Miriam Makeba

South African singer Miriam Makeba died yesterday. An outspoken opponent of apartheid, she had her passport confiscated by the South African state in 1960 and had to live in exile for 30 years.

The following song, Khawuleza, was recorded for a Swedish TV programme in 1966 - she links it to black children in the townships watching the police turn up for a raid and calling Khawuleza Mama (Hurry Mama - i.e. 'don't let them get you').

Classic Party Scenes (5): Beat Girl (1960)

The Soho jazz clubs of the 1950s (discussed in previous post) act as the setting for the film Beat Girl (1960), in which art student Gillian Hills runs away to be a crazy Soho beatnik and then a stripper in a club run by Christopher Lee.

Not sure if the dance scene is in a real club or a studio - the music is by the John Barry Seven and the scene also features a young Oliver Reed dancing in a check shirt (about four minutes in):



The film was released in the US as 'Wild for Kicks', with the following trailer promising a 'vivid and shocking portrayal of modern youth who grow up too soon and live it up too fast' with 'beat girls and defiant boys':

Are you trad or mod? (London 1958)

A great piece from 1958, I believe from the Daily Mirror - journalist Anne Allen goes on a tour of London jazz clubs to try and understand the split between 'trad' and 'mod' jazz. As is clear from this article this was not just a musical dispute between the fans of 'traditional' New Orlean jazz and modern jazz - there were also stylistic differences. This was a critical junction in post-war youth culture - from the jazz enthusiasts of London run two different trajectories, the dress down trad-beatnik-hippy line and the sharp dressing-working class dandy-mod line (with the original mods being modern jazz enthusiasts):

"We went to Cy Laurie’s, a home of ‘Trad’. Down steep stairs to a room lighted only near the band and in the corners we found a hundred or so youngsters, average age about 20. Most of them were in the midst of a hectic jive session. Some were glued to the walls in gloomy concentration on the music.

Some members come three or four times a week and being in the swim is manifested by a sort of nightmare uniform. Long straight hair for the girls, black or scarlet stockings, fisherman’s knit sweaters reaching to the knees or long tube dresses.

Little beards were common and a lot of the men had tight-cut trousers with a distinctive stripe. I was told that the thing of the moment, exclusive to this club, was the turning round of clerical collars.

The overwhelming impression was of heat. The amount of thick woollen clothing currently fashionable must be nearly insupportable after hours of lightning-quick jiving...

I got nowhere in my efforts to find out their jobs. They just did not admit to working although some were obviously bona fide students.

Had we dressed the part for this club we should not have been allowed into the other club we visited – the Flamingo, the home of Modern jazz. Even silk mufflers are frowned on here and the manager insists on lending a tie to anyone with out one. Most of the members came to listen. Only a few danced, and then in a minute space with the least possible movement

Three bands played while we there. No single one could possibly maintain the pace throughout the whole evening. There was almost no pause between numbers and the music was ear-splitting.

There was less of a social club atmosphere here… Again and again I was told ‘it depends what band is playing. We follow the band’. Such is their devotion that they come from as far away as Nottingham and Bournemouth. A little older than the Trad fans down the road they also seemed more steadily employed – shipping clerk, apprentice printer, builder, shop assistant, music student. The list was endlessly varied.

...And never forget that they are not licensed for drinks, and the two we saw were absolutely rigid about the ‘Members Only’ rule… nowhere did we find anything stronger to drink that a ‘coke’.

See also London Jazz Clubs 1950s. Thanks to Steve Fletcher for sending in this clipping - he is actually in the photo on the left - and for this flyer from the Cy Laurie Jazz Club at 41 Great Windmill Street in Soho. Note the invitation to 'Dance or listen to Jazz! Styled in the New Orleans idiom'. The club was indeed open every night of the week with bands including Bill Brunskills Jazzmen, the Graham Stewart Seven, the Brian Taylor Jazzmen and of course the Cy Laurie Band - sometimes with a skiffle group - skiffle also emerged from this scene.

Memories, flyers and clippings from this scene or any other always welcome - email address is in right hand box.

Iraq: cleric calls for dancing ban

'A cleric's call to ban partying and dancing in the Shiite holy city of Karbala has triggered a heated debate among residents, just when they had begun living without fear of hardline militias. In his Friday sermon, Sheikh Abdel Mahdi al-Karbalaie, the representative of revered Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, called on residents of Karbala to put a halt to dancing, partying, listening to music loudly and displaying "provocative" women's garments in shops...

