How Upsetting

We need to talk about femininity

We need to talk about femininity. Or rather, I need to talk about femininity because I’m quite good at these things and you lot quite frankly aren’t. No offence. Recession, austerity and that, women are feeling lost and powerless, unsure whether they’re allowed to like Beyoncé or not. Most feel as if they’re not allowed to question whether Beyoncé is a role model or not - or discuss whether she will be tomorrow.

I know this because I’ve met women. I’ve even spoken to some. My OWN MOTHER is a woman! She doesn’t know she’s in crisis but she is. I can tell when she calls me. “How are you,” she says, “how are things?” Using my powers of intuition I know that she is crying out, CONFUSED and probably victimised by someone with 200 followers on Twitter.

I’m uniquely placed to observe this crisis of femininity. I may be a man but I’m a bit gay and sensitive and that. Also, I can write words like these in sentences. Most importantly, I conduct rigorous research. Last night I spent ten minutes googling the week’s news in order to best determine how to pay this month’s rent. The answer jumped out at me when I saw that that Zooey Deschanel had been in the finale of ‘New Girl’ this week. She’s a woman in crisis and no mistake. She’s intelligent, talented, funny and beautiful and does it all for men. I know this because I saw her in Heat Magazine looking quite pleased with herself.

Nobody seems to have bothered to ask women and girls whether they actually are in crisis, or whether they are capable of holding more than one thought simultaneously cos youth unemployment and that. But they are. Some below the line trolls will no doubt have the temerity to whine ‘where’s your evidence?’ This, readers, is the patriarchy talking. We need to break out of that mindset and liberate ourselves from the oppressive shackles of ‘evidence’. What is ‘evidence’ anyway? I asked this of some Nigerian youth activists as I shared a Hob Nob with them before we jammed democracy the other Tuesday. They looked deep into my eyes and said, ‘we prefer rich tea biscuits’. I cried, shamed by my Western privilege.

Only the other day I saw a woman crying on the street. I rushed over and asked what was wrong, only briefly delayed by George Clooney pushing me out of the way of a lorry that was hurtling towards me. She told me her mother had died. Another victim of austerity, which is amplifying the crisis of femininity. The woman demurred - she said her mother had died of a heart attack. How many columns, I asked, have you had published in the New Statesman? I think we all know the answer.

Women shouldn’t have to choose between being pretty and being clever. That may sound obvious but it’s really not - in fact it’s something which I just thought up entirely on my own there. You may think you’ve seen it before but that is patriarchy talking and Helen Lewis agrees with me so there.

Something about internet trolls. Clear evidence of the crisis of femininity.

What is ‘femininity’ anyway? Some idiots may tell me it’s ‘socially-defined’ and so claiming it’s in crisis is nebulous to say the least. I say to those fools - yes, socially-defined BY THE MURDERING ADVOCATES OF AUSTERITY.

There can be no doubt that women are in distress. Society’s unwillingness to let go of the tired old “female” model of femininity contributes to that distress. Instead of talking about what women and girls can be, instead of starting an honest conversation about what femininity means, there is a conspiracy of silence around these issues that is only ever broken by brave columnists like what I am and politicians looking for some head-lines. We still don’t have any positive models for post-patriarchal femininity, and in this age of desperation and uncertainty, we need them more than ever.

It’s for this reason that I have decided to release a charity single. It is, in fact, what the kids down the protests call a ‘mash-up’. You probably don’t know what that means but if you had spent time at Occupy like me, you would understand. Myself and some comrades are going to release ‘Man! I Feel Like A Woman’/All Woman’. All profits will go towards feeding a hungry columnist by enabling them to toss off some half-baked rubbish they’ve just thought up while drinking wine and watching Coronation Street. Sorry, I mean by enabling them to make you think.

Please give generously. Am I at my word limit yet?

