A Community of Sense

The relationship between music, dance and community is a recurring theme on this site, but the word 'community' has come to be appropriated in ways that I am not comfortable with. In some uses it seems to imply an enforced membership of a social body and an obligation to abide by its mores. Worse it often implies an exclusion of those deemed outside of the community - like those migrants locked up in detention centres because they lack the papers to belong to the national community even though in every other repsect they have shared the social life of their neighbours.

I am more concerned with a looser, more open notion of community, the kind of free association constituted by the passage of a few persons (or maybe a lot) through an intense period of time.

In this respect I was interested in an exchange between the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and critic Chantal Pontbriand. The fomer argues that the word community "has come to connote very much the 'exclusive community'... That is why I prefer to speak of being-in-common or being-with". This is "No longer a community whose meaning would derive from some grand narrative, but a community of sense, which makes sense, a community of ties and touch, elaborated pragmatically rather than dogmatically" (Pontbriand).

For Nancy, this sensual connection with others can be magnified by art, which "intensifies a sensibility or a sensoriality, bringing it to an extremity where, precisely it touches the others". This can involve "Hearing, seeing, touching oneself, letting oneself be heard, seen, touched, smelled, sensed: art as the intensification of 'sensing'".

If this is so, the music space (the club/gig/party) certainly intensifies our auditory sense through volume and quality of sound. But it also intensifies the community of being experienced through the senses, constituted by the different ways our bodies relate to each other "distant-near, reachable-unreachable, desirable-fearful, erotic, powerful, weak, fleeting, confrontational etc".

This is precisely the dynamic of the fleeting community of the senses that is the dancefloor - not an undifferentiated mass, but defined by bodies moving in relation to each other - not just moving to the music, but moving to be nearer the object of desire, to get away from the moody guy, to invite in or exclude others from personal space...

I read this exchange in Common Wealth, edited by Jessica Morgan (Tate: london 2003), but it is now available online. Photo of clubbers in Berlin 2006, by Loewenhertz.

Berlin - 21 days and counting

Advance warning – I will be doing a talk in Berlin on Friday October 31st, part of an event to mark the tenth issue of Datacide zine. Not sure of details yet, but the plan is to have talks in the afternoon followed by a party, with other participants probably including John Eden (Uncarved), Stewart Home, Dan Hekate, Controlled Weirdness and Christoph Fringeli (Datacide, Praxis records and once upon a time Dead by Dawn). If you’re within reach, put it in your diary. Details to follow.

Reggae and the National Front

Excellent post at Uncarved on UK reggae and the National Front, complete with a mix of the tracks he talks about. The racist NF, which peaked in the 197os, prompted the Rock Against Racism movement and mass protests across the country.

Last year I helped organise Lewisham '77, a series of events to commemorate the anti-fascist clashes when the NF tried to march through South East London in August 1977. Reggae featured in this story, indeed there was a disagreement about exactly what track was playing at a critical moment, when demonstrators were deciding whether to disperse or to physically confront the NF.

Red Saunders, one of the founders of Rock Against Racism, came on a walk we organised around the route of the protests. He has recalled: 'What I really remember is that there were all these Christians and Communists, telling us to go home. Most people stayed. But we were all just milling about, when this old black lady, too old to march, came out on her balcony. She put out her speakers, as loud as they could, playing Get up, stand up. That did it for me".'

However, Paul Gilory has a different recollection. In his seminal There Ain't No Black in The Union Jack, he mentions that Junior Murvin's Police and Thieves (famously covered by The Clash) 'had blared out from a speaker dangled from an upstairs window when anti-fascist demonstrators attacked the National Front march in Lewisham during August 1977'. Indeed at the Lewisham '77 conference he suggested that Saunders might have been guilty of romanticising events by suggesting that the more militant Get up, stand up was played.

As somebody too young to have been on the streets in 1977, I can't judge who was right - presumably both tracks could have been played. Anyway one way or another, reggae was the soundtrack of opposing the National Front in Lewisham 1977 - when we did our commemorative walk last year we started off in the New Cross Inn where we played Peter Tosh's Get Up Stand Up in the pub before setting off.

A short film about Lewisham '77:

Moon-boots

It's been a while since I posted anything about space music (see here for the original Disconaut text), but I came across this fine piece of 1977 space disco the other day - Moon-boots by ORS (sometimes known as Orlando Riva Sound), a German outfit formed by Anthony Monn. You might still be able to download at Chezlubacov or The Red Room, or you can listen it to it here.

(Miraculi at youtube has put images to this track of women dancing at what looks like a Russian airport, but it's not the original video ).

Keep it Tight

Some interesting reflections on tight trousers, masculinity and sexuality cropping up.

The always excellent Pop Feminist has the remarkable tale of (then) Black Panther Party fugitive Eldridge Cleaver and his 1975 attempt to launch a range of clothes in Paris in keeping with his theories about black supermasculinity. I've only reproduced a bit of the picture, you must check out the whole thing

'The pants that men wear now will be looked upon as girls' pants after my models are sold' (Eldridge Cleaver)

Meanwhile Wayne&Wax wonders about the influence of gay style on the sometimes homophobic world of Jamaican dancehall, with the superbly titled post (Tight)Pantshall & Metro Cool, or “How Mi Look?” “Gay!” . He has also posted on the response this has generated, and has linked to a story from earlier this year about the distinctly homophopic No Tight Clothes track by Brooklyn rappers Thug Slaugher Force.

What would these tight-trousered guys make of it?

"Well you can tell by the way I use my walk, I'm a woman's man, no time for talk"

Sister Ray and Berwick Street

With record shop Sister Ray in London's Berwick Street going into administration (and inevitably a facebook group set up to save it), the usual questions are being asked about the death of vinyl and its retailers. Must admit I haven't bought any vinyl for a while, my decks are actually gathering dust in the cellar. I would like to be able to digitise the huge stack of records I have secreted in various cupboards, rather than buy any more - although I am often tempted to buy old disco records just for the sleeves or even just the design of the record labels.

