Thought you'd be interested in this -- tail-end of a thread on the music systems at London protests -- and I'd be interested in your take. Trigger was a piece by BBC' Paul Mason, on his BBC blog, which led to some cutting analysis. Fisher (Wire editor of old, if I remember correctly) as always is especially trenchant.
Hope you're well otherwise.
H
On 14 Dec 2010, at 12:00 AM, Mike Beggs wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 3:25 AM, Hein Marais <hein at marais.as> wrote:
>> Though the one comment right at the bottom seems to have the best
>> last word:
>>
>> Domuseswords said...
>> There were loads of sound systems all over the shop, and I heard
>> loads of
>> dubstep that day. And at other protests recently. Althrough rather
>> than
>> dubstep the thing I heard most was a lot of bate jumpup DnB.
>>
>> Listen, let's not over simplify things here: what's special about
>> this
>> movement is that it emcompases all of the contradictions and
>> aesthetics of
>> our generation as a whole. It's anarchy of the gleeks and the
>> grime'eads.
>
> Mark Fisher has some comments on this in his protest diary, which is
> well worth reading in full, of course it goes beyond the music:
>
> http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011750.html
>
> "Day X3, December 9th. There's long been a discrepancy between culture
> and the post-crash situation. It's now evident that the New Fifties
> are over - the scenery still survives, but you can push your fingers
> through it. Paul Mason talks of a "dubstep rebellion", and, although
> it would be churlish to complain about Mason's report, given that he
> was one of the very few mainstream media commentators to properly
> engage with the movement, Dan Hancox is surely right: it wasn't
> dubstep that was being played last Thursday but "rnb, bashment, road
> rap, american hiphop and - albeit only once or twice - grime". What's
> striking here is the lack of any political content, or even - "Pow"
> excepted - much anger in the music that was played. What we can hear
> exemplified, in fact, is the disengagement from politics that Jeremy
> Gilbert has persuasively argued was typical of the 90s hardcore
> continuum: "given the social and political radicalism characterising
> most of their immediate antecedents (acid house, with its origins in
> the black gay clubs of Chicago; hip-hop, only recently having left its
> 'golden age' of political consciousness; reggae, with its history of
> anti-capitalism and anti-racism), as well as the traditional
> radicalism of their core constituency - the multiracial poor of urban
> London - the music scenes of the 'nuum' were notable for their
> detachment from any kind of politics, their embrace of competitive
> entrepreneurial values, and their defence of masculinist and
> heterosexist norms which other dance cultures were busily and visibly
> deconstructing at just that moment." What we've grown accustomed to is
> a split between leftist political commitments and the most vibrant,
> experimental dance musics. No doubt this is an aspect of capitalist
> realism, and it's no accident that I referred to Simon's 1996 piece on
> hardstep in Capitalist Realism...
>
> "At DayX1 I heard the predictable "Killing In The Name" and the even
> more predictable "Sound Of The Police", alongside The Beatles,
> Madness, and - depressingly - The Libertines --- and, most jarringly,
> "Another Brick In The Wall" (hearing "we don't need no education" as
> we shuffled out of the kettle made for a suitably incongruous
> experience).
>
> "But this video that Jeremy shot on Thursday suggests a possible
> convergence between post-nuum musics and politics. It is my belief
> that the UK music culture of the next decade will emerge from the stew
> of sound and affect in the kettles these past few weeks. Paul Mason
> dismissed the idea that the demo was exclusively populated by
> "Lacan-reading hipsters from Spitalfields" - but of course (we)
> Lacan-reading hipsters were also there, alongside the "bainlieue-style
> youth from Croydon, Peckam, the council estates of Islington". In
> other words, this brought together working class culture and bohemia
> in something like the same way that art schools - so crucial to UK
> pop-art culture since the 50s - used to. But - with very good reasons
> from its own point of view - neoliberal policy has been hostile to
> this proletarian-bohemian cultural circuit. While Further Education
> and the new universities have precisely tried to make theory such as
> Lacan available to the working class - while also trying to engage
> with everything vibrant coming out of working class culture - the
> policy has been to re-cement rigid class and cultural distinctions:
> philosophy for the bourgeoisie; "vocational" courses for the masses."
>
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