Liberalism vs. Radicalism

This is none-too-subtle but at the very least it’s interesting because we really should (must) interrogate what we believe and why we believe it more. And on the whole, we really don’t. There’s no reason to, after all, no external pressure to do so (certainly not in our culture). Our identity and ego so easily get wrapped up in our ‘beliefs’ (I’m left-wing, I’m liberal etc) that any undermining of them quickly causes us to get defensive. Yet I’ve encountered plenty of people who would call themselves ‘socialists’ who believe, for example, that they earn £40,000 a year because of their innate superiority to most other people; or that ‘socialism’ is largely whatever the Labour Party happens to be doing at the time. Your peer group is hugely important in all of this and a key question regarding beliefs is whether you would hold onto it even when it caused difficulties, even unpopularity, in your immediate circle - a question which I’m sure most of us would instinctively answer yes we would but then you find yourself having an awkward moment in the pub and you think it’s easier to just change the subject. We don’t connect the latter to the former because we think we hold onto the belief inside but that’s when it’s little more than ego masturbation. We extend that to a whole group when we surround ourselves with people who don’t challenge us (and whom we don’t challenge). Rather than being off-limits, conversations about first principle beliefs (extended into ideologies and beyond) should be welcomed. Challenges, arguments and disagreements which don’t become thinly-veiled battles for supremacy should be celebrated. The alternative is intellectual laziness, stagnation and an unearned and unappealing certitude.

Hey some really wise guy once summed this up as ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ so what do I know?

Do You Get It? Some Thoughts on Music Criticism

If you’re one of the few unfortunates who reads my blog with any regularity, you’ll be bored to death of me bemoaning the state of music criticism. It’s a subject I return to often, particularly focusing on the lame ‘post-modern 101’ refusal to be overtly critical of POP! music and instead elevate some properly rubbish music with some half-baked nonsense about how authenticity isn’t real, maaaaan. Last year I attempted to sum up my thoughts in a ‘manifesto for pop’ and now Neil Kulkarni has written a blog which contains a lot of the same points made far, far more entertainingly. There are so many sections from it which I could quote at length - I won’t, you should just read it - but I’ll begin with what was point 7 in my ‘manifesto’, which means quoting myself cos I’m a dick:

7. Don’t patronise young pop fans or use them to justify crap pop. A common response to criticisms of certain pop artists these days is to say ‘the kids like it’. What’s forgotten here is that just as lots of adults like dross, so do lots of kids. Why are we so afraid of thinking this? Watching ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ the other evening I was struck by the scenes from the early career of The Rolling Stones where girls in their early teens were fanatical about them. Just as teens (and younger) throughout the past 50 years have loved Elvis, Little Richard, The Beatles, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Taylor Swift, Beyonce. And loads have hated these artists and loved countless other artists who rarely (if ever) trouble the charts. Every time someone (usually at least double the age of the people they’re talking about) defends something terrible with an appeal to ‘the kids’, they’re talking rubbish.

Kulkarni writes at length about this, noting the “pre-emptive whingeing” wherein reviewers observe that it’s surely only old bores who could possibly dislike whatever it is they’re discussing. I’ve stuck One Direction up there because the response to them from music critics who haven’t been 16 in quite some time is pretty emblematic of this trend. I’ve observed circle jerks on Twitter where various writers congratulate themselves on their ability to tolerate 1D, assuring each other that it’s mean and pointless to criticise them as they’re ‘not aimed at them’. Thinking about that for more than 30 seconds reveals it to be patronising rubbish - as Kulkarni puts it:

Young people want to be spoken to across the table, not condescendingly DOWN to by the simplifications and lazy dumbness of those young enough to know better or the embarassing sticking-up-for-the-kids type shit older pop writers imbibe in to stay the right side of their juniors.

