UNIT – MUSICAL
METAPHORS & PERSONAL POLITICS
“If you want to
write music that’s relevant to people our age, you need to make your
lyrics less obvious, less ‘in your face’. You should use metaphors
and avoid obvious political statements.”
Wong Yin Kit, April 2009.
We
were in Redchurch Studio at work on our album Kunstlerische
Schaffenspause. Those present were myself, Michael Hoang and Wong Yin
Kit (known as Richard to his mates). Our other group member, Luc Tran,
was in Vietnam at the time – the extent he’ll go to in order to
avoid band arguments is ridiculous. 1) Michael was trying – without
much success – to understand why I hardly ever include samples as one
of the tools of my compositional process. 2) Richard was trying –
without much success – to understand why I often use rock songs as a
medium with which to convey direct, blatantly political polemic. 3)
During this discussion I was trying – without much success – to
understand why so many teenagers prefer to listen to old fashioned music
by dinosaur rock bands or contemporary music played in very old
fashioned genres by modern rock bands. While these 3 questions are not
necessarily related, since they formed an integral aspect of what turned
into quite a long, detailed and passionate debate that afternoon, I
believe it is relevant to investigate the ramifications as they relate
to the change in fashions that prevails in pop music today.
Let’s
address the third matter first. When I was at school in the 1970s,
teenagers would never – not ever – admit they liked music that was
any more than 2 years old. In my case, I was absolved from such a
stricture since I preferred avant garde classical music. To me it was
more interesting, adventurous and relevant to me than the wretched
bleating of middle class nancy boys who, when they weren’t being
buggered by their managers, were more concerned with their eye liner
than the number of homeless people scattered around our inner cities
that year. That I failed to realise most exponents of the Darmstadt
school were also arrogant, middle class, spoilt brats speaks volumes for
my ability to avoid unpleasant truths. As the great Chinese martial
artist Li Siu Lung wrote: to suppress a truth is to give it force beyond
endurance. What matters here, however, is that I was free to listen to
any music I enjoyed regardless of the year in which it was written. In
classical music there is no longer any such property as ‘old
fashioned’ – or is there?
In
the 18th century, the English composer William Boyce continued to
compose music in the high baroque style rather than adopt the new
gallant mode preferred by Josef Haydn, Wolfgang Mozart and their pals.
His detractors often ridiculed what they called his ‘old fashioned’
works. In the 20th century, a new fashion ran rampant in Europe during
the 1950s: serialism. By 1960 every self respecting composer required 12
notes for a scale, not 8. Others went further and included
indeterminacy, aleatoricism and improvisation among their compositional
tools. I have no complaints here since many fascinating pieces were
written as a result of this artistic revolution. However, during the
1960s there were superlative works written by Malcolm Arnold and Robert
Simpson (among others) that were virtually ignored by the BBC, concert
promoters and major record companies because their music was regarded,
like that of William Boyce, as ‘old fashioned’. In 2009 there are
many recordings of the chamber music and orchestral works of Arnold and
Simpson now. Their works are performed at live concerts. Most of the
strange, eccentric sonic doodling of the avant gardists has been long
forgotten.
However,
the difference is that among classical music enthusiasts, you were never
going to be regarded as unhip if you enjoyed Bach and Brahms as well as
Varese and Messiaen or even a joke composer like Stockhausen. At school
I remember when Deep Purple released an album called Deep Purple In
Rock. When questioned about my reaction to it, I admitted that they were
highly competent musicians and for that reason I had more respect for
them than for, say, The Who or The Rolling Stones. ‘Oh, they’re old
fashioned, they’re past it now.’ was what one lad muttered with
complete derision. I think both groups were still active in 1970 but I
may be wrong. In any case, when you are a young teenager, 3 years is a
very long time indeed, therefore the music that was fashionable in 1967
was already ancient.
There
is another important factor to consider here. In 1970 there were no
I-pods and the internet was 20 years away. If you wanted to buy an old
record by The Small Faces for your decidedly unhip older sister, you had
to trawl through the second hand shops. In 2009, it is possible to seek
out (via a search engine such as Google) any recorded music from any
nation and download it into your computer or I-pod. Add to this the
cultural revolution that occurred during the 1990s that was epitomised
by the rave scene. Here, the prodigious use of samples and quotes from
old records became a major aspect of popular dance records. Hordes of
teenagers hunted down ancient obscure soul and rock records in order to
swipe drum beats and guitar breaks for their latest dance hall grooves
created on a home computer courtesy of the ubiquitous cubase programme.
