Friday, January 26, 2007
Nu Rave
To a certain extent, 'rave' is just one more seam in the gold mine of past counter/sub cultures, a mine well explored by The Klaxons with their arch references to Burroughs ('Atlantis to Interzone' ), Crowley ('Magick') and Pynchon ('Gravity's Rainbow'). The term Nu Rave seems to have started as a joke, or perhaps more accurately a tongue in cheek hook for the music media coined by the KLF-literate Joe Daniel of Angular records, who released The Klaxons' first single. Nevertheless there is a tangible phenomenon with The Klaxons and a number of other bands standing aside from from the worst boring blokes with guitars indie-rockist counter-revolution.
The commonality between some of the more interesting newish bands is not really an imagined link to 'Rave' but an intelligent, anti-cool, playfulness, with a desire to create interesting situations rather than just fulfill a Brits school business plan. It is noteable that as well as The Klaxons, Art Brut, The Long Blondes, The Violets and Bloc Party all first released stuff through Angular, a small indie label whose 2003 New Cross compilation created an explosion of interest in the corner of South East London where I live. Actually most of the 'New Cross Scene' bands weren't from the area (The Klaxons and Violets were), but playing in local venues like the (sadly gone) Paradise Bar gave them a crowd and a leg up. Angular has functioned like some earlier classic indie labels such as Postcard or even Crass's label, content to put out one or two tracks by bands they like to introduce them to the world and then leaving them to make their own way. Angular reference points include riot grrrl and indie pop rather than the tedious 60s/70s bloke rock canon. As well as launching (or maybe fabricating) 'Nu Rave', Angular have also been credited by the NME with inventing 'art punk'.
Musically, all of this is quite diverse, but what has been exciting - and perhaps following in some kind of rave trajectory - has been a sense of adventure, of stepping outside the normal confines of predictable outfits and gigs, a sense of the crowd and not just the band. An excitable New York Times journalist may not have been entirely geographically or otherwise accurate in the following description: "The new rave scene is a small, tightly connected movement of artists, D.J.’s, bands and partygoers forged in a series of warehouse parties that, beginning in 2003, were organized by a gang of artists called the Wowow Boys, in New Cross, a ragtag neighborhood of students and boarded-up buildings southeast of London Bridge. As in the 1990s, the gatherings attracted newly formed bands that were eager to create an environment "where the specific aim was to party", said Jamie Reynolds, the bass player of the Klaxons'.
But there have been real warehouse parties -we went to one at The Old Seagar Distillery in Deptford last year (where The Klaxons played), there have been parties in Peckham, and yes there's even been the obligatory police presence without which no self-respecting youth scene is complete (see this report of a squat party in Shoreditch last July, pictured). The Klaxons, with their ear for melody, may be heading for bigger things, but less radio friendly outfits like Lost Penguin will no doubt be blasting party goers for a while longer. All we need now is a moral panic to really kick things off, but with so many first time ravers now writing for the British press, this looks unlikely.
(photo sourced from PopScene).
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Nancy Spero (1926-2009)
'Ms. Spero was active in the Art Workers Coalition, and in 1969 she joined the splinter group Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), which organized protests against sexist and racist policies in New York City museums. In 1972, she was a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery, the all-women cooperative, originally in SoHo, now in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn. And in the mid-1970s she resolved to focus her art exclusively on images of women, as participants in history and as symbols in art, literature and myth.
On horizontal scrolls made from glued sheets of paper, she assembled a multicultural lexicon of figures from ancient Egypt, Greece and India to pre-Christian Ireland to the contemporary world and set them out in non-linear narratives. Her 14-panel, 133-foot-long “Torture of Women” (1974-1976) joins figures from ancient art and words from Amnesty International reports on torture to illustrate institutional violence against women as a universal condition. Ms. Spero considered this her first explicitly feminist work. Many others followed, though over time she came to depict women less as victims and more often as heroic free agents dancing sensuously...'
Images: top - 'The Dance' by Nancy Spero; bottom - 'Artemis, Acrobats, Divas and Dancers' by Nancy Spero, mosaic on 66th Street/Lincoln Center Subway Station, New York City (1999, installed 2004).
