Five and still alive

Like many others this blog has its five-year anniversary in 2008. Five years and crinklechrist knows how many posts. In that time blogs have become my main go-to inspiration, my main education even, as one click leads to another and you build up through truly interactive push learning. My workday routine – start surfing prior to lunch, pick out articles to read and print one on recycled paper for the out-of-office sandwich companion.

When WhoreCull’s protagonists realised in 2002/03 that we had to go online (distributing60-80 or copies of the zine was doing a disservice to articles that would go on to get thousands of hits), we decided to do three blogs. Sonic Truth was the obvious offshoot for the back page of music, Political Peccadillo would allow us to react quicker than the webzine to its main driver material, Meeja Hoors took a similar role. Real identities were deemed irrelevant as they had always been in the ‘zine. By the time we launched it as a proper blog we already had several reviews to paste in, as a scroll down would show you, then over time the authorial voice (mine) grew more singular and it got a bit of a rebrand.

Since then Cull moved onto an open source platform (props to Czukay, and Burton’s Gavin the Vacuous Ninnie for the original Dreamweaving and old McClintock director Craig for the new), the two others blogs foundered and the old zine’s stuff on Cinestatic is hard to access due to a server problem I still haven’t checked with Mike about; Main Cull too is also in abeyance as McClintock has taken over.

In that time, the social networking and syndication revolutions have kicked it but it’s remarkable how many of the successful blogs stick to the basic of text and links inc sidebars – eschewing Share This! syndication, other community enjoinments, meme clouds, What Music I am Playing Now and Are you Flossing? questionnaires - although Flickr it seems has synched in best with many’s ideals. And we’re all partial to a YouTube embed; who would have thought we’d understand html coding a few years ago?

Musically the period has witnessed the usual fluctuation; we are post-rave; although its manifold shapes – garage, hardcore, jungle, techno, house – are still a vital route in and out for ‘the kids’. The whiteboy skinny jean variant that kind of started with electroclash and has taken in indie and electro has lasted in various forms for most of the decade; indie rock has disappeared up its own corporate arsehole, shitting out only occasional quality like, arguably (and that’s what blogs do best as long as the comments box doesn’t get catty), the Arctic Monkeys. Hip-hop was correctly pronounced dead by Nas in 2004 and regional blends have not saved it critically. Grime had already peaked by the time I spake webly, but dubstep was just getting going and proved fecund and brooding for a good few years until, if we read the experts rightly, it has flipped the script and gone aqueous and wonky. Right now the smart minds look at a global blend of party-flavoured Latin, Caribbean, African (sub-Saharan and Maghrebi), European and US. I use the blogs as a source of knowledge and files while when I get old-school CDs I’m a typical modern consumer in that I load up the best two or three tracks of the album and leave the rest on the shelf, for occasional return.

Now Truth has grown older it has settled down to its original focus on music but with diary-style posts, while occasionally bigging up the slow-growing side project (the mp3s on the sidebar, however, really are an indulgence). Different author pieces are rare and interaction with the ‘sphere is not as much as it could be. The comments box doesn't even work so maybe i should move over to a plain old Blogspot address. But it carries on in hope that Blogger has kept its final salary pension scheme.

Infinite touches on many of the issues to do with the culture of the blog, in her Illich Deschooling post. Do we court more mainstream fame or notoriety? Well in some cases yes – Guido Fawkes and others show how it can be merely the apprenticeship. Like all the other social-cultural revolutions, from a revisionist perspective this could be seen as an emergent group coming through who will ultimately be subsumed into mainstream discourse. Others like Simon were working topdown in that he was already a successful journalist, but his propagation of the form was vital. Others of course stay staunchly alternative, still seeing the medium of distribution as revolutionary despite the appropriation and consolidation.

And she’s right. Of course the people who do you meet through the ‘sphere turn out to be sound – the shared space promotes ideas generation like no other and it gives you many things to connect on.

