stranger and stranger

Posted on June 29th, 2009

My life has been taking some uncannily Sex & the City-like turns lately. You know when Carrie and Aidan split up and then she nearly loses her flat? Well I’m no longer in the West End. OMG yes I’m moving back East. No more West End girl.

Anyway I’m only telling you cus that’s why I haven’t written shit for a while, again.

I’ll be doing some hoovering soon though.

Enjoy the 3-day summer!

Oh. A couple of things I wanna clear up. Bradshaw is my real name (heard some hilarious rumours). And I’m pretty sure i’m not as annoying as Carrie. I still maintain she’s alright in Series 1 though.

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Posted on June 5th, 2009

My dad says he doesn’t know what murking is.

(Merking? Spelling discontinuum).

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Posted on May 19th, 2009

I’M DOING A SURVEY! WHAT DOES ‘WASTEMAN’ MEAN TO YOU? SEND ME DEFINITIONS OR ANECDOTES to myspace!!

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EPISODE 8: MURKING K-PUNK V. SOCA AEROBICS!

Posted on May 12th, 2009

It’s been almost 2 weeks since K-Punk and friends decided to put on a 1-day conference at the University of East London in response to Simon Reynolds ego-exercise, sorry ‘why we still need the hardcore continuum’ 1-day conference at Fact in Liverpool. Apparently I murked K-Punk. I wasn’t so sure at the time but everyone said I did so it must be true.

All I said, basically, was that I was a young person and he sounded a bit bitter about his age. I am actually gonna be 30 next year but I was just taking advantage of the fact that my appearance is such that I still have to take my passport to Tescos to buy a packet of cigarettes. (I guess if I carry on smoking that might not last so long. Hey does anyone wanna help me stop smoking?)

Anyway, I’ve basically said everything I have to say about the whole ‘nuum debate* in my Paul White interview. Except a couple of things. There is nothing spectacular about the theory of the hardcore continuum. I was at a - totally unrelated - seminar last week and afterwards me and some other doctoral researchers (lol, ego) went to the pub and I started chatting to them about this and explained the concept, that one form responds to a lack in the other and replaces it, and one of them burst out laughing and said ‘well isn’t that true of all art forms’?

Durrr. Baroque - Classical - Romantic… etc.

Further to that, if the ‘nuum is a thing - and I have to say K-Punk was ridiculously unclear as to what the fuck he was talking about on this point - it’s only a thing in so much as the people involved subscribe to its thingness. Reynolds seems to be saying as much in this post.
OMG talk about over-theorising? So what am I supposed to sit down next time I write and go, “hmmm do I want this to be centrifugal or centripetal?” YAWN!

Last week I was reading an amazing little book by Al Alvarez, ‘The Writer’s Voice’. It’s all about how the best writers have their own voice.

In it he also talks about the hubris of New Criticism - we’re talking T.S. Eliot, I.A.Richards, Cleanth Brooks, and in their wake Harold Bloom - the kind of critics that made criticism a serious practice and relevant cultural form. The cardinal sin that they committed, as Alvarez, who happens to be one of the greatest critics of the 20th century, points out was assuming the primacy of the criticism over what it criticised. They thought their criticism was more important than the art. Harold Bloom is a towering figure who has done many great things, but he’s also a bullying exclusionist. Bloom used Freud’s psychoanalytic paradigm of Oedipal competition between and son and father to describe the way that artists respond to their influences. Sons both emulate and usurp their fathers. So far so good. But then he became an unbearably arrogant egoist who assumed that this was the only relevant paradigm for describing worthwhile art, got really powerful, and excluded art that fit into his ridiculously over-worded paradigm from what he called ‘The Western Canon’. He also failed to come up with a better way of responding to those - especially feminist - critics who challenged his model on the basis of its all-white all-maleness. He just dismisses them as ‘screeching women’. Clever.

Simon Reynolds is the Harold Bloom of rave because he has come up with a very specific paradigm and his status has got to his head so much that he thinks it’s the only valid way of seeing the world. The words omnipotence and delusional spring to mind. Reynolds has been saying that the reason the music isn’t as good any more is partly a failure of criticism. Artists and critics have never been at one with one another. So The stupidest thing about what Reynolds has done lately is that by derogating everything that people now are making he’s hardly likely to make artists more responsive to criticism.