Well, he doesn’t just ‘put it’ like that, he absolutely nails it. The writers who indulge in this sort of response are absolutely terrified of looking like they don’t get it and so hedge their bets rather than giving their actual opinion. They condescend to allow the kids to listen to their rubbish pop because hey, they’d never actually listen to it themselves would they? It’s not for them! So there is no allowance for the fact that pop can be great and it can be dreadful. No distinction made between young folk with their infinite varieties of taste or recognition that plenty of teenagers regard a group like 1D with contempt. Those of us who love music to such a pathological degree that we bang on about it constantly will all share memories of songs, artists and albums that took our little ideas of what music was out of their box, smashed them in front of our eyes and took us outside into an enormous, terrifying, wonderful world. When I was 14 I didn’t want to hear older people telling me that I was allowed to like Let Loose or Doop - in fact I started reading the ‘adult’ music press religiously and devouring every album which received rave reviews, every artist who sounded like they’d changed the game. I didn’t want my music to exist in some gloopy neoliberal fucktopia where everything had equal value as long as someone bought it. I wanted - and I loved - writers who reached out of the page, grabbed me by the collar and said ‘listen to this, it will change your fucking life’.

It’s a no-brainer that your tastes will develop as you age. That’s not to say that you necessarily stop liking certain kinds of music but, as you clock up life experiences and develop emotionally, different songs and artists speak to you in different ways. Personally speaking I don’t think a teenage me could ever have loved Leonard Cohen in the way I do now - I needed to live a bit before I could inhabit his songs. The point is that you do get different as you get older and you do have different perspectives - if you don’t you’re either dead inside or an idiot - and all a critic can do is bring that to the table. They can’t second-guess what the response of someone 20 years younger than themselves might be; they can’t make excuses for music they think is shit because they think great music is only for older people. I overwhelmingly write about how this is done to pop (Poptimism) but Kulkarni’s particular focus is on landfill indie. It gets around.

I think part of this trend is the related move towards a cloying ‘positivity’ where WRITING THIS THIS SCREAAAAAAAM ZOMG!!! about everything and anything is seen as more worthy than actually being a critic. The responses to Kulkarni’s blog (discussed here) are almost uniformly examples of this: he’s called ‘bitter’, ‘angry’, a deluded nostalgist. People make trite comments about how it’s so easy to hate things, contrasting this with the ostensibly ‘pure’ and ‘productive’ overblown love for even the most insipid rubbish which passes for so much music writing these days. Tellingly, there are quite a few responses which attack Kulkarni for not being paid for his writing - indeed, there’s one on his own blog. They speak volumes. What is, after all, the value of an opinion which hasn’t been paid for? What is an appreciation, a demolition, a response to art if you can’t get it printed in the NME or on Yahoo Music? It gives ample fuel to what Alex Niven writes here:

Unfortunately the mainstream of music journalism right now appears to be dominated by a peculiarly virulent strain of braindead consumer hedonism, by people who simply don’t acknowledge that pop music can be debated about in politico-cultural terms. It would be (sort of) alright if these people were cognisant of their position, but depressingly I fear that they’re just moronic capitalistic yes-people for whom pop music is a leisure pursuit and nothing more.

We’re given a glimpse into a cosy world of paid writers, getting their music and gigs for free and thinking that this makes their opinion more important than the music fans whom they occasionally condescend to defend if they think it reflects well on them. I was thinking about this again regarding the responses to The Knife’s gigs. Many claims were made that people expecting a GIG were ‘missing the point’. In this interview the following, quite insanely patronising, question is asked:

In a strange way, the complaints are almost like a critique of capitalism in themselves. I think it’s a pretty recent development, this sense of entitlement among fans to what artists should or should not do on stage: which songs they should perform, the manner in which they should present them. It’s almost like ticket-holders imagine themselves to be stakeholders in the band.

I say ‘question’, it’s more a plea to The Knife to recognise that the interview is one of the elite who ‘gets it’. Somewhat ironically given the ‘critique of capitalism’ line, the interviewer’s refusal or inability to seriously tackle the contradictions and problems inherent in The Knife’s show but rather agree with them at every turn causes Niven’s accusation of “capitalistic yes-people” to rush into your head. Obviously those people, those sheep, who bought tickets to see a band they loved and wanted to enjoy and didn’t enjoy it - they’re so entitled, such capitalists. They lack the appreciative skills of the critic (who probably had the added bonus of a free spot) who doesn’t actually need to be made to think themselves but can see that lesser mortals need to “question themselves a bit”. It’s another circle jerk, another self-congratulatory sneer from the balcony above yet fuelled by the same terror of being seen to ‘not get it’ as insincere 1D adoration. The alternative is not getting it or, even worse, being bitter, being negative.

