2012 in Music

2K12 IN MUSIC

Yo, this blog post will be in two sections, Part I dealing with my own personal year-in-music, and the second a more critical look at some of the major musical trends this year.

PART I 

2012 was a good year! Started the year doing a dissertation/parring it in Cambridge and finish it as a graduated real human about to move to Japan for the next few years :O

On a personal musical level it's been interesting as well. Though I've been out raving less than in 2011, this was the year I really pushed myself with DJing and began to develop a (very small) name for myself. As I say, my first couple of terms at Cambridge were a big parr, and it was bedroom DJing that made most days bearable, so I did a lot of it (big up my neighbour Leeana for her tolerance!!). Coupled with getting far, far better technically, my residency slots with Rudimental and Voodoo Rave, and later on in the year, my slot on Innacity FM, gave me space to develop a sound and the motivation to constantly hunt for new music to keep things fresh. I can now say "I am a DJ" without feeling like a wanker.

As a punter, a few of my major moments came on the dance floor - Champion dropping Mosquito at Cable, Beneath's whole set at Rudimental, Manny and J-Cush slaughtering the dance in Brooklyn - but just as often came from intimate moments with friends - discovering Call Me Maybe at Jambie's Jubilee BBQ,

And a very high, very magic May Week evening listening to Will Saul's old Fact mix by Mill pond with good friends.

But in true 2012 fashion, the defining musical moment of my year, my epiphany/I-have-seen-the-future/I-like-music-again/this-is-why-I-rave moment, came not in collective euphoria on the dance floor, but in the atomised setting of my dorm room on headphones, when I clocked Marcus Nasty's jackin podcast, thus instigating the most exciting 6 months in music I've ever had. More of that below.

PART II - TRENDS

'UK Bass' AKA post-dubstep, AKA intelligent zzzzfest AKA HOUSE MUSIC… AGAIN!!!!! 

Hessel Audio, Hypderdub, Hemlock, Night Slugs etc. Are all banished to the 'boring until proven exciting' corner.

how do u even dance to this I don't even

For London producers working under the 'Bass' umbrella this year, not a single gun finger was busted. Postmodernism has not treated UK dance music well, and the atemporal, internetty, vybless music coming from the capital - a mush of vaguely dubsteppy bass, house rhythms, washy synths, 808s and AALIYAH SAMPLES MADE BORING HOW DO U EVEN DO THAT?!?!? - has lost all sense of FWD progression and all sense of fun. 

This is literally Pearson Sound pressing the 'make Pearson Sound track' button on Logic. Dead-Out.

One notable exception to this rule has been the output of Keysound records, and Dusk and Blackdown's Rinse sessions. Here a sense of teleology has been sculpted by the curation of a tight aesthetic - dark, grimey, jungalistic, syncopated rave music:

Yet otherwise there was next to zero signs of life here. Wake me up when London artists stop talking like critical theorists and when somebody, anyone makes a BANGER. Until then Fuck u-K bass.

 UK FUNKY 2007-2012 RIP 

Well it had a good run; maintaining a sense of cohesion and progression, constantly putting out great tunes, and balancing light and dark elements for a good five years, even as it was loosing support to the most stale of deep and tech-house for three of them.

2012 even saw a number of great funky releases, notably from Beneath, who's combo of dank 2006-dubstep dread vybez with ass-shaking tribal soca-flavored skank riddims make him a sub-genre unto himself.

DANK

Mosquito by Redlight's Lobster Boy alias is possible one of the greatest funky tunes ever, and gets a special mention for providing my most memorable and documented rave moment of the year:

Champion's one of the best DJs in the country, and his Crystal Meth EP showcased the gully possibilities of entwining funky even further with grime.

Still, though the massive left funky in 2009, for a few years still there was a constant stream of great music being made by people like Roska, Lil Silva, Cosmin TRG, Swing Ting etc. By summer 2012 that stream had truly dried up. UK FUNKY R I P

EUPHORIA 

Not so much a movement as a feeling.

This year, we climaxed. 

100% of humanity has climaxed to this song

We've gone up up up up up uuuuup.

And we wailed where have you been all my life. 

Yes. Yes yes yes. 

TEKLIFE OR NO LIFE

Imagine what music/culture would be like right now if footwork didn't exist? It's a truly depressing thought. For musical modernists, footwork is pretty much all that that stands between us and the end of history. There is quite literally no other movement across the arts - music, literature, visual culture - that is more radical, more important right now. 

Yet the radical rhythmic/music-structural disjuncture that footwork represents is a large part of why the original sound itself has been limited in popularity to the Chicago demographic that created it and the global avant-hipster class who live for that future rush. 

Where its influence has spread, it has spread in watered down forms - from UK bass to trap. The fact that the for the first time in musical history the UK has responded to an American innovation by tempering it:

And not by roughing it up:

Is in itself a telling sign of the relative decline of the London based hardcore contiuum vis-a-vis ghetto America.

This year was a particularly great one for footwork, and once again the Teklife crew of Chicago fought off new pretenders and reasserted their place at the top of the footwork food chain. 