The call from Sheikh Karbalaie, aide of Ayatollah Sistani who is known as a moderate religious leader, has divided the local population, with many welcoming the sermons and others terming it an attempt to return to the "dark old days". During the former regime of Saddam Hussein, Iraq was known for its more secular lifestyle but after he was toppled in 2003 by invading US-led forces, local Shiite militias began enforcing a strict Islamic code of living. Attacks on shops selling music CDs, women's beauty products and dresses were common in Karbala as the militias, mainly loyal to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, became the city's new moral police. Sameer, a shopkeeper who used to sell women's dresses, recalls how one day militiamen stormed his shop and ordered him to put a veil even on the dummy of a model. "At that time there was a woman in my shop and she asked the militiamen why they didn't go and veil dummies of male models in other shops," said Sameer, who gave only his first name'.

Source: AFP 26 October 2008

Dancing in the Streets: Revolution in Portugal 1974

In April 1974, decades of fascist rule in Portugal were brought to an end in a coup staged by left wing military officers. In the weeks and months that followed there was a mass upsurge of nearly 50 years of repressed energies, with strikes, demonstrations and factory occupations. A good account of these events is contained in Portugal: The Impossible Revolution by Phil Mailer, from which this vivid description of May Day demonstrations in Lisbon is extracted. It is a great example of the explosion of the carnivalesque in the context of a revolutionary festival - dancing in the streets with all possibilities open. Although the movement ultimately subsided, fascism was permanently vanquished, and the Portuguese colonies - including Angola and Mozambique - gained their independence.

We have never seen anything like it before. The whole of Lisbon is out, the emotion beyond belief. All morning the radio has been calling for 'calm and dignity'... We stand at the corner of Alameda and try to absorb it all: the noise, the spirit, the joy surging out in floods, after half a century of being bottled up...

This is the day of the workers and all Lisbon is here... I could cry. Others are weeping already. All day we march, lost in different parts of a crowd half a million strong. Flowers, carnations everywhere. Along the way, people are offering water to demonstrators, from their windows...

Young workers are dancing to the music. Police cars go by, with demonstrators on top of them. A bus passes, the driver tooting his horn in rhythm with other noises. There's no telling where that vehicle will end up: it's going in the opposite direction to the destination written on the front. The emergency exits of all buses are open, flags protruding from every window. A group of youths pass, 'the Gringos of Samba' according to their banner. Their Latin-American music is very catching. More people begin to dance. A group of students pass shouting 'O Povo armado jamaissera vencido' (an armed people will never be defeated). People laugh at this subversive variation of the 'official' slogan. The whole thing is confusion. People are cheering anything and everything. Someone shouts 'Viva Spinola, viva o communismo'.

We go to the house of certain young singers whose songs had been banned.Their records, censored, were rarely played on the radio. Everyone is drinking. A singing session ensues, which after an hour moves back to Rossio. We stay there, sitting on the ground, until 3 am, singing, watching people jump into the icy cold fountain. Finally, exhausted, I decide to go home. I shall never forget that First of May. The noise, the noise, the noise is still ringing in my ears. The horns tooting in joy, the shouting, the slogans, the singing and dancing. The doors of revolution seem open again, after forty eight years of repression. In that single day everything was replaced in perspective. Nothing was god-given, all was man-made. People could see their misery and their problems in a historical setting. How can words describe 600,000 people demonstrating in a city of a million? Or the effect of carnations everywhere, in the barrels of rifles, on every tank and every ear, in the hands of troops and demonstrators alike?....

A week has passed, although it already feels like many months. Every hour has been lived to the full. It is already difficult to remember what thepapers looked like before, or what people had then said. Hadn't there always been a revolution?

Party Police Round-Up

Australia: Riot Police called to Sydney Rave (In the Mix, September 1 2008)

'A secret warehouse party in Sydney’s Inner West was shut down by police early on Sunday morning, causing unhappy revelers to spill onto busy Parramatta Road, forcing its closure for around 90 minutes. Riot police and the dog squad were called to the party by concerned residents, and it’s estimated the illegal warehouse rave had between 1,000 and 1,500 party goers. The party was split over three floors of the abandoned Parramatta Road warehouse, but it was closed by authorities around 1am. Ravers on the building’s top floor are said to have showered police with bottles when asked to leave, and news reports indicate authorities are now on the hunt for the people responsible, as well as the event’s organisers'.

