhythms of Rebellion

4

later, “Under African Skies” shows the two men meeting again and arguing their position. Tambo explains the boycott as “all or nothing” and that “we couldn’t allow Simon, any more than a tank coming in”, while Simon explains his arguments about being on the side of the artists as opposed to the politicians. After all, Simon didn’t go to South Africa to perform, he wanted to record music with a number of celebrated South African artists like the Boyoyo Boys, General Shirinda and the Gaza Sisters and the now legendary acapella group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, all of whom were

little known outside the continent. Simon felt that these South African musicians deserved global exposure. But, all good intentions aside, the wording of UN Resolution 35/206 was clear: “The United Nations General Assembly request all states to prevent all cultural, academic, sporting and other exchanges with South Africa.

Appeals to writers, artists, musicians and other personalities to boycott South Africa.

Urges all academic and cultural institutions to terminate all links with South Africa.”

After the release of the album, a true PR battle unfolded. Jerry Dammers of the Specials who was heavily involved with AAA, was among those to react with outrage asking: “Who does he think he is?

He’s helping maybe 30 people and he’s damaging solidarity over sanctions. He thinks he’s helping the cause of freedom, but he’s naive. He’s doing far more harm than good.” Support for Simon came from an unexpected angle. Hugh Maskela and Miriam Makeba, two leading black South African musicians who had been closely associated with the anti-apartheid strug-

5

gle, both exiled from South Africa, suggested Simon should go on tour with them and a number of other black South African musicians. Maskela was delighted that the Graceland tour was bringing black South African musicians together, which is why he chose to cooperate with Simon.

When the show reached the London Albert Hall, Simon met with a blast of anger. An open letter was handed to him on stage, a group of musicians - among others Jerry Dammers, Billy Bragg and Paul Weller - called on the singer to apologize for thinking he was “above politics” and to vow to adhere to the boycott in the future.

It was a strange situation: people who arrived at the Albert Hall had to pass a noisy AAA picket line which included the writer of “Free Nelson Mandela”, Jerry Dammers, to hear Hugh Maskela perform the proMandela song “Bring Him Back Home”.

It’s important to note that Graceland doesn’t have any political songs; Simon had no intention whatsoever of following in Dammers’, Stevie Wonder’s or Peter Gabriel’s footsteps. The lyrics for Graceland

were not political but pop; their language playful and absurdist and it is now hard to believe that such a joyous album caused an immense political storm. Back in the 1980s, Simon, who eventually made his peace with the ANC and Tambo, had said “I have a feeling that when there are radical transfers of power on either the left or the right, the artists always get screwed. The guys with the guns say, ‘This is important’, and the guys with guitars don’t have a chance.” Simon did not intend to start a political storm, but his notion that “guys with guitars don’t have a chance” was also felt by those musicians who did opt to mix music and politics.

In this second part of our series “Rhythms of Rebellion” we continue to explore music as a vehicle for social change.

And again, like in our previous issue, it becomes painfully clear that artists who try to “make a difference” experience many difficulties. To quote Dorian Lynskey whose book 33 Revolutions per Minute is discussed in our Book & Author feature: “to take on politics in music is always a leap of faith, a gesture of hope over experience,

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because there are always a dozen reasons not to”. Fortunately many artists persevered, like Marvin Gaye who is the subject of this issue’s biography, and produced songs that made people aware of what was happening around them. Another artist who took on politics successfully was Joe Strummer. In his article Mark Bedford shows that the Clash had a huge impact on people’s lives. His respondents express a conviction that being a Clash fan was integral to the formation of their political outlook and a factor in their subsequent political commitments as trade unionists and/or political activists.

Other contributors to this issue focus on how music interacts with but also reflects its surroundings. Giacomo Bottà, reveals how the ‘Collettivo Punx Anarchici’ dramatized Turin’s decay and social unrest, which were consequences of the FIAT automobile industry crisis. Emilia Barna explores the contemporary indie music scene in Hungary and Moulay Driss El Maarouf highlights Moroccan music

Ladysmith Black Mambazo festivals as seats of struggle where people through lyrics and dance make bold statements against mainstream politics.

As we saw in the first part of this double issue, musicians are often reluctant politicians – co-opted by movements they don’t fully subscribe to (viz. Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell) or caught up in political storms, as was Simon. Yet in other instances, as with Woody Guthrie or Billy Bragg, musicians have willingly stepped up to the political rostrum to make their voices heard.

The rhythms of rebellion, as we hope to have shown, follow many different beats.

Finally.

You’ve finished your thesis, you turned it in, you completed your studies & your work disappears on a shelf somewhere.

Was it all a waste of time?

NO. 7

United Academics Magazine brings it back to life.

Your thesis in our magazine? Contact us.

ARTICLE ARTICLE ONE ONE

THis is Joe public Speaking

Why Joe Strummer's Passion By: Mark Bedford

is Still in Fashion

Article One

Raise a toast to Saint Joe Strummer. I think he might have been our only decent teacher. (“Constructive Summer”, The Hold Steady (2008)

T

here is no way that I can introduce this essay without disclosing my personal investment in its subject. I can pinpoint the moment I became a fan of the Clash and Joe Strummer to January 1979 when, as an 11-year-old, I bought the Clash single, “Tommy Gun”, from an out-of-chart ‘bargain bin’ in a South London branch of Woolworths. Although I didn’t see the Clash live in their original line-up(s) they have always been my favourite band. I saw Joe Strummer perform with his last band, the Mescaleros, on eight occasions between 1999 and 2002. The last of these was at Acton Town Hall in West London on November 15 2002 where the band played a benefit for a trade union struggle that I was a part of.

In November 2002 I was one of over 50,000 fire fighters across the United King-

dom who took strike action in a bid to improve national fire service pay. Fire fighters at Acton Fire Station (in the same West London Area Command that I was attached to) organised a benefit event at their local town hall and announced they had secured the support of Joe Strummer. That night – which followed a forty eight hour national strike – was one of the most memorable of my life. The venue, a dilapidated Decoera municipal hall, was crammed with over 500 Fire Brigade’s Union members and a couple of hundred of Strummer’s most loyal fans. The politically charged nature of the event gave the show a rousing energy that some who were present say rekindled memories of the Clash.1

In the period following Joe Strummer’s sudden death (just six weeks after he had supported the FBU at Acton), Strummer ‘experts’ made their pronouncements about what Joe Strummer had and hadn’t stood for. Reviewing the release of the Clash Singles box set in 2006, Uncut’s Alan Jones (who had known Joe Strummer during his pre-Clash period) paid

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“This is Joe Public Speaking” - Why Joe Strummer’s Passion is Still in Fashion

tribute to ‘Strummer’s unbridled passion’, yet mocked ‘Joe’s ill-conceived admiration for a variety of squinty-eyed killers passing themselves off as revolutionary freedom fighters’.2 In the same year, however, Mojo’s Pat Gilbert (author of Passion is a Fashion, published 2004) attempted a revisionist account of Strummer’s supposed support for the FBU during the 2002 dispute. Gilbert states that because Strummer was ‘no trenchant socialist, he himself wasn’t entirely sure about the FBU’s decision to strike, and [that] he used the award [i.e. the fire fighter statue] he received [from the FBU] as a doorstop’.3 This kind of posthumous commentary has contributed to a discourse that at once celebrates Strummer’s everyman appeal while exculpating him for any ‘naive’ political commitments he may have made.

My essay builds upon other work relating to Joe Strummer, the Clash and Clash fans that I produced in 2007, 2008 and the summer of 2011 and aims to give expression to the latent voices of Clash and Strummer fans that are largely absent

from the cultural (and academic) discourses that surround Joe Strummer. Central to this enquiry is the question of who the fans of the Clash and Joe Strummer were/ are. It is a question that I first asked myself during an event organised by Philosophy Football in December 2007 to celebrate the Clash on the eve of the fifth anniversary of Joe Strummer’s death. During a panel discussion at this event, the esteemed cultural studies academic, Paul Gilroy, made the (quite possibly throwaway) comment that the Clash, unlike peers such as Sham 69, had never attracted a fascist element because the band’s fan base was middleclass. Yet almost all of the people I knew who had followed the Clash circa 1976-82 could not be described as middle class. Indeed, not long after listening to Gilroy’s remarks I had a conversation in a central London pub with the friend of a mutual friend, Tim Mardell (born July 1962) , who explained how Joe Strummer became a ‘figurehead’ for a layer of disaffected white working class youth who may otherwise have been pulled into the orbit of the

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val at Victoria Park, Mardell made a cogent and compelling case for this thesis: The National Front had been trying to influence youngsters by leafleting football matches and were starting to find a way into the music scene as well, but Joe gave us a figurehead for what became a stand against racism, and his involvement with Rock Against Racism was fundamental to retuning whole swathes of [white] working class music fans in London to the antifascist and anti-racist stance.5

far right National Front. For Mardell, an east Londoner who was fourteen when he first listened to the Clash in 1977, Strummer was the key to Rock Against Racism’s success in fashioning a cultural movement that would steer thousands of white working class youths away from the ascendant National Front.4 In an interview for an article I wrote commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the April 1978 RAR carni-

White Punks on Beer and Analytical Autoethnography In May 2011, I was invited by Anna GoughYates at London Metropolitan University to submit a paper for a cross-disciplinary symposium on ‘subcultures, popular music and social change.’ The invitation provided me with the opportunity to organise ten interviews with Clash fans born between 1959 and 1966 and to explore their experiences of, and feelings about, the Clash’s impact on their lives. More specifically, I was

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“This is Joe Public Speaking” - Why Joe Strummer’s Passion is Still in Fashion

interested in the extent to which fans of the Clash felt they were politicised by their engagement with the band’s polemical-punk aesthetic. Nine out of the ten interviews that my paper, ‘“Like Trousers Like Brain”, the Walk and the Talk of the Clash City Rockers’, was predicated upon were carried out in London pubs with white male participants.6 The other interview, with the only female (but also white) participant, was carried out in the interviewee’s west London home. Using the socio-economic indicators of occupation, parents’ occupation, level of education and whether parents owned property to operationalize the participants’ social class I established nine of those taking part in the study to be working class. The interviews were conducted in a semi-structured fashion. There was structure in so far as each participant was asked the same questions, but there was also flexibility in that the structured questions sometimes led to other questions and lines of enquiry.

Problematic for my study was the fact that, in different capacities and within the

spectrum ranging between acquaintance and close friend, all of the participants were known to me. Indeed, an important motivational driver for my research was the desire to be vicariously immersed in the recollections of the particular people I had targeted. My personal involvement with both the subject matter and the participants thus foregrounds my role as a social actor within the research process.

Moreover, the examples of ‘explicitly personal anecdote’ and ‘self narrative’ that I have disclosed to frame this essay necessarily means this work is subsumed within the field of autoethnography.7 This is a branch of ethnographic sociology that includes biographical ethnography and self-narrative research. The sociologist Leon Anderson states this genre ‘has become almost exclusively identified with those advocating the descriptive literary approach of evocative autoethnography’.8 However, in contrast to the ‘postmodern or poststructuralist sensitivities’ of the subjectively centred ‘evocative or emotional autoethnography’, Anderson has proposed the development of

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‘a viable and valuable [autoethnographic] subgenre in the realist and ethnographic tradition’.9 This approach places autoethnographic research in a social analytic context, allows for broader generalization and has a commitment to theoretical analysis.

Anderson terms this ‘analytic autoethnography’. In this conception, there is a reflexive ‘awareness of the reciprocal influence between ethnographers and their settings and their informants’ that can help the researcher ‘refine generalised theoretical understandings of social processes’.10

Availing myself of Anderson’s analytic autoethnographic approach has allowed me to include discussions between the participants and myself that were outside the overtly observed (and recorded) interview process. With the exception of one of the interviews (with Matt Wrack, born May 1962, who is the current General Secretary of the Fire Brigade’s Union, and was my first interviewee), all of my first sets of interviews were carried out a few days after the wave of rioting that erupted in London (and elsewhere across the UK) in early

August 2011. The irony of discussing the Clash in the aftermath of this contemporary social unrest was not lost on the participants (or myself) and led to some interesting pre-interview group discussion.

Before taking their turn to be interviewed individually, two of the participants (Joe Williams and Gary Bassett) concurred that the lyric “every job they offer you is to keep you off the dock” from the first album song, Career Opportunities, was ‘completely relevant’ to riot-torn Britain. Also prior to being interviewed, a larger group (Dave Watkins, Kevin Barry, Bob Warren and George Bishop) discussed how one only needed to look at the national and international news to see how the Clash’s themes of conflict – from the local “White Riot” to the global “Washington Bullets” continued to render the band ‘important’ and ‘relevant’. Similarly, the question of the social composition of the Clash’s fan base that precipitated the study arose in an extemporised manner when, in post-interview conversation, I mentioned to Joe Williams and Gary Bassett that Tom Robinson had stated fairly re-

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“This is Joe Public Speaking” - Why Joe Strummer’s Passion is Still in Fashion

cently that he believed RAR had not functioned ‘to convert bigots, but to create solidarity amongst those who opposed them’.11 Williams and Bassett disputed this claim and concurred that while this may have been true for the already ‘converted’ TRB fans, it was not necessarily so for all fans of the Clash. Bassett, who works for the London Ambulance Service, stated during our (first) interview that the ‘area’ of south east London he grew up in ‘had always had a fascist presence’. For Bassett, the Clash ‘put a line down [and asked anyone interested in what they had to say] which side of it are you on’? These sentiments all echoed Mardell’s thesis that the Clash effected a causal influence in ‘retuning working class youth towards the anti-fascist stance’.

The talk of the Clash City Rockers The conclusions that I drew from the study I carried out in the summer of 2011 were congruent with Dave Laing’s observation that ‘punk’s ‘subculture’ was [never] fully outside the wider cultures’.12 Indeed, I found that punk – especially as embodied

by the Clash – was often quite easily reconciled with the participants’ wider parent culture(s). Kevin Barry (born April 1961), who is a typesetter by trade, described how ‘for people like us who have always been in the union, punk rock and especially the Clash, galvanised solidarity for our generation’. Joe Williams (born November, 1962), who works as a Buildings Services manager for Greenwich Council, talked about how the Clash ‘reaffirmed a world view that came from being born into a family that believed in joining a union and not crossing a picket line’. Dave Watkins (born April 1961) built a branch of the National Union of School Students in his secondary modern school in 1975 and was a member of RAR from its inception in 1976. Watkins’ mother was a life-long Labour Party activist who fought for pension rights for part-time workers. Indeed, six of those taking part in the study had a long history of family affiliations to the labour movement and are of the view that this contributed to shaping their a-priori worldview.

Perhaps even more interesting for a

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study concerned with the influence of the Clash (and Joe Strummer) upon the lives of the fans was the revelation that three of the participants (Bob Warren, George Bishop and Sian Griffiths) were from similar socio-economic backgrounds, yet only embraced the labour movement after their experience of punk and once they had entered the workforce. Bob Warren (born December, 1963) intimated ‘I didn’t get my politics from my family; my political stance came from music’. George Bishop (born February, 1966) stated ‘I respected the Clash even more after I became left wing’ as a trade unionist in the Civil and Public Servants Association during the mid-1980s. Sian Griffiths (born October 1960) attended the RAR carnival in April 1978 to ‘have fun’ and ‘see the Clash for free’ but went on to be an active trade unionist in the FBU and an organiser of support networks for other female fire fighters.

The first survey’s final participant, Piers Bannister (born March, 1962), who is the only middle class representative of Clash fans in the study, worked for Amnesty In-

ternational for over twenty two years and currently works for an anti-death penalty voluntary organisation. Bannister put his interest in international politics down to his love of the Clash – stating ‘I developed with the Clash’ and that the Clash’s exposition ‘of global injustice made me want to do something about it’. However, he also credits the influence of his educated parents and, by extension, a liberal-left middle-class parent culture.

While the term ‘parent culture’, as figured by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in the 1970s, was not supposed to be confused with intergenerational relationships, the role of parents and parenting during the formative socialization process was offered by some of the participants as an important explanatory factor for why they gravitated towards the Clash and Joe Strummer over other punk bands and front-people during the punk era. Tim Mardell stated that he believed he benefited from having had a father who was a ‘staunch Labour supporter, a staunch trade unionist’ and who ‘had

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“This is Joe Public Speaking” - Why Joe Strummer’s Passion is Still in Fashion

an open mind about multiculturalism’.

Indeed, with hindsight, my own father’s abiding support for the Labour Party and my mother’s love of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen (both of whom were significant influences on Joe Strummer) are likely to have helped orientate me towards the Clash’s ‘new-wave’ rebel rock aesthetic.

Another conclusion of the study was that despite a loud backlash in the letters pages of the music press and elsewhere arguing the Clash had ‘sold out’ (in the period following RAR), many Clash fans remained loyal supporters of the Clash and the band’s front-man.13 Certainly, most of the participants professed to having stuck with the Clash – through the challenge presented by Sandinista! circa 1980 (discussed below) and even the Cut the Crap! fag-end of the band’s life circa 1984-86. Generally, there was a consensus that the Clash (and Joe Strummer) emerged as ‘leaders’ of the UK punk movement and then outgrew this sub-cultural scene in mostly positive ways.

During the symposium at London Met I argued that my study’s qualitative data ul-

timately lends itself to the interpretation that posits fans of the Clash (over time) were either reassured of, or assisted in becoming assured in, their progressive (proLabour and trade union) commitments.

Gauging Joe Strummer’s ‘Long Shadow’ Mathew Worley, a member of the Interdisciplinary Network for the Study of Subcultures, Popular Music & Social Change Steering Committee (who is researching the politics of the British punk rock scene more generally) put me in touch with Brady Harrison at the University of Montana who was involved in a collective project exploring the cultural perspectives of the life and work of Joe Strummer. Although my symposium paper was centred on people’s reflective responses to questions about the Clash, much of the data that I had collected exceeded this remit and included ruminations about Joe Strummer that post-dated the Clash. In the light of my discussions with Harrison and with the tenth anniversary of both the FBU benefit and Joe Strummer’s

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untimely death on the horizon, I designed a follow-up survey that I could use to elicit the participants’ thoughts and opinions about the impact of Joe Strummer on their lives and upon popular culture more generally. Some of the questions were intended to encourage responses that considered Strummer within his early Clash context.

The first question asked was: ‘Do you think Joe Strummer became a ‘figurehead’ or ‘spokesperson’ for young people in the late 1970s’? Other questions enquired about the participants’ views on the significance of Joe Strummer’s post-Clash after-life.

Thus, the question detailed above was followed by: ‘Do you think Joe Strummer’s enduring credibility is all down to this Clash-era period’?

For the second set of interviews I tried to repeat the original process by meeting the same individuals and groups I had met with for the first interviews in the same venues.14 Subsequently, I met up with Tim Mardell in the same Canary Wharf pub in the central business district where he manages construction projects. I met again with

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“This is Joe Public Speaking” - Why Joe Strummer’s Passion is Still in Fashion

Joe Williams and Gary Bassett in their local pub in south east London, and the larger group in Soho in central London. The latter group was minus Dave Watkins, but plus Lisa Hayman (born January, 1965).