Monday, December 06, 2010
Classic Party Scenes (6): Warriors, 1979
Musically my favourite scenes are those featuring the radio DJ who broadcasts a coded commentary on the gang battles with lines like 'All right now for all you boppers out there in the big city, all you street people with an ear for the action' before playing Nowhere to Run as a threat to the Warriors.
Then there's the scene where the Warriors are enticed into the club house of The Lizzies, an all-women gang who promise 'Let's party a little, get something going'. You don't need a PhD in queer studies to work out that Lizzies suggests 'Lezzies', with women dancing together to "Love Is A Fire" by Genya Ravan. Of course the welcome is a trap and as the women pull out their weapons a hapless warrior shouts 'The chicks are packed'. The film is loosely based on an ancient Greek story, so The Lizzies also stand for the Sirens.
Update: As mentioned in the comments, a sample from the film features in the mid-1990s house track Can You Dig It by Mark the 909 King (sample kicks in at about four minutes):
The Can You Dig It sample comes from a speech by gangleader Cyrus early in the film, where he calls for the gangs of New York to unite and take over the city:
This speech is also sampled in Can U Dig It? by Pop Will Eat Itself
Sunday, December 11, 2011
The Art of Parties
A 1950s report of a 1920s retro party might seem obscure even for this site, but there are some interesting reflections on the art of parties.
'On last March 24th, in Greenwich Village, a party, was thrown for the ostensible purpose of commemorating the 1920s. The editors of Retort, being at the time on one of their occasional visits to New York, attended. It was a fairly large party — upward of 100 people, most of them costumed in the styles of the period — either authentic or reasonably faithful representations. There was a competent Dixieland jazz band and an adequate amount of drink, the price of admission being a bottle. The party was held in a commodious sculptor's studio on the top floor of a loft building in a non-residential section of the Village, so there was both plenty of room and sufficient isolation to permit complete freedom from the usual urban inhibitions about noise.
Yet, in spite of all these manifest advantages, the party, as a party, and especially as an attempt to recapture the spirit of the '20s, didn't really come off. There was a good deal of boisterousness, some fairly wild dancing, and a determined effort on the part of the sponsors to keep things moving, but the atmosphere was not at all that of the period that was supposed to be commemorated, and the level of intensity that a really good party attains was never observable. The present writer, who has a very warm feeling for the '20s, perhaps because he was just a little too young to take part in the revels of that era, but old enough to have witnessed some of them, stayed on to the bitter end, hoping that something might turn up, but unfortunately the evening just wilted away, and when at 3 or 4 in the morning the last remaining revelers began looking for their coats, it was as if nothing had happened.
To the connoisseur of parties — and in the '20s, the party was an art form with many zealous devotees, not a few of whom gave their lives as a result of their single-minded dedication to art — a party is not really successful unless something happens other than the usual banalities of passings out, corner seductions, et al. Exactly what is supposed to happen is impossible to foresee (this is the chief charm of the party as an art form). At some point in the evening, usually well after midnight, when the more inhibited guests have gone home and the rest are sufficiently liquored up to be ready for anything, a sort of spirit of the party begins to take over, fusing the participants into a spontaneous organic whole which is capable of very curious and memorable acts.
At the party in question, the focal point of the evening was the so-called Charleston Contest, and had the party been sufficiently alive, this could have been the spark that started things moving. As it turned out it was merely an exhibition of rather extreme dancing (none of it the Charleston) with most of the people reduced to spectators while a dwindling number of couples competed. I can recall parties in the '20s when an event of this nature suddenly evolved into a mock revival meeting or voodoo ceremony, with everyone taking part, or at least experiencing the excitement — a sort of pseudo-religious ecstasy that could be quite breathtaking.
