Tag: Music

Can someone please give Neil Tennant a hand with the words?

Rich Will9 Comments

maxresdefaultWhen I first heard ‘Being Boring’ by the Pet Shop Boys I thought it was about me. Not that I thought they were calling me boring, necessarily; as we shall see, the song is actually about not being boring. I was at university at the time, in my first year, and I had, like Neil Tennant, left from the station (in his case presumably Newcastle, in mine Sheffield) with some luggage and a sense of apprehension about what lay ahead. Also like him I had kissed some people, some of whom I’d subsequently lost contact with. And I was listening to the song for the very first time in my room in the university residences (which was rented) in a ‘foreign’ place (well, Norwich) in the 1990s! If you add in the fact that all of the experiences I had had had taken place in the 1970s and 1980s, it was uncanny. As for ‘you’ not being ‘here’ with me, well, I suppose in a very real ‘you’ (and you, and you) weren’t. I certainly hoped I could rely on my friends, and that I would get to become the person I wanted to be. So far, so very Alan de Button. I suspect that, especially given that it features Johnny Marr on guitar, it may well be David Cameron’s favourite Pet Shop Boys song. He probably heard it at the same time as me, with the references to old photos, dressing up and never holding back bringing his Bullingdon Club days flooding back like it was all yesterday. (Maybe it even inspired his political career.) The same is probably true for everyone who has heard the song, from Robbie Williams to Basher Al-Assad. The song is essentially a succession of Barnum statements, insights that are seemingly designed for the listener but could actually apply to pretty much anyone.

There’s also a problem with the chorus. A couple of years previous to 1990 I’d, to my eternal shame, purchased and listened to the second album by (I have to bear in mind that this blog now carries my own actual name) a certain pop artist from Newton-Le-Willows. One who, and no-one saw fit to mention this at the time, looked like Billy Bragg. I shall give away no more clues. In any case, on that album there was a ballad called ‘Hold me in your arms’, the chorus to which goes:

‘If you hold me in your arms
I won’t feel better’

…which is nonsense. It’s a love song. It’s supposed to make sense because the line before that, the one that is not part of the chorus, which is the bit designed to be remembered and sung along to, is ‘….and who would be the fool to say’. Now, I’m just about to do something which in an ideal world would get me into trouble with the police, which is to google the words ‘Rick Astley discography’. Doing so I see that it got to number 10, which isn’t bad, but it’s not exactly ‘NGGYU’. (While we could use the term Tennant-coined expression ‘imperial phase’ to explain his commercial decline, I’d rather we didn’t as it has become ruinously ubiquitous).

‘Being Boring’ commits the same error, meaning that the implicit chorus to the song is actually ‘We were always being boring’. It cemented rather than challenged their growing reputation as morose. Now, it’s not that Tennant is by any means a bad lyricist. At times he’s clearly a genius. Chorus mishaps aside, ‘Being Boring’ is a very great pop song. There are countless lyrical highpoints in their oeuvre, including ‘West End Girls’, ‘If there was love’, ‘Nothing has been proved’, ‘LTEODORO’ (incidentally I’m presuming that anyone still reading this is a fan and knows what I’m referring to), YWIWM (having now made that assumption I’m now going to exploit it to the full), YOTMYLMWYD, and obviously LIABC. And it’s not just wordy ones, which do tend to be my personal favourites. There’s also songs like ‘So sorry, I said’, ‘The loving kind’, and ‘Minimal’, which take a more, well, minimal and vague approach, which is obviously fine for pop music, and also works well in poetry. There’s the allusiveness of ‘Two divided by zero’ and ‘Domino Dancing’, with the ‘you’ slipping and sliding all over the place – maybe it’s the listener, maybe it’s everyone alive today, or perhaps it’s the listeners ex-lover or perhaps their cat. ‘You choose’ is another very good example – it could be fruitfully (or, perhaps, fishfully) used in an advertising campaign for cat food. Such lyrics leaves space for the listener to fill in the details of their own life. Their history songs can also be good, like ‘The Resurrectionist’ and ‘Don Juan’. Then they can get away with songs like ‘Vocal’ and ‘All over the world’, transparent attempts to revive a flagging base. But that habit can fail them, as is the case, for example, of ‘The Pop Kids’, which sounds like it was written in the back of a taxi on the way back from a disappointing meeting with their new record company.

