Notes on 'Dancing in the Street'

Notes and thoughts on:

Barbara Ehrenreich, 'Dancing in the Streets: a history of collective joy', 2007

For me this book continues to explain how class oppression works culturally after my efforts to bring arguments together in 'Conspiracy of Good Taste' (1993). I had noticed that the new ruling class of the last 4 or 500 years had claimed the head or intellect as their identity with book knowledge as its main tool. The lower classes did not have true intelligence and were all brute and smelly bodies good for manual work. Of course the ruling class had emulated the old courtly manners and then the power of aspiration had drawn all their minions (the middle or managing classes) to take on these manners. In the last century the power of mass media and education had everyone to aspired to have any human 'dignity' take on these manners. One of the greatest of which was the ability to sit still. (footnote on aspiration: Wallpaper magazine anecdote)

her book is well timed in its support of the disco aspect of my recent Agit Disco project in which questions the relation of music and politics.

Barbara Ehrenreich shows how the repression of movement has long been tied up with the subjugation of the crowd. We are all reminded that the ifrst self disciplien required at school is the ability to inhibit bodily movement and to sit still for hours. She argues in great detail how moving together as a group is also a profound motor of human connection/ communitas/ collectivity/ and commune ity. Firstly she looks at how religious ritual may have functioned in this way. She goes back to the repression of Dionysian rituals and of early Christianity, which she describes as being a danced religion, by the Romans. Later of course as the Christian church develops its own hierarchy and power elite the dancing in the churches is repressed by the church authorities. This culminates in the edicts of Calvin from which emerges the well-timed 'Protestant work ethic'.

She indicates how separation and physical passification may lead to all kinds of ills - in particular depression. She describes the limitations of Freud who could only imagine a love between two persons and had not experienced or concieved of group bonding, much less anything approaching collective ecstacy.(p14)

Dancing together with a lack of restraint is one of the most important things we can do together as humans. I was struck at the Cardew book launch event at Theed Hall, after all that had gone before, the audience was so still, quiet and passive.

She argues strongly that rock and roll was the greatest break from the escalating success of this separation, especially in the Sixties (she is from theat generation!). She does not seem to be aware of the rave cultures Second Summer of Love two decades later.

Perhaps she is wrong to separate dance from all the other sensory expressions... and in fact all direct means of communication.

There is no reference to oral culture or more particularly to oppression and its relation to the repression of emotional expression. Can ecstatic ritual embody release of painful emotion? It seems to involve the kind of shaking and or wailing that might be related to primal pain (early hurts). Certainly oppression aims at isolation and division and so a ritual of reconnection would bring up the pain of separation (most forcibly perhaps infant separations) and lead to an expanded sense of freedom.

The weakness of her argument that depression is attributable to lack of dance /ecstatic ritual is that many other possible causes are not considered. Many of the forces of modernisation could just as easily be argued to contribute.

Can class questions be collapsed into the question of hierarchy? She argues that the suppression of ecstatic ritual and communal dance happens with any heirarchial society.(p.251). A pre modern /rural society with its irregular work patterns and connection with nature is surely less liable to alienation. On the other hand the formation of urban societies with modernity gives rise to masses of people in close proximity. Technology give a greater possiblity of co-ordination of mobile action - although the forces of control are using equal and opposite technologies.

The book is persuasive that the lack of communal dancing, singing, ecstatic ritual, carnival, feasting, costuming et al in consumer society, dramatically weakens collective bonds. She is unsure if countering this constitutes a revolutionary strategy - at least on its own...

Is it possible that effects of the Rave dance scene of the late Eighties will be evident as those who took part in it, and, let us assume, gained a profound reconnection to the collective body, as they come to positions of greater social influence? This should be happening around about now! Are the progressive political leaders of the future being formed in the anti-globalisation carnivals of the present?

Strong points she makes:

1. Our capacity for collective joy and union is encoded within us possibly as deep as our capacity for sexual joy and union. Demonstrated by its constant return. p.260

2. This desire can be manipulated or repressed by power. It seems to pose a threat to power but it is uncertain how this becomes a political reality.(see Schell.)

