Hallelujah?

Well it was only on Christmas day that I found out about the ever-so-engrossing race to Christmas number one: Jeff Buckley vs Alexandra Burke, the X-factor winner. Of course the most cursory search shows that the former, now deceased, was signed to Columbia Records whereas the latter, after her win on one of the most irritating tv programs ever conceived, was signed to Syco Records, founded by that utter cunt Simon Cowell and, according to whom, Syco accounts for 40% of the profits of its parent company Sony Music Entertainment. Guess what? It’s also the parent company of Columbia Records. So the real effect of the ‘campaign’ to preserve musical values was to whip up a huge media storm and makes lots of money for the company that depends on precisely the sort of crap pop music that the so-called campaigners saw themselves as reacting against.

I’d previously been completely oblivious to this. I’ve been lost in my own little world for pretty much the whole of december. So I just had a look on facebook. I found 44 groups of various permutations before I stopped counting: some wanted Jeff Buckley to be number 1, others wanted to stop Burke from getting to number and others were about how much superior the Buckley/Cohen songs were to Burke’s. I ignored the plethora of Buckley groups that didn’t mention the christmas number one in their title. No doubt many predated the ‘campaign’ but from my brief search it seemed the number 1 was, perhaps inevitably, the hot topic on them. The largest group has 146,279 members. The image above is from this one. There was letter writing and a ‘flash mob’. There’s also a Jeff Buckley new music group which tries to “keep the spirit of what we achieved alive” by getting recognition for artists who are deemed to be under appreciated. Like I say, it was only on Christmas day that I found about this because when some family friends came over, we ended up talking about it. This is viral marketing at its best and fuck me did it work:

Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.^[1] Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily.^[2] Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages. The basic form of viral marketing is not infinitely sustainable.

I think at the start of this there were street teams who got paid and this is evidenced, at least in part, by the sheer quantity of groups on facebook with few members. Obviously many of these were probably the result of people hearing about the ‘campaign’ and thinking “me too”. Even so when something proliferates unsuccessfully to the extent that these groups did (i.e. most of them had under 200 members) it’s a sign of a conscious attempt to project a sense of plurality. I don’t find it particularly likely that this many people heard about the ‘campaign’, felt sufficiently moved to take part and yet were either unaware of the countless existing groups (some of which were very popular) or chose not to participate in them. This was deliberate: you start many groups in the hope that a few of them will take off.

So what was the result? Burke got christmas number 1, Buckley number 2 and Leonard Cohen’s original came in at number 36. Wonderfully Cohen is also signed to Columbia Records. Burke sold 576,000. Buckley sold 495,000 after, as the Guardian puts it, “an internet campaign masterminded by music fans who feared that Burke would desecrate Cohen’s 1984 anthem”. An internet campaign that made the people they set out to depose an awful lot of money. The phrase useful idiots comes to mind, no? It’s hard not to sneer when you read people posting on these facebook groups about how it feels “good to make a difference”.

In case anyone takes this the wrong way because I’m well aware I sneered like a mother fucker while writing this: (a) I love Jeff Buckley and think the X-factor song is a travesty (b) I’m sure people genuinely felt very strongly about this (c) the point I’m making is that it wasn’t just the internet campaign that generated this outcome for Sony, the response and awareness, even amongst those who wanted Burke to win (10 popular groups on facebook before I got bored counting) as well as the coverage of the popular ‘contest’ in the media was integral to the whole marketing strategy (d) I too think Simon Cowell is a tool.

The largest group says its campaigns is set to “make a huge statement against the barrage of cynical manufactured pop dirtying up our charts”. Surely a bigger statement would be not feeding the media strategy of the corporation involved? When I think someone is a tool I prefer not to ‘campaign’ to make them* a lot of money, even if I feel passionately about the aesthetic idea being expressed in the campaign. At the end of the day it is an aesthetic idea. This isn’t a political campaign, it was motivated by an attempt to preserve musical value against the corrosive forces of crass commercialism. In the process the energies that in a healthier democracy would have been directed towards politics and society are instead fixated on individuals expressing themselves for the stances they take re: music and culture. Maybe if we lived in that healthier democracy it would be possible to fight for aesthetic ideals without making a multinational corporation a fuck load of money in the process? I can’t help thinking from reading these groups how much sublimated desire to make a difference was expressed within them. People want to join together and do stuff. They want to fight for what’s right and good and true. It’s a sad indictment of our society and the profound evisceration of our politics that this is what that goal, in practice, amounts to.

