Dancing Questionnaire (9): Tracy K - 'music was everything and the possibilities were endless'

Tracy K recalls nights out dancing from Tamworth to Tokyo, via London and Aberystwyth. The tale of dancing in Tokyo with Belle and Sebastian made me very jealous

1. Can you remember your first experience of dancing?

I can remember my mum, who had me at 19, dancing me round the room as a baby to Aretha Franklin and Sam and Dave. I know I've inherited my dancing gene from her!

2. What's the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?

Too many to mention, but I've met a lot (a LOT) of my significant others in clubs, so I would say the dance as mating ritual. I would also have to mention the kind of shamanic ritual of mass dancing to Jah Wobble at Glastonbury in the 1990s and dancing onstage with Belle and Sebastian in Tokyo to Dirty Dream #2 on my 33rd birthday.

3. You. Dancing. The best of times…

Being at a generic indie club in 1995 at the Marquee with my very best friend in the world and realising we were the only two women in a sea of cute indie boys. Being young, single, moderately attractive and a feeling that the music was everything and the possibilities were endless.

4. You. Dancing. The worst of times…

Again, London in 1995, having been dumped by charming bastard, I went to see Gene at the Forum and cried my eyes out in the moshpit to Olympian. Alone at the aftershow club, I danced broken hearted to The Smiths, pursued hopelessly across the floor by a lad in a Morrissey shirt too shy to make eye-contact. Pathetic...in both senses!

5.Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you've frequented?

Aged 11, I frequented the local youth club, which had an excellent nightclub room: I tended towards the Mod, with my southern soul mum and ska loving dad, so it was The Jam, Madness etc all the way back then.

Aged 16-18, my male friends and I went into Tamworth's premier (ie only) club, fondly called the Imbecile (Embassy). We would storm the floor for the token indie half hour (The Cure/Smiths/Pixies/Wonder Stuff etc) and then sup our cider and black morosely for the rest of the night. this was enlivened by regular trips to Rock city in my mates' clapped out mini. Very heady days!

Aged 18-21, university days. My friends and I went to the local footy Club on a Friday night every Friday night for 3 years. A mixture of poppy chart stuff, cheesy old music and the occasional cool track. We all loved dancing and had little routines to Loveshack etc. We could never work out why we almost never got asked for the end-of-the-night slowie, when we were a group of 13 girls who were inseparable...hmmm...

Aged 21-25 and then again from 28-30. A downstairs club in a seafronty hotel in Aber, painted black, which attracted the local Goths, indie, metal and mistfit kids [The Bay Hotel, Aberystwyth]. I was DEVOTED to this place, I went 3 times a week and danced my arse off every week, always one of the first on the dancefloor, always one of the last to leave. The happiest and most carefree times of my life. I met the best people, heard the best music and felt at home there. Actually, I felt like the queen of the scene there. Everyone knew each other, there were never any major stresses or fights (there was a cheesy nightclub upstairs, a similar atmosphere but more fights) and it had a devoted crowd of habituees. Wonderful place, I miss it still.

Aged 29-32. Moved to London, went to lots of okay clubs but discovered the After Skool Klub (not a horrible school disco type place, despite the name), the right mixture of indie, retro and classic music with kids who just didn't care. I took lots of people there, used to love staggering out in the early hours of a summer morning and watching the sun rise sitting by Embankment. Around this time I also used to go to the Metro midweek: there's always something special about clubbing midweek, when everyone else is going to work in an hour or two and you have just staggered out of a dingy basement, mascara in rivulets down your face and your clothes soaked with sweat. Around this time I met a girl who was a great dancer, we danced for the love of dancing. People thought we were lesbians, because we were so in synch with each other. People are generally idiots though.

Now. I go out dancing less frequently, though the will is still there and I get itchy feet about 11:30 on Saturday nights. Our local club is a bit too student disco for me these days and I can't take anywhere seriously that actually plays Razorlight. I look back fondly at my dancing days and think they were some of the happiest of my life: the freedom, the music so loud it's in your blood, the hypnotic state you get into when the dj keeps them coming, the sense of communion with people you love, the ritual of getting ready. I love all of it. I miss all of it.

6. When and where did you last dance?

I had a little dance at the ASK with my friend a couple of Saturdays ago, but she was working, so it wasn't for long. Before that, it was my hen night in Manchester the weekend before and we danced in a mental little basement club which played Fun Boy Three and Sinatra. A couple of my best mates who had stamina and cocktails running through our veins. Magic!

7. You're on your death bed. What piece of music would make your leap up for one final dance?

Probably Pixies Debaser or The Breeders Cannonball. The Cure's Boys Don't Cry would do it too, or Stevie Wonder's Superstition. I love a good bassline...

All questionnaires welcome- just answer the same questions and send to transpontine@btinternet.com (see previous questionnaires)

Revolution Girl Style Now!

Riot Grrrl was probably the ultimate zine-driven scene. While punk, for instance, threw up fanzines written by people who wanted to document the new music of the late 1970s, with riot grrrl the zines came first. Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe, who formed key scene band Bratmobile, first put out Girl Germs zine in 1990. They then gave a name to the emerging movement with Riot Grrrl zine, the first issue of which came out in June 1991. Toby Vail, meanwhile, put out Jigsaw zine as a result of which Kathleen Hanna got in touch and they started Bikini Kill – inevitably the best-known of the Riot Grrrl bands also put out a zine of the same name.

Riot Grrrl – revolution girl style now! (Black Dog Publishing, 2007) gives due weight to the zine and DIY dimensions of the movement, with a chapter by Red Chidgey on Riot Grrrrl Writing. She argues that the zine ‘manifestoes were a form of wish fulfilment, conjuring up in words whatever the authors wanted to see happen in real life… “Riot Grrrl was about inventing new titles”, says Jo Huggy, ”you think up some name for a fantasy revolutionary group of girls, spread the ideas of it about and hope, for someone, it’ll come true”'.

In England, key riot grrrl band Huggy Bear declared in their Her Jazz manifesto (printed in their Huggy Nation zine, 1992): ‘Soon truckloads of Girl Groups and Girl/Boy Groups will be arriving to storm onto our platforms to start the riot they’ve been dreaming and plotting in the many hours spent waiting, growing taller with anticipation’.

Thus the bedroom dreams of a post-punk feminist youth movement gave birth to just that, initially in early 1990s Olympia and Washington DC and then in the UK and elsewhere.

The scene struggled to cope with a media onslaught, and the record industry was soon repackaging a diluted form of girl power with The Spice Girls. Nevertheless, Riot Grrrl inspired girls (and boys) across the world to form bands and write, and there continue to be riot grrrl networks to this day.

Riot Grrrl was also one of the final pre-internet movements. As Beth Ditto notes in her foreword to the book, it was ‘Built on the floors of strangers’ living rooms, tops of xeorox machines, snail mail, word of mouth and mixtapes’. In the pre-internet world ‘the main means of communicating and networking… was through exchanging zines and writing letters’ (Julia Downes). Erin Smith, who published the early Teenage Gang Debs zine recalled, there ‘was something special about having this pen-pal and then kind of calling on the phone, and then hearing about this other person, and then reading their zine, and then mailing your zine out to people and just hoping somebody’s going to understand it’.

Internet communication is much quicker and broader – I know that within minutes of writing this somebody on the other side of the world will be reading it. But arguably communication is often shallower than the exchange of gifts implied by sending tapes, zines and letters to kindred spirits.