The undeniable king of footwork is and remains DJ Rashad, who this year helped to launch the Lit City label to showcase the best of the Teklife massive. The first album on the imprint, Welcome To The Chi, showed footwork reaching a new stage of maturity and production values, and showed it turning outwards towards the world by incoperating influences as diverse at Jungle and Grime:

The dreadest track on the album, We Trippy Mane, brought footwork at it's most avant-'ard, evoking the minimal grime instrumentals of Alias and Wiley:

Back in the summer I was privileged enough to make a trip to Chicago to witness a footwork battle in a closed-off shop front down on 87th street. The vibe was insane - dark outside, bright florescent lighting inside, no drinks or drugs (just lots of soda), fuck off pounding sub-bass, a circle of dancers kicking their limbs at speeds your eyes can't register, DJ Spinn MCing like a total joker, and 200 tracks just like this - the dark, minimal, brutal ones they call battle trax - mixed deftly by DJ Earl. It was like witnessing the limits of human cultural expression expanding before my eyes.

Fellow Teklife badman Traxman also killed it this year with his Da Mind of Traxman over at Planet Mu, which engaged the rhythmic NOW of footwork in a dialogue with black America's musical history - namely jazz, funk, and disco. 

Planet Mu were also responsible for a number of the other footwork highlights this year, particularly the scholarly undertaking that was Bangs & Works Vol 2 - which showcased footwork in all its wonderful diversity

And they brought us the dancefloor duppying experiments, the metamodern mashup of Jungle/Juke/Jukle/jUKe/Foot & Bass with Dream Continuum's Reworkz e.p.

The experiment worked and it remains to offer a fascinating path out of the UK's dancefloor malaise and a good answer to the question of how to deal with an import scene like Chicago footwork. Here's to more of it in 2013.

Jackin AKA Jackin House AKA Jackin Bass AKA "bouncey wobbly mucky in ya face catty phat beats (real house music)" 

AKA THANK FUCK NOW I LIKE MUSIC AGAINN!!!!! 

Anyone who's friends with me on facebook, or who's held a conversation with me over the last 6 months will know wot music won 2012 for me. Ever since clocking Marcus Nasty's 6th of June Rinse podcast, northern/midlands jackin house has made up the vast majority of the music I listen to, buy, think about and DJ.

Never since getting into music have I been so interested by a current scene that old music ceased to grab my attention, but since Jackin my DJ sets have gone from predominantly old school Garage retro-fare to 80% traxs from the last month or so. Every month brings out as much good music as I was used to getting in half a year. It is quite simply the most exciting thing happening in British music, and if you disagree, you're wrong. 

What is jackin? Jackin is what happened when the police shut down all the bassline raves up north and all the bassline ravers, DJs and producers started going to house events, and eventually, started making house music.

Bassline RIP

From house jackin got its "neck snapping" 4x4 riddim, defined by propulsive open high hats and straight forward snares. From house, jackin got its slower BPMs (124-130, with the sweet spot at 126), and from house jackin got its sense of 'cool', 'sexy'.

From bassline, jackin got its penchant for big, mellifluous diva vocals, good-times-toasting MC patter and cheeky pop bootlegs. Most importantly, from bassline jackin got its bass: big, bolshy bass; bass that overpowers the other elements; bass that would be turned away at the door at classy house events. 

But those these elements - snappy 4x4 beats, cheesy, crowd pleasing vocals, oversized bass lines - are the core of jackin, there's more to it than that. At its best Jackin is kitchen-sink UK house, in the tradition of Basement Jaxx and Groove Armada, both of whom have been serviced with the jackin treatment to great effect.
More than that Jackin is a topography of a specifically Northern British dance tradition - evoking everything from bassline to Northern soul, via organ house, speed garage, happy hardcore, donk and jungle, and at times reaching to a pan-UK pop history which includes 2-step garage, dubstep, and the imported RnB and hip hop American hits that topped the charts here.

The difference between this music history in a blender and the internetty mush I decry in London-centric UK Bass, is that Jackin is the response to a specific Northern tradition, it's not a random assortment of influences gathered from soundcloud and youtube (thought the artists are all very much plugged in, the music disseminated through 2k12 digital channels), but local influences absorbed into the music through a regional IRL scene, and absorbed through the memory of other local scenes. Simply put, jackin is exactly what you'd expect Northern rave music to sound like in 2k12, and it's strong because of its basis in The Real. 

Apart from this Jackin succeeds where UK Bass fails not only because it takes itself far less seriously:

The Anchorman sample ALONE here cements jackin as the true heir to 'ardcore

But because it is a scene which corresponds to a sound. Whereas if you say a song sounds like UK bass I have 0% idea what you might be referring to - in regards to its rhythmic pattern, its sound pallet etc. - if you tell me a song has a jackin bass then I know what to expect from the bass line. This is a sign of the scenius at work - a creative community that is stronger because its members share good ideas, not one in which such a premium is given to individual expression that there's no sense of collective purpose. 

I've seen this drop do things to people... 

Specifically, jackin doesn't just have a sound, but it has a new sound, a sonic innovation, in what I call its hollow-donk-warp-owl-bass.

Check at 1:14

Reliable sources tell me that the sound was one hidden away under layers of midrange in bassline, and  that the innovation here consists of bringing it to the forefront, giving it space, and making it "cooler". The sound is made by taking a speed garage warp:

2:05

Then ramping up the attack, and filtering it through high-end, spacey/contemporary F-X. If dubstep innovated by giving the sub-bass some space, and then through its wobble, jackin runs with these innovations and furthers them by making the bassline carry the melody, wobbly arpegiated melody.

It's space aged shit, and its impact upon the body in the dance is like nothing else before.


Tracks which meant a lot to me in particular include Tom Shorterz - We Are The Stars

Garage to the future, this track perfectly evokes that moment in 1995/1996 when the Brits first tried their hands at American garage house - labels like Nice and Ripe, Confetti etc. but it updates this pallet for a 2k12 sensibility. The track is glorious and euphoric throughout, but something rather magic happens at 2:45 when the female MC and organ sounds come in. 