What has been so rewarding to see is this exact progression – Owen is an in-demand authority on architecture; Mark now writes for The Wire and a host of other publications; politicos publish provocative and vital books and the sonic bloggaz write their own magazines, start their own labels and release quality music. Then there's the Kino clubs, photo-essays, alternative local histories. But all have their original portal which – crucially - often hosts their most interesting and diverse material. Others stick to their gunz, hit big with one angle then go away, lie low then reinvent themselves for the next connection. A year or two ago this particular blogscene seemed weeks away from the Sunday supplement/lifestyle treatment – mainstream writers (all of whom of course now have their colums turned into ‘blogs’) trying to get a handle on it and almost certainly getting it wrong. We/they seemed to have bypassed that possibility, and we carry on as the fertile and furtive alternative.

In this context – make no mistake, blogging is as valid as forum as the mainstream organs; literally the only difference is that there is no editor/big other second-eyeing your copy so for the less meticulous there will be one or two typos (in my case inevitable as I do real-world editing 9 hours a day for my job). But I think we can live with that because of the great generation of ideas. Believe me, I have seen the copy of so-called real writers and it’s well shabby.

That last bit I have alluded to several times in Truth. Because of the content, I never have been able to equalise my real and virtual worlds, but that remains the target - to get to a situation where the side projects take over and I don’t have to hide behind Truth (even though for a simple and lazy pun I love the name) or facile narcotic metaphor. or I could just make this less autobiographical and stick to the sonics/pop culture, or more autobiographical – turn it into a whimsical biography of a past-it office boy.

The last bit remains unlikely. Relative anonymity is hardly a price to pay at all for having this medium of expression, which can be a bit like a diary. There are certain things that can be said and certain things that can’t but it still offers a viable space; the notion of ‘Truth’ is questioned in the standfirst below the logo anyhow. My circle may continue to decrease but I’ll still keep this going.

“Punk’s Not Dead”

Punk is many things to many people, the end of something, the start of something or merely the next stage. Here’s some of the many theories up for a debunking:

The end of the second world war – as argued by Phil Oakey in the Made in Sheffield doc. This is the long view, suggesting that the UK socially and culturally was so grey, so controlled, so straightjacketed in the post-war era that it took us 30+ years to shake the nanny state off.

Tear it up – shorter in outlook but no less sociologically driven. Late 70s punk as a rational reaction to three-day-a-week broke but nuclear-armed Britain heading for Tory-led atomisation. The feeling of powerlessness was tangible, and punk was the era’s howl of impotence, no-one knowing how to deal with the onset of market Stalinism.

No Future. For many punk was nihilism unbound and to try and attach wider meaning to anything outside of this pretty vacant statement of no intent would be deeply misplaced.

For others though, it was Out with the Old and in with the New. Musically, culturally and socially, this was an essential holocaust designed to raze trends and styles before it, so the UK could finally be Modern beyond rarefied circles. The few years of white rioting cleared the way for a general disenfranchisement from politics but also a true multicultural era, with a lot of shopping and fucking, necking and dropping, slapping and stabbing.

Musically too, punk is only valid for the post-punk that followed. Here, punk is a constant renovative credo, the rulebook always being ripped up. It is year zero every time a band gets together. The idea is not to make punk music like you think punk music should be, that way leads to ever decreasing circles and Richard Briers with a safety pin through his neck. The idea is to make music without reference. Post-punk officially began (we now know) when 40 people went to see the Pistols in Manchester in 1976.

Oh come on. Punk? It was a niche scene with no substance or longevity. A few kids from the ghetto, a few situationists, a few fashionistas, a few from Bromley and a few Mancs – you call that a movement? Not even the Clash or the Pistols deserve to be in ‘the canon’, etc.

Bowie, Reed, Roxy. Punk was merely a locus for all the seminal 70s artists to be heard and appreciated and for their fans to be accused of transgressive sexuality but not to have to have defend yourself.

The immediation of another strata – this time it was the suburban and urban youth of a late-70s UK, teased by T-Rex and the Sweet but wanting to get off on a bit more, that were ushered into the middle class mediascape; an inevitable process whenever a scene becomes so big that it’s tabloid and mainstream fodder. After the first shock and awe and a bit of time to weigh up the next move, like the hippies and the ravers either side of them, the punks were happy to become part of the cultural consensus, punk as just one route. Restoration always follows revolution.