However, given the immense promise of West End Girls – not so much Che Guevara and Debussy as WH Auden meets Melle Mel – there is undeniable decline in the quality of their lyrical output. A thesis on this subject might usefully be called ”West End Girls’ to ‘Winner’: What Went Wrong?’. As it happens, ‘You know where you went wrong’ was the b-side of ‘It’s a Sin’, and it had something in common with other early tracks like ‘A man could get arrested’, with a clear hiphop influence in its rhyming schemes. In their early days they were famously more daring and experimental with their b-sides, both musically and lyrically: ‘The sound of the atom splitting’ and ‘Your funny uncle’ being cases in point. One reason for their relative lack of lyrical development in their more commercial products is that they appear to be still chasing chart success even though it has ceased to be relevant in and to society at large (although try telling that to these people). Having got this far, then, let’s have a look at some of the lowpoints of Neil Tennant’s career as a pop lyricist.

  1. ‘Beautiful people’

‘Buy the latest magazine
And aspire to the dream
Perfect home and perfect kids
Not a life lived on the skids’

This could have been written by the younger brother of one of the lesser members of whichever boyband came between Westlife and One Direction. There is no way that that verse took more than ten seconds to write. None. And it repeats the same theme as ‘Love, etc’: wealth and fame are empty illusions. We get it.

  1. ‘Ego music’

‘Ego music
It’s all about
vacuous slogans
innocuous sentiment
Ego music
It’s all about
fake humility
sense of entitlement’

Again, repetition! This has the same message, or at least targets the same set of attitudes, as ‘HDYETBTS’. It’s also a hungover b-side idea which should have been tossed away before they stepped into the studio and took off their expensive coats.

  1. ‘Everything means something’

‘Everything means something
yes, even our mistakes
Carelessness means something
not simple give-and-take
Everything means something
and something has occurred
Everything means something
although the meaning can be blurred’

Vapid. Has something of the Roxette about it. Estimated time to write: ten minutes.

  1. E-mail

‘Communication’s never been
as easy as today
and it would make me happy
when you’ve gone so far away
if you’d send me an e-mail
that says ‘I love you’
Send me an e-mail
that says ‘I love you”

Love the hyphen. Released in 2002, ie (to be extremely generous) seven years too late. In 2002 if they really wanted to do a song about communication issues they should have called it ‘I’d like to text you to tell you how much I love you but the limit on any individual text is 160 characters and then it automatically sends it as two texts, which is confusing and twice as expensive’, or ‘ILTTYTTYHMILYBTLOAITI160CATIASIATTWICATAE’ for short.

  1. Winner

(I do not want to be exposed to the lyrics of this song).

A calculated insult to every single human being alive in 2012. I would like to publicly express offense on behalf all their fans, my friends and family and my as-yet unborn daughter. It is humiliating to listen to and accompanied a phase in their career which was all about smiling in photographs and actual flagwaving, in other words when they went full-on Elton John. The video was good.

  1. Hold On

Look around, look around
The rain is falling from the sky
Planes taking off to fly

Why else do planes take off? To go for a fucking swim? To go to an art opening with Janet Street Porter? Your taxi’s here, Neil. Can you fax over those lyrics before you leave? Oh, wait, why don’t you ’email’ them over on your ‘smartphone’? Speaking of which…

  1. ‘Twenty-something’

‘Twenty-something
In the mix
Always that
Ironic twist
Got a start-up
Good to go
When the money
Starts to flow
Oh, Twenty-something
Up to tricks’

Another title for that thesis would be ‘Smartphones, startups and ideas trending: Why don’t the Pet Shop Boys just give up?’. This is a parody of what you’d expect a Pet Shop Boys song to be about in 2016. It is the contents of an Samsung Galaxy memo written after too much champagne in yet another taxi after yet another gallery opening with Janet Street ‘yet another’ Porter. It is the draft lyrics to a potentially good song, but no more. Plus the video is inappropriate. The song is clearly about the UK, and the setting for the video is Latino LA. It’s good, but it doesn’t work. ¡Más esfuerzo!

  1. ‘Se a vida é’

The lyrics to this are actually quite nice, simultaneously wistful and euphoric as all their best songs are. That’s not the problem.

On my first visit to Rome in 1997 I banged into someone in the crowd next to the Trevi Fountain. ‘Scusi!’ I exclaimed, to which to his reply was a cheerful ‘I’m Brazilian!’. Quick as a flash, I came out with ‘Se a vida é!’ (the only Portuguese phrase I knew at the time), to which he looked at me, still smiling (he was, as I say, Brazilian) but also clearly puzzled.