This book is a good start at documenting Riot Grrrl, though inevitably there are gaps. In the chapter Poems on the Underground, Cass Blaze covers the UK music influenced by riot grrrl in detail. She considers Huggy Bear, Mambo Taxi, Voodoo Queens and the crossover with the indie-pop scene. I would have liked the US Riot Grrrl music scene to be treated in similar depth. The link with the related queercore scene could also have been explored more, with bands like Sister George in the UK and Tribe8 in the US.

There's lots of good Riot Grrrl stuff out there online - you could start with The Riot Grrrl Manifesto, The Riot Project and Riot Grrrl Online Blog.

Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water’s roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool’s triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind?



Words: from W.B. Yeats, To a Child dancing in the Wind , 1916; image by Mitch J Johnson via Flickr.

More disco police action

England: "Illegal ravers stayed behind to tidy up!" (Northampton Chronicle, 11 June 2008)

'The 500 ravers who broke into a farm on the outskirts of Northampton for an illegal party stayed to tidy up the mess before police moved them on. The partygoers managed to hack through a metal clasp and open the steel gates into the field near Sywell off the A43 where they remained for almost 24 hours over the weekend. Landowner Michael Bletsoe-Brown said he could hear the music from his home, at least three miles away.

He said: "It's the third time this has happened in three years, and we really thought we had got the gates secured because we put a metal clasp on, which you're not supposed to be able to break. Somehow they managed to get in and once they're in, there's very little anyone can do about it. The police don't have the resources to be able to come and herd them all off and, if they did, we would be left with all the ravers' mess and rubbish, which was our biggest concern. As it was, the best way to deal with them was to leave them until they decided to move, which finally happened at about 4pm on Sunday." Mr Bletsoe-Brown said the rave, which resulted in two arrests for drugs offences, was well organised...

Northamptonshire Police detained six people for causing a public nuisance, as well as seizing two vans with sound equipment and stopping two motorists who were driving without insurance.

England: Immigration Disco Raid in York (Yorkshire Post, 9 June 2008)

A restauranteur targeted in an immigration raid thought she was the subject of a stag night prank when 30 police officers poured in and handcuffed her and five other people. Soo Fong, the owner of Cantonese restaurant the Willow, in Coney Street, York, was questioned alongside her husband and four members of staff, including the chef. Mrs Fong, who has had the business for 35 years, was in her office when the officers, in black and wearing balaclavas and helmets, stormed the building on Friday night.

She said: "The disco starts at 10pm and I thought they are coming early tonight. "When they handcuffed me I found it hilarious. At first I thought it was a stag night and I played along with it. My husband was very worried because they got him handcuffed and wouldn't tell him what they were doing." Mrs Fong said police checked her staffs' papers before they were released. She claimed: "Three of my full-time staff have work permits and the other staff are legally resident or students. They arrested nobody and after an hour and a half we managed to get the restaurant opened."... The joint operation between North Yorkshire Police and the Borders and Immigration Agency followed tip-offs about the alleged employment of illegal immigrants and legal immigrants disbarred from working.

USA: Detroit Police bust funk terrorist cell (Detroit Free Press, June 3 2008)

Officials at a west-side art gallery were consulting with attorneys Monday after a Detroit police raid Saturday morning left 130 partygoers with loitering tickets and 44 vehicles impounded. Police said the raid targeted illegal after-hours alcohol sales.

Patrons described commando-dressed copss, some heavily armed, bursting into a popular monthly party at the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit - widely known as CAID - about 2:20 a.m. and forcing people to the floor at gunpoint. Some patrons described police as abusive, said Aaron Timlin, CAID's executive director. "There were serious civil liberties issues here," said Timlin, who said the crowd was composed largely of young suburbanites.

One patron, identifying himself as Derrick, posted a detailed account on MySpace. It read in part: "One man claimed he was an attorney. The man stood on his knees, asking the police what was happening, explaining his occupation as an attorney. He was promptly kicked in the back, and forced onto his hands."

... The raid took place in its gallery in a 119-year-old building on Rosa Parks Boulevard north of West Warren. The party under way Saturday morning was the monthly Funk Night, at which gallery members dance to funk music. The party usually starts at midnight and lasts until about 5 a.m. The reported heavy-handed police presence elicited derision on some art and music Web sites. The Metro Times' music site carried a headline that read: "DETROIT POLICE BUST FUNK TERRORIST CELL."

Seven (more) songs

The seven songs meme is still doing the rounds - it goes like this:

'List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to'.

I must admit I've already had a bite of the cherry at my South Londonist blog Transpontine (having been tagged by Rough in Here and Someday I will treat you good). Now I've been tagged here by Simon Reynolds, and since I go through all the effort of maintaining two blogs, I don't see why I shouldn't have two shots at this.

Rather than spending time thinking about what my current seven favourite songs are (which is a bit Hi Fidelity for my taste) I'm just going to list some found objects - seven songs I heard over the weekend that meant something to me.

Something old

B-52s - Give me back my man ('I'll give you fish, I'll give you candy')- because this was the first record I danced to at a friend's party on Saturday night at a pub in Kings Cross. It reminded me of all the other parties where I've danced to this band, to this track/Rock Lobster/Planet Claire/Love Shack/Party Gone Out of Bounds.

Something new

Black Kids - I'm not gonna teach your boyfriend how to dance. Because this was one of the last records I danced to on Saturday, a Robert Smith-channeling refusal to assist a love rival with two left feet. There's a good even dancier remix of this one floating around (and Kate Nash has already covered it).

Something borrowed

Roy Davis Jr. - Gabriel (Large Joints Remix) - well not so much borrowed as a steal, 20p from a car boot sale in Rotherhithe on a mix cd (Sound of the Pirates - the garage sound of uk pirate radio mixed by Zed Bias). Garage angelology - you see the the archangel of love popped by to tell you that 'one love was the focus of the true message'. So take your communion on the dancefloor: 'Dancing soon became a way to communicate, Feel the music deep in your soul'.

Something blue

Leonard Cohen - Famous Blue Raincoat - because I sat down on Sunday with the assorted strummers of the Brockley Ukulele Group and played this. I note, via Bob from Brockley, that another seven songs respondent, From Tehran with Love, chose no fewer than 5 Cohen songs. As long as the worlds greatest Canadian-Jewish-Zen Buddhist songwriter remains venerated by some in predominately Muslim Iran, there is hope for the world (the Iranian singer Farhad Mehrad has covered some Cohen songs)

Something in a movie

Belle and Sebastian - Expectations - a long time favourite of mine which I was delighted to hear on the soundtrack to the teen pregnancy movie Juno, which I watched on Saturday. 'Your obsessions get you known throughout the school for being strange, Making life-size models of the Velvet Underground in clay'.

Something in a book

Huggy Bear - Her Jazz - because I am reading a book about Riot Grrrl. This still sounds a fresh and urgent call to arms -'Girl Boy Revolution Yeah'.

Something on TV

2 Unlimited - No Limits - because the video was on one of those freeview music channels on Friday night as part of one of those 50 cheesiest pop songs ever programmes. I do have a soft spot for late 80s/early 90s production line techno-pop, it’s a toss up between Technotronic and 2 Unlimited for the techno-pop crown. It amuses me that they are both from Belgium, at the time also home to the super-credible house/techno label R&S. In the high street/holiday resort clubs of the time it was 2 Unlimited rather than Joey Beltram that filled the floor. I remember being in a club in West Belfast (think it was the Trinity Lodge in Turf Lodge) and when they played ‘Get Ready for This’ loads of people started chanting IRA in time to the chorus. That was a lesson for me in how the products of the pop production line get used in ways the producers could never dream of.

