13 f Ranting & Reeling I
’ve been alive far longer than you might think I’ve been alive. I create the illusion of youth by wearing tight jeans, having silly hair and using words like “YOLO”, “sexting” and “Taylor Swift”. But I’m old enough to remember the miners’ strike, the Falk- lands conflict and the unshakeable belief we’d all die in a global thermonuclear war before our mock exams (that’s why I didn’t bother to revise).
From the perspective of a politicised
child with scuffed Doc Martens on my feet and a bleached fringe in my eyes, the 1980s looked bleak. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer and those who’d been bafflingly elected to power on both sides of the Atlantic gambled with our lives in increasingly high-stakes games of international aggression.
Fortunately we had Billy Bragg to sing songs about it, which made us feel part of a gang vicariously sticking it to Thatcher with a 7" whose sleeve artwork insisted the buyer “pay no more than One pound and twenty-five pence” (an anti-capitalist gesture recently taken up by the manufac- turer of Wotsits, much to my corner shop owner’s annoyance.)
The recent release of private letters between the Iron Lady and her tipsy name-
sake Princess Margaret don’t reveal what she thought of Bragg’s Between The Wars EP. But I knew a Tory supporter back then who liked the record despite its overtly lefty leanings, because they paid scant attention to song words. Maybe Mrs T was the same. I like to imagine her idly whistling the tune to Billy’s version of Flo- rence Reece’s 1931 mine workers’ protest song Which Side Are You On?, blissfully unaware of its lyrical content as she watch- es Britain’s striking pitmen return to work – broken like the country by her actions.
But judging from her 1978 appear-
ance on Desert Island Discs, Maggie didn’t like music – opting for a couple of nostal- gic novelty records and the kind of classi- cal tunes that members of polite society pretend to enjoy. Add to that a later insis- tence that her favourite song was (How Much Is) That Doggie In The Window? (The One I’ve Chosen To Import From Poland, A Decision That Will Decimate The UK’s Nationalised Canine Industry) and you have a leader clearly untouched by Euterpe.
You can’t really trust anyone who
doesn’t like music, it suggests they lack something fundamentally human in their psyche. If a song can’t make you cry then it seems unlikely the plight of your fellow
man ever will. It’s the same disconnect between your- self and the experience of others; an impenetrable level of
sociopathy. No matter
how loudly and gruffly we bel- low in praise of
the good guys, the bad guys still frequent- ly win. A song cannot change the world. It can’t even dent the political process, as the musicians and activists who released the absurd charity Christmas track JC 4 PM 4 ME will find out soon enough.
Billy Bragg’s debut single didn’t affect the outcome of the miners’ strike just as Picasso’s Guernica didn’t bring a favourable end to the Spanish Civil War. But they were not in vain. Art can only connect. And in days like these, when our countries are darkly divided, connections such as these shine a vital light.
All music is a protest of a kind. Even that awful rubbish you like.
Tim Chipping
The Elusive Ethnomusicologist T
ravelling down from Aviemore on the train listening to Show of Hands. Steve Knightley’s pithy, witty spearing of social issues
soar on Phil Beer’s virtuosic melodic improvisation as we snake by snow- covered mountains and icy lochs that sparkle in the sun. I say ‘we’ but I’ve a whole table to myself. Though the reser- vation ticket on the seat opposite warns of company from Newcastle.
The chap who gets on is neat and quiet and called Neil. He works on his lap- top, but forced to make an unscheduled change as our journey goes awry, we fall into brief conversation. “What do you do?” he asks. I tell him about fRoots, safe in the unlikely event he’s ever read it. And we return to work.
“Is this it?” he says, turning his laptop
towards me. fRoots is on his screen. “You’ve got a column!” [Not for much longer. Ed.]
“Actually, it’s better to get the real magazine,” I say. “It feels nice, it looks nice and people even tell me it smells nice! You don’t get that online! Because, let’s face it Neil, the real thing carries the weight of the truth of the printed word that’s missing on the internet. In the quag-
mire of the ‘post-truth’ pants that’s posted up, any cretin with a keyboard can and does plaster the ether with shite invective, so the printed world’s devalued. I mean, gone are journalistic practices such as veri- fying a story. Ethics have drowned in emo- tional outpouring and abusive claptrap. Look, in a world where any old orange twat can spout bollocks and get his pudgy pinkie-finger on the nuclear button and give his cronies a leg-up to boot, celebrity culture has made morons (if not toast) of us all. It has spewed up Trump as Presi- dent. We have sunk from class to crass in the White House…”
“Are we nearly there yet?” asks Neil.
I shake my head. “Don’t you think Neil, that where the worst of humanity is celebrated and vindicated as a ‘mass movement’ though it’s typified by a total absence of critical thinking, magazines like fRoots, that celebrate creativity and hope and interconnection and the best of humanity won’t just smell nice, they’ll smell like roses in sewers of shit! Honestly, we really shouldn’t put up with ‘post- truth’. Neil.”
“Oh God, we’re only at Doncaster…”
“Post-truth simply lends a smattering of cod-intellectualisation to a world where
blatant stupidi- ty has met with cynical manipu- lation and
we’re all caught up in its deathly embrace. There is truth. Neil, it exists! We mustn’t forget how to find it. Or how to
speak it, write it and fight for it. We mustn’t
accept anyone telling lies and just shrug- ging. ‘So what?’ Lies do not become true because people believe them, Neil, people are just believing lies.”
“Oh,” says Neil, “if only you could have sung all this with wit and lovely har- monies and woven a story to reveal the facts as the music itself rings with the truth of human interconnection. It would be the opposite to the stories that spin lies, poncing about as truth as they peddle fear, feed hate and demean us all.”
Actually Neil didn’t say this and I
didn’t rant at him. But let’s wake up and smell the copy.
Elizabeth Kinder
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84
