Read my current Morning Star column HERE (a self-absorbed one this week)
Column #53
The one sad thing about Nick Griffin and his BNP morons’ otherwise laughable recent attempts to appropriate – or at least identify themselves with – the English folk scene is the insecurity it highlights within that scene about its own identity.
Of course, the racist ilk will get nowhere. Remarkably quickly the Folk Against Fascism movement launched against them and gained wide support after kicking off at Sidmouth festival.
More importantly, long before this latest melee, mainstay players in the folk world, particularly the younger and more politically minded ones, have already forcefully positioned themselves. They have connected with organisations such as Love Music Hate Racism or taken their own stances to make it as clear as possible that they aren’t interested in any racist agenda.
The nazis’ “borrowing” of Show Of Hands frontman Steve Knightley’s song Roots took advantage of that song’s lyrical complexity and perhaps ambiguity, without ever realising how passionately its underlying ideas conflict with theirs.
So although Knightley was right to be concerned and ask them to cease, he really needn’t be worried about wider misunderstanding. Nobody’s fooled.
By its very nature English folksong is anti-racist. It’s an anarchic cultural mish-mash in the same way as so much of our inherited creative memory. It’s so damn obvious, I shouldn’t even be feeling a need to write it.
Folk may have been collected by an eccentric bunch of toffs and Christians, but its heart is the songs, not the collecting of them. The voices of travelling, active, front-line people. To try to “own” a tradition by talking up wrong homogenised assumptions, simply because folk songs hark back to older times, is dumb and dumber.
Trad-heads take note though. As a quick glance through the membership of the Folk Against Fascism Facebook page makes clear, a lot of those music-makers signed up are in the enormous wider scene of quiet/acoustic music that isn’t accepted by the real folk world, not because of reasons of race or heritage but simply because the folk world is incredibly musically snobbish.
And increasingly it’s in that world, rather than the folk scene itself, that the contemporary songs dealing with situations relevant to fighting the BNP are being made.
Perhaps the racists wouldn’t even have begun to make their connection with our open-hearted multicultural roots heritage if those who run the trad circuit were more interested in collecting great new material which says something about our state of being right now, instead of being obsessed with pushing pretty young people who have no content but look tidy on magazine covers.
Through conservatism and perhaps a misplaced longing for establishment acceptance, trad-folk risks stifling itself and at the same time waters down unique selling points.
Even when big projects kick off with an explicit agenda in this area, like the Imagined Village, too often they produce hammy, over-hashed “old” music or rely on a groove instead of writing great new songs.
There are exceptions of course – and overlaps, where the beautiful kids also have something to say – but if the accepted norm were a demand for rich, relevant content, then even the bland Teddy Thompson Radio 2 fodder would be forced to, well, just be better.
When musical journeys are so firmly quests for “success,” rather than travels through song-making, they should be reconfigured or ignored. I wish the enamoured bookers and promoters would look afresh at the piss-weak generation given a leg up thanks to successful – or scenester – parentage.
Soft pop material filtered through hints of trad musicianship and arrangement a great new folk scene doth not rend.
The clever Folk Against Fascism strategy is to encourage artists to put the phrase, or something similar, on their CD cases. This is so that, although they can’t stop idiots like the BNP selling their music through online shops, at least they can make them uncomfortable doing so.
It makes sense – surely the Place Called England compilation it’s been flogging wouldn’t have been so welcome in its store if the CD case slagged the BNP off.
Yet I’d feel uncomfortable putting the phrase Folk Against Fascism on my CDs, not because I don’t hate fascism but because I feel like I don’t have the right to call myself folk at all, certainly not in the folk world’s eyes.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter though. If an artist is clear in their mind about what they’re singing or where they stand, it shouldn’t matter how many wannabe Hitlers purchase their albums.
It’d be no problem if I got a review in The Sun – I have a couple of times and they were nice – or if Asda started selling my albums, as long as I’m confident I believe in what I’m singing.
It only becomes truly ambiguous if I’m vacuous – and sadly that’s where some of the folkies need to worry.
Column #52
The Man Booker Prize and the Mercury Music Prize seemed to run parallel this year. Without denying the obvious talent of many nominees, both award lists had a slightly nerve-wracking pro-establishment wobble and overlooked not only a pile of interesting, slightly more outsider options but played deftly into corporate hands.
Perhaps it’s the people at the top of both industries who’ve driven their two creative trades to the edge of collapse, panicking that the only way to save their arses is to go to ground, so to speak, isolating the independents and trusting only themselves.
It’s establishment approaches rather than established “artists” that I’m thinking of. Both prizes this year lean heavily towards the major A&R or grand old agents.
My friend MJ Hibbett, who has run his own label and released his own music for over a decade, put his new album Regardez, Ecoutez & Repeatez in for the Mercury Music Prize. Hibbett has been around forever and plays classic shambolic indie with a semi-acoustic bent and clever-funny lyrics. In the tradition of Half Man Half Biscuit and The Wedding Present, he’s got a killer way with a phrase.
I’ve been entered by record labels a couple of times in the past. I apparently made it on to the “long list,” although, annoyingly, they don’t publicise that one, but I haven’t ever stumped up the cash myself, so I was quite impressed.
I also quietly thought Hibbett might actually score a nomination because we’ve come full circle, reaching a point where the old-school English style of his work ought to be seen as “classic” and influential. No such luck.
