Rock Musicneeds to Get Political Again
How ironic that The Clash should be on the cover of the NME in the calendar week that London was called-for, that their faces should be staring out from the shelves as newsagents were ransacked and robbed by looters intent on anarchy in the U.k.. Touching too, that the picture should be from very early in their career – Joe with curly blond hair – for The Clash were formed in the wake of a London riot: the disturbances that broke out at the finish of the Notting Hill Funfair of 1976.
At the fourth dimension, the printing reported information technology equally the mindless violence of black youth intent on causing problem; now we look back and recognise that information technology was the stirrings of what became our multicultural lodge – the moment when the get-go generation of black Britons declared that these streets belonged to them likewise.
The Notting Hill Riots of 35 years ago created a genuine 'What The Fuck?' moment – the outset in U.k. since the violent clashes betwixt mods and rockers in the early 60s. While west London burned, the rest of lodge recoiled in terror at the acrimony they saw manifested on the streets of England. In the aftermath, severe jail sentences were handed down and police patrols stepped up in areas where at that place was a large immigrant population. Sound familiar?
But something else happened also – in the months that followed, bands appeared that sought to make sense of what went downward on that hot August night. Aswad, Steel Pulse and Misty in Roots were among the reggae bands that stepped forward to speak for the black customs.
Punk was galvanised into action by The Clash, whose debut anthology featured a pic of police charging towards blackness youth under the Westway on the back cover. Their beginning single, 'White Anarchism', was an explicit attempt to make a connection betwixt the frustration faced past unemployed white youth and their black counterparts whose employment prospects were fated by racism.
In the Clash interview from 1976 that was reprinted in the NME 'riot issue', Joe Strummer boldly said "Nosotros're hoping to brainwash whatsoever kid who comes to mind the states, just to keep them from joining the National Front end". That certainly worked in my instance. When Notting Hill went up in smoke, I didn't get it, still, a year or so afterwards, the first political activism that I ever took part in was the commencement Rock Against Racism Funfair in London. I'd been drawn by the fact that the Disharmonism were tiptop of the neb.
That event brought me into contact with some of the aforementioned British reggae bands, acts that had previously struggled to find white audiences. This coming together led directly to Two-Tone and to Artists Against Apartheid. These bands, black and white, didn't cease racism in Britain, only they helped me to understand why information technology had to be confronted.
Fast-forrad 35 years to the present twenty-four hours. Much has changed, yet we detect ourselves in the same quandary. The Baronial riots of 2011 are another WTF? moment, when society recoils in horror and says 'I don't sympathize you'.
Everyone who has seen the footage of the 'Bad Samaritans' pretending to come to the aid of the injured Asyraf Haziq Rossli, while their mates rummage through his rucksack and rob him, will have made an instant sentence virtually the kind of people who would do such an unspeakable thing.
Undoubtedly, many people in the 15-24 age group will know people like that and be quick to condemn them. For the remainder of us – who know zippo simply what we see – we'll damn y'all all, because of your wearing apparel, your music, your haircuts, your attitude. You can already hear the generational disdain in mainstream reactions to the sentences handed downwardly to looters.
Now, you don't accept to do anything about this. Y'all tin simply shrug your shoulders when politicians speak dismissively about feral youth leading futile lives. But information technology won't end there. The regime are going to lean on your generation and hard. Y'all are being set up every bit the new enemy within. 'Feral' is a word that is virtually interchangeable with 'vermin'.
The disturbances of the past weeks have stirred up a shit storm of opinion in the mainstream media, much of it from people who have no existent experience of the pressures faced by this generation, the commencement in a century that are likely to abound up worse off than their parents. Though this situation has been building for some years, the disturbances have created an opportunity for immature people to provide an alternative commentary.
I know things are different now, non to the lowest degree in the music manufacture. Dorsum in 1976, we only had i medium – pop music – through which to speak one another and the world. The cyberspace has inverse that. Now, if you lot have an opinion near something, yous can blog, tweet, and mail service your thoughts for everyone to see. Information technology makes yous experience like you lot're making a contribution, but are you really?
Nobody ever got rich writing snarky remarks in the annotate section nor got to tour the globe performing to thousands of people on the back of writing a blog. Sure, you may get a lot of 'likes' on your comments, but nothing beats the thrill of making an audience of 50 people cheer a line in a song that you've just written that hits on something that they feel strongly nigh.
I know that there are artists out at that place who already sympathize this, but I am besides aware of the atmosphere of cynical post-modernism that has warped the music scene to such an extent that musicians who write ostensibly political songs spend their interviews desperately dorsum-pedalling to avert being 'divisive'. Joe Strummer is spinning in his grave.
I can empathize why young artists might be unsure of how to arroyo politics. Since the ideological battles of the 1980s, the whole stardom between left and right has disappeared under the rubble of the Berlin Wall. Even I have trouble making sense of it all – does everyone know what Tony Blair really stood for?
But making political pop should not be a thing of setting Karl Marx to music. I've heard that stuff and it never sounds correct. Pop becomes political when it stops existence self-pitying and self-aggrandising and starts to speak truth to power.
Punk was born in a time of rise unemployment and stultifying colorlessness among young people. It contained a stiff nihilistic streak that claimed to simply want to destroy, an impulse that bands like the Disharmonism constantly had to fight against. I'm not looking for a nostalgic trip downwardly memory lane nor for a punk revival. That was some other time. Yet, information technology at its core, punk contained a revolutionary idea that remains relevant today: 'Here's three chords, at present a form a band'.
Of class information technology doesn't have to be a band – technology has put the means of product into the easily of anyone with a computer and some beats. The riots terminal week were a spark – what is needed now is an alternative commentary. Some of y'all who are reading this need to produce songs with spirit that tell us something we don't know nearly what the fuck happened last calendar week, how nosotros got to such a identify and where you think nosotros should be going from here.
This slice was first published at Billy Bragg's website.
Filed nether: Archive
Source: https://beyondchron.org/why-music-needs-to-get-political-again/
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