Berwick Street vinyl fetishism is celebrated/satirised in Stewart Home's anti-novel Memphis Underground, with its semi-autistic narrator:

'I found a dozen collectable punk singles in a charity shop. I paid one pound twenty for them, and sold them for three hundred quid. I made the money in Berwick Street and half of it stayed there, because I spent it on rare groove. It was a potlatch, deliberate waste, what, after Bataille, I might call solar economics if I didn't find this theorist's attraction to the sublime aesthetics of tragedy and sacrifice so unpalatable. It wasn't as if I'd actually listen to the original vinyl pressings I'd bought. I didn't need to, since I already possessed what I'd purchased on cheap CD reissues. Besides, playing the records might well reduce their value. Certainly overplaying them, so that they ended up scratched and worn, would lessen their financial worth...

Analogue and digital are two quite different things. A vinyl record wears away: every time you listen to it, you never hear quite the same thing. Flaws are gradually introduced and these increase with repeated plays. Whereas a CD either works or it doesn't. If a CD plays you always hear the same thing. With CDs change is absolute. A damaged CD is useless and worthless. What I coveted was obsolescence as the ultimate luxury product, so my distaste for ruined CDs is not quite as odd as it may at first appear. Vinyl records possessed me and the only way I could undo this hoodoo voodoo was to purchase the items by which I was enchanted. It was a fatal strat­egy. The revenge of the object became the object of my revenge. A dialectic of metaphysics with Jean Baudril­lard and Rudy Ray Moore battling it out at an all night blues party saturated with gut-bucket funk. It could have been worse, since unlike some people I know, I'm not into the eight track cartridge- a fetish that greatly restricts the choice of music available to you'.

For me going to record shops is as much about getting a sense of what's going on in different music scenes as actually purchasing produce - picking up zines and flyers, hearing what people are playing and seeing what's on the racks. So I guess I'm part of the demographic that doesn't buy records and then complains when record shop disappear!

The loss of a single record shop is no big deal, but it is important that there are zones of the city where you can wander in search of lost treasure - which in my case means books and music. You could plot my serial obsessions by mapping the routes I have taken across London at different times in search of particular zines or singles. Berwick Street, with its various record shops, has often featured on these itineries - for instance at one time there was a good techno shop where I used to buy datacide and nearby Vexed Generation, with its mid-1990s anti-Criminal Justice Act clothing. Whatever happens to Sister Ray, it would be a shame if Berwick Street just ended up full of generic bars and coffee shops like much of Soho.

Sister Ray photo from jereoen020 at flickr . Update 8 October 2008: there's a thread on the decline of Berwick Street over at dissensus - noting that Reckless Records closed its two shops there last year. Sister Ray remains open for now, but seems fairly certain to close - though whether it goes bankrupt or manages to move to an area with lower rents remains to be seen.

The Carnivalesque

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White on the carnivalesque, extracted from The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986):

…in the long-term history from the seventeenth to the twen­tieth century, as we have seen above, there were literally thousands of acts of legislation introduced which attempted to eliminate carnival and popular festivity from European life. In different areas of Europe the pace varied, depending upon religious, class and economic fac­tors. But everywhere, against the periodic revival of local festivity and occasional reversals, a fundamental ritual order of western culture came under attack - its feasting, violence, drinking, processions, fairs, wakes, rowdy spectacle and outrageous clamour were subject to sur­veillance and repressive control. We can briefly list some particular instances of this general process. In 1855 the Great Donnybrook Fair of Dublin was abolished in the very same year that Bartholomew Fair in London finally succumbed to the determined attack of the London City Missions Society. In the decade following the Fairs Act of 1871 over 700 fairs, mops and wakes were abolished in England.

By the 1880s the Paris carnival was rapidly being transformed into a trade show cum civic/military parade, and although the 'cortege du boeuf gras' processed round the streets until 1914, 'little by little it was suppressed and restricted because it was said to cause a traffic problem' (Pillement 1972). In 1873 the famous Nice carnival was taken over by a 'comite des Fetes', brought under bureaucratic bourgeois control and reorganized quite self-consciously as a tourist attraction for the increasing numbers who spent time on the Riviera and who were finding neighbouring San Remo's new casino a bigger draw. As Wolfgang Hartmann has shown (1976), in Germany in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war, traditional pro­cessions and festivities were rapidly militarized and incorporated into the symbolism and 'classical body' of the State. This dramatic transform­ation of the ritual calendar had implications not only for each stratum of the social formation, particularly for those which were disengaging themselves from ongoing practices, but for the basic structures of symbo­lic activity in Europe: carnival was now everywhere and nowhere.

Many social historians treat the attack on carnival as a victory over popular culture, first by the Absolutist state and then by the middle classes, a process which is viewed as the more or less complete destruc­tion of popular festivity: the end of carnival. In this vision of the complete elimination of the ritual calendar there is the implicit assump­tion that, in so far as it was the culture of a rural population which was disappearing, the modernization of Europe led inevitably to the super­session of traditional festivity - it was simply one of the many casualties in the movement towards an urban, industrial society….

But, as we have shown, carnival did not simply disappear. At least four different processes were involved in its ostensible break-up: frag­mentation; marginalization; sublimation; repression.

Carnival had always been a loose amalgam of procession, feasting, competition, games and spectacle, combining diverse elements from a large repertoire and varying from place to place. Even the great carnivals of Venice, Naples, Nice, Paris and Nuremberg were fluid and change­able in their combination of practices. During the long and uneven process of suppression (we often find that a carnival is banned over and over again, only to re-emerge each time in a slightly altered fashion), there was a tendency for the basic mixture to break down, certain elements becoming separated from others. Feasting became separated from performance, spectacle from procession: the grotesque body was fragmented. At the same time it began to be marginalized both in terms of social class and geographical location. It is important to note that even as late as the nineteenth century, in some places, carnival remained a ritual involving most classes and sections of a community - the disen­gaging of the middle class from it was a slow and uneven matter. Part of that process was, as we have seen, the 'disowning' of carnival and its symbolic resources, a gradual reconstruction of the idea of carnival as the culture of the Other. This act of disavowal on the part of the emergent bourgeoisie, with its sentimentalism and its disgust, made carnival into the festival of the Other. It encoded all that which the proper bourgeois must strive not to be in order to preserve a stable and ‘correct' sense of self.