Donkie Punch n Lorenzo - Snapbacks & Tattoos

To pick just a single Lorenzo tune would be to commit a great violence, and indeed, if you look at the tracks throughout this list the tag '& Lorenzo' appears again and again. Lorenzo, one half of Cause & Affect is without a doubt the greatest producer of the year. Lending his engineering skills to countless collaborations which populate and dominate the bigtunesmp3 best selling charts, as well as his work with C&A, I count no less than 41 tracks this year in my iTunes folder, of which perhaps 30 are total classics. There has not been a producer with this kind of hit rate since Wiley, or perhaps the DMZ guys if you're being generous. The year wouldn't have been the same without him.

Majestic - Let's Go Back (Cause & Affect remix)

The first track on the Marcus Nasty mix, the track which started it all, the track that was so good I had to wheel it about 10 times before I could bring myself to move on to the next track. This one's a true collaboration between Majestic's nostalgic vocals and C&S's futuristic production. It starts with one of the most perfect build ups in dance music, going from the shuffling two-step, filling in with the thudding 4x4 bass drum, before pausing to build and then.... and then that drop. SNM

TUNE OF THE YEAR: Nick Hannam & Tom Garnett ft. Tom Zanetti

No competition - no single song got wheeled as much, got as much play on my iPod, made me and my friends smile so hard or gave me more faith in UK dance music's ability to revitalise itself. 

The tune combines Nick Hannam's signature sound - deep, haunting, crisp-yet-murky, silly-yet-sexy - 

with Tom Zanetti's cool, bubbling, pure-Leeds-vybzin vocals, and that Said Ama sample. It sounds great at its native 124 bpm or pitched up to a ravey 132, on a poor quality pirate stream or a massive club system. 

This is the perfect British pop song. Perfect. If there was any justice in the world this would have been number 1 in the charts, sung at school discos, sodcasted from people's Blackberries at the back of the bus, wheeled up and sung along to at raves across the country.

It helped make this year the best year I can remember for music. And just to reiterate, 2012 was a great year in music. Let's push the sound and make 2013 even better.

Happy New Year! XXX

Jack to the Future

So there's this big thing happening Up North called Jackin House and standandarly the southern blogaratti haven't clocked it at all.

Jackin House, or more commonly, just Jackin (also known as/near interchangable with Electroline) is basically Electro House mashed together with Bassline at about 130 bpm, with strong influences from Speed Garage and 2-step, a bit of Dubstep and Funky, and even traces of Jungle thrown in. The other way to think about it is that Jackin is to Electro House what UK Funky is to Funky House. Either way, what most seperates it from international Electro is the presence of MCs toasting over the top of it in the vybezy, bubbling vein of old skool garage, but the truth is it runs on a spectrum, ranging from a whole-lot-of-shite that's little more than Electro House + MCs to some stuff which is far more interesting and nuum'y.

Jackin is kind of a big deal. Marcus Nasty, Godfather/Don of UK Funky has up and jumped ship:

(This is THE Jackin mix to get to know) Leed's main man Tom Zanetti has about as many Facebook fans as Joy Orbison (29,274 vs.  33,478), and in many cities across the North, Bassline is out and Jackin is in. This is a new twist, a new chapter in the 25 year history of the hardcore continuum, yet it's been getting no recognition or love from any of the usual suspects. This seems like critical neglect. 

To be fair to the bloggers, Jackin has any number of things going against it. For one the name's been taken, like, 25 years ago. Jackin shouldn't even be a genre name, it's an adjective: a type of house that jacks, which you can jack to. Popularly understood, it refers to hard hitting dancefloor Chicago trax from the 80s, which makes searching for information about this new northern stuff really difficult.

The second thing is how it bleeds into other genres at all edges, with barely any solid core to grip on to. Simon Reynolds has spoken before of this 'plausibile deniability', whereby as dance genres increasingly seek out the space between existing poles of influence rather than exploring new zones of sonic possibility, it becomes increasingly easy to deny that there's any meaningful difference between, say, Tech-Step and Neuro Funk; Jackin and Electro. Combined with this is a 'whachucallit' syndrome, where on bigtunesmp3 (a dedicated online retailer for the stuff, and from where I'm sitting down Saaf, something of its mecca) every tune is tagged mulitiple times as both Jackin and Electroline, Warper, House, Bass, and Funky, befitting the fact that Jackin is as of yet a space where many influences combine without any new sound to call all its own.

Finally is the matter of just what a parr how much of it is. Bigtunesmp3 is flooded with painfully poorly produced tunes amounting to little more than bait Electro House with some swag northern MC toasting on top of it. It's barely its own thing and most of it's shite; why would you pay attention to this scene?

Because this is nuum shit, that's why! It's a scene filling the gap left by the decline of Bassline, listened to by northern nuumy contingent of multi-racial livin-for-the-weekend ravers.

Musically it's most obvious link to the nuum is the presence of MCs toasting over the top in the champagne and good times vein or Jungle/Garage/Funky/Bassline rather than the darkside verbal pyrotechnics of Grime. But on top of this sonically, at its best it brings together the most winsome elements of the nuum's 20 something years of history in a manner neither pastiche or hauntological, but true to the spirit of rave. Tracks with a bassline/dubstep wobble are called 'wobblers'. Tracks using the Double 99/187 Lockdown Speed Garage bass warp are, fittingly, called 'warpers'. It mixes a 4x4 bounce with the shuffly Dem 2 high hats, bringing the swing and at times traces of Funky in the snares. It's got the vocal science of 2-step (see the Burkie tune above) and some tunes, like this one even bring the Ragga chat and Amen break of Jungle. On top of all these sonic signifiers are other promising signs of 'nuumental activity, not least the surfeit of cheeky pop tune bootlegs:

Though all too commonly, it lies too close for comfort to the Electro sphere of influence, it's clear that Jackin is the latest chapter in the history of the Hardcore Continuum, a summary of which now runs: Hardcore - Jungle - DnB - Speed Garage - 2-step - Grime - Dubstep - Bassline - Funky - Jackin.