Hayman’s agreement to participate in both surveys back-to-back doubled the female contingent of the sample (without altering its class or ethnic composition) and also brought the aggregate number of participants to eleven. Matt Wrack, Sian Griffiths and Piers Bannister didn’t take part in the second round of interviews, but due to their respective personal involvement with Joe Strummer benefit events (at Acton in 2002 and Milton Keynes in 1988) I had already collected useful material regarding their feelings towards Strummer’s post-Clash contributions.

The remainder of this essay draws upon a synthesis of data from both sets of interviews. The study now extends beyond analyses of people’s early memories of the Clash (and the punk scene the band was integral to) and presents the more nuanced discursive narratives that a broader

temporal frame of reflection has permitted the participants to plot. To some extent, the project can now be considered as one that has employed ‘a retrospective method for collecting life history data’.15 This methodology has facilitated the study members’ ‘comparison of events in a particular year [... with] events across the [heretofore] life span’.16 The particular significant moments for this study are the Clash’s ‘RAR turn’ in April 1978 and Joe Strummer’s support for the FBU in November 2002.

The use of this quarter-century time frame – from the vantage point of a further ten years’ critical distance – has precipitated the generation of reflective data that resists both ‘post-modern’ evocative/emotional autoethnography and phenomenological interpretations and locates the participants’ life stories within the material contexts of their life stages. Sian Griffiths’ personal narrative, for example, illustrates a process of politicisation that developed over time. Unlike others canvassed for this study, she recalled how her seventeenyear-old-self attended the April 1978 RAR

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Carnival Against the Nazis not ‘to be serious’ or because she was ‘political’, but so she could ‘have fun’ and ‘see the Clash for free’. However, this recollection was from the perspective of a trade unionist recently suspended by her employers (the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority) for eight months over an incident relating to her trade union activity during an industrial dispute in October 2010. Moreover, eight years previously, in December 2002, Griffiths organised a guard of honour for Joe Strummer’s funeral in west London.

Griffiths felt she had a ‘duty to honour Joe’ and to repay a double debt. Joe Strummer had supported her trade union’s then current struggle, but he had also been ‘part and parcel’ of the punk scene that had been central to shaping her identity and forging her self-confidence a quarter of a century earlier.

This is Joe Public Speaking During the first round of interviews, Joe Williams (born November, 1961) put the release of the Clash’s third single, Com-

plete Control, in September 1977, as the moment the Clash’s ‘anger’ was tempered ‘by something in Joe’s delivery that had a hurting poignancy which made him our spokesperson’. Asked whether Strummer became a spokesperson for young people in the late seventies for the follow-up interview, Williams reminisced once again about the Clash’s third single. ‘I was still 15 when I bought Complete Control, [the line] “This is Joe Public speaking” spoke to me, not just because I was Joe and he was Joe, but because it spoke to us’. Responding to the same question, Kevin Barry shot back: ‘Yeah, definitely, Joe was a bit older – he knew what he wanted to say. People used his lines’.

Considering the significance of the Clash’s endorsement of RAR for the project’s first survey, Tim Mardell offered a rhetorical question: Who else in the punk era was prepared to say the NF and fascism had to be confronted’? He continued, ‘the Pistols toyed with fascist imagery and the Jam were conservatives [yet] skinheads were a constant menace. We were only

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“This is Joe Public Speaking” - Why Joe Strummer’s Passion is Still in Fashion

kids, but there was a hardcore element going the wrong way; we were lucky to have a figurehead in Joe which meant you could go the other way and be in Joe Strummer’s gang’. Asked if Strummer became a youth representative for the follow-up survey, Mardell responded unhesitatingly: ‘Absolutely, Joe was pivotal in bringing politics into the [punk] scene’.

Bob Warren described himself as ‘a Mod’ who ‘loved the [punk] music’. He attended the RAR event in April 1978 at Victoria Park but missed the Clash’s performance on account of being waylaid by NFsupporting skinheads who wanted to fight.

Warren described how the multi-racial group he was with fought with skinheads at the edge of the park and, with the assistance of some Rastafarians, eventually saw them off. For Warren, the Clash endorsing RAR ‘had credibility’ because unlike the ‘overtly political’ Tom Robinson Band (who headlined the Victoria Park event), ‘the Clash were a rock and roll band’.

However, Warren is reticent about affording Joe Strummer youth spokesperson

status. He argued ‘the Clash were greater than the sum of their parts’ and that it was the Clash’s intervention in the public discourse around fascism that mattered. In Warren’s account, ‘the NF was a bit of a fashion thing, you either were [for the NF] or you weren’t. The Clash playing reggae and coming out on our side was different’ to ‘right-on bands like Tom Robinson [doing so]’. The emphasis on the role of the Clash over Joe Strummer notwithstanding, Warren’s argument about the Clash’s positive connection with young, white working class audiences concurs with the opinions of Mardell, Bassett and Williams detailed above. In the accounts of these participants, the Clash had a punk rock street credibility that helped the ant-racist message of RAR to reach a white working class audience that the TRB could not. Gilroy’s extemporised thesis (discussed above) may better fit the TRB fan base than the fans of the Clash. It is primarily for this reason (as articulated by Mardell and Warren) that the participants all expressed a belief that Joe Strummer and/or the Clash played an

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important progressive role in challenging the rise of the far right in the United Kingdom during the late seventies.

Another aim of the research was to ascertain the participants’ attitudes towards the Clash and Joe Strummer in the early nineteen eighties and towards Joe Strummer during the two decades that followed the Clash’s implosion (circa 1983 -86).

The purpose of this was to explore the relationship between the participants and the Clash/Joe Strummer over time. With the exception of one participant, Gary Bassett, who became disillusioned with the Clash, Joe Strummer and punk more generally ‘around Combat Rock time [circa 1982]’, there was a consensus that the Clash and Joe Strummer continued to make positive – political – contributions to popular culture in the early eighties and in the period that followed up to November 2002. Kevin Barry remembered finding the 1980 triple album, Sandinista! ‘hard work’, but argued this work was ‘rewarding’. For Barry, ‘the Clash were the punk rock group that grew up’ and who ‘painted bigger pictures for us’.

Asked if Joe Strummer’s enduring credibility was all down to his work with the Clash, Barry replied: ‘Partly down to this period and partly down to how he handled himself afterwards’. Barry saw Joe Strummer with the Latino Rockabilly War ‘on the Rock Against the Rich tour’ in May 1988, almost exactly ten years after the RAR carnival, with the Pogues in 1991, and fronting the Mescaleros ‘half a dozen times’. He also pointed up that he ‘enjoyed Joe’s contribution to Big Audio Dynamite – on songs like “Beyond the Pale”’ (from the 1986 album, No. 10, Upping Street on which Strummer has seven co-writing credits).

Joe Williams believes that the later Clash period had a bigger impact upon his political consciousness than the earlier ‘angrier’ era. ‘Sandinista! fed stuff into my mind about oppressive regimes around the world that I wouldn’t otherwise have known about’. In response to the question of whether Strummer’s enduring credibility ultimately derived from his association with the Clash, Williams replied with a forthright ‘No, absolutely not! Of course

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“This is Joe Public Speaking” - Why Joe Strummer’s Passion is Still in Fashion

it’s not’. Similarly, when asked if he saw Joe Strummer in the post-Clash period, he replied ‘Of course I did’. Like Kevin Barry, Tim Mardell, Bob Warren, Dave Watkins, Lisa Hayman, George Bishop and Piers Bannister,Williams also saw Strummer with the Latino Rockabilly War and the Mescaleros. Like Barry again, Williams also appreciated Strummer’s collaboration with Mick Jones in B.A.D.

The two youngest participants in the project, George Bishop and Lisa Hayman, both spoke at greater length and with more alacrity while participating in the second survey. On the question of whether Strummer’s credibility was down to his contribution while with the Clash, Bishop replied: For me, no, because we went on with Strummer. Yes, to a point, the early days made him credible, but he stayed credible to the end. Strummer never let us down, he always delivered; musically, politically and professionally – it sounds funny to say, but it’s true – we were always guaranteed a good night out.

Hayman responded to the same proposi-

Sandinista! fed stuff into my mind about oppressive regimes around the world that I wouldn't otherwise have known about (Joe Williams)

tion with a question: ‘Was it in the seventies or later? From my point of view, people took more notice of his [Strummer’s] causes later, because he was separated from the Clash’. For this reason Hayman suggests Joe Strummer was more of a ‘spokesperson’ for her in his later incarnations than whilst in the Clash.

The burden of authenticity One of the key questions participants were asked during the second survey was: ‘How

Article One

much of Joe Strummer’s persona was authentic and how much was a performance’?

Joe Williams responded with the John Lennon lyric ‘A working class hero is something to be’. Williams argued ‘this weighed heavily on him [Strummer], it was important to Joe to buy into what people wanted him to be’. During the first survey, Williams expressed how, occasionally, he had felt disappointed by Strummer’s wilful ‘yob image’.

But for Williams, Strummer’s beliefs were more important than his persona. ‘Joe’s beliefs stayed the same. As Joe became more comfortable [with himself], layers peeled away and what was there in the first place was still there’. Tim Mardell replied to the same question more indignantly: Who says it [Strummer’s persona] wasn’t real? He lived the life, didn’t have the dough, [he] had hardship. His background doesn’t change his achievement one iota.

Joe never conformed; he didn’t become a banker he became a musician and an artist. He wasn’t afraid to change musically and he opened people’s ears and eyes to the possibilities of different music. He kept

looking forwards. Joe represents making the right choices.

Considering this question, Kevin Barry reasoned that although Joe Strummer’s ‘privileged background was exaggerated […] he felt he had to overcompensate for it’. On the same question, George Bishop concurred with Barry’s assessment: ‘Strummer’s background wasn’t that posh – he was middle class, so what? Strummer wasn’t a fake; if he was we wouldn’t be talking about him now’. Bob Warren remembers being uninterested by the ‘flak’ the Clash got for ‘supposedly being middle class poseurs’. He says ‘that [criticism] came from people who were jealous’.

For Warren, Joe ‘Strummer was consistently sincere and consistently interesting – which is what attracts people like me [a working class youth worker] to him, even if he’s playing Hungarian folk [music]’.

Arms aloft in Acton Town None of the non FBU members participating in the project attended the Mescaleros’ FBU benefit at Acton Town Hall in

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“This is Joe Public Speaking” - Why Joe Strummer’s Passion is Still in Fashion

November 2002, but there was unanimity amongst everyone surveyed that Acton symbolised why Joe Strummer still mattered. Lisa Hayman, who works for the Musicians Union, remembers thinking ‘it was amazing, but not surprising that he would support such a brilliant cause’. For Hayman, Strummer’s support for the FBU at Acton ‘justifies why you had such a passion for him in the first place’. Bob Warren used similar language: ‘I thought it was brilliant. As a trade unionist I thought it was amazing’. George Bishop concurred more emphatically: ‘It was absolutely fucking brilliant. They [the fire fighters] were working class blokes in normal jobs and Strummer was there for them’. Joe Williams saw the Acton benefit as illustrating his argument about Strummer’s consistency. ‘Joe playing for the FBU has resonance – it fitted with the whole Clash ethos. Joe and Mick being solid and representing the people they’d always been about – “this is Joe public speaking!”’

There was unanimity also on the question of whether Joe Strummer had ever

‘sold out’. Responses to this question were mostly succinct. Kevin Barry replied: ‘No, in a word. No chance’. Echoing Barry, George Bishop’s response was even more peremptory: ‘Never. No way. Not by any stretch of criteria’. Bob Warren offered: ‘No, it was the opposite with Strummer.

He could have done a Hookey’ (i.e. rested on his back catalogue in a self-serving way in the manner of Peter Hook) but his passion for music drove him on’. Gary Bassett is the one participant who ‘confess[ed]’ to having thought Joe Strummer had sold out.

But Bassett is now at pains to stress ‘on reflection, this was more to do with my own confused world view’. Bassett says ‘I better appreciate and understand the Clash and Joe Strummer now than I did then’.

‘The first important one of our generation to die’ Ten of the eleven participants remember exactly where they were when they heard the news that Joe Strummer had died. All remember how they felt. Tim Mardell recalls: I was working at Canary Wharf DS4

Article One

working on a building. I saw the Evening Standard headline: “Punk Legend Dies”.

‘I thought it would be someone from the Lurkers or a rumour. I was devastated.

Even though I’d never met him, I felt like a family member had died. I cried my eyes out right there.

George Bishop remembers being ‘distraught’. ‘Dave [Watkins] phoned me at work. I listened to the message standing in the cold in shock’. Bob Warren talked about ‘feeling gutted’. He recounted that although ‘Lee Brilleaux and Ian Dury had

already gone, Joe was the first important one of our generation to die’. Warren spent most of Monday 23 December ‘raising a glass’ to Strummer: ‘I left a pint of Guinness for Joe [in every pub] all along the Mile End Road’.

Piers Bannister had met Joe Strummer while working for Amnesty International when the Latino Rockabilly War played a benefit concert for the humanitarian organisation at the Milton Keynes Bowl in June 1988. Bannister’s eldest son, Elliot, who was born in July 2003, has the middle name Strummer on his birth certificate.

Like Sian Griffiths, Bannister felt a similar need ‘to pay tribute to Joe’. When Bannister reflected on the bands and musicians that have been important to him in his life he concluded: ‘I liked David Bowie, Adam and the Ants and the Jam at the time, but the Clash and Joe Strummer have stayed with me’. Other participants also expressed how they felt the influence of the Clash and Joe Strummer in later life. Asked if he thought liking the Clash had affected how he thought about the world, Dave Watkins

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“This is Joe Public Speaking” - Why Joe Strummer’s Passion is Still in Fashion

replied ‘More now than then’. A locksmith by trade who is now a manager for a successful security company, Watkins gestured to his business suit and recited lines from “Clampdown”: ‘You grow up and you calm down, you start wearing blue and brown’.

Turning rebellion into action In his seminal 1984 essay, ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, the American cultural critic Fredric Jameson dismissed the counter-cultural ‘political interventions [...] of The Clash’ for being ‘all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it’.17 A schematic engagement with this thesis might posit Strummer as having re-connected with the struggle against capitalism because he had achieved sufficient ‘distance’ from the ‘system’ supporting the anarchist Class War led Rock Against the Rich campaign in his ‘wilderness’ period, and then the FBU having become an independently signed

artist at the turn of the millennium.18 Matt Wrack saw the Clash on the White Riot tour on 15 November 1977 – twenty five years to the day before the Acton FBU benefit.19 In the first interview carried out for the project, Wrack commented that he ‘thought it was great that our bands were lining up for the antifascist cause’ circa 1978. However, he suggested that Strummer’s final gesture of ‘supporting a trade union struggle was more socialist than the Clash supporting a populist campaign against racism’ twenty four years earlier.

Yet while Wrack’s comments cogently point up that Joe Strummer became, if anything, more radical at the end of his life, most of the participants of this project have suggested Strummer’s popular cultural interventions – both with and without the Clash – have, for the most part, been a consistent source of personal and cultural enrichment.

Echoing Sian Griffiths’ life history, Lisa Hayman expressed her belief that ‘getting into punk music and liking the Clash made me confident and changed my whole

Article One

life’. She says that without this experience ‘I wouldn’t have become interested in politics or worked for the Musicians’ Union’.

Yet Hayman is also of the view that Strummer became more important as a spokesperson for her generation by demonstrating that ‘he definitely did care’ and ‘was genuine’ in the post-Clash periods.

Jameson’s critique is further undercut by some of the participants’ insistence that Joe Strummer should be defined by a consistent commitment to challenging his audience in terms of both form and content. In the words of Tim Mardell, Strummer ‘opened people’s ears and eyes to the possibilities of different music’. Indeed, it was while with the Clash – working within the ‘system’ – that Strummer most boldly risked alienating his audience. Reviewing the sprawling triple album, Sandinista!, for Melody Maker at the end of 1980, Patrick Humphries argued the Clash’s ‘interesting’ subject matter’ was ‘lost in a welter of reggae/dub overkill’.20 Marcus Gray has noted with irony how the Clash went from being critiqued ‘for exhibiting retrogres-

sive tendencies [circa the Give ‘Em Enough Rope and London Calling periods] to being criticised for experimenting with form’.21 But this experimental foray also pulled the rug from under some of the band’s most ardent supporters. Garry Bassett says ‘I didn’t understand Sandinista!’ and Tim Mardell remembers finding the album ‘difficult’.22 Although Bob Warren remembers being intrigued by the album’s title – ‘All of a sudden I wanted to know what “Sandinista” was’ – he also admits that ‘Apart from the singles I didn’t like the album at first’.

The wilfully anti-commercial, ‘difficult’ Sandinista! period surely goes some way to refuting Jameson’s suggestion that the Clash were easily ‘reabsorbed’ by the ‘system’. Moreover, the accounts of the participants detailed in this essay attest to the progressive influence of the Clash and Joe Strummer upon their lives (and popular culture more generally) throughout their youth and into middle age.

Conclusion For almost all the participants, Joe Strum-

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“This is Joe Public Speaking” - Why Joe Strummer’s Passion is Still in Fashion

mer has remained a progressive touchstone for over three-and-a-half decades.

All regard Strummer as having a significant place in their life stories. It is no exaggeration to suggest the White Riot tour, RAR, the Sandinista!-hurdle, collaborating with B.A.D, Rock Against the Rich, returning with the Mescaleros and supporting the FBU at Acton are all plot-points in the participants’ lives. There is a sense of journey in the way some of those surveyed discussed how ‘they ‘developed with’ the Clash and ‘went on with’ Joe Strummer. Yet there is also the suggestion that Strummer represented consistency – by ‘stay[ing] credible’ and ‘consistently sincere’. Indeed, in the very act of ‘not being afraid to change’, Strummer consistently ‘mad[e] the right choices’, ‘musically, politically and professionally’.23 Perhaps most pointedly of all, Joe Strummer is remembered by the participants for being ‘about’, and ‘there for’, people such as themselves.

Although based on a small and potentially unrepresentative sample, the reflective recollections that have been elicited make

the project an important contribution to the critical discourse around Joe Strummer. Despite shortcomings, not least the failure to address Dave Laing’s observation that punk’s ‘anti-elitism did not preclude the reproduction of macho styles’24 the study has demonstrated ways in which Joe Strummer has had a material impact upon the lives of its participants. While the project as it stands can lay claim for validity (for its insights into the influence of the Clash and Joe Strummer upon the lives of its participants), a larger and more diverse study is needed to establish the extent to which the parent-cultural forces considered above provides a useful theoretical approach for understanding the appeal of the Clash and Joe Strummer. A wider (i.e. less London-centric) collection of oral histories is necessary for developing more ‘generalized theoretical understandings of social processes’25 in which different audiences have established and maintained an affinity with Joe Strummer. Towards this objective, more interdisciplinary work in the fields of cultural history, sociology and

Article One

other areas of enquiry is surely needed to more fully evaluate the long shadow that Joe Strummer continues to cast across many people’s lives and popular culture more generally.

