All Tomorrow's Parties: NS Travels piece

Morning, campers - in the New Statesman

They looked like refugees from an indie war, the duffel-coated huddled masses, sheltering ineffectually behind pin-badge amulets, under sheets of British summer rain.

I went to All Tomorrow's Parties in Butlins Minehead for the NS, and somehow avoided reviewing a single band all weekend. Huzzah.

Purple wow: bonus level

(L-R: Gemmy, Joker, Guido, outside The Bell, Stoke's Croft)

The other day I went to Bristol to meet the new purple wave, Guido, Gemmy and Joker, for a piece that ran in Friday's Guardian:

Bristol fashion: the rise of purple

This was quickly picked up by The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones, who mentions that all the dubstep DJs he's met in the US have been women. 'Maybe it's different in England,' he suggets - it is Sasha. It is. I'll post a paragraph of the original piece that had to be cut for space, just because I think the Joker-Roni Size connection will interest some people:

It’s a school night in a cosy pub beer garden in Bristol, and three grown adults are humming different Sonic the Hedgehog and Street Fighter theme tunes at each other and downing cranberry sambucas. It’s not a scenario that screams out ‘the future of British dance music’, and the students and local misfits drinking in The Bell pay them no mind. No-one notices when the retro computer game eulogies mutate into slightly more candid clues: one of them, Joker, is on his way to Roni Size’s house after the pub: “Roni asked for a remix from me. I think maybe he expected to hear BRRRRRRRRRR, the generic dubstep wobble-bass sound, so he was kind of surprised by what he heard. But he gets it... he gets it.”

And here are a few bonus bits we didn't have space for in the purple text-box, a few tunes I arbitrarily decided would help to 'explain purple':

Gemmy – Sonic The Hedgehog theme remixes http://bit.ly/sonic1
Blackstreet – ‘Don’t Leave Me’ http://bit.ly/blackstreet1
Nate Dogg – ‘G Funk’ http://bit.ly/nate1
Skream – ‘Midnight Request Line’ http://bit.ly/skream1
Mr Fusion – ‘On Da Block’ http://bit.ly/block1

The great cultural entropy: as prophesised by Bis

Are we reaching a deceleratory endpoint, in terms of cultural productivity? Are we 'running on empty'? Mark Fisher/K-Punk thinks we are - in the New Statesman a few weeks back he followed up Alex Williams' thought-provoking blog post with the same gloomily menopausal dismissal of contemporary dance music we heard at the nuum debate. (On which subject: I wrote a Buffoon Empiricist Manifesto on Lower End Spasm, putting the apparently controversial case that dancing is preferable to RSI.)

While jokingly mooting a riot grrl-Europop-grime club night on Dissensus, I was reminded of 'Eurodisco' by Bis, and looked it up on YouTube. Well I'll be damned if the Scottish trio haven't accounted for so many aspects of the hardcore continuum debate, years ahead of time. In a minimal, looped lyric - it is disco, after all - they deal with genre taxonomy and the 'wot do you call it' moment ("a style is named and it's dead"), and quite succinctly account for the idea of post-modern cultural entropy ("there is no latest trend / the party's at its end / i thought music was dead") and the terrible persistence of information in the web 2.0 era ("i'm just so sick of listening"). It's really quite extraordinary:

Bis - Eurodisco

the party's at its end
a style is named and it's dead
there is no latest trend
the party's at its end
if it's a new beginning, then i don't want to know
if it's not worth pretending, then i don't want to know
i'm just so sick of listening, why should i want to know
i lost my 15 minutes on eurodisco
the music's in my head
i thought music was dead
give me the words i'll sing
but i can't feel a thing...i'm singing
pump it up pump it up pump it up...
just don't stop just don't stop just don't stop...
the party's at its end
a style is named it's dead
there is no latest trend
eurodisco
you're so disco

J'accuse K-Punk: biting your ideas off an 11-year-old Bis single? I'm surprised.

Junior Spesh

Last summer Elijah from the Butterz blog/Rinse FM and I were talking about the lack of imagination in music blogging – oh look, here’s another grime blog which offers embedded YouTube videos and nothing else: great.

So while the whole of the grime scene was on its summer holidays in Napa, I jokingly suggested we use Red Hot Entertainment’s brilliant ‘Junior Spesh’ ode to budget fried chicken shops as a jumping off point to start a blog on the subject. Elijah called my bluff and registered the name , and the Junior Spesh Blog was born. After a flurry of initial activity and a bit of a break, the blog is now back with a vengeance, with a host of contributors from the grime and dubstep scenes – at least half of our writers are leading DJs.

Chicken and chip shops are the pirate radio stations of the culinary world. Their starting point is the mainstream corporate legitimacy of KFC, the chain that has exported a culinary staple of the American south to the whole world – indeed our blog features a review of KFC in Cancun, Mexico, and its peculiar ‘curry sauce’ option. But what we’re really interested in is not KFC but the pirates: HFC, SFC, Dollar Fried Chicken, Alabama Fried Chicken, Kennedy Fried Chicken.

Just like pirate DVD sleeves, mistakes are made in the plagiarism of the original model: so you end up with such abominations as New York Fried Chicken (the very thought would upset southerners a great deal), Chickpizz (which serves pizza too), and New Taxas Fried Chicken (which managed to make up a new American state and spell it wrong too).

The names are silly and the chips are greasy, but in an age of global fast food brands, this pirate fried chicken stands against brand homogeneity and for devious ingenuity – it’s dirty, creative local capitalism at its best.