3. Danced ritual as a "biotechnology" in the processes of formation of larger groups (p 254) This is our desire ('generosity and wit') to reach out beyond 'kith and kin' to form larger collectives with 'affective ties' (p.253) "Ecstatic rituals build group cohesion" p.252. "There is no apparent limit to the number of people that can celebrate together" p.251

4. A basic pattern by which repression occurs p. 251 "The elite withdraws from the festivities" "Festivities continue for a while" but they then present a real or imagined challenge to power and are repressed.

The antipathy of collective celebrative activity to the modern world relates to the treatment of the Ecuadorian Volleyball players in Kennington Park by the local powers. (see Participant study of the management of an enclosed common in London 2006 unpublished)

refs

Michael Albert Parecon Verso 2003

Those 'without culture' are those whose culture is simply unresourced, unarchived and not represented as knowledge in the rituals of legitimation

notes on Archive from 1996 (with a few 2009 additions )

The ARCHIVE as field, the production of knowledge and the accumulation of cultural capital.

The archive is a consignment of knowledge, activated as 'res publica'. The archives are the pile foundations of the edifice of knowledge. The base of discourse builds a consensus which becomes our collective world view - as Knowledge.

As Derrida points out the 'consignment' of data to archive is, literally, a 'gathering together of signs' which by its exclusions and emphases forwards the cultural ground of a particular epistemology. I hope to demonstrate that Simon's Evans' private collection of materials from Kents Gypsy and traveller cultures and Exploding Cinema's forum of action exist as 'archive' in neonate form but have difficulty becoming 'res publica' with the appropriate architectural prestige and usage by a network of scholars.

"The meaning of 'archive', its only meaning, comes to it from the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded. The citizens who thus held and signified political power were considered to possess the right to make or to represent the law. On account of their publicly recognised authority, it is at their home... that the official documents are filed. The archons are first of all the documents' guardians. They do not only ensure the physical security of what is deposited and of the substrate. They are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archives. Entrusted to such archons, these documents in effect state the law"(Derrida 1995).

The written document or other numinous artifact kept within the public and intellectually integrated archive allow a new dimension of stability, objectivity and developmental progression to accrue to discourse which an oral culture cannot not hope to achieve. The printed book allowed a massive expansion of this power.

The museum or archive, functions as a ritual structure through the use of architectural vocabularies, dispositions of collections and the routing and guidance of public access (Swallow 1996). The sum total of such designs will, of course, tend to affirm the status quo. It will rarely be a place of uncertainty as its central function is quite the opposite. Nor will it often invite debate and challenge to prevailing orthodoxies.

One aspect of this mediation of power is in the selection of the collections and archives that are donated or purchased. The collection is then indexed and or catalogued. In this process alone much is often hidden. Search for collective in the National Art Library and you won't find the Exploding Galaxy, a performance commune from 1966. However I know they have the document 'Planted' as I sold it to them in the Eighties. Further refinement is then achieved by the type and timing of displays, conference presenting papers on thematic archive explorations, summary descriptions, contextualisation and evaluation papers. Museum and other journals. All these mechanisms surround the archive on its path from its emergence in temporary collective 'Xplosions' or slowly accrued private collections, to collections of collections and their building-up into an architecturally framed 'palaces' of Knowledge and the triumphant world-view that this expensive process entails.

This is a generalised theory and some claim the museum may be changing a little; at least, to a degree, in the North of England. David Fleming, an Assistant Director of Tyne & Wear Museums Service, argued that museums are unpopular with working class people only when they do not deal in social history that they can relate to their daily experience. He even went so far as to claim: "The days of middle class curators creating museums in their own image, dominated by their middle class outlook, are gone"(Fleming 1991).

However, Simon Evans reported that the local museum of Kentish life was not interested in his archive as they were soley orientated towards tourists and entertainment rather than contributing to deeper levels of learning, debate and knowledge. We should remember that archives of Kentish folk culture are rare so Simons collection should have evinced a special value. This is not an isolated experience, as illustrated by the recent prolonged series of similar exclusions related by Emmanuel Cooper.('People's Art: working class art from 1750 to the present day', Mainstream, Edinburgh 1994) In the face of the lack of interest from the Kent 'archons' Simon's approach to activating his archive as knowledge has been to make occasional radio programmes commissioned by Radio 3: This year he did one that was field recorded early on Mayday morning, then edited, and broadcast that same evening. He is currently preparing a book on seasonal rituals (1996!).