The old music utilised for these new pieces emanated from a quite
bewildering variety of sources that included Tubeway Army, James Brown
and Led Zeppelin.
As
a slight digression, consider Gentle Giant. They were the greatest
progressive rock group in the world. There can be not the slightest
dispute about that – it is a scientifically proven fact. While I enjoy
each of their albums, let us pick their 4th one – Octopus – released
in 1972. It was the first Gentle Giant record to achieve significant
sales both in Europe and America; it became one of their most loved and
respected recordings. It possessed a superlative combination of
memorable melodies, dazzling instrumental counterpoint, a couple of a-capella
vocal fugues and some intriguing lyrics. In 1984 I remember reading,
with absolute disgust, an article in some pop music newspaper about the
alleged sheer irrelevance and pomposity of progressive rock. Now this
journalist was obviously in his 30s and therefore would have been a
teenager when progressive rock first became fashionable. He cited Gentle
Giant as one of the bands who merited his puerile comments. The primary
audience for this group during its existence tended to be white and
middle class. This is not a criticism, merely a factual observation.
Music journalists who are employed by the corporate media (New Musical
Express, The Face and so on) are all middle aged and middle class.
Young, working class writers are simply not eligible for employment by
this system because its task is to help the government maintain the
social order by channelling youthful rebellion into safe and
non-threatening areas.
Bear
in mind that at this time I had never heard a single work by the group.
In fact the first time I ever heard the music of Gentle Giant was in
2003. Therefore, my reaction to his scribbling was not motivated by any
desire to defend a group who had provided me with treasured musical
memories. However, I possessed sufficient perspicacity to appreciate
that his feeble rant was inspired purely by a desperate desire to appear
trendy, hip and cool by his perceived readership and nothing else. Which
pop groups did he regard and respect during the early 1970s? His defence
of commercially acceptable punk rock (The Clash, The Damned and other
pop stars) certainly did not fool me nor, I suspect, the majority of his
readers. If Octopus by Gentle Giant was a highly enjoyable record in
1972, does it cease to be a highly enjoyable record in 1982 simply
because it is no longer 1972? Of course not. Does the music change in
any manner simply due to the succession of years? Of course not. If a
piece of music is excellent, it retains those qualities that generate
its excellence regardless of the historical period in which it is heard.
When I listened to that album in 2003, I was immensely impressed by its
contents. I was also highly surprised to have found a recording from
1972 unknown to me that was of such inestimable interest.
The
net consequence of this is that in the 21st century, you are no longer
considered unhip and uncool if you possess tracks by Deep Purple and
Marvin Gaye on your I-pod along with Coldplay, Eminem and Shocking
Lemon. Is this a cause for celebration? Does this mean teenagers have
liberated themselves from the tyranny of fashion? Sadly, no, it does
not. You see, ‘old school’ and ‘retro’ are now rather hip and
cool! So when we hold a UNIT rehearsal in my flat, it is not to the
modern CDs the lads go when they want to borrow a disc of possibly
intriguing music from my collection. They reach for the 1970s
progressive rock. So why do I find this rather sad? Because it
represents a sad indictment upon the state of contemporary pop music
that it is so bland, conservative and often even irrelevant to teenagers
that they are compelled to delve into the recordings of past decades in
order to find music that means something to them.
When
Fabio and Grooverider introduced the world to the genesis of what would
soon become rave culture with dance music in all its various forms
(house, garage, techno, drum’n’bass etc), their use of samples was
considered novel and innovative. A sample is an excerpt, usually looped
(a repeated section or riff), taken from a previously recorded piece of
music by another singer or group. By the early 1990s, groups such as The
Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers and The Orb used the technique in ever
more inventive ways: the excerpts were sped up, slowed down, subjected
to echo, reverb, digital delay and other extraneous effects in order to
integrate them into the music. This was artistic recycling on a major
scale. This was ecologically friendly music! The inclusion of excerpts
from pre-recorded works also added a new dimension to the world of
popular music: it confronted the issue of copyright and ownership. An
artist known as Plunderphonics released a disc that consisted entirely
of samples taken from works by Michael Jackson from which new works were
created. This generated a furore among the record company executives who
released the original recordings and a court case proceeded which
resulted in the Plunderphonics disc being banned.