'I was at the party on Saturday night, standing directly behind decks on the drum n bass stage when the riot police invaded. The news reports state there was no damage to police vehicles or property, but what about the damage to the equipment caused by the over zealous police who stormed in and smashed both turntables and attempted to smash the mixer (about $5,000 worth of damage) and then they pushed and shoved and bashed everyone they could get their battons on. This was complete overkill and so unnecessary. there were no arrests on the night so clearly the "riotous partygoers" were non existant'.

England: 'Curfew order on man at rave' (Lynn News, 23 October 2008)

'A Swaffham man who went to a rave when a court had ordered him not to, now faces a curfew to keep him indoors seven days a week. [RW]... was caught by police on the record decks of an unlicensed music event at Gayton Thorpe in August, Lynn Magistrates heard on Tuesday.In April, a Norwich court had given him a two-year community order with a requirement he was “not to attend a rave or other unlicensed musical event”. [RW] admitted he had carried out an unauthorised licensable activity at Gayton Thorpe and accepted he was therefore in breach of the order.

... police became aware of the rave after a Gayton estate employee called them at midnight on Saturday, August 16, and said there were a number of cars and people gathering near his home... police found [RW] wearing headphones on the sound decks and he was arrested. Items taken by officers included 12 speakers, two generators, three turntables and five mixer-boxes. In a police interview, Walsh described the equipment as a “suicide rig” in that it was expected to be seized... The bench decided to revoke the original order and replace it with a new two-year order with a curfew, meaning [RW] will now have to stay at home from 8pm to 6am seven days a week for six months.

India: 'Police raid rave party' in Mumbai

'In one of the biggest police swoops in recent times, cops barged into a Juhu pub on Sunday night and picked up 240 youngsters on suspicion of 'doing drugs'. Nine of them, including an Israeli national, were arrested for peddling and distributing narcotic substances. The other 231 were made to undergo blood and urine tests and released on Monday afternoon after spending about 12 hours at the Azad Maidan police club' (Times of India, 7 October 2008)

'Blaring trance music, smoke-filled dance floors and stoned youngsters are no longer confined to just Goa or farmhouses in Mumbai's outskirts. Nightclubs and pubs in the city are fast becoming hotspots for rave parties. The busting of a rave party in Juhu is perhaps only the tip of the iceberg, say police officials. "Youngsters form a huge pie of the clientele. With higher disposable income and easy accessibility to high-end drugs, Mumbai is soon becoming popular," said a senior ANC official, requesting anonymity. Rave parties are characterised by high entrance fee, extensive drug use, chill rooms and even open sexual activities in some cases, said a senior officer from the Narcotics Control Bureau, Mumbai, on condition of anonymity. Apart from youngsters from affluent families, the upwardly-mobile people employed in BPOs and KPOs, film personalities, industrialists are also part of the clientele. "Attendance can range from 30 ravers in a small club of tens. While techno music and light shows are essential for raves, hard drugs such as cocaine, ecstasy and LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) have become an integral part of the rave culture," observed a senior cop.' (India Info, 7 October 2008 - KPO=Knowledge Processing Outsourcing, BPO= Business Process Outsourcing, i.e. IT, call centres etc.).

'The next time you get a whiff of a rave party in your neighbourhood or see a hippie-looking character trying to pass on drugs to youngsters, just dial a number and help the police.
The Anti Narcotics Cell (ANC) of the Mumbai police has introduced helplines for people to give information about suspected drug peddlers and about those consuming drugs. “We are aiming at maximum participation by people. We need their support to help us remove drug menace from our society,” said Vishwas Nangre Patil, deputy commissioner of police, ANC' (DNA Mumbai, 1 November 2008)

For Laika

Thanks to John Hutnyk at Trinketization for reminding me that today is the 51st anniversary of the launch of Spuntnik 2, with its passenger Laika the dog becoming both the first mammal in space and the first space fatality a few hours later.

I've discussed the first songs in space by a man and a woman, but perhaps the honour should go to a dog whimpering in zero gravity. There have been quite a few Laika references in music - indeed there's both a Finnish band called Laika & The Cosmonauts and a UK band, Laika (who I once saw at the Venue in New Cross supporting, I think, Spirtitualized Electric Mainline).

The best of a number of songs referring to the dog is by Arcade Fire - not so much a song about the dog as one evoking the sadness of Laika being sent away to die as a metaphor for the fate of an errant brother ('Our mother should have just named you Laika! It's for your own good, It's for the neighborhood').

