Rock vs house: a political comparison
Posted on Friday 11 June, 2010
Filed Under Saturday Night Music Club
THERE’S an apocryphal story about a 1950s country musician asked to offer an opinion on that new-fangled rock ‘n’ roll. ‘Tell the truth, I don’t much like it,’ he muttered in what was doubtless a Southern accent. ‘Then again, I figure I ain’t supposed to like it.’
That just about sums up my attitude to house, which replaced rock as the soundtrack of choice for teens and twentysomethings at some point during the Thatcher years. I’m sure its aficionados wouldn’t want it any other way.
In so far as music is there to provide an aural backdrop for the eternal Saturday night out, I would even argue that the genres are functionally equivalent. When the main object of the exercise is to show off your extremely fashionable new outfit, get drunk and/or high and then procure someone of your gender of choice to sleep with, who cares what is coming out of the speakers?
But if in addition the latest recordings are derided by older generations as monotonous and tuneless, so much the better. I can remember being 14 and endlessly playing ‘Aladdin Sane’ on the family radiogram and loving Bowie all the more precisely because my old man detested the bleedin’ obvious pooftah.
So if one or both of Daddy’s Little Princesses get into that house crap at some point, I will know better than to put them down. It would only encourage their devotion. It’s a rite de passage, I guess.
But my point here is that music always used to be so much more than an aural backdrop for the eternal Saturday night out. Especially in the 1960s and the 1970s, rock carried connotations of counterculture and socking it to the man and even revolution. As far as I can make out, such a stance is entirely missing from the house scene.
A couple of weeks back I caught the DVD of an excellent film called ‘The Baader-Meinhof Complex’. Dunno why, just fancied watching it from some reason. One scene shows Andreas Baader and his buddies driving stolen cars through a German city and firing random pistol shots at street signs. The Rolling Stones are playing very loud on the car stereo.
To this day, ‘Anarchy in the UK’ would rate a place on my Desert Island Discs list. Now that I have read shedloads of political theory, I am of course aware that that the anarchism it lyrically espoused was pretty confused. Giving the wrong time or stopping a traffic line are hardly approved Bakuninite steps forward towards smashing the state. But back in 1977, I thought Johnny Rotten meant it, maaaan.
And yeah, I know that both the Stones and the Pistols were poseurs and that such band members as failed to die from drugs overdoses fucked off to tax exile in the US as soon as they could afford it. I know this, and believe it is beside the point; in the decades in question, the symbolism was what counted.
But what homogenised and over-produced house acts, by contrast, even bother with genuflections towards the far left? Perhaps some younger reader will put me in my place by providing a list of 12 Maoist-oriented Old Skool Ibiza anthem bangin’ choons or something. But I doubt it.
What’s more, depoliticised house music almost certainly reflects the low level of political conscious among the young. I’ll only believe the left is in for a revival when Armand Van Helden and Roger Sanchez are doing Trot benefits, and not before.
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The music of choice for today’s teenage generation is hip-hop/rap, which most often promotes conspicuous consumption, a garish displaying of wealth, and the idea that one must “get rich or die trying” ala 50 cent.
It is the perfect soundtrack to a generation who have known little other than rampant neo-liberal capitalism.
My experiences of clubbing always put me in mind of a Nazi rally more than anything- a kind of sinister, hedonistic, mass chauvinism directed by Mein DJ. It’s in clubs that I can most understand how ordinary people can get sucked into Fascism.
A few random points. Modern electronic stuff tends to be much less about lyrics than rock. So there’s almost an inbuilt bias against any kind of message. You do get plenty of tunes with samples, and a few are political (there was a thing for excerpts from MLK speeches a few years ago for instance).
There did seem to be more of a political aspect to it in the 90s. There was an overlap with opposition to the Criminal Justice Act remember and tunes like Dreadzone’s Repetitive Beats and Spiral Tribe’s Forward The Revolution came out.
There was also that whole free party scene that had a definite anarcho edge to it. There were attempts at crossover by people in the punk scene. I remember buying some green vinyl 12″ in the 1990s that had a really bad attempt at house with a very strong political message, one side had some sample to do with Latin America, and I think the other one was explicitly about class struggle. but it was BAD.
so much wrong with this – I don’t know where to begin
for a start what do you mean by house music?Deep, Soulful, Progressive, Trance ? Chicago, Detroit, South Africa, Baltimore, New Jersey, San Francisco? – or do you just mean europop/ uptempo club music?