Also when I was reading Reynold’s centifungal thing, the words ‘community’ and ‘communitarian’ started to float in close proximity before my eyes. What kind of a threat lies behind “we all know what happened to Goldie when he disconnected from the nuum?” What if what happened to Goldie had to do more with fame and complacency than failing to perform his alloted role?

Here’s a question. If the ‘nuum has been going on so long and it’s an inclusive community why are there still so few women involved, either in making the music or in the criticism? Where were the discussions about this in the debate?

What would happen if three women really into raving got together and stepped outside of the continuum?

Dare I disconnect from the ‘nuum?

As a matter of fact me and my friend Cora (two weeks ago) left the nuum debate early and went, instead, to Soca Aerobics at Peckham gym. On the way we met up with Manara, who you will be glad to know I found (on facebook). We left a room of arguing, theorising mainly men in favour of a room of batty shaking, sweating, raving women.

Me, Cora and Manara after Soca Aerobics. Can you believe the guy we asked to take this photo for us flyered us for some shit indie night?!?! Oh yeah, and if you look at the side of my head you can see my hair is all dark from the sweat. 

A week later I got a text from Kode 9 asking me which was better? Well, here goes. I loved 9 and Kodwo’s paper at the conference. It was everything K-Punk failed to be. Oh, btw, K-Punk was deriding all the younger people there by saying ‘when I was young I never tried to claim that the Boo Radleys were as good as The Beatles’. This was utterly ridiculous because I’d be the first to say that DMZ is no Metalheadz! Or that I wish I’d been there for Bukem. So what it was was that K-Punk was imagining things we’d said that we hadn’t actually said. He was attacking a wholly hallucinated enemy.

Hey I’ve just been reading ‘A Case Of Paranoia’ which relates paranoia to sexual frustration. Actually when you get to Schreber later on its to do with homosexuality.

Come on there’s nothing wrong with being gay!

Anyway. As a true raver who loves to shake my batty, I realised I could only answer 9’s question on an unfair basis. Of course I would love Soca Aerobics more. There was actual music, playing! I got to wear my Missy Elliott RESPECT M.E. shorts that I bought at Sonar in 2005! I wouldn’t have been comfortable wearing them at the conference.Initially I was going to try and theorise how Soca Aerobics fits into the ‘nuum. But when I read Reynolds theorising writing it made me feel a little sick. So what I decided to instead was to take the best bit of the conference, which was 9 and Kodwo’s paper, and see how it compared to the best bits of Soca Aerobics.

9 and Kodwo’s paper was the best bit of the conference because it was not only about finding other ways of theorising the music, but because it neither prioritised theory over art, nor made theory appear as a useless, self-referential wanky thing that only the initiated can get involved in. Instead they proved it an inventive, creative practice that complements art, adds to its life, and helps us think about how we think about culture, rather than strangulating and straight-jacketing it.

Now my favourite part of their paper, apart from when they talked about the “poverty of our discourse networks”, was their description of “synaesthetic signatures” such as “day-glo tone-colour”, where the sounds are as toxic as colour; “metric drift within insistent metric stricture”, which is pretty self-explanatory; “animatic apparatus”, where the songs take on the outline of sonic animism, with all the biological indicators of life such as breathing and reproducing appearing in the music; “machinic orality”, e.g. the use of vocoders; “and cosmic sleaze”, which seems to have distracted me so much I didn’t write anything else down, but I remember some stuff about that 200F tune and space age pimps.

Manara and Cora outside the gym trying to make up for the fact that we couldn’t take any pictures of the class due to our legal issues, and they would have made us pay £100!

Soca-Aerobics happens in quite a few community centres throughout London. Here is my theory of Soca-Aerobics.

“Aggressive gynaeo-circulation”. In music theory ‘feminine’ always describes soft, passive qualities. Jumping up and down with your legs out wide, your thighs burning and your forehead dripping sweat, is neither soft nor passive. But there were lots of women doing it. It was also kind of circling because we were doing different kinds of whining.