As I subsequently found out when I learnt the language, ‘Se a vida é’ doesn’t mean anything in Portuguese. Even if you pronounce it correctly, which, despite (at that point) having the resources of a major record company behind him, Neil Tennant does not. It just means ‘If life is…’, which you’d assume is some sort of idiomatic expression, but it isn’t. It certainly doesn’t mean (‘That’s the way life is’). Imagine someone just saying ‘If life is…’ to you out of the blue. You’d expect a little bit more. Although if what they said was actually /aif liv ais/, which is a reasonable attempt to represent how inaccurate his pronunciation is, you’d be even more perplexed.

There are more examples below. Now, to be scrupulously fair, there are also times when Neil Tennant simply tries too hard to be lyrical, ‘Legacy’ and the one about leopardskin being good working examples. He has to be given credit for trying. There are also occasions when his lyrics are actually very good: thoughtful, moving, original, memorable. Recentish examples include ‘This used to be the future’ (admittedly a co-write with my personal friend Phil Oakey, but still), ‘The Dictator Decides’, ‘The Sodom and Gomorrah Show’ and ‘Brick England’. I suspect those are the ones he put a lot of time into and ultimately enjoyed writing. Maybe someone just needs to apply a bit of…pressure. There was a very entertaining documentary about twenty years ago in which Michael Bracewell locked Barney off of New Order in a room with some Prozac and basically refused to let him out until he’d written some good lyrics, something more along the lines of ‘I feel so extraordinary/something’s got a hold on me’ and less like ‘Is there anyone out there who cares/If a child can run free/Can a girl walk the street/will United get beat’ (NB those are the actual words to an actual Electronic song). It sort-of worked. Perhaps something like that needs to be done to Neil Tennant. His lyrics are often simply underworked. Perhaps now they get help with the music they need to call someone in and pay them a lot of money to work on the words.

In order to help address this situation I’ve decided to put in my two centavos (hey look, I’m bilingual!). That’s why I’m created a playlist with the most lyrically gauche Pet Shop Boys songs. If anyone reading this has any connection to Neil Tennant, please forward it to him. He needs to hear this. If it doesn’t work I’m going to tweet Michael Bracewell and ask him to bring over a camera crew and a new notepad, popping round the chemists on the way. Or maybe Neil just needs a gun pointing at his head. Now that might be a bit extreme.

UPDATE: I posted a link to this in a Pet Shop Boys Facebook group and I’m glad I did so because it’s starting to open up an interesting discussion about the difference between making pop music and making music to be popular. My point about songs like The Pop Kids is that they are too much the latter. You could legitimately argue that my exaggerations in the piece, the bits of devil’s advocacy, were guilty of the same (ahem) sin in that I wanted it to be read and discussed so I played up the ‘commercial’ (meaning, in the context of the ‘attention economy’ of the internet, controversial) elements. I think the Pet Shop Boys would have been an (even!) more interesting group if they had gradually lost interest in commercial success after their initial run of pop triumphs was over and the charts had ceased to matter (with the accompanying diminishment of the space in the culture for ‘pop’ music as such) and concentrated on following their more experimental interests as (mostly) expressed on their b-sides. Or maybe I’m wrong, perhaps it’s that tension that has kept them interested and interesting. It’s certainly possible that I should apply the lesson to my own writing by avoiding writing things designed to annoy people. But then, if you’re not popular, you’re no longer a pop group, and you can’t be a writer if you don’t have readers. Maybe it’s just a fruitful contradiction/unresolvable paradox/dialectical thing to be further explored and exploited /end of ramble.

George Michael, 1963-2016

Rich Will1 Comment

imagesPoulton-Le-Fylde, Blackpool, 1986. I’m staying with my grandmother. She has a small red turntable from the 1960’s. Music is my lifeline to a life I’ve yet to live. The place, that room, that record player I associate with ‘State of the Nation’ by New Order, the 12″ version of ‘Bring on the Dancing Horses’ by Echo & the Bunnymen and the second coming of Frankie Goes to Hollywood. I see now that the timeframe is all wrong – I’m confusing two visits from the same year. But then like all 14-year-olds I was mixed up. It strikes me as significant in some way that I don’t remember my life in Sheffield at the time. I know school was hard in some long-since undefinable ways and Blackpool represented some sort of escape.