House music comes out of the black/gay underground,whereas rock music is by and large suburban , white and male – which of these constituencies do you consider more oppositional/revolutionary?
There is more political conviction in any recording by Moodymann, Theo Parrish, Jaymz Nylon , Detroit Underground etc etc than anything that rock music has produced in the last thirty years.
Anyway do young people listen to House music that much? Hiphop,Dubstep and Drumnbass are surely more relevant to english youth.
TBH, there is little rock, pop or dance music around these days that is even radical musically, let alone politically. Bands like Scouting for Girls even make Keane sound like Led Zeppelin. Dance music was more rebellious at one time, but the scene has been thoroughly commercialised and tamed over the last ten years or so. The popularity of Rap and R’n'B shows how far things have sunk.
Moritz
I probably am equating house with ‘what the girls in my office like’. Forgive me if there is more depth there.
Dave, take my word for it. There’s nothing very radical about Dubstep, Drum and Bass or modern Hip Hop.
I gather you’ve never read Simon Reynolds book ‘Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture’? It provides an excellent history and commentary on the House music scene and its many variations.
One of my fav sayings is ‘your favourite band/musician suck’
applies to films as well
its all opinion anyways.
“I probably am equating house with ‘what the girls in my office like’. Forgive me if there is more depth there.”
Dave, loath as I am to make any unwarrented assumptions regarding the music the “girls in [your] office” like, I’m going to do so anyway and suggest that whatever Europop/trance gubbins they’re interested in bears as much relation to classic House as does My Chemical Romance to the Dammed.
Tom P and Moritz are both spot on: House arose out of the (predominantly black) gay post-disco (and by disco think Loose Joints rather than Saturday Night Fever) loft-party scenes, most famously in Chicago, but fairly simultaneously in many major cities across the US. The sound is/was minimal, based primarily on combinations of Roland 303 and 808/909 and occasional, fairly abstract, vocal samples. Think Frankie Knuckles, Kevin Saunderson, Marshall Jefferson. I don’t expect you to like it, but I imagine you’ll at least be able to tell the difference between it and whatever pop-startlet fronted-act is currently clogging up the charts. You’re also way off the mark with your characterisation of clubbing as “to show off your extremely fashionable new outfit, get drunk and/or high and then procure someone of your gender of choice to sleep with”. One of the then-remarkable things about the early UK acid-house scene (as well as the Northern Soul scene that preceeded it) was that people (particularly men) actually went to dance and to hear new music, rather than simply to get pissed, pull or have a fight. The kind of clubs you refer to certainly exist, but they’re likely to be playing the blandest of chart R ‘n’ B (no, I’m not talking about Dr. John), “indie”, or chart pop (which I’d imagine you might mistake for house) rather than House. Old House-heads often lament the descent of clubbing into the pissed-up free-for-all (likely fronted by Danny Dyer rather than some hot new DJ from Detroit) than mainstream “clubbing”‘s become. At any rate, much of what you describe there is prefectly applicable to the majority of rock clubs in history.
That said, House (except its Baltimore variety, whose similarities to both classic house and the chart-pap to which your refer hardly extend little beyond the name) is hardly at the cutting edge of underground clubbing these days, though the distant descents of its wider diaspora certainly are: dubstep (often with a distinctly political edge: check out, for example, Kode9 & The Spaceape, or even, if you like your political music more posturing and chart-ready, MIA), drum’n'bass, techno, underground hip-hop (contrary to Igor Belanov’s claims, there’s plenty radical, at least in the musical sense, contemporary hip-hop; you just need to look outside the pop-charts to find it: ditto “indie”. It was, incidently, ever thus, at least without the benefit of rose-tinted glasses and several generations of obsessive hipster taste filterers), schaffel, wobbly, the Warp/Rephlex/Skram milleaux etc. etc. Moreover, a number of major names on the electoric scenes have CVs heading back to the punk era: what do the 40-50 something guys from Optimo and Basic Channel see that you don’t?
As for lyrics, most dance music (of any description) is focused less around lyrics than rock. That means less political lyrics: it also means less inanities and cockswinging. Both are win-wins, frankly: I prefer my political music more allusive and less hectoring: shite like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwnkFlVRCZc is about as bad as music gets, frankly. (Asian Dub Foundation work for me because I can’t actually make out any of the lyrics without the aid of the sheet.) I’m honestly hard-put to think of any meaningful, thought-provoking, explicitly-political message in rock music of any era. (Ian Sevonious’ Situationist-style provocations are the principle exception.)
