Folk the Bank$

I was handed a copy of Occupied Times newspaper  #09 when I was visiting St Pauls Cathedral yesterday and inside was an article by Adam Jung who runs Occupation Records. They’re just bringing out a benefit album: ‘Folk the Bank$’, featuring Ani DiFranco, Tom Morello, Billy Bragg and Sam Duckworth with cover art by Jamie Reid. This and several other  albums are intended to be crowd-funded projects via Sponsume.com. There is an aim to model a 99% style record label. The 45 Revolutions Per Minute Collective   is the workforce behind Occupied Records.

On the same spread there was an article by Dorian Lynskey about the abscence, as yet, of an Occupy anthem, and he then goes on to discuss how music can be political: “The roles that music can play in times of crisis and resistance are many and varied and if there isn’t one song that everyone can slap a label on and call an anthem, well, like Morello said, ‘who the fuck cares?’.”

On page 19 the paper reproduces Leon Rosselson’s words of the ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ (Diggers Song) as best sung perhaps by Dick Gaughan although I have found it most moving when sung more slowly, and collectively.

Nitin Sawhney – Spins the Globe on Radio 2

As one of the most consistently political of British musicians in the last two decades its something of an embarassment that he is amongst the many hundreds of political artists that did not appear on the pages of Agit Disco. However although he’s political his music of often only obliquely political and he’s certainly part of the celebrity establishment even if he stands in the left field. His music possibly doesn’t appear so oblique to British Asians and other immigrants as immigration has been a consistent theme.

His last album ‘Last Days of Meaning’ is a set of social commentaries narrated by John Hurt.

Portraits of a Player – from Thornton Heath

An encounter with gift economy on the street of Thornton Heath: a review of  ‘Portraits of a Player’

Art Daley's street gifted creation

Thornton Heath obviously does not have the extreme cruelty and oppression of apartheid – different cultures happily swim together in the same pool and share the same schools. That can feel good. But the cultural groups of The Heath still mostly lead separate lives; meeting fleetingly in school drop-offs and children’s parties. So it was refreshing when a older white man like me, trudging up the hill from shopping, was approached by a young black man with an offer to gift me a copy of his latest CD. I get approached to embrace Jesus often enough, but this is a rarer and realer opportunity. The man introduced himself as Art Daley. I got home and put it straight on. He describes it as having a Seventies soul vibe, to me it’s articulate and often lyrical urban rap. ‘Portraits of a Player’ is nicely presented with ten well-produced tracks from the local Crook Street Gang.

NEXT STOP SOWETO – VOL 1: Township sounds from the golden age of Mbaqanga

I never got hold of a South African agit disco selection. This great CD (with booklet), just given to me by my brother, is an opportunity to make a start in this direction.

NEXT STOP SOWETO – VOL 1: Township sounds from the golden age of Mbaqanga. Strut records, 2009

Compiled by Duncan Brooker and Francis Gooding. With a concise and essential illustrated history essay, in a little booklet insert, by David B. Coplan.

http://www.nextstopsoweto.com/

I’m thinking about this with the idea of exodus as applied to urbanisation in mind. (Howard Slater 2012). This compilation shows how rural people adapt to a process of urbanisation that has only just, a year or two ago, claimed the majority of the worlds population

How his story is made…

LOVERS ROCK

My thought here was a nice little story about how history is bent into a male shape – with compensatory soundtrack:

“Most record collectors are male – boys seeking boys’ things. So it is hardly surprising that the reggae records which have been most resistant to collector-mania have been the ones which don’t deal with the sort of things that blokes check for. There are lots of Ebay Earners about war, overcoming tribulation, weighty spiritual issues and smoking ‘erb. So yes, these days much of the bargain bin reggae was originally sung by, and ultimately aimed at, teenage girls. Teenage girls are like kryptonite for record collectors, I think.”

Agit Disco the book is now out!