However,
the notion that the prodigious use of samples to create a musical
collage was new and revolutionary only applied to rock and pop music –
classical composers had in fact adopted this idea decades earlier. In
the 1950s there were experiments made with compositions created directly
onto magnetic tape that took recordings of trains, concert halls and
prerecorded music, often subjected to electronic manipulation. These
pieces were grouped under the title of musique concrete. Later,
composers combined electronic sounds with live instruments or voices and
the precorded sounds often included fragments (samples) of previously
recorded music. The eccentric American John Cage often wrote works
designed to incorporate radios broadcasting classical, jazz and popular
music during a performance. There was also the concept of live collages
actually composed to be performed by the musicians during a piece.
Sinfonia by the Italian avant garde composer Luciano Berio (1968) is the
most notorious of these with its extensive quotes from the Symphony No.2
by the Austrian Gustav Mahler. The German 20th century composer Bernd
Alois Zimmermann frequently included quotes by Beethoven and Wagner in
his orchestral works. Finally, the most eloquent use of collage is not
in an avant garde work at all but in the scherzo of the 4th Symphony of
Robert Simpson where Joseph Haydn is quoted (Symphony No.76) as it
nonchalantly skates through all manner of turbulent tumult hurled at it
from the late 20th century.
Now,
by the late 1990s, rave culture was not merely past its prime, it was
virtually moribund. Criminal gangs and the establishment music business
had each colonised all its major aspects such that nothing of the
original culture remained untarnished. As both old and new outfits
became bereft of inspiration and ideas, the samples were about the only
aspects of the music that were still enjoyable. By the 21st century,
samples were generally adopted by groups who were devoid of original
ideas. Also, if the majority of your music is based upon looped samples
then you need not spend much time writing and performing much music
yourself. So, there are three reasons why I do not use samples in my own
works, at least not in the form of incorporating recordings of music by
other people. First, I am in a group with highly competent musicians who
do not require the crutch of samples to prop up their performances.
Second, we possess a sufficient wealth of compositional skills and ideas
such that we are not obliged to resort to samples in order to compensate
for the creative poverty that afflicts so many other contemporary groups
today. Third, the prodigious use of samples, like the genres of house,
garage, hip hop and rap, sounds so old fashioned and dated now. To hell
with all that 1990s gear – I want to write 21st century music!
The
question raised by Richard Wong is the most fraught with difficulties
when engaged in any attempt to answer it. I have frequently returned to
the issue of the use of popular music to propagate political ideals in
various essays. This is primarily because I have yet to satisfy myself
that there is a convincing answer to the problem. When I told Richard I
wanted UNIT to be of interest and relevance to people his age (17), his
reply was unequivocal. “If
you want to write music that’s relevant to people our age, you need to
make your lyrics less obvious, less ‘in your face’. You should use
metaphors and avoid obvious political statements.”
This
surprised me – not because of the content but because of the speaker.
It was a most unusually articulate and astute observation from a lad
who, to be brutal, has hardly built his reputation from intellectual
pursuits or the pithiness of his profound statements. Well, perhaps I
can be accused of under estimating his abilities. Besides, I’d not
seen him since he last contributed to a UNIT recording, back in 2006 –
when he was 14. It also disturbed me. If his assertion is accurate –
and I have no particular reason to doubt his ability to represent his
peer group, after all – then it implies that teenagers possess scant
interest either in what is happening to this country or the reasons
responsible. It further suggests that teenagers prefer not to confront
the ugly realities of life in what is fast becoming national socialist
Britain but choose drugs, third rate poetics (rap) and escapism instead.
Well I can understand that – but where do we all go when there is
nowhere left to run and hide?