At any rate, it’s possible for music to be radical without an explicitely political message: multi-ethnic South London and Glaswegian teenagers producing abstract, oblique electronic music on pirated software and cheap laptops that reflects the architecture of their estates, infinitely moreso than a bunch of middle-class LSE students mewling about the Missippi Delta whilst forcing on the often poverty-stricken original songwriters and performers restrictive contracts barring them from releasing the originals in the UK.
Finally, although a lot of mainstream contemporary hip-hop is utterly objectional lyrically, I can’t help suspect there’s a tiny twinge of racism in its ritual denunciation. Worse than the open misogyny (WASP used to simulate the rape of nuns during their shows; Motley Crue kept women in kennels backstage; whilst the Stranglers fucked prostitutes onstage and sang about women with “vaginas like the Blackwall tunnel”) and rampant conspicuous consumption of 70′s and 80′s rock? The lumpen macho idiocy and homophobia of 90′s Nu Metal bands who encouraged festival crowds to tear down sound towers with people stuck half-way up them, and at whose gigs there developed a nasty tendency for female fans to be gang-raped? The Hitler-worship, anti-Semitism, and enthusiastic pursuit of real-life churchburning and, oh, murder of Scandanavian black metal acts? A little consistency, please.
“What’s more, depoliticised house music almost certainly reflects the low level of political conscious among the young. I’ll only believe the left is in for a revival when Armand Van Helden and Roger Sanchez are doing Trot benefits, and not before.”
Oh, and just to interpret that comment over-literally, the Asian Dub Foundation, as well as various local electonic DJs, used to play frequent benefits for the SSP back in the dim and distant days of the early-mid 2000s. A few months back I noticed a lot of posters up for a popular local techno night doing a Mayday benefit for the Zapatistas. Optimo have done various benefits for solidarity and grassroots organisations too. Tigerstyle run eletronic music programmes for unemployed teenagers in Glasgow: ADF have done similar things in South London. I won’t bother to post other examples as they come to me, but you get the gist, and I’m sure others can fill you in on the details of their cities and scenes.
FrFintonStack. I saw a couple of Stranglers gigs back in the day.I must have missed that one.
Popular music lost any social-revoluntionary cachet it had about 1980 with the advent of Reagan and Thatcher. There were several reasons for this.
Firstly, the fashionable bands of the time went mainstream. Bands like Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran were really a pop-culture reflections of Thatcherism. Five years after the Pistols and the Clash Dave Rimmer could write a book called ‘Like Punk Never Happened’.
This assimilation of music carried on till it was one bland landscape of consumers and customers of all ages (not just the young) neurotically scampering after cool labels, new looks and the secrets of youth. Christ! During punk you were ‘past it’ if you were over 25, now Madonna and the Stones are still flogging the circuit into middle and pensionable age.
Secondly, the ‘counter-culture’, a product of modernism collapsed and dissipated. Post-modernism took its place and everyone divided and seperated into sects and sub-sects. There’s nothing radical or revolutionary about popular music today, often quite the opposite. I know Bowie has said if he was a kid starting today he wouldn’t go into music, he’d probably do something on the net.
Finally, in a way we ‘won’. “Sex and drugs and rock and roll” might have had a radical aspect to it in the ’60s and ’70s but it doesn’t today. It’s everywhere! It’s not ‘counter-cultural’ or ‘alternative’ is the culture of today, the mainstream, you can’t get away from it, in the papers, on the telly and the net. It’s just that when we were sticking it to the man back in the day I don’t think we thought the end product would be ‘The X-Factor’.
So we could say we ‘won’, just not in the way we thought we win…..(see also: things like feminism).
Michael Osler
The Stranglers didn’t ‘fuck prostitutes onstage’, they had strippers onstage at one gig.
They were misogynistic, they wrote songs like ‘Peaches’ and said stuff like “women have smaller brains than men”, but in its way it was a deliberate wind-up designed to provoke an outraged reaction.
Couldn’t stand ‘em meself.
Could someone translate this post into English, please?
I used to listen to the light wireless music that did the bleep bleep before the news. It was very comforting. I did eventually like Johnie Ray and the Beatles! But Freddie Mercury became my favourite. The music of course not the sex and drugs.