MPs do the right thing; predicted cold snap fails to materialise in hell

Since last year the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee have been hearing evidence about the 2003 Licensing Act, about Form 696, and about how bureaucracy has come to shackle live music, clubs and even circuses. Astonishingly, the cross-party Committee of MPs has done the right thing, and called on the government to scrap 696 and re-liberalise small-scale music events. It’s a rare fillip for the image of MPs in these dark times: evidence of a switched-on, liberal parliamentary democracy, heeding popular feeling (the anti-696 petition), common sense (unlicensed live music does not result in orgies of violence), and expert witnesses (like Feargal Sharkey of UK Music, who I also interviewed for the Guardian piece on 696 and black music).

Politicians in acting-for-the-public-good SHOCKA. It does happen. Full story on The Guardian Music Blog.

Subsequently the Met Police have gone on the defensive, claiming 696 has helped reduce violent crime in this BBC interview:

"A co-ordinated effort, and 696 assisting the process of identifying potential gang conflict, is undoubtedly contributing towards that reduction of shooting incidents in licensed premises."

How 696 assists with identifying potential gang conflict is not made at all clear. The viability of the Met's stats are also unclear, with no proof of causality, and especially given they've been summoned specifically in response to criticism. What is increasingly clear is that the often-rumoured Police blacklist of artists - musicians whose names will get a rave shut down immediately - must exist. UK Music are trying to find out more about this issue, do get in touch with them if you know more.

Hardcore continuum debate: Aftermathematics

Just a quick update to say the Hardcore Continuum discussion at UeL last month was good fun (not least because of the opportunity to 'drive' the DLR, above) - thanks to everyone who came. A few people have done write-ups or responses, including Alex Williams, Martin Clark, Melissa Bradshaw and Simon Reynolds, who I guess has been listening to tapes of the debate - I’m still not clear if mp3s are being made public or not, I've been told different things at different times.

I wrote this follow-up on Lower End Spasm, which was basically a long-winded way of saying ‘okay, this has been fun, I want to get back to enjoying music again now’. In Melissa Bradshaw's case, this mentality led her to flee to a socaerobics class half-way through the debate (see the link above). Alex Bok Bok pretty much ran home to get on with making beats. Friends in the audience who I spoke to afterwards (among their number promoters, DJs, producers, musicologists, bloggers, and broadsheet journalists, fwiw) responded in the same vein: "okay, that was that. Can we go raving now?" A bit of theory is indeed the spice of life, but too much of it and you end up choking.

The revolution at home

Tony Benn spoke at a public meeting in Stoke Newington on Monday night, and I seized on the opportunity to see the big friendly giant of the British left in the flesh, sidestepping the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea on the way in. There's a write-up of the event here, so I won't bother reiterating everything that was said - but there was plenty of compelling pacifist rhetoric, calls for justice for the dead and displaced of Gaza, and enriching historical context, delivered Grandpa Simpson-style by Benn ('I remember being in London during the Blitz when...').



I just wanted to account for one of the audience members who spoke at the end. He was about 22 or 23, and spoke with deliberate, learned passion about the need to "shut down" the G20 when it comes to London on 2 April this year, to loud applause. He said it was the responsibility of young people like himself - like myself - to stand up and resist, to crush the international capitalist system that has brought the current economic crisis upon us. He spoke with anguish of his own personal plight, being without work for months, struggling to get by in recession-hit Britain after finishing his degree last summer. Our blighted generation are suffering the most, he said, and it will only get worse.

What I haven't told you is that this poor, impoverished young man, struggling just to survive in a country brought to its knees by global capitalism, had just graduated with a degree from UCL (one of the best universities in the UK), and was wearing crisp new Adidas pumps, a new Nike sweater, expensive looking jeans, and Georgio Armani frames to his glasses. I actually felt like punching him, but I didn't want to get moron on my knuckles. God I despise the left sometimes.

As Alan Parker Urban Warrior put it: "ignorance is a weapon: use it".

Nasty, Londonist and Short

He's actually neither nasty nor short, it's just a silly pun on one of my favourite blogs.

Asked by the New Statesman last year "Do you love your country?" Roots Manuva replied: "I love London so much it should be a country. London, love you until you die."

Roots Manuva @ Koko for the New Statesman

The Hardcore Continuum? A discussion.

Presented by the Centre for Cultural Studies Research, University of East London
In association with The Wire.
UEL Docklands Campus (Cyprus DLR)
April 29th 2009 2:00pm-6:00pm

Simon Reynolds' commentary on the "hardcore continuum" - the mutating sequence of dancefloor music to have emerged from the breakbeat hardcore matrix of the early 1990s - has recently generated intense debate in the musical blogosphere. What is the value of this concept? Does it still usefully describe the context from which dynamic new beat musics emerge? Can the conditions of creativity in the 1990s be replicated in the era of web 2.0? Should we even want them to be?

Speakers: Mark Fisher (K-Punk), Alex Williams (Splintering Bone Ashes), Steve Goodman (Kode 9), Lisa Blanning (The Wire), Dan Hancox (Guardian, New Statesman), Kodwo Eshun (Author of More Brilliant than the Sun), Joe Muggs (Mixmag, The Wire), Jeremy Gilbert (Co-author of Discographies)

Attendance is free but pre-registration is recommended. For info or to register contact J.Gilbert@uel.ac.uk

'Buffoon empiricism'

some replies and follow-ups to my 'generational resentment' piece about the hardcore continuum in fact magazine: from k-punk, simon reynolds, alex williams, kode9, and mixed biscuits off dissensus.



*thanks to sara manara for the image and sophie heawood for the drunken meme