Endnotes 1 In the documentary, The Last Night London Burned (Alan Miles and Gregg McDonald,2003) the then general secretary of the FBU, Andy Gilchrest, states ‘Just when you thought the evening couldn’t get any better at all, Mick Jones [Strummer’s former song writing partner with the Clash] strides on and starts rekindling everyone’s memories of the Clash on stage’ 2 Jones. A, Uncut November, 2006 p124 3 Gilbert. P, Mojo June, 2006 p87 4 Rock Against Racism was established in 1976.

‘Ironically the inspiration for [RAR] came from the singer Eric Clapton […] who had gained fame and fortune from black music [after he] interrupted a gig in Birmingham in [August] 1976 to tell his audience that Enoch [Powell] had been right [to predict the inevitability of race riots]. The first RAR gig was held in November 1976. The RAR Carnival that took place in east London’s Victoria Park on 30 April 1978 attracted over 80,000 people. RAR produced a fanzine called Temporary Hoarding which by 1979 was selling 12,000 copies an issue’ Searchlight Extra September, 2007 pp2-9 5 Quoted in Bedford. M, ‘Concerted efforts, remembering rock against racism’, Vertigo Volume 3 No 9 Summer2008, p64 6 The consumption of alcohol by most of the participants during the interviews may be con-

sidered as an extraneous variable that has influenced responses. However, the interviews were all carried out mid-week i.e. on days where the participants had work the following day and only moderate amounts were imbibed 7 Anderson. L, ‘Analytic autoethnography’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Volume 35, Number 4, Sage Publications, August 2006, p376 8 Anderson quotes Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner’s description of evocative autoethnography as being ‘the mode of storytelling [that] is akin to the novel or biography and thus fractures the boundaries that normally separate social science from literature’, Anderson. L, ‘Analytic autoethnography’ Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Volume 35, Number 4, Sage Publications, August 2006, p377 9 Anderson. L, ‘Analytic autoehnography’ Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Volume 35, Number 4, Sage Publications, August 2006, pp375-378 10 Anderson. L, ‘Analytic autoethnography’ Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Volume 35, Number 4, Sage Publications, August 2006, pp382-385 11 Robinson. T, in Searchlight Extra, 2007, p7 12 Laing. D, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock, Open University Press, 1985, p128 13 For a good example of second-wave punk anti-Clash sentiment see the documentary, Rough Cut and Ready Dubbed (Hassan Shah and Dom Shaw, 1981). In this film young punks and skinheads line up circa 1980 to give their opinions on the Clash: ‘Not as good as they used to be’; ‘Sold out’; ‘A bunch of wankers’. However, the ‘election’ of Joe Strummer as fantasy prime minister by NME readers in the 5 May 1979 ‘Election Special’ demon-

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“This is Joe Public Speaking” - Why Joe Strummer’s Passion is Still in Fashion

strates continuing support from young music fans and corresponds more closely with the opinions of the participants canvassed for this study 14 This strategy was partly practical and partly to maintain continuity. However, the same caveat detailed in footnote 6 obviously continues to apply 15 Elder. G H and Giele. J Z, The Craft of Life Course Research, Guilford Press, 2000, p7 16 Elder. G H and Giele. J Z, The Craft of Life Course Research, Guilford Press, 2000, p7 17 Jameson. F, ‘Postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, New Left Review, 146, July-August, 1984, p87 18 Strummer was brought in from the ‘wilderness’ with ‘the offer of a record deal with Hell Cat, the pet project of Tim Armstrong of Rancid’, Salewicz. C, Redemption Song, the Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer, Harper Collins, 2006, p560 19 Wrack saw the Clash on 15 November 1977 at the Belle Vue in Manchester, exactly a quarter of a century before Joe Strummer’s final London performance in Acton 20 Gray. M, Return of The Last Gang in Town, Helter Skelter, 2003, p354 21 Gray. M, Return of The Last Gang in Town, Helter Skelter, 2003, pp356-57 22 They respectively add, ‘I now put that down to my stupidity’ and ‘I have since grown to love it’ 23 Interestingly, no one brought up the question of the Clash’s infighting and Joe Strummer’s sanction of the sacking of band members.

This simply seems to be taken as read.

24 Laing. D, One Chord Wonders, (1985) p381 The participants of the study were generally of the view that the Clash’s masculine gang aesthetic was integral to the band’s appeal and this

was seen as positive by both the male and female participants 25 Anderson. L, ‘Analytical autoethnography’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Volume 35, Number 4, Sage Publications, August 2006, p385

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Since completing his MA in History at London Metropolitan University in 2007, Mark Bedford – who was a fire fighter in the London Fire Brigade between 1992 and 2006 – has lectured at a variety of Further Education institutions. He currently lectures in sociology and history at Amersham and Wycombe College. He has also written on film and music for a number of publications.

ARTICLE TWO ONE ARTICLE

G i a c o m o B o t t Ă

Articulating Punk in an Industrial City: Turin and the Collettivo Punx Anarchici in the early 1980s

Article Two

T

he 1990s saw the slow academic demise of ‘subculture’ as concept and as field of academic research, culminating in the publication of a The Post-Subcultures Reader in 2003.1 A growing number of scholars understood subculture as too static and too dependent on the class structure to be able to define group formations in postmodern, flexible and neoliberal societies. In addition, local articulations of youth groups were more and more regarded as particular responses to place which could not be generalized or abstracted. Also, the notion of resistance was put back in perspective and regarded mostly as an eventful possibility in the field of consumption.

Terms such as ‘scene’ and ‘neo-tribe’ began to be used to address communitarian, underground and so-called ‘spectacular’ expressions of youth.2

Nowadays, punk can be regarded simply as a canonized niche in the multitude of scenes, communities and neo-tribes sharing an origin in Anglo-Saxon popular music. As such, it is even possible to argue that punk has been embedded into the new

spaces of flexible accumulation represented by culturalized urban space. Just like other subcultures, punk was at home in the bohemia of dilapidated working class districts, which are nowadays more and more commodified as urban spectacles and as expressions of ‘local cultures’. Nightlife has become a way to reconsolidate cities’ economies after the demise of industry. City tourists expect to see and participate into the rituals of so-called scenes or neo-tribes.

Punk does not represent a menace or a form of resistance to the city establishment or to urban safety; on the contrary, it signifies excitement, liveliness and buzz and collaborates in the consolidation of a symbolic economy.3 Moreover, the appropriation of DIY (do it yourself), in its ideological and practical sense, has had a key role in sustainable development as implemented by municipalities during the ongoing recession.

Nonetheless, the above-mentioned processes have clear spatial borders: they have proved effective only in national capitals and the cultural centres of design-intensive neo-liberal countries, i.e. in cities

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Articulating Punk in an Industrial City

Flyer of one of the first torino collettivo gigs

where money already resides. In other places, at various scales, punk still functions and is still perceived as a social menace and as a subcultural form of resistance.4 Moreover, since the first taste of a global recession in 2008, academic and media attention has widely focused on the period of the late 1970s – early 1980s, trying desperately to find clues about what was going to happen or creating irritating forms of recession nostalgia.5 Many of the subcultures that originated following the oil crisis of 1973 are clearly bound to a certain social and spatial configuration caused by economic crisis.

However, drawing a straight line between the current economic crisis and the past organic birth of new antagonist forms of cultural resistance, such as punk, ska and hiphop in the late 1970s, seems to be inaccurate and in need of more academic attention.

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My attempt in this paper is not to revive subcultural research of the late 1970s, which is as imbued with a particular historical and cultural momentum as the subcultures it analyzes. Instead, I am going to examine how, in decaying industrial cities around Europe, it was possible to generate interesting and original cultural responses in the field of popular music and to articulate resistance and possible material and imaginary solutions to the crisis. Subcultural research created important instruments for this kind of inquiry and I will implement some of them here.

My case for this paper is the Collettivo Punx Anarchici (Anarchist Punx Collective), active in Turin in the early 1980s. I am interested in revealing how the Collettivo dramatized Turin’s decay and social unrest during the FIAT automobile industry crisis. Bands such as Contrazione, Declino and Negazione (among others) were able to ‘sound out’ urban alienation and decay, creating the original, non-profit and self-organized forms of musical production. Nonetheless, they also followed the

rules and rituals of a globally expanding and cosmopolitan-thinking subculture.

Setting the scene: Torino/Turin6 Turin was the first capital of Italy from the unification in 1861 to 1864. It is the industrial city par excellence in the Italian context, because the automobile company FIAT (Fabbrica Italiana Auto Torino) was founded there in 1899. The workers’ movement has clear connections to Turin: the Sardinian socialist thinker and political prisoner Antonio Gramsci studied and organized in the city. The big strikes of 1943, starting the slow demise of fascism through resistance, also found fertile soil in FIAT automobile factories. Furthermore, from the late 1960s, students’ and workers’ radicalisation and twisted evolvement into terrorism in the late 1970s, had the city as their national hotspot.7 The 1980s are often interpreted by Italian historiography merely as an era of riflusso,8 where ideological struggle ended and people retreated into a hedonistic private sphere. This was inaugurated in

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Articulating Punk in an Industrial City

the city by the so-called marcia dei colletti bianchi -the white-collar march in 1980 - which brought a long FIAT blue-collar strike to a bitter end. This was followed by cuts in employment, robotization of production and the apparent demise of Fordism. ‘Conflict’ at the social, economic, cultural, and urban level could be considered as one of the keywords when approaching the topic of Turin.

The Collettivo Punx Anarchici was a group of youngsters (most of them still in secondary school) who began dressing up, making music, organizing gigs, writing fanzines, producing and trading tapes, and claiming spaces in Turin in the early 1980s, inspired mostly but not only by American and British bands as diverse as The Sex Pistols, Crass and Black Flag.9 The Collettivo Punx Anarchici defined themselves as punks and politically as anarchists (just like their name suggest). The anarchist movement had been active in the city for years already and it was in the small premises of an anarchist circle/club, that punks had the chance to gather, organize and de-

velop their socio-political consciousness.

Industrial city culture In the introduction to the seminal CCCS book Resistance to Rituals, ‘culture’ is defined as ‘the way the social relations of a group are structured and shaped: but it is also the way those shapes are experienced, understood and interpreted’.10

Culture is therefore characterized as something two-fold: on one hand, it is a material entity based on the shapes and structures which social relations take, on the other, it is also a conceptual entity, based on the way we rationalize and make sense of these social relations. However, social relations are also inextricably bound to spatial ones. To examine culture, especially if articulated at the urban level, it is relevant to approach it by examining how both spatial and social relations have been first shaped and then understood and interpreted.

In general, industrial cities in Europe responded for almost three hundred years to the needs of a capitalist regime based on

Article Two

Fiat Factory manufacturing and industry by maintaining one sole paradigm: production. This kind of city was not designed for consumption, not even in its centre, nor for services (excluding the basic ones and those connected to manufacturing); it was designed to facilitate, enforce, and embed production. It took decades before urban planning began regulating the needs of capitalist industries and workers acquired the

consciousness of their rights, bringing forward the concept of welfare and wellbeing.

Certain materials became typical of industrial cities and there use widespread: red bricks in the 19th and bare concrete in the 20th century.

Turin in the 1980s was an industrial city, its culture was industrial and its sociospatial relations were determined mostly by production. An interesting factor is the

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Articulating Punk in an Industrial City

concentration of production in the hands of one company only: the FIAT automobile industry, with some ancillary manufacturing and handcrafts, referred to in Italian as indotto. Built in the fascist era, FIAT Mirafiori remains a huge functioning industrial conurbation in the south of the city, surrounded by residential tower blocks, where the workers lived and long alleys connected to the centre of the city and to the surrounding region.

Until the 1980s, the dominance of FIAT had clear spatial and temporal landmarks: from the work-shifts determining the frequency of public transportations, traffic congestions and family lives to the habit of Giovanni Agnelli, CEO of the company, of frequently commuting even within the city on a helicopter. It is nearly self-explanatory to relate the spatialities of Turin to its social features. Distances did not only encompass the city horizontally; Gianni Agnelli’s power towered vertically over the city: socially, as the CEO of FIAT and spatially, on his helicopter.11

The city grew vertiginously from the

1950s to the 1980s, especially because of massive immigration from the south of Italy; this resulted in the construction of dormitory peripheral districts, sometimes suffering from segregation and consequent social problems ranging from petty criminality to heroin abuse.

A communist mayor, Diego Novelli, led the municipality from 1975 to 1985 and some forms of social welfare were introduced, such as the so-called centri d’incontro, district-dependant youth centers where bands were able to rehearse. In addition, transportation was organized following grids - not only in the city centre therefore, at least theoretically, putting all districts on the same level.

Punks responded to this socio-spatial structure and shape constituting the culture of Turin by also articulating their own needs as a quest immanent in the same material dimension, a quest for space.

Punk as articulation Articulation is one of the keywords in the thought of the CCCS and of Stuart Hall, in

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Fiat Mirafiori Chimney seen between the apartment blocks were the workers live

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Articulating Punk in an Industrial City

particular. In Resistance through Rituals, subcultures are described as ‘double articulation’12 in reference to the parent culture (the working class) and to the dominant one (the ruling class). Building on the thought of Ernesto Laclau, Hall develops this concept further as an instrument to overcome Marxist reductionism. He uses the term both to refer to a form of expression and enunciation and as a temporary structure formed by two elements. This concept is useful in reference to the contextual constellation of cultural practices.

As brilliantly stated by Daryl Slack in her analysis of articulation in Hall: the context is not something given out there, within which practices occur or which influence the development of practices. Rather, identities, practices, and effects generally, constitute the very context within which they are practices, identities or effects.13 Rojek14 also refers to the way pop music is able to articulate identity, resistance and regulation.

By adopting this concept, I aim to overcome a deeply-rooted issue in the study of

popular music and subcultures, i.e. their relation to place and to the industrial city in particular. ‘The sound of the factory’ or ‘the rhythm of the assembly line’ have been used in reference to disparate genres, from soul to heavy metal, from house to postpunk, as if they are simply organic homologies and not mere reductionist positions.

Punk as a subculture articulates itself as a heterogeneous mix of subjectivities, of what Stuart would call ‘positionalities’ and of identities. The collettivo articulated itself through writings, drawings and music. Their critical views on the socio-spatial structure of the city and the idea of individual and collective needs are not to be understood as simply deriving from a particular socio-spatial context, they were articulating themselves within this context and therefore, at the same time, were able to change and shape it.

For instance, interpreting punk as a continuation of the workers’ struggle and tradition within the working class, cannot work in the context of the collettivo. As stated by Mara, the female voice of Con-

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trazione, active between 1983 and 1985: With Contrazione we always tried to express our needs, my need has never been to work in a factory and die there, my need has always been to live and be happy, despite work.15 Contrazione were very much aware of the spatial articulation of their activities and of the consequences it could have: Our attempt is to not get used to desperation and greyness, but to use the sounds, colours and life of a metropolis, coming everyday into our mind, as an incentive to build a ground for our life and our fight. Fight for the present, against heroin, nuclear energy or themes like ICT (that from possible moments for wider cultural divulgation will become in-

strumental to the aims of a increasingly technocratic society), with the conscience of living in an urban landscape like Turin, which shows everyday, in increasingly tangible fashion, the symptoms of a progressive decomposition.

CONTRAZIONE are for a music, which is not only a punch in the face, but also a moment of projection of our conscience.16 A double articulation – based only on class relations – is not enough to understand the activities of the Collettivo and its bands.

Punk, as a subcultural expression of youth, cut through social classes: members of the Collettivo were from different walks of life and represented an interesting social mix.

Their efforts were not merely connected to

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class or generational pride, but were much more invested with a cosmopolitan urban feel of rebellion and claim on public space which articulated itself betwixt and between politics and popular music.

This took an interesting turn with reference to lyrics. Punk lyrics were often built as political slogans, usually with refrains to be shouted ad libitum, a style that would find great resonance. A later development lent lyrics some existential(ist) nuances with references to social isolation, depression and sadness, sometimes in exaggerated emotional ways. Nonetheless, it was the articulation of these lyrics, mostly through shouts and growls and the embedding of them in a fast and furious wall of sound, which determined their meaning.

In recordings and especially in live situations, lyrics remained mostly unintelligible; however, they were also photocopied, distributed and translated into other languages. The attempt to examine Collettivo’s songs should therefore always refer to the way they were articulated.

Declino were the first band that could

release an EP in 1983, thanks to the collective decision and the efforts of the Collettivo, which created a DIY label, Contro Produzioni Records. The song “Mortale Tristezza” could be read as an articulation of the band’s sound and subcultural standpoint, within the material, social and historical context of Torino: Deadly sadness in this city / not so middle class and not so working class / once royal now decadent / feeble resistance to this system (…) deadly sadness in this city / assaults people who feel derided / for their broken dreams to pile up money / but the robot doesn’t rebel and starts dreaming once again17 (Declino – “Mortale Tristezza”).

“Noi” by Negazione appears in Condannati a morte nel vostro quieto vivere, the band’s second EP, recorded at Joke’s Koeienverhuurbedrijf in Emma, an Amsterdam squat, in April 1985. After a mid-tempo intro, the song starts accelerating, the guitar riffs get more intricate, the voice louder and the lyrics less easy to understand. The song is not constructed following a verse–refrain scheme; it builds on guitar riffs changing

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up to a point and then changing back in reverse until returning to the mid-tempo intro (now an outro) and finishing. In the intro, Zazzo, the band’s singer, recites with a certain emphasis: We, we will overthrow the pride for your cars / We will destroy the happiness of your Sundays18 (Negazione, “Noi”, 1985.)

In its simplicity, the two phrases bring a certain context into focus. The first is about the manufacturing of cars and the pride associated with both the production and the ownership of these cars. The second is to do with the workers’ condition and the delights of Sunday, the day without work devoted to relaxation. There is an interesting dialectic step from early punk, the idea is not to burn cars and destroy Sundays; it is more about overthrowing pride and destroying (false) happiness.

The Collettivo should therefore be understood as the articulation of several individual and collective forces, establishing precarious links and relations at different scales and under different circumstances with social, cultural and spatial forces

around them. It is impossible to understand the collettivo by merely referring to international, national or local socio-spatial situations or, worse, to a tradition of political opposition mixed with a musical and fashion-related subculture. These songs reveal a change in the status of these individual musicians and listeners, in the way they carried out subcultural practices and in their relation to the own environment.

An important step towards the understanding of articulation is the use of mapping. Although in cultural studies this term detains very complex theoretical nuances, I would like to use it in its simple spatial connotations.

Already the seminal work of the Chicago school on subcultures, in its ‘ecological’ bias, showed an interesting use of maps.