DIY Punk Singles

From the mid-1970s there was an explosion of independent music labels that coincided with the birth of punk. Some of these labels were one off do-it-yourself affairs- perhaps a band putting out one single on their own label and then disappearing. Others, like Rough Trade, became reasonably substantial businesses - with all the contradictions that implies in trying to steer an alternative course in a capitalist market. Still, at the very least the independent labels provided an outlet for some interesting, innovative and challenging music that the big labels would never have touched - as well as for quite a lot of rubbish that would never have seen the light of day if the band/label had ever sought a third-party opinion on the quality of their work!

There are some good websites and music blogs trying to document this eruption of 7 inch vinyl creativity. Most are seemingly compiled by people digitising their old records and scanning the sleeves (the latter are great social historical artifacts in their own right) and sometimes the vinyl itself in various glorious colours.

45 Revolutions is the blog linked to the bible for this kind of music - 45 Revolutions by Mario Panciera, an encyclopedia aiming to be the definitive guide to punk, mod, powerpop and new wave singles issued in the UK and Ireland from 1976 to 1979. The book itself is nearly 1200 pages long and covers 3000 singles.

Killed by Death Records covers a slightly broader time scale and demonstrates that the post-punk DIY single phenomenon was not limited to the UK, Ireland, America and Australia- the site includes lots of Swedish examples too.

Always Searching for Music has more of the same (but also some 1980s stuff) with a 1977 French example from Warm Gun.

Worthless Trash is good too, perhaps more power pop than punk-centred with stuff mainly from UK and Belgium.

Punk 77 is not a music blog with MP3 files, but does exactly what is say on the tin with lots of information about UK punk bands from 1976 to 1979.

You need to check these sites regularly, as music files are often only available for a limited period of time (though the pictures and text are still interesting on their own). Warning, this can be very addictive - I have spent the last week listening to 1977 classics from the likes of The Dils ('Class War' and 'I hate the rich'), The Nosebleeds ('Ain't been to no music school') and Some Chicken ('New Religion').

Datacide conference and party in Berlin

I'm going to be in Berlin on Friday taking part in this... If you're within several hundred miles you should try and make it down!

Datacide Conference 2008 and Party

DIA DE LOS MUERTOS, 31.10.08
K9, Kinzigstr.

910247 Berlin-Friedrichshain

Doors open 15.00; Conference start at 15.30

Christoph Fringeli: Introduction - A brief introduction to Datacide, where it’s coming from and a brief introduction to the new issue and the conference.

Christoph Fringeli: Hedonism and Revolution

Will true pleasure only exist after the revolution, or will it be indispensable to even lead to the revolution?Proclaiming the revolutionary as a “doomed man” without “personal interests”, the anarchist Sergey Nechayev set the pace for an ascetic image of the revolutionary that would be picked up by the direct heirs of Bakuninism: the Leninists. An “ideal” of a person without desires and only one passion - the revolution - was supposed to bring about a society of human fullfillment, something that had to go wrong, and end in the misery of the Maoist and Trotzkyist sects. But there has always been a hedonist counter-tendency to this, from Fourier to Sexpol to the Commune movement and the counter cultures of the 60’s to the 90’s. CF will examine some of the tensions and discussions that took place in the 70’s and ask if they have any relevance now.

Neil Transpontine (History is Made at Night): A Loop Da Loop Era: towards an (anti)history of ‘rave’

In 2008 the UK media have been full of stories about the ‘20th annversary of acid house’. Neil Transpontine critiques this conventional history, and celebrates instead the multiple trajectories that converge and pass through the various sonic, social and chemical phenomena grouped under that unstable term ‘rave’. It is a story that takes in not just 303s and 808s but gay riots, carnival uprisings and underground jazz clubs in 1940s Europe.

Stewart Home: Hallucination Generation

Looking at some of the more occulted aspects of the counterculture in 1960s London. How some of the key figures in the development of the scene rarely make it into the histories. Terry Taylor the first person to mention LSD in a British novel, and the inspirationfor both Absolute Beginners and Mister Love and Justice by a better known writer Colin MacInnes. Detta Whybrow and the first major LSD distribution network in London after the drug was made illegal. Alex Trocchi, drug dealing and black powers. Plus the Notting Hill’s problematic writers of the 1950s who later occupied positions on the outer fringes of the counterculture.

