Category: Culture

By Henry Worsley.

They passed us in groups of ten or a dozen. Convoys of armoured trucks – blocky, khaki-green, fitted with glass so thick that they seemed driven by shadows. They were heading in the opposite direction, down South towards the Tajik border. Some kind of fight had started there a few days before, ‘you know, just farmers with shotguns and slingshots, neighbour against neighbour. That’s how they all start, and it just gets bigger from there.’ And it had got bigger – it had crept its way up on the BBC newspage. It was turning into an international scene. The ‘WAR’ word was being thrown about on Kyrgyz TV, and people were scared that one of the major powers, most likely Russia, would intervene. 

‘In all honesty, I think we’d do better if we still had the Russians,’ Dima said, ‘you see that’ – he pointed at a factory, sunk in on itself on the arid plain – ‘that is the state of our country now, since the communists left.’

He showed me a few photos from the South as we went further into the mountains: I saw a house split in two by shelling; shattered porcelain littered across the Fergana valley; Apache helicopters thudding over the horizon; explosions shot with a telephoto lens. It all looked somehow staged, like a huge post-Soviet stunt show. I wondered how old the boys were in those trucks, if they really hated those goddam, good-for-nuthin’ Tajiks just because they spoke Farsi and had different hats.

But we weren’t heading that way, we were going to a different corner of the country, to a lake in the Northwest named Issyk Kul. The road which wound towards this lake used to be full of military checkpoints – Issyk Kul is the largest and one of the deepest alpine bodies of water on the planet, and therefore an ideal place to fire off some torpedoes. The USSR had tested submarines there for decades.

I had an idea of how vast the lake would be. I mean, it was big, it was really big – you could see it from space. I read somewhere that it was the size of Wales (why are so many things compared to the size of Wales?). But when you see Issyk Kul for the first time it doesn’t resemble a lake at all – it is so damn huge it may as well be a sea, a mirror stretched horizontally ad infinitum, duplicating and inverting the cloud-shrouded peaks on every visible piece of shoreline. Here, surrounded by the monumental Tian Shan – The Heavenly Mountains – was the utopia of the nomad; the perfect microclimate, the richest grass to graze on, the most crisp and delicious water to bathe in and drink from. The air smelled good, clean, snowy. It was the opposite to the cloying stuff that rotted and sizzled back in the capital, Bishkek, where the utilitarian blocks built by the Soviets had been left to crumble, where people sold horse milk out of shipping containers.

Not that it was very different on the shores of Issyk Kul – here you could also buy horse milk in plastic bottles – but it was more fresh, of course. 

There were still plenty of remnants of Soviet rule: in the centre of Cholpon-Ata, a battered tank doubled as a memorial to the war in Afghanistan; next door was a ‘museum of spiritual practice’, full of big empty halls displaying yurts or framed photos of Kyrgyz poets. As you went further back along the line of portraits, they stopped being listed as poets and started being listed as manaschi – those who sing the Epic of Manas, Kyrgyzstan’s legendary founder. The manaschi wear the kind of felt-brimmed hats you see in portraits of Genghis Khan.

Dima and I slept that night just outside town. My companion was converting an old workers’ resort into a hotel. It was half-finished, there was no electricity. We ate grechka and fried eggs by lamplight, then played backgammon in silence, taking turns on google translate to bridge the gap between our mutually patchy English and Russian. 

After dinner we took a walk.

‘Stol – o – vaya … stolovaya, you see.’ Dima pointed at the bones of a clapperboard cabin, some words written in scabby red on its back wall. Below the script there was a mural of a beaming communist tucking into his borscht. There used to be a dining room here, but now even the table was gone, just broken glass and smashed-in doors. How very cold it felt to see that place in the grey half-light, surrounded by thin, peeling birch trees – the sort of trees that look romantic in Doctor Zhivago. Dima just stood between them, silent, looking at a place his parents might have remembered from summer holidays.

I had never done that before or since – spent two days with another human being with whom I could barely communicate. But Dima didn’t need to say much, not with that sad, stubbly look of a man who knows the mountains. I could certainly tell he was kind – his grechka was perfectly al dente, although he did cheat at backgammon. And he really was a man of the mountains – he woke me up at dawn to swim naked before we left. We barely knew each other, and here he was, stripping down. He did it with the nonchalance of a soldier at a medical test. 

