A Mirror To Society
A Mirror To Society
Protest Song and The Sweet East
This old town's changed so much
Don't feel like I belong
Too many protest singers
Not enough protest songs
And now you've come along
~ Edwyn Collins, ‘A Girl Like You’
Truth telling does not involve seeing both sides or objectivity, truth telling is unselfish inwardness.
~ Knut Hamsun, The Cultural Life of Modern America, 1889
We don’t often see a good general conversation about the state of the art of local music in Aotearoa New Zealand, but Graham Reid, arguably still our most productive scribe when it comes to covering new releases, managed it the other week by comparing the Dam Native re-issue (1997 raps about historical injustice, current affairs and identity over a novel, jazz-tinged hip-hop template, a sound specific to NZ that went on to influence a scene) to the BBQ reggae (a soft, neutered, probably automated version of reggae that developed in this country while the Caribbean was inventing reggaeton) that rules our charts. One of my best jokes
What’s the only thing worse than barbeque reggae?
Vegan barbeque reggae.
Is not so funny now vegan BBQ reggae is the only flavour. Reid begins thus
”… riding on an uplifting rail of reggae, soulful sincerity, lyrics which are often banal and – to avoid alienating the audience – uncontroversial.
It is populist music which is undeniably popular because it doesn't provoke or offend. It pleases because it is pleasing. And it dominates our local music charts.
At times when the peace, love and whānau messages overwhelm with blandishments, you yearn for voices like those of Herbs, Upper Hutt Posse, Dam Native and many others in the past who didn't hold back but laid the blame where they thought it belonged.
You don't hear much of that from young rock bands either...”
It’s not just the artists in the charts, there’s a whole industry here invested in what Lias Saoudi calls safety art. I listen every week to the 4 hours of “popular” and “alternative” music played by the state broadcaster, Radio NZ’s Music 101, and am lucky to hear two or three songs I don’t want to skip. Few musicians in this country seem to have what it takes to get their music heard without government funding, and who’s going to apply for that money making music the government stations don’t want to play? I’m pretty sure the ram-raider generation knows how to make beats and speak their truths, I can hear their US equivalents.
What’s the frequency, Kenneth?
There’s plenty of scope for safe protests, repeating slogans easily found on social media, slogans that have their own political parties, with positions that have their own TV channels. This isn’t what protest music was in its heyday. Arguably, the heart of protest music in NZ was broken when the Government, fronted by the DJ leader of the party most musicians supported myself included, with her second-in-command a noted fan of the Flying Nun acts my own included, closed the schools, locked people in their homes, isolated the dying, destroyed small businesses, including the live performance incomes of local musicians, making music more of a rich-parent business going forward, and did a bunch of other harms, and no-one could protest this because the Govt was more-or-less doing the right thing, the thing most of us putative protest-rockers wanted done. Missing the point that music doesn’t have to be, indeed shouldn’t be, reasonable. It shouldn’t be an expression of political interest but an expression of the unreasonable, inconsolable human soul. In other countries artists sublimated the lockdown experience into potent new songs about other things, but our Freedom protest singers, drunk on lower-middle class ‘conservative’ identification and rural ideals, stubbornly refused to rock the boat musically. Not one that I’ve heard even attained the giddy heights of Tom Scott at his worst.
In Graham Reid’s thread a lot of people pointed to Scott (Homebrew, (at)Peace, Avantdale Bowling Club) as someone still speaking up. Scott’s written some of the best social commentary in NZ music, because of an honesty similar to this quality I described in Kirsty MacColl: “she knows very well where she stands in the social order, so that her social concern is expressed without false identification”. When Scott’s critiquing the welfare system and being Marxist about the industries that don’t employ him, and you know he’s going to spend his dole on weed, that’s a relatable character: paradoxically, someone you can trust. But it also matters that Scott’s music was revolutionary. He didn’t cobble his words onto the 2012 version of BBQ reggae, but with Hazbeats took something more like the Dam Native template, of jazz-tinged hip hop, further, then made even more revolutionary beats on his own, and if he’s getting a little nostalgic with his live modal jazz band now, damn, he’s earned the right.
Before too long Sivle Talk, some smart young musicians from Ōtepoti, rose to Reid’s challenge, and came up with ‘Bottom Feeder’, which a) holds a mirror up to the political zeitgeist b) isn’t too reasonable to be fun, and b) neatly wraps the spirit of 1981 protest songs like Riot 111’s ‘1981’ up in a tuneful 2020’s post-emo punk sound. That this sound is an improvement over the BBQ reggae sound matters as much, when it comes to protesting, as the music. What changed the world wasn’t Bob Dylan’s folky rebel songs but the fact that he went electric, scandalized the protest establishment, caused his minority-interest acoustic albums to sell into the millions, and, along with his mates in the Beatles, changed the haircuts, sexual politics, and drug habits of a generation. As the Athenian philosopher Plato once warned, “When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them." To be specific, when the people en masse start to like different modes, rhythms, and timbres from those the Establishment feels comfortable with, the Establishment comes under pressure to adapt. In a few decades, the more successful of those sounds will be well on the way to becoming part of the Establishment.
Prior to ‘Bottom Feeder’, the last great political song I heard from a Kiwi artist was Princess Chelsea’s ‘Respect the Labourers’, from The Loneliest Girl (2018) a song which takes the opposite position to Headless Chicken’s classist industrial hit ‘Gaskrankinstation’ (1990).