John Eden: Shaking The Foundations: Reggae soundsystems meet ‘Big Ben British values’ downtown

John Eden will examine the contribution reggae soundsystems have contributed to British culture and identity, and what they can teach the global mp3 generation. John has contributed writing to a vast number of independent publications over the years and currently co-edits Woofah magazine – “a completely DIY rag covering reggae, dubstep and grime”. He has run his own uncarved.org website since 1997. He began unleashing his musical taste on the world in the mid 80s by wrestling all-comers off the stereo at house parties and standing guard whilst his carefully compiled cassettes played. More recently he has contributed sets to the respected Blogariddims podcast series and played records at a bewildering array of obscure London venues.

Hans-Christian Psaar: Kindertotenlieder for Rave culture.

It's a common myth in music subcultures to think of themselves as independent. But what happens? Commodities get produced and sold on the market to consumers. No matter if those consumers wear dreadlocks or suits. Rebellion and subversion are labels to sell capitalist goods in the cultural industry. Be creative! Have fun! Those are the new imperatives of post-fordist capitalism and its cultural economies. The talk will show on the examples of The Prodigy and Kid606 how rave music is branded and sold.

Lauren Graber: Countervailing Forces: Electronic Music Countercultures and Subcultures

This paper will open with a discussion of how counterculture and subculture have been defined, and then ask what is at stake when we seek to assess divergent avenues within electronic music in these terms. Central to the operational imperative of subculture is the solidification of style and genre - visible and audible signs connoting sameness and belonging. The tactics of visibility and disappearance enacted as subcultural and countercultural everyday practices will be drawn out through a commentary on the book “Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race” and other oppositional tendencies in experimental electronics.

Alexis Wolton: Tortugan towerblocks: Pirate signals in the 90s

After a clampdown on pirate activity at the end of the 80s, the housing estates of London saw a renewed explosion of pirate stations in the early 90s. During the 90s commentators enthusiastically linked the pirate stations with Hakim Bey’s ideas on pirate utopias, information networks and self-organisation. A decade later the pirates still exist, their relationship to the world radically changed by the internet, but the positivist optimism of 90s technoculture has waned, many of its hopes recuperated by Capital.A discussion of the history and legacy of pirate radio, the theories of self-organisation that accompanied it and current ideas on participatory media.

OPEN ENDED PANEL DISCUSSION

PARTY:

noise:_____from 23h

Mario D’Andreta (Alien City Soundscapes)

Line Destruction (Spine)

Circuit Parallele (Spine, Hekate)

The Wirebug (Hekate, Coven H, London)

DJ Controlled Weirdness (Unearthly, London)

Blackmass Plastics (Dirty Needles, U.K.)

Kovert (Criticalnoise.net, Datacide, London)

El Gusano Rojo (Hijos de Puta)

Excavated Shellac

One of my favourite quotes is from Walter Benjamin: “A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history” (On the Concept of History, 1940). This is the method I try and follow with History is Made at Night - no detail is too small for recording.

Many others in the blogospere seem to be operating on a similar basis, documenting every available piece of evidence relating to their particular obsession, nowhere more so than in relation to music. As an example one of my recent discoveries is Excavated Shellac, dedicated to '78rpm recordings of folkloric and vernacular music from around the world'. Here you will find fantastic old recordings from all around the world not to mention images of some gorgeous slices of vinyl and their archaic labels.

Critiques of blogging sometimes give the impression that it is all about ill-informed comment and subjective rants. Granted there is plenty of that, but there is also lots of good qualilty research in progress and primary source material being put out there on blogs. My only concern is how fragile this is - held on private sector browsers, and at risk of being deleted if the blogger loses interest, or perhaps dies. Our collective cultural databank is being extended by the efforts of a million bloggers, but at the same time whole chunks of the social memory of the human species get wiped just because somebody can't afford to keep up their broadband payments.

Mardi Gras in New Orleans

This weekend there has been a 'festival of New Orleans' in London, with Dr John playing for free at the O2 arena in Greenwich. Unfortunately I haven't managed to get down there, but I have been reading up on the history of New Orleans, and specifically the Mardi Gras carnival.

The Mardi Gras carnival in its modern form is the result of ‘a process of creolization, a melding of cultural identities as strands of cultural material fused into a synthesis of something new’. In the eighteenth century, ‘Carnival began more as a closed operation than as a public festival’ with masqued balls in the houses of the wealthy preceding Lent. These later developed into formal processions under the auspices of the aristocracy.