The Exploding Shows could be seen through Bourgeoise spectacles as a exercise in kitsch. A sort of Ragged Special School for 'les enfants terrible'. But it may equally be seen to focus what would otherwise be unseen and unknown. It also nurtures those artists who are excluded for many reasons. Classism ensures that many working class artists will be among this number.

Apart from the photocopied programmes, which record the films shown by title and maker, the Xploding Cinema Collective also encourage artist's networks and independent festivals (eg 'Volcano' forthcoming November 1996). They are currently launching their first compilation tape amidst controversy as to whether this will produce a selective history which will misrepresent the diversity of the live event.

Working class cultural capital could be seen to exist in dispersed forms but capital is not activated as power unless it is concentrated. One of the mechanisms which concentrates cultural capital is the archive. Unless the distillations of the archives are available a complex culture cannot be reflexive, cannot come into full consciousness of itself and so cannot adapt intelligently.

This means that an archive is not enough. It has to be activated by research, interpetation, discursive rituals and publication.

The dominant culture, the heritage of the Enlightenment, is typified by a reason so cold and calculating that it becomes a distraction from or even justification of oppression. Working class culture is warm and somatic but denied an inclusive and integrated realisation of its intelligence as power.

Thoughts on the relation between APG (Placements period 1968 - 1975) and the subsequent Working Press (my period as editor 1986 - 1996)

These thoughts mainly came out of reading Howard Slater's THE ART OF GOVERNANCE 2000 in preparation for the discussion "Industry and the Arts must walk hand in hand" at Flat Time House, Peckham, London, July 2009

The Incidental Person failed to take off because it posed a challenge to the Arts Council as an institution of cultural control. But the Incidental Person Placements got a far as they did because it was not a radical challenge, or not apparently one. Was it a Trojan Horse? Possibly... if you read between the lines.

As defined the IP was a professional individual who had to enter an firm or institution at a managerial level. It would never been contemplated at all if what was being proposed was a firebrand to infuse the shop floor with ideas of social revolution! Or as Anthony Davies pointed out we compare the interventionist strategies of Cinema Action, who entered factories and worked with the workforce, with those of the IP Placements... we see how twee is their challenge.

There was no contemplation of the class nature of culture in John's mind as far as I could tell whenever I had the chance to challenge him on this. At the same time unwritten factors like the network of artists who supported the idea and were fed into the placements were often radical left and or working class and aware of it, like Ian Breakwell. Barbara's own back ground is not what it appears.

HS quotes John Latham as saying artists should:

'take determined control of their social function'

'work with a total context of people'

'bypass administrative and curatorial control'

'transform exhibitions into zones of social research'

I remembered meeting John Latham at various times throughout the Seventies and into the Eighties, when I more spoke to Barbara and we all lived in SE London. The Seventies conversations with John were often stratospheric and often his rhetoric didn't quite answer my questions but nevertheless stretched my mind in following what he was saying and he in turn had good attention for what I had to say.

"The overtoned echo of the APG is such that its most socially effective work seems to be either submerged from the record in the desiring-production of a placements micro-events or lies in what Sir Roy Shaw, the then General Secretary of the Arts Council, dubbed as a 'spoof work': the exposure of a state controlled culture." HS

I agree with Howard Slater's conclusions and it made me think that Working Press 1986 - 1996 was a strategy that responded the APG in some part, especially in being intended as a challenge to the Arts Council (state culture system) as an attempted re-alignment of the concept /identity of artists in a way that produces a indigestible contradiciton within the system. It also aimed to do useful experimental work in finding our about what 'working class' people who become artists end up thinking and doing simply by inviting them to (self-)publish a book under the Working Press imprint. In fact it followed the four injunctions of JL. I'm not saying that I was following John's line any more than I'd claim that those injunctions were not part of the prevailing oppositional culture of the time.

Several ideas came together with the Working Press project (which was started with the artist Graham Harwood).