‘Azora, davaiti!’ – ‘Lake! Swim!’

As we returned to the capital we heard news of the war down South. It had been resolved swiftly, diplomatically – the Kyrgyz had taken a good beating, a few hundred dead, and the Tajiks had captured a small chunk of the disputed frontier. The line had shifted a little on the map. Nothing had really changed, the ghost of the USSR still mattered – it still killed people. Now there were more of those spirits between the birch trees. 

And I thought again of the white forest and the ruin of the cafeteria at twilight, and how some places really give you the creeps.

By Ed Osborne.

If I asked each of you reading this which genre of music you believe has had the greatest influence over mainstream music and culture, what would you say?

The most common (and probably accurate) answers would gravitate to commercial giants like hip-hop, rock ‘n’ roll, or going further into the past, jazz and blues – all arguably correct choices.

However, pretentious-indie-kid-wannabe that I am, I have to propose an obscure alternative to these that’s cool enough to earn me a knowing nod from the leather-jacketed, doc-martened, cigarette-dragging hipsters I’ll see at gigs. So, meet Post-punk: a moody, depressed genre of music that had a cult popularity in underground music circles from 1978-83, and has only briefly resurfaced from time to time since.

Don’t look at me so cynically though, I’m not just doing this for cool points – I really do believe that post-punk is the most underrated and underappreciated genre of the last 50 years. It’s had a huge influence on subsequent popular music but has received almost no mainstream attention itself. To see my conviction, you only have to glance at my record collection, or the number of books on Joy Division and the Cure I’ve accrued (and then breathe a sigh of relief at the absence of Morrisey’s albums or autobiography).

Emerging from the ashes of the self-righteous and self-consuming fire of the punk movement, post-punk is what happens if you take a punk song, give it a hangover, abandon it in a warehouse in Manchester, and then play it to a very small crowd. The instrumentation is stripped down, sparse, and more rhythmic; guitars are often washed in reverb, whilst the bass plays the melody line. The drums sound industrial, the snare like a gunshot. The production is distinctive, mostly down to one man – Martin Hannett – who produced Joy Division and the rest of Factory Records’ bands in the late 70’s and early 80’s.

The lyricism was also radically different; gone was the escapism of rock ‘n’ roll, or the raging protest of punk. Instead, lyricists such as Ian Curtis and Robert Smith write with a seemingly numb acceptance of a broken status-quo, seeking only to document their own experiences with it, rather than cry for a revolution or glamorous alternatives. The Cure’s ‘10:15 Saturday Night’ gives us none of the ‘sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll’ we would usually associate with such an evening; instead we are left with the bleak image of a tap dripping into the kitchen sink, whilst Smith watches and waits for a phone call.

The watershed moment in post-punk’s formation came when Joy Division – considered to be the quintessential band of the genre – performed their ‘hit’ (by post-punk’s standards) single ‘Transmission’ on Tony Wilson’s ‘Granada Reports’ TV show. The genre and its aesthetic were now distinguishable from punk and an exciting embodiment of a new underground musical future. Unfortunately, this exciting beginning didn’t last long: just before the release of their second critically acclaimed album, Joy Division’s frontman, Ian Curtis, took his own life, and the band ended.

When they reformed, after some time off, as New Order, their sound had progressed – although it retained the driving rhythms and distinctive bass playing of Joy Division, it was now unmistakeably dance-oriented. Their 1983 single ‘Blue Monday’ almost single-handedly kickstarted the UK Dance scene, which operated out of Factory Records’ club, the Hacienda. By the mid-eighties, the record label and band responsible for originating post-punk had swiftly become dance acts, whilst retaining their countercultural edginess.

Elsewhere in Britain, the rest of the ‘scene’ was also branching out into new landscapes of sound. The Cure, Bauhaus, and Siouxsie and the Banshees exaggerated their theatrical gothic image, becoming icons of goth rock, before the Cure ventured further into new wave and art rock later on in the decade. Many of the original post-punk bands are indie darlings nowadays, and their albums classics, but post-punk’s influence stretches into the mainstream, too. Stadium rock giants U2 began their careers as a Dublin post-punk band, and whilst their sound has expanded, their lyrics have remained honest, emotional, and realist. Aside from individual bands, the sound of post-punk has bled into countless genres: its distinctive drum sound can be heard in almost all 80s pop, from Michael Jackson to Duran Duran.