Alongside this was another tradition of public dancing amongst enslaved Africans from the early days of 18th century New Orleans: ‘The plantation economy soon faltered, and land­owners could not generate enough food to feed the enslaved Africans who worked their holdings. The rulers allowed slaves to trade food they grew, hides or meat they hunted, and vegetables and fruit they cultivated at a makeshift Sunday marketplace on the grassy public commons behind the ramparts of the town. The place became known as Place du Congo, or the Congo plains. Today, a portion of the area is contained in Louis Armstrong Park along Rampart Street, just outside the French Quarter… on Sunday afternoons at the Place du Congo market a tradition of public dancing mushroomed. As many as five hundred dancers at a time formed concentric rings, moving in counterclockwise circles, their hand­clapping and feet-shuffling forming cross rhythms to music made on conga drums, tom-toms, panpipes, and calabashes… Costuming was fundamental to African ritual. Mask making as a specific tribal custom was lost in the Middle Passage, but the idea of mask-and-dance in a spiritual continuum lived on in a city where gentry flocked to see the exotic spectacles. Nowhere else in the South were slaves given such freedom of expres­sion in music and dance. The Africans sometimes dressed as Indians, "ornamented with a number of tails of the smaller wild beasts," wearing "fringes, ribbons, little bells, and shells and balls, jingling and flirt­ing about the performers' legs and arms."'

'The patrician love of masked balls and the high place of costumery in the danced religions of the Afri­can ritual psyche spilled into the streets as Carnival traditions unfolded. "Men and boys, women and girls, bond and free, black and white, exert themselves to invent and appear in grotesque, quizzical, diabolical, horrible, strange masks and disguises," reflected a visi­tor at the 1835 celebration. "Human bodies are seen with heads of beasts and birds, beasts and birds with human heads; demi-beasts, demi-fishes, snakes' heads and bodies with arms of apes; man-bats from the moon; mermaids; satyrs, beggars, monks and robbers parade and march on foot, on horseback, in wagons, carts, coaches ... in rich profusion up and down the streets, wildly shouting, singing, laughing, drumming, fiddling, fifeing ... as they wend their reckless way."'

In the 1850s, carnival began to become more formalised: ‘The Mistick Krewe of Comus, formed in 1857, gave Mardi Gras its formal patina. People wearing costumes and parading in streets had been around for years when along came Comus, a group of elite young white men…This was the first group to form an elite and secretive men's society, which came to be known as a krewe. "Their lavish balls could be attended only by those fortunate enough to have received invitations, but their proces­sions of floats, lights, and music could be viewed by anyone who cared to, and vast crowds lined the city's streets," observes the artist and Mardi Gras chronicler Henri Schindler… Float designs were steeped in themes of antiquity and Renaissance drama. With the artistry of early Carnival rose the aspirations of a former slaveholding class that wedded its eco­nomic recovery to an idea of neoclassical glory. Mardi Gras became a time when "deities of forgotten pan­theons and the splendors of long-vanished courts are restored for a season, summoned into being from the gilded vaults of the old city's memory”’.

Black Krewes

Later other parts of New Orleans society began to form their own krewes: ‘The Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, the leading black krewe, was formed in 1909 (its parade began seven years later). Zulu today is the longest and most imaginatively designed black parade, a rudder of Carnival. Black men in blackface, wearing grass skirts, hand out gilded coconuts from floats that roll down St. Charles Avenue on Mardi Gras morning, preceding the Krewe of Rex . But where the Rex ball is a pinnacle in the calendar of the white elite, with invitations difficult to come by even for those with personal ties to members, the Zulu ball is a sprawling affair with upwards of ten thousand people, many of them bringing food to be laid out on a vast array of tables. Zulu is where privilege melds with the masses: just about anyone can go to the ball for the price of a ticket'.

'Zulu began as a double satire. A group of black longshoremen engaged in a parody of the Zulu tribe in South Africa and used their African costumes in a further burlesque of Rex and the would-be royalty of white folk. If Rex had a royal robe and scepter, King Zulu wore a grass skirt and waved a ham bone. Out of this smirking parody evolved an organization rooted in the working and middle classes. Louis Armstrong rode as an exultant king of Zulu in 1949. Today the city's leading politicians, including several dozen whites, are members of Zulu… The Zulu parade has been and still is one of Mardi Gras's most loved traditions'.