I tagged some people last time who responded including Uncarved and Speakers Push Air. Looking round it appears that most people I know in both the music and South London neighbourhoods of the blogosphere have already been tagged, so this time I am just going to leave it open. If you fancy listing seven songs, just go for it.

Rape

Songs about rape is an excellent post at Uncarved, taking to task people who play around with rape in music and contrasting it with a couple of harrowing women's accounts of the real thing.

Fluxus and musical notation

At Tate Modern last month, the Long Weekend (24th to 26th May) included a series of free concerts featuring musical scores and events by Fluxus artists. I saw a performance of Ay-O’s ‘Rainbow No. 2 for Orchestra’ ('A totally inexperienced orchestra plays a 7 note major scale on various instruments' – in this case including banjo, bagpipes and harp); Takehisa Kosugi’s MICRO 1; the 1963 piece F/H Trace by Robert Watts ('A French horn is filled ping-pong balls. Performer enters the stage, faces the audience, and bows toward the audience so that the objects cascade out of the bell of the horn into the audience'); and a Willem de Ridder flute piece (performed by the man himself).

Other musical events which I didn’t see included performances of Yoko Ono’s Sky Piece for Jesus Christ (1965 - a chamber orchestra is gradually wrapped in bandages) ; Anagram for Strings (Yasunao Tone, 1963); Alison Knowles conducting her Newspaper Music (1965 – performers read from newspapers in time and volume according to composer’s instructions); Solo for Balloons by George Maciunas (see image); and various responses to La Monte Young’s Draw a Straight Line and Follow It.

All of these works from the early 1960s high point of Fluxus are characterised by a playful approach to performance and notation, as well as an implicit critique of the role of the artistic or musical specialist – in the programme Alice Koegel (curator) notes: ‘One of the most unique aspects of Fluxus was the ‘free license’ that artists gave one another in interpreting their works. In fact, many Fluxus objects and performances began as a text or score open to interpretation by anyone at any time’. An invite for the Festival of Misfits in London in 1962 declared: 'We make music which is not Music, poems that are not Poetry, paintings that are not Painting, but music that may fit poetry, poetry that may fit paintings, paintings that may fit... something'.

Related territory is explored in an article by Simon Yuill in the latest edition of Mute magazine, All problems of notation will be sold by the masses. Yuill compares the recent practice of livecoding – where music is generated by writing and playing around with software code – with previous collaborative experimental efforts to step outside of traditional musical notation, including Cornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra (1969-1972) and the work of jazz musicians such as Sun Ra.

I was struck by the fact that Ornette Coleman used the term ‘free playing’ in opposition to the term ‘improvisation’ ‘on the grounds it was often applied to black music by white audiences to emphasise some innate intuitive musicality that denied the heritage of skills and formal traditions that the black musician drew upon’ (Yuill). He quotes Coleman’s statement that ‘during the time when segregation was strong… the [black] musicians had to go on stage without any written music. The musicians would be backstage, look at the music, then leave the music there and go out and play it… they had a more saleable appeal if they pretended to not know what they were doing. The white audience felt safer’. As someone’s who shares Simon Reynolds’ (and evidently Steve Albini’s) instinctive suspicion of some aspects of jazz improvisation, this is music to my ears

(I freely admit that my scanty knowledge of jazz precludes making any meaningful judgment about it. I vividly remember a conversation at a party years ago - it was in a squat in St Agnes Place in South London- in which I had this epiphany that the universe of music is full of more worlds than anyone could have time to fully explore in one lifetime. Later I decided that I would never again force myself to try and like music that didn’t appeal to me just because it was cool when there was so much music that did appeal to me that I didn’t have time to listen to. For me at least, life is too short for jazz - or at least it has been so far. Like a bit of Sun Ra though!)

News of the World, UFO and the Rolling Stones 1967

This week's protest at the Daily Mail put me in mind of another series of music-related demonstrations against a right wing British tabloid newspaper: the News of the World. In February 1967 the News of the World tipped off police about drug use at a party at Redlands, the Sussex country home of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards. The police raided the house and in June 1967 Richards and fellow Rolling Stone Mick Jagger were jailed for drugs offences.

In his book Watch Out Kids (1972), Mick Farren put the event in the context of a wider police crackdown in the period:

"The authorities weren't slow, either, in getting their shit together to deal with the hippies. As early as March 1967, regional drug squads were formed to deal with the "drug problem" (the only drug problem most of us experienced was not getting enough). In a grand showcase on the first weekend of their operations, this new glossy narc squad managed to bust over 150 hippies, including the Rolling Stones and the IT offices. In subsequent weeks hundreds more kids were busted, in their homes, on the street, or in clubs.

A club being raided by the narcs is a strange experience. One moment there is music, lightshows, dancing: everything normal, and then, suddenly, the band falls apart, the house lights come on and hundreds of people are shuffling about, dropping pills and pieces of ·dope. There are uniforms everywhere. The audience is hastily segregated by sex and dividing screens are erected. Everyone is then searched. This can be a swift frisking or an order to strip, this depends totally on the individual cop's attitude. It is sad that a lot of pigs tend to adopt the manners of Gestapo officers in B-­feature war movies. If you're clean it's okay to leave, in fact, you are forced to leave, and even to go home, by police stationed in the street outside. It doesn't matter that you've broken no law, and paid for a good deal more entertainment. In the eyes of the drug squad you are guilty by association and lucky not to have been arrested. In this kind of raid it's women who suffer most. Women of 23 and 24 without means of proving their age find themselves hauled in on suspicion of being under age…'

On the day Jagger and Richards were convicted (29 June 1967), Farren was involved in organising a protest:

'The general opinion was that a protest should be made the same evening at the News of the World building. Everyone split to spread the word, and agreed to meet at midnight for the demonstration. Those of us who were left went to the house of one girl's parents where there were two phone lines which we were confident were not tapped. For the next three hours we called people solidly telling them (a) to show up at midnight in Fleet Street, and (b) to start calling people they knew to tell them about it.

At about a quarter to twelve we arrived at the News of the World to find that about fifty freaks had shown up. It was disappointing, but it didn't last. From then on hippies began to show up in droves, until by twelve-­thirty the narrow streets around the newspaper building were thronged with a weird assortment of people. Hippies came with drums and flutes, political heavies in leather jackets. Superstars drove around the building in limousines. A rock band equipment manager blocked the street with his truck.

The police were totally unprepared. Accustomed to protests that were planned and publicised for weeks in advance, they had no rules for dealing with these dial-a-mob tactics. It took them at least an hour to raise a force capable of dealing with the 1,500 freaks paralysing the newspaper building. So unprepared were the police that most of the people they did arrest had to be released because the arresting officers could not be found in the confusion.

The protests continued for two more days. The second day (Friday) the audience at UFO, the weekly rock/multi-media concert, left the club and marched to Piccadilly, where they found the police, equipped with dogs, waiting for them. After an hour of scuffles and abuse the crowd returned to the club, where a number of people were treated for cuts, bruises and dog bites.

On the Saturday things got a little heavy. Late in the evening between two and three thousand kids showed up in Fleet Street again, with the intention of blocking the street so the Sunday newspaper could not be shipped out. The police, this time, really had their shit together. In addition to uniformed pigs operating in force, hurling people back on the sidewalk and attempting to split the crowd into small groups, detectives and plain clothes men mingled with the demonstrators with orders to "pick out the ring leaders." As I was pushed across the road by the uniformed squad four of these infiltrators grabbed me, dragged me into a door way and worked me over with their fists and boots.