And though as of yet Jackin doesn't have a sound all of its own (though that steely, hollow warpy bass is pretty distinctive), there's no reason that it can't develop one. For now, it might be fair to call Jackin one of the first Metamodernist dance scenes, neither straight forwardly postmodern/revivalist nor jetting off into a modernist future, a tension perfectly encapsulated by the first tune of the Marcus Nasty mix (A remix of Majestic's Let's Go Back, but I'm DESPERATELY searching for an ID if anyone's got it).

It starts with a skippy 4x4 garage beat while Majestic spits about the jokes old days of cheap McDonalds and Garage Raves in the early 2000s, untill he gets to these lines:

We can't go back,

That's in the past when I reminisce now 

Bring on the future, here for the day,

I'll be making music come what may.

I don't come from the Old Skool,

But I got to big up the Old Skool,

Reminiscing for times when I was younger,

To this day I still got the hunger.

And it breaks into a cavernous, space-age-shiny j-j-jackin bass riff destined for insta-wheelup and total dance duppiage. Jack to the Future? Yeah, alright then.

P.S. Big up my fellow Voodoo ravers, my boys Frankly $ick and Jack Jambie. They got me into this shit, and they're killer DJs each of them. #crewlove

RUFF HOUSE: Part 1

YO. Haven't blogged in ages and thought I'd ease myself into with a big splurge of youtube.


Big debates going on ATM about the state of the scene.

Some people think that a return to first principals - in Dance music, this means House - is just what the doctor ordered for the Dubstep scene, and that the space where 'UK Bass' - a vom inducing term that tries to hide that we don't got a sound at the moment - and House collides is a particularly fertile one. I think it probably makes House a bit more interesting and UK music a fuck lot more boring.

But also, I don't see why there's any need for it to happen, when around 2006 Grime producers cottoned onto American and European Funky House - like this:




And rather than subtly incorporate a few UK influences around the edges of this, totally transformed it into something hard, gully and ridiculously fun, bringing it into an amazing tradition of hyper energetic, multi-cultural UK dance music that reaches back through Grime, Dubstep and Garage all the way to Jungle and Rave. UK Funky. This post is basically a 'fuck me, UK Funky was/is/can be so good! LOOK HOW GOOD IT IS.

This time round I'm going to be focusing on the darker, ruffer stuff from 2007-2010. What was great about UK Funky though is the way it mixed this harder aesthetic with loads of amazing gyal tunes, big poppy vocal numbers and kept the ideas of light/dark, male/female, pop song/dj tune gloriously in tension, so I'll look at some of the other strands + the more recent output from the scene in later posts.

Atari Teenage Riot

There's been a lot of opinion written on the #londonriots. The main divide seems to be between those who think this is 'pure and simple', 'just criminality', and those who see the matter in its complexity. The first view point is understandable from the standing point of the ruling classes. If this matter were complex, more than an act of mindless animals, then that might necessitate a rethink of an action like scrapping EMA. It would necessitate the entire political class, all the major parties to admit the abject failure of the Neo-Liberal project. It would also force a wider rethink of our own negligence of communities such as Tottenham and Brixton, our own role in the hollowing out of the social sphere.

Those who seek to probe the causes of these outbursts beyond shouting 'thuggishness' (say it aloud over and over again) are charged with the difficulties of articulating the questions of blame and causality and potential plans of action to be drawn from these.

Seeing the enormity of this task, I thought I'd restrict myself to trying to answer the question 'what about these protests is political'. The question is not 'are these protests political'. I'm a Marxist. Of course they are. But they are not political in the sense that most liberals/lefties have argued so far.

The argument runs like this:

"I understand that there are legitimate concerns with police brutality and cuts to youth services etc. But there are people out there who are just using this as an excuse to get a new TV".

This forms a neat parallel with what was said of the student protests:
"I'm against tuition fees but some people are just using these protests as an excuse to smash shit".

But these riots are not the student protests, and though the Left was right to challenge the division of 'good' and 'bad' protesters then, they are wrong not to see that there is a big difference between the vigil for Mark Duggan and the mass looting taking place across the country. The latter are far more 'political'.

The idea is meant to be that there are some people with legitimate political concerns re: police and poverty and that there are others who are 'stupid', 'greedy', 'selfish', with no higher motive than acquiring a new pair of Nikes. Every society everywhere has some people who are willing to clash with police, who are willing to risk jail for their political beliefs. But what the fuck does it say about our society that there are so many with no higher motive than acquiring a new pair of Nikes? What does it say about our society that there are so many who would have no guilt in stealing them?

I wouldn't mind getting a PS3 for free. But I could never steal one. For one I'd feel guilty, because stealing goes against social conventions and society's treated me well. And secondly, I'd be scared, because I'm part of that tiny minority who are privileged enough to have received an expensive education providing the skill-set and the networks/networking skills and all the life opportunities that arise from that. If I were to steal a TV and get caught doing so, it would fuck up those opportunities. Clearly my life is too good for looting to be worth it.