'The Zulu krewe consists of a non traditional hierarchy of characters. It has a king but no nobles per se, and one character, the "Big Shot of Africa: outshines the king (the term outshine was used in earlier days and meant to look better than someone else in competition). A Zulu member created the Big Shot character in the 1930s. He is the man behind the throne; no one can see the king without seeing the Big Shot first. Among the other Zulu characters, the Witch Doctor was one of the first. He prayed to the gods for good health for the members and the king, as well as for good weather and safety. The Ambassador, Governor, and Mayor were characters created in the 1970s, representing heads of government… Also in the 1970s, James I. Russell and Sonny Jim Poole created the "Mr. Big Stuff" char­acter, who tries to outshine the Big Shot. The idea came from the 1970 recording "Mr. Big Stuff" by Jean Knight'.

'Another side to black Carnival is a symbolic revolt against the overlords of history. In 1883 or there­abouts, a group of black day laborers began masking as Indians. This tradition harked back to the slave dances at Congo Square, where Indians watched Africans who sometimes dressed as Indians. Indians had harbored runaway slaves in Louisiana territory. Unlike Natives in many other parts of the South, where Indians were driven out by force, the Choctaws in New Orleans melted into the local popu­lation, many of them marrying blacks. Traveling Wild West shows of the 1880s had a hold on the black population. But with sinuous street dances and improvisational rhythms pounded out on hand percussion instruments, the Mardi Gras Indians cast a spiritual searchlight onto the African past. Embracing the persona of the Indian, the black tribes paid the supreme compliment to another race by adapting their trappings as spirit figures. The black Indians used the ritual stage of Carnival to parade as rebellious warriors for a day, stopping in bars, sometimes fighting, releas­ing passions otherwise bottled up by the dally grind of poverty and race’

'The trancelike possessions of African Americans in the vernacular churches found an analogue in the dancing of the black Indians, according to the late Big Chief Donald Harrison Sr., founder of Guardians of the Flame. "Trance: remarked the chief, a folk philosopher who worked for many years as a waiter and enjoyed the works of Albert Camus, "I can see winos, anybody, you can get to a certain point and go into a trance. To the casual observer they look like they're just jumping up and down, but in reality they're in a world by them­selves, rhythmically." Some call it a trance; others say "with the spirit." The term "possessed" is another way of saying "fugue state." The sudden force of energy rushes into the body, throwing it out of control, into gyrations, while the mind - or spirit- spins into another zone.’

Gay Krewes

'The French Quarter is the Babylonian essence of New Orleans, a riot of erotica during the big day, with many people walking around semi-nude, nearly nude, or nude-but-painted…The high point of Mardi Gras in the Quarter is the midday drag-queen beauty contest on a stage at the corner of Bourbon and St. Ann Streets. The dazzling costumes, many with rainbow feathers, dripping light, bespeak a tradition of the day without ­closets stretching back well before the rise of gay lib­eration in the 1970s. Gay Mardi Gras grew more formal in the 1950s with the Krewe of Yuga, which sati­rized the traditional Mardi Gras balls. The police raided Yuga's first ball in 1958, and ninety-six members had their names printed in the newspaper in an arrest sweep'.

'Undeterred, the Krewe of Petronius formed in 1961, marking a move by gay men into the Carnival mainstream. By the early 1980s some fifteen gay krewes were holding balls with elab­orate floor shows. The AIDS epidemic, however, cut deeply into the community, and by 1999 only five krewes were active, including the Lords of Leather and the first black gay krewe, Mwindo'.

Source: Mardi Gras in New Orleans, USA: Annals of a Queen by Jason Berry in Carnival, ed. by Barbara Mauldin, 2004, Thames & Hudson. Pictures: top: a 19th century Mardi Gras scene, sourced from a history of the Rex parade; bottom, Mardi Gras 2007 by 'Sir: Poseyal Squire Poet'

A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld

... or at least the 'sounds' of pulsating stars detected by the Corot space telescope in France. Have a listen, some interesting noise from the outer shores of Stellar/Helio Seismology. Did you know that the Sun 'forms a spherical acoustical resonator with millions of different normal modes of oscillation. Due to the waves' long life times, destructive interference filters out all but the resonant frequencies, transforming the random convective noise into a very rich line spectrum in the five-minute range'.