Of course, such a performance is only possible in an entirely spontaneous andabandoned atmosphere, and the heavy aura of self-consciousness that hung over this party was a serious detriment to even bogus spirituality. Perhaps we who have endured the terrible '40s are unable to recapture the fine, free and essentially naive gusto for wickedness that characterized the lighter side of the '20s. The '20s, despite the fond belief of its Flaming Youth, was — at least in perspective — a very innocent period. There was something ingenuous and good-natured about its revolt against Victorianism. The bottomless pit that the First World War had opened up before the Lost Generation was a shallow ditch compared to that which our generation has witnessed, and the consequent cynicism was childlike and lighthearted, in comparison to the numb apathy that is characteristic of the more advanced youth of today.
The "wild" party was the perfect vehicle for expressing this spirit, especially since, as the result of Prohibition — that last desperate stand of the forces of Puritanism — the simple act of taking a drink was transformed into a wicked and excitingly illegal event. (Today, the youth must resort to the more deadening narcotics to achieve a similar thrill). A party in the '20s that commemorated the '90s was a lively, good-natured spoofing of the previous generation's foibles; we of the '50s, with our prevailing atmosphere of doom and disintegration, are hardly in the proper mood to give the same sort of treatment to the youthful follies of our parental generation'.
Tuesday, December 06, 2011
Police use UV ink at Occupy Montreal
Bouncers tricks and bass lines at the eviction of Occupy Montreal:
'Occupy protesters “branded” with UV ink: Montreal police borrow tactic from club bouncers to stop protesters from returning to public square
Occupy protesters in Montreal were dismayed to find they had been marked by police with a special ink that is only visible in UV light after being arrested during a raid of Victoria Square Friday. Police told CTV Montreal they borrowed the technique from bouncers at clubs and bars and it is meant to mark protesters who might return to the square.
But they apparently weren’t so forthcoming with at least one protester. “They wrote on my hand with a permanent marker and then after I felt something pointy and metallic scraping across my skin,” wrote protester Nina Haigh on Facebook, continuing: 'I immediately asked “What are you doing” and they simply said we wrote on you with a pen and showed me a bunch of various pens in her hand. I didn’t argue about it and I was unable to look at my hands as they were tied behind my back with zipties. As soon as I was released I looked at my hands and there was no ink on them from a pen. …
This morning we tested my hands under a black light and sure enough there was a number 2! The freaky thing is this is IN my skin, washing my hands and scrubbing with abrasives will not get this off…. perhaps in several months of my skin cells renewing themselves if will eventually fade.What ever ink that is in there is irritating my skin slightly and its a very terrible feeling that they put a substance in my body with out my consent and then later lied about it' (Salon, 30 November 2011).
This took place during the eviction of the Occupy Montreal camp on 25 November, as reported in The Link, 29 November 2011:
'In the end, Occupy Montreal didn’t go out with a flash bang, but with a bass line. Exactly six weeks after the global Occupy phenomenon came to the city, Victoria Square was a place transformed, then transformed again. Gone was the intricate maze of shelters and structures. Gone were the kitchen and library areas. And gone were many of the inhabitants of the tent city, kicked out by members of the Service policière de la Ville de Montréal on Nov. 25.
Still, despite the naked landscape of the square compared to the bustle and crowds that had been a mainstay for the past month and a half, on Saturday afternoon, a few hundred people came back to the site to discuss what they had been a part of, and where the movement will go now. Unlike the violent end to the Occupy camps in New York, Oakland, and UC Davis, Montreal’s version didn’t end in clashes with the cops—instead, it ended with a concert. Local legends Bran Van 3000 performed a stripped-down set marked with the refrain, “Love is in the air.” [Bram Van 3000 are best known in the UK for their track Drinkng in LA]...
Today, the tents have been torn down, and the inhabitants have all gone back to wherever they came from. All that’s left is the question that’s been levied at the movement since the beginning: what’s next? What do you do when a protest predicated on the physical occupation of a location no longer physically occupies that space?
“That’s a good question,” said di Salvio. “Even in the middle of summer we were wondering what was going to happen in the winter. We’re human, and it gets very cold". Rather than look at the winter as a time for bonds to weaken, di Salvio, who had also paid a visit to New York City to check out Occupy Wall Street, thinks that breaking up the camp will result in different kinds of organization—digital and physical—that will lead to bigger things when the temperatures rise again in the spring...It’s almost like a tour: you go and reinforce and recharge to meet up again next summer.”