What’s fundamentally missed here is that responses to The Knife’s shows, and writing more generally, can and should say something themselves. Criticism can be a transformational art form. Clearly much of what we read in the press is very strictly governed by diktats (albeit sometimes self-imposed) that constrain the response to ‘this is good/bad’ and it’s precisely for that reason that sneering at Kulkarni for his unpaid passion is so, so idiotic and tedious. Overwhelmingly, the best music criticism I read is on the fringes - in smaller sites or blogs rather than in the traditional places. The last time I picked up Q Magazine (the David Bowie issues) I was pretty appalled by most of what I read. There’s nothing challenging, nothing illuminative, no sense that the critic can have a role beyond flattering ego (primarily their own) and saying ‘yes, you can spend your £10 on this’. Perhaps The Knife’s interviewer wouldn’t unquestioningly accept the assertion that their show can make people ‘question themselves a bit’ if music writing wasn’t so currently posited on the basis that the critic is a species apart - an implicit assumption which is made all the more absurd by the failure of most of these people to actually ever express any view other than the most obvious one. The only way in which the critic is ‘separate’ is that they are in a tiny minority of people who are privileged enough (by this I don’t necessarily mean financially - time, opportunity, abillity and more come to mind) to write at length about this stuff. As such, there is an obligation to actually criticise, in its broadest term. Argue, destroy, defend, adore - just show some fucking passion and some backbone and accept that looking like a bitter idiot who doesn’t get it isn’t actually all that bad sometimes.

Leona Lewis @ Royal Albert Hall, London

It highlights what seems to be Lewis’ biggest problem at the moment. Glassheart is both her most diverse and strongest album to date, yet its eclectic styles and lack of key-changing power ballads meant that it lost much of her former audience. Clearly Lewis has both the desire and capability to artistically spread her wings but whether she’ll be allowed to do so is another matter. Tonight’s set, however, largely pulls off this uneasy balancing act. Note-perfect and affecting renditions of Footprints In The Sand and The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face captivate the audience and allow riskier choices like a reggae-fied Better In Time (mixed with Rihanna’s Man Down) and the pounding album obscurity Sugar.

At usual place.

My photos of Leona Lewis at the Royal Albert Hall last night here.

The Knife Live In London

Since The Knife’s two shows in London this week the internet has been awash with reviews and comments like the one above. They make claims that The Knife “highlight artifice as the fulcrum of all performance, and in doing so take a self-referential, probing look at its effectiveness as a tool for subversion” and celebrate its ‘disruption’. Anyone who thinks it’s all a bit second-year art school and perhaps taking the piss for a £30 gig just doesn’t get it.

I understand that some people genuinely had a fun time (though the feedback I’ve heard on an anecdotal level has been overwhelmingly negative) and I can understand that. What I can’t get behind are these ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ reactions which imply (or even explicitly state) that you were somehow an ignorant heathen if you took issue with the show; there certainly seems to be an eagerness in some quarters to let us know that they GOT IT. Myself, I was so excited about seeing the band that I devoured videos, descriptions and reviews of the show as soon as they became available. My expectations slumped as a result and I ended up not even bothering to go.

So while my comments come in that context, they are largely on the common themes of these responses. Firstly, they all make some claim that, as it’s The Knife, we should never expect a ‘typical concert’. The review above explicitly states that “Shaking The Habitual was not written with live performance in mind, at least not in the conventional sense.” I saw The Knife at The Forum in October 2006. It was most definitely a ‘typical concert’. The act performed their songs on stage in front of an audience. They had light-shows, big screen visuals, props etc. They sang live. It was absolutely bloody brilliant. Where this idea that The Knife are crazed auteurs who would never deliver a concert has come from, I’ve no idea. As for Shaking The Habitual, to my ears it’s largely ‘challenging’ because of its length and some clearly deliberately tedious tracks, not because it sounds so unlike anything ever recorded before. I don’t really see why it would be difficult to perform it live.

