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Slaves

04 Monday Jan 2021

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“Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.”

– Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

There are presently two bands that go by the name Slaves that are made up of white men, one from the US and one from the UK. The US band has vowed to rebrand following the release of their latest album, To Better Days, although their UK namesake has no such plans.

The two bands have both put out statements regarding their names, the US one in June 2020 and the UK one all the way back in May 2015. The two statements contain many similarities; the origin of their names, how they have evolved, the purpose of their music; but they reach different conclusions about how to move forward:

Slaves (UK): “Our band name relates to people not being in control of their day to day lives. […] Our name and music is aimed at being a slave to day to day life and routine, it is a metaphorical use of the word. […] we are all slaves in this modern age, whether it be to our jobs, corporations, social media or society in general.”

Slaves (US): “The name ‘Slaves’ was conceived as a reference to the band’s battle with substance abuse in the past, to the idea that we became enslaved by our addictions and by our own demons.” Lead vocalist at the time, Jonny Craig, also described the origin of the US band’s name in an interview after they had formed: “Men have been enslaving men for as long as we’ve had gods to hide behind. Every man is a slave to what we love — whether it be women, drugs, music or sports.”

Both bands chose the word ‘Slaves’ because it represented their respective struggles in a figurative sense, the UK band in 2012 and the US band in 2014. It is unlikely the US band were aware of the UK band when they formed because the latter did not become widely known until the release of their 2015 debut album, Are You Satisfied? and its subsequent nomination for the Mercury Music Prize. As music attorney Bob Celestin noted in a Rolling Stone interview about Lady A’s name change, which was discussed in a previous blog: “This problem with [the same] names is not too common, because it’s easy to do a Google search.”

The two bands also agree on the purpose of their music:

Slaves (UK): “The music we make is motivational and aimed at people personally as well as collectively.”

Slaves (US): “Our goal has always been to tackle these difficult subjects head on, as well as to build a community and share stories of hope to let others know that their inner demons can be defeated.”

Both claim their music encourages people to metaphorically emancipate themselves, but their conclusions diverge, as the UK band is gearing up for a defence of their appellation while the US band is prefacing an apology and announcing their upcoming name change:

Slaves (US): “This definition of the name neglects to take ownership of its racial connotations. As obstinate supporters of the BLM movement, we cannot continue to tie our music and our positive message to a word associated with such negative weight and hurt.”

Slaves (UK) “On this point we would like to highlight the Oxford dictionary definition of the word Slaves; “(Especially in the past) a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them.” As you can see, there is no mention of race. All different slave trades could be discussed now, but it would be futile.”

One reason for the different responses is their nationalities. The US has a long history of confronting racial issues, from slavery to the Civil War to Civil Rights to the modern Black Lives Matter movement, so there is an awareness of the term ‘slaves’ referring to African Americans embedded in the culture in a way it is not in the UK, despite the latter’s instrumental role in the Atlantic slave trade. The uproar over Edward Colston’s statue being toppled and thrown into Bristol Harbour proved that the UK has yet to seriously reckon with this ugly part of its history.

Although the US band say they are changing their name because they are “obstinate supporters of the BLM movement”, there are other advantages. One was the departure of lead vocalist, Jonny Craig, who had been the only permanent member, as bands often change their name when they get a new singer, and he was also the one to explain the origin of their name. It also avoids confusion with the UK band. It is difficult to estimate the outfits’ comparative popularity, but at time of writing, the UK band has 922,594 monthly listeners on Spotify and the US band has 515,222, it will help cut through the noise of internet search results.

Before these two bands came to be, there had previously been a band of white men called Slaves from 1997 to 2000, forming from members of The VSS and becoming Pleasure Forever in 2000. In an interview with online publication, Westword, drummer Dave Clifford gave his explanation for choosing the name: “I’ve also always been intrigued by the human will toward slavery. This isn’t any new revelation, but more of an artistic interpretation of Wilhelm Reich’s writings about fascism and human nature. We all seek authority figures, whether to ultimately rebel against them or for the comfort of having someone make our decisions for us. Ultimately, all of us are slaves to one thing or another, and we all revel in that.”