Monday, August 25, 2008
Arthur Weinstein
Weinstein opened HURRAH, a club at Broadway and 62nd Street, in 1976. When it closed down he ran a number of ‘illegal after-hours clubs downtown that mixed the fashionable and the young and artistic. The kids had radically odd colors of hair, and the coat-checker was a transvestite’ (New York Times). The clubs included the Jefferson in his apartment on East 14th Street (1980) and the Continental on West 25th (1981-83). His partner 'Colleen gave the Continental a characteristic look, at once kitschy-retro and futuristic. She put up several dividers, creating little rooms, and pasted them with wallpaper from the Fifties and Sixties. She had Futura 2000, the graffiti star, cover a wall in the former loading dock and put a giant aquarium tank in the main space' (Observer 2004).
As recalled in the Observer interview, running these clubs involved dealings with corrupt cops, mobsters and the FBI- one night at the Jefferson 'the Public Morals Squad raided us. With axes. That was some night. A guy who was part of the sanitation police was there and he started fighting with them. And they beat him up. He went to jail. He had a gun on him.'
Later Weinstein ran a legal Lower East Side club called the World and in the 1990s designed lighting for clubs including The Tunnel (1990-1998), The Limelight (1990-98) and Club USA (1993-1996).
Brooklyn Vegan has a nice appreciation of his life, with lots of interesting comments from people remembering seeing bands at his clubs (including Jesus and Mary Chain and The Pixies) and Fred Giannelli from Psychic TV recalling a 1988 PTV Halloween gig at Weinstein’s The World.
Weinstein was also an artist, photographer and sometime resident of the famous Chelsea Hotel – there is an interview with him at the Living with Legends: Hotel Chelsea blog. The Hotel Chelsea blog is fascinating by the way – everybody knows about William Burroughs and Leonard Cohen staying in the Chelsea, but did you know about Elizabeth Gurley Flynn?
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers
Monday, November 07, 2011
Halloween in London
London Halloween Costume 2011 |
At the party a DJ dressed up as a penguin span the obligatory Michael Jackson's Thriller to a party including a crocodile, a parrot, the snow queen from the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (handing out Turkish delight), a bat, two suicide bombers, Amy Winehouse and somebody dressed up in a take on one of Louise Bourgeois' costumes from her performance piece Banquet/A Fashion Show of Body Parts (seemingly somebody had a similar idea at a feminist art themed Halloween ball in New York in 2010).
Louise Bourgeois in 1978 |
Erica Magrey, New York Halloween Costume 2010 |
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
The Wind from Nowhere
Thursday, September 08, 2022
Monica Sjöö - art of anarcho-feminism, the Goddess and the peace movement
This was the night of Beltane and we were here to celebrate the Mother. We made a Beltane-fire carefully so as not to damage the mound and then gathered to discuss a possible ritual. By now, we had been joined by the American wise woman/witch, Starhawk' [who] 'suggested that we cast a circle, call in the elements, ground ourselves and dance the spiral dance. We danced and drummed and chanted'
At the end of the procession on 4th May they 'cut holes through the fences and snaked our way into the stones across the field, all the while singing Return to the Mother while police and tourists looked sheepishly on. Our number had by now increased since many women had come from London, Bristol and other nearby places to join us just for the weekend. Once within Stonehenge, we gave the ancient stone-beings loving care and energies and danced for hours amongst them; we meditated, sang, lit candles and dreamed.
Many pagans and people of the Craft have a love for the land and a reverence for the Earth, but many too do not realise that this is not enough and that one must also take political direct action against those that ill-treat and exploit Her. It was this understanding that fired the women on our walk'.
The exhibition at Beaconsfield gallery, 11 June to 10 September 2022 |
Monday, November 28, 2022
London queercore 1995: Vaseline, Up to the Elbow, Sick of it All
'Vaseline zine' started out in 1995 'for gay people who love indie and alternative music and want to rage against the scene'. They put on club nights including at the Bell in Kings Cross (later the Cross Bar, today the Big Chill). The period saw a flourishing of 'queercore', riot grrrl and LGBTQ+ indie clubs and bands in the UK - including Sister George, Mouthfull, Bandit Queen and Sapphic Sluts.