They drew geographical maps to visualize the distributions of ethnicities circling the city centres and to understand territorial gang control. The CCCS also utilizes cartographic concepts and metaphors, for instance when referring to ‘maps of mean-

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ings’, the objectified patterns used by human beings to become social. In addition, the CCCS echoes the Chicago School’s insistence on territory, assigning it a positive role: They, too, win space for the young: cultural space in the neighbourhood and institutions, real time for leisure and recreation, actual room on the street or street-corner. They serve to mark out and appropriate ‘territory’ in the localities.19

The Collettivo revolved around a few meeting places: the Piazza Statuto (a square), Rock & Folk (an import record shop), the Circolo Anarchico in Via Ravenna, the Centro D’Incontro in the Vanchiglia district (a municipal-led youth club with rehearsal room) and, initially, the Bar Roberto (a bar close to the main University building).

Interestingly, the only really central place in this list is Bar Roberto – nowadays a place for aperetivo – at the time, a shabby bar. Mapping these places reveals a new understanding of the city, no longer based on a Lefebvrian/1968 need to ‘take over the centre.’ There was a keener attempt to

take over residual spaces for new purposes, which climaxed in the squatting of El Paso in 1987, a disused kindergarten, which is still active nowadays as an autonomous gig venue and squat.

In a way, music, the act of sounding out noise, seems to take over the role of public space. It is no more a commodity; it becomes public with no copyright policies and with fair distribution through a democratic, non-commercial circuit.

Another lesson from the CCCS that I’d like to use in this paper is related to the performative / spectacular aspects (which, strangely enough, rarely connect to music in subcultural studies) of subcultures. This can be addressed by using Hebdige’s idea of dramatization. In his words: punks were not only directly responding to increasing joblessness, changing moral standards, the rediscovery of poverty, the Depression, etc. they were dramatizing what had come to be called ‘Britain’s decline.’20

Dramatization lies therefore very close to articulation, but it emphasizes aspects such as performance and mimesis. For

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instance, the cover of Tutti Pazzi, Negazione’s first EP, shows the singer Zazzo sitting on the ground on a street corner, next to a trash bin. The shot was taken by Tax, the band’s guitar player while the band was hanging out close to the place where Zazzo was living with his parents, in the Lingotto district. In this cover, Zazzo performs the role of the rejected, the mentally unstable, the unemployed, the heroin addict through his position (head on knees, sitting on the street). There are, however, clear subcultural references through the clothes (jeans, Chuck Taylor shoes), pose and haircut to other famous punk covers (band members quoted the Ramones’ first LP and a Minor Threat EP). In addition, the trash-bin can be interpreted as a symbol of periphery: it is a very cheap piece of functionalistic urban design and can therefore be taken as a symbol of economic crisis and cuts in public expenditures. In the back of the picture, there is the nearly subconscious presence of a car. The car can still be understood as a hegemonic symbol in Turin.

The use of the xeroxed black and white

aesthetic, although being simply connected to the band’s lack of means of production, also evokes authenticity and a certain kind of humanism. As shown here, dramatization justifies the quest for authenticity and offers a chance to rearticulate the meaning of the crisis as performative force.

Conclusions My main concern within this paper was to show how subcultural research matters – especially when confronting a specific conjuncture – such as ‘industrial cities under economic crisis.’ I think that such an approach is still scientifically valid and will offer interesting results also in application to contemporary crisis-ridden European centres. In fact, interpreting the relation among subcultures, spatialities and economic crisis as an articulation, offers the chance to overcome at least two possible forms of reductionism. The first kind of reductionism elects the economic dimension (the Marxian base) as the main determinant of any possible (sub)cultural expression, therefore turning resistance into a factual

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impossibility. The second reductionism is an aesthetic one, based on the belief that certain places organically produce certain musical genres, making industrial cities responsible for the development of certain sounds.

Through the analysis of the Collettivo and their embedment into Turin’s spatial and social context, I tried to delegitimize both form of reductionism and to achieve a more nuanced understanding of the possible activities of underground resistance in the context of the contemporary city.

Endnotes 1 David Muggleton & Rupert Weinzlier, The Post-Subcultures Reader (Berg, Oxford 2003) 2 About these debates see for instance: Andy Bennett ‚ ‘Consolidating the Music Scenes Perspective’ in: Poetics (32, 2004), pp. 223–234; Andy Bennett & Richard A., Peterson, Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual (Vanderbilt, Nashville 2004), and Paul Hodkinson & Wolfgang Weicke, Youth Cultures: Scenes, Subcultures and Tribes (Routledge, London 2007).

3 About the relation between music scenes and economic development see, for instance, the project Music and the Entertainment Economy: http://music.martinprosperity.org/ (last accessed: 9.5.2012) 4 For instance, see the case of Russian female punk band Pussy Riots: Sergey Chernov, ‘Female Fury against Putin’, in: Norient (11 April

2012) http://norient.com/stories/pussy-riots/ (last accessed: 9.5.2012) 5 For instance: Robert Booth, ‘Artists’ creative use of vacant shops brings life to desolate high streets’, The Guardian, 18.2.2009; Mark Townsend, ‘Return of underground rave culture is fuelled by the recession and Facebook’, The Observer, 7.11.2010.

6 In this article, I am going to use the English Turin, as a translation of the original Italian Torino.

7 For the history of Turin see: Tranfaglia Nicola, Storia di Torino XI: Gli Anni della Repubblica. (Einaudi, Torino 1999).

8 Stefano Di Michele, I magnifici anni del riflusso. Come eravamo negli anni ottanta (Marsilio, Venezia 2003).

9 I won’t dig into the ideological and aesthetical differences separating these bands, which could be considered as expressions of classic ‘77 punk (The Sex Pistols), British anarcho-punk (Crass) and hardcore punk (Black Flag). These differences were also at the origin of tensions, schisms and misunderstandings within the Turin scene.

10 Stuart Hall & Tony Jefferson (ed.) Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain (HarperCollins, 1991) p. 11.

11 For a biography of Gianni Agnelli see: Enzo Biagi, Il Signor FIAT. Una Biografia (Rizzoli, Milano 1976).

12 Stuart Hall & Tony Jefferson (ed.) Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain (HarperCollins, 1991) p. 15.

13 Jennifer Daryl Slack, ‘The Theory and Method of Articulation’, in: David Morley & KuanHsing Chen , Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (Routledge, London 1996), p.

126.

14 Chris Rojek, Pop Music, Pop Culture (Polity,

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Cambridge 2011).

15 Giacomo Bottà, Interview with Mara of Contrazione, 22.4.2011.

16 Stefano Giaccone & Marco Pandin, Nel Cuore della Bestia (Zero in Condotta, 1996). Originally in yeti fanzine, n. 1283 (Torino 1983).

Transl. by Giacomo Bottà.

17 Mortale tristezza in questa città / poco borghese, poco operaia / un tempo reale, ora decadente / mite resistenza a questo sistema ( ) mortale tristezza in questa città / assale la gente che si sente derisa / per i sogni svaniti d’ammucchiare denaro / ma il robot non soppone / e riprende a sognare 18 Noi, noi rovesceremo lorgoglio delle vostre automobili / noi distruggeremo la felicità delle vostre domeniche 19 Stuart Hall & Tony Jefferson (ed.) Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain (HarperCollins, 1991) p. 45.

20 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Routledge, London 1979) p. 87.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Giacomo Bottà is docent (adjunct professor) in Urban Studies at the University of Helsinki.

He received his PhD at the IULM University in Milan (2003), examining the representation of Berlin in urban novels after 1989.

Thanks to a fellowship of the Von Humboldt Foundation, he is currently affiliated to the Deutsches Volksliedarchiv (German Popular Music Archive) in Freiburg (Germany), where he is conducting a research about music scenes, industrial cities and economic crisis in the early 1980s that will lead to a book.

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Undressing the System: The Rituals of Madness and Badness in Moroccan Music Festivals By: Moulay Driss El Maarouf

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T

his paper1 deals with madness and badness in music festivals. In the most realistic of non-philosophical imaginings, a madman is a threat; he signals one’s death, because if he murders, within his scope of unpredictability, he is just a madman, rising above the logic of blame and guilt -as logic cannot be so insane in nonphilosophical thought. A madman on the loose is a man capable of all sins - most of which hit at the heart of power: divine and worldly. Theory and actual experience demonstrate that power is wobbly, an unstable non-fixed entity because, as Foucault has it, ‘there are always also movements in the opposite direction, whereby strategies which co-ordinate relations of power produce new effects and advance into hitherto unaffected domains.’2 These movements might not be strong enough to change the course of mainstream orders, but the presence of conflicting ideologies makes social sceneries fascinating as power and power-in-reverse both lead to interesting moments of contradiction, struggle, and ambivalence. Madness is therefore a

complex pronouncement drawn on self and others. A madman is capable of going naked anytime, anywhere, capable of exposing himself in public in the most daring and veritably shocking ‘fuck you’ indifference.

Accordingly, madness and badness are interconnected, for the reason that when one goes mad one goes bad, and when one goes bad one has ‘chosen’ to disrupt an existing order of sanity. On many an occasion, the margin outside the festival soon becomes a recipe for forces of production of madness within the festival, as counter-power upshots help power relations grow severe and demanding in atmospheres of festive laughter and drunkenness (both boosters of structures of madness), capable of the manufacturing of new parameters within the status quo that makes it all the more unpredictable and unreliably erratic. As counter-streams in artistic sites now contribute to the conditions of production of social meanings of resistance, however theatrical, they prove capable of verifying and changing the content and form of the mainstream.

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Madness as différance In his ‘Again Ethics: A Levinasian Reading of Caputo Reading Levinas’, Jeffrey M. Dudiak examines the use that John D. Caputo makes of Derrida’s notion of différance without worrying much about the fidelity, or lack thereof, to Derrida’s understanding of this term. Within the negotiative recesses of re-employment, Caputo declares différance proficient, in the way that it unsettles meta-powers through difference and deferral by creating a blockade, whereby différance is ‘the condition of the im/possibility of everything’, in which: every term, in being posited in a discourse, implies and therefore relies upon its excluded opposite, which can therefore no longer be effectively excluded but must also be made “central” to the discourse (thereby creating a second “centre”, which deconstructs the very notion of centre), is essentially (if it has an essence) de-centring, deconstructive of all presumed centres.’3 The understanding of the festival monster as grotesque and profane, alongside the

damagingly undermining connotations of the marginal other will not lead us anywhere if we want to probe the realities and hyper-realities, as Jean Baudrillard would have it, of the orgy spectacle marked in its prehistoric making, by the disappearance of the real world as we know it.

Keeping up with Caputo’s deployment of Derrida, Dudiak has a preference for a particular ‘impiety’ regarding `the other: an other that is not ‘purely’ other, that is, a deconstructed other, an other whose manifestation is always already a function of the play of différance, always already presented across the trials of undecidability, always already inside/outside of politics (with) no metaphysical backup—not in God, not in Truth, not in Reason.4 Dudiak points out that Caputa wants to maintain a ‘discourse of alterity’, maintaining what Dudiak calls ‘the heteronomic- the law of the other that gives rise to obligation’, while disrupting the limpidness of this ‘law’ by exposing it to the ‘heteromorphic’, which is, according to him, the uncontaminated play of difference in the

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plenum of Being, without the supreme hierarchy instituted.5

Caputa’s sense of alterity that transcends, in gestures confrontational and restless, the forms of all hierarchies, presides over orgy festivals, where the other is decoded to be otherwise, where ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’, to put it à la Jean-François Lyotard, is the essence of postmodern thinking.

The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements—narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. [...]

Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?6 By ‘metanarratives’ Lyotard makes a reference to all overarching totalities, premised on linearity, neatness and comprehensiveness, pushing instead for a discourse of illegitimacy that renders these grand narratives skeptical and flawed. Instead, dotted on the provinces of such metanarratives lingers a throng of ‘petite narratives,’ in-

volved in different ‘language games’, staging ‘a heterogeneity of elements’, which yield institutions in bits, mounting up to a scenery of ‘local determinism.’7 Lyotard declares metanarratives replete with inconsistencies, and for him ‘incredulity is now such that we no longer expect salvation to rise from these inconsistencies.’

We should so little think of incredulity as a form of knowledge residing solely in the hands of authorities, Lyotard warns us, since it improves our ‘sensitivity to differences’ and strengthens our skills to ‘tolerate the incommensurable.`8 Performativity in the postmodern world has the general effect of ‘[subordinating] the institutions of higher learning to the existing powers’.

The other existing powers are, more often than not, reduced by the authorities to their initial adjectival wording: other. The demise of grand narratives not only helps us to ask questions regarding which alternative powers we should consult, but also accommodates a reflection on the politics of otherness in play along the scapes amid the margin and the centre. The ‘other’

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in such vastness plays le fou (the mad), who can act madness and always get away with it. This reminds us of Lord Polonius in Hamlet who asserts that ‘though it be madness, there is method in it.’9 With the rise of madness and the mad-man rises a wave of ‘gothic forms’, as Foucault might call them, because madness is tied, in giveand-take ebbs and flows, to the rudder of gothic symbolism: The dawn of madness on the horizon of the Renaissance is first perceptible in the decay of Gothic symbolism; as if that world, whose network of spiritual meanings was so close-knit, had begun to unravel, showing faces whose meaning was no longer clear except in the forms of mad-ness. 10 Writing madness is one Foucauldian attempt to write the history of that other form of madness, by which men, in an act of sovereign reason, confine their neighbours, and communicate and recognize each other through the merciless language of nonmadness. 11‘Neighbour’, for Foucault, is the counter part of I for Emmanuel Levinas, who examines Husserl’s theory of the ‘in-

tersubjective reduction’ by way of which Husserl argues that ‘Einfuhlung’, (translated by Ingo Farin and James G. Hart as ‘empathy’ in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology), is defined as a unique kind of intentionality that discloses the ‘other’ I’.12 It is rudimentary, according to Husserl, to think of the ‘I’ as a human being who operates in the wake of other human beings or ‘social objectivities’ that affect his behaviour, in the way they represent power or authority. Their relationship is thus marked by an element of fear and control: The human being lets ‘himself’ be influenced not only by particular other humans (actual or imagined) but also by social objectivities that he feels and apprehends as effective objectivities in their own right, as influencing powers. He is afraid of ‘the government’ and carries out what it commands. He views such and such individuals, for instance, the police officer, etc., as representatives of the government only; he fears the person who is an official representative. The customs, the church, etc., he feels as powers, too.13

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Festive madness: chaos and profanity In the context of the festival, the relationship between the ‘I, less authoritative’, with the ‘I, more authoritative’, between the ‘fearing I’ and the ‘fearsome I’, between the ‘I powerful’ and the ‘I less powerful’, is not fraught with fear and control; rather it is fraught, on occasions, with defiance and insolence. To be sure, the postcolony refuses to take the straightjackets of reason, immersed in hallucinations concerning its past, together with an assortments of contradictions and aporias powerfully marking its history, resulting in all sorts of ‘incomplete, strange signs, convulsive movements.’14 The incomplete and strange and the convulsive are all symptoms of postcolonial madness. This madness does not get any better (i.e. - safe and reasonable) in the festival. On the contrary, it is performed chaotically, yet with calculation and intention. Lack of reason accordingly feeds from a minimum amount to a maximum amount of method technique, preparation, and groundwork:

In this extremity of the Earth, reason is supposedly permanently at bay, and the unknown has supposedly attained its highest point. Africa, a headless figure threatened with madness and quite innocent of any notion of center, hierarchy, or stability, is portrayed as a vast dark cave where every benchmark and distinction come together in total confusion, and the rifts of a tragic and unhappy human history stand revealed: a mixture of the half-created

Chaos is not something that takes place outside of ourselves. It happens first in ourselves, and we later impose it on the world as an extension of ourselves.

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and the incomplete, strange signs, convulsive movements in short, a bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gap, and primordial chaos.15 In a situation that shows signs of chaos, the role of the profane messenger is not to perfect the situation, but rather to communicate the chaos through language, and, by the same token, to try and improve the communication process through music, performance, etc as a medium of change.16 Chaos is not something that takes place outside of ourselves. It happens first in ourselves, and we later impose it on the world as an extension of ourselves. The profane prophet, a post-colonial agent, tries to philosophize the (dis)order of things and stage himself as a not-so-superior voice inspired less by divine power, more by the worldliness of language and confused realms of physical and mental structures.

It is interesting to see some of these messages; what they try to communicate, how they communicate it, the dialogue that the profane prophet strives to establish. The messages passed by rappers, for

instance, are intertextual, yet they reflect a huge inner determination to take the risk of offering a written version for their reading. These can, at times, be punishable, in the absence of clear democratic law and human rights.17 In general, urban artists with other styles change the tone of their message. They make it either soft or too stern. They amplify or pass over some aspects, add or omit gags, give details or cut things short through allusion. These techniques are all borrowed from the chaos in which they live, these being mechanisms of survival (both to maintain themselves as the right and best messengers, and to contravene the system without getting punished). In a way, profane and polite messengers have been accused on many occasions throughout the history of madness and trivialized constantly. This explains why, in their attempts to change the situation, they encounter too many difficulties.

While in the case of the polite prophet, (those sent by God to deliver a divine message) the texts they provide strive to demonstrate that they are not mad, the profane

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prophet exploits this madness to keep retribution postponed, while giving the impression that he (it is usually a ‘he’) is a jerk who doesn`t mind his mouth, one who dances on the head of the system (danse sur la tête du système), as goes the song by Hoba Hoba Spirit, performed in different editions of different existing festivals, like the Mawazine Festival:18 Dancing on the Head of the System Intolerance comes from Artists themselves And they think they could solve the problem When they send calls for hatred

Hoba, Hoba Spirit Group

Swinging on charges of blasphamy Yet I advance even if you don’t like it I have the insolence to criticize what I like And I dance on the head of the system Dance on the head of the system—from Kalakh (Stupidity)19.

Madness is symptomized by the gesture of dancing on the head of system, which is empowered by the motivation to press on with the insolence to criticize, but with folly. I have the insolence to criticize what I like (J’ai l’insolence de critiquer ce que j’aime) situates the speaker into a level of awareness, which, mingled with a sense of foolishness, renders him mildly dangerous. Hoba Hoba Spirit group departs from the premise that madness is a discourse of power that enables them to be ‘entertaining’ because a madman is most attractive to the eyes of those who claim sanity. It also enables them to

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The Rituals of Madness and Badness in Music Festivals

be unofficial representatives of the people, appointing themselves to a position of counter-power from which they can bring the system down and dance on its head. On the other hand, the hoba hoba spirit message addresses the other ‘messengers’ (artists) who ‘think they can solve the problem, when they gesture calls for hatred.’ Urban music is premised on this chaotic situation where every messenger comes with his own preaching rhetoric, which causes other messengers, while the problem stays and persists, to build their legitimacy on the downfall they sing about other messengers.