William Addison (1953) charts many of these geographical marginalizations in the English context in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Within a town the fair, mop, wake or carnival, which had once taken over the whole of the town and permitted neither outside nor outsider to its rule, was confined to certain areas and gradually driven ­out from the well-to-do neighbourhoods. In the last years of the Bury St Edmunds Fair it was 'banished from the aristocratic quarter of Angel Hill and confined to St Mary's and St James's squares' (Addison 1953). In and around London:


‘Both regular and irregular fairs were being steadily pushed from the centre outwards as London grew and the open spaces were built over. Greenwich and Stepney were the most popular at one time. Others - Croydon's for example - came to the fore later when railways extended the range of pleasure as well as the range of boredom, until towards the end of the nineteenth century London was encircled by these country fairs, some of which were, in fact, ancient charter fairs made popular by easier transport. ... Most of them were regarded by the magistrates as nuisances, and sooner or later most of those without charters were suppressed. Yet such was the popularity of these country fairs round London that to suppress them in one place led inevitably to an outbreak elsewhere, and often where control was more difficult. As the legal adviser to the City Corporation had said in the 1730's, 'It is at all times difficult by law to put down the ancient customs and practices of the multitude.' (Addison 1953)

In England the sites of 'carnival' moved more and more to the coastal periphery, to the seaside. The development of Scarborough, Brighton, Blackpool, Clacton, Margate and other seaside resorts reflects a process of liminality which, in different ways, was taking place across Europe as a whole. The seaside was partially legitimated as a carnival­esque site of pleasure on the grounds of health, since it combined the (largely mythical) medicinal virtues of the spa resorts with tourism and the fairground. It can be argued that this marginalization is a result of other, anterior processes of bourgeois displacement and even repres­sion. But even so, this historical process of marginalizalion must be seen as an historical tendency distinct from the actual elimination of carnival.

Bakhtin is right to suggest that post-romantic culture is, to a con­siderable extent, subjectivized and interiorized and on this account frequently related to private terrors, isolation and insanity rather than to robust kinds of social celebration and critique. Bakhtin however does not give us a convincing explanation of this sublimation of carnival. The social historians, on the other hand, tend not to consider processes of sublimation at all: for them carnival came to an end and that was that. They tend not to believe in the return of the repressed.


But a convincing map of the transformation of carnival involves tracing migrations, concealment, metamorphoses, fragmentations, in­ternalization and neurotic sublimations. The disjecta membra of the gro­tesque body of carnival found curious lodgement throughout the whole social order of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. These dispersed carnivalesque elements represent more than the insig­nificant nomadic residues of the ritual tradition. In the long process of disowning carnival and rejecting its periodical inversions of the body and the social hierarchy, bourgeois society problematized its own relation to the power of the 'low', enclosing itself, indeed often defining itself, by its suppression of the 'base' languages of carnival.


As important as this was the fact that carnival was being margina­lized temporally as well as spatially. The carnival calendar of oscillation between production and consumption which had once structured the whole year was displaced by the imposition of the working week under the pressure of capitalist industrial work regimes. The semiotic polari­ties, the symbolic clusters of classical and grotesque, were no longer temporally pinned into a calendrical or seasonal cycle, and this involved a degree of unpredictability in moment and surface of emergence. The 'carnivalesque' might erupt from the literary text, as in so much surrea­list art, or from the advertisement hoarding, or from a pop festival or a jazz concert.


Carnival was too disgusting for bourgeois life to endure except as sentimental spectacle. Even then its specular identifications could only be momentary, fleeting and partial- voyeuristic glimpses of a promiscu­ous loss of status and decorum which the bourgeoisie had had to deny as abhorrent in order to emerge as a distinct and 'proper' class.


Photos from Notting Hill Carnival: top from 1976 Carnival riot, bottom from August 2008 at the Good Times Sound System (sourced from Flickr, picture by Berg's Eye View).

Street and Studio

I enjoyed Street and Studio: an Urban History of Photography at Tate Modern in London over the summer (the exhibition opens in Essen next week if you're in Germany and curious).

There were some iconic images, like Richard Avedon's 1969 photograph of Andy Warhol's Factory gang (this section shows, left to right, Paul Morrissey, 'Little Joe' Dallessandro and Candy Darling -full image here).



I liked Madame Yevonde's gorgeous 1930s Goddess portraits - who cares if they are aristocrats in fancy dress, there is an otherworld fantasy of fab frocks and hair that anyone can relate to.

My favourite pieces were focused on people in their clubbing clothes. There was a collection of Malick Sidibe's 1960s potraits of young people in Mali (don't think this specific image was in the show, but there were lots of others):

Then at the end of the exhibition was a room dedicated to Rineke Dijkstra's video piece with a splitscreen showing people in the Buzz Club, Liverpool and Mysteryworld, Zaandan (in Holland), 1996-97 - with a soundtrack including George Morel's Morel's Groove). It looks like she got people off the dancefloor to stand in front of a white wall, dancing, staring at the camera, chewing gum, smoking, making out, looking bored....

This bootleg doesn't quite do it justice, but gives an idea of the piece:

It is wild. It is sexy. It is the mambo

Around 1950 a new music and dance craze swept across the Americas - Mambo. It had emerged in Cuba during the 1930s as a series of variations within existing styles before becoming seen as something new, distinct and fashionable.

In New York, the key centre for Mambo was the Palladium dance hall in Manhattan. After visiting it in 1951, writer Jess Stearn wrote an article for the New York Daily News with the headline: 'Touch of Jungle Madness: Denizens of Broadway go Slightly Primitive under Spell of the Wild Sweaty Mambo'. The article continued 'it may turn the Great White Way into a veritable Congoland before it is through. It is wild. It is sexy. It is the mambo'.