Vaseline, no. 2 1995 'rage against the scene' - with review of PJ Harvey at Kentish Town Forum, May 1995 |
Vaseline no.2 (May 1995) mentions that 'Popstarz is a new weekly gay indie night' opening at at Paradise Club with 'indie-pop downstairs and 70s discos and trash upstairs'. Not sure where the Paradise Club was (don't think this was the Paradise Bar in New Cross) but Popstarz went on to be a massive club night moving to the Scala in Kings Cross and continuing for 20 years at various locations. Its founder Simon Hobart died in 2005 (see Remembering Popstarz) |
from Vaseline no.5 |
'Mouthfull' interview from issue 7 |
Katy (right) on her way to see Bikini Kill |
Vaseline no. 7 |
Tuesday, October 02, 2012
Hobsbawm on Jazz, Dance and Class
One of my favourite short essays of his looks at the early days of jazz in Europe, reflecting on how its popularity related to changing class cultural practices. 'On the Reception of Jazz in Europe' was originally published in 1994 and then republished as 'Jazz Comes to Europe' in the excellent collection 'Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz' (1998). Here's a few extracts:
'The speed of transatlantic transport was such that ideas, notes and people could already cross the ocean very rapidly indeed. Will Marion Cook's Clorindy: The Origin of the Cakewalk - Cook was later to bring Sidney Bechet to Britain - was performed in 1898 in both New York and London. The foxtrot, the basic dance routine associated with jazz, first appeared in Britain in the summer of 1914. a few months after its first appearance in the USA , and in Belgium in 1915. Jazz had hardly been baptized in the USA when groups under that name already toured Europe. They were there from the middle of 1917.
...the interesting thing about this diffusion is what was being diffused. It was one of several kinds of novel cultural and artistic creation that emerged, in the late nineteenth century, from the plebeian, mainly urban, milieu of Western industrial society, most probably in the specialized lumpenproletarian environments of the entertainment quarter in the big cities, with their specific subcultures, male and female stereotypes, costumes - and music. The Buenos Aires tango which secured for Latin American music a permanent but minor place on the international dance floor at the same time as jazz did, is one example. Cuban music is another...jazz was both novel and, in origin, an art belonging to an autonomous subculture...
...Jazz made its way and triumphed , not as a music for intellectuals but as a music for dancing, and specifically for a transformed, revolutionized social dance of the British middle and upper classes, but also. and almost Simultaneously, the British working-class dance. During the 1900s the upper-crust dance was transformed in two ways. (An expert contemporary witness dates the major change precisely to the season 1910-11.) First urban dancing had already ceased t be a seasonal occupation linked to special occasions. and was being practised all the year round as a regular social and leisure activity. To some extent it was practised privately, but special dancing clubs developed - there were three in Edwardian Hampstead alone - and it occurred in hotels and what were not yet called 'nightclubs' . The tea-dance and the restaurant-dance appeared on a modest scale. Second, the dance lost its formality and ordered succession. At the same time it became simpler, more easily learned and less demanding and exhausting. The crucial change here was that from the turning dance (for example. the waltz) to the walking dance, such as the Boston. a sort of rectilinear waltz, in the early 1900s. It seems clear that these developments reflected a substantial loosening of aristocratic and middle-class conventions, and they are a striking and neglected symptom of the notable emancipation of women in these classes before 1914. The link between the dance revolution, even specifically between the new primacy of rhythm in social dancing, and the emancipation of women, did not pass unperceived. It is noted in the most intelligent or the early jazz books, Paul Bernhard's Jazz: Eine musikalische Zeitfrage (1927)...