Of course, you're not actually hearing the stars. There is no giant microphone in space picking up sound waves, rather it is possible to infer what sound waves are emanating from the interior of stars by interpreting light images - and then to convert this data into sounds that we can listen to. If we could get close enough to the stars would we ever be able to hear them? I don't think so, because sound waves need air to travel through to our ears. Still it would be nice to find out first hand - set the controls for the heart of the sun.

(a huge ever growing pulsating brain...)

Anita Berber: Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy

Anita Berber (1899-1928) was a dancer in pre-Nazi Germany, famous/notorious for a life of bisexuality, drugs and semi-naked performance.

With her sometime husband and dancing parter Sebastian Droste she published in 1923 a book of poetry, photographs, and drawings called Die Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase (Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy), based on their performance of the same name.

In Berlin, "Berber was known to dance in the Eldorado, a homosexual and transvestite bar, where Rudi Anhang, dancer and jazz banjoist, accompanied her. Berber's speciality was a depraved dance number entitled 'Cocaine', performed to the music of Camille Saint-Saens. She also did a piece called 'Morphium'" (Kater).

Another dance, first performed in 1919, was Heliogabal where she played a sun-worshipping priest ‘Exquisite, entirely attired in gold, her metallic body lured the sun’ (Elegante Welt, 1919, cited in Toepfer).

In 1925 she was the subject of an expressionist portrait, entitled The Dancer Anita Berber, by the painter Otto Dix. 

Death in Vegas dedicated a song to Anita on their 2004 album Satan's Circus.

Berber's reputation still manages to wind up present-day Nazi sympathisers. While researching this I came across one such scum-site praising Hitler's cleansing of 'decadent' Weimar Berlin, and stating that Berber 'Typified the Jewish mindset. Her stage acts revolved around masturbation, cocaine, and lesbian love' (yes the fascists are still out there, though apparently there's now one less to worry about in Austria)

Sources: Michael H. Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the culture of Nazi Germany; Karl Eric Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935.

100 bpm - songs to save your life

A research study at the University of Illinois suggests that people were more effective at Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) if they were listening to the Bee Gees 'Staying Alive' while performing it. The reason is apparently that the song's tempo, 103 beats per minute, is close to the optimum number of 100 compressions per minute to help jump start a heart during a cardiac arrest.

I don't mind this song, but if you're working in the health service it might be an idea to get a bit of variety and check out other tracks with a similar tempo. DJ BPM Studio - which specialises in just this kind of thing - has a whole list of 100 BPM tracks including Madonna 'La Isla Bonita' and Bjork 'Isobel'; pretty close too is Lily Allen 'LDN' (100.01 BPM), Pink 'Stupid Girl' (100.02), ABBA 'Dancing Queen' (100.47), The Clash 'Hitsville UK' (100.69) and Blondie 'In the Flesh' (100.8).

Update February 2012: The British Heart Foundation have put out an advert for hands only CPR featuring actor/ex-footballer Vinnie Jones and using 'Staying Alive' as the soundtrack 

Smell

My previous post on the notion of community mediated by the senses got me thinking about what senses come into play in music/dance spaces. I would say that they prioritise, in this order, hearing (music), seeing (lights, clothes, people), and touch (dancing with physical contact with others or just feeling vibrations and the sensation of your feet on the floor).

But what about smell? This seems a bit of a neglected sense, it is rare for any effort to be made to create an olfactory ambience, although you occasionally come across incense in 'chill out' spaces and flowers at more glamorous events. The smell of clubs, parties and gigs varies according to the crowd but is usually an accidental cocktail of sweat, smoke (less so since the smoking ban), perfumes and, in some cases, poppers.

While I was pondering this I came across an article by Cathy Heffernan in the Guardian about a club in Finland for deaf dancers which puts a strong emphasis on scent: 'Deaf clubbers respond to the music's beat and vibrations, which is why DJs tend to use heavy bass. But vibrations do not relay tunes or lyrics, the aspects of music that trigger memories and emotions'. At SenCity in Jyväskylä, Finland, an effort is made to 'translate the emotions behind the music... An aroma jockey uses a fan to direct wisps of vapour from burning oils into the crowd, producing scents that will complement the music - citrus flavours are used for happy songs for example. Visual jockeys are responsible for co-ordinating signdancers, who interpret song lyrics on stage through a fusion of sign language and dance, with the music and light displays. And there's the vibrating floor: a raised platform with a transmitter attached to enhance the vibrations, just as speakers enhance music soundwaves'. Sounds interesting, check out this short film about the club:

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"