The second common defence is that The Knife never billed the show as a ‘concert’ but rather as some artistic presentation of their music. Aside from the fact that the announcement of the tour really had nothing in it to alert people that the bulk of the show would be taken up by playback, it’s utterly absurd to berate people for not expecting a gig by buying a ticket for a show at the Roundhouse. The Knife could have made the nature of their show much clearer in many ways. Playing at a venue such as the ICA and billing it as an ‘art piece’ would have solved the issue of expectation in one fell swoop. People buying a ticket to see a concert billed as “We, The Knife, will be performing live” at a venue like the Roundhouse have reasonable expectations.

Now, much of the rhetoric around Shaking The Habitual has concerned itself with that favourite preoccupation of broadsheet music journalists: “authenticity”. It’s incredibly fashionable nowadays to sneer at the concept in a manner which suggests you once read the first few pages of an ‘Introduction to Post-Modernism’ and think it’s terribly clever to argue that the music of Bob Dylan is no different from the music of Fast-Food Rockers because it all depends on the listenerzzzzz. The Knife have thoughts on this which are rather more developed but still clearly manna from heaven for this audience. The responses to their show, however, completely demolish everything they’re saying. A positive response depends on believing that an act like The Knife is more authentic than other acts who may use playback and dance routines. As the Evening Standard reviewer noted in one of the few dissenting pieces I’ve read:

The problem is that this kind of performance art is rarely as arresting as that which it attempts to debunk. If Britney or Beyoncé mime, they are slaughtered, yet the spectacle they provide while doing so is light years from the spinning and waving that went on here.

He is so spot-on that it’s painful. No-one spends time dissecting the motives and intentions of a Britney Spears show - because they think it inherently has less worth. Yeah she can mime, she’s just a pop artist! If The Knife do it and shove some trite academic speech about ‘authenticity’ behind it, well that’s very different indeed! The same mentality was evident in almost all of the reviews of Shaking The Habitual which claimed that it was a ‘challenging’ and ‘difficult’ work which you may not even wish to ever listen to again, but still rewarded it with strong ratings. Can you imagine someone doing similar with a Madonna album? If they weren’t grabbed by it after a couple of listens they would have no hesitation in tearing it to shreds. Underlying much of this, then, is that almost-subconscious contempt for pop which shines through in the attitudes of many who ostensibly claim to love it. When it gets down to it, they think pop is the realm of piss-taking reality television and ironic club nights in Vauxhall; it couldn’t possibly be an art form on a par (or better than!) The Knife.

We have seen it for a long time in responses to artists like Björk, who can become as ropey as they please as long as their work appears suitably ‘artistic’ and ‘challenging’. The assumption is, of course, that mass listeners are simply too dumb to get it and if you do, you’re one of the enlightened ones. Many of the responses to The Knife’s show have presented it as clearly a work of genius which dissects those dumb, trashy pop concerts that people like - you can smell the sneering contempt and the masturbation from a mile off.

New Left Project | Articles |Is This What We Fought For?