One song I remember very powerfully from that week was ‘Different Corner’. There was something about its mood that resonated with mine and something about its unusual, meandering shape (particularly its lack of a chorus) that I found intriguing. I assume that its lyrics must also have struck a chord (“I’m so scared…”). The mood I now recognise as languid but if you had asked me at the time I’m sure I would have described it as ‘melancholy’. Looking up its release date on Wikipedia I see that someone has categorised it as ‘adult contemporary’, which would have pleased George. As the title indicated, this was his attempt to be Taken Seriously, following a false start with the vapid holiday romance of ‘Careless Whisper’. But ‘Different Corner’ was more than AOR. It had a sense of disaffection which was more than just boredom with pop stardom. He sounded authentically distressed and so I found it consoling. The lyrics laid bare feelings which I, with my stoical Northern English upbringing, had difficulty articulating to myself. There was also the yearning aspect. I can see now that I entertained a courtly notion of love which pop music itself had taught me, albeit one suffused with a vague sense of the inevitable disappointment of a reality which I already sensed would never live up to my (in the words of Paddy Mcaloon) ‘four honeymoons each sleepless night’.

I see that ‘Cowboys and Angels’ was released as a single in 1991, but I may have come across it a few months earlier. I have no memory of buying the album it was on but the song is so familiar when I listen to it now that I must have taped it off the radio.  I can’t imagine that I listened to it at anything other than a low volume because I was living in university residences, in the Ziggurats of the University of East Anglia and my gauche attempts to establish myself as Cool would have suffered. George Michael was, despite his very best efforts, not credible, and my own assumption before I reached university that I would immediately be recognised as one of the campus’s most debonair intellectual talents had met with disappointment. ‘Cowboys and Angels’ had that same languid mood as ‘Different Corner’ and a similar chorusless structure, along with lyrics which alluded to disappointment and heartbreak, the ‘trace’ of something before. Musically its stylings were those of bossa nova, one of those flashes of good taste that George would show throughout his career. Its self-consciously coffee table sound and presumably deliberate lack of hooks meant that, like the similarly ‘mature’ ‘Being Boring’ a few months before, it wasn’t a hit.

I’m not aware of any interesting songs George Michael produced afterwards. In his striving for adult acceptance he took the road more travelled, dueting with Queen and Elton John. Bombast and sentimentality. Later came his hamfisted attempts at being ‘political’. But in interviews he always came across as heartfelt and his occasional public mishaps evoked pathos. His need to be admired, loved and regarded as thoughtful and sincere, is one that I recognise and relate to, and I think the same is probably true of everyone of his, my and all generations. Rest in peace, George.