There are entire websites penned by junior Derridaites devoted to the revolutionary content of house and it’s various offshoots.
Gramsci and Armand Van Helden will be invoked, Lacan and Althusser will lie down with A Guy Called Gerald, the ghost of mid-eighties NME gibberish will haunt the dancefloors of post Fordian Detroit – I won’t lie to you, they entertain the bejesus out of me.
I thought I wrote a post for you a while back on this?
Anyway, there is no real political music these days, and bands like Rage Against The Machine, System of a Down etc are the exceptions rather than the rule.
It’s what we like. And while there is nothing inherently radical about a lot of house music, It’s fun. I like it. I’m not overly fond of this idea that the culture we like should be political. In some ways, it is, but then again, the Sex Pistols’ “anarchy” was as superficial as a politician’s sincerity.
However, you should check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6KnJ0k_u7w
Kit Leary. Bands just jump the bandwagon and make money on what is politically prominent. They are just capitalists making money. I never followed a band except the Irish Guards.
Token ‘yoof’ here. moritz and FrFintonStack are both spot on. First of all the cutting edge of electronic music isn’t, and hasn’t been house music for a long time. Especially not in England, where, as with Rock and Roll, we are leaps and bounds ahead of the continent in terms of musical innovation and experimentation. The cutting edge of British electronic music today is Dubstep (ish), Future Garage and UK Funky, although one of the features of the scene as of 2009 and 2010 is a huge degree of cross pollination among genres.
Since the early 90s British electronic music has evolved along what is called the ‘hardcore continuum’, a series of related genres starting with Hard Core and Jungle, moving through Garage and Drum and Bass and continuing with Dubstep et al today. It’s a movement with it’s roots in the rave culture (which certainly had and has a a distinctively anti-establishment edge to it, see the RAVE Act…) and has it’s focus on the darker side of human existance, with notions like honestly, the proper balance of masculine and feminine elements, and with enough ideological factionalism to rival the Far Left.
On top of this it’s largely defined against the meaningless, bling culture of the house scene. When Garage moved from the side rooms of clubs and into the main rooms, when it moved from a niche into the top 40 charts, and the club scene developed what is sneerlingly referred to as ‘champagne vibes’ that is when Dark Garage began to grow out of which comes Dubstep. Confusingly, the same ‘champagne vibe’ has plagued the House influenced UK Funky scene before it’s even fully formed, which has led to the search for a purer, darker scene with the Future Garage movement.
And to get into the politics of the sonics themselves, the dark, fractured, challenging audio landscape of the hardcore continuum, and of the IDM scene of Warp records etc is intrinsically confrontational and has as much unspoken political potential as cubist painting or Surrealist poetry ever did.
In short, you can like house and vote Tory. Somebody who lives their life along the highway of the hardcore continuum, or for whom Aphex Twin is a semi-diety can not vote Tory.
I always thought that Sandie Shaw was pretty revolutionary back in the day – the rebelious way she walked about with no shoes on. And “Puppet on a String” was a stark (Grramsci-esque) critique of the US/UK “special relationship”/imperialist hegenomy. Gerry Heally (UK Marxism’s Larry Parnes) had all her records and would regularly demand that Cliff Slaughter (gtr) and Tom Kemp (mouth-harp) back him up on “Girl don’t come” – a scary preminition of Margaret Thatcher.
I saw Sandie on daytime TCV recently – she’s now into crystals and “healing”. And had eaten FAR too many FAT cakes.
“She’s real (fat) M.F.” (Johnny Guitar Watson)
The revolution has failed.
What worries me about the educational system (as I have expereienced it through my own childrens’ schooling) is that REAL music is very much downpolayed. When I went to primary school in the 60s, we used to listen to a BBC music for schools programme, there was a class choir lesson, teh Headmaster used to gather us all in the hall every so often and play gramophone records of orchestral music to us, and I was fortunate to attend the Robert Mayer concerts once a month at the Royal Festival Hall (sponsored classical concerts for children). We also had daily hymn singing. From what I have seen, none of that applies nowadays. One of my daughters joined the school choir at her primary school, but the ‘songs’ were so uninspiring, more like chants, all specially written for primary school children and with approved sentiments. In those days, most boys played the guitar and wanted to be in a rock and roll band, and every school had a school rock band. Pubs also hosted live music. Where I grew up in Barnet/Finchley there was the Salisbury, the Torrington and the one in New Barnet where the Stranglers played, it might have been the Blue Anchor. Oh, and of-course, every Sunday there was a concert at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm. None of that applies nowadays. I believe if a young person wants to make it as a musician they have to post themselves on Youtube. It’s not surprising that music has developed along technological lines, because that is the easiest way to transport and publish it nowadays. I’ve always been a word-oriented person though, and, regardless of the structure of this new music, I miss decent lyrics, words that convey meaning and a message. I’m interested in the idea that some of this music is interpreting the ideas of femininity and masculinity. How’s that work, then?