David Garcia argues that such statements - not uncommon amongst writers in the USA and Cuba - reflected a 'shared sense of anxiety over and desire for racial and cultural Others whose sounds and bodily movements did not complement those commentators' concepts of a culturally and racially homogeneous nation'. They tended to cast 'Latin musicians and mambo music as relics of the remote or "primitive" human past' and by implication not belonging in the present on equal terms with other musics or indeed people.

Dance teachers saw a potential new market in popularising Mambo, but only by reducing it to a simplified series of steps. In a 1951 article in Dance Magazine, Don Byrnes and Alice Swanson argued that 'It is now the responsibility of the teacher to standardize, discipline and properly present this thrilling dance to make it acceptable'.

By contrast, Garcia found that 'Cuban and Puerto Rican dancers... emphasize the individuated, extemporaneous and communal aspects that defined and inspired their dancing in the 1940s and 1950s'. In contrast to rigid steps, the first generation of Mambo dancers stressed 'feeling the music', inner emotions, spontaneity and dancing as 'an embodied experience, in which sound and movement were merged through the body'.

Source: Going primitive to the movements and sounds of Mambo, David F. Garcia in Musical Quarterly, volume 89 (4), Winter 2006

Some great footage of Mambo dancing in Harlem in early 1950s, posted by the folks at dancehistory.org:

Humans and dancers

Human, the new single by The Killers, confirms their place as the new U2 of epic pop complete with grandiose themes of faith and mortality. I was struck by the chorus where singer Brandon Flowers seems to repeat 'Are we human or are we dancer?'.

Not sure what he means here - obviously I think it is a false dichotomy, dancing is part of what makes us human, moving to music as social beings.

Does Flowers mean that the state of being a dancer is less than fully human? There is a dubious notion of humanity, or rather masculinity, as being tied up with individual self-possession and separateness from which perspective dancers who 'lose' themselves are surrendering to music like puppets at the expense of their subjectivity.

On the other hand, perhaps Flowers means that the state of being a dancer is more than human, a step beyond to a higher state of grace. Knowing that Flowers is a Mormon I wonder if there are clues in the theology of the Church of the Latter Day Saints? Actually unlike some sects, Mormons seem to have historically been pro-dancing - indeed one article refers to them as the Dancingest Denomination, pointing out that founder Joseph Smith wrote approvingly that 'Dancing has a tendency to invigorate the spirit and promote health'. A more detailed consideration of Mormonism and music shows that the attitudes of some early Mormons was more ambivalent, but dancing has always been popular among many believers.

Anyway, perhaps none of this is relevant and The Killers were just looking for a line to rhyme with 'on my knees, looking for the answer'.

Dance Participation Regulations, Utah

From Salt Lake Tribune, 12 September 2008:

Dirty dancing high school students, consider yourselves warned. Get that "freak on" during a Bountiful High School dance and administrators won't bother asking you to turn it off. Instead, they will escort you from the building - assuming that you and your parents have signed the school's new "Dance Participation Regulations," that is.

The regulations prohibit not just "vulgar, seductive, or inappropriate movements" known as "freaking" or "grinding," but also any attire that might lead to that kind of behavior. That means no clothes deemed too tight, short, low-cut or anything stationed lower than the shoulder blades. Straps on dresses for formal dances must be at least two inches wide - spaghetti straps are banned - and sheer fabric is off-limits.

Off-limits for guys is any clothing deemed "slovenly" or worn "for protest, defiance, dissent, or displays obscene, illegal substances, or suggestive words or pictures," according to the regulations... Some students said the regulations set a double standard. "They make exceptions all the time for cheerleaders who walk around in tank tops and short skirts, but others who wear short skirts or shorts have to go home and change," said Beth Forsythe, also a 15-year-old sophomore.

Schlurfs: Vienna Jazz fans under the Nazis

I've posted here before on jazz subcultures under the Nazis, including the Zazous in France and Hamburg anti-fascists. There’s an interesting overview of this subject in Jazz Youth Sub Cultures in Nazi-Europe by Anton Tantner (first published in International Students of History Association Journal, 2/1994).

Tantner mentions some scenes I hadn’t heard of before, including the Vienna ‘Schlurfs’ (a name ‘which means people who are going very slowly and who are lazy’) and the Prague ‘potapki’ (meaning ‘divers’). The former were apparently predominately working class; the boys, with longish oiled hair, tended to wear ‘shirts or coloured pullovers and coats with the belts always open... wide trousers and white scarfs’ (see picture). The girls, sometimes known as ‘Schlurf-cats’ girls wore 'coloured dresses, kneelong skirts and upswept hair’. They improvised parties wherever the opportunity arose: ‘Schlurfs went to merry-go-rounds, where the owners sometimes played the swing records they had brought along’.

In Vienna ‘fights between members of the Hitler Youth and Schlurfs took place rather often... On one occasion about 50 Schlurfs came together and attacked a home of the Hitler Youth’. The Austrian Schlurfs ‘stayed outsiders even after the liberation from fascism. In the new democratic newspapers they were regarded as "weed" endangering the "Austrian tree of life"'.

There is more information in an article by Alexander Mejstrik, which quotes a 1942 Nazi publication describing the Schlurfs as ‘immature youngsters of deficient nature who strive for superficial leisure, dance, jazz music and female company, and who show no interest in politics... the Schlurf-youth has to be fought because of their negative attitude towards the sate, their softness, and their detrimental mindset'. In the same year a Viennese newspaper claimed that the Schlurf ‘smokes like a Jewish coffeehouse poet’, ‘drinks like a British colonial soldier’ and strives for ‘the Anglo-Saxon gangster ideal’. Hitler Youth raids and patrols were deployed against the Schlurfs, with a set of particular measures set out in a document called ‘Bekampfung des Schlurfunwesens’ (‘fighting the Schlurf nuisance’). Schlurfs could have their long hair forcibly cut.