• I thought the system was vulnerable to small groups aligning themselves as identity groups (demonstrated by Black artists) because of the Equal Opps legacy of the Sixties and Seventies. But that class identity was almost impossible for the system to absorb without radical challenge.
• The Arts Council represented a unequal distribution of resources to the arts in proportion to the sources of finance (working peoples taxes). Identity politics was a good way of challenging this. The oppressed had to make demands from their own mouths.
• The identities of artist and working class were mutually exclusive in the semiotics of class identity. Artists were assumed to be 'middle class' by virtue of being artists. Artists from working class 'backgrounds' were also often rejected by their communities. Working Class communities did not have their own artists, or for that matter their own culture, beyond the vulgar or the community arts.
• To chalenge the narrow definition of 'peoples art' (Emmanuel Cooper) that saw it as the naive, amateur, folk, outsider but excluded those people who had chosen to go to art college in the course of following their enthusiasms to make stuff.
• Publishing offered delineated freedoms. ISBNs bought over the counter no questions asked. Alternative distribution available. Even a network of alternative & radical bookshops, and bookfairs. (though little access to the reviewing mass media by then). You could publish what ever ideas you liked. This all meant access to a fairly wide discursive field. A 1000 book edition would cost around £2000 to print.
• Artists who had grown up in working class situations might be having thoughts due to that, might be producing work that bore that influence, might have different ideas about art, might, even, have glimmerings of what a working class intellectually autonomous culture might be like.
• Promoting artists 'with working class voices' in the way that a publication can within the Art field.
• Encouraging artists with such background to take themselves seriously and have their work and thinking validated by the invitation to publish. And to form a network of working class artists on this basis.
• To connect working class visual culture assertion across generations (e.g. with John Gorman...)

WP avoided the professional claims of APG but it never got to the point of contending hegemonic space with ACGB (as ACE was then). I hoped this would happen out of a group agreement on radical strategy that never occured. Were we too scared to risk sacrificing our careers in the way that John and Barbara had done?

A bold confrontation with ACE would have required a Ghandian faith and vision from the artists. It wasn't a strategy I could argue or lead well enough! It was enough for most people to get support to get stuff out themselves and perhaps to contribute to the last aim of developing ad hoc questionings about what relations could exist between working class and art or culture.

Like the IP WP had an open agenda on content - there was no editorial control of what invited artists self-published.

The final illustration of the connection between WP and APG was that Barbara Steveni herself was going to do a WP book about her life. This was based on my admiration for the way that she used her female charms to 'get through doors' and into seemingly impregnable institutions, government departments and corporate boardrooms with determination, resolve and clear radical thinking. What she had in mind I'm not sure as the book never materialised.

The other point is that the whole set up of the ongoing historification of APG is supported by John's art historical achievements. I was going to say that WP doesn't have that sort of mast to hang its flags on but maybe the achievements of Harwood and Co may be such a vehicle. You never know.

PS I has been brought to my attention that the copy of Howard Slater's ART OF GOVERNANCE paper that was circulated prior to the event, and that I read, was one that had some passages excised. This is a classic mechanism in the recuperative process that are embedded in high cultures management practices. I'm not even suggesting its conscious. Anyway please refer to the unexpurgated version on Infopool that I have linked to.

Slumdog Millionnaire? aye Danny now you are one

To understand the core intent of this film you have to keep in mind Danny Boyle background and where he is coming from. You also have to take into account the inevitable content control of high finance movies that demands glamour and slush.

With this in mind the most radical interpretation of the film is that the really worthwhile statement that this films inserts into a popular discourse is that the most worthwhile knowledge is not of the encyclopedic pub quiz kind but rather knowledge that is formed out of the experience of oppression. 

Because of academia's formation from Humanism as a training for state cadres it has always spurned knowledge gained through the fire of suffering and pain. And so it is we cannot and will never solve war, & punishment and all the problems that beset humanity thru that path because that way to knowledge does not allow one to enter or study this type of experience. There are partial exceptions but the univer-city rites of seminar and lecture do not allow for anything but mild brushes with emotionally strong material or in depth human engagement.

(Exceptions of course are highly defended usually by being professionalised, like pyschoanalysis. And remarkable individuals will always transcend the system.)

AGIT DISCO 4 by Martin Dixon

AGIT DISCO 4

1 School's Out - Alice Cooper          

When I first heard this awash with static on Radio Luxembourg back in 1972 I just couldn't believe it. Soon we were all singing along with glee.
"Schools' been blown to pieces..."