“Vivification”. Much more fun than listening to K-Punk.

“Alien teleological tautological extrapolation”. The trend towards Soca-Aerobics has everything to do with London’s African-Carribean communities. Most of the women in the room were black. So the phenomenon is definitely derived from the presence of people living in London, who have absolutely nothing to do with the continuum as defined by Reynolds, but have been here quite a long time and rave nevertheless. If you go - Actually Go To A Rave! God That Must be “Buffoon Empiricisim!”- a funky rave you will notice that people dance in very similar ways to how they do in Soca Aerobics. So there is definitely some kind of teleology/tautology thing going on there. I wrote extrapolation first and I like the word most so I just left it in there.

“Non-communitarian authentication”. Everyone was welcome, and immediately granted the status of auteur of their own style of soca-aerobics. This was largely because there were so many people in the room that you couldn’t see the teacher, so you had to kind of try and follow what everyone else in the room was doing, which gets really confusing, because everyone’s doing it differently, so you become the auteur of your own soca moves. But no-one laughs at you so it’s all good.

“Perspiratory disinhibition”.  Soca-Aerobics was like raving but better because I must have produced about 2 pints of sweat, whereas at a rave I always feel inhibited and like I have to stop when I sweat too much.

“Free batty respeculation”. There is a hidden reference to Irigaray’s speculum of the other woman in here. Mostly it refers to the fact that Soca Aerobics is liberating for women in the most urgent, up-to-date sense. For all the changes feminism has made, the one thing that we haven’t got over is that we are still judged more than men and consequently judge ourselves according to what we look like. We’re still trapped in the visual. The women in Soca Aerobics probably mostly go in there worrying about what they look like. I definitely went in there worrying about what I looked like, but as the moves went on and I was slapping the floor with one hand and the opposite leg up in the air, I totally forgot about what I looked like because I was having too much fun making bare noise on the floor. The batty bit is because our instructor had an absolutely incredible, big tough round ass, but I’m sure it didn’t come from worrying what she looked like. She was too busy marching round the room telling us not to be lazy.

On that note, I have to go, because it’s time for me to go to the gym. Otherwise I wont have the energy to spend all afternoon reading Lacan (oh yeah I do!). Just remember, Soca-Aerobics: it’s more than a bunch of sweaty bitches. (more…)

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EPISODE 7: HOW BIG IS PAUL WHITE’S EGO?

Posted on May 12th, 2009

When I go out raving I bring my ego. Sometimes we stay together all night and sometimes we don’t. We’re tight so we watch out for each other. But we know to give each other space when it’s time to.

My favourite moments in rave are when me and my ego are a bit euphoric and it feels like we’re separated but I know my ego is there somewhere.

She does have some annoying features. If someone pushes me just because I’m quite small she gets pissed and pushes me so I push them and it looks like I pushed back. Seriously, I’m not aggie, it’s just my ego!

Also she does this thing of telling me I’m not drunk when I blatantly am. Obviously when you’re drunk your capacity for measuring sobriety goes out the window. Your ego should watch you and help you stay in control. My ego though is naughty and enjoys seeing my boundaries change. Whenever I ask her about it she says it’s because of my Irish blood, or mutters something about being a proper writer, but I’ve seen her sniggering in the peripheries of my vision before and I often wonder if there isn’t a more destructive streak to it. Freud would probably say in our unconscious love and hate are the same thing so it doesn’t mean she doesn’t love me.

Anyway other friends can be just as bad! Last week at Deviation Kode 9 bought me a tequila because his new pleasure is having a tequila instead of smoking, and it went straight to my head. My ego surprised me by being nice and telling me not to drink anymore. Instead was like come on come over here and bruk out, because Benji B and Martyn were playing some dirty funky of the kind that feels like a wanton drive in your midriff, so you should drive your midriff wantonly. And then here comes my other friend Bob with a large beer she decided I definitely needed to have, to take the edge off!? Oh Bob.