At a bar-restaurant called the Second Cafe in the Prater area of Vienna ‘the youngsters could dance to live music, drink alcohol and smoke even though at the time all this was forbidden’. They sang a song which declared ‘Hitler Youth, watch out for your lives, because the Schlurf of the Second Cafe in the night woke up, They will brandish their knives, and St Louis Blue will sing his songs again. Police, fuzz, stop cutting bald heads’.

(Source: Alexander Mejstrik, 'Urban Youth, National-Socialist Education and Specialized Fun: the making of the Vienna Schlurfs, 1941-44' in 'European Cities, Youth and the Public Sphere in the Twentieth Century' by Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried (Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2005).

Songs about dancing (4): Everybody Dance - Chic

Everybody dance it says on the tin, and on the many occasions when I have heard this song in clubs, parties, weddings that's generally what everybody does. If the lyrics urge 'Everybody dance, do-do-do, Clap your hands, clap your hands' they are hardly necessary - the bass alone is surely enough to generate the required response. The dancefloor as the place where the indignities and humiliations of daily life can be put aside: 'Music never lets you down / Puts a smile on your face / Any time, anyplace / Dancing helps relieve the pain / Soothes your mind, makes you happy again / Listen to those dancing feet / Close your eyes and let go'.

This was originally released in 1977 - it is impossible to overestimate the significance of Chic in this period. Just think for instance how many times Good Times was sampled in early hip hop (e.g. Rappers Delight by the Sugarhill Gang or The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel).

See also Disco was the only time we were equal

Disco Fires

My thoughts go out to the victims of the nightclub fire in Shenzhen, China this weekend:

Thirteen people have been detained in connection with a nightclub fire on Saturday that killed 43 people and injured 65. Wang Jing, owner of the club who could not be traced after the fire, surrendered to police Sunday afternoon. The general manager, deputy general manager, safety officer, technician and performers had been detained earlier.

Hundreds of people, most of them youths, had packed into the Wu Wang Club, popular as "King of the Dancers Club", in the city's Longgang district when the fire broke out around 11 pm. "We were watching a show and one of the performers lighted a firework, which rose to the ceiling that caught fire it spread rapidly across the hall," and turned into the worst fire tragedy in the southern city, a survivor surnamed Zheng said.

"Power supply to the hall was cut immediately, leaving the room in darkness, except for the light from the blaze I heard people shouting and crying everybody dashed for the only exit. I don't know how I managed to get out I felt like i was running on people's body but I couldn't see," the youth said. The nightclub, about 35 km from downtown, had a hall and 10 rooms that could hold 380 people. It was on the third floor of a second-hand goods' market, and could be accessed from the staircase only through a narrow passageway, about 10 m long (China Daily, 22 September 2008).

Sadly this is not unique, as a current trial in Argentina shows:

One of the biggest and most controversial trials in Argentine history has started in the capital, Buenos Aires. Fifteen people are accused of responsibility for a nightclub fire in December 2004 that killed 194 people, many of them youngsters... The 30th of December 2004 is a date etched firmly on Argentina's national consciousness. On that night, someone set off flares inside the Cromagnon nightclub, starting the huge fatal blaze, in which 1,500 people were also injured.

The images of the burnt bodies and choking survivors being dragged from the embers of the nightclub are as strong today as they were then.

In court, accused of responsibility for the tragedy, are the club's owner, members of the band the Callejeros who were playing that night, and policemen and local officials accused of taking bribes to overlook safety measures. The controversy surrounding the fire brought down the then Buenos Aires city government and led to tight security measures being imposed at venues across Argentina (BBC 19 August 2008)

At the time there were big demonstrations in Argentina:

Thousands have taken to the streets of the Argentine capital calling for the city's mayor to resign after a nightclub blaze... Some 5,000 people took part, many of them relatives and friends of the young people who died in the blaze. As night fell, they gathered outside the Cromagnon nightclub, destroyed when fire engulfed the building a week ago. The protesters demanded those who they believe are responsible, including the club's owner, be held to account...The club was reported to have been filled beyond its capacity and some of its emergency exits were said to have been locked (BBC, 7 January 2005).

I am reminded too of the December 2000 fire in in Luoyang, China in which 311 people died, and of the Stardust disco fire in Dublin in February 1981, in which 48 people died, prevented from fleeing the fire by locked fire exits and barred windows. Christy Moore wrote a song about this, They Never Came Home, which was banned in Ireland for libel. Moore's line 'Hundreds of children are injured and maimed, And all just because the fire exits were chained' is a reminder that while accidental fires will happen, it is security systems designed to maximise profit by restricting entry and exit that stop people escaping them.

Sleepless in Seattle

I am really interested in the micro-histories of dance and music scenes, not the broad generalisations but the nitty gritty details of places, spaces and sounds. Through the dancing questionnaire and other posts at this site, I hope I have managed to document some details that might otherwise vanish into increasingly foggy memory. I am always keen to encourage people to write things down, even the details that don't seem so important to them, partly because in my historical researches it is often the seemingly irrelevant trivia which are actually most revealing.

Along these lines, I was interested in this brief summary of the history of dancing in 20th century Seattle, with links to articles on dance marathons, jazz at the he Savoy Ballroom and 1960s rock'n'roll at Parkers Ballrooom. It ends up with the absurdities of the 1985 Teen Dance Ordinance, whose stipulations drastically restricted young people's leisure in the city until it was repealed in 2002.

Remembering Katy Watson

My good friend Katy Watson died last month. Her obituary was published in yesterday's Guardian:

'In the late 1980s Katy Watson, who has died of Hodgkin's lymphoma aged 42, was a key member of the collective producing Shocking Pink, a feminist magazine by and for young women, which tried to take on teenage magazines on their home ground, with photostrips and cartoons. She was also involved in two other feminist magazines, Outwrite, and, in 1992, Bad Attitude. Katy was inspired by the 1990s Riot Grrrl and Queercore punk bands, some of whom she interviewed for Bad Attitude. She took up DJing and played at lesbian and gay punk clubs, including Up to the Elbow and Sick of It All - the latter which she started with friends...