 

2 Shipbuilding - Robert Wyatt       

Set in the build up to the Falklands war it's hard to choose between Elvis Costello's version and Robert Wyatt's. Costello's has a beautiful trumpet solo by Chet Baker but Wyatt's voice really gets to the poignancy of the lyrics. 
'Diving for dear life, when we could be diving for pearls"

3 Zombie -  Fela Kuti             

I love the way Fela sets up a groove and then digs in deep for three minutes before even starting to sing. An outspoken critic of the Nigerian military and government.

 

4 What keeps mankind alive? - The Happy End

A big band inspired by Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, a favourite place to see the Happy End perform was at the White Horse in Brixton, always an uplifting experience both musically and politically.

 

5 Machine Gun -  Jimi Hendrix        
Hendrix at his finest on this protest song at the Vietnam war from the Band of Gypsys live recordings (recorded on hand held portable B&W video recorder) at the Filmore East in 1969.

"Evil man make me kill you - Evil man make you kill me - Even though we're only families apart"

6 Clandestino -  Manu Chao

I like Manu Chao's music. It makes me happy.        

 

7 The Band Played Waltzing Matilda - The Pogues
Written by Eric Bogle this version is from the album Rum, Sodomy And The Lash.
A powerful anti war song made all the more poignant by Shane MacGowans's raw vocals. Alec Campbell, the last known survivor of the ANZAC forces at Gallipoli (and the last known survivor of Gallipoli) died on Thursday, May 16, 2002 at the age of 103. Mr Campbell enlisted at 16, and served at Gallipoli in 1915. He led Hobart's ANZAC Day parade three weeks prior to his death.
"But year after year their numbers get fewer
Someday no one will march there at all"

 

8 Stand up for Judas - Dick Gaughan        

Written by Leon Rosselson I once made my mum and dad, both Methodists,  listen to this thinking it might change their minds.

"So stand up, stand up for Judas

And the cause that Judas served

It was Jesus who betrayed the poor with his word"

9 Ku Klux Klan - Steel Pulse            

I first heard Steel Pulse at Rock against Racism gigs and then later on the college circuit.

We used to warily wear yellow Anti Nazi League badges and shout at the protests against Tyndall and the National Front.
"Walking along just kicking stones
minding my own business
I come face to face, with my foe
disguised In violence from head to toe"

              

10 Tension Town - Radical Dance Faction           

From the 1991 album Wasteland. Founded by Chris Bowsher with their dark dub and spoken vocals they became the sound of Elephant and Castle if not of south London. We (the Proles) shared Wango Rileys travelling stage with them at Fordham Park festival and later at the Archduke Charles. It was the only time we got a decent rider – a case of beer.

 

11 F.T.R.T.V. - The Twenty Fifth of May 

Fuck The Right To Vote. From the 1992 album Lenin and McCarthy. But who were they? I've got no idea except I reckon the SWP featured in there somehow.

 

12 Career Opportunities - The Clash         
Originally recorded on their first album, this version with vocal track by the keyboard players very young sons is from Sandista!

"Do you want to make tea at the BBC

Do you want to be, do you really want to be a cop"

13 Animals - The 1926 Committee
Steve Cope and the 1926 Committee arose from the ashes of The Proles. I used to play trumpet with them on this one song. Invariably the last song of the set I remember getting on stage with them in the packed basement of the squatted121 Centre in Railton Road, Brixton. Every time I lifted the trumpet a dog would leap up barking wildly.
"Whenever they need to segregate, experiment or isolate, or simply to humiliate, they'll call you animals " 

 

14 The Good Ship Lifestyle - Chumbawamba

By the time they released the album Tubthumping most of their previous anarchist following were screeching about how they'd sold out. They probably had, but I was still suckered by their anthemic pop and that sweet trumpet.

"This is the good ship lifestyle
all my friends jumped ship
I elect me the captain
this is the loneliest voyage"

Martin's music stuff  www.mdx.org.uk

AGIT DISCO 3 - Getting It Straight In Notting Hill Gate

Tom Vague’s Agit Disco speed pop history London psychogeography selection

Vague 47

1 The Pink Floyd ‘See Emily Play’

 Syd Barrett was reputedly inspired to write the lyrics of ‘See Emily Play’ by the ‘looning about’ of Emily Young at All Saints church hall on Powis Gardens in late 1966. This was during Pink Floyd’s seminal Sound/Light workshop series of gigs, which were part of the London Free School community action project, along with the first Notting Hill Fayre and Pageant procession. The first UK hippy underground paper, International Times (or IT), was a continuation of the Free School newsletter, The Gate/The Grove.