The majority of people have something that means that the risk of prison or social exclusion for stealing a £50 pair of shoes isn't worth it. You don't need loads of money for the algebra not to add up. A caring family might be your dissuasion. Your religion. Your diploma course. Your part time job. That tune you're working on in Reason. Some of us have every reason, and most of us have a few, to think "should I go riot? Nah". The people out at night on the High Streets of Britain now, have none.

The left have talk much of 'simmering anger', this is certainly one component in the mix of social unrest, but what about simmering boredom? The question on people's lips is 'why are these people rioting', but perhaps the question should be 'why wouldn't they'?

Politicians can't see any political message to be drawn from the eruption into the public consciousness of thousands of people around the country with so little stake in society, so little to loose, so little to do with a long hot summer and no EMA, no spending money, no youth centres to do anything in that they're willing to risk jail time for the thrill of a firebomb and a new TV. If they want to see an end to #londonriots11 and avoid #londonriots12 they better look a bit closer

Fucking Voodoo Magic, Man

!!!!


!!!!@1111?!11


come 2 this this this this this this this this this
U NO IT MAKES SENSE.

Definitely come, you've got nothing better to do and there's nowhere else in London you're going to hear any Juke or Bassline in the next 6 months xxx

Abandoned Ship (The future of British Bass)

Crisis averted.
The future of the Hardcore Continuum is secured.

This Unfolds (10 reasons to see Four Tet this Friday 25th @Plastic People)

10 >>

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Wut (Fashion tips for the Far-Left)

This article is obviously not going to be a list of fashion tips for the Far-Left. That would be a stoopid article. What I would like to do is talk a bit about the relationship between emancipatory politics and fashion. Firstly because fashionistas seem to be quite bad at defending the political and social worth of what they do, and secondly because there's a current of philistinism in the Left which I think is misguided and perhaps even counter-productive.

At its worst fashion is vacuous and self-obsessed. The Fashion Industry is notoriously cut-throat and bitchy. Fashion marketing is perhaps the worst culprit in the "YOU ARE WORTHLESS/UGLY - BUY OUR SHIT AND YOU WILL BE WORTHY/PRETTY" line of work. This, combined with the size-zero culture of the cat-walk can probably take the majority of the blame for the heart-wretching rise in anorexia and other eating disorders in the developed world. High Street fashion has its brutal sweat-shops. High End fashion has its fur. To judge someone for their clothing seems to be the most brazen example of book/cover and is riddled with the risk of enforcing cultural stereotypes and classist prejudices. The very concept of fashion itself - that something is 'in' one day and 'out' the next - seems like it was concocted by evil genius/idiot to rape the planet for the lulz of it. It enforces destructive and archaic gender roles. Yes, with a list of crimes like this it would seem like it was duty of the Left to find fashion guilty and revert to Anarcho-Primativism/German nudism. Which I'm not wholly opposed to

However, fashion is important. In fact, to define 'important' narrowly, fashion and architecture are the most important of arts in that they are both the only completely unavoidable arts in modern society. Everyone wears clothes, and every street has buildings. Fashion weighs heavier in our cultural memory than perhaps anything else. If you think of the 60s, you see hippies in floral dresses and tie-dye whatever. Think of the 70s and you see flares and punks. Think of the Japanese and you either see terrifying panda-girls or geisha and samurai. Think of the Mexicans and you see sombreros. Considering the aesthetic ubiquity and social significance of fashion I would rather say that it is the duty of the Left to firstly understand fashion and to ultimately appropriate it for our own ends.

I think the first step to defending fashion is simply to recognise that some people really really love it. The number of lefties in the world of music is probably disproportionate to their numbers in the general population, so when I talk about a passion for music I think it's a language most of us can understand. The world of work and our pop-culture at large are incredibly alienating. In the workplaces of our regimented jobs there is no community, and as mass-culture becomes ever more commodified it provides no space for individual expression. We get the isolation of individualism but the conformity of communalism. 8 hour routine jobs then 6 hours shit TV then bed then death. The people who are best able to survive in today's world are those who have something they truly love to escape to. You can call this escapism, you can work it into the framework of John Holloway's Crack Capitalism, or Hakim Bey's theory of Temporary Autonomous Zones, you can even get old-skool and Marxy and talk about religions and opiates. Religion no longer matters to anyone, but music does, and the important thing to remember is that if somebody's leg has just been cut off you sure as fuck don't take away their opiates! Playing in a band is a very obvious way of creating the space for the best of communalism and individualism, but I would argue too that a real love for the listening of music is a qualitatively different thing to the mere consumption of it. And in the same way my life is richer and more meaningful for debates about the difference between 4x4 and Speed Garage and piecing together the roots of Burial back into old Foul Play and El-B tracks, people's souls have been saved, not only by the creative/colaborative act of designing clothes, but by recreating outfits from old films and perusing 50 vintage shops in search of the perfect cardigan. And in the same way Dubstep moves beyond necessary escape-route into a revolutionary weapon when it's used to soundtrack kettle-breaking, a good suit takes on a new political baggage when the person inside it abuses policemen with Byron. You can't get away with smashing a Starbucks unless everyone's dressed in all-black.