In the 90s, the popularity of grunge and pop-punk forced post-punk’s distinctly 80s sound to take a backseat, but the new millennium brought it straight back into popular consciousness with the sudden popularity of New York’s ‘post-punk revival’ indie scene. Bands like The Strokes and Interpol had made post-punk sound fresh again, leaving the overproduced drums behind in the 80s but keeping the interlocking melodies of the guitar and bass, and continuing to foreground their personal lyrical stories in a straightforward, no-frills delivery. The ‘revival’ took a while longer to reach the UK, arriving almost halfway through the 2000’s with Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys and, strangely, a little-known Las-Vegas based band who were struggling to find any popularity in the states: The Killers. All of these acts have been unanimous in crediting original post-punk bands as inspirations, and their work in modernising the genre’s sound to keep up with the sonic trends of the 2000’s has kept the genre alive to fuel the wave of rock and indie bands that emerged in the wake of the ‘revival’ trailblazers.

Unsurprisingly, the wave of 80’s nostalgia that swept popular culture in the mid 2010’s flooded the music world with a craze for anything synthy, and original post-punk was back on the menu. If it sounded at home on the Stranger Things soundtrack, it was cool; The 1975’s 80’s pop sound made them the biggest modern band on the planet, and even cult acts like the Belarussian 3-piece Molchat Doma have become mainstream thanks to social media’s reawakened appetite for the new-wavey, post-punk sound.

Post-punk’s musical legacy includes genres as diverse as dance, indie, post-rock, goth-rock, new wave, synth pop, industrial rock, and so much in between, but what I find most exciting is bands like Fontaines DC, Idles, and Ultra Q, who are exploring new avenues of post-punk and generating mainstream interest whilst they do it. This most recent wave of bands show that the genre isn’t just an artifact, whose influence can be studied but remains in the past: post-punk is at the forefront of the newest innovations in modern music, and its time everyone knew it.

Recommendations:

Post-punk, an introduction – https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5f4GW6B55mSjof0A8cQki3?si=072c19d7600f4ba3

By Maggie Baring.

In May 1693, one of the most famous witch trials in history came to an end, having caused the executions of 14 women and girls, as well as five men. The Salem Witch trials offer another example in a long history of the oppression of women, in which outspoken, powerful or ‘difficult’ women were, and arguably are, still deemed as a threat to society. It is interesting to ask why, within the period known as ‘the witch craze’, spanning the 16^th and 17^th Centuries, around 78% of all those accused of witchcraft were women. Let us take 49-year-old Sarah Osborne, one of the first women accused at Salem, as a key example of how powerful women, in upsetting gender norms, fired up suspicion and hatred in those around her. Sarah Osborne was left a 150-acre farm in Massachusetts by her first husband after his death in 1674, which upset the status-quo when she moved herself and her new husband into her new home, overtaking her male sons who, legally, should have been given control of the land. Her attempt for economic independence, along with accusations from the young ‘afflicted’ girls who claimed she was ‘tormenting’ them, led to her subsequent arrest. She died in jail in 1692 from neglect. 

A recent trending song on TikTok by Devon Cole, ‘W.I.T.C.H’, says it best; that what is deemed a witch in modern society is a ‘woman in total control of herself’. How often are modern women, especially women in the media’s spotlight, torn down in this way because of a similar quest to gain economic independence and success? Why is it that businessmen such as Jordan Belfort, whose hideous ambition and illegal enterprises areglamourised by the media, whilst powerful businesswomen such as Taylor Swift are torn down for every move they make being deemed ‘calculated’ or ‘bitchy’. Indeed, Taylor Swift’s timeline as an artist in recent years is a prime example of how these modern witch hunts targeting high-achieving women very much still exist, even if they don’t involve mass executions anymore. 

Cancel Culture, a movement very much debated in the current climate, can be turned very quickly into a veiled way of tearing down powerful women, as the negative connotations of power in women is so deeply embedded in society that we find it uncomfortable, even now, when a woman transgresses the social norms she is expected to uphold. #Taylorswiftisoverparty became the number one trending hashtag on twitter for days in July 2016 in what seemed like an unprovoked attack upon the multi Grammy-award winning artist. One tweet read: ‘Taylor Swift is the worst thing in a while to happen to the music industry. Everything about her is calculated and fake’. 