Due incontri per strada a Roma/Two street encounters in Rome

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sin-tituloIt’s a bright blue Monday morning in mid-October 2016 and I’m standing at the corner of Via dei Gracchi and Via Alessandro Farnese in the centre of Rome, having just left work. I’m partly waiting to cross the road and partly trying to get fivethirtyeight.com to load on my phone. There’s a guy in a car looking at me, stopped at the traffic lights on this quiet street, shouting and laughing. At first I don’t think he’s talking to me, maybe on his phone or to himself. But no, it’s me, he’s beckoning me over, and he seems to know my name, so I must know him, but I feel bad because I have no idea whatsoever who he is. He looks very Italian, in a slightly fighetto kind of way – bald head, properly shaven, shirt well-ironed, smart and garrulous with his hands. He’s speaking quickly with a Napoli accent, and he’s saying something about an embassy, and 2011. I explain that I wasn’t here in 2011, that I was in London, but then it turns out he’s talking about the school. Il British! Ah! Well, that’s where I worked, after a fashion. British Study Centres, in Marylebone. He clearly knows me. Matteo!, he exclaims. He’s an ex-student! I taught dozens of such people over the course of eight years or so in London, so many Matteos and Giovannis and Robertos so I feel bad that I don’t remember him. Seeing him again I’ve got a feeling of nostalgia. I’m delighted to tell him that I live in Rome nowadays, I’m here to stay, in fact I’m married to an Italian. And she’s pregnant! He’s delighted, and we shake hands again. He tells me he’s now living in Frankfurt. Just to show off, I switch to German, but he waves his hand dismissively. He’s going back to Germany after a week doing business here, driving all the way there in this quite plush new vehicle. When I ask why he doesn’t fly he laughs again and explains that he’s not had a good week, he’s been working overtime and still getting nowhere. He says he works in l’abbigliamento, and as he’s sure I’m aware i tempi sono dificili. In fact, he says, he wants to give me a gift, from the clothes he hasn’t managed to sell. He reaches back and grabs an expensive looking bag, explaining that this is his company: Tutti Frutti. The jacket he takes out is maybe a bit natty for daily use but not remotely unpleasant. He gets me to try it on, and it is quite a good fit. When he tells me it’s worth mille euro, I start to regret putting it on; it’s clearly not worth a thousand euros, although it is worth…something. Money is an issue, he explains. He needs some, to buy petrol to get back to Germania. By now I’m inevitably having my doubts, even here. Surely if he’s genuine he’ll remember the names of some other students. Male Italian students always buddy up, play off each other. If he was in the school he will remember other people who I should be able to recall. Plus I’m also very aware that Il British is the generic name that Italians use for all English language schools. I ask who else he remembers from the school but he’s a bit vague on the details. Then he has another idea. My wife! He also sells women’s clothes! He jumps out, goes to the boot of the car and takes out another bag. This time it’s a dress. I know Chiara’s shape and style, and this is not it. By this point I’m experiencing quite a lot of confusion, so there is the temptation to just walk away, but the whole exchange is just too good-natured for that. If he’s an actor, he’s a very good one, and the situation just doesn’t allow me to break character and accuse him of being a liar. And the clothes must be worth something. There’s a lot of face at stake and on the small chance that this is real I don’t want to humiliate him and thereby myself. I look in my wallet and see that I have €30. He sees it too, and I reluctantly hand it over. But then he says it’s not enough. He’s driving all the way to Germany, after all. He wants me to go to the cashpoint and withdraw more money. This is clearly una stupidaggine. Sure, I tell him. Torno subito. I take the bags and walk round the corner onto Via Cola di Rienzo while he drives alongside me. I need to get some more money out anyway as I’ve just bought some probably-stolen clothes that I didn’t want from someone I’ve quite clearly never met before. I spend two minutes in the bank lobby, take out some cash for myself and then slip outside, immediately turning left and then left again, onto a side street. As I turn the corner a young African man holding out a baseball cap asks me for some change, but I shake my head, and just as I do so I hear someone calling my name. I turn, see the car and give il mio truffatore a look designed to get him to leave me alone and drive away.

* * * * *

Two months pass. I’m just getting to work on a Monday morning, having walked all the way from Viale Marconi because of another bus strike. I’ve reached the corner of Via dei Gracchi and Via Alessandro Farnese, and am lost in my own thoughts, wondering what to do in the off-chance my students should turn up, when suddenly I notice that there’s a young African man standing right in front of me and talking to me at high speed. It’s hard to make out what he’s saying at first because he’s speaking a mix of French and Italian. He’s on the street selling trinkets, colourful plastic beads and the like, and so he pushes a red tortoise representing African folk art into my hand, but the curious thing is that just as he does so he turns away, not seeming to want anything in return. At the same time he’s thanking me for taking the time to talk to him, because most Italians don’t. And this is a very special day, he says, and he wants to share his happiness with someone because his wife, back home in Senegal, has just had three kids, the night before in fact. I shake his hand and congratulate him, and say that I’m about to become a father myself, in just a few weeks. I ask him the names of the children and he shows me a photo, sent via Whatsapp just a few hours before, of his wife lying in hospital with her arms around Amadou, Fatou and Mariam. Their father is called Mustafa. I ask him how long he’s been away from his wife and he tells me just four months, he came here to play professional football in San Remo but as I can see things didn’t work out.  This reminds me of the recent Guardian article about the thousands of football players, particularly Africans, stranded with no salaries around the world. There must be a whole subculture of budding Drogbas and Tourés exiled in Europe, their peak years of skill and fitness quickly slipping by. Now he has a problem because his wife needs medicine, there were complications in the birth and there are some products that exist in Italy but can’t be found back home. I think of what I’ve learnt in the last few weeks about the process of childbirth and try to imagine what having three in quick succession must be like. I offer to help; although I don’t have any money in my wallet I know there’s an ATM just round the corner on Via Cola di Rienzo. As we walk I try to remember the word used in Senegal to describe white foreigners, particularly Europeans, and I feel embarrassed because I can’t, although I should, because when I learnt it from a book I bought from someone from Mauritania in the street outside la Feltrinelli on Viale Marconi last December I thought, I must remember that (the word, I remember later, is tubab). We reach the cashpoint, I take out €20 and give it to him, and then realise it’s already past the time for class. Time to run to work.