In view of this, resistance leads to containment, and containment leads to resistance. The greater the containment, the more intensely unshakable resistance becomes a creative machinery of ascendancy. In the festival, policy feels less powerful, less reasoned in the axis of ‘mainstreamism’, more in the terrains of nonconformity and collectivism. It is not always feasible to verify whether such nonconformity was a result of the agent’s conscious

action or mainstream inaction, or whether it is the product of organizational lethargy, a lack of exercise as to the deeds of the mass. 20 Evidently, this is for the most part due to chaos, disorganization, and vulgarity in many Moroccan festivals. In the main, vulgarity is a question of intention and opportunity; one can be vulgar when one’s intentions to be vulgar meet an opportunity. When intention is there, while lacking the potential and the conditions for such an extravagance, vulgarity doesn’t take place. Vulgarity is an art, with its own orations, tenets and language skills. People can be vulgar out of necessity or out of magnificence. It can be their profession or their hobby. Vulgarity can be a disaster or a success, brilliance or foolishness, a token of civility or of rawness.

Vulgarity in the music festival takes place in the music and the festival. The festival, awash with its own musical vulgarity and profane performance, makes a reference to, and is in itself a reference to, the mood of the era where it is produced.

It holds a mirror out to the badness of the

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epoch, to the crookedness of social lines, to the absurdity of life, to the unscrupulousness of the worth of human relations and emotions. In our postcolonial world, art has been ushered, or probably has ushered itself, by obligation not by choice, into a world of the words and images of unprecedented vulgarity.

Robert Pattison asks the question that if we are torn between the sureness that the ‘vulgar will join civilization’ and the

Mawazine Generation Festival 2010

likelihood that ‘civilization cannot survive vulgarity,’ then are we not to lapse into the fate Rome, at a time where the ‘young rebels’’ attitude being ‘For God’s sake, burn it down!’21 The victory of vulgarity, Pattison contends, withholds no promises of the annihilation of ‘elite culture’ but the ‘reinterpretation’ of that culture in a popular style.22 The visions of vulgarity are preapocalyptic, and not at all apocalyptic, yet they contain a sense of bitterness, a mood clouded by what is coming, that what is coming is worse than what is being lived.

George Bataille, in his Death and Sensuality, while speaking of the ogreness of/in feasting, whereby ‘we can always imagine a heavy vulgarity taking the place of frenzy’ without possessing the ability to disallow the chance of a ‘state of exaltation’ made of the intoxication that goes with the orgy , the erotic and ecstatic.23 As I see it, a sense of decay drifts into the spectacle as an arena of feasting, creating a state of cohesively vulgar imagination that can’t escape the attractions of its own social afflictions, or the underpinnings of

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its own creative makings. A vulgar imagination is one which produces and consumes, speaks and listens, performs and applauds, sings and dances; it recognizes the vulgar and has intentions to sustain it.

Phallic Creativity and Dominance: From the Corporeal to the Symbolic Let’s consider the image on the previous page. What we have here is a very young Moroccan, carried on the shoulders of someone we cannot see. Standing at the background is a cameraman, with his camera directed toward the stage. The young Moroccan holds two fingers in the air. He looks angry; infuriated and overexcited in the least. Two different hands rise up in a local finger fucking manner. A forth hand is in the process of writing the same f-expression, the fifth concealed by the head of a spectator. Basically, we have four (eyes) and ‘Is’ here, and two types of orations.

The first I (eye) is too visible to disregard, that of the young spectator(s). Second on the list is the eye of the cameraman. The third eye is absent, yet it is suggested by

the two other eyes (artist). The fourth eye is that of the photographer (observer, researcher, etc). To begin with, the cameraman and the spectators, though looking in the same direction, construct different messages. While the spectators are trying to bring into the fore an aesthetic of vulgarity, the cameraman downplays the act by not filming them, given that such is a mediated performance. This is a discursive practice, marked by inclusion and exclusion, addition and omission, marking some statements valid, others invalid, in a Foucauldian sense. Here comes the role of the observer to lay it all bare, and discuss it, being the fourth eye. The camera man gestures towards very deliberate tactics of oversight, a technique of suppression, being a pressing ‘polite’ erasure process for confiscating likely vulgar scenes, by not looking at them, and therefore, by counting them as inexistent. Had it not been for the fourth eye, the act of vulgarity could have never been documented.

The cameraman is aware of the tension, his position is unclear as to what side

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he takes, yet his objective is to maintain a sense of politeness throughout the performance. His role is that of a ‘peacemaker’, mediating a false consciousness, in short, maintaining visual order, against a background of visual vandalism and madness.

The cameraman knows—or has studied—that for each audience there exists its larger double. That is to say, the audience in the festival is but a fraction of the larger audience behind the TV sets. When the festival audience makes a fuss, its double should stay ignorant of it, because a fuss is contagious and scandalous. The cameraman imposes an aura of politeness on the orations of vulgarity. The aura of politeness has the function, in the midst of the interaction of the different blending and clashing languages (corporeal, aesthetical and linguistic), of providing clues to the audience’s double and the state’s double (the broader organizing body) concerning the presence, and in very few cases the absence, of order. His function is to engage in a procedure of camouflage and fabrication of news through narrativization. We can

identify a number of techniques at play, most of them discursive, related to the discourse of politeness, such as downplaying, degree of politeness (camera gestures of either looking or ignoring), minimizing, alarming, etc. My aim is to put into question the very term ‘politeness’ as we socially think of it in terms of what is proper and improper, what goes and what does not, a term that was exploited by systems of power to dominate and discipline, to structure and banalize, to standardize and homogenize behaviour. If there is anything I would like to underscore it is the negotiatory practices ratified by the festival agents, who are social agents in the first place, within the habitus theatre of music and dance. These encapsulate the ‘I less powerful’ and the ‘I more powerful’, and exist as diverging entities anchored historically in time, and globally in space, exposed to change as the rules of the struggle over meaning itself vary.

The conceptualization of politeness refers thus to the endeavour to make sense of the perpetuation or negotiation, production or consumption, construction or deconstruc-

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tion of the polite in popular culture and art, which are always already contaminated by their popularity and mass production —contamination being an enabling rather than a flattening practice.

The young Moroccan in the image is not willing to do the listening. This is a subversive strategy, where all modes of discipline are undermined. Nothing is more repulsive nor more shocking than a display of genitals before the white man.24 The white man expects no accidents, no mishaps, no mayhem, for order would authenticate his splendor, validate his credibility and substantiate his finery. He hires his subjects— white too as long as they maintain the othering process and status quo—cameramen, technicians, security agents, workers, a whole force of personnel, and he does the demarcations, imposes the binaries to further strengthen the sense of control, so that

the talking runs slickly well. None of these is expected or allowed to snooze, for the ‘I less powerful’ (‘Negro’ in this analogy) is unpredictable and the ‘majesty’ of the white man too precious to be dulled. ‘What gives rise to conflict,’ Mbembe notes, ‘is not the frequent references to the genital organs of those in power, but rather the way individuals, by their laughter, kidnap power and force it, as if by accident, to examine its own vulgarity.’ In other words, in the postcolony the search for majesty and prestige contains within it elements of crudeness and the bizarre that the official order tries hard to hide, but that ordinary people bring to its attention, often unwittingly.25 Decoding the politics of finger fucking The finger fucking in the image is charged with meanings. First, the fingers are used as ‘symbolic penises’, used against the artist, whom the ‘I less powerful’ thought he shouldn’t listen to. Second, the finger fucking symbolizes a great amount of aggressiveness and negative energy discharged

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brashly. Third, the diversity in the finger fucking style (typically Moroccan and a more global style) tells us something about the unified mentality and spontaneity of the gesture. Irritated and short-tempered, the spectators finger-fuck the artist in chorus—who was singing politely to appease the system—yet it comes out in diverse languages. This is one occasion when wrath spills into the square in an uncalculated manner to punctuate an on going narrative of festivalization. In spite of the hybridity of present day Moroccan agents, the diversification is suffused with a rising self-belief and antagonism. Each agent, in his own style, epitomizes a unique carriage toward the social habitus.

If the phallic sign keeps vacillating along our conception of male-female difference, it is deployed otherwise here to speak of a supposedly male-male correspondence.

Far from solely being the starting point of all gender debates on lack and possession, virility and castration, it has to somehow fit into this particular discussion of the phallic nature of struggle, implied or pronounced,

between the Negro and the white man. It is a relationship of competition and repression, defiance and rumoring, fucking and counter-fucking. Depictions of the phallus in the carnivalesque are plentiful, infused with ambivalences, apprehension and parody. Authorizations of the repressed loci of the body comprise a crowning of the plurality of the festival imagery, giving voice to the often-too-marginalized organs, which enjoying their own new opportunities of speech, move from the biological to the political.

The phallic avatars in circulation are precursors to narratives of public virility, imbued with a rhetoric of a phallic empire rising from the underground, where politeness is a myth, a metaphor, in a nutshell, a mythaphor. Indeed, the representation of this post-modern virility entails considerations of the phallic as a fetish, the fraction that describes the whole, in this context, the image that arrests a mental posture, a trend of thought, a post-colonial behavior cutting across old totalities and fixities, brandishing all ‘incredulity towards meta-

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The Rituals of Madness and Badness in Music Festivals

narratives.’26

We should be able at this stage to understand the difference between the organ and the phallus. The phallus cannot directly comply with our understanding of the sexual organ, in its biological implementation, because the phallus is irreducible and too symbolic to stand for the sexual object as we understand it. The phallus is a re-enactment of the penis, a reproduction and a facsimile. While the penis is real and organic, the phallus is a mock-up, symbolic and nonfigurative and, as such, it is a perfect example of castration. The penis is constrained by its biological geography; that is to say, the specific location of its place, which is taken for granted as incontrovertible, an organ closely related to the idea of existence and incarnation, the geographic locality of which is effortlessly mentally and corporeally preconceived. The phallus, however, is a fetish marked by its mutability, mentally and corporeally changeable.

It is imitable, likely to represent; furthermore, it is charged by its dislocation. Once uprooted, the penis becomes a phallus,

transportable and representational. While it loses its function as a channel for urine and semen, it remains closely attached to the idea of virile supremacy and an immediate signifier of it. As we have seen in the images, the phallus takes different forms, imitated variously by the hand, infective and referential, infective because it produces itself contagiously in collectivity, and referential because its symbolism always consults its genesis. In view of this, it is inevitably clear that the penis is the beginning but the phallus is not the end, because it is not static and resists the ideas of unity and similarity, yet can always establish connections with its beginning.

Now we have seen how the phallus generates itself in the sub-theatres of the mob. The mob becomes phallic when it insists upon castrating the official discourse.

By producing a hand phallus, the producer claims a double virility, in possession of the other’s phallus (done through castration) while still preserving his own penis and its creative phallo-centricity. Having the intention to castrate the antagonistic other

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entails the ambition of becoming a superman and, in the case of a woman, a super wo-man, who, through the acts declares, as Robert Pattison notes, ‘I am the creative hub of the universe, and the creative hub of me is my genitalia’.27 ‘My genitalia’ hints at the logic of the declaration, which is domineering, overprotective, and appropriative.

Interestingly, the Negro wishes impotence and therefore death to the white. The penis, initially a source of pleasure, renovates as a phallus into a site of pain for its initial owner, which is suggested by the very act of castration; yet it constitutes a source of pleasure for the new owner, who, now master of supreme symbolic virility, can command or rule. Mbembe stresses this clearly in his writing that the mouth, the belly, and the penis constitute the classic ingredients of commandment in the postcolony, but did not fully examine the process by which pleasure is transformed into a site of death.28

To be certain, the sender of the erotic message is transmitting implications far more complex than he had intended,

but it is part of the agreeable game, wars and war games of the street, charged as they are by pleasure and death. By the same token, the sender of the taboo message is not planning a scheme which consists of having him uprooted out of his living in and from his being a social continuation within a flow of elements, beings and data inside time and space (such as him being a fullyfleshed citizen in a recognizably real social context or experience), sometimes beyond it, like in festive transferability 29 where he can be a representation, a symbolic character, an idea, a vision, a reproduction.30 That he is ‘a representation, a symbolic character, an idea, a vision, a reproduction’ does not mean he is fictional, trapped in his theatrical standing, locked in that message, inextricable from it, enslaved by it. Staking a claim like this could be a grave gesture of

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standardization, and an insolent exclusion of Bataillian discontinuity and fundamental difference.31 The festival agent is essentially different from himself. Once he steps into the festival world he does not leave his identity outside at the gate, but he wears something else on top of it to the point of disappearance or death, however temporarily, which permits the birth of the orgy self, capable as it were of many orgy things.

Second, the festival agent is different from his reality. He is ‘different from’ in the sense of opposed to, antagonistic towards, spiteful towards. His antagonism towards his reality is contingent with his familiarity with and understanding of it. This difference could technically be suggested by way of posture, costume and excessive behavior, which, when we try to evaluate it, we call it unreal in the least, outlandish in the most. Third, he marks a difference from the system, a constellation of institutional codes he shapes into some penetrable form. Although taboo words are evocative of sexual activity, their eroticism (the creation of an unreal sex situation that may or

may not necessarily be sexual, but in which sex is evocative of the desire to disrupt and lead) and the atmosphere around them is indication not so much of the yearning to gratify a mere corporeal sexual drive, rather than a phantasmal desire to embody the system, exposed it, then penetrate it.

Endnotes 1 The author would like to thank Rabie Daissa for his precious research assistance in the field, in 2010, 2011, and 2012. Special thanks to BIGSAS and DAAD for funding this research.

2 Foucault, Michel, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980, pp196.

3 Dudiak, Georges, ‘Again Ethics: A Levinasian Reading of Caputo Reading Levinas.’ Joyful Wisdom 3/2, 1997, pp 175.

4 Dudiak, Georges, ‘Again Ethics: A Levinasian Reading of Caputo Reading Levinas.’ Joyful Wisdom 3/2, 1997, pp 179.

5 Ibid.

6 Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984, pp xxiv.

7 The words and phrases in quotation marks are by Lyotard.

8 Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984, pp xxv.

9 Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Horace Howard Furness. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1877, 2.93.

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1o Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Random House, 1965, pp 13.

11 Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Random House, 1965, pp 3.

12 Husserl, Edmund, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Dordrecht: Springer, 2006, pp 25.

13 Levinas, Emmanuel, Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, pp.199.

14 Mbembe, Achille. On the Post Colony. London: University of California Press, 2001, pp 3.

15 Ibid.

16 The term is discussed elsewhere in my research to refer to rappers, urban agents, festival goers who craft a passionate communication process, replete with profanity and vulgarity, lacking politeness, yet which is capable of sending a message appreciated by the chaos-full mind of the ‘I less powerful’. Profane prophets are distinguished from the polite prophets sent to deliver a divine message.

17 Moroccan underground rappers who want to stand in the face of the system are very likely to be accused of assault and punished. Anti-monarchist rapper, Mouad Belghouate, known as Lhaqed, was charged 3, May, 2012 with assault for the second time and sentenced to one year of prison.

18 This festival takes place in the capital, Rabat, since 2001, organized by the association Maroc Cultures, under the auspices of the king.

19 Hoba Hoba Spirit, formed in 1998, is a fusion group based in Casablanca. Their style is an amalgamation of Gnawa music (which has

an African flavor, Rock, and Reggae, While most of their songs are in Moroccan Arabic, they also sing in French and English.

20 The term is defined elsewhere in the research as ‘mob ass’, inspired by Bakhtin’s discussion of the grotesque body and actions of lower substratum, in the context of the festival where one can either dance passively, or produce vulgar gestures of symbolic farting, defecation. Put simply ‘m-ass’ or ‘mob ass’ refers to the bigger body of the crowd which can either appease the system or revolt against it.

21 Pattison, Robert, The Triumph of Vulgarity.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp v.

22 Pattison, Robert, The Triumph of Vulgarity.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp vi.

23 Bataille, Georges, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality.. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 1986, pp 112.

24 ‘White man’ is used in the bigger research from which this article has been extracted to refer to those in or representatives of power, who, through measure of control and categorization, indulge in systems of othering that resemble those of racism. This term has been deployed after many interviews and discussion, where the Arabic word for racism, onsiriya, was employed to describe how people feel about festival constructions.

25 Mbembe, Achille. On the Post Colony. London: University of California Press, 2001, pp, 109).

26 Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984, pp xxiv.

27 Pattison, Robert, The Triumph of Vulgarity.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp 114.

28 Mbembe, Achille. On the Post Colony. Lon-

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don: University of California Press, 2001, pp 126.

29 Festival transferability allows for a deliberation of how bodies transferably transform from one shape to another (from ordinary look to disguise back to ordinary look), or how time transfers into liminal time marked by its own chronological sense, or how hierarchies and power within the festivals shift in speedy and dramatic ways to give shape to the festival monster. For more details on this term see: El Maarouf Moulay Driss, ‘The Rise of the Underground:Moroccan Music festivals between Laughter, Drunkenness, and Excre-Mentality’. Ed Charlie Blake & Steen Christiansen, Akademisk Kvarter 3, 2011, pp 32-48.

30 El Maarouf, Moulay Driss, ‘The Rise of the Underground: Moroccan Music festivals between Laughter, Drunkenness and Excre-Mentality,’ ed. Charlie Blake and Steen Christiansen, Akademisk Kvarter 3, 2011, pp 38 31Bataille, Georges, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality.. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 1986, pp 12.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Moulay Driss El Maarouf received his MA in Cultural Studies at the Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre, Fez, where he worked on gender construction in advertising photography in Morocco. Currently he is doing a PhD on the local and global dynamics of Moroccan music festivals at the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies, Germany. He is co-editor of Moorings Cultural Review. He also writes fiction and poetry.

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Musical Identity and Social Change: Articulating the National and the Translocal in Hungary's Indie Music Scene By: EmĂ­lia Barna

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istorically, rock music has been an art form and discourse carrying values of opposition. It has in part been described and theorised – most notably, in subculture theory – as being linked to the ways in which social groups define themselves, and/or are externally defined, in terms of social and/or symbolic resistance.1 As Simon Frith observes, when it comes to musical taste and value judgments, rock, ‘in contrast to pop, carries intimations of sincerity, authenticity, art — non-commercial concerns’2 – in other words, an oppositional stance not only in a broader social sense, but also towards the commercial discourse and the music world of the ‘mainstream.’3 Moreover, particular styles and genres within rock as a broad category have been associated with particular forms of opposition. ‘Alternative rock’ from the 1980s essentially opposed mainstream popular/ rock music as an aesthetic and mode of performance – amongst other things, the ‘associations of masculinity with physical violence and power’ characteristic of the most dominant form of rock of the 1970s

- heavy metal,4 as well as also opposing, aesthetically, ‘the mammoth guitar solos of heavy metal, the life and death seriousness and sonic overload of hardcore, the technological excesses of experimental music’.5 As Holly Kruse observes, the alternative subculture of US ‘college music scenes’ involved an oppositional identity, even if, paradoxically, it was at the same time also an ‘industry-imposed definition’.6 Meanwhile, ‘indie,’ short for independent, or ‘indie rock,’ initially arose as an alternative to the industry model characterised by the dominance of major record labels. At the same time, indie artists and the creative network built around them also sought to assert independence through emphasising their local embeddedness and organic scene-like quality, often implying a(n ideologically) marginal position: ‘[r]ecurrent in narratives of indie pop/rock is the conscious geographical and ideological positioning of the “peripheral” local sites and practices of indie music production in opposition to the “centers” of mainstream music production.’7 While retaining this –

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sometimes clearly articulated, sometimes vague – core ideology and rhetoric of opposition, the meanings and values attached to particular genres and styles have been shifting both in time and across locations.