Political bands were ALWAYS the exception rather than the rule.
There’s an awful lot of rockist nostalgia on the left, often for a form of music and a cultural period that never really existed. And it’s reflective of a broader, uptight anti-populism.
And Rage Against The Machine are bloody awful – turgid, soulless, one-dimensional.
Off topic, but are you planning to do a post on the BP sil slick? Most of the left seem to be ignoring it and it is rather serious.
I was wondering how long it would take for someone to say the R-word, but a little part of me deep inside hoped-against-hope that it would never happen. I now await “there isn’t a tune you can whistle”, “you can’t hear the words” and “it’s too loud”, followed by “they’re just making it up as they go along!” and, for the intellectuals in the house, “dodecaphonic? CACOPHONIC more like!”. (On a serious note, Sue: the prevalence of electronic music has nothing to do with electronic means of distribution: it’s perfectly easy to record acoustic or electro-acoustic instruments on a computer and transmit the result over the internet).
I also can’t help notice the lack of historical nous of many of the posts on this thread. The idea that popular music somehow went into a terminal decline sometime around 1980 (would that be the moment synths became popular?) is ludicrous: actually look at the charts from ANY era and see them stuffed full of complacent rot every bit as noxious as Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran (Englebert Humperdick? Lulu? As Bob Dylan remarked in No Direction Home, “Where I came from no-one listened to country or folk or blues music. All you’d hear on the radio was ‘How much is that Doggy in the Window?’). Moreoever, the early 80′s were the heyday of Cabaret Voltaire, early Human League, New Order, the Associates, Soft Cell, Throbbing Gristle, and Scritti Politti though those will undoubtedly be dismissed out of hand and lazily lumped in with SB and DD due to their lack of LOUD revolutionary! guitars and shouting (If you’re really synthphobic, just replace those bands with The Specials, The Beat etc. etc.) The way people on this thread talk, you’d think that the charts and airwaves were full of nothing but cutting-edge politico-punk and psychadelia previous to that. Bullshit. In ANY era people had to make an effort and look outside the popcharts (and, with few, exceptions, BBC or commercial radio) to find anything engaging or worthwhile. Things don’t stop existing because people don’t know where to look for them, can’t be bothered looking for them, or have become so atrophied they confuse meaning with form can’t recognise them when they’re right in their faces.
E10 Rifle: spot on on all points!
Whatever form it takes, I can’t help but think there is less music around these days. Or maybe, it is more segmented. What’s wrong with ‘How Much is that Doggy in the Window?’ anyway? And, all the other comedy songs hanging on from music hall that used to appear in the charts every so often ie ‘Ernie the fastest milkman in the west’, the song about digging a hole in the road, and the one about moving a piano (both sung by Bernard Cribbins if I recall,). Do you still get comedy songs, I’ll except Peter Kay’s versions of vaarious ballads to raise money for charity.
SueR. According to an oil expert last night on Newsnight there are about 22 serious leaks in the Niger Delta but no one cares. It is not the US of A.
@ E10
Just the nature of the music in the ’60s and ’70s sometimes
made it subversive.
There might have been nothing overtly ‘political’ about the Stones in the late ’60s, or the Sex Pistols in the mid ’70s but there can be no doubt the ‘establishment’ perceived them as subversive and a threat and tried to do them over.
Even they way they dressed was seen as wrong and some sort of threat. When was the last time you were beaten up/stopped by the police/refused service in a shop, or pub cos of they way you looked? Cos it used to happen to me and many others in the ’70s.
I’d imagine plenty of people involved in the dubstep, hip-hop and dance scenes get stopped by the police just for the way they look every single day. I’d imagine if they vertured far enough out into the exurban hinterland, they may well be beaten up, or at least verbally abused, and they’d almost certainly be refused service in plenty of shops and pubs if there weren’t (thank god) laws against it.