*Or to be precise their company’s parent company with whom their business interests are deeply and irrevocably intertwined.

It’s weird to agree with the Pope but in this case I do:

Today, a particularly insidious obstacle to the task of education is the massive presence in our society and culture of that relativism which, recognizing nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires. And under the semblance of freedom it becomes a prison for each one, for it separates people from one another, locking each person into his or her own ego

Analysing background understandings…

That post just got me thinking about a form of argument I’ve been making more and more but I’ve never explicitly justified. I’d argue that all our attempts to understand, categorize and interpret the world are framed by a background understanding. This collection of ideas and assumptions -  not immediately susceptible to discursive penetration, although we can bring these ideas into the light and they do change – shapes the way in which we understand the world and seek to act on it.  They allow us to make sense of data, to give our moral claims sense, to construct and apply theoretical concepts: our rational and explicit thought and action always takes place against this sort of tacit background. The analytic categories this background presents us with shapes the direction our inquiry takes. In terms of the contingent reasoning processes of individuals operating with them, they push us in some ways and not others: the sheer attentional limitations of human beings makes certain modes of inference more likely than others, as in any particular process of reasoning, certain pathways of thought are more likely to be pursued by others. So there’s no necessary reason why a New Labour politician who understands his actions and role against a background of  the aforementioned communitarianism won’t start to consider whether their centralising bent fundamentally inhibits what they’re trying to do. It’s very fucking likely they won’t though.

Obviously this

The Poverty of New Labour’s Communitarianism

I’ve just been watchin last week’s question time and the first question was on Labour’s welfare changes. As well as leading me to add Phil Knight to my growing list of new generation Labour ministers I truly despise, the language in which said ass-hole was defending the ‘reforms’ got me thinking about the nature of New Labour’s Communitarianism. I’d dispute those who argues that New Labour is just Thatcherism in disguise: there is a political philosophy motivating it and, in spite of the different forms it has taken in different political climates, I’d argue that is at heart a vaguely coherent one. It takes a certain model of economic and social change as given: in an increasingly individualised UK within the harsh world of global capitalism, anomie will flourish without a strong invocation of the values of community, both in terms of a legislative agenda and framing national debate. Yet at heart it’s weirdly liberal in its theoretical understanding:  the individualised society and the globalised world constitute the rules of the game within which government’s must struggle to pursue social aims. It’s tacking a counter-veiling pole of community on to an interpretive political  paradigm that had previously everything to the individual.  Yet much as liberalism’s reductive individualism perpetually pushes inquiry away from the social structures that persist independently of those individuals and structure the material opportunities available to them, this sort of communitarianism merely doubles the ideological distraction by adding another chimerical term: new labour’s community, like the liberal individual, is something to be valorised and fought for but that which can never truly be found. It’s fundamentally a moral concept and operates at a level of abstraction that leaves it constitutively blind to the messy micro-political realities that inevitably leaves its moral promise unfulfilled.

The social concepts new labour deal in (e.g. community, rights/responsibilities, inclusion/exclusion) are entirely detached from the economic and political structures, nationally and internationally, which led them to begin to articulate those concepts in the first place. It leaves these people smug in their moral self-certainty while blind to inadequacies of the legislative agenda they formulate on this basis, given that this has to deal in the messy contingent realities that are obscured by an obsessive moral focus on individual/community. Like the fact that their media-driven style of politics precludes the sort of long-term strategic planning which is necessary for the sort of scheme they’re proposing to be anything other than draconian. Or the fact that their obsessive centralisation precludes the sort of individualised advice and training (dealing, by necessity, in local knowledge) that is necessary to make this anything other than draconian. Or perhaps that matching jobs with the unemployed is not a contingent problem particular to this specific situation but a systematic incoherency in welfare-to-workfare schemes. In effect new labour’s communitarianism takes a certain contingent arrangement of global capitalism, swallows its ideological self-narrative wholesale, grants this further fixity and then proceeds to try and shape national politics through a morally myopic and instrumental outlook that deals solely in how we (new labour, the community, the uk!) might ‘collectively’ navigate a path through these choppy waters… and it can’t even do this well because this outlook, in tandem with its ‘modernizing’ agenda and the obsessive centralisation that come with this, systematically precludes them seeing the contingent obstacles their legislative schemes face as anything other than contingent. They are technical obstacles to be overcome for the sake of the new labour project. At no point might the obstacles suggest there is something fundamentally wrong with the project and that, coupled with the sheer weakness of the opposition, suggests we might be in for quite a lot more of this shit.