US-based ‘alternative rock’ definitely entered the mainstream of popular music culture with acts such as REM at the end of the 1980s, followed by Nirvana and Pearl Jam in the early 1990s, while ‘indie,’ as Wendy Fonarow observes, has come to refer to any or all of the following: a mode of distribution (through small, independent record labels);8 a musical genre to an extent independent of the industrial criterion,9 which can be described in terms of musical form, musical production and style (e.g. ‘guitar pop’ sound), stage appearance, technology (e.g. simplicity in the case of both), and consumption practices (e.g. the preference of vinyl to CD, i.e. analog to digital);10 a particular ethos and corresponding moral, namely the idea of freedom – independence from corporate control – as well as a certain kind of pathos, with romantic connotations;11 and finally, a mode of aesthetic

judgment, manifest in discursive practice and taste choices.12 Furthermore, the notion of ‘underground’ – another counterpoint to the ‘mainstream’ – is a similarly contested term. This is especially relevant within the context of the internet, where, in theory – but not in practice13 – any content is available to any group of users.

In the local context of European socialist countries, including Hungary, ‘rock as rebellion’ assumed a particular meaning, which included the counter-cultural goal of symbolically opposing the political regime in the form of an underground, or at least unofficial – i.e. not officially recognised, but perhaps tolerated – cultural

Pearl Jam

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activity.14 However, following the regime change of 1989-1990,15 a rapid process of opening up towards Western markets and cultural products began in these countries.

This process inevitably affected the world of popular music, where Anglo-Saxon culture had, and has been of primary influence both before and after the change. Recordings that were previously difficult to obtain became available for purchase in local music shops; pop music television channels began mediating the current trends in unprecedented abundance; and a specialised popular music press was also gradually established. With the spread of the internet beginning from the mid-1990s, access to international popular music has of course been much further extended, with, at least in theory, the disappearance of boundaries between Hungary and the Anglo-Saxon world in terms of the availability of music for consumption. Yet, I intend to show by examining the relationship between particular genres and identity that symbolic boundaries shaping Hungary’s popular music world continue to remain.

This article poses the following questions: firstly, what are the relevant points of social-cultural reference along which ‘indie’ bands in Hungary define and position themselves? Secondly, what does the genre label ‘indie’ signify in relation to other labels such as ‘alternative’ and ‘underground’ in the Hungarian popular music world of the first decade of the twenty-first century? This case study uses Hungarian indie music of the past decade to examine these questions, through a qualitative analysis of the presentation and self-presentation of indie bands and musicians in the media, in particular online platforms. Out of the significant choices and strategies, I discuss two issues in detail here: firstly, the language of the lyrics, and secondly, the use of genre labels.16 The music network and ideological positioning My inquiry touches upon two main theoretical issues. The first issue relates to understanding and describing the relationship between the individual (musician or

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band), the national context, and the international or trans-local context. To this effect, I offer the conceptual tool of the music network as developed in my doctoral thesis.17 The indie music scene can be described as a particular cultural network formation within which there is an enacted and represented coherence with regard to the following aspects: genre aesthetics and ethics; locality (understood as practices within particular locations as well as the symbolic meanings and affect associated with those); discursive participation and identification (including everyday discourse and media presence); and meaningful personal relationships and attachment (e.g. among musicians, among members of the audience, between bands and their audience). The network focus is useful because it helps to draw attention to connectivities as well as boundaries, e.g. in terms of economic and creative relationships, as well as aesthetics, values and symbolic content. It helps us to map the trans-local, or transnational structure of cultural influences, and thus move beyond the descrip-

tion of localities (a task that Holly Kruse, for instance, deemed imperative for an adequate description of alternative/indie music scenes18). As will become evident, in relation to the present case study, it has assisted the description of Hungarian indie music along a binary system of attitudes, namely in terms of an articulated international focus (indie bands) in opposition to an inward-looking, national focus (alternative bands).

The second issue relates to ideological positioning in the arts in relation to social change. The two basic attitudes and sets of practices identified by Pierre Bourdieu19 in his analysis of the ‘fields of cultural production’ – i.e. the set of social and economic relations that constitute the (in his case, literary) work – have provided a useful framework for understanding the prevailing authenticity paradigms.20 The ‘heteronomous’ principle, or ‘bourgeois’ art, is ‘favorable to those who dominate the field economically and politically,’ while the ‘art for art’s sake principle’ asserts autonomy and sees ‘temporal failure as a sign of elec-

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tion and success as a sign of compromise.’21 Bourdieu identifies the ‘art for art’s sake’ principle as characteristic of social groups with less specific capital than the bourgeois, and the ‘autonomous’ position as one of opposition. As others have convincingly argued (including Szemere22), the alternative and/or underground culture of 1980s’ Hungary, incorporated particular musical styles, articulated its oppositional stance through asserting an autonomous position and attempted to create its own symbolic space. I will argue, firstly, that ideology that can be described as asserting creative ‘originality’ on the one hand, and ‘authenticity’ on the other, continues to have a strong presence in Hungarian pop music discourse of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and certain identities based on genre can be delineated along the stance taken towards this ideology. I found that the discursive use of the ‘indie’ label, combined with particular aesthetic and industrial choices, is typically employed by musicians as an attempt to distantiate from the ‘autonomous,’ oppositional, and

nationally-focused position of the musical tradition identifying with the ‘alternative’ label. The two ideological positions of heteronomy and autonomy, moreover, can also be identified in terms of the relationship to the ‘pop’ music label, whereby the former attempts to reclaim the label, while the latter maintains a distance from it. I will also argue that the authenticity paradigm and the relationship to the ‘pop’ label can simultaneously be interpreted in national and political terms, as a residue of the oppositional stance in the 1980s’ Hungarian ‘alternative’ culture produced outside the state-supported sphere, and in terms of trans-local genre ethics.

Hungary’s indie scene In recent years, more and more Hungarian bands have emerged calling themselves ‘indie,’ playing guitar-based, danceable rock music with electronic elements, singing most often in English. The first such band, Heaven Street Seven, emerged during the second half of the 1990s. Parallel to their gaining popularity, a number of other acts appeared, including Fabulon, later re-

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Amber Smith

named Stig Roar Husby, which only contains non-Hungarian members living in Hungary, as well as the Puzzle, who are partly based in the UK; Rag Doll, and from the early 2000s, Amber Smith. The second half of the past decade saw the success of EZ Basic and the Moog, as well as the emergence of other acts such as the new wave-inspired, keyboardheavy Hangmás and ‘indie supergroup’ the Twist (including members from Heaven

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Street Seven and Amber Smith). The first indie nights popularising British indie music (from the early 1990s, e.g. Stone Roses, Primal Scream, Happy Mondays, EMF, as well as Britpop bands) were held around the turn of the century in Budapest. These included Loaded Indie, as well as Gumipop from 2002 (still running in 2012).

The role of the press, especially a particular group of journalists formerly associated with the online cultural and eventsfocused magazine Est.hu, was crucial in constructing and promoting the scene through media discourse. Moreover, these individuals also played significant roles on a more direct level thanks to their interpersonal networks - for instance, by fostering collaborations between particular musicians. Online presence and networking in general has been crucial in the discursive formation of the scene: besides online magazines and bands’ own websites and profile pages – most importantly, on MySpace – websites such as Indie.hu, earlier Gumipop.hu have also been important for promotion, self-presentation, and commu-

nity formation.

Language choice as a strategic decision The choice of singing in English or Hungarian is a crucial and strategic decision on the part of Hungarian bands, heavy with assumptions that are informative with regard to career objectives and attitudes. Alternative culture has always embraced Hungarian language singing. Amongst Hungarian indie bands, a variety of strategies can be found. Amber Smith began with English language songs, then followed up with an album and an EP in Hungarian in 20012002, but completely switched to English after this (between the last Hungarian recording and the ensuing English language one, the lead singer spent considerable time abroad). Heaven Street Seven also used both languages initially, but Hungarian gradually dominated, in line with their domestic career motivations, i.e. to increase commercial success within Hungary. Characteristically, they also released occasional English versions of their songs. The Twist

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sing entirely in English, with the deliberate purpose of marketing their music abroad.

EZ Basic and the Moog both exclusively use English, primarily for aesthetic reasons - in line with the perceived requirements of the genre with which they identify. The Puzzle similarly sing in English and, in their case, this is coupled with the band spending considerable time abroad – in London – and focusing on achieving international success.

Interviews with musicians reveal the most important assumptions underlying choice of language: 1) Firstly, that Hungarian, due to its minority language status, is not marketable outside the borders of the country, despite the fact that some countries, such as France or Germany, manage to produce internationally successful pop in their native languages. A clear boundary is drawn between Hungarian and some other non-English languages in this respect; for instance, the Moog specifically state that there is a handful of successful acts singing in German but with Hungarian such an expec-

tation is, at the moment, unrealistic. This argument clearly indicates strategic thinking on the bands’ part in terms of marketing their music, with assumptions regarding the specificities of the music industries.

2) Secondly, that the choice is genre-specific, namely that English is the primary language of indie. Moreover, the English language significantly determines the writing process and outcome (even though this is disputed by some musicians). Besides this, according to some musicians, the English language lyrics as sound have particular aesthetic qualities which are essential to indie rock.

3) Thirdly, that singing in English is somehow in opposition to being ‘a Hungarian band,’ in other words, in opposition to articulating, and endowing the artistic product with an emphasised national character. This assumption, in other words, is framed in terms of identity.

4) Closely related to the previous is the fourth assumption, that singing in Hungarian is associated with national relevance, i.e. being ‘political.’ In contrast,

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singing in English carries in itself a market orientation that is specifically international – which also carries the paradoxical implication that the international cannot be political.

The uses and meanings of genre labels A second important issue appearing in indie discourse relates to genre labels themselves. The status of the label ‘pop,’ clearly ambiguous and contested, is particularly informative of the predominant values, attitudes, and identifications in the world of popular music.

Kruse also observes how ‘[w]ithin alternative music culture the pop/rock distinction is clearly important.’23 ‘Pop’ is a complex and semantically loaded term. It carries the

connotation of pop music in the sense of music produced for commercial purposes, or as a stylistic equivalent to this, in opposition to rock. It can also be used in a much broader sense to refer to popular music – a category that, in contrast, would incorporate rock rather than stand opposed to it.

At the same time, ‘pop’ in terms of musical style, especially ‘indie pop,’ connotes a focus on melody, as well as a produced as opposed to raw sound (e.g. ‘pop punk’ versus

Heaven Street Seven

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‘punk’) and, in terms of attitude, the lack of an explicit oppositional stance. In my case study, the negotiated labels were ‘pop’ and ‘indie,’ as well as ‘alternative.’

When asked about the situation of Hungary’s ‘indie scene,’ Amber Smith’s Imre Poniklo recognised the temporary and shifting quality of genre labels, and implicitly criticised the widespread conception of ‘alternative’ and ‘indie’ as something standing in opposition to pop: I’m not going into this ‘indie/not indie’ question now. Because the extent to which this present scene – E.Z. Basic, Hangmás, The Moog etc. etc. [sic] – is ‘indie’ or ‘alternative,’ the scene around [the bands] Illés, Metró etc. 45 years ago was the same, only ‘beat’ instead of ‘indie.’ And I see our chances the same way: with the help of [MR2] Radio Petőfi and various other media, as well as the festivals, people could finally realise that all this is just pop music.

(Imre Poniklo, 13 February 2008)24 The parallel drawn with the 1960s, which places the ‘label wars’ in the context of national popular music history, is notable

here. The mention of the radio station at the same time points to the significance of the media outlet in the forming of public musical taste.

The Moog also embrace the ‘pop’ label, and even more explicitly comment on the unpopularity of writing ‘pop’ songs: In my opinion you are basically a pop band. Do you agree? Tamás Szabó: Absolutely. The horrors of Hungarian pop music have scared everyone so much that writing good 3-minute pop songs has gone out of fashion. I mean among those people who are not complete freaks and enjoy good music. And I don’t think this is a good thing! (Tamás Szabó, 30 July 2006)25

Szabó thus blames the devaluation of the label on the lack of aesthetic quality in much Hungarian pop music. Some musicians, however, hint at a tendency of improvement in this respect: I think, now, if we look at which bands’ gigs are attended by most people, they are typically those that were called alternative a few years ago, which means this system has sort of turned upside down. But why this distinc-

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tion of alternative music versus pop music used to exist, as if they were two entirely different things, I have absolutely no idea.

(Krisztián Szűcs, 30 October 2010)26

The ‘alternative’ label, of course, implicitly includes the conceptual opposition in relation to the popular (the same way as the label ‘underground,’ at times interchangeably used with ‘alternative’ in Hungarian popular music discourse, incorporates the opposition to a ‘mainstream’).

‘Alternative rock aesthetics,’ as Matthew Bannister puts it, ‘are [...) structured around the concept of negation: we find a [...) removal of the author concerning (self-negation); the music is declared autonomous from the mainstream, and negative and critical in character.’27 At the same time, the identification with ‘indie’ as opposed to ‘alternative’ appears to symbolise the transcending of this binary opposition. Indie musicians typically did not attempt to distance themselves from the pop genre(s); on the contrary, they expressed explicit criticism of those – musicians as well as music listeners – who maintain this con-

ceptual opposition, or do not acknowledge the merits of pop songs (for a summary of the different associated values belonging to the ‘alternative’ and the ‘indie’ labels, see Table 1).

The primary assumptions underlying the quoted opinions on the unpopularity of writing pop songs are, firstly, that ‘pop’ is a devalued label in Hungary, and secondly, that this is not just or justifiable. One of the quoted reasons for the devaluation is that pop music in Hungary has been lacking in quality to such an extent that musicians and audiences have become disillusioned.

While we can accept the validity of such a claim, it is also important to realise that this is an explanation from ‘within’ popular music, without a broader understanding of the field in the Bourdieuean sense: that is, the uneven distribution of economic and cultural capitals, the collective struggles for symbolic positions, and the principles – ideologies – corresponding to the different economic/political positions. I would here argue that the authenticity paradigm underlying the deliberate distantiation

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from pop, as well as the simultaneous identification with the ‘alternative’ label that goes hand in hand with this distantiation, stretches back to at least the 1980s.

Alternative

Indie

Autonomy

Heteronomy

Originality/Authenticity

Influences

Not ‘pop’ National

‘Pop’ International

Table 1 A summary of the primary associations in terms of values and identity with genre labels based on the above analysis.

As Anna Szemere28 shows in fine detail and with much insight, the 1980s were a time when the pop genre(s) represented the embracing, or at least serv the socialist regime.

In simple terms, the public sphere of culture and the mainstream were perceived as synonymous and pop music as part of this realm, while the counter-culture was represented by the – relatively closed and exclusive, cultural capital-heavy – scene

of the ‘underground’ on the one hand, and the more politically radical punk and skinhead bands on the other. Szemere shows how, with the changing of the political system, many underground acts of the 1980s ‘emerged’ from the underground in the 1990s (in several cases through reforming after a break-up or hiatus), edging towards the mainstream. Yet, while becoming part of the ‘official’ popular culture – with their cultural capital now augmented with, and/ or converted into, significant economic capital – the ‘alternative’ label as a stylistic category seems to have persisted up until now, whether we consider bands’ own self-definitions, the music press, or the discourse of music fans. The value-laden distance kept from pop music appears in part to be a residue of the politically oppositional stance associated with the alternative stance during the previous era.

This explanation arises from a focus on the particular national context of the production and consumption of popular music. At the same time, it would be a mistake to underestimate the existence

Article Four

of corresponding values and ideological directions in popular music internationally. Frith’s definition from Sound Effects, quoted in the introduction, regarding the rock authenticity paradigm within which the opposition to pop is inherent, echoes the same symbolic demarcations.29 Socalled label wars, involving disdain for particular stylistic categories with reference to authenticity are, of course, present internationally, and also persistent in the trans-local space of the internet – with only the emphasis varying. Yet the particular structure of the field of cultural production on the national level provides a unique configuration of musical styles, social groups and discourses. Returning to the opinions voiced by indie musicians, the articulated attitudes towards labels are always specifically associated with Hungary, and placed in contrast with the ‘elsewhere.’

Conclusions While I have argued that the indie scene appears to fight the mentioned ideological binarism through embracing an open-

The (almost) complete lack of politics and, in particular, the mentioned association of the trans-local aspects of the music with the lack of political meaning and relevance, is striking in this music scene. ness towards international influences, this is not to suggest that the heteronomous attitude of the indie discourse is to be uncritically celebrated. This attitude seems to stem as much from musical tastes as from deliberate marketing-related strategies. The (almost) complete lack of politics and, in particular, the mentioned association of the trans-local aspects of the music with the lack of political meaning and relevance, is striking in this music scene.

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While this attitude also characterises the indie genre internationally (however paradoxically, considering the original ideology of independence and opposition), it is at the same time also worryingly in line with the ideology of an uncritical consumer capitalist society, within which choices, including musical taste, are interpreted as belonging to an individual ‘lifestyle.’ Such an interpretation emphasises individual agency, while completely concealing the logic of capitalism that dictates consumption. I therefore conclude this analysis with a call for an interpretation of Hungarian/Eastern European popular music within the broader social, economic, and symbolic context of the consumerist or, depending on perspective, lifestyle-based values and practices of the post-1989 era.

Endnotes 1There is no space here to give an overview of the broad area of music and subculture studies, but some of the most influential works laying the ground for this perspective include Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds.), Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (Routledge 1991 [1975]); Paul E. Willis, Profane Culture (Routledge, London

and Boston 1978); and Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Methuen, London and New York 1979).

2 Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock (Constable, London 1983) pp.

10-11.

3 The mainstream, as Sarah Thornton shows, is a construct with crucial orientating function in youth culture, primarily as something to identify against (Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Wesleyan University Press, Hanover and London 1996, pp. 87-115).

4 Will Straw, “Characterizing Rock Music Culture: The Case of Heavy Metal” (1983) In: Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (eds.), On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word (Routledge, London and New York 1990) p. 90.

5 Holly Kruse, ‘Subcultural identity in alternative music culture,’ Popular Music 12(1993: 1), pp. 36-37.

6 Kruse, ’Subcultural identity,’ p. 35.

7 Holly Kruse, Site and Sound: Understanding Independent Music Scenes (Peter Lang, New York 2003) p. 1.

8 Wendy Fonarow, Empire of Dirt. The Aesthetic and Rituals of British Indie Music (Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Connecticut 2006) p. 30.