The internet witch hunt tearing down her hard-earned career was allegedly provoked by her falling out with Calvin Harris, over a gender pay gap over the song-writing of ‘This is What You Came For’, and their subsequent breakup. Even if one believes that Swift was in the wrong for this event, it is interesting to compare her behaviour to that of a male artist whose behaviour is far worse than hers. Liam Gallagher, for example, who called himself ‘one of the f**king true great rock’n’roll singers on the planet’, is labelled as a ‘comic genius’ for such comments, whilst one could not imagine the uproar if Taylor Swift, or any other female artist, had ditched the drilled-in notion of humility and modesty in making a comment such as this. Although the music industry’s treatment of women is notoriously unfair, this is beginning to change, with awards such as ‘Woman of the Decade’ being introduced to celebrate women’s achievements and protecting them from the abuse which they can face from the media. 

As Swift said in her acceptance speech for the award in 2019, ‘as a female in this industry, some people will always have slight reservations about you. Whether you deserve to be there. Whether your male producer or co-writer is the reason for your success. Or whether it was a savvy record label; it wasn’t’. Like the targeted Sarah Osbourne of the witch hunts, who died at the hands of a hostile society objecting to her financial ambitions, one can clearly see how this systemic gender-based bias still affects modern society with regards to contemporary successful businesswomen. It is encouraging, however, to see these powerful women push through media scrutiny, showing that these witch hunts are slowly becoming a thing of the past. 

Since coming through the other side of her mass online witch hunt in 2016 onto greater things, with her tenth studio album being released on the 21^st October, Swift has fast become an icon and an inspiration to young girls who fear that reaching for heights of success is something that only a man can access. 

By Emily Mahoney.

Years ago, on one of my 4-hour voyages through the black hole of Spotify’s recommended for you section, I stumbled across an artist called Taeko Ohnuki, a Japanese pop singer and songwriter from the 70s. Her song じゃじゃ馬娘 (Jajauma Musume), the first track on her 1978 album Mignonne, stirred a peculiar curiosity within me that I had not felt for quite some time. I immediately knew that whatever genre of music this track belonged to, I was in. Despite not speaking a single word of Japanese and, subsequently, not having a clue what she was singing about, the rise and fall of her soaring vocals, accompanied by the funky synth and an incredible guitar solo, created such an intense feeling of nostalgia within me, nostalgia for an era in which I was not even conceived.

Hooked on the distinct feeling that her record gave me of intense melancholy, coupled with wanting to dance my arse off, I searched for more, coming across a plethora of Japanese songs from the 80s categorised as ‘City Pop’. I came to discover that this music was the soundtrack to Japan’s economic boom in the 1980s, and was somewhat influenced by American rock, soul and R&B, perhaps why it seemed so unheard yet so familiar. The genre as a whole gave me the feeling of glimpsing through a window into the past, with many of the songs energies seemingly capturing the atmosphere of the 80s, the synthy and upbeat instrumentals creating the perfect backdrop to a good boogie.

Despite my propensity for a good dance, what I found the most enthralling about City Pop were the melancholy undertones that seem to lurk in the background of every track, creeping through the discography that I poured over and giving the tracks dimension. Underlying emotions of heartache seemed to seep through hidden cracks in each song, itching a part of my brain that I didn’t know existed. The juxtaposition between the catchy hooks and cheery sounds and the lyrics that speak of regret, lost love and gloom help to create that sense of nostalgia, and within me, summon the feeling of looking back at time passed and love lost.

This is perhaps why Tomoko Aran’s 1983 hit Midnight Pretenders pairs so well with the toxic and regretful lyricism of The Weekend’s discography today, particularly on his 2022 album Dawn FM, in which his track Out of Time samples the song. In the chorus and it’s repeating phrase ‘Say I love you girl, but I’m out of time’ The Weekend’s dreamy tenor, both distinct and versatile, seamlessly intertwines with arguably two of the most important elements of City Pop, the melancholy lyrics and the groovy, nostalgic instrumental. The Weekend’s undeniably incredible vocal performance makes the song an instant hit, shining a light on the genre of the sample.

