His Masters Voice goes Silent

The threatened closure of HMV (which has gone into administration) saddens me mainly because thousands of staff in its shops in Britain and Ireland face joining the dole queue, along with workers from Blockbuster video and Jessops cameras which are also in Administration. Good to see that workers at two HMV branches in Limerick have occupied the shops demanding they are paid for work they've already done and that they get redundancy payments.

Unless somebody buys the shops and reopens them, that will be the end of music shops in most  UK town centres. I believe that would also hasten the end of the CD format - why make products if there are no shops to sell them? (apart from a small number of specialist shops on the one hand and supermarkets selling a narrow range on the other). Of course people can order CDs online, but increasingly they are more likely to just download or stream the music.

In the pre-internet age record shops were portals to whole musical worlds, and beyond them to alternative  sexual, literary, fashion and political sub cultures. Arguably this function began to decline once CDs replaced vinyl, if only because CD boxes conveyed so little information to the browsing music fan compared with a 12 record sleeve. Of course the internet finished it off, demystifying all those hidden scenes by giving instant access to their 'secrets' from the home computer and later from the mobile phone.

Analysts have criticised various HMV business decisions and blamed tax dodging at HMV's big competitor Amazon for the fall of the record shop chain. But these are marginal factors compared to the bigger trend - the fall in the value of recorded music.

As both Marx and the classical economists (particularly Ricardo) discovered, the economic value of a commodity is ulitmately a function of the amount a labour embodied in it. In the pre-digitial music industry, a huge amount of labour was involved in bridging the gap between the recording of music and the consumer - workers in record pressing plants (and in the plants feeding them with raw materials), in transport distributing records and CDs, and in shops like HMV.

The amount of labour embodied in CDs and DVDs sold in shops hasn't changed, but as Marx also showed it's not the amount of labour in an individual product that determines its value but the amount of 'socially necessary labour' - ie the average amount of labour time in a society necessary to produce that thing. If the 'thing' in this case is the consumer having access to the piece of music when they want it, then the socially necessary labour involved in its manufacture and distribution is virtually zero with internet downloading. As price broadly follows value, old style retailers of material music cannot really compete. And with the magnitude of value circulating in the music industry reduced there is obviously less scope for 'surplus value', the element accrued by capital as profit. Hence businesses like HMV becoming less profitable and ultimately unviable from a capitalist point of view.

Does that mean that record shops are completely finished? Not necessarily. For most consumers the 'use value' of a song is simply a matter of being able to listen to it at will - the delivery mechanism (digital, CD or vinyl) is irrelevant. For a minority though the use value of a physical record or CD goes beyond this. It might be a matter of a perceived difference in the sound quality compared with digital music, it might be an aesthetic appreciation of the packaging. It might be to satisfy (or never quite satisfy) the fetishistic desire of the obsessive collector, or to signify some kind of imagined 'cool' (hey look at my hipster cassette collection). There's enough there to hopefully keep open some specialist shops like Rough Trade which retain some of that aura of the portal. But in the present form of society, probably not enough value to cover the costs of a presence in the average high street or shopping mall.

British Record Shop Archive

Right on time comes the British Record Shop Archive: 'The record shop was once the centre of every music lover's universe, from the beginnings of the vinyl 12 inch in the 1940's through to the digital music developments of the 1990's, millions of us browsed, socialised and bought music in our local record shop or high street department stores. Record shops were an integral part of the social fabric in local areas. They launched pop stars, record labels, and were focal points for emerging music genres. The aim of this site is to record the history of the record shop in an accessible archive, to hold intrinsic details that could get lost in the mix, and to celebrate the role that the record shop played'.

Leon Parker is trying to raise funds at Kickstarter to mount an exhibition on the history of Dobell's Jazz and Folk Record Shop (21 Tower Street, London WC2): 'Until 1989, when Dobells finally became another victim of rent rises and redevelopment, Dobells had been a Mecca to music lovers for more than four decades. Dobells was one of the first record shops outside the US to stock Jazz, Blues, Folk, World, Latin and African music. It was also a meeting point for a remarkable network of different people — musicians, both the famous and the forgotten, anarchists, Tory politicians, doctors, dancers, dockers, writers galore, union leaders, eminent academics, film stars, journalists. school kids still in uniform and bankers (not to mention some distinctly dodgy Soho characters) — all rubbing shoulders drawn by a passion for music into a cramped, smoke-filled and frequently alcohol-fueled record shop in Soho.