2 The Jimi Hendrix Experience ‘Purple Haze’

In early 1967, as Erno Goldfinger said ’scuse me while I kiss the sky and began work on Trellick Tower, Jimi Hendrix was staying at 167 Westbourne Grove, when the property was painted purple. According to rock legend, on his return from a UFO club trip one morning, the sight of the house inspired his second single.

3 The Rolling Stones ‘Sympathy For The Devil’

Shortly after the Powis Square gardens were forcibly opened by radical hippies as a children’s playground, number 25 was chosen to star as ‘Turner’s House’ in Performance. Leading the supporting cast, Mick Jagger sold his soul to satin as the jaded rock star ‘Turner Purple’. The May ’68 revolution in Powis Square may have been overshadowed somewhat by the events in Paris, but one square at least was opened permanently for the people in London.

4 Quintessence ‘Getting It Straight In Notting Hill Gate’

As the hippy movement went horribly wrong in 1969 with the Altamont and Manson murders, to Quintessence’, ‘things look great in Notting Hill Gate, we all sit around and meditate.’ According to the review of their debut Island album ‘In Blissful Company’ in Oz 25, the ‘Hippy Atrocities’ issue, the track ‘Getting It Straight In Notting Hill Gate’ ‘transcends a tendency towards total banality in the lyrics and achieves the status of a minor classic.’ After getting in straight in All Saints hall with a lot of Grateful Dead-style collective jamming, Quintessence became the ultimate, or worst, progressive-jazz-rock-blues-Indian-cosmic hippy group.

5 The Clash ‘London’s Burning’

Of all the groups associated with Notting Hill, from Pink Floyd to Gorillaz, the Clash have the most street cred and best represent the area with the Sound of the Westway. Joe Strummer wrote the lyrics of ‘London’s Burning’ at his Royal Oak squat in 1976 after watching the traffic on the Westway from Mick Jones’s towerblock, Wilmcote House, the other side of the flyover. The day after their first London gig, Joe Strummer was under the Westway on Ladbroke Grove at the start of the ’76 Carnival riot. The Clash first promoted themselves with a graffiti campaign that included Westway stanchions, and never missed an opportunity to pose for photographers under the flyover.

6 Bob Marley and the Wailers ‘Punky Reggae Party’/‘Jamming’

By all accounts, Bob Marley was initially sceptical of punk rock and more inclined towards prog. But in Notting Hill, during the course of the ‘Exodus’/‘Jamming’ sessions at Basing Street studios in 1977, he was won over to the cause. Don Letts says he assured him that the Clash were reggae fans and not ‘crazy baldheads’. As a result, Bob, Lee Perry and Aswad came up with ‘Punky Reggae Party’ as the b-side of ‘Jamming’, the Wailers’ first top ten single.

AGIT DISCO 2 Selection and notes by Johnny Spencer

Although there were some exceptional rock recordings that would have some influence on me until Punk came along I grew up listening almost exclusively to black music most of which was from America. The struggles for civil rights by blacks in the USA during the early part of the 20^th century was one of the most critical conflicts in the developed west; and up until the late 1960s, much of the music of Afro Americans reflected this. Located within that music was the message of resistance and hope, it spoke, not always directly, of a rejection of the status quo, a refusal to accept, and often of a complete disregard for convention, but also gave out a message of love, and the anticipation of another way of life, a life without burden, a life with justice. 

It was these sentiments embodied in the music sometimes ethereal at other times concrete that I along with many other working class youth in Britain felt an affinity with, though not necessarily knowingly. Having grown up ‘working’ class in a specific ‘outsider’ community I was sensitive to many of the themes in the music outlined above, and felt a particular empathy with the anger, at the hypocrisy and abuse, that would at times be manifest in the songs. Chuck Berry’s Too Much Monkey Business is a fine example of this, where his anger can be heard spontaneously breaking through at the end of some verses; but rage on the brink of containment can be heard at its most potent on Muddy Waters Manish Boy (first released at a time when black men were still called boy), the anger, self assertion and defiance in this song is quite literally palpable.