Joe Boyd, like Mick Farren, was involved in running the UFO club in London's Tottenham Court Road. In his book 'White Bicycles: making music in the 1960s' (2005) he recalled the night of the second protest, Friday 30th June 1967 as the peak of the sixties:



For the UFO audience, the Stones' bust represented the sinister collusion of circulation-seeking editors, treacherous grasses and killjoy drug squads. Jagger and Richards may have been wealthy superstars, but they were counter­culture heroes, too. Hoppy had also been busted that spring (after a plainclothes man reached, conjuror-like, behind his sofa and pulled out an evidentiary plum) and had just been sentenced to eight months in Wormwood Scrubs. Ads and editorials in the International Times, posters around UFO and graffiti in Notting Hill Gate reminded everyone of the injustice. A bucket was circulated at the club, the money going to a legal defence fund for drug busts.

We decided to close the club after the first set and parade through the West End, finishing off with a protest in front of the News of the World building in Fleet Street. The West End at 1 a.m. on a Friday night was nothing like as busy as it is today, but there were quite a few 'normals' about, and they gaped as we rounded Piccadilly and headed for Leicester Square, then down through Covent Garden towards Fleet Street. Our destination was a letdown: the News of the World building was dark and silent. Firebrands among us started planning a blockade of the Sunday paper and an assault on their vans the next night.

The long walk in the night air, the hostile stares from the 'straights' and the threats from the police had energized everyone, so the club was packed and buzzing when Tomorrow hit the stage about 4 a.m. The unity of spirit between audience and musicians was tremendous: Twink had been at the head of our two-hundred-strong column. Tearing into 'White Bicycle', they had never sounded tighter. At some point Skip from The Pretty Things took over on drums as Twink grabbed the microphone and plunged into the audience. Howe's playing moved to another level of intensity, sending the dancers leaping into the cones of light as Twink crawled along the floor, hugging people and chanting 'Revolution, revolution'. Everyone was high - on chemicals or adrenalin or both. You really did believe in that moment that 'when the mode of music changes, the walls of the city shake'. The tide of history was with us and music was the key.

The bill for this glorious moment was presented a month later. The News of the World may not have known who we were before that weekend, but they certainly did afterwards. The fruits of their plotting burst forth on the last Sunday in July: beneath a grainy, out-of-focus shot of a bare­breasted girl, the front page screamed that she was fifteen years old and that the photograph had been taken at the 'hippy vice den' known as UFO. Our normally stoic landlord buckled under police pressure and evicted us.

The Blackshirt Parade: Emos, Flappers and The Daily Mail

On Saturday at least 200 people demonstrated outside the offices of the Daily Mail in London against its coverage of 'emo' - after a young My Chemical Romance fan committed suicide the paper ran a story headlined 'Why no child is safe from the sinister cult of emo’ (photo by Abbi London - more reports and reflections at Thrash Hits).

There's been some incredibly patronising coverage but I think it's great. The Daily Hate needs to be called to account more often for its ludicrous 'reportage', and hopefully these mostly young MCR fans will be inoculated for life against its daily tirades against migrants, gypsies and other affronts to the enraged Middle England Right Wing.

Flappers

'Emos' are far from the first group of young people to be targeted by The Daily Mail. Way back in the 1920s there was "an obsession with the moral and physical deterioration of British men and women" with the Daily Mail worrying about civilisation being destroyed by women not breeding enough thanks to short hair and lesbianism. Young women enjoying themselves dancing and partying – so-called ‘Flappers’ – were particularly criticised. There were "hysterical attacks in the Daily Mail and Daily Express on the irresponsible behaviour of the 'Flappers', those selfish and irresponsible young women who were alleged to be pursuing an energetic social life and sexual emancipation. In the process, the pundits claimed, they ceased to be real women in both the psychological and even the physical sense. Referring darkly to women 'with short hair, skirts no longer than kilts, narrow hips, insignificant breasts' the Express warned: 'this change to a more neutral type can only be accomplished at the expense or the integrity of her sexual organs'".

When it was proposed to allow women to vote at the same age as men, The Daily Mail waged a vigorous campaign against it, arguing that women would be more likely to vote Labour: "In a bizarre campaign the Mail carried daily headlines that screamed: 'Men Outnumbered Everywhere'; its editorials exploited Conservative fears by suggesting 'Why Socialists Want Votes for Flappers" and they urged 'Stop the Flapper Vote Folly'".

Fascists

In its recent tirade against emo, the Daily Mail described it as a 'trans-Atlantic import' whose 'followers dress in black, favouring tight jeans, T-shirts, studded belts and sneakers or skater shoes. Hair is all-important: often dyed black and straightened, it is worn in a long fringe brushed to one side of the face'. In the 1930s though the Daily Mail was quite keen on people dressed in black clothes - as long as they were members of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. It's quite well known that the Daily Mail once had an article headlined 'Hurrah for the Blackshirts', but this was not just a one-off throwaway comment:

"This pattern of support for the BUF in the Conservative journals culmin­ated on 5 January 1934 when the Daily Mail published its notorious head­line: 'Hurrah For The Blackshirts!', thus inaugurating six months in which it promoted the movement. There was nothing anomalous about this initiative. Lord Rothermere had been heaping praise on fascist dictatorship throughout the 1920s…. Rothermere controlled a large slice of the press including the Daily Mail, Sunday Dispatch and Evening News, as well as several dozen provincial newspapers. He lauded the BUF as a modernising, virile, British movement, above party politics and above all as 'the Party of Youth'. 'The Blackshirt Movement', enthused the Mail, 'is the organised effort of the younger generation to break the stranglehold which senile politicians have so long maintained on our affairs.' There followed a systematic campaign of promotion in which the Sunday Dispatch turned itself into a house journal for the BUF. Not content with regular features on 'What the Blackshirts Are Doing' and biographies of the leading personnel, it endeavoured to engage its readers' involvement in the movement. In April 1934 the news­paper offered free tickets to major rallies including the one at Olympia in June 1934 and £1 weekly prizes for readers' letters on 'Why I Like the Blackshirts'. Winning entrants wrote: 'The Blackshirts place King and Country before personal motive. Up to the present, no party has done much good for the community', and 'I like the Blackshirts because they stand for Empire Unity, the re-establishment of British prestige and the reawakening in the British public of pride in the nation' The Sunday Dispatch also carried frequent reports on female fascists along the lines of 'Girl Blackshirt Attacked' and 'Beauty Joins the Blackshirts', as well as pictures of women practising ju-jitsu, fencing and physical exercise."

So you see whether you like My Chemical Romance or not, you should certainly be on the side of their fans expressing their disgust at The Daily Mail.

All quotes from Martin Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts - fascists and fascism in Britain between the wars (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005).

See also: News of the World 1967; Mexico Emo bashing

Tube Party in London

The dust is still settling after last Saturday night's party on the London underground. For people outside of London, the basic story is this: a new Conservative Mayor has been elected for London - Boris Johnson (replacing the socialist Ken Livingstone). One of his first acts was to ban drinking on the London underground train system, a ban due to come in on the 1st June. On Facebook various groups were set up calling for a party on the Circle Line on Saturday 31st May- a final drink and a protest against prohibition (the Circle Line trains, as the name suggests, go round central London in a loop rather than from A to B - ideal for parties as there is no endpoint where the train stops and everybody gets off).