9 Fonarow, Empire of Dirt, p. 39.

10 Fonarow, Empire of Dirt, pp. 39-50.

11 Fonarow, Empire of Dirt, pp. 53-56.

12 Fonarow, Empire of Dirt, pp. 57-68.

13 As Tamás Tófalvy demonstrates in his exploration of the reproduction of underground cultural capital in music scenes in the age of unrestricted access to music (“Underground és közösségi média. Hogyan termelődik újra az underground kulturális tőke a zenei színtereken a korlátlanul hozzáférhető zene ko-

Article Four

rában?” [Underground and social media. How is underground cultural capital reproduced in music scenes in the age of unrestricted access to music?] Conference paper given at Zenei szubkultúrák médiareprezentációja, University of Pécs, Hungary, 29-30 April 2011).

14 ‘In Hungary the Kádár-era [1956-1988] saw the application of the “three T” strategy, which defined three different attitudes towards artists and pieces of art, in Hungarian each beginning with the letter “t” (“p” in English): promote, permit, prohibit.’ (Tófalvy Tamás and Trever Hagen, Popular Music and Society in Central Europe – An Introduction,” Eastbound 1 (2012) p. 2). For a detailed account, see also Anna Szemere, Up from the Underground. The Culture of Rock Music in Postsocialist Hungary (Pennsylvania State University Press, PA 2001).

15 Hungary’s transition from Soviet-style state socialism to Western-style parliamentary democracy was a relatively smooth and gradual process. In response to an evident political, economic and social crisis, a national roundtable was formed from various oppositional groups in 1989 in order to discuss and draw up a new constitution and pave the way to the first free democratic elections, held in March – April 1990. The withdrawal of Soviet forces was completed by June 1991.

16 I offer a more detailed discussion of the same case study, including an exploration of the indie music network in Hungary, and the relationship between the indie network and local, national and translocal identity and connections, in Barna R Emília, ‘Articulating the (Inter)National through Aesthetic Choices: Towards an Understanding of the Hungarian Indie Scene 2000-2010 in a Translocal Context,’ Eastbound 1 (2012) pp. 1-28.

17 Barna R Emília, Online and Offline Rock Music Networks: A case study on Liverpool, 2007-2009 (Ph.D. University of Liverpool 2011).

18 Kruse writes the following: ‘By focusing exclusively on local practices, […] I think that Finnegan’s [1989] and Cohen’s [1991] studies overlook an important way in which musicians and others involved in local scenes understand their own involvement: as something that both identifies them with and differentiates them from individuals and groups in other communities. Moreover, when we see the social and economic relationships that link one locality to another and that ultimately place all individuals involved in relation to an organised national and transnational entertainment industry, we realise the importance of how, as Jody Bertrand states, cultural technologies and their accompanying structures move entertainment from “a particular space to a non-particular space” (1992, p. 47)’ (Kruse, ‘Subcultural identity,’ p. 38). The references in the quotation are to the following: Ruth Finnegan, The Hidden Musicians. Music-making in an English town (Cambridge University Press 1989); Sara Cohen, Rock Culture in Liverpool. Popular Music in the Making (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1991); Jody Berland, ‘Angels dancing: cultural technologies and the production of space.’ In: Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treicher (eds.), Cultural Studies (London and New York, Routledge 1992) pp. 38-55.

19 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production. Essays on Art and Literature, ed. and introduced by Randal Johnson (Columbia University Press 1993) 20 Beatrice Jetto similarly describes the relationship of indie music and the practice of music blogging within the framework Bourdieu’s

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two principles (‘Music Blogs, Music Scenes, Sub-cultural Capital: Emerging Practices in Music Blogs,’ In: Aris Mousoutzanis and Daniel Riha [eds.], New Media and the Politics of Online Communities [ebook], Inter-Disciplinary Press, pp. 69-76. Available: http://www.interdisciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/ebooks/ new-media-and-the-politics-of-online-communities. Accessed: 07 July 2012).

21 Bourdieu, Field, p. 40.

22 Szemere, Up from the Underground.

23 Kruse, ‘Subcultural identity,’ p. 36.

24 Déri, Zsolt, ‘“Igen csinos kis színterünk van” – Amber Smith,’ Est.hu, 13 February 2008.

Available at: http://est.hu/cikk/53204/igen_ csinos_kis_szinterunk_van_-_amber_smith [Accessed 07 July 2012] 25 ‘MOOG interjú - Később majd jöhet a szitár, a szakáll, meg az effektparádé...,’ Passzio.hu, 30 July 2006. Available at: http://passzio. hu/modules.php?name=News&file=article&s id=8925 [Accessed 07 July 2012] 26 Inkei Bence, ‘“Semmiről nem tudtunk semmit.” A Heaven Street Seven a Quartnak,’ Quart.hu, 30 October 2010. Available at: http://quart.hu/cikk.php?id=5617 [Accessed 07 July 2012].

27 Matthew Bannister, White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock (Ashgate, Aldershot, England 2006) p.

29.

28 Szemere, Up from the Underground.

29 Frith, Sound Effects, pp. 10-11.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Emília Barna completed her Popular Music Studies doctoral degree at the Institute of Popular Music, University of Liverpool, UK. The topic of her PhD dissertation is the relationship between music scenes and the internet with regard to the music making activity of contemporary indie bands in the city of Liverpool. She currently teaches at Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and also works as editor of Hungarian popular music studies journal Hangok a Gyárból.

ARTICLE ONE BIOGRAPHY

Things ain’t what they used to be’: Marvin Gaye and the making of What’s Going On

By: Ruth Charnock

Biography

B

orn 1939 in Washington, D.C, Marvin Pentz Gay Jnr (who later added the “e” to his name1) was one of four born to a mother he remained devoted to throughout his life and a father whose cross-dressing tendencies he reportedly found both humiliating and confusing. A minister for a small Hebrew Pentecostal sect, according to his daughter, Marvin Gay Snr. was not one to “spare the rod” when it came to his children.2 Violence coursed through Gaye’s life (in a BBC Radio 2 documentary to commemorate the 40th anniversary of What’s Going On, Gaye also alluded to frequent scuffles with Motown boss Berry Gordy), culminating in his violent death at the hands of his father in 1984.

An austere and terrorised childhood As Michael Eric Dyson depicts it: ‘[t] he world into which Gaye was born in Washington, D.C – much like the world his music would resonate – was torn by racial conflict.’3 According to Dyson, the edition of the Washington Post published on the day Gaye was born featured an op-

ed piece called “The South’s Problems”, and a piece covering opera singer Marion Evans’ refusal from a performance at the Constitutional Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution. As Dyson writes, ‘the same forces of poverty and racial conflict’ that underpinned these two stories ‘shaped the young Gaye’s life.’4 By all accounts (except, occasionally Gaye’s own5), his was a highly regimented, austere and terrorised childhood.

Escaping from his troubled home-life, Gaye dropped out of high-school aged 17 and joined the Air Force for a short stint but was discharged owing to his inability to obey authority;6 a trait that would find further resonance in his fractious relationship with the Motown machine.

Building on the love of doo-wop he had fostered throughout school, Gaye joined a variety of D.C bands in the late fifties and early sixties. One, the Moonglows, was discovered by Bo Diddley and signed to Okeh, then Chess Records. When manager Harvey Fuqua moved to Detroit, Gaye moved with him. Gaye was taken on by

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Motown as a session drummer, playing for bands like Martha and the Vandellas, the Marvelettes and the Spinners.

Motown family Gaye became a staple member of the Motown family (also marrying Berry Gordy’s sister Anna in 1964), churning out hits throughout the sixties - from the apt ‘Stubborn Kinda Fellow’ in 1963, to his run of duets with Tammi Terrell (whose premature death in 1970 from a brain tumour greatly affected Gaye), to the paranoid torment of ‘Heard it Through the Grapevine’ in 1968.

However, Gaye’s

real aspirations during this period were far removed from the upbeat party songs or soul ballads for which he became known.

An early record of jazz standards had failed to chart but Gaye retained visions of himself as a crooner in the mould of a

Biography

Frank Sinatra or Sammy Davis Jr and was heavily influenced by the jazz-inflected phrasings of Nat King Cole.7 Subsequently expressing his frustration with the Motown system in an interview with Rolling Stone’s Ben Fong-Torres, Gaye described himself as a ‘free-thinking person’ who did not respond well to Berry Gordy’s regimented, assembly-line approach: Invariably, when you are a free-thinking person, one who feels he or she has something on the ball, and involved in a group of people who are in power, and you don’t become part of the power … or bend toward it, or…that’s the problem right there. It was power against me, and I didn’t like the feeling of made to do something simply because a bunch of people said this is that I should do […] and the biggest insult was that they always claimed they recognized me as talent […] but they never proved it by letting me do my own thing.8 It was this sense of being treated ‘as though I’m a robot’9 coupled with grief over Tammi Terrell’s death and clustering attacks

of stage-fright that led Gaye to retreat from public view at the end of the sixties.

Between ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’ and What’s Going On, he ventured into production work for other artists. Worn out from chasing after Anna Gordy-Gaye, whom he suspected of infidelity, Gaye’s mind took a turn. As he told an interviewer in the late 1970s, leading up to the making of What’s Going On: ‘I stopped thinking about my erotic fantasies and started thinking about the [Vietnam] war.’10 Increasingly aware of his country’s slide into chaos and violence- what with Vietnam, the 1967 race riots in Detroit and the Kent State shootings (1970) - Gaye was also under keen pressure from Berry Gordy to produce another hit. As Gaye told biographer David Ritz: My phone would ring, and it’d be Motown wanting me to start working and I’d say, ‘Have you seen the paper today? Have you read about these kids who were killed at Kent State?’ The murders at Kent State made me sick. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop crying. The notion of singing threeminute songs about the moon and June

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didn’t interest me. Neither did instantmessage songs.11 Yet according to Ritz, in 1970 ‘message songs were selling. Edwin Starr’s ‘War’ hit it big, John and Yoko were hot and so were Simon and Garfunkel.’12 But imagining himself as both cultural commentator and divine conduit, Gaye saw the artist’s purpose as to shock audiences into new states of consciousness. His sense that ‘an artist, if he is a true artist, is only interested in one thing and that is to wake up the minds of men’ was not an affect that could be achieved in three minutes alone.13 A sonic call to attention According to James C. Hall, for many African-American artists throughout the 1960s, there was a rising and ‘fundamental disbelief in the inherent goodness of the offerings of modernity’14, fed by events such as the Birmingham, Alabama bombings of 1963. This disbelief permeates What’s Going On with its often prelapsarian longings for a better time (especially the case in the regretful refrain of ‘Mercy Mercy

Me (The Ecology)’ where ‘things ain’t what they used to be.’15) Speaking to, if not directly about, the spiritual overtones of Gaye’s album, Hall writes: Somewhat like the religious revivals of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, individuals as diverse as Martin Luther King, James Baldwin [...] and many others demanded that Americans face up to a deteriorating social order.16 Motown songwriter Lamont Dozier has characterised What’s Going On as a sonic call to attention: We as a people have short attention spans and we need to be lectured. And he was lecturing the people with those songs that were going right into each other like that.17 As a form, the concept album was the ideal format for Gaye’s messages of equality, ecology, pacifism and an end to familial discord. Providing him with the expressive latitude he had felt lacking from the 3-minute format, What’s Going On is the sound of an artist driving his message home but taking in the scenery along the way.

‘What’s Going On’ was written before

Biography

What’s Going On. Inspired by the horrorstories Frankie Gay (Gaye’s brother) told returning from Vietnam, coupled with the violence witnessed in San Francisco by Renaldo “Obie” Benson when he was on tour with the Four Tops, ‘What’s Going On’ was a joint effort. Motown songwriter

Al Cleveland and Obie Benson were already working on a song of the same title and, according to Benson, ‘all the music was already there’18 before Gaye heard the track for the first time. That said, Gaye added lyrics to the track, produced it and brought in his friends from the Detroit Lions to add the snippets of conversation that punctuate ‘What’s Going On’ - lending it the feeling of ‘a successful social festivity’ rather than ‘of uprisings or demonstrations,’19 as Eric Henderson puts it. The listener becomes interlocutor – an effect heightened by the multi-layering of Gaye’s vocal throughout the record.

This conversational, anecdotal register continues throughout What’s Going On,

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especially in ‘What’s Happening Brother’, where Gaye imagines his brother returning from Vietnam to an America he no longer understands, wondering whether ‘things are really gettin’ better, like the newspapers said.’20

The appeal of ‘What’s Going On’ and, to some extent, of What’s Going On rests on its combination of specificity and abstraction.

Whilst Gaye was explicit about the specific events (Vietnam, Kent State, the Detroit riots) that impacted upon his conception of the album, he was also keen to stress the universality of its message: I wanted to write an album that could be translated into any language and it would still hold its meaning and not be particularly an ethnic statement that other nations or people couldn’t get into.21 Cautious Gaye was eager that What’s Going On not be branded a “race album”, despite the explicit social commentary of songs such as ‘Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler.)’ His uneasiness regarding identity

politics comes out in a 1972 Rolling Stone interview. When asked whether he intended to continue with ‘more serious work’ after What’s Going On, Gaye responds: If you notice, I never stepped on anybody’s toes and I didn’t intend to. Somebody said the other day, “That’s a fine black album.”

I said, “Wait a minute. The word ‘black’ is not in my album from the A side to the B side.” I was very careful not to do any of those things.22 Gaye’s caution can, obviously, be attributed to the universal, no-race vision that permeates What’s Going On. As Michael Eric Dyson identifies, one could ‘fix on Gaye’s political anthem and make it personal.’23 But one can also detect Gaye’s desire not to be pigeonholed as a one-issue wonder, harking back to his distaste for “instant message songs” expressed earlier, as well as a desire, surprising though it might seem, to fly below the political radar: ‘[s]ome of these guys go around and think they’re crusaders […] A lot of people don’t want you saving the world. They like it the way it is. You gotta be careful.’24

Biography

What’s Going On is an album of questions; from that implied by the title track with its double-meaning - Gaye is going to tell us “what’s going on” but he also wants us to ask - to the plaintive ‘where did all the blue skies go?’ of ‘Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology).’ Of the latter, David Kahn points out that Gaye refuses to provide any pat answers: The song’s refrain “Mercy mercy me, things ain’t what they used to be” offers a powerful lament that Gaye then builds upon by singing of the ways in which overpopulation, mass extinction of species, toxicity, oil spills and the like waste the planet and threaten existence.

With no positive message offered as a counterpoint, Gaye’s song thus represents a kind of blues and gospel of spiritual mourning.25 Hearkening back to past times (‘things ain’t what they used to be’), the mournful impact of the song is belied by its laidback cadences and almost exultant opening.

Throughout What’s Going On, Gaye relies on his lyrics rather than his rhythms to do the lecturing- whilst his messages are

insistent, his melodies ruminate, swing and lazily stretch back (the exception being the bluesy opening and spiralling flutes of ‘Right On’, although this too has a distinctively languorous feel). But lecture he does, according to Motown’s Lamont Dozier. Describing the segues between tracks on the album Dozier suggests that Gaye wanted to give the feeling of an unfolding sermon, as well as a conversation: [Gaye] was trying to keep the whole thought [with the formatting of the album]. He had a thought about why we’re having problems in this world […] he had these songs running into each other so the thought would not break.26 Although the album has many moods, this sense of a ‘whole thought’ is amplified by the recurrence of phrases (melodic and lyrical) throughout the album - especially the calls to familial reconnection of ‘What’s Going On.’ As Kahn gestures towards above, Gaye resembles nothing so much as a preacher, albeit one who draws his highs from places more terranean than the church (cf. ‘Flyin’ High (In the Friendly Sky)’). What’s Going

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On is an album steeped in Pentecostal foreboding. David Ritz puts it thus: The fundamentalist Christian view of Marvin Gaye would see him as a fallen preacher.

Born with the sacred power to transmit Jesus’ love through heavenly song, his religious responsibility was, at least in Marvin’s own mind, clear.27 Indeed, when called upon to give an account of the process behind What’s Going On, Gaye would often abdicate responsibility – saying on one occasion ‘[it] was a very divine project and God guided me all the way. I don’t remember a great deal about it.’28 It was certainly an album that Berry Gordy tried hard to forget. Upon hearing ‘What’s Going On’, Gordy apparently named it the ‘worst record’ he had ever heard.29 Gordy has admitted himself ‘when Marvin Gaye wanted to do a protest album, I was petrified’30, afraid that such political fare would trash Gaye’s reputation as the premier Motown pin-up. Although accounts differ as to how the track was eventually released, released it was – to instant chart

success. Gaye told Motown that unless they allowed him to release the album, he would never record for them again: ‘[t]hat was my ace in the hole and I had to play it.’31 Coming out from under the Motown thumb, Gaye blazed the trail for other Motown artists such as Stevie Wonder who would mount his own fair share of musical protests in the 1970s. Ex-Motowner Michael Jackson would also make his own ‘Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)’ with 1995’s ‘Earth Song’, but perhaps the less said about that moment in his oeuvre, the better.

Lamont Dozier has described What’s Going On as: almost one constant chant that keeps pounding at your head to get you to understand that there has to be change in this world and we can only do it ourselves, by coming together as a people.32 Certainly, the album turned around Gaye’s critical reception – whilst he had always been celebrated for his vocal abilities, now these vocals were coupled with a new political swagger. As David Ritz recounts ‘the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People] gave

Biography

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Marvin their fifth annual Image Award, naming him the “nation’s most socially significant entertainer,” as well as the year’s best singer and producer.’33 Gaye was invited to headline Martin Luther King Day (although he didn’t show up). The album remained on the Billboard Album charts for over a year and reviews were glowing, if often containing a note of surprise as in this response from Rolling Stone’s Vince Aletti: Ambitious, personal albums may be a glut on the market elsewhere, but at Motown they’re something new [...] There are very few performers who could carry a project like this off. I’ve always admired Marvin Gaye, but I didn’t expect that he would be one of them. Guess I seriously underestimated him. It won’t happen again.34 For the rest of the seventies – indeed, for the rest of his career – Gaye would continue to surprise. Trouble Man, the soundtrack to the blaxpoitation movie of the same name, saw Gaye in a contemplative, bluesier mode, especially in the title track which sees Gaye musing darkly ‘there’s only three things for

sure: taxes, death and trouble.’35 In 1973, Gaye created the soundtrack to a thousand seductions with Let’s Get It On, followed by the more neurotically yearning I Want You in 1976. Here, My Dear, released in 1978 was Gaye’s sonic payoff to his ex-wife Anna Gordy Gaye. Commercially unsuccessful at the time, on its re-release in 1994 it was critically reappraised as a work equal in craft to What’s Going On.

Mired in cocaine addiction, with a huge IRS bill, a second divorce and consuming paranoia, in the late 1970s Gaye once again retreated from public view and moved to Hawaii, then London, and then Belgium.

1983’s ‘Sexual Healing’ from the Midnight Love album crossed the troubled spirit of ‘I Want You’ with the unabashed lust of ‘Let’s Get It On.’ Touring the album, Gaye’s stage fright manifested, perversely, in increasing exhibitionism – he often ended ‘Sexual Healing’ either in an open silk robe or just in his underwear, performing, as David Ritz sees it ‘a sad parody of himself.’36 By spring of the following year, Marvin Gaye was dead - shot twice in the chest

Biography

by his father, whilst trying to break up an argument between his parents. Initially charged with first-degree murder, when it was discovered that Marvin Gay Snr. had a brain tumor, he received a six-year suspended sentence.