Revolt into Style is taken literally, the rebel rock and rollers soon becoming part of the establishment scene, the snarl the only token of past battles won and lost (I mean it was only music wasn’t it?). Punk as mere look and pop art statement, but also as Billy Idol, Richard Jobson presenting magazines, Simenon going off painting like a nonce. Fucking sell-outs!

Neurotic punk. The Buzzcocks chapter. Quintessentially English tales done with quintessential abashedness, reserve, awkwardness, none of the prostrations of prog and other rocks before it. "Why am I in a band?" "I don’t know - why do I have to answer such a banal question". It’s the tag the ICA is safetypinning on its current punkish season. See also indie punk, and therefore punk as DIY. Such as the inventive all-female -and democratic - group Gertrude, who do shouty and noisy but also dubby, atmospheric phases, their interchanging musicality always giving them room to take it up a notch or down one as required.

Absolute punk – aka Punk’s Not Dead. Where the grimaces of the band, the three chords and the neutered anti-socialism is everything. This was exactly where the Fumadores and Neurotic & the PVCs – the other two bands on at the ICA, one finishing with a Stooges cover that sounded like the Pistols and the other a Pistols cover that sounded like the Stooges. What’s slavishly known in other genres as keeping it real. Neurotic singer Fiddian Warman is so punk he’s built robots to do the pogoing in lieu of a decent-sized audience. That’s right, they were intensely irritating.

Punk is just another rock. A stylistic iteration. It has no historical resonance outside of music. After pub-rock and forward to post-rock and back and through again with pop divergence always close by. That’s why MOJO can do regular CDs in and around bands of that era.

It was all a big fuckin laugh. Sadly one of the most popular of all revisionist theories today. The sort of view of the punk all-dayers, the old boys going and the type of self-reassurance Steve Jones and co tell themselves. People who’d like to have been involved in a revolution called it a revolution, but it’s all just funnies, mere semen in Matlock’s roll.

I Said Worthy Farm I Can't Hear You! (pause, silence)

With literal hours to go the liberal disquiet still grows at Jay Z’s imminent performance on the fields of our very own Avalon – Glstnbry. Like the Roc-a-fella himself, they have invoked the commercial imperative, this black man is not cricket and has inspired poor ticket sales (nothing to do with complete festival saturation then). Of course, in curtain-ruffling England the new breed of cultural Nimbys haven’t been expressing their misgivings in anything so vulgar and as giveaway as racist terms. They’d have to admit that to themselves first. No, far easier to say ‘he’s just not my cup of tea’ and then to have a cup of tea than anything too divisive. Inclusion is an illusion on the modern festival goer’s iPod.

No-one would deny Jay Z has got rich on glorifying the gangster lifestyle. In an entrenched Jam and Jerusalem world, the artifact representing an ethnic poor trying to get rich and being a success by any means necessary is not welcome – 70s films only for that please. J-Z was on J-Ross’ show last night, casually dressed and completely comfortable with turning his life into art and therefore commerce, not feeling guilt for making teenagers rapists and murderers because this simply wouldn’t have happened.

Listen carefully, beyond the niggaz and hos language, and the overall sound is pretty tame and not likely to inspire youthful rebellion any more than the latest Jet rockout or Duffy soul revue. He’s not likely to inspire extreme devotion and replication, but if you're (still) into hip-hop in the mid-to-late noughties you’d be checking his thing.

So Brooklyn boy Shawn Carter is the unfortunate target of the ongoing consensus hallucination that is gangsta rap (it doesn’t even look right writing that in 2008), a genre that peaked about 15 years ago and isn’t really relevant to any of the main players’ current package.

Of course there are criticisms of Jay-Z - he should work his talent a bit more, write down rhymes and knock out the cliché; revealingly on Ross he said his mum told him that to be a star you’ve got to work at it, but Shawn realised his talent was natural and he has therefore never really had to work at it as such.