Hibbett didn’t seem phased though. He’s already moved on to his one-man show for the Edinburgh Fringe, which is a sci-fi disaster musical (in the vein of War Of The Worlds) called Dinosaur Planet. Nuts.
A fundamental challenge with criticising the Mercury list is to avoid denigrating the people on it.
Everybody’s music taste is different and if one starts listing who should’ve and who shouldn’t have been there, it quickly becomes too focused on that rather than the general picture.
It’s a real pleasure to see an unknown act like Sweet Billy Pilgrim who’ve made a charming record nominated.
However, this year that band seems to be the “folk” option, which just results in several wonderful records by real folk artists getting overlooked.
If you want a trad folk album that both understands the language of traditional music and cuts a vicious swathe through convention – breathtaking in its brilliance and scope – you needed to nominate Jon Boden’s ‘Songs From The Floodplain’. But there – I’ve fallen into the obvious trap of suggesting alternatives, which wasn’t the point.
It may be passé to moan about the Mercury but, increasingly, I think that something needs to be done.
People have made a good case for limiting the prize to debut albums. There’s real value in that idea, although of course it would rule out veteran outsiders like me.
Also, often the big companies put more weight behind an artist’s debut than any future work, so you’d end up rewarding the hype even more.
Another interesting and recurring suggestion has been a sales cap. So, once an album has sold, say, 50,000 copies, it can’t be entered. But even that doesn’t rule out the subjects of well-timed hype, because their albums simply wouldn’t have sold that many at the point of entry, even if they’ll go on to sell bucketloads.
So here’s an idea – what about a marketing spend cap? Albums cease to be eligible once they’ve had more than £50,000 spent on their marketing. Of course, once nominated, labels could then ramp up the PR in response – which would in turn increase that recently diminished feeling that a Mercury nomination helps a record. With a marketing spend limit, you’ve hamstrung the bigger labels and provided smaller labels with a real chance of competing.
Of course, the real trick must have to do with liberating the judges themselves from whatever behind-the-scenes relationships they have with old school A&R, management and PR players. And with the Booker, the same move away from the heavyweight publishing gurus and agency bosses. Over the previous two to three years, I felt that this had gone a long way towards being achieved.
It’s just a pity that this year everyone’s crawled back into the box.
Column #51
It is often regarded as a negative thing that we consume culture in much smaller, much more disparate audience groups than in recent history.
People hark back dewy-eyed to these enormous mass media events that unified the whole country through the 20th century, like the Moon landings that were recently commemorated everywhere, or Live Aid, or the Morecambe & Wise Christmas Special. Unhappy world events also caught public imagination in an oddly focused way. When Kennedy and Lennon were shot, the presentation was common to all of us, the language and reactions shared.
Then people look around at what we’ve got now – collapsing ratings, thousands of channels broadcasting to tiny audiences, the end of Richard and Judy – and cry foul that it’s somehow a terrible thing. But exciting and involving as the coverage of those kind of events may have been, with hindsight, such grand unifying moments in world culture surely weren’t all they’re cracked up to be, especially in terms of the effect they may have had on society as a whole.
Even the presentation of moments that seemed overwhelming at the time – Diana’s funeral, Mandela walking free or large-scale political events – didn’t truly unite us in any way, beyond momentary emotion. All the nasty wars and a general background of vicious inequality make that abundantly clear.
Beyond the lack of unity among humans as a whole, I’ve often wondered about the people left out of those huge events by circumstance. There are thousands upon thousands of us who’ve never watched a Harry Potter film or Star Wars. At no point in British history have more than 95 per cent of households had a TV, which means that even when these grand events were unfolding, some people missed it. And one has to suspect that a proportion of those did so because they couldn’t afford to join in.
Similarly now, I may get excited about the internet but look at the disenfranchisement of those without it. Every time you see a discount offered for ordering online or paying your bills that way, it’s easy to forget the often elderly or impoverished people who just don’t have that access. No wonder an increasing number of expert voices argue for online access – and broadband in particular – to be a considered a universal human right. Nobody ever said that about colour TV, except really extreme snooker fans.
Anyway, assuming that the age of the mass shared media experience is now over, thanks to the rise of the web and the multitude of digital TV channels, it’s a tiny portion of human history that was consumed by these behemoths. Turns out, it was a distinctly 20th century phenomenon, outlasted by single lifetimes. Over the past few weeks, some widely covered global events, all harking back in their own way to days gone by, have made me certain that it was never a good thing. The financial crisis, death of Michael Jackson, swine flu epidemic and even the anniversary of the Moon landings have all been consumed and then reacted to in a multitude of different ways. And for me, those chaotic reactions have been all the better for it.
In fact, the move in this direction ties in very much with optimistic ideas about the socialisation and tendency towards anarchy of technology-led culture. If survivors end up living in self-sufficient small units, while using the remains of digital, mobile technology to communicate more widely, this will perfectly chime with where culture is headed right now. We don’t need 20th century concepts of fame or shared moments worldwide.
A sad thing is those left behind using the language of mass culture but with a tiny audience. The Big Brother generation talks about watercooler moments, when everyone’s drinking from their own tap.
I discovered that I’d been picked to go on the fourth plinth as I was writing this. I wrote about the plinth fairly critically a few weeks ago. Again, although it may use the language of mass consumption, it’s in no way a mass cultural event. People might be aware of it, but few have interacted with it at all and fewer still have become “viewers” in the conventional sense, via Sky’s webcams.
In fact, it’s almost a lot of different, localised, friend-oriented events, instead of one big one.