Out Now! - click here to buy now

http://www.metamute.org/shop/mute-books/agit-disco

Country Music and class oppression

Tex Sample, ‘White Soul: Country Music, the church and working Americans’,  The Abingdon Press, Nashville 1996

I found this odd book on the way home from taking some students to see the brilliant Grayson Perry exhibition at the British Museum. Perry integrates the signs and wonders of oral and popular cultures into objets d’art with consummate grace and extraordinary skill. But in the expensive exhibition at the British Museum it gave me the chills. The cold wind of recuperation that steals the souls of our children. I might have resisted a book on country & western music at times in the past. Prejudice against ‘rednecks’ and ignorance of country music beyond the all-time-greats like Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, might have put me off. But this guy Tex can write with great eloquence about working class culture and how the dominant culture is presented to working class people with the most fracturing effects. Published just three years after my own The Conspiracy of Good Taste, there are things in this book I wish I could have written.

A few of the chapter headings: Rowdy and Loud at the Twist and Shout: working class taste; Elitist taste and the politics of aesthetics; Country music and the politics of resistance; Traditional politics and populist anarchism.

“It was in Miss Ellie’s class that I learned for the first time that country music was ‘bad music’. I distinctly remember the experience. My mother loved country music and woke me every morning with a kiss on the cheek and the music playing loudly on the radio. I can still feel physically what I felt in being told country music was bad music. On the one hand, I felt a sense of getting taller, because I had learned something that most people in Mississippi must not know since they so absolutely bought into it. On the other hand, it was the first time I can remember my mother being smaller, or not ‘enough’. Back then I had no words for these feelings. I just knew I had not had them before. While I believed I was learning something important, I also felt a strange difference from my mother for the first time.” p.42

Pete Townshend: “Apple bleeds artists like a digital vampire”

Pete Townshend gives the inaugural John Peel Lecture and makes a very good point that gets reported around the world about how exploitative of musicians iTunes is. Meanwhile Apple has so much money stashed away it doesn’t seem to know what to do with it… Take a tip from Pete.

Guardian

BBC iPlayer

Rolling Stone

Ode to Lowkey

Rahul Verma in todays Metro writes an ode to British Iraqi rapper Lowkey. He is “loyal the the roots”;  ”in these discontented times… couldn’t be more relevant”; “in the tradition of Public Enemy, Dead Prez and Immortal Technique”; “ensure hip hop remembers its responsibility to challenge, question and act as a voice for the oppressed”. And a beautiful portrait photo of Lowkey to top it off – much better than most of his more macho publicity shots. I’m always amazed when such gems appear in what is usually a crap middle of the road paper.

This is all a review of his Soundtrack to the Struggle LP (Mesopotamia Music)  After writing this I heard ‘Hand On Your Gun’ on Resonance in the car which has a stroke of ironic genius as a chorus sample -”Keep Your Hand on Your Gun” probably from some western = brilliant. See hear

Verma goes on to look at other independent UK hip hop voices, Mikill, Tricky Micky, & Random Impulse: Not to be found on Metro’s terrible website !?  so no link.

Hope Not Hate – Billy Bragg

“The HOPE not hate campaign is offering 5 of its supporters the chance to win a pair of tickets to see Billy Bragg anywhere in Britain during his forthcoming Left Field tour. The progressive songwriter/singer, who has been a huge supporter of HOPE not hate, is about to take Glastonbury’s legendary Left Field on tour.

Left Field blends Billy Bragg with new emerging talent The King Blues, Akala and The Sound of Rum. The tour begins on 13 November in Edinburgh and finishes in Bristol on 28 November.

The HOPE not hate campaign has been so successful because of the 165,000 people who have participated in our campaigns over the last three years. Together we have driven the BNP out of local communities, built cross-community walls of resistance against the anti-Muslim EDL and stopped hate preachers like Pastor Terry Jones from entering the country. Time and again we have ensured that HOPE has won over hate.

Now tell us what HOPE not hate means to you?”
http://action.hopenothate.org.uk/page/s/left-field