None of that, incidentally, would be because they’ve chosen to dress like an idiot in order to solicit those precise reactions.
I don’t really get your point, to be frank. Rather than saying that music was more radical in the 70′s, it could tell me that people are generally a bit more tolerant now. Or that the establishment have “chilled out” (as people apparently said in the 70′s) and realised that rock ‘n’ roll never was actually any sort of threat and is a nice little national money-spinner. Or that the estabishment are now the 70′s former-rockers former schoolchums, neighbours and political fellow-travellers. Or that members of the current establishment WERE THEMSELVES wearing silly clothes and listening to rock music in the 60′s 70′s. Or is it just that the kids now aren’t nilistically-provocative enough?
That said, I don’t recall any government of the 60′s or 70′s introducing criminal legislation specifically directed against particular types of music and music-related youth culture, let alone any that went so far as to stylistically-define the types of music it intended to combat. (Unless 70′s rock was “wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”, it wasn’t covered.) http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1994/ukpga_19940033_en_8#pt5-pb2
Baws, it didn’t allow my joke “deliberate provocation” HTML tags around the second paragraph.
The Gov loved all those tax paying pop groups even the ones that pretended to be political radicals of sorts.
31 responses, well 32 now, on the politics of pop music
Sue R: A lot of electronic music has lyrics, thought it must be said that due to the way the voices are cut up and played with, the vocals are more used for how they sound (although a clever sample can really make the whole song) than their lyrical content. The way masculine and feminine are played with often involve female vocals, slinky rhythms and softer sounds and samples mixing with aggressive bass, and a darker range of sounds on the other. Garage and Bassline could both be said to be genres which focus on a balance. Dubsteps varies from a balanced sound to one which is far more dark and ‘masculine’. Grime, the most important British hip hop scene, is characterized by very aggressive rhythms, sounds, and of course, often pretty misogynistic lyrics. The hyper-masculinity is seen as one of the reasons it will never make the mainstream.
But the idea that there’s less music to day is simply ridiculous. The major talking-point is that we are living in a age of hyper fragmentation and de-centralized cultural production. Everyone with a guitar and laptop and an internet connection can record themselves and publish it for the world to take note (or not). But the fact is humans love to make music, we’ve always been doing it and we always will. Genres, technologies, focuses shift with the times and many die out and stagnate. In the same way that you’re not going to find the contemporary cutting edge of literature in those writing sonnets in iambic pentameter, it’s true that punk and rock have peaked and a lot of the greats of the 60s/70s remain unbeaten in their specific fields. But had Joe Strummer been born in the 80s, he’d probably be making great indie or even dubstep now. Likewise Distance might have been a great blues act.
And just a couple of names for those who say we don’t do good lyrics anymore (that includes you Dave!) Check out some hip hop like Deltron 3030 or Jurassic 5 if you want to hear some intelligent political polemic. And check out Graham Coxon if you want a great guitarist and lyricist in the the tradition of blues and rock and roll. And check out The Mountain Goats if you want to most bitter, and quite simply, one of the best lyricists of all times.
I was thinking about this overnight: what it bears testament to is the power of creativity in the human mind/spirit. In any society, not ruled by ritual and tradition, where humans are free to experiment with different forms of thought andconstruction, then science and art will not stand still. So, although I prefer more ‘tradtional’ forms of music, I greatly admire the people who produce the more ‘avant-garde’. you can’t step in the same river twice and all that.
No human has ever conceived of anything that doesn’t already exist in some form or another. That doesn’t take anything away from great ‘inventions’ or innovations (which is a better description) but I tend to reject the Eureka moment. Creativity is better served by people bouncing ideas off each other and using the material that already exists to mould something new.
And what was the famous quote from the third man,
“Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly.”
If we’re talking about technological innovations, it is war that drives it. Da Vinci was a military engineer who worked for various courts. Michelangelo worked for the Catholic Church of-course, notnoticeably involved in war, but he was living at a time when the Italians were fiercely proud of their Roman military heritage, not doubt because of the fall of Constantinople and the beleagued Eastern Church. Look at any invention and you will find that it is the military who were behind it. As for Switzerland (and Dave probably knows more about this)aren’t they good with chocolate? and banking?
@ FrFintonStack
“I’d imagine plenty of people involved in the dubstep, hip-hop and dance scenes get stopped by the police just for the way they look every single day”
Yes, because they are black, not because they belong to something ‘alternative’. Think it’s bad now? Try being black in the ’70s with the old ‘sus’ laws – today is nothing compared to that, ‘sus’ caused riots.