2008

This has been a weird fucked up year. At the start of it, I expected to be back in London by this point, doing a PHD at the LSE and generally having severed ties with Coventry. Yet in actuality I’m here, I now own a house and I’ve doing a PHD part-time over six years.  The weird thing is that I’m actually glad about it. No matter how much fun London may be to live in, I couldn’t do everything I’m doing here in London, I’d find it too distracting. Plus my supervisors here are far better than they would have been in London, no matter how interesting it would have been to have sessions with Richard Sennett if he’d accepted me.  I’ve had two things published in journals, with a few more to come next year and my first conference paper, on a research area which I was unsure I was interested in at the start of the year. There’s not a chance in hell I would have bothered to sit down and write those if I’d just moved back to London after two years away. When I went there last weekend for a gig it felt really foreign to me in a way it never had and I really didn’t like the crowdedness of the place (though that was partly me being a grumpy twat as a result of getting shit faced till 4am on Friday night). The point in London when I’d have to “go home to Coventry” was always unbelievably fucking depressing to me and this time, for the first time, I was oddly glad. How strange. I appear to have settled in this weird little town, there are a lot of really safe new people in my life and I seem to be becoming rather content here. Apart from getting stressed because I have absolutely no outside organization of my time and it seems to leave me feeling the obsessive need to plan. But I figure this is just practice and a sign, which is leading to a new years resolution,  that I should smoke less weed. I’d much rather control my own time than have it controlled, even if it’s initially slightly tricky.  Next year will be easier though: my paid work is very structured, I’m auditing one/two classes and I start teaching, which ought to be interesting. So things seem likely to start to cohere in a really positive and satisfying way. This year was really truly shit at points but in a way it seems to have been really good for me,  in terms of making me think about what I really want in life, rather than what I find exciting and distracting. I seem to have these things and be set to get much more of them. Plus I’m so fucking excited about the next year of my life. Taking in themselves, these two things seem to suggest this was a very good year… though an exhausting one.  I don’t even think I regret the shit bits any more, as I think they were a necessary part of me getting from where I was at the start of the year to where I am now. So in conclusion: this has been a fucking excellent year and I think I’m almost certain to be able to say the same thing at the end of 2009.

The consequence of hippys

I was watching Adam Curtis’s absurdly brilliant documentary The Century of The Self last night. It gave a fascinating account – which was really strongly supported by all the reading I’ve done on this, perhaps because he’s been reading precisely the same books – of the role that the new left and counter culture’s initially political turn towards self-transformation (out of frustration at the strength of the state,  as well as the somewhat drug addled hope of initiating some quasi-Hegelian dialectic of social and absolute transformation) played in promulgating therapeutic subjectivist categories of self-understanding through the culture but how, somewhat inevitably given the moral inward-turn they were promoting, the categories themselves lost the context of political concern that initially framed their elaboration.  So the overall affect was to leave increasingly large segments of the population feeling a moral push towards self-expression at a time when economic concerns about over-production were finding resolution with new technologies allowing increasingly segmented production: thus giving the growing movement of expressive-individualists a whole cornucopia of consumer products with and through wish to engage in ever more elaborate presentations of self. The whole inward turn (inevitably) raised countless new existential questions and answered few. The moral climate this creates is one in which consumerism will flourish in a self-reinforcing way: the elaboration of individual particularity becomes a normative notion, as at least in private life the self-expressive and self-actualised individual (loosely translatable to cool and confident?) became the norm to which others must inspire. It’s also what gave the cultural – though not theoretical, political or economic – foundations to the emergence of modern homo economicus: the uber-individualised self of expressive individualism but with a narrow self-interested rationality and a arbitray list of preferences where the hippy shit used to be. Is this a lesson that social transformation through self transformation is not a good idea? I really think it is.

The Idiocy of Anarcho-capitalists

I’m watching Louis Theroux’s recent documentary about private security companies in South Africa. It graphically illustrates what anyone with a social conscience and a brain could work out for themselves: market-based approaches to policing & security are horrific. Particularly when they develop within highly anomic societies, although it’s difficult to see any other context within which they would emerge. Multiply the scale of the operations in South Africa (as well as the extent of the anomie that spawned it*) a hundred times over and you start to get an approximation of the likely on-the-ground situation within the free-market utopias these idiots long for.

*It seems fairly obvious that the two are mutually enforcing: the more the situational logic of daily life necessitates the private militarization of everyday social relations, the greater the anomie that in turns renders it rational for individuals for act in this way.