Dobells was the first port of call for visiting American musicians. Many would come to Dobell’s from Heathrow and buy records before they found a hotel room! BB King loved Dobell’s while once Janis Joplin dropped in with a bottle of Southern Comfort. You could find Roy Eldridge, Ben Webster, Red Allen or half the Ellington band shopping and gossiping. It acted as a fertile learning ground for the youngsters who went on to lead such legendary British bands as the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Cream and from Belfast Taste. The listening booths were research libraries to a whole generation and on Friday afternoons wage envelopes were torn open for rare Blue Notes, Riversides, Topics Folkways and Blue Horizons. And Dobells is where Bob Dylan spent a lot of his time during the long winter of 1962 when he lived and performed in London. Dylan even recorded in Dobell’s basement as Blind Boy Grunt'.

(find out more and pledge your support if you are so minded at Sound of Dobells)

Low Frequency Struggles

'Early in 2011, in the depths of social and economic crises characterized by radical inequality, common sense seemed to dictate that we trust the decisions and guidance of the ruling powers, lest even greater disasters befall us. The financial and governmental rulers may be tyrants, and they may have been primarily responsible for creating the crises, but we had no choice. During the course of 2011, however, a series of social struggles shattered that common sense and began to construct a new one. Occupy Wall Street was the most visible but was only one moment in a cycle of struggles that shifted the terrain of political debate and opened new possibilities for political action over the course of the year...

Each of these struggles is singular and oriented toward specific local conditions. The first thing to notice, though, is that they did, in fact, speak to one another. The Egyptians, of course, clearly moved down paths traveled by the Tunisians and adopted their slogans, but the occupiers of Puerta del Sol also thought of their struggle as carrying on the experiences of those at Tahrir. In turn, the eyes of those in Athens and Tel Aviv were focused on the experiences of Madrid and Cairo. The Wall Street occupiers had them all in view, translating, for instance, the struggle against the tyrant into a struggle against the tyranny of finance. You may think that they were just deluded and forgot or ignored the differences in their situations and demands. We believe, however, that they have a clearer vision than those outside the struggle, and they can hold together without contradiction their singular conditions and local battles with the common global struggle.

Ralph Ellison’s invisible man, after an arduous journey through a racist society,developed the ability to communicate with others in struggle. “Who knows,” Ellison’s narrator concludes, “but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” Today, too, those in struggle communicate on the lower frequencies, but, unlike in Ellison’s time, no one speaks for them. The lower frequencies are open airwaves for all. And some messages can be heard only by those in struggle'.

Source: Declaration by Antonioi Negri and Michael Hardt, 2012

(see also Revolution as Resonance)

Massacres 1981 and 2011

Thirty years ago last week, on December 16 1981, nine striking miners were killed by the state at the Wujek Coal Mine in Katowice. Three days previously martial law had been declared in Poland by General Wojciech Jaruzelski and the miners were on strike against military rule. Tanks, water cannon and then live ammunition was used in the clashes between police, troops and strikers.


The repression successfully pacified the movement in the short term, but the memory of the massacre fired up the next big wave of strikes in 1988, and within ten years of the killings most of those responsible were out of power. Some of those directly implicated in the massacre later went to prison.

Still the collapse of the Soviet Bloc precipiated by the Polish strikers and similar movements elsewhere did not unseat all the generals, secret policeman and bureaucrats in these countries. Some just changed their badges and got on with business as usual, nowhere more so than in Kazakhstan where the former head of the local 'Communist' Party Nursultan Nazarbayev became President of the newly independent country in 1991, holding on to power ever since.

Thirty years to the day since the Wujek massacre, on December 16 2011, tanks and military forces were used in battles in Kazakh city of Zhanaozen. More than 3,000 people assembled in the city in support of oil workers who have striking and protesting since May in support of better living conditions. Police and special forces attacked the meeting and opened fire on the strikers and their families. At least 10 people are reported to have been killed.