So on Saturday, thousands of people converged on the Circle Line, some in fancy dress. Lots of people had a great time. At Liverpool Street station, where people were evacuated from the train, there was a sound system and mass dancing in the station. Obviously there was some chaos, with the police closing down six tube stations over the night, and 17 people getting arrested later after some drunken behaviour (perhaps not that many considering the numbers, and maybe not that many more than on average weekend). There's loads of photos, accounts and film footage all over the web - a video from Space Hijackers shows people dancing to The Prodigy's Out of Space with a sound system in the carriage (and pausing when the train gets into the station so as not to draw attention to themselves):



There's a rare positive press report by Johann Hari, 'They arrested the gorilla!' (Evening Standard, 02.06.08):

'On the concourse at Liverpool Street station, two men dressed as Tower Bridge are dancing a slow waltz. Their partners are a gorilla and a sex doll that has Boris's beaming face. This is not a strange dream: it is the last party of Ken Livingstone's London. When I first signed up on Facebook for a final boozy toast to Ken on the Tube, I imagined a few hundred people would appear - but I underestimated my city. As I enter the station, the crowds begin: goths and bankers, Asian teenagers and posh white women, all waving their bottles of Guinness and Blue Nun. The plan is that we will all clamber on to the first three Circle line trains to leave the station after 9.02pm. As I push through, I bump into a man who is on his knees, a tube in his mouth, with his friend pouring lager directly into his gullet. A chicken carrying a banner which says "People Not Profit" tells me: "Boris symbolises everything we hate. He's not our London." Every time a train pulls in, the crowd whoops and yells "Ken! Ken!"

Hundreds heave on to the first party-train, but as it leaves the Tannoy announces: "This is a security alert. Evacuate immediately"... More than a thousand people throng in the centre of the station [Liverpool St] , and I mingle among the booze fumes and costumes. A lean Brixton-boy says: "I think the drink ban is probably a good idea - but let's party!" Then the crowd is suddenly united with one chant: "Boris is a wanker!" A group of Essex lads dressed as the Village People stand high on the platforms above, leading a stationwide cover-version of YMCA. A conga line forms and, at 10.17pm, a sound system covered with Free Tibet stickers appears. We all begin to dance, and there is a random cry of "Dalai Lama! Dalai Lama!"

At 11.01pm, boys gyrate on top of ticket machines, and a girl rides the information sign like it is a pony. A friend who got on the party train calls. "They arrested the gorilla!" he cries. At 11.14pm some idiot starts smashing bottles. Other people tell him to stop, and a few guys start trying to clear up the crunchy carpet of cans and bottles so it doesn't look so bad. But it's too late: the police, who have been watching from the platforms above, swoop... The police form a line and start pushing people out. A few more protesters foolishly throw bottles. Everyone is chanting again. Pushed out onto Bishopsgate, the crowd looks now as if it will dissipate. But then, suddenly, a bongo-player appears from nowhere, and we all begin to dance again, long into the night. Looking with a smile at the throng, a girl dressed as a Fifties starlet in a shimmering dress, hands me a biscuit, and says: "This is so London, isn't it?"

Ballroom Dancing Made Easy (1942)

I am fascinated by old dancing manuals - this example is 'Ballroom Dancing Made Easy' by Robert Brandon, first published by C.Arthur Pearson Ltd, London in 1936, and then revised in September 1942. I like the notion of people trying to teach themselves the Slow Foxtrot from a book in the middle of the Second World War.

The English ballroom dancing phenomenon successfully translated a range of dances from across the world into rigid routines with the gendered foosteps of 'gentleman' and 'lady' clearly laid out. How far the tango, as precribed here, reflects the origins of tango in Argentina is another matter. Over time a fixed repertoire of dances developed - this book advises that only four main dances are essential: the Waltz, the Slow Foxtrot, The Quick Step and The Tango.

Silent Rave, New York

From New York Times, 20th April 2008:

'on Friday evening, at the south end of Union Square near East 14th Street. More than a thousand people, most of them young, gathered for a dance party without audible music, known as a silent rave. It was striking for what could not be heard.... A mass of people — a head-bobbing, arms-above-the-head, conga-line-forming, full-tilt boogie-woogie — emitted what seemed like no sound but rather music visible. Everyone danced in place, listening to an iPod and prancing to his or her own playlist. For long minutes, in the distance, only the square’s ever-present bongo players could be heard, while close up only shoes, or bare feet, could be heard padding on concrete. Video cameras and cellphones were everywhere. A man explained to his friend: “It’s a silent rave. Everyone’s dancing to whatever’s on their iPod.”

The mastermind behind the silent rave was one Jonnie Wesson, 18, a British exchange student spending a year at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn Heights. Silent raves are popular in Europe, especially London, where he grew up, Mr. Wesson said. “The basic premise is that a hundred or a thousand or a few thousand people all turn up in a public place, turn on their own headphones and dance.” He added: “It’s always fantastic and weird to see thousands of people dancing silently. It’s always in a public space, but it’s not meant to cause disruption, but only because it’s the last place you’d expect that sort of thing.”... As is the case with much of his generation, Mr. Wesson organized the silent rave through a social networking Web site, in this case Facebook. By late afternoon on Friday, nearly 7,000 people had responded.

It began at 6:17 p.m. “It’s a random time that fits in with the ethos of the flash mob,” said Mr. Wesson, standing below Union Square’s giant statue of George Washington. At the appointed hour, people rushed toward Mr. Wesson, shouting the time from the digital watch of a passer-by, counting down with him as if it were New Year’s Eve. By 11 p.m., the rave had dwindled to several hundred still-whirling people.



Lots of great photos by Ballulah here, who describes the event as follows:

"This was a flashmob style event, all these kids gathered at the south end of Union Square at 6:30...after a countdown they all put their headphones on and had their own private silent raves. Every few minutes or so "the pineapple" would appear and get passed around to the sound of lots of cheering. Beach balls were tossed. Styrofoam was beaten to confetti. Water balloons and/or bottles were tossed upwards. The skaters were very confused. And I swear I heard a kid in raver pants say to his friend, "I have a ton of glowsticks in my pants," and proceeded to pull up his enormous pantleg, and sure enough he had a WHOLE MESS of glowsticks velcroed to his calf. Another guy was singing Foreigner on top of his lungs".

See also Dancing Flashmob, London, 2007

O Ecstasies, O world, O music!

'O Douceurs, ô monde, ô musique ! Et là, les formes, les sueurs, les chevelures et les yeux, flottant. Et les larmes blanches, bouillantes, - ô douceurs ! - et la voix féminine arrivée au fond des volcans et des grottes arctiques'.

‘O Ecstasies, O world, O music! And here, shapes, sweats, heads of hair and eyes, floating. And white tears, boiling – O ecstasies! – and the female voice reaching to the bottom of the volcanoes and the arctic caverns’

from Arthur Rimbaud, Barbare, published in Illuminations (1874).

Photo taken in Space, Ibiza, 1995 - a year I was there too. I found the photo at Faithfanzine.com but couldn't find photocredit -

if you took this and would like to be credited let me know.

History of Gay Bars in New York City

History of Gay Bars in New York City is a remarkable blog that does just what is says. There is some great material - police raids, mafia connections, reflections on differences between Italian and Jewish gay cultures. Nothing's been posted since December last year, so hope this project hasn't ground to a halt.