...Her life was transformed by the birth of her children Orla in 2002 and Joe in 2007. Her happy parenting experiences informed her involvement with the lesbian mothers' group, Out for Our Children. Her first book for young children, Spacegirl Pukes, appeared last year - she was proud that a book could be published in which a child had two mothers without the fact needing any explanation - and her second book, Dangerous Deborah Puts Her Foot Down, will appear soon. Her novel, High on Life, a fictionalised account of heroin addiction, was published in 2002. She is survived by her children, her parents and her sister Anna".

I first met Katy in the early 1990s in Brixton where we were both living and both hanging out at the 121 Centre, an anarchist squat centre in Railton Road (home of Dead by Dawn club, which I've written about before). Katy was involved with Bad Attitude, a feminist paper, I was involved with Contraflow, a radical newsheet. Bad Attitude had an office at the top of the building and used to let us use their computer.

I have so many memories of Katy, but as this a music site I will concentrate on that side of our friendship. Music was a central part of Katy's life - in fact in my last conversation with her, in the hospice just a few days before she died, she asked me if I'd heard any good new bands recently. Although she did not want to think too much about the possibility of dying, it is notable that she did go to the trouble of choosing the songs she wanted played at her funeral. So when a big crowd of us gathered at the Epping Forest Woodland Burial Park, we all came in to 'Denis' by Blondie and followed the coffin out to Magazine's 'Shot by Both Sides'.

Katy's first love was punk, so the 1990s Riot Grrrl and queercore scenes were right up her street. She interviewed Bikini Kill for Bad Attitude, and indeed Kathleen Hanna from the band once slept on her sofa in Brixton. She took up DJing and I remember going to see her play out at places like The Bell in Kings Cross (famous London gay pub known for indie/punk nights - some great footage of the place here) and at Freedom in Soho, when Mouthfull played there downstairs. We were always swapping tapes and CDs, I have a boxful of obsolete (?) cassettes Katy made me - Sister George 'Drag King', 'Spend the Night with the Trashwomen'...

In the mid-1990s Katy was part of my clubbing/party posse. Saturday nights were often spent in the Duke of Edinburgh pub in Brixton, waiting for news from the United Systems party line about where the free party was happening - followed by a trip out to Hackney, or Camden or wherever. As I kept a sporadic diary at the time, I know that on April 29th 1995 me and Katy went to a United Systems squat party in Market Road, off Clarendon Road (north London). There were police outside with bolt cutters, so we had to go round the back and climb over a wall and across a rooftop to get inside. Another time we went to a party in a squatted church in Kentish town, with the sun coming through the stained glass after dancing all night.

We also went to clubs - Megatripolis and Fruit Machine at Heaven, to Speed at the Mars Bar in '95 (LTJ Bukem's drum and bass club). Once in 1996 we got really glammed up and headed to Pique, a night promoted by Matthew Glamorr at Club Extreme in Ganton Street. It was cancelled , but someone gave us a flyer to a private party in Lily Place in Farringdon, a fantastic loft style party packed out with people dancing.

Katy started getting into Americana, she introduced me to The Handsome Family and Alabama 3, whose Twisted night we went to at Brady's in Brixton. We went to lots of gigs at The Windmill on Brixton Hill, from alt.country to Art Brut, and we went to Electrowerks in Islington to see ESG (in June 2000).

A lot of good nights, but no more, which is very sad. Still her five year old daughter has been jumping around since she could stand to The Ramones and, more recently CSS. Her son is just starting to stand and no doubt will be dancing himself soon. So the spirit lives on... I don't believe in the literal afterlife, but it's nice to imagine Katy wandering around in some punk rock Valhalla looking round for Joey Ramone and Johnny Thunders.

Neil

The F-word, HarpyMarx and AfterEllen have all picked up on Katy's death, which would have pleased her. Shocking Pink in particular had a big impact and it's nice to know that some of yesterday's readers are today's feminist bloggers. I will dig out some old S.Pink and Bad Attitude and other Katy stuff over the next few weeks.

The photo of Katy was taken on the infamous May Day 2000 Guerrilla Gardening action in London's Parliament Square. Katy was a keen gardener, as well as Guerrilla Gardening on May Day she was a member of the Royal Horticultural Society, and got us tickets to the Chelsea Flower Show!

See also:

Katy's music column in Bad Attitude (1995)

London queercore 1995: Vaseline, Up to the Elbow, Sick of it All

Nepal Disco Workers Protest

Hundreds of disco and nightclub workers protested Wednesday in Nepal's capital for the right to work all night long, eyewitnesses and police said. Protesters blew whistles and screamed slogans "Stop the crackdown on night workers" and "Down with government," as they rallied in Thamel, Kathmandu's tourist hub, an AFP reporter at the scene said. Police watched the protesters but no one was arrested.

"More than 500 workers staged demonstration demanding they be allowed to operate bars and discos all night," Ramesh Thapa, a police officer at the scene, told AFP. "Due to the operation of night bars and restaurants, public security has worsened. We have begun to crackdown on such midnight activities to maintain law and order," Thapa said.

Police began raiding scores of restaurants and discos last week after the new home minister of the Maoist-led government ordered a crackdown on them, saying nighttime activities were compounding security problems in the capital. Since then, disco bars and eateries that operate at night have been forced to close down by midnight in Kathmandu - home to more than two million people - in a move that has irked some in the business community. "There are thousands of people who are dependent on night jobs to earn a living. The government just can't take such a decision on an ad hoc basis," Ramesh Basnet, a protester, told AFP.

"Closing the business is not the solution. The government should make proper laws to regulate nighttime business rather than completely shutting it down," Basnet added. Sameer Gurung, president of the Night Entrepreneurs Association, said the forceful closure of dance bars, nightclubs and discos have left some 80,000 people jobless.