I think this last point relates to the notion of fashion and tribalism. Though fashion can be an individual act of playfulness, it almost always has a social role in projecting an image to others. It's for this reason that I think it's misguided to think that those who spend a lot of effort on their clothes are necessarily narcissistic, as a carefully constructed costume can just as much mean "I'm making an effort for you". But regardless, an interesting element of fashion is its role as a social signifier stating one's membership of a group. When we talk of teen tribes we mean groups of young people who wear similar clothes and hang out with each other. Fashion is not the only thing that defines these groups, music, drug choice and all sorts of rituals play their part, and so we can be pretty sure that the kids in one corner of the canteen in the hoodies listen to grime and the kids in the other in Nirvana hoodies and baggie jeans listen to, well, Nirvana. This seems like a negative thing. There are often tensions between the groups that can escalate into violence, it seems a means to divide people of the same class background and with the same material interests. If Socialists are to reject Nationalism, we should surely reject all fashion tribalism, right? But to me there is probably something more healthy about people organizing themselves around communities based upon shared interests and tastes rather than the wholly arbitrary divisions of the nation state. Socialists may call for the abolition of the nation state, but we certainly shouldn't call for the abolition of cultural and regional diversity. And one of the most inspiring things about this recent Student Movement is that is has brought together pretty art-school students in fur coats with indie kids and revolutionary Rastafari and grime'eads from council estates all in the same place at the same time fighting for the same thing. And it's the presence of all these different fashion cultures that allows us to talk of a broad coalition and not just a big interest group. Of course, when crunch-time comes, people must know that their true loyalty is to the struggle and class solidarity and not their tribe, but to the extent that class solidarity is achieved then I think the spaces of aesthetic nationhood can be a breeding ground for communalist sentiment and cultural-assertion and the diversity this brings is only a good thing.

The final topic I was to address is fashion and class relations. It would seem like the easiest criticism of what I have said so far is that it is incredibly class-coded and that it's all very well for me as a posh Socialist to talk about how great clothes are but that many people just don't have the money to dress well or the time to think about it. Yes, Fashion is incredibly class-coded and clothes are one of the most instant tip-offs of someone's wealth and status. Of course single mothers with 3 kids who are living on the appallingly inadequate welfare state don't have the means to be fashion conscious, which is to say nothing of the developing world where so many of our cheap-clothes are sweat-shoppingly sweat-shopped. Nor is any of this is to deny that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that different cultures and classes have different notions of taste. However I reckon that class barriers to fashion are less now than they have ever been, that the class-coding of fashion is something that can be manipulated and played with, and that just because many people can't afford to dress as they like it doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to.

In fashion as in politics the internet has seriously eroded many of the old hierarchies and power structures. Blogs are able to prove that what the big fashion magazines say is 'in' or 'out' bares no relation to what people actually like to wear. Street photography means that anyone with the ability to put together a creative and unusual outfit can show it to millions of people without having to be spotted looking like a stick-insect and working up through the fashion industry. On a rather less technological front, the rise of second hand/charity shop/vintage fashion - through predictable gentrified and co-opted into fancy overpriced shops, like all good things - has made interesting clothes from throughout the ages widely available and highly affordable, seriously damaging the Tax-Dodging-Top-Shopping-Next-Oligarchy's ability to make everyone look the same. Furthermore, owing largely to Labour's (too-few, too-meager) wealth redistribution schemes, perhaps most notably EMA, millions of kids for the first time in their life have had the money to go out and buy some nice clothes. Incidentally, when people say we should replace the EMA with something more targeted like free transport for the 16-19s and free school books, the answer is no, we should supplement EMA with such schemes, we're not fighting for a world in which everyone has just the bare material necessities, but one in which people can actually enjoy their lives. Some of my most fashionable friends are those on the dole and conversely, as a student in Cambridge, I can assure everyone that money does not buy taste. Fashion in the abstract then, is less exclusive than ever.

However, in as far as clothes still do tell a tale of class and fortune I think there are radical opportunities for subversion and assertion. I think we feel uncomfortable with the culture of fake Burberry not just out of some Kunderian concept of totalitarian kitsch, but also because it reveals how deeply the poison Thatcherite notion that 'we're all middle class now' has permeated into the working class. Likewise as mentioned before, there is something tragic about gentrification, about the ability of capitalism and the ruling classes to steal the most vibrant elements of working class culture, package it, and sell it back to them for a profit. Hence £3 cardigans from Portobello Market going for £50 down the road in Notting Hill and John Lewis selling pink/punk baby t-shirts. For Punk, of course, was a working class culture which beautifully displayed the subversive potential of fashion. It inverted dandyism and said 'what ever you say is ugly we say is pretty' and genuinely created a moral panic and rupture in the social fabric of Britain. I think we need a punk for the 21st Century. I also think we need to learn from Caroline Lucas. Caroline Lucas is one of the top-5 radical voices in Parliament (others: Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, somebody help me out here). The Green Party advocates for a maximum wage and the nationalisation of transport, yet she wins votes from Conservatives. This is no doubt because she is highly intelligent and a brilliant advocate of the cause, but it is also because she is able to articulate radical policies while not seeming like a radical. This is partly because she wears a nice suit. The problem with New Labour is that they thought "this country is full of Right Wing reactionaries who read The Daily Mail, we can never win an election on a platform of Social Democracy, what we have to do is publicly espouse Right Wing reactionary policies and sneak whatever scraps of progressivism we can under the table to the dog/working class while nobody's watching". Really they should have realised that nobody believes in anything anyway and people will vote for an 80% upper rate of taxation and the abolition of the army if they're told to by somebody reasonable sounding in a nice suit. We need more Socialists in nice suits.