The whole watching me thing can get kind of complicated. Like when I catch a boy watching me in the rave, my ego is kind of schizoid: sometimes she runs right up to them and smacks them a kiss, sometimes she runs up to them and slaps them in the face and sometimes she runs into the corner all sullen and fuck-off like. I find her difficult to predict in these circumstances. Then you get to the thing where it is girls watching me in the rave. Most of the times girls watching other girls in the rave is not because they are lezzers. Generally I consider it to do with homosociality. Most raves are organised in accordance with male desire, which means a lot of girls get atomised and compete with one another. This is not a universal phenomenon. I tend to befriend girls that don’t do it. It means they are a bit smarter.  So when you get a girl watching you funny, it’s homosociality. They are thinking, why is that woman driving her midriff so wantonly, she looks sexy, I need to look sexy, etc. The question is, is the girl watching you because your ego is on general look-out mode and she can tell, and she is therefore watching you because your ego is watching yourself? Or are you aware she’s watching you because your ego is watching other people too much? I can never work that one out. I just try and give my ego a slap and bring her down a little bit.

Oh shit this wasn’t meant to be all about me. No! This is about Paul White. I’ll tell you how. Last year I lost my ego. It was a bad time. Simultaneously people around me started playing more and more Paul White. Now, losing my ego had to do with other girls watching me and homosociality. Everyone knows about egos and the music business. I don’t even work in the music business. Basically, another girl tried to run off with my ego, largely to do with what happens to egos in the music world. In fact, it was actually precisely to do with a rave, and partly happened in a rave. When I objected, in not unheated language, she told me it was “just my ego!” At the time, she hit me right on my “am I watching myself too much?” spot and I - almost - gave in! I nearly handed my ego over to someone who didn’t know what the hell they were talking about.

It got me thinking a lot. In a world where everyone is bumping into and trying to stamp all over each other’s egos, wouldn’t we be better off without them? Can we live without our egos?

Anyway, Paul White. So here I was, trying to relocate my ego, and thinking about Paul White at the same time. It was about the time just before Blackdown coined the W-word. And then it struck me that this was ego-less hip hop. Obviously, there aren’t any MCs boasting. That is the most obvious display of egos there ever was. You could think of the whole history of MCing as a history of egos. Like, U-Roy is like the continuous observing ego; early NYC hip hop was pretty simple competing egos and then Rakim came along and made it feel more like an actual consciousness; NWA were a murderous ego; Wu-Tang the dissillusioned but visionary ego (Ghostface is the voice of your survival and supremacy instructor), etc. But it wasn’t just that. There was something in the music that made me forget the fact that I couldn’t find my ego.

So I did what I always like to do and asked Paul White about it.

Actually my friend Alex Chase the One-Handed dude made me wait a long time until Paul White’s album was just about to come out. It was well over a year since I lost my ego in the rave, and the weather was grey, so Paul and I were discussing feeling grey and uninspired, which made him mention wanting to go surfing. I’ve only tried surfing once and it was somewhere in England and my skin is practically see-through so I went blue…

Yeah I’m one of those people that gets hot and cold really easily, I’ve got crap circulation so I go blue.

“Oh no! I’m sure you could get into it though. Get a really thick winter wetsuit, they’re quite warm.’

So do you think there’s much of a surfing influence in your music then?

“Haha I dunno … probably not…”

It’s a little bit psychadelic that’s what I was thinking. I was thinking Beach Boys, surfing…

“Yeah! I dunno it’s quite meditative you know music, I dunno if it influences it, I suppose it must do in your subconscious. But I don’t get to do it very much cuz I’m in the studio all the time. But when I was a kid I went down there every year but the past 3 or 4 years I haven’t really, I think I’ve only been once in the past 4 years. So I can’t really call myself a surfer, I’m a fake.”

How do you stay fit then?

“Er, well I don’t really. I tap my drum machine as hard as I can for hours and I dance around my room, haha.”

That sounds like most of us! What music were you making, were you making hip hop when you went to Uni in Bristol?

“Not when I went. By the time I came back I was. When I went I was making a lot of kind of ambient music. When I was doing my A-levels before that I met up with a guy in there who was like a technical wizard who wrote dance everything. I’m quite embarassed to say but I did actually write, I got a couple of happy hardcore tracks from when I was young…”

HAHAHA!