After hours of fun procrastination on youtube, my favourite gigs in 2008:

15 – Alabama 3 @ Glasto

I saw them 3 times but the saturday afternoon when they were on one of the main stages was far and away the most fun.

14 – Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip (and Kid Carpet) @ Warwick tempo

I assumed this was going to be quite fun but it was so much better than I thought it would be. The Students Union used to be a shit venue but as part of the big union rebuild they’ve knocked together a really cozy underground venue and I really hope they keep it given I never conceived the students union (which I’m now kind of shackled to for another six years) would have a place for music that I actually really liked. Kid Carpet was supporting and I’d never heard of him but he looked like such a fucking tool I thought I would hate it. It was really fun though: lovely, silly and entertaining music, in a similar way to a lot of ska-punk.  Dan Le Sac was awesome. Again this was party down to the venue though and the bass in Thou Shalt Not was lovely. He did awesome slam poetry while Scroobius Pip went outside to smoke, flawlessly timing it to last exactly the length of one fag.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=6MKSCFufSeA

13 – Futureheads @ Warwick students union

I went to see this solely for Hounds of Love. From what little I’d heard, I’d never been interested enough to listen to anything else they’d done and I figured this song (which I adore) was a one-off. Even so I was stunned by quite how boring and, well, shit their other music is. I assumed they’d finish with Hounds of Love given it’s their only good song. I was in the toilet half-way through the gig when the initial vocal harmony bit started, cue excited jumping up and down as I tried to do my pants up, scaring the shit out of the guy who walked into the toilets at that moment. The song was fucking brilliant and kind of made it worth listening to 90 mins of shit music and paying a tenner for a single song. The night after was awesome as well, leading through the gig to a crappy but fun and very drunken rock/metal night to my living room and passing out at 7am in the morning. If I remember correctly – which I probably don’t – the following morning was the day of the riot. I got kicked out of bed by my ex to go buy milk and food, I left my flat at 11am on a saturday morning to find the high street filled with riot police, looking very nervous and with really old crap 1980s riot gear: the sort of small round shields you see police wielding uncertainly in photos of the miners strike, rather than the ultra-modern stormtrooper shit the TSG has. What must have been every available police body in Coventry on a saturday morning was out, as they had some football fans barricaded inside my local pub and they were periodically sending snatch squads in to bring people out and arrest them. Leicester were apparently playing Coventry and hoolies  from each side decided to meet in my local area, which is nowhere the fucking stadium, to have a fight. I’m all for letting people who want to have huge fights do it, as long as it’s away from anyone who could get hurt (and I think the tendency of liberal thought to reduce this sort of phenomenon to ‘collective irrationality’ is a really interesting explanatory failure, given there’s blatantly a lots of quite complex emotional and social meanings tied into why people want to get together and kick the shit out of each other). However if you decide to this on a busy shopping street you’re simply a cunt. That was a weird morning and in the state I was in after the night before, it was deeply fucking confusing until I joined the large crowd of gawping onlookers (feeling deeply British as I did so) and asked them what on earth was going on.

12 – James Blunt @ Glasto

Everyone I’ve said this too has, perhaps justifiably, taken the piss out of mercilessly. I went to see it largely out of morbid curiosity and the fact there was nothing particularly interesting on at that time (it was also, I think, after the Editors so I was in fairly emo mood). It somehow seemed to fit the slightly confused and messed up state my head was in at the time, perhaps because watching Goodbye My Lover with my ex as we neared the end of a convoluted and depressingly protracted break up was a really sadly poignant yet strangely cathartic experience. He is such a cock though. He insisted on taking his shirt off for the crowd.

11 – Gogol Bordello @ Brum Academy

Great fun, though I wish I’d managed to see them at Glastonbury as well.

10 – A Golden Rule @ a pub in Leamington Spa

Far and away the best pub gig I’ve been to in my life. The other bands were quite fun but A Golden Rule were awesome, not least of all because of how much fun they were clearly having despite the dingy venue and tiny crowd. They’ve since split up which is a bit shit since I failed to make it to a gig they did in London which would have been really easy to get to.  I listened to their CD so much that I killed the music for me a bit. They manage to take everything I like about skate punk and melodic hardcore and wrap it up in one lovely enthusiastic package. No youtube videos but their myspace is here and it has Trying So Hard which I enjoyed so much live.