The final argument is that in a world where people are dying every day of curable diseases and the wealth divide is ever increasing, it is frivolous and exclusionary to care about fashion. The problem with this is it borrows the language of the mushy centre, the Social Capitalists who say that pushing for revolution in a world where there are so many problems in the here and now is dangerous and delusory. Don't join a revolutionary party, just give to Oxfam. We can have a revolution once we've dealt with Africa. Of course this is a fallacy. While accepting that of course charity keeps people alive within a brutal system, if you don't work to destroy the system itself and put something better in its place then there will always be unnecessary deaths. In parallel to this, fashion, music, art, are all in fact more important than feeding the poor. Bare with me, I'm going to get a bit Wilde here. We want a world in which everyone has enough food to survive, a roof over their heads, freedom from aggression, clean water, free education, free high-quality health-care. But we don't want this for it's own sake. The fact is this is simply the starting point for something much, much better. Feeding Indian children in 2011 is 100% necessary, and it's also a complete waste of time and effort. Nobody should have to dedicate their life, their altruism and energy to feed the poor, because we should have a system where the equal and just allocation of goods takes place as a matter of course. It is not a lack of resources and technology that causes hunger, but an unequal distribution of them. When we have a system of equal distribution in place, the human mind will be free to focus on far more challenging, far more creative, far more fulfilling things. Like fashion.

I started writing this when thinking about the stereotype image of the scruffy Left. Then thinking about the partial truth of that image. Then I thought about the the wicked-cool Marxists who own the vintage shop at 295 Portobello Road. Then I saw this post on a friend's fashion blog And the more I thought about it the more I realized how everyone I know involved in fashion in some way is pretty right-on, and there must be something to it. The occupations are amazing spaces were all voices are listened to equally regardless of gender, sex, party political background, race, class, and regardless of if you're decked out in a sharp suit or an old "Hostky for Trotsky" t-shirt (these don't exist, but I want them to). But within the Left at large, on a lot of internet discussion there's been a vibe of hostility towards students in suits and anyone who looks a bit middle class. This can been seen in some of the nasty and overly personal sniping at (and not the justified 'no enemies on the left' tactical critique of) Laurie Penny from Far-Left or the language of the debate around Charlie Gilmour and his outburst of patriotism. This is A Bad Thing™. I would never try to imply that those who just aren't interested in fashion should be, and I would never try to dictate my own personal aesthetics on anyone else. But I argue that the term 'Fashionable Leftist' is not a contradiction in terms nor a hypocrisy. If we can excuse his old-fashioned notions of gender and his technophobia, I'd like to bring in some William Morris. In his fantasy piece of the Socialist utopia - 'News From Nowhere' - everyone spends their time writing poetry, carving tobacco pipes and making and sharing beautiful clothes. I dig.

Open Your Mind - Foul Play

Within this beautiful student movement there has been an ugly undercurrent of un-comradely reds-under-the-bed style attacks on the far-left. To the extent that our focus remains outwards and that we're all moving towards a similar goal, diversity and debate within the movement is only a good thing.
Emily Davis' notion that a "coalition of social-democrats and democratic-socialists" would constitute some sort of broad front is risible. So too is her Godwin baiting claim that "[Communists'] views are comparable to Fascism" in what is meant to be an article about left wing unity. The centre-left and the far-left can and must work together. Here are a couple of reasons why:

1) We share the same goals.
I am a Revolutionary Socialist, but I'm not a very revolutionary personality. Violence kind of scares me and I tend towards searching for practical solutions for immediate issues. If I believed that legislation and changing social attitudes could result in a global Norway; If I believed that reforming capitalism to purge it of its worse excesses could end with Zimbabwe having full employment on a 35 hour work week with a generous paternity and maternity leave system in place, then I would be a Social Democrat. Unfortunately I'm convinced that this isn't the case. The capitalistic economic system is a totality that absorbs and neutralizes dissent. This is why something radical like the post-Stonewall LGBT Rights movement ends up in the position today where its biggest public cause is the fight to allow LGBT people access to the reactionary institution of marriage. This is why seemingly permanent gains in people's living conditions, brought about by the welfare state, are in retreat across the developed world, even in the Nordic countries. Though the word 'revolution' seems big and scary, at its most basic it just refers to the need to change the basis of the economy away from one in which the market allocates goods and dictates price towards something different.

2) We need each other.
To look at Europe, the countries with the strongest and largest far-left organizations are those with strong centre-left traditions. A Marxist systemic analysis of the inevitable failure and end of capitalism, though objectively correct, is certainly less able to capture the public imagination than a pragmatic call of "let's raise wages". A strong centre-left provides a certain level of class-consciousness and the narrative of asserting one's rights which the far-left requires. But this relationship goes both ways. The Soviet Union was a Very Bad Thing™. But we in the developed world also owe the Social Democratic gains of the post-war to its existence. If it wasn't for the threat of this alternative economic system which completely did away with their class as a whole, the ruling classes of the Western World would not have so easily made the concessions of the welfare state that they did. It is significant that it is after the fall of the Berlin Wall that we see the rise of the 'Third Way' among the mainstream left, the Thatcherite pact with the devil pledging "there is no alternative". It takes a strong revolutionary current to scare the ruling classes into reformism.

Their are other benefits that we westerly comrades bring to the movement that the centre-left would do well not to forget. Our tradition and experience of direct action, our ability to get feet on the ground for demonstrations, our strong presence in the trade union movement and our ability to put students and workers in direct contact. I may disagree with the means of Social Democracts as ultimately ineffectual, but I would also hope to engage in productive dialogue in the spirit of solidarity and not aim to exclude them from the movement. To suggest that it was my place or Emily Davis' to decide who's in and who's out would run contrary to any notion of democracy. Social or otherwise.