However,
let’s be fair. Was the situation really any better when I was a
teenager? What did teenagers in the 1980s really achieve, after all? If
our merits are to be judged merely on our achievements then Richard and
his pals are welcome to laugh at us with contempt. I suggest that
different criteria should be used, not to salvage any self respect on
our part, you understand, but to emphasise the importance – indeed,
the necessity – of a radical paradigm shift in the mentality of the
average teenager in Britain today. We did not (most of us) vote for
Margaret Thatcher and we most definitely did not vote for Reichsmarshall
Tony Blair. Fair enough, most of us refused to vote at all, but this was
not so much due to apathy but because we realised that there was
actually no person or party in Britain who deserved our vote: they were
all complete bastards. Why encourage such scum? Our reasoning took this
form. If we participate in their ballot box ballet with its proscribed
choices (which deny real choice) then we sanction this absurd and deeply
offensive electoral edifice so we thus have no recourse to complaint
regardless of who is actually elected to run the country. Why is this?
Because by voting in the poll station farce, you give credence to it; in
effect your participation bestows upon the British electoral system a
legitimacy it does not deserve.
During
the 1980s and especially during the 1990s, we continued to squat empty
property, to sell and take drugs and largely to ignore the petty,
restrictive, draconian rules and laws by which the government sought to
control and regulate our behaviour. Something then went drastically
wrong in the 2000s: British youth started to yield, surrender, give up
and give in. The soundtrack to contemporary youth consists primarily of
bland pop muzak and, for those who wish to adopt the pretence of
rebellion, gangsta rap. There are more swear words and shouting than
ever before but the anger and aggression is generally reserved for other
gangs of teenagers, other rappers, other social groups, other racial
groups and other people who are equally inoffensive and unimportant.
Gangsta rap, hip hop and, especially, R&B are irrelevant because
they provide safe and utterly ineffectual avenues for teenagers to let
off steam and avoid being any threat at all to the people actually
responsible for making our lives miserable.
In
1982 a group of teenagers from Kent called Anthrax released a record
called Capitalism Is Cannibalism. The music was harsh, tuneless and
brutal – the real sound of capitalism perhaps. There were dozens of
other groups like Anthrax (although most of them were nowhere near as
intelligent or pithy). These teenagers saw what Thatcher was doing to
Britain and they were sufficiently disgusted by it to write a song of
extreme anger and outrage as a protest. Now name me one equivalent group
(excluding UNIT) from 2002 who released a record attacking the Blair
regime in a similar manner. No, neither can I.
There
was even, for a while, a frankly preposterous (yet, in hindsight,
understandable) belief that punk rock groups were ‘political’ or at
least their lyrics and attitude were relevant to political protest and
social dissent against the establishment. From 1976 to around 1980, punk
rock was no more politically active than glam rock – The Sex Pistols
were simply The Bay City Rollers with safety pins and swear words
(except Les McKeown could actually sing in time and in tune). A look at
the primary trio of punk bands from this first wave reveals the true
extent of any political rebelliousness from that quarter. The Sex
Pistols were little more than the realisation of a daft concept by a
couple of Kings Road clothes shop entrepreneurs, Malcolm McLaren and
Vivian Westwood; The Monkees for 1970s Britain. Session musicians
assisted for most of the music and the songs themselves were rarely
written entirely by any members of the group itself. The group was
contracted to Virgin Records and so worked hard to accrue hefty profits
for the Branson financial empire. Anarchy In The UK, is it? I rather
think not, old bean.
I
must add that this is not merely the disingenuous carping of a
dispossessed progressive rocker 30 years after the fact. Even when I was
at school, virtually nobody took The Sex Pistols seriously – almost
every 15 year old knew they were a joke. The Clash were far less fun and
far more offensive because they adopted the uniform of political dissent
and moral outrage purely as a means to sell records and accrue larger
audiences at their concerts. Remember that during the late 1970s
agitational propaganda, political slogans and social protest were
especially relevant to working class people: unemployment was rife,
homeless people littered the streets, Marxist led unions held the nation
to ransom with their greed and bourgeois aspirations and the government
bent over backwards to offer its arse to Saudi Arabia in an effort to
squeeze out even a faint hope of slightly cheaper oil. Meanwhile The
Clash, all dolled up in military drag, posed for their album cover as
guerrillas on a flat bed truck. This was their latest insult to everyone
in Britain who genuinely fought for political change and social
improvement. The Clash were signed to gigantic American corporation CBS
who, like EMI, were dab hands at financing weapons systems with which to
keep those uppity niggers in Africa in their place.