In view of my earlier post on Holland Park in the 1930s, I was struck by a New York Times report of a February 1923 raid in Greenwich Village:

Village Raid Nets 4 Women and 9 Men: Detectives Thought They Had Five Females, but Misjudged One Person by Clothing

The police continue to pay special attention to Greenwich Village. Every tearoom and cabaret in the village was visited yesterday morning by Deputy Inspector Joseph A. Howard and Captain Edward J. Dempsey of the Charles Street Station, and a party of ten detectives. Detectives Joseph Massie and Dewey Hughes of the Special Service Squad were at the Black Parrot Tea Shoppe Hobo-Hemia, 46 Charles Street, to witness what they had been informed would be a “circus.” They arrested what they thought were five women and eight men. It developed later, however, that one of the “women” was a man, Harry Bernhammer, 21 years old, living at 36 Hackensack Avenue, West Hoboken, N.J. He is familiaryly known in the Village as “Ruby,” according to the police. The charge against him is disorderly conduct for giving what the police termed an indecent dance (NY Times 5 February 1923)

A London Drag Ball, 1930s

"If you went to clubs in those days before the war, you'd have been arrested and put in prison. I know personally a case where a woman, who I knew very well, started this gay club. Now I am talking many years ago, before the war, and I could see the danger. I said, you've got to stop it. But she took a house in Holland Park. It was known as the Holland Park case. They just danced, nothing so blatant as they do now. And one Saturday night the whole of Holland Park, reaching up to Shepherd's Bush I should think, was simply full of black marias and police. People thought the war had started or something. And there were two young policemen who were dressed up. Of course they gave the evidence. And everyone was arrested.

Now what I'm saying is history. They took them all to Brixton prison. And kept them there, they were not given bail. When they went up to the Old Bailey, it was top news, they had placards then, you know. The Evening News used to have a placard on, and everyone was talking about it. The judge made them wear a placard. He said there's too many to deal with these terrible people, put a placard on them and a number. And so they were numbered, with the indignity of this bloody placard. And then the trial came to the time of the sentences and he sentenced them to imprisonment.

When it was all over, the judge called these two detectives and praised them. He said, I am going to recommend your promotion for dealing with this horrible case. I feel so sorry, it must have affected you mentally. And I direct now that under no circumstances must you ever be involved in a case again of any description with homosexual men because no human being could stand it. It just shows you the scathing bitterness they had for it" (Roy, born in Brixton in 1908).

Source: Between the Acts: Lives of homosexual mean 1885-1967, edited by Kevin Porter and Jeffrey Weeks (London: Routledge, 1991).

The Holland Park Avenue drag ball raid is also covered in Matt Houlbrook's excellent book 'Queer London', where its is reported that 60 men were arrested in the raid leading to a trial in March 1933:

“The ballroom had been let for a series of dances by Austin S. – more commonly Lady Austin – a twenty-four year old barman, John P., a twenty-two year-old waiter, and Betty, who ran other West London dance balls. Publicized via word of mouth and a flyer advertising ‘Hotel Staff Dances’ within a network of friends working in nearby hotels, the events were run “only for our love for each other”. In court, arresting officers described a “blatant” spectacle of sexual transgression: men had danced together, kissed, and been intimate: they had worn women’s clothes and makeup and called themselves “Lady Austin’s Camp Boys”… David M [one of these arrested] asked of one policeman: ‘Surely in a free country we can do what we like? We know each other and are doing no harm… it is a pity these people don’t understand our love. I am afraid a few will have to suffer yet before our ways are made legal’’

Source: Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 (University of Chicago Press, 2005)

Yoko Ono's Do It Yourself Dance Festival

Yoko Ono's '13 Days Do it Yourself Dance Festival’ was, I believe, first 'held' in England in September 1967 - although 'held' is perhaps not quite the right word as it was a festival that took place in the imagination of participants who received a daily instructional postcard from Yoko for its duration. John Lennon was amongst those who took part. The first postcard said ‘Breathe at Midnight’, followed by 'Breathe at Dawn'. The last one read ‘Colour yourself. Wait for the spring to come. Let us know when it comes’.

The Festival has been repeated a number of times since, including via radio in Norway in 2005. When Yoko Ono performed in Liverpool last month, the Festival instructions were given out to people attending. Does anybody have the full set of instructions? They don't seem to be online.

Love Music Hate Racism: Memories of an Unfree Festival

Daniel Tilling in the New Statesman sums up my experience of last month’s Love Music Hate Racism festival in East London’s Victoria Park: ‘”I was here 30 years ago, mate," said the punk in the pinstriped pork-pie hat who was standing in front of me in the queue, bouncing around with excitement. He was about to continue when a security guard gruffly interrupted. "If you're going to take pictures with that camera, we'll confiscate it," he said to the punk. I looked around and it seemed that all the guard's colleagues were engaged in similar pursuits: rifling through pockets and throwing away any drinks that people were trying to bring into the fenced-off arena… From the moment you entered Victoria Park's fenced-off arena, it became clear that there was as little festival spirit here as you'd find at the most commercial of Britain's summer music events”

Yes it’s a good thing having 100,000 gathered together under an anti-racist banner (though that was the number throughout the day – I doubt if there was ever anything like that many at any one time), and many people clearly had a good time seeing bands for free. But that doesn’t mean the event should be beyond criticism. It was strange having to be searched and then confined in a fenced of section of the park for an event like this, and inside there was very little atmosphere. The sound on the main stage was really quiet, and the only excitement I saw was in the dance tent where people were whooping to Party People – but the tent was much too small, and as Tilling points out was later closed down.

The speeches were for the most part banal and patronising. I know Tony Benn has been semi-beatified now, but it was nonsense for him to say to the mainly young crowd that ‘yours is the first generation with the power to destroy life on earth, as well as the power to create a better world’ (I paraphrase, but this was the sense of it – I heard him give the same speech a few days later in Brixton Academy). Surely his generation of politicians were the first with the power of global destruction thanks to nuclear weapons.

Nostalgia for the 1970s?

I think there were political and musical reasons for this lacklustre display. Politically it was odd to have such a strong focus on commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Rock Against Racism festival in the same location in 1978. It’s one thing to note the historical continuity, another to have a festival to mark the anniversary of another festival – it lent a backward-looking tone to the whole event.

Politically too the context is different – the late 1970s festivals took place against the background of mass movements against the racism of the state and the far right, with clashes with police and/or fascists at Notting Hill Carnival, Lewisham and many other places. There’s nothing like this today – the British National Party don’t march and anti-racism is now an official ideology of the state. Nobody seriously believes that there is a danger of a fascist takeover in Britain, however dangerous the BNP could become. It was pretty unlikely in the 1970s too, but there was more of an overlap between the far right and sections of the Conservative Party, along with some senior people in the military and intelligence services. There was overt racism and some sympathy for the National Front amongst many rank and file police officers too. In other words being actively against racism had a radical political charge which it lacks today. To a certain extent the movements of the 1970s and 1980s (not just Rock Against Racism but the self-organised struggles of black people) were successful in banishing overt racism to the political fringe. This doesn’t mean that racism has gone away, but it is a more complex and variegated phenomenon – it’s far easier to project it all on to the BNP than to look at the way different communities are affected by, say, immigration and asylum laws.

Given that the Socialist Workers Party was a driving force in both Rock Against Racism in the 1970s and Love Music Hate Racism today, it’s not surprising that a certain nostalgia for 1970s leftism hung over Victoria Park last month and the following week’s LMHR concert in Brixton Academy. For whatever the SWP’s shortcomings in the 70s and 80s, it was for a while a natural stopping off point for many young activists and militants (even if most of them moved on). Recently Mark Steel, its most well-known member, resigned after complaining that that this is no longer the case (shame for those middle-aged trotskyist chicken-hawks who always seemed to be sleazing around their pretty new recruits). Perhaps too the SWP is hoping that LMHR might relaunch their fading brand by associating them with their peak moment.