Me and Billy Bragg, Billy Bragg and me

Rich Will3 Comments

billy-bragg-p0x2_o_tnOn my bedroom wall I have a signed poster of Billy Bragg. This suggests that I am a Billy Bragg fan, which is something about which I feel a certain awkwardness. To be a Billy Bragg fan is to associate oneself with someone always seen by many as gruff, proletarian, sexless, musically staid, and chippy. But nevertheless it remains a fact that the first single and album I bought were both his, his play ‘Pressure Drop’ was one of my highlights of last year, and I kicked myself recently on learning I’d missed his national tour, which ended last week. I’ve always felt an admiration with his seemingly boundless wit and warmth, and partly thanks to these qualities, and partly due to having, like that other group my fanship of whom has always occasioned a certain embarrassment, the Pet Shop Boys, he has managed to hang around just within public sight for over twenty five years without pissing off everyone too much and has in middle age been achieved the status of avuncular national treasure. Nevertheless like any uncle some of his pronouncements over the last few years have been somewhat dubious and increasingly conservative, especially around the questions of English national identity and tactical voting. There is an unpleasant element of both left-baiting in his relentless scorn for the far-left, and a not unrelated level of anti-intellectualism, both of which were evident in a Guardian interview published yesterday.

It is touching to read about his enthusiasm for the student protests, although predictably he also uses it as an excuse to indulge in some cheap digs at the far-left and anyone who tries to apply the lessons of the past to the present situation. There are signs that Bragg’s long-standing embarrassment with the legacy of socialism and communism colours his view of how things should develop, an awkwardness has always led him to temper his radicalism and try to sell it as instinctive, and organic, rather than intellectual. It seems churlish to point out that Bragg did not go to university and seems to harbour a certain resentment against those whose ideas for changing the world derive from detailed and patient analysis of complex ideas about society and how to change it. He is a proselytiser of what José Saramago used to call ‘hormonal’ socialism, although he now prefers to avoid the word itself if at all possible:

‘The people out protesting now, Bragg says, are the first generation ever to be able to talk about socialism without having the long shadow of Karl Marx hanging over them. If, indeed, they even describe it as such. “To be honest, I don’t care if it’s called socialism,” he says. “Anyway, what is socialism but organised compassion…They (the students) are making their own connections, and at the bottom of them all is an absolute sense of unfairness. That’s what’s politicised them. Not some abstract interest in dialectical materialism…We’ve got a lot to learn from them – their ability to join things up, take the initiative, not hang around and see what Marx would have said.”

He has also engaged in these debates in the last week or so, making very similar points on the already seminal Comment is Free piece by Laurie Penny:

“I now understand that what annoys you about Laurie and her generation is their refusal to be kettled in by either the Metropolitan Police or by the SWP and their ideological bedfellows.

Whether we like it or not, we are currently living in a post-ideological era. The language of Marxism is dead. Don’t mourn, organise! That’s what the students are doing – in a manner that is both different and challenging to those of us whose politics were forged in the 20th century.

We can either carp from the sidelines or join them as they take action.”

And is righteously smacked down:

“Laurie Penny, and in fact everyone ‘resisting’ the coalition’s education reform agenda, frequently draws on Marxism, even if she/they don’t know that that is what they are doing. And I don’t blame them, because if they want to talk about the ‘marketisation’ (i.e. commodification) of higher education, then they are de facto drawing on Marx! So to argue that the langauge of Marxism is dead is just a laughably ill-informed comment to make. It beggars belief.” (oxymoronic)

One wonders if Bragg has also been following that other debate about the meaning of communism and the role of Communist ideas in the struggle for a different world sparked off by Alain Badiou’s article in the New Left Review two years ago. The conference which that article inspired took place in the Logan Hall of the Institute of Education, the same venue as last year’s Compass conference, which Billy was at; but I suspect that the On the Idea of Communism event may have been anathema to him, given that it featured a series of Marxist intellectuals, two words guaranteed to provoke a spluttering splenetic reaction. It would be a shame if he hadn’t at least read Badiou’s article, because his aversion to the very names of Communism and Socialism is not uncommon, but to really think about what we do need to retain from the past, indeed to insist upon, and what we need to jettison, and who is this ‘we’ that needs to find answers to these questions, is an intellectual process, which demands that we analyse in depth revolutionary ideas and practices from the past. It is perhaps too easy to see Bragg’s dismissal of such debates of symptomatic of a British culture of anti-intellectualism, but it is highly likely that the experience of ferocious debates with SWP student firebrands on the Red Wedge tour in the 1980s traumatised the man and provoked this very evident revulsion at the very mention of revolutionary politics.

