In 2014 the world finally spun off
its axis into a suffocating vortex of incomprehension (just like the last half of Interstellar). Yet
consolation was always available in the form of culture, which
continued despite the progressing apocalypse. The next few posts will
include some of this year's cultural consolers and a few of its
challengers too - from Chekhov to Aphex Twin, the Oxford historian
Selina Todd to the posthumous Vaclav Havel, Gang of Four to Gyorgy
Lucacs, Nietzsche to the economist Thomas Piketty and many more.
10. Gang of Four - Entertainment
& Solid Gold
Not released during 2014 or even during this century, Gang of Four's
first two albums were nevertheless essential listening this year.
Moving back to Britain in July was something of a sensory and
informational overload: suddenly I was woken from the mute, balmy
slumber of life abroad by a turf war waged with the molten flak of
decades of unsold consumer goods. It was like a Hieronymus Bosch
painting sponsored by Matalan or one of those video-reels of the
1970s. Tory MPs hunted down disabled people for the metal parts of
their wheelchairs, vital apparently for "paying down the
deficit." Social welfare claimants were forced to perform improv
at sundry rural Fringe festivals for the amusement of bored shire
folk. The homeless were forced to invest the goods they got from food
banks in dubious entrepreneurial schemes intended to help them
innovate their way out of destitution. The semi-apocalyptic din of
Coalitionland that I had happily ignored for years was suddenly
intensely close and personal. Gang of Four were the soundtrack to
this rude awakening: not for the detached observer, they revelled in
the chaos, and like divers excavated little oil-black pearls out of
it. "Show me a ditch," they chant, "and I'll dive in
it."
Gang of Four's martial swing - an almost funky guitar strut driven to
maddening speeds - evokes the authoritarian style of British
politics in the 1980s. It heralds the hip-swivelling self-certainty
of the turn to right-populism during the Thatcher years, a turn that
utterly crushed both moderate and more radical varieties of Labourist
social democracy. It is the sound of old means of understanding and
organising the social world - punk, Dr. Feelgood, disco, left-wing
politics - crumbling as a maniacal, consumerist gaiety usurps them.
"Things all look a whole lot better for the working classes,"
Jon King sings on Gang of Four's 'I Found That Essence Rare'. One is
returned irresistibly to footage of Thatcher occupying some oversized
machine - a tank or a bulldozer - the self-conscious symbol of
violent national renewal, of a return to great things via the
irresistible force of "creative destruction."
In a year characterised by centenary hero worship, this style has
been excitedly reappropriated, with a galaxy of nobodies queueing up
to "remember the sacrifice" - without, of course, ever
questioning the causes of that "sacrifice" and the
senselessness of such a terrible collective death sentence.
Unsurprisingly a burst of intolerance has emerged in the prevailing
mood of death and nostalgia. Gang of Four's music stands as a
powerful incitement to challenge such popular self-righteousness.
"Just keep quiet, no room for doubt," they sing. "All
this talk of blood and iron is the cause of all my shaking.... The
fatherland's no place to die for!"
Gang of Four take the alienated protagonist of modernism and plunge
him (normally it's a him) unreconstructed into a fragmenting social
environment: "How can I sit and eat my tea, with all this blood
flowing from the television?" the affectless narrator of '5.45'
complains. These weak manifestations of a first-person subjectivity -
in effect, men we are invited to watch flail in the grip of
micro-practices of power - are cut across yelped slogans, which
sometimes function as dim reminders of struggles now taking place
elsewhere, out of view of the atomised individual: "Guerilla war
struggle is a new entertainment." Yet some of Gang of Four's
best songs are mimetic - personifying those who are active
participants in the creation of this new, paranoid world.
Here the domestic scene is penetrated by supposed military
virtues, as if the retreat from public life by Britain's TV-sozzled
masses has resulted in the internalisation of values once championed
by the outward face of Empire: "Discipline is his passion/Order
his obsession/Now he says there's none." In a sense Thatcher
redoubled, through our collective relegation to the privatized
domicile (famously there was no such thing as society only families
and individuals), the very metaphorical domestication of the
post-imperial British (no longer to rule the waves). Thatcher's
rebellion against "decline" merely resulted in the
destruction of the agon - the public marketplace of ideas -
that had supposedly fuelled British inventiveness in the first place.
What is left is a simultaneously commodified and militarized daily
life bound up with a growing conviction that what is "out there"
is dangerous; that we are victim to a total social breakdown
epitomized in such prosaic phenomena as late-running trains: "Outside
the trains don't run on time." 2014 found a privatized Britain getting ever twitchier - and not only over late trains.
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