This is quite something. The veterans of WW1 are gone now and in the next couple of decades we’re going to lose those from WW2. Years of textbooks, documentaries, period films and television shows conspire to make this seem not only like ancient history but another world entirely. Yet men and women like Harry Smith were ordinary people forced to become extraordinary by circumstance and as his words show, their fundamental concerns differed little from those of us born generations later. Crucially, they did something about it and created a system which, while imperfect, has benefited everyone who came after them yet is now under sustained attack – not only from politicians but from our own self-absorption and disinterest. It must have been difficult to develop much of an ego when you were submerged in death and destruction and it’s little wonder that a generation took stock afterwards. There is no great event that has forced us to do likewise (or seems likely to in the near future); little pressure to think about the kind of world we want to live in and, most importantly, the kind of person we want to be in it. Most of us who have had supportive families, who had a decent education, who have jobs which allow us a reasonably comfortable lives, are enormously fortunate yet we fixate on the ways in which we can feel oppressed and unlucky rather than asking why everyone can’t enjoy these simple benefits. This is not a trite ‘let’s all love’ observation but a question that is fundamentally political (few questions aren’t). We have the luxury of not having to think in any profound or uncomfortable sense but looking at the words of someone like Harry, who not only thought but acted and made a better world a reality, makes me feel profoundly ashamed. In her speech marking Thatcher’s passing Glenda Jackson noted that “We were told that everything I had been taught to regard as a vice—and I still regard them as vices—was, in fact, under Thatcherism, a virtue”. It’s difficult not to recognise this in the world around us today. Humility, compassion, reflection, solidarity all seem little regarded and sometimes even viewed as weaknesses. Instead we’re meant to fixate on how we are perceived, how we succeed, how we can be superior, how we can appear certain and confident and sassy and self-righteous. And one day we’ll look around and the people who connect us to a time when things were different, when a better world was forged from the remains of epic misery, will be gone. Perhaps on that day we’ll post some funny pictures of cats on our Facebook pages.

For some reason I knew since seeing the video for The Stars (Are Out Tonight) that the album’s third promo would be for The Next Day and it would feature Bowie singing the song behind a microphone. It seems like the final destruction of the ‘Bowie is dying’ myth which they’ve been having so much fun with - albeit with an exit which will only invite further speculation.

Where Are We Now? - Bowie the mythic figure, dying in the shadows, more ethereal than corporeal.

TS(AOT) - The big reveal. Bowie is alive and well yet haunted, tormented even, by his past. stalked by his legend.

This - the normalisation. Bowie performs. He hams it up. The curtain is pulled back. The deity figure is snuffed out at the end.

‘Religion is corrupt’ is a rather tired trope these days but it does its job in fuelling the Bowie speculation market. The Decameron ‘title’ on the door at the beginning is a nice touch. From wiki:

Decameron combines two Greek words, Greek:δέκα, déka (“ten”) and Greek: ἡμέρα, hēméra (“day”), to form a term that means “ten-day [event]”

That obviously feeds into both the album title and Bowie’s 10-year absence - and the bell tolls ten times. Certainly there is some behind-the-scenes activity in the Bowie camp which suggests something more than just another single release is afoot in the near future.

The video is worthy for this alone:

However it squanders the best moment of the song and one of my favourite Bowie moments ever - the opening line of the second verse, “Ignoring the pain of their particular diseases”. It is ridiculously satisfying to sing along to. You really should try it.

Rilo Kiley – rkives

It’s heartening, then, that rkives allows Rilo Kiley to have the kind of send-off that they deserve. A career-spanning collection of previously unreleased tracks and obscurities, it is much more a labour of love than a perfunctory ‘greatest hits’ collection would have been – something underlined by the album artwork and promo video for lead single Let Me Back In, all of which use the band’s personal photos, film footage and handwritten notes. The whole affair has a sweet-natured grace which erases the uncomfortable bitterness which characterised the band’s demise.

Beyonce – O2 Arena, London

Such fiery energy would be unsustainable but it’s still a surprise when the third song is the insipid Flaws & All, a B’Day deluxe track which no-one needs to hear again. Nonetheless its ‘I’m just like you, really!’ sophistry is met with wild appreciation – at one point Beyoncé shakes her toned arm as if she has bingo wings and it almost seems like some people are going to pass out with happiness. It highlights one of the central contradictions of Beyoncé as an artist – she is insanely talented and has enough charisma to fuel a nuclear bomb yet she clearly also has an ego to match and the tension between this and her everywoman shtick is fascinating to watch. At one point towards the end of the concert we are treated to a montage of Beyoncé’s life to the strains of I Was Here – images of Beyoncé with the President, Beyoncé doing charity work, Beyoncé with superstar husbandJay-Z, Beyoncé on holiday, Beyoncé at the Super Bowl. It says absolutely nothing other than ‘look at how great I am’ and it’s almost impossible to think of another pop superstar who would be indulged in this, yet once again it finds a hysterically grateful audience here.

My review of Beyonce up at the usual place.