Source: AFP, 17 September 2008

Pervis Jackson and Detroit

Pervis Jackson, the bass singer in the Spinners (or Detroit Spinners as they were known in the UK) died last month. Jackson's family came from New Orleans to Detroit, where the Spinners started out singing doo wop before signing to Motown and then Atlantic records where they found success with the early 1970s Philadelphia soul sound.


Unfortunately I couldn't find any footage of my favourite track by The Spinners, Ghetto Child, but you can listen to it here: 'when I was 17 I ran away from home, and from everything I had ever known, I was sick and tired, living in a town, filled with narrow minds and hate'. Also check out their 1970 version of Message from a Black Man ('No matter how hard you try you can't stop me now') with Pervis Jackson doing the spoken word sections.

But here they are from 1975 singing They Just Can't Stop It (Games People Play), with Pervis Jackson singing the middle '12.45' part:

The Detroit music explosion of the 1960s was underpinned by the migration of black people (like Pervis Jackson) from the Southern states of the US to Detroit, partly prompted by the demand for labour in the Detroit motor industries - and the desire of those moving for a better life. By 1943, when a racist backlash by white workers led to major riots in Detroit, 200,000 black people had come to live in Detroit, most of them to work in the motor trade and its wartime spin-offs of bomber engine and other military production. It was the children of this wave of migrants who gave us Motown, and some of their grandchildren who later gave us Detroit techno.

It's interesting how the motor city aesthetic filtered down through the black and white musical cultures that emerged from Detroit. Just look at the names - Motown, The Spinners (apparently named after Cadillac hubcaps), MC5 (originally Motor City 5). Think of Underground Resistance's early characterisation of their sound as “Hard Music from a Hard City”.

Interesting too, how Detroit has exercised a particular place in Europe’s imaginary America: Gramsci in his prison cell dreaming of the modernizing wonders of Fordism sweeping away the dead culture of old Europe; the 1960s dream of the Sound of Young America inspiring boys and girls in London and Liverpool; the continuing love affair with Detroit techno.

The actual relationship between place and sound is very complex. Ultimately it is patronising to assume that people’s cultural expressions are just a reflection of their surroundings. Music doesn’t spring spontaneously from the soul - it takes creativity, imagination and effort. But of course it is influenced by the music makers' experience, including where they live. So once again, put your hands up for Detroit, as well as for Pervis Jackson and The Spinners.

Somewhere over the Rainbow

Over the Rainbow must be one of the world's most recorded songs, its popularity partly due to the utopian wish that is at its heart, a wish planted by the creator of The Wizard of Oz, creator L. Frank Baum (1856-1919):

'His [Baum's] purpose is to bring loners and outcasts together to depict just how capable they are. Implicit is the notion that common people do not need managers or middlemen to run their affairs, that the latent creative potential in each simple person need only be awakened and encouraged to develop. Baum's major characters in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz are non-competitive and non-exploita­tive. They desire neither money nor success. They have little regard for formal schooling or silly social conventions. They respect differences among all creatures and seek the opportunity to fill a gap in their lives... he wanted to educate readers to the fact that individ­ualism could be achieved in other ways - through tenderness, good will, and cooperation. To be smart, compassionate, and courageous are qualities which could be put to use to overcome alienation, The colors and ambience of Oz are part of an atmosphere which allows for creativity and harmony along with a sense of social responsibility. Dorothy sees and feels this. She is 'wizened' by her trip through Oz, and Baum knows that she is stronger and can face the drabness of Kansas. This is why he closes the book in America: Dorothy has a utopian spark in her which should keep her alive in gray surroundings...

By the time Baum came to write The Emerald City of Oz in 1910, he had developed precise principles for his utopia, and he formulated them at the beginning of this book:

'Each man/woman, no matter what he or she produced for the good of the community, was supplied by the neighbors with goods and clothing and a house and furniture and ornaments and games. If by chance the supply ever ran short, more was taken from the great storehouses of the Ruler, which were afterward filled up again when there was more of any article than the people needed.

Everyone worked half the time and played half the time, and the people enjoyed the work as much as they did the play, because it is good to be occupied and have something to do.

There were no cruel overseers set to watch them, and no one to rebuke them or find fault with them. So each one was proud to do all he could for his friends and neighbors, and was glad when they would accept the things he produced.

Oz being a fairy country, the people were, of course, fairy people; but that does not mean that all of them were very unlike the people of our own world. There were all sorts of queer characters among them, but not a single one who was evil, or who possessed a selfish or violent nature.

They were peaceful, kind-hearted, loving and merry, and every inhabitant adored the beautiful girl who ruled them, and delighted to obey her every command'.
Baum's 'socialist' utopia is a strange one since it is governed by a princess named Ozma, but there is no real hierarchy or ruling class in Oz. Ozma the hermaphrodite is a symbol of matriarchy and guarantees the development of socialist humanism in Oz by regulating magic, especially by banning black magic'.

Source: Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (Routledge: London

Judy Garland's original version of the song from 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz:



'it is significant that Maud Gage, whom Baum married in 1882, was the daughter of an active and well-known feminist, Matilda Joslyn Gage, a colleague of the leading US suffragists in drawing up the Woman's Bill of Rights, as well as a feminist historian... Dorothy in the book is definitely a modern heroine, if not a New Woman; she is the predecessor of many a plucky, stoic, staunch girl lead - neither a milksop nor a tomboy, but a little girl who embarks on her adventures in a spirit of curiosity, wonder and self-reliance...But Dorothy makes allies, and she is convincingly loyal and brave, loving and good. With her clear, straightforward help, the Wizard will be deposed and the ideal Land will be restored to its rightful female ruler; in Oz, women won't reign through lies and illusions, but with sincere kindness. Ozites do not wage war: the enemies who tunnel through to the Emerald City in later stories in order to sack it and kill everyone are tricked by Ozma to arrive very thirsty and drink from a fountain of forgetfulness. They then can't remember why they have bothered to make the journey.

