Monday, October 27, 2008
Excavated Shellac
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.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Mardi Gras in New Orleans
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."'
'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'.
Friday, October 24, 2008
A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld
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...)
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Anita Berber: Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy
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.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
100 bpm - songs to save your life
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
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Smell
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:
Sunday, October 12, 2008
A Community of Sense
Friday, October 10, 2008
Berlin - 21 days and counting
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Reggae and the National Front
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:
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Moon-boots
(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 ).
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
Keep it Tight
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
Monday, October 06, 2008
Sister Ray and Berwick Street
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!
Sunday, October 05, 2008
The Carnivalesque
…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).
Friday, October 03, 2008
Street and Studio
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:Wednesday, October 01, 2008
It is wild. It is sexy. It is the mambo
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'.
Some great footage of Mambo dancing in Harlem in early 1950s, posted by the folks at dancehistory.org:
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Humans and dancers
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'.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Dance Participation Regulations, Utah
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.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
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).
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
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
Monday, September 22, 2008
Disco Fires
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.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Sleepless in Seattle
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.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Remembering Katy Watson
'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!
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Nepal Disco Workers Protest
"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.
"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.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Pervis Jackson and Detroit
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.