9 – Reel Big Fish @ Brum Academy

I actually went to see Streetlight Manifesto who were supporting but I was having a shit night, found the mosh pot really claustrophobic and lost my friends because I can’t see for shit (very dark & crap eye sight) in the main Academy. So they were a bit shit. Reel Big Fish were so much fun though and completely cheered me up in the space of an hour. I’m seeing them again in early 2009 and I can’t wait particularly given that the above song has such amusing personal relevance to me now. I almost got the shit kicked out of me afterwards though when I intervened inside McDonalds as three rude boys started kicking off with this skinny 16 year old kid from the gig. I tried to do it in the most non-comfrontational way possible but it blatantly didn’t work as they were waiting for me when I left, cue me ducking back inside McDonalds and holding the door shit when I realised they were about 3 seconds away from punching me in the face.  Such utter tools. It kind of took the gloss off the night a bit.

8 – Manu Chao @ Glasto

Skanking to this like uttery twats in sun glasses on a head full of mushrooms was wonderful. We were at the back of the crowd up a hill facing the sun as it set and it was truly beautiful. Even if the middle aged punks having a homoerotic orgy next to us was a bit weird. They all seemed very happy though.

7 – Bjork @ Wolverhampton Civic Hall

This was the third time I’ve seen Bjork and given that the first one, which the video is of, was – perhaps next to radiohead in 2003 – the greatest and most trippy set I’ve seen in my life, it’s always seems a bit of an anti-climax. God that was a convoluted sentence. Still an utter genius though.

6 – The Editors @ Glastonbury

Early Friday evening at Glastonbury, after a Thursday night that devolved into the most unpleasant kind of drug-fuelled melodramatic idiocy, and was the most fantastic pick-me-up. When this song started, I left the people I was with in a rather naive and overly enthusiastic attempt to get to the front of the crowd. This inevitably failed but I got right into the middle of a lot of very excited people and the atmosphere was fucking brilliant.  It had never really occurred to me that the Editors were one of those bands who just sound exponentially better the louder they are. I’ve never seen them in a venue, though after Glasto I fully intend to and I suspect they’re one of those bands (much like Muse) who just sound far better on a main stage at a festival than they do anywhere else.

5 – Streetlight Manifesto @ Brum Asylum

So much fun. Even though my favorite trainers fell apart midway through the gig.

4 – Frank Turner @ Birmingham Bar Fly

Well I was utterly shit-faced and depressingly I remember this gig far less clearly than I wish. It was fucking fun though, though it occurred the next morning that the singing along probably wasn’t quite as fun for the more sober randoms around us. Frank Turner is a lovely hippy twat and particularly live he has a really affable humility about him and his music. He also wrote the four lines that have fascinated me more than that from any other music I can think of:

Yeah, well life is about love, lost minutes and lost evening
About fire in our bellies and about furtive little feelings
And the aching amplitudes that set our needles all a-flickering
And they help us with remembering that the only thing that’s left to do is live

As I go on about it here,  I think it expresses an intriguingly ambiguous sort of late-modern romanticism. There’s a sense of the objectivity of moral sources expressed really poetically in it: ‘the aching amplitudes that set our needles all a-flickering’ and which push our gaze to the world outside our heads and beyond our evaluations. It’s like the classical romantic idea of turning inwards to move beyond rational introspection and (re)connect to transcendent nature. Of the late modern variety, the moral impulse is  accommodated to a naturalist universe that preclude the metaphysics tied up in the classical conception. It’s the reemergence of a romantic moral realism: kind of like what Richard Rorty tries to do from a PoMo approach but utterly fails because of the theoretical knots he ties himself in. Yet music flows right over the antinomies that appear inherent in the ethos when you approach it theoretically. It’s a scrabble for moral meaning in a metaphysically degraded universe.

3 – A Wilhelm Scream @ Brum Barfly

They were playing to a near-empty Barfly on a freezing Tuesday evening in February. One of the most fun nights I’ve had all year, even if I almost died of drunken hypothermia on the way home.

2 – Gaslight Anthem (and the King Blues) @ London Astoria

At Glasto 2007, where the video is from, the King Blues were my favourite band in the country. Then they got shit. Then suddenly they seem to have got good again. Not quite sure what happened there. As a support act they were superb and Gaslight were just as amazing as I expected them to be.  It’s a shame the video quality is shit because I’m in most of it. I love the fact that two days after a gig I can watch videos of it on youtube.

1 – Strung Out @ Brum Asylum

A near-empty and freezing Aslyum. Also my favourite gig of the year. 2008 was awesome.