As I mentioned at the start, I love the wit and warmth at the heart of the best of Bragg’s music. Growing up I even preferred his poetry to that of Morrissey, someone who had a more grandiose emotional range which I as a teenager couldn’t yet aspire to. There was something in the combination of plaintiveness and gruffness in songs like ‘St. Swithin’s Day’ and ‘A Lover Sings’ which echoed my more stoical sense of myself. Morrissey seemed too much at home in his outsiderness, seemed to enjoy his symptoms too much, while Bragg was (for me) comfortingly gauche in his sense of romance and bitter at the world. I recognised myself in his songs, and admired his sense of engagement.

This heightened poetic sense can lead to political confusion, however. In yesterday’s interview he draws an analogy which seems to work beautifully at first, but quickly collapses when subject to further reflection. He rightly condemns the slavish devotion to market ‘dogma’ of all three parties over the last number of years (he clearly prefers this word to its near cousin ‘ideology’, which, given that he insists we live in a ‘post-ideological age’, would complicate things somewaht, but what the hey). But then he produces a metaphor which sounds apt, but isn’t:

“‘The market’s like fire, you know? Constrain it, harness it, and it’ll provide you with warmth and light and heat for your cooking … Let it rip, and it’ll destroy everything you hold dear.”

Now that is a fabulous image, but as I say it doesn’t work. Why not? Well, in a world increasingly subject to the iniquitous dictates of the so-called free market, billions around the world lack precisely that warmth, light and heat for their cooking. And this is not because the market is improperly regulated and managed, but because as reality shows quite clearly it is not an appropriate mechanism for providing the essentials of life. Warmth and heat and fuel for cooking are commodities exchanged for profit, but they are not, as Bill Clinton remarked of food, commodities like any other, or at least, they shouldn’t be. The market may one day have a role of some kind in a world ordered justly and democratically, but the essentials of life – housing, food, energy, transport, health, education – cannot be left to be distributed according to a system in which the winner takes all and the loser freezes or starves.

I very much hope that Billy Bragg continues to play a part in what appears to be a growing movement for radical change. But his aversion to intellectual and ideological debate may be an obstacle to his making a full contribution. The debates of the last week over the role of revolutionary organisations, and what new forms of media imply for how radical activists should and can organise have been very important and useful. The legacy of the reluctance of certain far-left groups to engage in honest and open debate in the past may be something that can be overcome, or it may be something that serves as an obstacle to greater unity, but at the very least people are now trying to have that debate rather than cynically bitching about the irrelevance and inadequacies of the far left, as Bragg has long been prone to do.

The End of Communism and the Death of Vinyl

Rich WillLeave a comment

808-1226466881_rock-and-rollHow much is an album worth these days? On CD, surprisingly little, given that I haven’t bought a CD since, erm, 2002. You can pick up a physical copy of the marvellous new Pet Shop Boys album for only £7.95 at HMV. Online, if you care to make a donation to the ailing record companies, you can get it track by track for merely 79p a pop. But why pay for a physical product? Music is now in the air, floating around for free. And according to Bob Dylan, it’s not worth paying for:

“It was like, ‘everybody’s gettin’ music for free’. I was like, ‘well, why not? It ain’t worth nothing anyway’.”

There is of course a marked difference between price and value. I’m sure Dylan didn’t feel the same way about the folk and blues discs he treasured when he was growing up. Tom Stoppard’s new(ish) play ‘Rock n’ Roll‘ is on one level an elegy to rock music as preserved on vinyl. In one of the most memorable scenes the main character returns to his flat in Prague to find that all of his beloved records have been smashed to pieces by the Communist secret police. His immediate reaction is to go to the bathroom and violently throw up.

Anyone who grew up with 12 inch LPs will immediately be able to sympathise. As someone recently wrote:

Entire lifestyles built up around albums, smoking dope to albums, having sex to albums. You lent your favourite albums out with trepidation; you ruefully replaced them, on CD, when they didn’t come back. Getting hitched paled into insignificance next to merging record collections with your loved one. Getting rid of the doubles made divorce unthinkable. Elastica once sang, of waking: ‘Make a cup of tea, put a record on.’ That’s how generations of hip young (and not so young) people have lived.

People’s relationship with their physical albums – and singles too – was an intensely personal and jealously guarded one. Tom Stoppard chose several of his favourite tunes to be interspersed throughout the performance. His choices are fairly predictable ones, covering the broad canon of late-sixties early-seventies rock music, but then he is getting on for sixty or so; I would have made quite a different selection, with maybe more Motorhead and Momus and less Pink fucking Floyd and no Guns n’ bleedin’ Roses, but then I am only twenty-seven years old. In my mind, anyway. But I digress.