Like many progressives in the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods, both in Europe and the US, Maud Gage Baum rejected organised religion and was attracted instead by new thinking about the supernatural - spiritualism, psychic research and theosophy. The Baums became theosophists in the 1890s, and their four boys, at their grandmother's insistence, were not baptised. They were sent to Chicago's ethical school instead, where religion was not taught. Traces of the movement's beliefs show in Oz's structure - its matriarchal tendencies, and its freedom from established churches of all kinds'.

Source: Marina Warner, Over the Rainbow, Guardian, 19 July 2008

Here's a version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow sung by the late Hawaiian singer and ukulele player Israel Kamakawiwo'ole (1959-1997 - the bit at the end of the video is of his ashes being scattered in the sea):

Haredim move to eradicate 'foreign' pop

Haredi Judaism is often labelled as 'ultra-orthodox', but that hasn't stopped many people in Haredi communities in Israel from enjoying and making pop music - evidently incurring the wrath of some Rabbis.

Musicians who use rock, rap, reggae and trance influences will not receive rabbinic approval for their CDs, nor will they be allowed to play in wedding halls under haredi kosher food supervision, according to a new, detailed list of guidelines drafted with rabbinical backing that differentiates between "kosher" and "treif" music. The guidelines, which are still being formulated, also ban "2-4 beats and other rock and disco beats;" the "improper" use of electric bass, guitars and saxophones; and singing words from holy sources in a disrespectful, frivolous manner.

"Michael Jackson-style music has no place in our community," says Mordechai Bloi, a senior member of the Guardians of Sanctity and Education, an organization based in Bnei Brak that enforces what it sees as normative haredi behavior. We might be able to adopt Bach or Beethoven, music with class, but not goyishe African music and beats. We haredim want to protect ourselves from what we see as negative foreign influences. We are trying to maintain our own authentic music styles. We admit that times are changing, but we are trying to stay loyal to our roots."

This is the first time that specific, detailed criteria, including comments on playing styles, will be used to add transparency to the delineation between acceptable or "kosher" Jewish music and forbidden or "treif" music. The man responsible for drafting the list is Rabbi Efraim Luft of Bnei Brak, who heads an organization called the Committee for Jewish Music. Luft works in conjunction with Bloi's organization and with the Jerusalem-based Council for the Purity of the Camp headed by Rabbi Yitzhak Meir Safronovitch. These are the two most important and influential "modesty patrols" in the haredi community.

Bloi and Safronovitch have managed over the years to consolidate their power by successfully courting the backing of the major halachic authorities. A large portion of the haredi community, which numbers between 500,000 and 700,000, is loyal to its rabbis. Calls by rabbis to boycott a business, to take to the streets to demonstrate or to vote for a particular candidate are taken seriously... Similarly, enforcers of haredi norms are monitoring, supervising and censoring the haredi pop music scene, with Luft spearheading the campaign. Luft has already issued a list of "kosher" and "non-kosher" bands and musicians. He said that dozens of yeshiva heads have agreed to refuse to come to the wedding of a student who hires a non-kosher band. Halls with haredi kashrut supervision who host non-kosher bands run the risk of losing their supervision, and hence their clientele. Companies that help promote haredi concerts expose themselves to the danger of a consumer boycott.

Luft said that music is just part of a much larger problem in haredi society. "We see that the same people who are involved in the treif pop scene are also the ones in the unapproved news media, in the so-called religious radio stations, in film and in advertising," said Luft. "All of these things come together to demoralize haredi society and to lower the spiritual level of our youth. This is an issue that people over 30 understand very well what I am talking about and those under 30 have more difficulty understanding," Luft continued. "This music is pushing into our community a generation gap similar to one created by the rock music of the '50s in the US. The whole idea is that there are types of music that have no place with respectable people. Respectable people listen to decent music and immoral people list to indecent music, and it does not make sense that a community that has high moral standards should be listening to this type of music. The influence of music has a very profound effect on people in general. It has been proven that rock music has a very negative effect on people and on animals and plants, while classical music has a very positive effect."

Over the past several years haredi activists have enlisted almost all the major rabbinical authorities to stifle a burgeoning haredi pop music scene. Last year, a letter forbidding all public music concerts, even when men and women in the audience are separated, was signed by a who's-who of Israeli rabbinical authorities...

This summer, haredi activists banned a concert in Netanya that featured popular haredi singer Avraham Fried, who appeared together with secular performers. Despite the ban, there was a large turnout... However, performers who do not appeal to a wider, non-haredi audience have been hurt by the rabbinic ban. For instance, Yaakov Shwekey's concert this summer in Kiryat Motzkin, near Haifa, was a failure. Instead of attracting a few thousand, Shwekey managed to draw an audience of just a few hundred.

Avrahim Fried - banned in Netanya:


Menahem Toker, a popular haredi DJ who was reportedly fired from Radio Kol Chai under pressure from haredi activists because he promoted "treif" shows, said that the blanket prohibition against all shows is doing more harm than good. "Maybe a lot of people will listen to the rabbis and stop going to shows altogether," said Toker. "But there will be tens of thousands of people who, deprived of a kosher option, will end up going to mixed shows. And not just to frum, wholesome performers like Fried and Elbaz, but to secular performers also. So maybe in a way the anti-pop music activists have won a victory. But they also lost because they have not offered a kosher alternative."

Sources in the haredi music scene who spoke off the record for fear they would hurt their relationship with the rabbinic representatives said they doubted the rabbinic establishment would succeed in their newest crusade against CDs. "What are they going to do listen to every single disc that is released? What about the thousands of discs that are already in the market?"

Luft admitted that listening to all the discs on the market would be a formidable challenge. "The main aim is to focus on new songs before they get to the recording studio. So far there have only been two cases in which discs have been banned by rabbis", said Luft. "One by controversial haredi vocalist Lipa Schmeltzer called Bli Ayan Hara (Without the evil eye) and a Yiddish rap CD by David Kalish. There are certain types of music, such as rap and reggae, that are disgusting and have no place in our community."

(source and full article: Jerusalem Post, 9 September 2008)