But what about the music? Perhaps it’s just my personal bias but the bands who played for Rock Against Racism in the late 70s – The Clash, X-Ray Spex, The Gang of Four, Steel Pulse- were at the forefront of a period of post-punk creativity that was new, forward-looking and explosive. The biggest band in Victoria Park 2008 by contrast was Hard-Fi, defined like many other current bands by a nostalgia for that period that is musically old, backward-looking and safe. At the Brixton Academy it was different, as one of my favourite bands – the Alabama 3 – played a great set and didn’t sound like they could have been on the stage in 1978. Of course there’s still plenty of exciting music today – but let’s not discuss the fiasco of the Victoria Park dance tent again.

London Park Life

Leaving aside the music and politics, the organisers of the LMHR would no doubt say that the event was constrained by council and police health & safety and licensing regulations, and they’re probably right. I have been to a number of similar ‘free’ events in London parks in the past few years, heavily policed, searched, surrounded by high fences, restricted about what drinks can be taken in etc. (the Rise anti-racist festival in Finsbury Park last year was similar).

There’s a long history of huge free events in London parks without fences or searches, just music and whoever wants to turn up, spreading out as far as they need to take make themselves comfortable. This goes back at least as far as the famous Hyde Park concerts of the 1960s with The Rolling Stones et al, and through to the Rock Against Racism events in Victoria and Brockwell Park (Brixton) in the 1970s. I was too young for these but remember some of the big events put on by the Greater London Council in the 1980s. In the 1990s the biggest event was probably Lesbian and Gay Pride, held variously on Clapham Common, Brockwell Park and elsewhere – with hundreds of thousands of people coming and going as they pleased. Proper dance tents too with decent (loud) sound systems and holding thousands of people. There were also smaller one day free festivals like the Deptford Urban Free Festival in Fordham Park (30,000 people and lots of sound systems and bands) and the Festival of Global Rights on Hackney Marshes (1998).

Some of these were later refused licenses while others have been regulated to a shadow of their former selves. The atmosphere inside a fenced off area is completely different from being unrestrained in the open air in the park – there is a sense of being a controlled audience instead of a free crowd taking temporary possession of a part of the city, of being permitted to spectate rather than exercising a right to assemble. Perhaps that’s why the Victoria Park LMHR event was so lacking in atmosphere – as well as the rain, the politics, and the music.

Other reviews: Suburban Ghetto Musick reminds me that I missed Patrick Wolf who is pretty cool; Vinyl Junkie rubs salt in the wound by reminding me of some of the great stuff that was in the dance tent.

Classic party scenes (4): Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Prompted by a post at the excellent Pop Feminist, it's time to consider one of the great fictional nightclubs - The Bronze in Sunnydale, California - home to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the rest of her friends in the scooby gang. Buffy obsessives - and there's a lot of us out there - have noted that no fewer than 66 of the 144 episodes of the TV programme feature at least one scene in The Bronze. Considering the number of vampire-related fatalities in or near the club, it's amazing the parents of Sunnydale let their kids go there. Still they did at least have the chosen one watching over them. It was a club with pool tables, a stage where various hopeful West Coast bands gained global TV exposure, and a balcony from where brooding and morally ambiguous creatures of the night could survey the dancefloor.



Sadly The Bronze, like the TV series, is no more - it was destroyed along with the rest of Sunnydale in the final episode. I can't believe that its five years since the demise of the best thing ever to be on TV. Here's something I wrote about it at the time:

It's the end of the world as we know it: the last days of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'

The last ever episode of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' (2003) might have made me sad but it did not disappoint. Instead it demonstrated why over its seven year arc the programme remained the most interesting thing on television.

Buffy represented a conscious effort to create a female superhero(ine), but it was much more subversive than 'Wonderwoman' with better clothes and a sense of humour. The classic male superheroes have tended to be brooding loners wrestling with their isolation and their egos. The cult of the superman, whether in its Nietzche or Clark Kent form, has always had a fascistic side - the ubermensch flying high above the powerless masses.

Buffy may have been 'the chosen one' with unique abilities, but she always fought as part of a closely knit affinity group to which all members made their own particular contribution: wisdom and experience (Giles); a good heart and personal integrity (Xander); kick-ass lesbian witchiness (Willow).

In the final, seventh series, the tension between Buffy as 'chosen one' and the rest reached crisis point as the core gang was joined by a small army of potential slayers from across the world. At one point they mutinied against her orders before the contradiction was brilliantly resolved in the final episode by Buffy relinquishing her uniqueness, declaring: "In every generation, one slayer is born... because a bunch of men who died thousands of years ago made up that rule... So I say we change the rule. I say my power should be our power". In doing so she empowered all the potential vampire slayers, and by implication young women in general: "From now on, every girl in the world who might be a slayer will be a slayer. Every girl who could have the power will have the power".

Buffy and her pals referred to themselves as the Scooby Gang in self-mocking homage to the 70s cartoon strip. But in Scooby Doo the ending is always the same - once the kids have unmasked the villain they hand him over to the cops and the normal social order is restored. In the Buffyverse the state offered no such protection - police, priests and politicians tended to be either stupid or actively in collusion with demonic forces.

In the final series it was business as usual. The preacher who picked up the girl fleeing from her pursuers turned out to be the most evil of all, while the potential slayers had to beat up a group of cops intent on killing Faith (slayer no.2).

Marx wrote that "Capital is dead labour, which, vampire like, lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks." Buffy might not have been this explicit, but it hinted at it in episodes such as 'Anne' where Buffy runs away from home and finds work as a waitress in a diner. While experiencing the delights of casualised wage slavery she discovers that young homeless people are disappearing, seduced by religious missionaries offering a promise of help. When they reappear they have aged overnight into dying, decrepit old people. Buffy soon finds out the secret: an underground sweatshop run by demons where people are worked until they are exhausted. Naturally Buffy leads a slave revolt.

In the final scene of the last episode, schools, shops and the whole town were consigned to the hellmouth of history, as Sunnydale was swallowed up by the earth. Xander declared: "All those shops gone. The Gap, Starbucks, Toys 'R' Us. Who will remember all those landmarks unless we tell the world about them?". The end of the world as they knew it - but smiling they stood to face a better one.

Konono no. 1

Congolese band Konono No 1 were supposed to be playing at Tate Modern in London tomorrow night as part of their Long Weekend event. Now comes news from Tate: "We are sorry to announce that due to difficulties in securing European visas, the Congolese band Konono No 1 are unable to travel from Kinshasa to the UK to perform at Tate Modern this weekend". '

How many (mainly white) US/European artists are refused entry to Britain to exhibit/talk/perform at Tate? How many (mainly white) US/European artists are refused entry to African countries when they're looking for a bit of exotica to spice up their careers?

While you're pondering these questions here's some of their African 'electro-acoustic trance music' to keep you going:



See also No One is Illegal; NoBorder.Org

Funk: repetition and the 'cut'

The following extracts are from an article by Matthew P. Brown in which he applies the ideas of James Snead - set out in his 1981 essay 'Repetition as a figure in black culture' – to funk. I am not convinced about setting up a simple polarity between ‘Western’ and ‘African’ musics. What is true of the Western classical tradition is not necessarily true of some of the folk musics in the West where supposedly African elements of repetition and variation can also be found. But I like his exploration of how the distinction between linear progression and repetition impacts on the dance-floor.

