WOEBOT

Red Rob.

"They were taken with thing called improving music, improving culture, which is good for you, and naff culture, which is bad for you, and children must be guided away from all these bad things. The more I read about it, I realised that this tendency had been going on for centuries. The church, for example, used to have a problem with rabble music. Organised church music was elevating, and the music of the rabble, when they got pissed, caught sexual diseases and that sort of thing was the bad kind. The church monitored the rabble with totalitarian verve, intervening constantly to break down the power of mob culture and mob music. Following on from that, you couldn't shock my parents' communist or egalitarian friends by saying "I don't believe in God", but you could by saying "I don't believe in Mozart"...The left missed a trick there, because the idea that serious music was morally elevating took a bit of a battering after the Second World War." Robert Wyatt 2003.

Really I could sling inverted commas round the whole piece and leave it there. Wyatt's a fantastic thinker. He was probably the person responsible for coming up with the term "World Music", which while both a good AND bad thing is certainly a coinage to be reckoned with. Brian Eno would spend long afternoons with him in the seventies chatting, casually teeving his thoughts. Wyatt, and I read John Peel revealing this, has two houses a mile apart from one another which he swaps between. Cool! So many ideas swilling through this it's difficult to know where to pick up the thread.

The first thing I noticed was that Wyatt was exploring the tension between what Simon Reynolds would call the "Avant-Lumpen" and what we might call the "Beatnik". We talked about this here a while ago under the guise of "classic Cartesian dualism" Beatnik-vs-AvantYob. It's pretty safe to suppose Wyatt's family were classic Bohemians or Beatniks. They were part of poet/author Rupert Graves circle, and would holiday with them in the South of France. Isn't the idea of British bohemian retreats only having to be as far away as Majorca (Kevin Ayers and Terence Stamp's bolt hole) and the Provence wonderful? Nowadays folk have to own their own villa in Essouria or Mustique. I know I do.

Music which "improves" one is one of the hallmarks of Beatnik culture. It's one of the criteria that separates The Beatles from The Stones (ad infinitum). Wyatt's term "naff culture" spells it out larger. Reynolds might splice naff up with football culture, herd thinking, mass abandon on LSD, in short everything one might infer from The Mover's "Mescalinum United" alias. Wyatt's historical comparisons with church repression immediately made me flash on Greil Marcus's discovery of Jon of Leyden, medieval Germany's Johnny Rotten and also the thought that once-upon-a-time folk music* constituted this notional great unwashed. I guess Wyatt represents one part of a transgressive tradition that is neither "Beatnik" nor "Yob", but square to the politik of both.

What really stimulated me was his idea that the left had "missed a trick". It's got to be true. Right from the outset Communism (then Socialism) has persistently backed the wrong dog. The very earliest Communist experiments with siring a culture of their own were the Avant-Garde projects of Tatlin, Vertov, El Lizissitsky. A total cock-up in terms of state sanctioned art, sure we can enjoy the fruits of it as the western bourgeoisie but what possible success did it suspect to have with the "proletariat". Ditto the heavy-handed romanticism of Stalinist cinema and art with its top-down dogma and cut-out sentiments, almost not culture at all but untrammeled propaganda. You couldn't expect people to suck on a culture as bland as that. As for Capitalism, we've the compulsive shenanigans of Hollywood and Pop music leading us a merry dance down the supermarket.

Flash forward to Billy Bragg and his thoroughly bohemian re-shaping of The Clash as Woody Guthrie. It's no stronger a signal, in the final reckoning a culture of opposition which is eternally doomed to be the underdog. So where next Comrades? Well this is the germ of an idea I saw hatching in Wyatt's article. Why hasn't Socialism attached itself to "the invisible culture", the culture without trappings that is mob ecstasy? It's a snug fit with the political rally. Surely that's the missed trick Wyatt's referring to? Of course they picked up the folk thing in the early sixties all that pre-Bringing it Back Home swirl of Peter Paul and Mary** and Joan Baez. But by that stage folk music was, to use a term hijacked from Luka in a state of "Half-Life", it's radioactive fizz subsided to a degree that it was safe for the middle-classes to appropriate it. That whole wave of post Harry Smith's The Anthology folk was gestural rather than harboring potency.

What if Socialism had harnessed the rave? I'll bet I'm gonna receive a few dozen emails pointing me to the Socialist Worker's Bank Holiday party at Camber Sands with Judge Jules' Political Science Graduate brother on the decks. Red Square in a heavy fog of dry ice, the cupolas of St.Basil’s ablaze with lasers, grubby street-urchins selling black-market vodka-flavored gum, enormous inflatable tanks and submarines, a 4000k Turbo rig manned by Cossacks on a microdot ration, 100,000 strong crowd of Soviet ravers chewing their cheeks, Vladimir Putin in loose-fitting clothes sneakers and a medallion urging the legion on and upwards with quotes from Das Kapital and the latest corn production figures from Georgia, huge Stalinist Tower-block-sized screens playing old skool stroboscopic videos like “The Man with the Movie Camera” and proto-rave visuals like “Earth”. Monday morning back down the tin-mine the dutiful weekenders have Trotsky on a white horse dancing across their corneas.

The Christians had a good crack, if not much success. I saw an hilarious programme on TV the other night with the god squad cruising Ibiza, teaching holiday-makers how to DJ, playing at Mambo (was it?) before Carl Cox. The highlight being one of the girls in the outfit recounting seeing an angel at one of the islands superclubs, no really! Sit down because you'll wet yourself over this, what did he look like this angel: "Really cheeky...he looked really cheeky, like a regular clubber." Actually I couldn't laugh either, I was numb. So you see despite Chris Brain the Anglicans are still trying to have their way with the four-four beat. And why shouldn't the Socialists too? I expect they'll cotton on sometime in 2015 when we're all driving hovercrafts amid the frenzy of “scent” culture, I tell you the ears have had their day, onwards the nose!

Posted by Woebot at August 26, 2003 07:18 PM