Caught throughout his life ‘between hot sex and high spirituality’, as David Ritz puts it, Marvin Gaye not only made it possible for other Motown artists to break for creative freedom, he achieved the rare feat – a concept album that pleased as well as preached. In their paean to passed soul singers, ‘Nightshift’, The Commodores get it right: ‘Marvin, he was a friend of mine/ And he could sing a song/ His heart in every line.’37 Endnotes 1 Biographer David Ritz has speculated that Gaye added the “e” to distinguish himself from his father, see: Divided Soul: the Life of Marvin Gaye. Da Capo Press, 1985. Kindle edition.

Michael Eric Dyson argues that the change of surname was to avoid the connotation of homosexuality (see details below).

2 Jeanne Gaye, interviewed for “What’s Going On.” Part of the American Masters series for PBS, aired May 7, 2008 . http://www.pbs.org/ wnet/americanmasters/episodes/marvin-gaye/ whats-going-on/73/

3 Michael Eric Dyson, Mercy, Mercy Me: The Love, Art and Demons of Marvin Gaye. New York: Civitas Books, 2004, 5-6.

4 Ibid.

5 Occasionally, Gaye would paint his childhood relationship with his father as much more amicable than it was. See, for example, the interview with Ben Fong-Torres (details below).

6 Gaye gives his own account of this in the “What’s Going On” PBS documentary.

7 Smokey Robinson discusses Gaye’s love for Nat King Cole in a BBC Radio 2 documentary aired to commemorate the 40th anniversary of What’s Going On. Aired August, 2011: http:// www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b013ds1b 8 Marvin Gaye interviewed by Ben FongTorres, ‘Honor Thy Brother-in-Law,’ Rolling Stone, April 27, 1972. Reprinted in Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll. Berkeley: Miller Freeman, 1999, 84.

9 Gaye, ibid.

10 Marvin Gaye, Motown on Showtime 1988/2010: Universal Music Group.

11 Marvin Gaye talking to David Ritz for Divided Soul: the Life of Marvin Gaye. Kindle edition.

12 Ibid.

13 Marvin Gaye, Motown on Showtime.

14 James C. Hall, Mercy, Mercy Me: AfricanAmerican Culture and the American Sixties.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 4.

15 Marvin Gaye. ‘Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)’ from What’s Going On. Tamla, 1971.

16 Hall, 6.

17 Lamont Dozier, speaking in What’s Going On. BBC Radio 2, [51.39].

18 As told to David Ritz for Divided Soul.

19 Eric Henderson, What’s Going On, album review for Slant Magazine. November 10, 2003.

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20 Marvin Gaye. ‘What’s Happening Brother’ from What’s Going On. Tamla, 1971.

21 Marvin Gaye, speaking in What’s Going On, BBC Radio 2, [32.06].

22 Marvin Gaye, ‘Honor Thy Brother-inLaw.’85.

23 Michael Eric Dyson, Mercy Mercy Me: The Arts, Loves and Demons of Marvin Gaye. Basic Civitas Books, 2004, 1.

24 Marvin Gaye, ‘Honor Thy Brother-in-Law.’ 85.

25 Richard Kahn, ‘‘Environmental Activism in Music’, in Music in American Life: The Songs, Stories, Styles and Stars that Shaped Our Culture, ed. Jacqueline Edmondson, ABCCLIO, forthcoming.

26 Lamont Dozier, interviewed for What’s Going On, BBC Radio 2.

27 Ritz, Divided Self.

28 Marvin Gaye, speaking on What’s Going On, BBC Radio 2.

29 Jack Ryan, Recollections: The Detroit Years.

The Motown Sound by the People Who Made It. Glendower Media, 1982. 36.

30 Berry Gordy, interviewed for Showtime Motown.

31 As told to David Ritz, Divided Soul.

32 Lamont Dozier, speaking on What’s Going On, BBC Radio 2.

33 David Ritz.

34 Vince Aletti, What’s Going On: Album Review. Rolling Stone Magazine, 5th August, 1971. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/ albumreviews/whats-going-on-19710805 35 Marvin Gaye, ‘Trouble Man.’ From Trouble Man. Tamla, 1972.

36 David Ritz.

37 The Commodores, ‘Nightshift.’ From Nightshift. Motown, 1985.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ruth Charnock has a DPhil in English Literature from the University of Sussex and teaches there as a Tutorial Fellow in 19th and 20th century English literature. Her thesis is entitled ‘Touching Stories: performances of intimacy in the diary of Anaïs Nin’ and her research interests included histories of feminism, psychoanalysis, life-writing, intimacy and modernism. Currently, she is preparing work for publication on graphomania, modernist affect and Anaïs Nin and second-wave feminism. She lives in Brighton, U.K.

ARTICLE ONE BOOK AND AUTHOR

33 REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE - A HISTORY OF PROTEST SONGS, FROM BILLIE HOLIDAY TO GREEN DAY. BY: ELKE WEESJES

Book and Author

S

inger-songwriter Tom Robinson has said that combining music and politics is a double-edged sword: “If you mix politics and pop, one lot of criticism says you’re exploiting people’s political needs and ideas and sympathies in order to peddle your second-rate pop music, and another says you’re peddling second-rate political ideals on the back of your pop career. Either way they’ve got you.” Lynskey’s book 33 Revolutions Per Minute explores this struggle and shows that even the careers of those artists nowadays recognized as musical representatives of the civil rights movement were often coloured by disappointment, doubt, discouragement and misunderstanding. Taking his readers on a journey through seventy years of protest music and shows, Lynskey suggests that, besides the thrills and life-changing moments, it was and still is difficult to be a musician with strong political convictions.

33 Revolutions Per Minute poses two pertinent and pressing questions: what right does a musician have to discuss politics?

And is there a place for serious political is-

sues in entertainment?

From Holiday to Green Day “Strange Fruit”, written by Jewish Communist Abel Meeropol and made famous

by Billie Holiday, was arguably the first protest song that didn’t function as propaganda and could be considered as art. For this reason, it is an appropriate launch point for Lynskey’s musical flight. Lynskey dedicates 33 chapters to 33 songs, covering 1939-2008, and ending with Green Day’s “American Idiot”. Altogether well over a 1000 songs pass review, making this a standard work for anyone interested in music, protest songs, politics and history.

In an informative, witty and at times cynical style, Lynskey tells us of these songs’ conception and furnishes the reader with relevant but never prurient insights into the artists who wrote them. Lynskey makes his readers aware of the less glamorous side of writing/performing protest songs.

“Strange Fruit”, described by people in the audience at the time as akin to experiencing a physical assault, was banned or

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ignored by many radio stations and not heard by most American citizens. Bob Dylan distanced himself from his early protest songs because he didn’t want to be a poster-child for the counterculture movement, whilst the more stern political mu-

sicians called his sentiments facile. Some artists were discouraged from writing politically charged songs by their managers – an exemplary case being the initial rejection by Tamla Motown’s Berry Gordy of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” Gordy told Marvin Gaye that he was “ridiculous” when Gaye proposed a protest record, whilst musical director Maurice King gave The Temptations a lesson in Hitsville’s politics of caution; “Do not get caught up in telling people about politics, religion, how to spend money or who to make love to, because you’ll lose your fanbase”.

Other artists also struggled with their political identities. The FBI held extended files on many famous musicians, with artists such as John Lennon, Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs viewed as threats to national security throughout the 1960s and 70s. COINTELPRO (the covert branch of the FBI) which, since 1956, had been surveilling, infiltrating, harassing, and sabotaging “subversive” groups, with special attention paid to the civil rights and antiwar movements, was disbanded in April 1971, but the gov-

Book and Author

ernment continued to monitor black artists in other guises throughout the decade.

Role models Contrary to other authors who have focused solely on American protest songs, Lynskey explores developments in both the States and Britain. In parts IV and V in particular, the author’s comparative analysis of punk and hip-hop in both countries is refreshing and illuminating. Joe Strummer is a key figure in these two parts. People in the music industry either love the Clash and Strummer (fans include Public Enemy’s Chuck D. U2’s Bono, Crass’ Steve Ignorant, Billy Bragg and Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong) or hate him (detractors such as NME journalist Paul Morley or REM’s Peter Buck). Lynskey puts the Clash alongside early Bob Dylan and Public Enemy in terms of their respective political clout. Whilst there are ways to read Punk as non-political, the Clash did not allow for such a reading – a misunderstanding of the genre which Lynskey argues has been productive.

We can see a similar situation in hip-hop - if it wasn’t for Public Enemy one can only speculate about how political hip-hop would have been. Furthermore, Lynskey notes that perfection does not create a big following. The Clash grew up in public, they made mistakes and it was their imperfections that inspired so many people to be like them. Different people read different messages in Clash songs; that’s why artists who are so dissimilar - like Bono and Billy Bragg - both say Joe Strummer is their role model.

“To create a successful protest song in the twentyfirst century is a daunting challenge, but the alternative, for any musician with strong political conviction, is paralysis and gloom.”

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Paralysis and gloom Regardless of these wonderful role models, contemporary musicians have a harder time producing protest songs than their twentieth century predecessors. Lynskey concludes his book with the rather sobering observation that the discourse around politics and pop has become absurdly unforgiving. “The age of the heroic activist musician is over and the disincentive toward writing protest songs is not COINTELPRO but the audience impatience with any musician who purports to do more than entertain”, according to Lynskey. Unfortunately there isn’t much of an alternative: “To create a successful protest song in the twenty-first century is a daunting challenge, but the alternative, for any musician with strong political conviction, is paralysis and gloom.”

AUTHOR Q & A Your book, which combines political sciences with cultural and social history, covers roughly 70 years of music. What was your approach? Did

you outline history’s major events and picked songs that dealt with these events before selecting one that stood out in particular, or did you have a specific set list in mind?

In other words: what came first, the songs or the history?

“The songs came first, not the history, but as I was choosing them I wanted songs that had a distinct space around them. Some people wonder why, for example, Joan Baez wasn’t one of the selected 33 artists. She is part of the book though, but since I already had a Bob Dylan chapter I didn’t want to dedicate a chapter to her. If you have got Stevie Wonder it is hard to do Marvin Gaye. I wanted songs that were quite distinct, yet kind of hung together in a more general narrative - which is why there are certain areas/countries that I could not explore because they are so distinct. When you look at Australian protest songs for example, many are about the treatment of Aboriginals. Or Irish rebel songs. I didn’t want the reader to absorb an entirely new country each chapter. There is a little bit

Book and Author

of that in the middle of the book: I wanted to include Jamaica and Nigeria. It seemed a natural step to go from James Brown to Fela Kuti.”

a few particular artists or time periods. The same politicians, musicians and other public figures crop up throughout the book and sometimes one song contributes to another song in a different chapter. I wanted a cerSo people actually complained about tain cohesion. Otherwise, it is just a bunch your choices regarding what you in- of stuff that happened.” cluded and what not? This must have been frustrating considering the You are a music journalist; what I amount of years, genres and artists liked about your book is that it has you cover in your book - which counts an academic approach, yet it is writa whopping 660 pages. ten in a very popular, witty and some“When I read non-fiction books I don’t re- times raw style, exactly the style you ally care about what an author left out, un- apply when you write for the Guardless stuff wasn’t included out of ignorance. I ian and other publications. Was this was quite surprised that various people had a conscious decision? issues with what I have put in and left out. “I definitely did not approach the project People come up to me and ask “why I didn’t in an academic way, because I am not rediscuss so-and-so song and I am like; “well, ally an academic. All I have is an underprobably because I didn’t want the book graduate degree in English Literature. I to be 1500 pages long and unreadable”. I approached it like a critic. But in some wanted it to be grounding, so if it is read in cases I wasn’t as opinionated as I would be order you would already have certain ref- in a newspaper column, because it wasn’t erences. The book is meant to be read as needed. You don’t need my opinion every a narrative, although many people read it time I briefly discuss a song. I didn’t want out of order because they are interested in to be objective, but I tried to give my opin-

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ions some weight. For example it was important to me, when criticising Thatcher, to take a few quotes from a biography that was broadly sympathetic to her. It was an attempt not to make the whole thing about hating Thatcher or hating Nixon.

The music writing I enjoy is opinionated. [...] The academic bit for me was making sure it was properly researched and footnoted. I was absolutely adamant that readers would know exactly where every quote came from. In certain cases it took forever to find the confirmation I was looking for.

The book is solid when it comes to its facts, but I wanted its style to be argumentative and witty. I wanted to present my take on protest songs and the history behind them.

That’s why I chose the title “A history of protest songs” rather than “The history of protest songs”. I don’t think there is such thing as “The history” of anything.”

Scholars widely agree that the Black Power movement provided the model for the women’s movement, the gay liberation movement and other

political and cultural minority empowerment movements to move forward and gain some political traction. Some people say the music that came out of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements was also the model for music that came out of the gay rights and women’s movement. Do you agree with this? Or do you think this undermines what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic?

“I think it is true on a political level that black power influenced some of the models of feminism and gay rights. With music, not so much. When you try to make a list of gay protest songs or feminist protest songs which are as directly polemical and political as Black Power music; you are going to be disappointed, because there aren’t many.

By nature, when you write about gender or sexuality, a lot of the songs that end up having political potency are very personal.

That is quite different with Black Power. I tried to find notable feminist songs prior to Riot Grrrl, because I wanted more of a female voice in the book, but I couldn’t

Book and Author

find any explicit protest songs I could use.

I needed songs that self identified as protest songs. [...] People often say that one doesn’t have to be a protest singer in order to be political, of course you don’t. You can read politics into all kinds of songs, particularly when a songwriter is female or gay.

In certain points of history just writing about a relationship was already political.

But I could not hang a chapter on people that didn’t consider themselves as political in that way.”

Whilst reading your book it becomes clear that being a protest singer doesn’t mean a person is overall po-

litically correct. Misogyny and homophobia are, for example, disturbing features of reggae, soul, contemporary hip-hop and dancehall. Do you think that the fact that many protest singers can’t even absorb the message of previous singers is an indication that music can’t be seen as a vehicle for social change?

“I don’t know if you can say that people haven’t learned. People have different experiences. Like Rastafaris aren’t too concerned with gay rights, but that is okay, because they don’t have to measure up to some sort of liberal yardstick. The history of political movements is full of friction between different groups. There was friction between Black Power and gay rights. There was misogyny in many left wing movements. A big influence on hip hop was the Nation of Islam which looked down on gays and Jews. I don’t think it is a matter of not learning; they are not obliged to be part of a liberal dream rainbow coalition. People are flawed, look at the Occupy movement, the arguments within the movement are about

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whether they are equally representing female, black, gay and disabled people. They have had serious rows about it. And this is a pretty impressive radical movement.

There is always tension between people.

And music reflects those tensions. Midway through writing the book, what I found interesting is that these musician’s experiences are also the experiences that a lot of activists or politically concerned citizens have; they are all dealing with contradictions and compromises. Being involved in politics is difficult and frustrating. People who admire you on one level, let you down on a different one. Certain movements just concentrate on their own areas. And yes, in some cases to the expense of others.”

Speaking of the Occupy movement; do you expect that any decent protest songs will come out of it?

I don’t think so. The point is that music rarely comes from the heart of these movements. You can see examples of movements who did attempt this. For example the Black Panthers formed their own soul

band which didn’t go anywhere. Movements don’t make the music; what happens is that artists are inspired by these movements or major changes. Like Civil Rights, anti-apartheid or the fear for a nuclear war; musicians will tap into the general frustration. Songs are more likely to respond to a broader national sense that there are things to protest about.”

Can you give me one song that taps into the current situation?

“In Britain, there was Plan B with the song ‘Ill manners’, which is about class politics and the riots last summer. That was a very definite unapologetic attempt to write a political song about Britain as it is right now and it was fairly mainstream. [...] In the last few years, unlike events like Hurricane Katrina that suddenly inspired a brief flurry of responses, the economic crisis hasn’t done that. Older musicians do discuss it in their songs, like Bruce Springsteen, but somehow the crisis hasn’t inspired younger bands.”

Book and Author

Writing songs, and in particular writing political songs, is very difficult. You have analyzed so many, would you say that you have a clear view on what makes a protest song successful? Is there a particular theory or formula?

“Generally, I am not very interested in theory. I don’t write in theoretical terms. I am interested in people and their responses to certain events and certain environments.

What I like about all the individual stories is the ambivalence, the contradictions and awkwardness. The regrets some artists have. The sense that sometimes people didn’t quite know what they were doing. [...] I realised that each story is its own special case, I don’t think there is any theory that can explain all the weird constellations of all the factors that make a song

a hit - forget about politics - just to make it a hit. The factors are so unpredictable and it really is hit and miss. This is what I find so exciting and interesting; that you can never predict which things are going to catch fire. And then there are the questions: “what if such and such record was produced differently?”, or “What if ‘Born in the USA’ had sounded differently, maybe it wouldn’t have been misunderstood as much?” “What if Bob Marley’s music hadn’t been remixed for a rock audience would he still have been this huge interna-

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tional star? Or would he only have been big in Jamaica?”

So this history of protest songs isn’t as coherent as one might think?

During the interviews [for his book Lynskey interviewed over 40 people] [...] I had to try and hone it to a general argument.

But really the point is that if there was only one argument the book wouldn’t have been so long. The point is to show rather than tell. [...]When you read about all these different songs and these different situations the message I am trying to put across is that there is an incredibly diversity and complexity. It is not a thesis. It is history and histories are full of random facts and loose treats and anomalies.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dorian Lynskey is a music writer for the Guardian. He also writes for Q, The Word and Spin, among other publications. 33 Revolutions is his first book.

33 Revolutions per minute A history of protest songs, from Billy Holiday to Green Day Dorian Lynskey HarperCollins (2011) ISBN 978-0-06-167015-2

Photography Credits Article One: Page 6: © Annaberthold photostream Page 9: Harry Belafonte: © photostream Page 12: © Howdy, I’m H.Michael Karshis’ photostream Page 18: © Il Fatto Quotidiano’s photostream Article Two Author’s own images Article Two: Page 33: ©aka Menfis Punks’ photostream Page 35: Flyer - Author’s own Page 38: ©Wendy’s photostream Page 40: ©Wendy’s photostream Article Three: Page 51: © Fulvio’s photostream, ©Kimama’s photostream, ©YoTut’s photostream Page 58: © Kimamaphotostream Page 60: Author’s own Article Four: Page 73: ©Pearl Jam’s Official photostream Page 77: ©Macskapocs photostream Page 80: ©Macskapocs photostream Biography: Page 89: ©ABC archives’ photostream/©expertinfantry photostream/©AnHonorable German/©JohnnyRorschach Book and Author Page 98: ©KeithFujimoto’s photostream Page 103: ©brizzlebornandbread’s photostream, ©biko’s photostream, ©jasonalayne’s photostream Page 110: ©allison_dc photostream, Page 112: ©junia.mortimer

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