It Must Be America

(for Indieoma.com)

Last year, The Indelicates played a few gigs in New York. Shortly before then, we had released a single called ‘America’ – which, along with being vaguely intended as a correction of the record following Razorlight’s astoundingly graceless song of the same title, was unequivocally pro-American. It addressed what I saw as a distressing tendency among the British, middle-class left to view the world entirely through an ill thought out and fatuous anti-Americanism. It had, as its chorus, the assertion that ‘with godless America’, I would ‘stand and fall’.

In Jersey City, In Springsteen’s home state, dressed in an American flag shirt with an American flag guitar strap holding up my American guitar, I performed the song, confident that I was, in some small way, paying due (if arrogant) homage to a country that I like and admire. It is a source of some dismay to me that, the following week, I found myself attacked on the Brooklyn Vegan forum on a charge of being anti-American.

...read on at indieoma...

Book Of Job

So, June 4th Camden Head, we are reviving the musical I started writing five years ago - first rehearsal yesterday. It is actually sort of gratifying to be able to do so without toecurling embarrassment, in fact, I still think it's good, which I can't really say about things I wrote six years ago.

Anyway, there's a new site at:
corporaterecords.co.uk/job which has wanky flash, some visually accompanied music and easter eggs (I am also locked out of it because the *fla corrupted, so will never be able to update the content and will have to leave it stranded - a desolate beacon on the electronic frontier..), check it.

XX

An Unexpected Savior?

Simon Indelicate on how the credit crunch could revitalise the music industry

The music industry is dead, deceased, over, kaput, it has shuffled off the mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible: it is an ex-industry.

(...read on at Maps Magazine)

New David Koresh Superstar site

http://corporaterecords.co.uk/koresh/index.html

BRANDS: How Rebellion Works pt.1

------ Forwarded Message
From: Kevin O'Donnell
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:57:16 -0000
To: Sam Smith , Stuart Green
Cc: TOTEMPOLE , Alex Knight , Tom
, Dave Howell , Dave Cawley
,
Conversation: This weeks 6 Music Rebel Playlist vote - Send it around
Subject: This weeks 6 Music Rebel Playlist vote - Send it around

Hiya all.

Brakes are in the 6Music Rebel playlist vote this week.
If we blitz this vote, win it by a substantial margin then we can push for a
playlist spot again next week

Can evereyone get all the bods they can to vote on this please? The vote is at the
bottom of Lammo's home page http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/shows/steve_lamacq/ and I've
pasted the info below.

Tom and Tom can we get this info up asap on all the websites too?

Thanks
K

Two Deaths

Jade Goody.
Yep. I Went there.

Now to be clear, I don’t care about this. I don’t believe that Big Brother indicates anything particularly important about anything. At most it is a minor stepping stone along the path toward the new forms of narrative that will replace those that are currently in fashion. The commonly held assumption that a passable piece of light entertainment can only be properly regarded as an indicator of the direction and nature of the cultural hegemony is, I think, a distortion brought about by the prevalence of irritating humanities graduates in the print media and their tendency to clumsily apply half-remembered lessons about absurd French celebrity philosophers to everything. Big Brother is not Foucault’s panopticon. It is not the desert of the real.

And I don’t care about it. I didn’t care when Jade Goody was on it the first time – I wanted Kate to win. I cared a little bit when she was on it again, because it seemed thoroughly apparent that the blonde member of SS club 7 (kudos on the pun to Jimbob) and the pert model were much worse racists than Jade and were being treated better by the press because ‘doing nice singing’ and ‘having a pretty arse’ are regarded as ‘talent’ by morons who haven’t ever thought about it. I thought that Jade had demonstrated a likeable level of concern for her mother earlier in the programme. I wondered whether the reaction to the story was indicative of the transfer of base liberal middle class loathing from their former colonial inferiors to the white working class who had so disappointed them by preferring turkey twizzlers to owning the means of production. But still, I didn’t really care.

What I do care about, and care about increasingly at the moment, is the revolution in data transmission that we are currently living through. I define data as all information that can be digitally encoded and, consequently, where I have often in the past been unclear as to what it is precisely that I doing with my life, I now define myself as a creator of data. I have no interest in being a musician, designer, playwright, writer or poet - these titles feel loaded and dishonest. I’m a data creator, that’s my business, and it is important to me that the movement of data should be understood as much as possible.

Jade Goody, is significant for being among the last great failures of the old-fashioned, moribund print media. The filtration of data through a once necessary - now economically doomed - infrastructure of graduate recruitment, printing presses and hierarchies has perpetrated the sickness and unbearable fucked-upness of the Jade Goody story. Print has been defended as the maintainer of quality, the guarantor of truth, the upholder of standards, the roman centurion before the internet’s barbarian hordes and yet it has insulted, preened, peered, lied, raised, razed, gossiped and distorted. It has defined a young woman as a pig, as vile, as brave, as ugly, as courageous and, ultimately (on the cover of Richard Desmond’s OK! Magazine) as dead when she was none of them. Like a rough john who feels within his rights to kick the shit out of a hooker he’s paid for, it has made the spurious and revolting argument that the payment of money to a person legitimises any form of abuse. It has raised the odious, giftless charlatan Max Clifford to a position of power and riches. It has indefinably but unmistakeably lowered the level of our discourse. Jade is not the point. Her deadline-unfriendly death was just sad and horrible.