Overwhelmingly, however, the topic of the song interlaces perfectly with the melancholy sentiment of many Japanese City Pop songs. The Weekend proclaims his yearning to rekindle a relationship, despite the fact that he knows his efforts are meaningless and that he must accept that he is ‘Out of Time’ to show her his love. Patrick St Michel, a Japan-based music writer asserted that Out of Time, is “the most mainstream example of any older Japanese music being introduced to a wider audience”, and I am thrilled that people all over the globe have been able to experience the same mind-melting groove that gave me chills back in 2019.

By Emma Large.

When reflecting on previous avant-garde poets and movements, such as Allen Ginsberg and the New Age poets or Ezra Pound and the Modernist movement, it seems that new poetry is almost always divisive and controversial in its contemporary context. We often wonder why these works were such furious points of literary contention. I now want to be on the right side of history, embracing new art forms and styles with open arms. However, when I consider the new era of ‘Insta-poetry’, front-lined by poet Rupi Kaur whose work first shot to fame on the social media platform in approximately 2015, I am unsure which side I want to be on at all.

Kaur, self-styled a “poet, artist and a performer”, publishes and promotes her poetry on her Instagram account with a vast following of 4.5 million. She is known for her distinctly brief and fragmented poetic form, typed in all lowercase letters and without punctuation, and usually accompanied by a small sketch:

The debate about the value and nature of Kaur’s work has been particularly vociferous, and I have no desire to feed into a fierce pool of unnecessary criticism. However, whilst I understand her writing is emotionally impactful, I struggle to see how it can be called ‘poetry’; at least it seems less like poetry than the work of Ginsberg or Pound. Though it is not necessary for poetry to have form, I propose Kaur’s work lacks something that means it often fails to fulfil the conditions of real poetry. This deficiency’s exact nature seems elusive and contentious for all. While her work may be short, great Haiku poetry is only a few lines long; and though her words are decapitalised, this is also often the case for many contemporary poets. Hence, I pose the following questions: what exactly is Kaur’s writing lacking, and why does it matter?

I first contend that Kaur’s art lacks the unique specificity that provides most poetry it’s crucial emotional passion and substance, a point on which she has received a great body of criticism. Her work rarely provides a geographic or temporal location nor explicit context and abounds with generalised pronouns as she addresses the wider ‘you’ of her readers. This universality is amplified further by her poetry’s brevity. I provide these two examples from her 2015 collection ‘milk and honey’ for reference.

Kaur’s work is deliberately vague and imprecise for the purpose of being relatable to most people’s circumstances and contexts; the ‘all’ she depicts (or doesn’t depict) in the second poem is consciously undefined for this very reason. In the same way, her poem begins just after an event – ‘and’ – yet the exact occurrence remains unknown. The ‘you’ she addresses in the first poem could refer to anyone, thus easily translatable into a reader’s own life; and the ‘you’ addressed in the second is explicitly her audience. Though Kaur’s poetry thus appears to express passionate personal sentiment, at its bottom it does not entail anything individual or intimate at all; its emotion and personality is provided by her reader’s interpretation of it. This is arguably the key to Kaur’s popularity – her poetry can apply to everyone and anything, easily accessible and crafted for mass consumption.

Of course, I am hesitant to fall into the trap of poetic elitism. As Monika Hartmann suggests, Kaur’s work “democratises” poetry so that all can appreciate it; merely because something can be understood by all does not mean it is inherently bad or unworthy. Universality could be a vital asset of Kaur’s work. However, for me her artwork lacks the specificity and personal feeling that I think poetry – or at least captivating poetry – requires. Her poems do not make “monuments” out of “moments” (as Dante Gabriel Rossetti once wrote about sonnets), finding beauty and profundity in a singular place and time; but rather provide shiny all-purpose statements that could mirror any time and event in a reader’s life. Kaur’s poetry therefore may be reflective, but I certainly do not believe it is authentically personal.