Political commentary isn’t what we expect from this national treasure and hardworking success story at home and abroad. Princess Chelsea’s subtly witchouse pop sound and tradgoth kindyteacher persona are original, instantly recognizable creations, resonant with subconscious meanings, and I find her songs on the playlists of overseas artists I admire, bless her. Chelsea for PM!
I’d pretty much written all of the above when I turned on Radio 101 last Saturday and was surprised by the impertinent critique of Zionism in Joshua Idehen’s ‘Mum Does The Washing’.
How did that get through? ‘Mum Does the Washing’ lays out political ideologies as a menu to satirize them. It’s a strength, not a weakness, that I can see gaps and want to fill them (he’s conflated fascism with Naziism - I’d add “Fascism: your mum does the washing. You award her a medal. You start a war to pay for it" and “Incelism: you do the washing. You blame your mum.”), because the job of political satire is to get you thinking, not tell you exactly what to think.
This concept, roaming through and satirizing political or philosophical systems in a fantastic and allegorical way, has also been expressed in books and films; examples include Johnathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels ( 1726) and Voltaire’s Candide (1759), variants of the picaresque story in which an innocent, rather than a rogue, is the protagonist. In 1958 Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg updated Candide, with an ingénue protagonist, as Candy for the Traveler’s Companion “dirty book” section of Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press.1 Filmed in 1968, Candy may be one of the inspirations behind a new work of political satire, The Sweet East, which screened at the recent International Film Festival; the cast of Candy included singer Charles Aznavour and drummer Ringo Starr, while the cast of The Sweet East includes Earl Cave, son of the singer, and Gibby Haynes, singer from The Butthole Surfers. The Sweet East impressed me a few minutes in by letting its main character, Talia Ryder’s Lillian/Annabel, sing its theme song ‘Evening Mirror’, written by Paul Grimstad, over the title sequence (it also impressed me by having a title sequence).
This is a nice touch, demonstrating the importance of music to the film, and made me want to dig deeper into its soundtrack. ‘Evening Mirror’ is an elegant, European-styled song (it reminds me of Broadcast and Momus) which, being sung in an untrained voice, to best effect on the 3 syllables given to each “cat”, might be meant to embody one of the film’s themes, the political-philosophical age difference between America and Europe, also highlighted by its multiple (and mostly scholarly) Lolita references. Its other text, echoed throughout, is the eternally appealing Alice in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, absurdist variations on the ingénue satire (in which a young girl is gaslit and intellectually bullied by a succession of unhinged adults as her body goes through alarming changes) that were written to amuse a small child. Thus, The Sweet East begins its break from normality with a crazed Pizzagate activist before Lilian is led down her first rabbithole by a white-haired Earl Cave, playing a performance-art based film-maker whose Antifa activism also resembles inept performance art. On the road trip with Earl and his gang, there’s a great example of sound design, as the soundtrack music is mixed with loops of the organic sounds of the van ride; sound design in films often gives us remixes of the songs, like the echoey version of ‘Magic’ or the synth-bedazzled versions of other songs in Xanadu. The long, idyllic section where Lilian, as Annabel, cohabits, and toys, with a neo-Nazi professor played by Simon Rex (from Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, another excellent film with a cool modern soundtrack and an original song sung onscreen by its ingénue) includes a history lesson in United States counterculture, which continues in the next section when Lilian’s taken up by two film-makers to star in a period drama about a 19th Century transcendentalist community - this motif possibly re-appears as the trance music (or EDM) of modern-day fundamentalists in the next section.
Or not - coded works are most stimulating when they’re messy and decoding them is an imperfect science. The scene with Gibby Haynes is short, and the least satisfying section, but it’s saved by hallucinatory sound design, as Lilian is finally, like Alice, overwhelmed by another demented man talking at her.
We might expect such a film to have dug up some cool sounds that are new to us - here’s one, Albert Marcœur’s ’Histoire d'offrir’, a Gong-ish piece of French freak-prog from 1979.
There are a trio of tracks by Minimal Man, a post-punk San Francisco band who soon relocated to Europe, led by Patrick Miller, who died in 2003. ‘Showtime’ runs over the end credits, when things in the film’s US of A have begun to happen for real. Here’s a band I hadn’t heard off, creating sounds that were ahead of their time, and my best guess was that Minimal Man was a contemporary act.
At some point in the Sweet East playlist I smoked a joint, which coincided with the start of Julián Carrillo’s ‘En Secreto’ from 1927. You may not, but I felt at home straight away; this chromatic and whole tone composition for strings by the Mexican microtonalist is full of the language Vítězslava Kaprálova was using in the same period, veering into sonorist textures and microtonality (his “thirteenth sound”) as it develops.
There’s also a short electroacoustic piece by Pierre Henry, ‘Symphonie Pour un Homme Seul: Prosopopee 1’. The modernist, avant garde and experimental ideas of 20th Century classical music are still well worth getting under your skin if you’re interested in new sounds.
Mining cool movie soundtracks for forgotten gems - the system works, and I could easily fill more posts this way. The whole of The Sweet East seems to be free to view on YouTube right now. Enjoy!
Allegorithmic k-hole - Ängie & Skoj, ‘Lost Alice’
“…it got to be a big deal in the States, everybody was taking it seriously. Do you remember what kind of shit people were saying? One guy wrote a review about how Candy was a satire on Candide. So right away I went back and reread Voltaire to see if he was right. That's what happens to you. It's as if you vomit in the gutter and everybody starts saying it's the greatest new art form, so you go back to see it, and, by God, you have to agree” Mason Kass Hoffenberg