“I don’t really get your point, to be frank”
This doesn’t surprise me, you appear to have litte knowledge of cultural history, just a set of contemporary cliches. I imagine you like to consume a lot, and think what you consume is “radical”. And in 20 to 30 years time the clothes you are in today will look pretty silly too.
“That said, I don’t recall any government of the 60’s or 70’s introducing criminal legislation specifically directed against particular types of music and music-related youth culture, let alone any that went so far as to stylistically-define the types of music it intended to combat. (Unless 70’s rock was “wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”, it wasn’t covered.)
They didn’t need new fucking laws then, they already had them (check the ‘sus’ law for just one). And the police were a lot more violent and corrupt especially before the 1984 PACE Act, they’d beat you up and/or fit you up without batting an eyelid. A little bit of dope could get you three months inside.
As for the oppposition to laws to stop raves, it was remarked in the late ’80s when the laws were first being mooted how very limited the objectives of the campaign were. The campaigners just wanted to be free to wave their arms about in a field, milking the big cow in the sky while they were on one listening to house music without anyone bothering them. That was it. Finito..
At least we wanted to change the world, don’t lump us all in with the Tony Blairs in the ’70s, that was never on their bloody agenda. We may have failed miserably, but at least we tried. It was better than today’s consumerist, sleb-obsessed culture were voting on Big Brother and reading ‘Heat’ mag is about as radical as it gets.
“I’ll only believe the left is in for a revival when Armand Van Helden and Roger Sanchez are doing Trot benefits, and not before.”
My friend has a photo of Ricardo Villalobos DJing the Arches in a Subcommandante Marcos T-shirt. That count?
oops. just saw Frinton’s post. Nevermind.
In response to the mention of hip-hop, there are (left) political acts within the genre:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dr05tXktSo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMoHHd5IuF4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h73hA13nbPk
These artists are vastly outpublicised by the apolitical misogynist rubbish. Then again, contemporary rock has its own share of reaction. You have to go a long way to out-crap the Kaiser Chiefs’ ‘aren’t working class people a bit horrid’ themed warblings. The perfect soundtrack to the Cameron years.
The real problem is that Music Has No Meaning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnrfbpofFhk
surprised these guys haven’t been mentioned yet
I was going to post a long rant about how the cultures of consumption and production of underground ‘house’ and post-house music: which could mean everything from dubstep to UK funky to big room techno make it – or at least some of it – inherently more political than the rock establishment, about how they revolve around a concept of authenticity which resists corporate encroachment, how they provide a space for marginalised communities to mix and integrate, how they often exist on the fringes of or outside of the law, how the campaign to resist the Criminal Justice Act in the UK politicised a hell of a lot of people and so on. But I can’t really be bothered, so I thought I’d just post this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipOgakPJUTQ
Very interesting post. As someone who has also read shed loads of political theory, and DJ in my spare time, I think I can add a few useful points.
Hate to say this, but I think you’re letting your own personal musical tastes colour your perception somewhat here.
You mention that “rock carried connotations of counterculture and socking it to the man and even revolution”.
Now I’m not sure from which nation you hail, but if you have ever seen the massive clashes between ravers and police during the acid house explosion in the UK, I think you’d find a LOT of counter cultural resistance. Yes, that energy has died, but it did exist. At this time, the music itself was the revolutionary element BECAUSE it was electronic and BECAUSE it predominantly didn’t feature lyrics.
As for some contemporary electronic music which is political, check out the following. They are both techno collectives in Detriot, and their energies have been directed to political and economic emancipation for the disadvantaged through the power of music etc.
http://www.detroittechnomilitia.com/main/
http://www.undergroundresistance.com/
In the mean time, check out the UK’s very own Leftfield, in particular Dusted:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usaeUUAAnLM
Being a Northern Soulie I’m no expert on either type of music forms being discussed, but there doesn’t seem to have been much that is truly new for the past twenty years.
I am 41 years old and cannot believe that hip hop and electronic dance music/house (house? really?) are apparently still current music genres – this stuff was around when I was a teenager (and Public Enemy, NWA came at you like a punch in the face, unless some of the dirge that is called hip hop now). Compare the huge differences in music from 1970 to 1990 to the not so huge differences from 1990 to now. What the hell happened to the generation gap??