Furthermore, the immediate transparency and directness of her work also means that it does not need much thought to understand. She rarely uses figurative language, and her metaphors and similes are instantly obvious or explained to the reader. Many of her poems likewise seem to be frank statements of fact and advice, absenting any literary features at all. This is an example from her newest collection ‘home body’:

I do not deny that this poem can be emotionally powerful for its readers; in fact, I think that Kaur’s frankness intensifies her work’s vitality and impact. However, I do also strongly believe that good poetry requires a little thought from the reader in its understanding; poetry needs to be interpreted and mused on rather than simply served up to its reader on a silver platter. Kaur’s work does not engage a reader’s thought in the process of reading it, as they do not need to discover its meaning: it is spooned directly and straightforwardly, straight into their mouths. Her poetry to me appears more like statements reflecting fact, or self-help advice; while perhaps powerful and motivating, you do not need to think to understand it.

At the core of my arguments thus far lies my conviction that Kaur’s work seems crafted more for immediate mass consumption than individual deliberate thought. Both the structural form of her poems – their brevity, the frequent line breaks, the decapitalization of her words for no apparent purpose – and her direct transparency of meaning and universality all suggest that her work has been crafted to be read quickly by many. While superficially her writing seems genuinely confessional, at its core it does not offer much real emotional substance; likewise, it does not inspire much deliberation on its meaning. Kaur’s work seems to reflect its creation in the Instagram-age, in which we are used to consuming art and media at a rapid speed and forming an opinion after only a quick glance. Her work is perfected for the Instagram feed. While I cannot deny its emotional power and inspiration, I do not think either that a lot of it can be classed as poetry. Without personal contextualisation and emotion or figurative language, I think Kaur’s writing consists instead of beautiful assertions and mirroring musings on reality. Its focus is on its reader rather than its writer. This is art fashioned for consuming rather than thinking. But, perhaps, in our intensely commercial environment, this is what art is becoming?

By Grace Marshall.

Imagine you are in a silver box surrounded by dancing men and women in dagger collared shirts and PVC trousers.

Imagine flashing lights, streamers and a disco ball – imagine a voice on the loudspeaker giving thanks to Uncles Ralf and Florian and then blasting Numbers. You are in Detroit in 1988.

In fact you don’t have to imagine. You can go onto YouTube (everything I write comes back to videos on YouTube), type in ‘Kraftwerk New Dance Show’ and be transported. I’ve seen Kraftwerk live, but actually that didn’t really come close to watching this 144p video. I saw them a long time ago in the middle of East Anglia with my middle-class dad and surrounded by other middle-class men who looked like my dad. Not surprisingly, ‘80s Detroit seems very different to ‘10s East Anglia. There was widespread unemployment, a crack cocaine epidemic, and a ‘Devil’s Night’ on Halloween of every year. It doesn’t seem to matter too much to the people dancing. As YouTube user Alexlesexe observes, it is rather ‘Rare footage of people having real fun!’

The link between Kraftwerk and west coast techno has been wheeled out before. The stories are fun.  There is one about Ralf and Florian going into a club in New York and being confused when ‘Metal on Metal’ started playing only to go on for ages after it should have ended. Ralf asked the DJ what was going on and found out he had two copies of the record which he was mixing together. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Kraftwerk invented techno. You can hear the beginnings of four-on-the-floor and synth tech in Timmy Thomas and Lee Perry and Funkadelic – it might be time to reassess these kinds of reductive ‘handing the baton’ narratives you sometimes hear cropping up around techno. Juan Atkins does emphasize the influence Kraftwerk had on him, but he also says that “Kraftwerk got off on the third floor” and the elevator kept going up.

Whether it would have happened without Kraftwerk or not – Detroit techno went way beyond its European influences in the ‘90s. One of the things I really like about this movement is the sense of “scenius” – an ecosystem of Roland T808 and monosyllabic samples. Juan Atkins talks about listening to a Detroit radio show called Electrifying Mojo, which aired at midnight every night, and just before it came you would hear people honking their horns and turning their bedroom lights on and off. The 90s duo Drexciya would also have been listening to Electrifying Mojo as well. They really picked up on the idea of the techno ecosystem. Between 1992 and 2002 they released five records imaging an aquatic fantasy world in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, based on the micro-apocalypse of the Zong Massacre. A slave ship on the middle passage ran low on supplies and white slavers killed over 130 enslaved African people. Drexciya reimagined the atrocity by creating a sound-world in which the slaves who were thrown overboard didn’t die but gave birth to children who could breathe underwater. It’s not really comparable to Kraftwerk at all in my opinion – there’s more to electronic music than the Autobahn.

By Tom Sykes.