“from when I was like 16. Techno and trance and happy hardcore. We used to write that together and then I would write like ambient stuff. I was into … taking quite a little bit of acid and stuff I was into all sorts. Hip hop, funk stuff, skateboarding, I used to skateboard all the time and the skate videos, that was quite a big influence, they would have all sorts on them from punk to rock to reggay* to funk to soul to hip hop.”

Have you still got them?

“No that’s the most frustrating thing in the world the tape has snapped. I had a tape recorder and it bust. But I’ve got the details of the guy I made them with, I know that he has copies, I really wanted to get a copy just for myself just to crack up. I’ve got loads of tapes of old ambient music that no-one will ever hear.”

Well my next question was gonna be why is your music so trippy, but I think I’m getting the answer already…

“It’s definitely the 2 years I went to the Brit School, it was so extroverted and over the top.”

Oh you went there too?

“Yeah I was quite the shy kid, I didn’t fit in at all. Those two years were a bit mental, I just smoked a hell of a lot and listened to loads of crazy music and went raving every weekend.”

Where did you go out raving?

“To… loads of free parties you know like drum and bass free parties. I went to this funny place this night called Escape From Samsara at The Fridge….”

(*Laughs racously) I know that night! Everyone from my school used to go there…

“it was hilarious! Loads of hippies taking loads of acid. It was great man I loved it.”

And really crap neon stuff everywhere!

“Yeah really bad man! Like ‘Love Is The Key and stuff like that. It was really bizarre going to that and then really gritty raw free parties, people falling down everywhere. It was quite a nice contrast, Friday night was Samsara and then Saturday was gritty free party night. But the Brit School was great they had loads of equipment. They had really nice recording studios. That was the really good thing about there. They actually had analogue equipment, I think I just caught the end of that rather than computer music.”

So do you still use analogue stuff?

“Yeah I’ve just stayed on what that taught me really. Just hands on. Cus I learned doing it all with my hands rather than looking at a screen.”

Okay - do you know Simon Reynolds’ writing?

“No… I’m pretty bad with names to be honest.”

Well, not everyone’s that into music journalism! But he’s like the godfather of rave. HAHA! Well sort of, he wrote quite a famous book about rave culture and he invented this concept of the rave continuum. It’s called ‘Energy Flash’.

“Oh I haven’t seen that one.”

It is really good. But he’s just started a fight with, like, everyone young. He’s like, middle aged and he lives in America and he doesn’t really know what’s going on. And he’s attacking everyone young making music and saying the music’s not as good anymore and it’s also the critics’ fault because people aren’t criticising the music properly. He wrote… you know the whole thing about wonky?

“No… no. What’s that?”

Haha! That’s a name that someone else, Martin Clark, made up to describe stuff like what you and Bullion are making, but specifically mentioning Rustie and Hudson Mohawke. And he called it ‘wonky’. And people didn’t like it, of course.

“Because it sounds a bit wonky… hehe”

Yeah, and influenced by Dilla and all a bit off-kilter. But Reynolds just wrote this really ridiculous article in The Guardian saying that wonky was… his paradigm about rave culture was that it changed according to what people were bored of hearing, but also what drugs people were taking. So he wrote this thing in The Guardian basically saying that everyone was taking ketamine now and that’s why it’s gone wonky.

“Oh my god are you serious? Hahahaha…”

It was like, what are you talking about?

“That’s bad!”

So you don’t take ketamine then?

“No! Of all the drugs to take! Loads of my mates used to do that when I was young and the whole thing went absolutely nuts. No, definitely not ketamine.”

And your music’s not written for people on ketamine…

“No chance!”

This give me pause for thought. First thought: Simon Reynolds is definitely having some ego issues. Second thought: getting off on ketamine is a fast and stupid way of escaping your ego. That is why, like I wrote a long time ago
about its disorienting effects.

While not being able properly to locate my ego I started researching whether women can have proper egos or not using classical psychoanalytic theory. I can’t explain this properly here (though I would point you in the direction of Roxanne Shante).