At the other end of the spectrum was Sam Cook, and it his A Change Is Gonna Come that represents a landmark in black popular music and the struggle for civil rights. He takes a reflexive and optimistic position, and without being whimsical or over sentimental maintains a critical position. James Brown’s devastating Say It Loud, I’m Black And I’m Proud marks something of an end to this period of subject as total outcast. It’s hard to now to imagine how problematic this record was to white people, its message was so direct, so uncompromising that most whites, and possibly even some blacks, who heard it would have not only been offended but would also have felt vaguely threatened. In contrast to James Brown’s in your face approach, Marvin Gaye, when he finally broke free of the demands on him to be a crooner of love songs, wrote and sung what is considered to be the first black music concept album (What's Going On, 1971). His music echoed that of Sam Cooke’s, a generation earlier, with a thoughtful and questioning approach to a wide range of problems, including, the economy, ecology, drugs, and war (he had recently lost his brother in Viet Nam), admittedly he based a lot of it around his religion, but none the less his presentation of the issues helped politicise and agitate me and no doubt many others.

In direct contrast to the largely middle class and bourgeoisie hippy movement that had developed in the UK in the mid to late 1960s, the Skinheads, another British working class youth movement disdainful of convention and authority, took instantly to Reggae, another form of black music still expressing much of the anger and passion that seemed to be slowly ebbing away from Afro American music. These records from Jamaica were talking about the reality of poverty, oppression and the struggle for justice for the underclass, songs like Israelites by Desmond Dekker and Sufferer by The Kingstonians, figured prominently with Skinheads; who while being depicted as anti social were in fact, by accepting the art and culture of the West Indies and its people, doing more for the social relations of those immigrants in the UK than is ever given credit for.

During the 1970s Reggae music was to take over the flame of dissent from the US; and, like its American counterpart, the music from Jamaica had, contrary to general impressions, many different forms. One such form: ‘Roots’, first appeared in the late 1960s. Roots music was characterised by its, often militant, political position, the songs regularly focused on social situations of the underclass, and would mix social comment with a spiritual underpinning (Rastafarian).  When I first heard this music again I felt some kind of affinity, as I knew intuitively these were songs on my behalf. Songs of honesty, in the face of widespread and pernicious dishonesty from capitalism and its running dogs: the state, the media, advertising and etc., One such recording Declaration Of Rights by the Abyssinians, heralded this force for good in popular culture. Roots music steadily grew and became more widely accepted by larger audiences until songs like Get Up, Stand Up, by The Wailers were agitating oppressed people all over the globe.

By the end of the 1970s Reggae music had still managed by and large to stay outside of corporate control, and became part of Punk, the first real politically militant British Pop music that I took to. Punk music sounded a wake up call to a disheartened and demoralised British public subjugated by years of lies from a political movement that had completely lost all integrity with the principles for which men and women had fought and sacrificed for. I was now, after years of musical agitation (yes I am extremely slow witted) beginning to have a clear and informed mind with which to make my own decisions, and amongst the many political, thought provoking and motivational records to come out of the Punk/New Wave era Bloody Revolutions sums up my political thinking at the time. I did decide then that it might be time for me to start trying to do a bit of agitation of my own . . .

AGIT DISCO 2 

1. Too Much Monkey Business – Chuck Berry 1956

 

2. Monkey Speaks His Mind - Dave Bartholomew - 1957

 

3. Manish Boy – Muddy Waters 1955 (1977)

 

4. A Change Is Gonna Come – Sam Cooke -1964

 

5. Where Have All The Flowers Gone – Walter Jackson - 1965

 

6. Were Gonna’ Make It – Little Milton - 1965

 

7. Sufferer – Kingstonians - 1968

 

8. Israelites – Desmond Dekker - 1968

 

9. Say It Loud, I’m Black And I’m Proud – James Brown - 1968

 

10. Declaration Of Rights – Abyssinians 1969

 

11. Inner City Blues – Marvin Gaye – 1971

 

12. Mighty Cloud Of Joy – Mighty Clouds Of Joy - 1974

 

13. Don’t Give It Up – Blood Hollins - 1976

 

14. Supernature – Cerrone – 1977

 

15. Baltimore – Ron Pryer - 1978

 

16. Where Do The Children Play – Horace Andy - 1972

 

17. You don’t Know – Bob Andy – 1973

 

18. Fade Away – Junior Byles 1976

 

19. Get Up, Stand Up – Wailers - 1973

 

20. Bloody Revolutions – Crass - 1980

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