No Stone Circle dropout for him then, but my expectation and hope is that the legions of white boy hip-hop backpackers will forget their Q-Bert mix tapes for a while, get down the front and get down, displacing the indie moaners to the back. Repeats of Fiddy being bottled off at Reading seem unlikely.

Scorching back

My Bloody Valentine returned to live performance on Friday 13 June with a rehearsal gig for their few UK comeback dates. They did an expected set of purely 87-91 Creation albums and EPs.

The a-side of the awesome 1990 ep, Soon and Glider (repetitive sliding technicolour bursts precede industrial dystopia) is represented. Agree with Bliss that a favourite is the grungey e-bounce of Slow on the 88 You Made Me Realise 12, and that an album of the eps would make curatorial sense. A lot of the best bands only need around 20 or so great tracks to really make their mark, not walls and walls of careerist, new creative directions and churned lps ad infinitum. The percussive trances and quiescent tones of the last ep, Honeypower excepted (a great track despite being one of their most conventional, feel the warmth of the alternative post-new wave bass!), were a kind of endgame for Shields and co.

But as Paphides says on Quietus, the idea of this being retro or nostalgist doesn’t make sense when you consider the black hole of regress that followed MBV in the indie rock arena at least. Even without new output, they can make this short tour a huge blast of infinite present! All of which leaves me slowly relenting to my philistine “tickets are too expensive” attitude when the tour was first announced. It might be time to leave the records upstairs for the experience to go search for a spare.

Only Shallow:

Let's balk about sex

“I don’t want to employ the services of a beautiful Chinese call-girl. I’m quite happy to stay ‘out of the game’, thanks very much. I have no desire to act on desire.”

This was the situation 22 I found myself in on another ‘business’ trip to Singapore - if being holed up in an office robot-editing stories for three days can be called corporate travel (and next time I’ll just get up early and do it from home). One evening, the insistence of hospitality ignored anything I’d like to do in favour of checking out the hotel bars where the aprostates roam. When will people realise that we don’t always have to act on our desires, that we don’t always have to serve these needs, that the deed once done returns a gruesome reality to life? I eventually managed to leave this pre-transactional parade, vocalising taut jungle beats down Orchard Road in riposte (and still being offered business).

Super-reality is Singapore’s forte. It is like one long episode of the Apprentice. A city-state sandwiched with British colonial help between Malaysia and Indonesia, it long ago sought economic primacy with culture and society running behind a distant second to discipline and the work ethic. You will all have heard the stereotypes – clean, boring, crime-free, strict, corporate, efficient, it is all these things and not a lot more. In 30° heat, I found the ‘no drinking’ on the mass rapid transit (SMRT) system particularly oppressive.

Yet you head into town on the Smart-link and see perfect advertisements for Cities in the Sky – whole districts chocked full of clean, functioning towerblocks with the requisite infrastructure nearby. There will obviously be isolated resistance to ‘the system’ mainly due to and expressed through Western youth culture, but there’s no way an underclass can develop, so let’s do away with the net. Just as Chinese, Malays and Tamils come together and avoid tension through the lingua franca English, corporate and entertainment culture combine so the business, hotel and resto district is Singapore’s selling point – come and have a look at supersized towers, get a nice meal, let’s talk business. The ‘oldest profession’ is not pushed under the carpet but is legitimised as all part of the service.

An expat band played funky hits as the men roamed and the girls waited until drink absolved any morals or resistance (the ladyboys I’m told were more likely to roam near the airport, by a taxidriver crank credulous of the notion that it’s just “the jews” who run all the businesses!). Europe’s grotty red-light districts have thrust similar stag-tour temptation at me so I was unlikely to say ‘oh sure, get me a whore’ even if there was more of a patina of glamour here, even if, as I was told, they were ‘flocking’ to me. A mid-30 average white boy being slightly higher up the aesthetic food chain than their stock middle-aged sweaty overweight trade. Apparently though it’s fine here as everybody, meaning those sweaty and overweight and the ‘mind on my money and my money on my mind’ call-girls, has been able to reduce it to a pure transaction, the justification you hear everywhere else.