...British jazz had a broad popular base, because its uniquely large working class had developed a, for Europe, uniquely recognizable, urbanized, non-traditional lifestyle. Even before 1914 huge popular dance halls had already been built for the holiday demand of specifically proletarian seaside resorts like Blackpool, Morecambe, Margate and Douglas on the Isle of Man. The post-war mania for dancing was immediately met by the new institution of the so-called Palais de Danse, of which the Hammersmith Palais. the first . immediately became a jazz venue by booking the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1919. No doubt the music to which the plebs danced would not always be considered jazz today. Indeed, the central tradition of British mass dancing moved away from jazz towards a curious phenomenon called 'strict tempo' dancing, which was to become a competitive sport on British television. Nevertheless, jazz made its mark as a name, an idea, a novel and demotic sound.
The massive dance mania produced an unusually large body of dance-band musicians, mainly of proletarian origin, or at least raised in the environment of the brass-band movement, much appreciated in the industrial areas. These formed the original core of the jazz public... Socially speaking. dance-band musicians, who did rather better in the 1920s than in the depressed 1930s, were on the borders between the skilled workers and the lower-middle classes. It was in the higherparts of this zone that the bulk of British jazz evangelists were to be found before 1945. They were typically self-made intellectuals. In London we find 'Rhythm Clubs' (ninety-eight of which sprang up in Britain between 1933 and 1935) not in middle-class quarters like
Chelsea, Kensington or even Hampstead, but in the outlying districts like Croydon, Forest Gate, Barking or Edmonton...
We can leave aside the reaction of high society and its associated intellectuals. In Britain this was of no great importance though doubtless it pleased Duke Ellington to have the future King Edward VII sit in on drums at a party for his band in London. Much more important, as has been suggested, was the democratic and populist character of the music, which made the Melody Maker state approvingly: [It appeals not only to the fauteuils but to the gallery also. It considers no class distinction.'
...[what Britain] did develop, however, probably in close association with American New Deal radicalism ,was a powerful bonding of jazz, blues, folk and the extreme left, mainly communist but also, marginally, anarchist. For such people jazz and blues were essentially 'people's music' in three senses: a music with folk roots and capable of appealing to the masses, a do-it-yourself music which could be practised by ordinary people, as distinct from those with technical training, and lastly a music for protest, demonstration and collective celebration. Revivalist or Dixieland jazz lent itself unusually well to all these purposes. So much so that at its peak in the 1950s it came closer to turning jazz from the art of a coterie into a mass music than has been achieved anywhere else, except perhaps, for a moment, during the swing boom of the later 1930s in the USA. It is no accident that a typical anthem of the 'trad' jazz fans also became the typical song of the football fans on the terraces : 'When the Saints Go Marching In'. However, it should be noticed that, while revivalist jazz became de facto the music of an age-group in which students, and particularly art students, became prominent for the first time. it was neither consciously nor militantly a youth music... The 'trad' boom prepared the triumph of rock, but only rock turned itself into a conscious manifesto of immaturity'.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
1987: dancing in Brixton and beyond
A Wendy May chart of tracks from the Locomotion - not sure of source of this, evidently a 1980s music paper! |
'Free bus to Trafalgar Square from 1:00 am' |
Wear it Out flyer posted on Twitter by Ian Marsden, who recalled: 'We lived above the taxi office opposite and got a mainly local crowd from leafletting in Brixton and Camberwell. Prince was a staple. Collaborators/DJs were @deborahmarsden1, @WyattBedford, Susie Bonfield, Gin Murphy and @LucyOBrienTweet' (Lucy O'Brien, sometime NME journalist and author of books on women's music, recalls that she played Sign O' The Times DJing there. Apparently fellow NME writer Stuart Cosgrove also DJ'd there). Danse Chase (or Dance Chase) upstairs at the Alexandra at Clapham Common had a similar musical mix of old and new. I remember hearing tracks there from Michael Jackson's Bad LP, another 1987 classic, on the day it came out. The image on the membership card, with its Keith-Haring-meets-the-Aztecs figures, was repeated on banners around the walls. I believe they were designed by promoter Kev Moore. |
Fridge programme, March 1986 (from Phatmedia) |
The PSV - I didn't realize until recently that stood for Public Service Vehicles, it being at one time a social club for bus workers (photo by Richard Davies via Paul Wright on twitter) |