Emanating from a forgotten corner of the American South East, the blues is the foundation upon which modern popular music has been built. Rock ‘n’ roll, soul, jazz and country music all owe a significant debt to the blues men and women of the Mississippi Delta.

Alongside gospel music, blues was the most popular form of African American cultural expression in the first half of the twentieth century. However, since the genre’s heyday in the 1930s and 40s, blues has been forgotten and displaced by its more slick and economically savvy musical offspring, rock and soul. Since the 1960s, blues artists have only been brought back into the spotlight by the rock stars and soul singers who appreciated their influence. It was British bands, such as the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, who sparked the blues revival of the 1960s, after they popularized covers of tracks by Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Robert Johnson. There is still some way to go before the blues is fully appreciated as the bedrock of popular music, but thanks to the success of the Stones and others, there is a growing recognition of the profound influence of this remarkable genre.

One area of blues music that remains fundamentally misunderstood is its political and social significance. Though we acknowledge the musical debt owed to the blues by the writers of the great protest songs of the civil rights era and beyond, we rarely see blues as a form of protest music in itself. Blues, instead is regarded as deeply introspective, dealing with themes of love, pain, and personal misfortune. Where Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye and Bob Dylan hit out forcefully and explicitly against the injustice facing African American communities in tracks such as ‘Chain Gang’, ‘What’s Going On’, and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, blues musicians seemed content singing about spurned lovers, sexual prowess and the wonders of rail travel.

According to one study by the University of Mississippi, overt political protest was present in just two percent of the blues records produced before 1945. However, when blues music is placed in its historical context of racial oppression in the Jim Crow South, it becomes clear that the blues was a radical and sophisticated form of dissent against white supremacy in the USA. Not only did blues provide the musical foundation of twentieth century popular music, but it was also the first musical genre that brought the experience of an oppressed minority into mainstream culture and laid the groundwork for the more famous protest anthems of the 1960s.

The seemingly trivial themes that southern bluesmen addressed in their songs all carried a far greater meaning than a superficial look initially reveals. One such theme is the recurrence of the trope of rail travel in Delta blues music. Southern bluesmen were not simply impressed by the locomotive as a symbol of modernity. Instead, rail travel was an expression of one of the most prized freedoms of the post-emancipation South: the freedom of movement. In this context, a seemingly simplistic song such as ‘Hello Central’, by Lightin’ Hopkins, in which Hopkins moans about being prevented from catching a train to see his lover, can be understood as a protest against the structures of southern racism that sought to limit the freedom of movement of African Americans and tie them to their traditional role as plantation labourers. Protest against the structures of Jim Crow racism is similarly evident in the reverence shown for criminals and vagrants who challenged white supremacy by existing outside of the control of white landowners. The popularity of the itinerant bluesman, Henry Thomas, who sang about his existence beyond the grasp of white plantation owners, is testament to the power of Delta blues as a declaration of African American autonomy in the post-emancipation South.

Arguably the most politically radical and powerful of the blues artists of the South were the Blues Queens who dominated the ‘race records’ industry in the 1920s and 30s. These women, whose popularity far exceeded their male counterparts until the 1930s, directly challenged the structures of white patriarchal society that sought to defeminize and even dehumanize Black women. The Blues Queens, led by Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, asserted their own freedom and sexual agency through their music in a manner that shocked white audiences. Bessie Smith’s ‘I Ain’t Goin’ to Play No Second Fiddle’ is an assertion of female agency, in which the singer talks about kicking her man out of her house, as she “ain’t gonna play no second fiddle ’cause, I’m used to playin lead”. In her 1928 hit ‘Prove It On Me Blues’, Ma Rainey even challenged the gender normsr imposed by US society by singing “It’s true I wear a collar and tie”, and later alluded to her lesbian sexuality with the words, “I went out last night with a crowd of my friends, It must’ve been women, ’cause I don’t like no men.”

The radicalism and political significance of the blues is confirmed by the reaction of white society to the growing popularity of what was described as the “devil’s music” by many social conservatives. According to the musician, Adam Gussow, who was one half of the blues double act, Satan and Adam, a pastor from Baltimore described the blues dancehall as “hell’s ante-room”. Gussow even identifies Black community elders who warned that the blues “only poisons the soul and dwarfs the intellect”. Such an extreme reaction against the radicalism of the blues can only serve as evidence of the efficacy of blues protest and expression.

