Saturday 25 November 2017

Context

I mean, this is pretty self-explanatory. Fun to write, so I hope you like it.


Context is the casualty of the constant “oh, humanity”s
Of the cohort of the Pharisees of this broke age.
Concepts like cold sanity fade in heated faux humility
In the cloth-eared cloistered malady of bespoke rage.
Constrained by their fallacies come a thousand fraught apologies
From a hundred caught-out Socrates in the courtroom.
Consecrated effigies made for bonfires of false vanity
Feed the hungry, maddened Manichees’ lost proportion.
Concern turns to calumny just as fast as last week’s amnesty
On poor broken panicked Salomes fades to nowhere.
Content created casually makes a martyr far more rapidly
Than the lately feted banishee can manoeuvre.

Tuesday 21 November 2017

Sparsiones erint

I wrote this a few days ago. The title really was the first Latin phrase i learnt, for some reason.

Suddenly, I remembered it. It really took me aback, sent me a little chill.

So I wrote this immediately.

SPARSIONES ERINT


Sparsiones erint were the first words that I learnt
In the language of the cruellest empire then to blight the earth.
Sparsiones erint was the least that they could say
To keep the plebs from riots on a bloody, sunny day.
Panem et circenses were the satirists’ words that stuck
To show that Roman nobles gave enough – just - of a fuck
To stop the city burning with the rage of the oppressed;
“Your fate’s blanket mistreatment, but we will mistreat you best”.
Sparsiones non erant in Grenfell Tower that night -
“Sprinklers, oh no sprinklers, no, the borough’s budget’s tight.”
Twenty centuries’ progress – “it looks wonderful from here,
Hail this bright, nay, veritably sparkling veneer.
Flee the madding crowd in your redecorated Babel –
We’ve noted your complaints but we’re quite sure it’s strong and stable.”
Progress is just cladding, it’s a venal, vile word,
A silencer, a smiled threat to the now – and then - unheard.

Both Sides, now and always

So I'll start by saying this.

Being left-wing, to me, means thinking better of left-wing people in general. Meaning I generally like them more, I generally think that there aren't always two sides to the same story and that we all want the same things in different ways. Meaning I think, on balance, left-wing people are likely to be kinder, more thoughtful, more tuned in to social issues, more caring about inequality, all of those things.

These are either life's truths or life's illusions. I think they're life's truths.

I believe the whatabouttery that persists in modern political discourse mainly serves the right. I believe they relentlessly distort the arguments, draw false comparisons, to conceal this blatant truth. It puzzles me if ever left-wing people don't think like this, to be honest. You're being too fucking fair, I think. What's even the point of being left-wing if you don't think that?

But ...

and here's where my illusions were long ago shattered ... there is an area where this is, depressingly, but pretty obviously, not true.

For decades, my reading matter has included a large chunk of popular social history and biographies of "heroic" men - icons of civil rights, of rebel music and of the left - the likes of Muhammad Ali, Bob Dylan, Joe Strummer, Paul Robeson, Jesse Owens, John Lennon, Marlon Brando, film guys, Hollywood innovators and protestors, Bowie, more political figures like Mandela and Kennedy, you get the idea.

Now, there are some who have never really been held up as paragons of virtue, like Dylan, De Niro, etc. Their work is what it is - one couldn't really say they have sought to be or ever really been treated as secular saints.

But there are others like Robeson, say, Strummer, and others, who get spoken about in revered terms and I went into reading their biographies with high hopes that they might be different from the rest.

But no.

The fact is, the universal, cliched, truth about these men who changed the world is their transparent and impossible-to-conceal bad treatment of women, their sense of entitlement and hypocrisy, that they got to have their cake and eat it. There was always a little woman at home who was expected to behave herself while they got in with doing great things and having whatever they want.

Any naivety I had about that disappeared quickly, but I was always a bit disappointed. I'm not a moralist, but there was always a double-standard and a cruelty.

And, look, there's a big line between what the likes of Weinstein are being accused of and someone just being a trifling, good-for-nothing type of brother, but, in the sense that clearly these men felt like they could always have exactly what they wanted, it's part of the same mindset.

And very few of these books were hatchet jobs. The writer's affection for the subject was often transparent. If what I was reading was the best way to spin it, one often imagined that the truth might have been worse (particularly when it came to Hollywood ... that was where i had the hardest time, initially, reckoning the liberal politics of some of these dudes with their utter arrogant disregard for their wives and girlfriends).

Life's illusions. I truly, truly think the better of left-wing people - maybe it's what I need to keep my world in order - but that impression stops short when it comes to casual and not-so-casual personal misogyny.

I'm not saying anything that everyone doesn't know, but people on the left trying to make political capital out of "our sex offenders aren't as bad as yours and we deal with it better" are getting nowhere fast.

Wednesday 15 November 2017

Song 66: Grace

This blog's hardly short on words about Jeff Buckley, but, still, a little over 20 years after he died, I want to write a little about the song 'Grace'.

'Hallelujah''s a bit of a shame really, because any Buckley fan knows that's not the half of it. The title track from his only full album is the masterpiece, and I don't think that's really been acknowledged enough.

Perhaps until now. When I looked it up this week on youtube, I saw to my glee that the song is being studied now for GCSE music. That's cool.

Quite a piece of music to study. Where do you start? Riff? Bassline? Lyric? Vocal melody? Coda? Probably ...

I watched the official video, and that prompted me to consider Buckley in context - making a video, maybe the record company hopes it will get on MFTV - a mid-90s rock guy, maybe like The Gin Blossoms or Deep Blue Something or Hootie and the Blowfish or Dave Matthews.



Not the legend of Buckley, just some mid-90s rock guy who never quite made it.

And, look, some of those moves, they're similar to everything we've come to hate, every narcissistic pretty boy rock boy really meaning it, and all the voices that have come after, all the good and godawful before and after, soaring tenors and squawking howlers - Freddie Mercury, David Coverdale, Axl Rose and James Dean Bradfield, metal singers, then Muse and Coldplay, Damien Rice, James Blunt and the Darkness and John Mayer or whomever, they're all in Buckley territory. All trying to do it, nearly all failing horribly.

But really, to me, there's Buckley doing Grace and then there's everything else.

The intensity, the way he uses his mouth and his whole head, again, we've seen it so many times in so many irritating ways since, but we've not heard anything like this again. He does that because he needs to, he's making a range of noises far beyond other singers.

There's so much more here than on Hallelujah, which is controlled and spooky and pretty. 'Grace' is mental, it's possessed. I've never heard anyone else sing like this. No one. There are other singers in pop music who are his equal, Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin and ... (other names escape me) ... but even they, I'm not sure they're quite capable of this.

The rage ... the madness ... the echoes ... the marrying of different styles of singing, sometimes within single notes...

In terms of the song itself, it was actually the King Creosote cover which really helped me get to grips with it - one of the cleverest covers I've ever heard - he tames the untamable, and turns its into a sweetly eery folk ballad.

Then again, there's this ... http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/music/popular_music/rock1.shtml
which tells you plenty that I can't!