According to this report at libcom 'the Kazakh oil field workers established a “tent city”, in Zhanaozen’s main square, in June. When police tried to break it up in July, 60 of them covered themselves with petrol and threatened to set themselves on fire. Friday’s massacre took place in the same square'.

Say what you like about Sting, but to his credit he cancelled a performance at a government-sponsored festival earlier this year in solidarity with the strikers, saying 'The Kazakh gas and oil workers and their families need our support and the spotlight of the international media on their situation in the hope of bringing about positive change'.

Other UK interests have been less choosy:

' - The companies where most of the protesting oil workers work are partly owned by Kazmunaigaz Exploration and Production, which is listed on the London stock exchange and has often raised loans from London-based institutions;
- The UK is the third largest direct investor in Kazakhstan (after the USA and China);
- Tony Blair, the former prime minister, is being paid millions of pounds to lobby in the Kazakh government’s interests. Many other British businessmen and politicians help, too. Richard Evans, the former chairman of British Aerospace, is chairman of Samruk-Kazyna, a state-owned holding company that controls a big chunk of the Kazakh economy.
- The oil produced in Kazakhstan is traded in the offices of big oil trading companies and international oil companies in their London offices'.

Tomorrow - Wednesday 21st December 2011, 12 noon - there's a solidarity picket at the Kazakh-British Chamber of Commerce, 62 South Audley Street, Mayfair, London W1K 2QR.

UK nightclub chain goes bust

The financial crisis looks to have killed off the UK's largest chain of nightclubs, threatening up to 3000 jobs. According to the Finacial Times (27 October 2011):

'Clubbers put away your dancing shoes: Luminar , the only London-listed nightclub company, is to go into administration after failing to secure an extension to its banking covenants.In a statement, the owner of clubs such as Love Social and Fuzzy Logic said it would immediately suspend business and place the company in administration because it was unable to meet repayment obligations on its debt, which fall due on October 27.

Luminar has approximately £85m in net debt owed to Lloyds TSB, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland. The company is the largest UK nightclub owner by number of venues, with 75 clubs across the UK employing 3,000 full and part-time staff. However the company had experienced several years of declines in like-for-like revenues.

The company was hit hard by the smoking ban and government licensing re-arrangements which meant pubs could extend their drinking hours beyond 11pm. Following the changes, Luminar cut the number of clubs it owned from 230 at the end of 2006 to 100 clubs two years later. More recently Luminar’s core 18-24-year-old customer base has been badly hit by the economic downturn and subsequent youth unemployment' (read full article here).

Venues owned by Luminar include the numerous Lava & Ignite, Life, Oceana, Bar Rock, Jumpin Jaks and Liquid clubs found in town centres across the country (full list here). It started out in 1988 with one club, Manhattan Nitespot in King's Lynn, and grew rapidly, being floated on the stock exchange in 1996.

The Battle of Millbank

After the exuberance and excitement of Wednesday's massive demonstration (50,000+) against education cuts in London, the hangover is setting in as the inevitable witch hunt is launched against those accused of taking part in the clashes at Millbank Tower, where the headquarters of the Conservative Party are located.

So far more than 50 people have been arrested, with newspapers including the Daily Mail and the Telegraph running photos of protesters and urging people to shop them to the police. I hope some of the Facebook generation don't have to learn the hard way that there are times when filming every moment and sharing it with the world can put people at serious risk. No doubt in future protests too the police will be back to cracking heads Iain Tomlinson-style, now that they have 'shown' what happens when they are expected to show restraint. Today's Observer quotes a 'senior police figure' as saying 'In the past we've been criticised for being too provocative. During the next demo no one can say a word'. You reckon? A swifter and more brutal response at Millbank might have saved a few windows, but seriously injuring students would inflame the protest movement across the whole country.

So potentially dangerous as well as exciting times ahead, but it does feel like a turning point has been reached. Two years after the 'credit crunch', and months of phony war about austerity, the reality of cuts is beginning to be felt and the opposition to them is beginning to get serious. Nobody should dismiss this week's demonstration as just a bunch of students protesting as usual - in the history of the education system in the UK there has never been a student protest of this scale or militancy.