Black cultural expression is organised around two central principles, repetition and the ‘cut’:

'In black culture, the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is 'there for you to pick it up when you come back to get it.' If there is a goal (Zweck) in such a culture, it is always deferred; it continually 'cuts' back to the start, in the musical meaning of 'cut' as an abrupt, seemingly unmotivated break (an accidental da capo) with a series already in progress and a willed return to a prior series'. (Snead, 1981)

…Snead supports his conception with a series of examples from literature, folklore and the Church; but it is African-American music that might best exemplify the principles of repetition and montage in black culture. The call-and-response character of gospel and go-go, the repetition within the blues form, the cuts to improvisation within jazz performances - all exploit cyclicality and announce disruptions as fundamental expressive tools. These idioms achieve their musical communication primarily through rhythmic and vocal conver­sation. On the other hand, the Western tradition concentrates on harmonic, tonal or melodic development. For example, a Mozart symphony seeks resolution within a certain key and around a certain tonic. The melodic progression of a Beatles ballad is organized around the song's tonic and the supporting chordal patterns. With harmony and melody predominant, shifts in a Western piece of music are experienced as motivated. This sort of trajectory is de-emphasized in the African-American tradition. Interplay between rhythmic patterns are predominant, and a shift occurs at the point when those patterns are rearranged. The montage form is heard, on a small scale, in the traded phrases of bluesman Robert Johnson and his guitar. On a grander scale, it occurs in the abrupt shifts of meter and tone in African drumming. Both reflect a montage technique that avows rupture. Western styles, however, are goal-oriented, seeking resolution through structured deviation; their shifts are covered over by harmonic progression.

This opposition cannot be taken too far, especially when studying African-American musical idioms like jazz or the blues. Jazz is generally considered a marriage of African rhythms and European harmony. Be-bop and John Coltrane show a tremendous interest in thematic development­ – it’s what makes 'My Favorite Things' bloom. The conventional chordal patterns of the blues (I, IV and V within a key) propose and satisfy certain expectations for the listener. The pop/rock song, derived of course from r&b, has a similar harmonic definition, and a quite familiar structure: verse-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus, evident in any 1960s Motown song. There is an underriding telos to all of these forms.

But funk music, especially the style originating with James Brown, looks for no such resolution. To refine the concepts of repetition and the 'cut', and to near a sense of funk's radical design, we can recall the method of an unfaltering Brown classic, 'Cold Sweat' ('1967). Its initial tempo begins with a single stretched horn blast, a fluid bass, drums, percussion and voice, all patterning a rhythm that revolves around several relational beats. Once this groove is established, there is a sharp break, and a new tempo is set up with new horn and vocal patterns. Another cut occurs when we hear punchy horns and Brown's delivery of the song title: 'I break out' - bemp, bemp, bemp, bemp - 'in a cold sweat!' - bemp, bemp, bemp, tonktonk, BREAAAH. And we then return to the initial groove. The song's pattern is A-B-A-B-A, with cuts as the markers of transition.

These cuts are often announced and recognizable and they can introduce a new key or tempo, or simply a solo that is layered on top of the earlier beat. Other familiar Brown cuts are 'take it to the bridge' or 'Maceo' (signalling the JBs' sax player); but they can be instrumental as well, descending bass lines or snaky percussive accents. A more recent example of the articulated cut occurs in Prince's 'Kiss' (1986), again around the exhausted squeak of the song's title and the shimmying guitar that accompanies it. In Trouble Funk's 'Drop the Bomb' (1982), a synthesizer's reproduction of an air raid serves as the cue. There may be no such marker to signal the cut, as is the case with Prince's 'Sign 0' the Times' (1987). In any event, we hear sudden, unmotivated shifts, often announced (though not necessarily) and then the reiteration of a tempo and groove heard once before. Not surprisingly, a funk work-out's stopping point is arbitrary. In Brown's case, twenty-minute sessions would be tailored to three minutes for record marketability. Every instrument, the voice included, is used for percussive ends; melody and harmony are present only in the interplay of drummed instruments, and never teleologically conceived in the composition.

So funk music, at the structural level, engages in a critique of progress as it inheres in Western music. The polyrhythms of the music push the listener not forward, but inward, toward a beat he or she chooses, and outward, toward a beat he or she shares. Of course, it is great dance music, which surely empowers the psychological force of Chuck Brown's or Bootsy Collins’s performances. The music's design can be seen as architectural, a three-dimensional space within which performer and listener work. Rather than attending to the vertical, linear drive of melodic or harmonic development, the listener is asked to inhabit this space (the dance-floor, the song's world). It is expansive and social, intensely democratic. It asks us to move here, and not go there. Black music's circularity and flow – what Jones calls a 'plane of evolution, a direction coming and going' - is oriented to a local awareness of space, or what Jones then names 'Total Environment' (Leroy Jones, The changing same, 1966).

Source: Matthew P. Brown, Funk Music as Genre: Black Aesthetics, Apocalyptic Thinking and Urban Protest in Post-1965 African-American Pop, Cultural Studies, 8 (3), October 1994.

Moments of Excess

"Don’t ask me why I obsessively look to rock ’n’ roll bands for some kind of model for a better society. I guess it’s just that I glimpsed something beautiful in a flashbulb moment once, and perhaps mistaking it for prophecy have been seeking its fulfillment ever since"

I came across this Lester Bangs quote at the music blog The Swill Merchant. Apparently it comes from an article he wrote for NME after touring with The Clash in 1977. In some ways it mirrors my own sensibility - the sense of music as offering something more than the daily grind. But there is a key difference - for me, apart from a brief period as a 14 year old enthralled by The Clash, it's never been 'rock ’n’ roll bands' themselves that have offered 'some kind of model for a better society' but the fact of people coming together to enjoy music. It's always the scene, the crowd, the dancefloor, that has interested me - with the bands as one element but sometimes entirely absent.

The model offered by rock bands themselves is usually the masculine fraternity, the gang of self-importantly cocky blokes, what Bob (after a recent encounter with such rockism) described as 'earnest hoarse-voiced troubadours, swaggering long-haired types, lots of sweat and leather and testosterone'. Of course there's nothing wrong with long hair, sweat, leather or testosterone. It's just that I don't see these elements in themselves constituting some kind of alternative to the 'straight' world - instead this kind of rock endlessly recycles the pseudo-outlaw pose all the way to the bank.

Still I like the image of the 'flashbulb moment', which parallels the notion of 'moments of excess' developed by The Free Association:

"Every now and then, in all sorts of different social arenas, we can see moments of obvious collective creation, where our ‘excess of life’ explodes. In these ‘moments of excess’, everything appears to be up for grabs and time and creativity accelerates. From our own lives, we’re thinking of punk in the mid to late 1970s, and the struggle against the poll tax in the late 1980s/early ’90s, and the recent moments within the anti-globalisation movement. At these times, which may have spanned several years or literally a few moments, we have glimpsed whole new worlds. But we could also mention the 1960s underground, the free software community, the popular uprising in Argentina.

All of these examples are specific to a certain time and place, but we can see a common thread: a collective, liberating creativity that delights in mixing things up and smashing through all barriers. And they constantly lead back to the fundamental questions: ‘What sort of lives do we want to lead? What sort of world do we want to live in?’ We don’t mean this in a utopian sense. Moments of excess aren’t concerned with developing ideal types or blueprints of how life should be lived. Instead they deal with the possible, and represent practical experiments in new forms of life. In these spaces, there is a real sense of subversive energy, freedom and possibility".

Robert Rauschenberg

US pop artist Robert Rauschenberg died yesterday aged 82. He was apparently raised as a Christian fundamentalist, but gave up his plans to to be a minister because his church banned dancing - I guess they might have had a problem with him being gay too.

His passion for dance led him to design costumes and sets for dance companies over a 50 year period, working particularly closely with Merce Cunningham.

This 1949 picture shows him with a unicorn Mardi Gras costume he designed while at Black Mountain College, worn here by one Inga Lauterstein.