Then
there was The Damned, easily the least offensive of the Big Three punk
bands at this time. They were considerably more honest in every respect:
they played their own instruments and, to be fair, played them rather
well. They concocted no contrived political rhetoric in order to accrue
credibility from the music press and audiences, unlike The Clash and
countless other no hopers from this period. They never set out to change
the world – they merely wanted to hold bigger parties than anyone
else. Personally I found them just as boring as The Sucks Pastilles and
The Clash but if someone put on a record by The Damned when I was in the
room, at least I didn’t feel compelled to head for the door at
Olympian speed.
It
is no accident that virtually all punk bands were white, male and middle
class. One of the rare exceptions, Poly Styrene (the vocalist for a band
called X Ray Spex) found the scene so traumatic that she ended up under
psychiatric care not long after her band recorded their first album. A
Marxist organisation calling itself Rock Against Racism made a concerted
attempt to address what they perceived as The Problem in Britain in the
late 1970s. I suspect a few of their members may even have been genuine
opponents of racism but I bet these people were also among the first to
leave the organisation once they realised what was actually on its
agenda. The motto for every RAR meeting should have been ‘How To
Persecute Anyone In The World Who Isn’t Exactly The Same As Us’. How
many Asian, Oriental or Black Caribbean members were there in Rock
Against Racism?
There
were pop musicians who provided insightful and intelligent responses to
the dreadful state of Britain at this time and whose articulation was
memorable: John Cooper Clarke, The Fall and Alternative TV are the three
examples that come immediately to mind but by no stretch of the
imagination could such people be called ‘political activists’, nor I
suspect would they thank you if you tried. There were many highly
committed political activists at the time who dedicated their lives to
raising social awareness and provoking constructive change in our
society – but none of them had either the time or the inclination to
be in pop groups. Most of the punk bands of the day were actually no
different in their aspirations from the pop groups of the 1960s. They
wanted fame, fortune and fanny. There were only 2 primary differences
between 1960s pop groups and 1970s punk bands: the former generally
learnt to play their instruments at least to a reasonable standard and
they never tried to disguise their desires behind a feeble facade of
political rhetoric.
Were
there any bands from this era who revealed genuine political sentiments?
At the time, some of us believed this to be the case when a bunch of
communist sympathisers called Crisis released their first single as part
of a campaign to raise awareness of gross corruption and avarice
perpetrated by Southwark Council. No Town Hall moaned about the millions
of pounds due to be spent on a new town hall while hundreds of people
remained homeless. PC1984 was the now obligatory rant to equate the
police with fascism and a totalitarian state. Holocaust was a plea for
public awareness to realise the National Front were neo-nazi
sympathisers. Well, pardon me, but every one of the political agitators
I knew were already well aware of that back in 1974. Their next single
continued to display all the politically correct sentiments. White Youth
was a tedious drone that exhorted black and white to unite and fight
while UK79 suggested Britain was becoming a fascist state. Their final
single featured Bruckwood Hospital, a daft rant about psychiatric
patients escaping from a hospital – well, as an ex-psychiatric patient
myself, I really don’t need a bunch of middle class dandies using
vulnerable people as a means to invoke amusement. Alienation was
enjoyable but utter nonsense. They also released a thoroughly tedious
album of seven miserable Marxist moans against nothing much called Hymns
Of Faith. This gaggle of grim geeks collapsed early in 1981, unable to
continue the farce.
A
couple of months later, the 2 founder members, Tony Wakeford and Douglas
Pierce, who were responsible for most of the music and lyrics in Crisis,
formed a new group called Death In June. This sad and sorry outfit would
trawl through all the badly played acoustic guitars of the world during
the next decade in an unsuccessful effort to find a single memorable
melody. Every record was a celebration of German soldiers, national
socialist chic and a barely disguised celebration of the third reich –
but never overtly, never deliberately. In other words, they possessed
neither the decency nor the courage to stand up like real men and admit
they found fascism more attractive than socialism. They were obliged to
allow themselves a semantic escape hatch through which to crawl so that
the mystique would allow them to be able to sell records and concert
tickets. Death In June were not alone in this absurd behaviour. The
1980s witnessed a whole plethora of pathetic middle class malcontents
out to shock mummy with their naughty antics: Sol Invictus, Current 93,
Whitehouse and so on and so forth, ad nauseum. Toward the end of the
decade this scene perked up a little when an American performance artist
called Boyd Rice entered the fray and added a slightly more articulate
voice to this previously painful charade with essays and lyrics that
were by turns amusing, angry and insightful. Finally, the pantomime
Nazis had a Führer.