And look now at the internet. That great threat to truth, quality and decency. Yes, there was isjadedead.com – sick, certainly, but tempered (as sickness must be to be forgiveable) with a degree of wit and, unlike OK!, at least accurate. Yes, there are people spreading scurrilous gossip and disparaging abuse on the digital spy forums – but they are tempered by an immediate and equally prominent faction who find their actions revolting and rebut them. Yes there is sickipedia – but there is no pressure from the medium to buy into its worldview, you can laugh or you can be offended: it’s up to you. At the same time wikipedia (that self-policed, establishment defying replacement for the Brittanica - once among print’s proudest achievements) gives an accurate uncontroversial account of Jade’s life without resorting to emboldened little adjectives; a google news search gives us unfiltered access to every different version of events; Stephen Fry twittered about it; And I, quite consciously and unsteered chose to notice.

The internet is not a piratical upstart spoiling business models for a vital fourth estate. It is an improvement on the press in every way. As Jade Goody - poor, dead, rich Jade Goody - is remembered, I feel a little bit sad. When print goes the same way, I cannot say that I shall feel anything very much at all.



Addendum:
The dead press has this week also been complaing about the EU changing guidelines on women’s titles. Apparently insisting on Ms instead of Mrs or Miss is ‘political correctness gone mad’. Just so we’re clear, the argument for Ms. Is this:

It is not acceptable for a woman’s public status to be contingent on her relationship to a man, if a man’s public status is not equally contingent on his relationship to a woman.

It’s not complicated. It is very simple, very clear and very difficult to dispute. So don’t. Stop being wankers and use Ms. already. Idiots.

S.I. March 22nd 2009

Shades of Brown

As you probably know if you are reading this, I am the singer and guitar player in a pop band. Consequently, I find it hard to find a justification for writing about politics. I feel fine with economics as it is at the heart of pop music; fine with religion for similar reasons. I feel fine attacking the postmodern theories of the intellectual elite because plenty of half-baked pop musicians have ineptly deployed them and I feel entitled to reply. I feel fine, also, attacking shallow anti-americanism, programmeless anti-globalism and silly adolescent brands of socialism because these too are the playthings of dilletante pop musicians.

Where I stumble is attempting to write about real politics where people stand for elections and make changes in that thin band of policy that actually affects people. Why should my opinion on such things be worth knowing about? I don’t know. I suspect they aren’t. But, all the same, for one blog only, I shall tell you what I think about the Prime Minister and then we can all move on.

I fucking hate the Prime Minister.

I say this as a dyed-in-the-wool labour party supporter. I discovered that I was one of those while voting in 2005 and finding out that any notions of voting otherwise were simply inconcievable. My Dad is a union lawyer, I’ve been to parties with Neil Kinnock and funerals with John Prescott, My heart welled with glee when Stephen Twigg won Portillo’s seat in ‘97 and it shrank with dismay when he lost it to David Burrowes in 2005. I dislike Tories, even the ones I like, because they are Tories and that’s how it is.

More than that, I am (in the short term at least) New Labour. Eventually I should like to see the abolition of menial work, the abandoning of all borders and the universal application of mechanised of welfare divorcing a basic level of free living from economic participation maximising liberty while encouraging scientific innovation – but, for now, I believe in equality and protection for members of involuntary minorities; I believe that there are market solutions for many social problems but that society is obliged to maintain a basic living standard for all; I believe in a strong transatlantic alliance, I believe that human rights are universal and worth defending; I believe in coming to terms with the transformations that were the result of Thatcher’s cruelties and ploughing on with a tweaked mixed economy… In other words, until Bob ushers in the age of Slack, I am of the Blairite, third-way, centre-left.

I believe, also, that a Tory victory at the next election will hurt people. There is a pernicious myth that the two main parties are basically the same. This is not true, but - even if it were the case that the leaders of both believed and acted identically - there is no end of difference between a man who, when forced to compromise to please his base, makes concessions to Trade Unions, Peaceniks and Liberty and a man who would do the same for little-Englanders, Daily Mail readers and racists. There is a gap and the recession is widening it. You probably do not fall into that gap, but millions do and a Tory government will hurt them while you glibly pontificate on how the parties are identical.

Gordon Brown though. Ugh.

It was obvious all along. The nonsense about abolishing boom and bust. The ineptness of his spin. The sulkiness. The facial tics. The airless speeches. The smirking pretence at contentment. The self-satisfied promotion of a ludicrous ‘iron-chancellor’ image… He is the living embodiment of the Peter Principle which sees managers promoted to the level of their own incompetence.

It was never at all relevant that he was ‘competent’ anyway. There are a great many people who are competent waiting to be employed. The man does not understand the British people. He does not understand the we are a nation of skiving chancers who like to be told that we are hard working – not a nation of hard working people. He does not get that we are increasingly connected by the internet, media and its currencies and that we do not know anybody else who would call her ‘Jane’ Goody. He doesn’t understand that poorly delivered, badly written jokes about Peter Mandelson getting doused in custard are fine for Peter Mandelson but beneath an elected prime minister and head of government. The man cannot lead.

People used to criticise spin, but spin was not the problem. Good spin can inspire, can enable democracy, can broaden understanding. Good spin is Henry V at agincourt, Obama’s oratorical tours of wheatfields and aircraft carriers, Kennedy’s inaugural, men on the moon. Bad spin was always the problem – weasly and obvious, seeking to distort rather than present. Brown is horribly spun and hopelessly unspinnable. He appears contemptuous, dishonest and small. He is unlikeable and cannot be made to appear otherwise.

The job of Prime Minister is not to tinker and control but to communicate an agenda and steer its passage. Brown can’t do either and he will lose the next election because of it. The labour party must act now, as it should have months ago. Ditch him. Pick a successor. Call an election. Lose it. Let the Tories mismanage the recession for five years and then take the country back. There really is no other choice.

I shall go back to fiddling with effects pedals now.