Top ten tunes to kettle-break to

From the free-party and rave scene of the early 90s through to dubstep, grime and UK Funky today, there has been one force, one culture at the heart of Britain's alternative electronic music scene. This cultural phenomenon has been called the Hardcore Continuum ('nuum'), taking its name from the early days of Hardcore Rave and a simple time-line of it might read Rave>Hardcore Rave>Jungle>Drum and Bass at which point (sometime in the mid-90s) a lot of the big names and the mass of fans found things getting stale, moved into the second floor of the club, which played American Garage House, made it faster, bassier, darker, better, and then we get Garage and eventually its bastard daughters and sons; Dubstep, Grime, Bassline and more recently UK Funky. It has in other words pretty much contained every exciting strand of electronic music to come out of the UK this last 20 years. It is a continuum, or rather culture, because although its constituent parts sound nothing alike (rave and garage, grime and jungle), it has the same demographic (multi-cultural working class), the same hubs of activity (South and East London, outposts in Bristol and the North East), often the same DJs and producers (Steve Gurley who went from Jungle to Garage to Dubstep, El-B who went from Garage to Dubstep to UK Funky etc) the same means of distribution (pirate radio, small record shops, giant raves) and alongside an intense look-to-the-future Modernism, and sense of its roots in those that came before.

Another defining feature of this culture has been its almost total lack of political consciousness. Despite its roots in the self-assertion of the most marginalised sections of British society, despite the fact that the music itself is dark, anarchic and avant-guard to the extreme, despite how much energy and passion goes into the creation and expansion of this music (check this for an example of the insane lengths people went to to set up pirate radio stations), despite an explicitly combative stance to 'the mainstream', despite its energy and innovation deriving from the collectivity of the 'scenius' (good ideas are generated randomly, spread rapidly, with no question originality or providence) rather than the auteurship of select genius individuals, despite it's hyper-modernist dedication to progression - moving forward, the scene was never overtly political.

This has been to the immense detriment of the Left. Politics happens when an intellectual understanding of what is wrong combines with an emotional impetus and arrives at the anger to act. Culture, for many, is this emotional impetus. It's a love of cultural traditions that makes Nationalism such a potent and WHY WONT YOU DIE persistent force in the face of its obvious, objective falsehood. But culture is also at the heart (as opposed to the head) of the best movements of the Left. Thatcher killed off the mining industry - that was so economically successful that it subsidized the rest of nationalised British industry - because it supported a way of life and culture that was antithetical to her plan of creating an island state of island people. That this large body of angry self-organised, self-consiously outcast, intimidatingly creative people never in a moment of bass endued madness decided to leave the club and clobber and burn down the buildings of Parliament Square, is a waste of potential and talent on a (failed) apocalyptic scale.

But something new happened in November. While 5,000 of us assembled outside of the TORYHQ at Millbank, kids with boomboxs blasted out wub-wubbing dubstep and bmttsttskkattskatsskabmttsbmkatsts of Drum and Bass. It worked really well and ever since British Bass music has been a recurring feature of the student protests, often brilliantly accompanied by live drum groups. The most radical music to come from Britain since Punk is finding its place within radical politics. This is proof of the novelty of our movement. When the drop comes in we charge. Smash the window in time with the bass.

But there is one problem. The kids with the speakers - their taste is shit. Richard Dawkins help the university student who thinks they know better than the sixth-formers, who thinks they can lead the way for those living life on the edge of this governments axe, but I will allow myself the patronizing tone - not an older and wiser-political entity, but of a massive geek - when I say, wipe the Pendulum and Rusko from your Protest Playlist, and try out a couple of these:


DJ Crystal - Warpdrive - 1993

Omigosh, this is the sort of tune which makes one baffled to think of how the Hardcore Continuum didn't achieve the revolution. The beats talk of destruction, the melody of creation.

DJ Tango - Think Twice - 1994

It's dark. Play this. Set off flares. Confuse Police.

KMA Productions - Cape Fear - 1996

The squelching bass kind of reminds me of a crowd pushing and being pushed. The 4x4 beat keeps you pushing. I also think you'd get points for get battoned to garage.

Photek - Smoke Rings -1997
Photek - Smoke Rings at Hype Machine
Makes you want to hit things while writhing on the floor. Which come to think of it isn't especially wise considering the police's medieval cavalry tactics of late. Maybe it will help you violently roll away.

ES Dubs - Standard Hoodlum Issue (Z Bias mix)

Wriggle right past the police line.

Vex'd - Angels - 2005

Scary.

Burial - South London Boroughs - 2005

I think this is a good one for those times when you've been re-kettled on a bridge 5 minutes after leaving the last one.

Distance - Traffic - 2006

The ravey high parts sound like the sound of sirens come, the bassy roars sound like wolves or bears or something.

Code 3 - Response Call - 2010

For plotting.

Jack Sparrow feat. Ruckspin - Dread 2010

I'm pretty sure the vacuum-scuffle-boom sounds the right temp for heave hoing a metal fence.

Bonus Track (not British, not Bassy) for those who like their riots with 20 minute build ups:
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Providence - 1998


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Bibliography of others talking about music and politics

Simon Reynolds (coined the phrase Hardcore Continuun, started all of this, is the most ravey of the academics and the most academic of the ravers - this blog is essentially 90% ripped off him)

An early Wire article of his
A pre-protest blog on the failure of the 'Nuum to politicize

BBC Article on dubstep and protest

An [incorrect] counter point

Counter-counter-point/wider view (Good article~)