All
the same, give me an honest fascist band like Skrewdriver any day. They
supported the National Front and, later, the British National Party –
they were national socialists and proud of it. Besides, their lyrics
were funnier and their music rocked! Now, their political allegiance
aside, Skrewdriver were (at least initially) a punk band and they never
tried to disguise their extreme right wing political beliefs. From 1981
onwards they risked imprisonment, physical assault, social exclusion,
the impossibility of live concerts and impounded records rather than
behave themselves and spout the safe politically correct slogans
demanded by the music business of the day. This was in the time before
gangsta rap when promoting the rape of women and the death and
intimidation of jews and homosexuals became hip and trendy once again.
They supported national socialism with an honesty and integrity that was
both laudable and impressive. Of course, to appreciate this it probably
helped if you were a national socialist. It is therefore unfortunate
that socialists and anarchists have never found a pop group of their own
who displayed an equal degree of commitment to their political causes.
Before all you old, sodden middle aged middle class punk types scream
‘Crass’ at me, I ask you to consider just how many genuine
anarchists and supporters of working class revolution ever considered
Crass to be a feasible or acceptable provider of the soundtrack for the
cause.
What
about The Jam? Here was a refreshingly articulate pop group with its
roots in the original punk rock wave of the 1970s and its branches in
the mod revival and soul boom of the 1980s. One writer once stated that
had The Who formed in 1976 they’d have sounded just like The Jam. This
is questionable. There is none of the quirky eccentricity nor the bitter
cynicism of Pete Townsend in Paul Weller, the singer and guitarist of
The Jam whose technical prowess (all 3 members were highly competent
musicians) immediately set them apart from all that punk dross. Despite
being signed to Polydor Records, a huge corporate record company, Weller
made scant effort to hide his socialist beliefs. However, that didn’t
prevent his band attaining the upper reaches of the national popular
music charts on no less than 15 occasions from 1977 to 1982. That they
achieved this despite many of their lyrics displaying blatantly left
wing political texts is nothing short of miraculous. It wouldn’t be
allowed to happen today, of course – New Labour National Socialism
would see to that. However, just how political can a pop group be when
they’re making money for a multinational corporation? Just how much of
the politics Weller espoused was so much rhetorical window dressing? I
suggest his beliefs were a damned sight more honest and genuine than The
Clash (for example), no matter how odious and risible. Despite being an
ardent supporter of Rock Against Communism for nearly 3 decades now, I
still respect The Jam for having the courage to express their beliefs in
a public forum and for doing so in a musically proficient manner.
Now
it can be argued – perhaps with some justification – that after the
first wave of punk (1976-1979) died a death that was long overdue, the
second wave exhibited an ostensibly overt political awareness not
apparent in their predecessors. This was inspired by a group of hippies
who realised that the summer of love in 1967 had, 12 years on, mutated
into the winter of hate. They were rather more intelligent and
articulate than most of their peers and indeed their origins were
related to the avant garde art and music scene rather than the standard
blues and rock circuit. When they elected to form a music group in 1979,
they were not so much a punk band as an outsiders’ interpretation of
what a punk band might be – the difference is crucial if we are to
comprehend what motivated this group who, within a few hectic months,
had their name sprayed on walls and leather jackets across the entire
length and breadth of Britain. Crass had arrived. By 1981 it had become
de rigeuer to adopt these commandments: thou shalt be an anarchist; thou
shalt be a vegetarian; thou shalt be a pacifist; thou shalt wear black
rags; thou shalt be a boring bastard. To be fair to Crass, at no time
did any of their members insist or even suggest that their followers
should adopt the same modes of dress, behaviour and belief systems as
themselves. Indeed, they often made it clear they did not want actual
followers at all. ‘You are all individuals!’ they’d yell from
stages and concert halls across the nation. ‘Yes, we are all
individuals!’ their young acolytes would scream out of sweaty mosh
pits from Carlisle to Cornwall.