There is no room for the uncanny in Singapore, or an appreciation that culture quite often comes from the margins, and can’t just be slapped on the populace. I found myself longing for a bit of London’s rough around the edges, its faded glamour, its dissolute attitude. Culture is a little more than fine food, wheels even bigger (but of course) than the London eye and impressive neon-lit views of the harbour from a hotel tower (I’d surprised myself by not going bandy after I had been persuaded to go 70 stories up). It is not all about the spectacle and - because you’re worth it - satiating desire (generated by all that work).

But in global capital, the machine needs all the cogs to work for faultless efficiency. And there were lengthy delays at Changi Airport on connecting flights – at last I had time to put on my the walkman and play some tunes. White Denim’s playful rock shapes were an enjoyable way of blotting out the entreaties to enjoy the Changi Airport 'experience' (when culture has been traduced as outlined, it is the same as anything outside the airport has to offer).

When it got delayed again, I had no music to match the fraught mood. I thought I would zone out with Liars’ 30-minute psycho trancer This Dust That Makes Mud, but it beat me about 15 minutes in. Singapore will never be able to degenerate culture this way.

Strewth-via-Sonics

***Update, it turns out MC/r council themselves were only prepared for the pseudo event of celebrating football, etc, and not the reality of 100,000 Rangers fans pissed out of their mind and irate when a) one of the main screens went off b) they lost 2-0 and a significant minority used the city centre site for a rampage. MCFC.co.uk, of course, fails to mention this side of the occasion at all in its review.

Don't laugh, the Euroid final between Glasgae Rangers and Zenit St Petersburg was not the first time there has been at atmosphere at Eastlands. It's the seventh. This was also City's final and the whole area was lit up like normally it isn't, the B of the Bang banging and a great overhead of the ground. the gers lost to two good goals from Zenith Peter's Borg and some Russians ran on to the pitch but were briefly dispatched. Rumours have it the Rangers crowd were pissed from town centre booze-offs and this may have been reflected in their non roof-raising noise but took defeat well. From a City Eastlands point of view the coverage was great, although given that the area is normally neglected this showed up the very worst of international capital's veneering of area/event/'experience'*. And where is this 'Manchester' that they say the final is being held at? is it near or have anything to do with Manchester City? or is Eastlands one of United's training grounds or something - Not loving the neutralisation of place in the description.


The coverage did it until the final climax of the trophy lifting, which was timed horrendously by the UEFA colleagues with the release of a Foo Fighters song about 'giving the best of me' or something (actually Best of You), to add to a collective stew that looked/sounded like David Brent at his motivation lecture in Reading, finaling with Tina turner's Simply the Best. When will these mediator bastards realise that one sensation/celebration doesn't need to be excessed with a complimentary overload by another. Leave the music out of it, the atmosphere was sufficient.

Morphing the munglists

Back to rave last week. Czuk and I landed in some stereotype nu jungle jump-off in ghetto rave venue/pubclub Goldsmiths Tavern, a night made palatable by an enthused local crowd even as the music made a standard out of its own bog. Yes the mood was better there than last time, what with laydeez free and the still-liberating deshackler of the madfast jungle, put on by Kings of the Nu School and with Skibadee representing the only known.

His name ensured an MC-led angle to it. Each tune sped past unremarkable by any other characteristic, this functionality emphasised by the treble seeming to be down on the record to give the chatter its space, siren and riff-free. Each time though the 100ish crowd helped to make each lick seem more vital, more edgy than perhaps either the present-day post-garage or four-beat variants. It’s surely time jungle as a music moved on from its psychedelic concrete heyday but this may be unlikely while the spirit changes it in half-death. Maybe it should roughen up the beats again and take a different reality, like these.

On a personalised and selfish note, because I blog like that, the night emphasised the unfulfilled futility of any nights out when the interdependables are back at home. So schooled now in the metaphorical boat-pushing out and barely able to resist the flow in any case, this was made painfully evident by the need to go relatively early, leaving the 171 bus and home as chief loci for the biscuitworkings. No point in going out if the deshackler can’t be accessed, but it was still a welcome few hours away from corpo-reality.