But what I did realise was that the whole point of an ego is to survive. Egos are where our internal desires meet with the reality of the external world and we negotiate a passage between the two. The process is never clear cut. It’s messy and difficult. Yet without them we’d all being walking around like paranoid schizophrenics, projecting our unconscious on to everyone else in the most violent and messy disorder, because or egos wouldn’t be keeping us in check. Or presumably worse, because paranoid schizophrenics still have an ego to overcome. We’d probably all end up cannibalising and raping each other. (What a dark and Hobbesian view of human nature! Okay, so there would be loving projections too, but everyone knows what happened to R.D. Laing when he tried to live a life of unrestrained eros.)
So now I laugh derisively in the face of people who tell you “it’s just your ego”. They don’t know what they are on about. And they are obviously fat hypocrites because it comes from their own egos.

I did find another solution. It’s called humour. Laughing at ourselves and others. When something is funny it’s because the normal reality as organised by your ego is momentarily rearranged. Your ego lifts for a moment. It’s like the euphoric moment in raving, where you are there but not quite there are you normally are, and you feel momentarily free. Brukking out and laughing are like, the same thing. If you want to know more about this I recommend Freud’s ‘Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious’. Unfortunately it’s quite long and one of the unfunniest books ever written.

Am I talking about myself again? Paul White! So… where you get music that isn’t designed to support the ego riding on top of it, you also get really amazing little snippets of conversation that are infinitely funnier than speaking to someone on K. Like two guys trying to say what eventually turns out to be: “Fast and bulbous! That’s right the mascara snake, fast and bulbous! Also, a tin teardrop. Bulbous, also tapered!.”

You’d better buy the album if you wanna understand. It’s called ‘The Strange Dreams of Paul White’ and it’s out on June 8th (hey that’s my mum’s birthday). Plus you need to hear the way they say “bulbous.”
Among discussing all this Reynoldsian, what-do-you-call it naming is interpollation fandangle (Alex Nut was twittering last week about not being from a ‘beat scene’), I askd Paul if he would call it the beat scene and he said yeah. Then it turned out the beat scene as he describes it was just two mates from London called Typeface and Surreal who he used to share beat-tapes with. (more…)

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OUMOU!!!

Posted on April 25th, 2009

Last night I went to see Oumou Sangare at the Barbican. She is my new icon. Like, up there with Grace and Fela. On top of being a 6-foot smiling goddess whose voice can make you quiver, she came with a programme that said she refuses to let men control her life!

Plus she had two really amazing dancers. I hope someone recorded it, I can’t find anything as good on youtube. They were the two girls on stage right in this video, except going really wild, and beautiful:

This is ‘The Shivers of Passion’:

Afterwards I met Charlie Gillett who was really nice and consoled me on trying to be a music journalist. You should check out ‘Seya’ on his page. I explained that it’s even worse because I’m also trying to be an academic.

But I’m happy anyway because I’m gonna move to Mali.

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Nutface Killah

Posted on April 17th, 2009

Blackdown’s done some killer sleevenotes for Alex Nut’s Rinse CD.

Alex is one of my top 3 DJs in London right now. (Clue to the other 2 - their names both begin with K…. ).

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Posted on April 8th, 2009

Ps. Does everyone know ‘dubbage‘ has now gone official?

I’m not going out until the next Circle,* and then I’m gonna explode. [Out to everyone who told me it was just US stuff, I love you guys… ]

*Probably a lie

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MISSING MANARA

Posted on April 8th, 2009

Hi. I have lost Manara. I last saw her in last Tuesday in Nando’s on Goodge street, I left her eating corn with a large plate of mostly salad dressing to finish.

She was wearing a blue t-shirt and big fake gold hoops. We were discussing our legal issues with Peckham gym and arguing about her not wearing a bicycle helmet.

If you have seen Manara please let me know.

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Simon Reynolds is the Harold Bloom of rave!

Posted on March 10th, 2009

More on that somewhere else, one day.

Right now: I’m not apologising but I’ve had more delays with the latest episode of Decks and The City, due to (more) illness and legal issues with Peckham Gym.

So March and April Episodes will be, like, b2b. Meanwhile enjoy my Skirt Crimes.

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