An article in the Evening Standard by the pro-cuts Chris Blackhurst on the day after the demonstration warned: 'The temperature is rising all the time. Already, we've had strikes from the Tube drivers and firefighters, and now students are taking to the streets. More groups are likely to follow suit... Disturbingly, the scene is set for more yesterdays. The police will undoubtedly be better prepared. But that is not to say there won't be trouble or that the rage is going to disappear ('Expect more rage if the rich and poor divide gets bigger', 11 November 2011).

The Government is clearly hoping that the diffuse nature of the cuts, with different groups affected in different ways over a long period, will prevent a united movement. They are trying their best to inflame division and resentment between those bearing the brunt of the cuts. For instance claiming that attacking benefits claimants is good for ordinary workers because it is 'unfair' that some people earn more from signing on than others do for working - easily remedied by increasing wages, rather than cutting benefits which will actually tend to put downward pressure on wage levels as a whole.

In relation to the students protests, we are told that they are being selfish and that they will be the privileged of the future. Some of them may be, but many of them will be 'lucky' to find a job when they leave college. Many of those protesting this week, including some of those arrested, were actually working class 16 & 17 year olds facing the axing of the Education Maintenance Allowance, the small payment to young people from the lowest income families to help them stay on at school or college.

In any event, the current generation of students will not be affected by the planned rise in fees as they are likely to be phased in for new students. So their motives cannot be dismissed as simply narrow-self interest (not that there's anything wrong with that). As Nina Power argued this week: 'The protest as a whole was extremely important, not just because of the large numbers it attracted, and shouldn't be understood simply in economic terms as a complaint against fees. It also represented the serious anger many feel about cuts to universities as they currently stand, and the ideological devastation of the education system if the coalition gets its way. It was a protest against the narrowing of horizons; a protest against Lib Dem hypocrisy; a protest against the increasingly utilitarian approach to human life that sees degrees as nothing but "investments" by individuals, and denies any link between education and the broader social good'.

Dancing in the streets

Anyway I was at home sick during the demonstration, so had to make do with watching on TV. Like at the G20 protests in London last year, the endless looping of the image of the windows breaking was used to convey a sense of an ongoing orgy of destruction. Clearly a time limited episode of smashing things up was part of what was going on, but there was also celebration. At one point on Sky TV they showed footage of people dancing to some wobbly bass and the presenter announced 'drum and bass is playing, and the beer is open'. Yes a cycle-powered sound system was on hand, according to a participant account at The Commune: 'A sound system started playing dubstep leading to a Reclaim The Streets carnival atmosphere'

Some good footage here of people dancing, with a megaphone-wielding MC:



This film provides a good overview of the whole event - clearly the main demonstration was carnivalesque, not just the Millbank protest, with people climbing on bus shelters etc:



* Advice for those at risk of being arrested at the November 10th Defence Campaign

Updated 16 November:

* Rouge's Foam has a good post on the demo, including some reflections on the music used:

'That day music stepped out of the record collection paradigm and played a role in raising morale, coordinating chants, and most importantly cohering and drawing attention to ourselves as an organised collective. Just south of Trafalgar Square as the march was starting I was near the back and still stationary, tightly packed in and shivering with hundreds of strangers from dozens of different universities. Eventually a sound system started up and boomed out Cee Lo Green’s ‘Fuck You’, a powerfully catchy, upbeat song and a perfect choice at that moment.

Recognising the sentiment we all turned, smiled, and started dancing and singing along, our eyes meeting with a strong and implicit sense of mutual understanding and agreement. There were performers on instruments too. The music of drummers and samba bands contributed to the sense of a shared mood. Outside the Houses of Parliament a student brass band were playing a characteristically old-fashioned and very English sort of music, and yet it only enhanced the atmosphere of diverse voices contributing in every unique way to one cause. By the time I arrived at the Millbank buildings, sound-systems were playing techno, dub, and if I’m not mistaken, Aphex Twin’s ‘Come to Daddy’. Together with our reasons for being there, the sense of collectivity that music instilled that day was ten times as strong as that whipped up at the very best of raves, and I’ll never forget it'.

* Beyond the Implode has done a very funny riff on the line 'drum and bass is playing and the beer is open'. Wish I'd recorded that Sky broadcast, would be a great sample.