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.

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

He describes a previous album that brings together many celebrity guests: “London Undersound is about how London’s changed since 9/11 and how I and other people perceive that change.”

http://rcrdlbl.com/artists/Nitin_Sawhney/

Sawhney is currently putting out a four part programme for Radio 2 on some of his sources of musical inspiration – from John Lee Hooker to Afrika’s Ali Farka Toure. Its available on BBC iPlayer so you can catch the last 2 programmes at least.

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.

A long sample from the namesake Arthur Daley bridges the b/w cultural gap and reminds me of our shared cultural experiences. At the same time corny rap words add to the gulf between us that still prickles out of this nice bundle of creativity.

“RU a fag or summat?” and plentiful use of ‘Bitch’ means, I hate to say so bluntly but, it won’t get played to my young daughter or some of my friends. These thorny taboo words can mark out the territory of our separation.  How can we represent our whole multi-cultural community when such simple jags of difference and markers of oppression, can get in the way so easily?  How are we going to get through this abrasive surface and get down to sharing culture and our different experiences as human beings?

The final track ‘Setting Sun’ to me seems to say it all for Thornton Heath and  many other poor suburbs:  “Guns don’t kill, people do”;  “I wanna face up to my fears”;  “I’m a mountain”; “Your raps worth more, than the waiting crack”. Listen to this track above all.

This is why Thornton Heath older folks like me should get behind the creative force of their sons and daughters – Art Daley, lead us into the future man!

See more on:

Facebook.com/artdaley

Youtube.com/crookstreet

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 (This first occurred in England in 1850). Its  about how rural people adapt to city life and insulate themselves from the cold winds of alienation in the shape of dominant cultural forms. The cities of South Africa were formed in the C19th but keep growing with successive generations of displacement. Each new wave producing their own cultural response to the inexorable ‘progress’ of modernity.

The compilation here covers a short period leading up the the great Soweto Uprising of 1976/77. The music from c1967 to 1976 was dominated by a style known as Mbaqanga which the essay traces back to the 1920′s and 30s and in particular through the emergence of the Pennywhistle Kwela music of the 1950s. Kwela was suffocated by the intensifying regimes of apartheid by 1960. Mbaqanga arose from within the interstices of the state broadcasting system known as Bantu Radio. The music was controlled to a large extent by the radio studio producers who seemed to hit a very popular formula that hybridised traditional musical forms with modern technologies and new arrangements. They seemed to know how to wear a shirt, and tie, and so disguised, still produce a musical response that was vital to the human needs of their audiences under the surveillance of their white paymasters.

The tracks are are all upbeat and make you want to dance and whistle along, even now all these years later in the English suburbs. I doubt if any of the lyrics are political, or could have been in the circumstances. The politics is all in the allusions to ‘home’, a reassuring ground of deep collective values and an upbeat approach to the possibilities that technological development and urban proximities open up for wider social solidarity, resilience and cohesion. All necessary to keep the human spirit alive in the face of an unbearably oppressive system.

What are not included here are the Maskanda sounds led by the electrified Zulu guitar (exemplified by John Bengu, according to Coplan. Bengu played under the name Phuzhushukela), the emergence of a more westernised rock scene and the oral culture of ‘freedom songs’ that accompanied the struggles against apartheid although they were almost never recorded in South Africa at the time.

“The study of ‘freedom songs’ has taken a back seat in academic circles. Ethnomusicologists such as the Tracys have collected hundreds of songs but amongst their collections one can’t find ‘freedom songs’. Social historians have studied a wide variety of topics but hardly ever political songs. The History Workshop has, to my knowledge, only presented two papers which touch on the topic” (Staffrider, 1989, p.83).

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.”

See also Lovers Rock 2 over at Uncarved…

Out Now! - click here to buy now

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

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

It is hard to express this violence. “I can remember my mother be(coming) not (good) ‘enough’. !!! This is the primal level of hurt that oppression operates on but few people can describe with a potency of words that matches the psychic violence that is being done to the people concerned.

Unfortunately and I imagine this will put my readers right off the book Tex Sample is also an, albeit working class, professor of theology in Kansas City and seems to extol a sort of liberation christianity. If you can ignore these later chapters though the book is full of sharp analysis of the ways cultural oppression works within oral culture. In fact his wrapper of christianity may allows him to understand the affective and embodied dimensions of oppression in ways that most of the left do not. And he can do this an reference Pierre Bourdieu all in the same breath! Keep in mind that the Civil Rights Movement in Southern USA might not have got anywhere without the churches…

The other key experience that he writes about is about going to a performance of La Boheme by Puccini with some middle class friends. He is moved by the music and responds with (almost) convulsive physical movements especially when it ends. His friend however claps politely but is very still. Tex asks him if he enjoyed the performance. He replies in dry terms that he did appreciate the aesthetics etc. This shows the difference between a detached aesthetic appreciation and an embodied aesthetic response of a person from a working class or oral culture. I don’t believe this embodied response implies a lack of intellectual response. See p.27/8

Guardian

BBC iPlayer

Rolling Stone

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.

And by the way on the question of oppression, do people know what it means?! In all the Occupy! and leftfield activity I get the feeling that oppression and its affects are rarely understood in any depth. There is no theory of oppression in common circulation that I know of.

“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