Now,
even though I once met the group and discovered them to be intelligent,
articulate and honest individuals dedicated to their cause, I found
their politics offensive and their music atrocious. Unfortunately,
through no direct fault of the group itself, they did attract followers
– rabidly partisan fans who adhered to the ridiculously naive polemic
of anarcho-pacifism with a self righteous fervour equal to the most
belligerent Muslim fundamentalist. All this bollocks meant absolutely
nothing to me. I was poor, working class, slightly disabled and
profoundly angry with what the government was doing to my country. I was
in a pop group called The Apostles by this time. When Ian Bone and his
crew created the group Class War in the middle of the decade, finally,
at last, there was an organisation that spoke my language, that
addressed real issues relevant to me and which produced a newspaper
worth reading. The great unwashed anarcho-pacifist white middle class
animal lovers had Crass. I realised Class War could do with their own
pop group. I intended The Apostles to be that group – but here was
where I totally failed to appreciate the situation. You see, Class War
did not actually need a silly pop group to sing its praises, help raise
public awareness of the issues it addressed and propagate its tenets –
it was perfectly capable of performing those functions itself. Besides,
each record by The Apostles was bought by no more than 5,000 people;
Class War sold over 5 times that amount for every issue of its paper.
The Apostles were never featured in the mainstream media. Ian Bone was
interviewed on the Jonathan Ross Show on national television. Case
closed, m’lud.
So,
doesn’t all this mean that Richard Wong is perfectly correct to
question the validity of UNIT utilising blatantly political texts for
its lyrics? Yes it does – his argument is simply too strong for me to
refute it entirely. So far, since 2005, various works by UNIT have been
broadcast on no less than 15 different programmes on Resonance 104.4 FM.
Out of all these pieces, hardly any have featured our more overt
political statements. It is almost as if these works have been avoided
by the programme presenters on Resonance. Could this be because they
find our political sentiments offensive or too dangerous to broadcast on
the air? Even a cursory investigation of the radio station will reveal
that such a contention is utterly without justification. Indeed, even
stronger beliefs of a similar nature have been vituperatively expounded
on a whole variety of its magazine and news programmes. No, the reason
very few of our political pieces have been aired must surely be because
the programme presenters find them a little boring; they know the
problems, they are familiar with the political arguments and they
don’t need to hear them recycled through the UNIT pop song process.
Our strident critiques of Blairite national socialism would be shocking
to the middle class wimps who run BBC radio programmes and who write for
the New Musical Express; to the programme presenters of Resonance,
however, they no doubt mixed with people who discussed these same ideas
while I was still at school so they are hardly liable to be impressed
with our manifesto. I posit that this is why they have featured our
other material with such generous regularity but generally avoided the
political rants.
When
UNIT formed in 1999, 3 of its members were Chinese. This provided us
with sufficient license to write about issues that concerned people from
south east Asia, including political issues, especially since these were
generally unknown to the majority of young people in Britain. When I was
in The Apostles we had an Indian guitarist for nearly a year and we
wrote about issues of racism at a time when literally no anarcho-pacifist
punk band touched the subject with a barge pole. Certainly white people
can write songs about racism but such sentiments sound profoundly more
convincing when there are non-white people in the band. However, when I
write songs concerned with the racism directed against white people, we
are met with a stony wall of indifference. The implication here is that
racially motivated assaults against the indigenous white people of
Britain are in some bizarre manner less offensive than similar attacks
against coloured people. This concept is a direct concomitant of the
disgusting tenets of political correctness created by Marxists within
the Labour Party during the 1980s. It has led directly to the imposition
of national socialist policies being inflicted upon the British
population today.
The
problem now is that teenagers are, by and large, ignorant of political
issues or, worse still, they are aware of the issues but simply don’t
care anymore. There are so many more interesting distractions to keep
their minds occupied: the internet, their play station games, x-boxes,
I-pods and downloadable, interactive whatevers. In other words, so long
as it is illegal to play live music in public places without licenses,
so long as it is illegal for people to enjoy a cigarette in a pub or
club, so long as we are under constant surveillance by closed circuit
television cameras on nearly every street in the nation, so long as
employers have the right to deny basic rights to employees, so long as
it is acceptable to give jobs and homes to immigrants while these same
jobs and homes are denied to British people, so long as it possible for
the government to send its troops to invade foreign countries in
defiance of the desires of the majority of the population, so long as it
is illegal for ordinary people to protest on the streets against
government corruption and the injustices inflicted upon them by global
capitalism then I shall continue to defend our adoption of overt
political lyrics in UNIT.
Andy
Martin © 2009.