In the context of Jim Crow oppression, blues artists, who dealt with themes such as freedom of movement, resistance to labour exploitation, and female sexual agency, were vital in the development of consciousness of racial injustice in the USA. Without pointing the finger explicitly at the white establishment, the blues gave expression to the simmering anger of African Americans, both in the South and in industrial North and West. It was these artists who laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights movement and the protest anthems that accompanied it.

The blues deserves credit for establishing a tradition of protest and dissent that had never existed in popular music beforehand. Just as from a musical perspective James Brown could not have existed without the influence of the likes of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, nor could he have written the Black power anthem, ‘Say It Loud – I’m Black And I’m Proud’, without the trailblazing protest of the bluesmen and women of the American South.

By Ed Merson.

Spotify can lead to many different places. The rabbit-hole of music which I embarked on during lockdown opened my eyes to the peculiar phenomenon of Charles Manson’s debut album in 1970, ‘Lie: The Love and Terror Cult’. Music often evokes emotions of happiness or sadness, but not much has incited such confusion and fascination, or even guilt, as Charles Manson’s debut record.

When people think of Charles Manson, the most likely things which come to mind are the events of mid-1967 involving the Manson Family. Feeding a commune of middle-class teenagers LSD while manipulating the words of the Beatles to incite a race war, Manson coerced lost souls in the Summer of Love to commit nine murders on his behalf, including that of Sharon Tate, the wife of Roman Polanski.

Before listening to this album, it’s interesting to consider what to expect. Dark and estranged by madness is the first inclination. The album cover immediately gives this impression, which features Manson, Swastika on forehead and ‘LIFE’ magazine changed to ‘LIE’. Besides, what else could come from the mind of a serial murderer who forced innocent people to paint the words ‘Piggies’ on Polanski’s kitchen walls with blood.

To my dismay, the album offered a deep and reflective Charles Manson, commenting on US Society, his wish to return home and his relationship with girls. If anything, this fits perfectly into the context of counterculture and Woodstock.

The first song ‘Look at Your Game, Girl’ is a soft and intimate address to a girl, asking to reveal her emotions to his confused and sad state:

What a mad delusion

Living in that confusion

Frustration and doubt

Can you ever live without the game

The sad, sad game

Mad game

Just to say loves’ not enough

it can’t be true

Oh, you can tell those lies

but you’re only fooling you

Although experiencing familiarity while listening, I was immediately snapped back to the narrative of murder and manipulation.

‘Look at Your Game, Girl’ is followed by ‘Mechanical Man’: an unemotional response to the monotonous nature of industrial life in middle America. Manson offers a satirical and receptive comment on the dysfunctionality of life that Manson experienced himself, growing up with a negligent father who worked in local mills in Ohio.

 I am a mechanical man, a mechanical man

And I do the best I can

Because I have my family to look out for

I am a mechanical boy

I am my mother’s toy

And I play in the backyard sometime

I am a mechanical boy

Largely abandoned by family, he lived between foster homes and eventually committed his first offence of arsenal when he was 13. From then on, Manson’s home would be in state institutions, spending 20 years in rehabilitation centres and prison intermittently. The background brings sadness when listening to ‘Home is Where You’re Happy’: a short and upbeat song that resonates with his own loneliness and isolation.

Up to this point in the album, without knowing the origin of the words, you could equate it to the voice of Rodriguez, also lost in American culture until recently. However, the insightful lyrics are interrupted by ‘I’ll Never Say Never to Always’ performed by an ensemble of girls. The same ensemble who loyally followed Manson and whose hands killed nine people. A chilling amalgamation of murderous voices.

The album was written during his incarceration, where he learnt to play the guitar and met Phil Kaufman, producer of Gram Parsons, who encouraged Manson to record his music. Through this relationship came another with The Beach Boys. He recorded his album in their studio and even harboured his family in Dennis Wilson’s LA house. The Beach Boys even went on to adopt his song ‘Cease to Exist’ as ‘Never Learn Not To Love’.

If ever you wanted a means of gaining an insight into the mind of a psychopathic multi-murderer, behind the Swastika tattooed on his forehead and his chilling expression of madness, an album with a mixture of longing for love and social commentary provides the perfect opportunity. You may now continue on the straight and narrow of modern music.