There’s no doubt that the songs he chose are those that have been most important to him, and the titles and names of the performers are displayed on a screen between each scene, emphasising just how much these little details are or were so important in the fetishing of each individual record. But if nostalgia for the days when rock music assumed such critical importance in our lives is one theme, the main one is the role of rock music in the ideological struggle against the repressive Czech regime. The characters argue bitterly and passionately about music and about politics. The polarisation of the debates about materialism, about sex, about human happiness, and about what could be endured (in the name of freedom) and what must be resisted (in the name of freedom) is very clear. There is an appetite for ideas and a willingness to explore the implications of a particular stance; just as a vinyl disc had two sides, every idea must have its counterpart, both in the mind and in the ‘real world’. In the era of the two tribes, nobody could deny the existence of an alternative way to organise society, however pitiful and repressive that alternative might eventually turn out to be.

Perhaps since the advent of the CD, and certainly since the revolutions of 1989 and 1990, the debate about how we organise our economic and social life has become considerably more one-sided. A couple of weeks ago I visited the Museum of Communism in Prague, which proudly advertises itself as ‘above McDonalds, right next to the Casino’. It stands on a street which looks, with its Mango and Zara and Starbucks et al, not too dissimilar to the centre of Leeds. Consumer capitalism has swept all before it; who now would defend the Communist project, or argue for any different kind of society?

As a friend of ours pointed out during the interval, it’s unusual to hear passionate debates about basic political questions these days. And about music too; maybe because it’s harder to defend something that exists only as a list of ones and zeros on a device that may stop working from one moment to the next, rather than a physical artefact which you have held and cherished and studied intently for hours on end. The days of getting to know someone that bit more intimately by flicking eagerly through their record collection, making connections and laughing at their occasional folly, are long over. These days the question ‘what kind of music are you into’ reveals the unfortunate truth that so many of us have no longer have any discretion.

Discretion. There is an irony in the fact that, as we chat after the play to one of the actors about how quickly so many political arguments about the past and future of our planet simply dried up in the six months after the Berlin Wall fell, we do so sitting in one of central London’s many Caffe Unos (or maybe that should be Caffe Uni?!). Not a place I would choose to go, you know, it was raining and, hey, what’s the alternative?

One day in Prague an Australian businessman we got chatting to recalled how in 1990 he had seen trucks belonging to French antique dealers queuing up at the border into Czechslovakia waiting to load up with as much heritage and history they could get for a handful of francs and cart off back to France to sell for une fortune. It’s a truism that since then capitalism has run riot across that whole swathe of countries that were then just emerging from forty or more years of isolation and deprivation. But it struck me watching the play that we have experienced something akin to what James Connolly called a ‘Carnival of reaction’. The euphoric triumph of big business capitalism can be seen just as clearly in London, Lisbon or Leeds as it can in Prague or in Poland. Now everything has, as Bill Hicks put it, a price tag on it; usually, in the case of our own service-station nightmare of a nation, a highly inflated one.

But as music itself has got cheaper, political debate has too, to the point of having very little or next to no currency. Including, of course, in the realm of pop and rock music. The current consensus dictates that absolutely everyone, from Bill Gates to George Bush to Hu Jintao, and presumably Pol Pot if he were still around, has the interests of the poor and unfortunate of the world at heart. Is there any near equivalent to the Plastic People of the Universe, the dissident Czech rock group that Tom Stoppard’s play celebrates? Well, there is always the most prominent of our rock n’ roll heroes, Bongo of U2 and the UN, a defender of both the poor and the rich, and a man so politically stupid that he cannot see the contradiction between fighting for global justice and an end to poverty on the one hand, and studiously evading contributing to the cost of public hospitals, social welfare and schools on the other (fucking) one. Tax efficiency, they apparently call it. I’m sure Jesus Christ would have been very, very proud.

We stand outside in the rain mulling over these questions until the one-minute bell goes and then go back in for the second half of the play. The action has moved on to 1987 and so the curtain raises to the sound of … U2. On the train on the way home some young Australians are discussing whether if they were rich they would buy a Lambroghini or a Ferrari, a group of drunken English people are talking about how much they love working for their software company, and someone is gloating over the defeat of a football team belonging to the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. I find myself wondering: is this oh-so-ironic Schadenfreude the very best kind of challenge to authority we can offer up these days?