What Clifford is referring to is a hypothesis put forward by Wilhelm Reich in his book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Reich contended that the suppression of sexual desire in a patriarchal society created an anxiety that manifested in the political sphere as a propensity for authoritarian idealism. The patriarchal family is therefore the most fundamental of the institutions supporting fascism, whether the resulting internalised desire for an authority figure was unconsciously followed, or, as Reich proposed, consciously fought against through a revolutionary sexual politics. Reich would later go on to obfuscate this fascinating idea with baffling pseudoscience based around the debunked concept of the ‘orgone’, which he claimed to have discovered, and makes any attempt to research it on the internet lead you down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and online lunacy.

In an interview with the Phoenix New Times, Clifford explained why they chose to stop using it: “The name ‘Slaves’ was easy to be misinterpreted, and didn’t fit what we were doing [at that point]. We were addressed as ‘The Slaves’ a lot, like we were saying as a band, ‘We are slaves,’ like getting into some victim ideology. The real, actual impetus for the name was an interest in slavery as an idea, the different forms it can take — as part of something that’s human will, or an external force that guides someone’s life. That was more involved and heady, and that was difficult to get across.”

To avoid confusion, they could have called the band ‘How humanity’s repressed sexual desire subjugates people to authoritarian idealism and other implications of the word slaves’ but it’s difficult to fit that onto a bass drum.

The three bands independently chose the name because of the sheer all-encompassing nature of the how the term can be applied. In these statements, people are described as being enslaved to day to day life and routine, jobs, corporations, social media, society, personal demons, women, drugs, music, sport, family, authoritarian thinking and fascism.

Remember that each of these three bands used a version of the phrase ‘we are all slaves.’ To explain their name. The 1997 to 2000 band: “all of us are slaves to one thing or another”; Slaves (UK): “we are all slaves in this modern age”; Slaves (US): “Every man is a slave to what we love”. Aside from the androcentric formulation in the last quotation, the same basic idea crops up in each of their explanations.

As the UK band noted, slavery has happened to many peoples. In fact, the the foundation of music is tied-in to the history of slavery, as Ted Gioia noted In an interview with the Syncopated Times about his book, Music: A Subversive History:

“Take for example the most basic building blocks of music, our musical modes. These simple scales are usually the first thing students are taught when they study the theory of Western music. And each mode has a name. So students learn about the Lydian mode or the Phrygian mode, but no one ever tells them that the Lydians and Phrygians were the slaves who performed music in ancient Greece. These enslaved outsiders came up with the most exciting and disturbing sounds—so much so that the Greeks became very concerned about controlling which modes people were allowed to hear.”

However, slavery is not just “(Especially in the past)”, as the OED so quaintly puts it, but often used in contemporary parlance as part of the phrase ‘modern day slavery’, which has been used to describe, among others, kafala workers in the Middle East, debt bondage in South Asia and sex-trafficking in Eastern Europe. It may initially bring to mind the enslavement of African Americans, but that is a bias of the present moment and Western culture. The word ‘slaves’ has had and continues to have hundreds of other connotations throughout the world and throughout history. It is why three bands chose the name separately and why yielding to pressure to change it, subjugating themselves to the will of others, only makes the original moniker more appropriate.

John Lennon – Imagine

19 Monday Oct 2020

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“Give up sainthood, renounce wisdom
and the people will be a hundred times happier.
Throw away morality and justice
and people will do the right thing.
Throw away industry and profit
and there will be no thieves.”

– From Chapter 19 of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

In a recent survey conducted on behalf of the book series, Little People, Big Dreams, it was found that 15% of children aged six to 16 had never heard of John Lennon and a third of them did not know why he was famous. Imagine, the most well-known of his solo offerings, is one of the reasons why Lennon was famous not just as a member of The Beatles.

Imagine by John Lennon is not, as the title would suggest, a song about imagination. It is concerned with reality without the imposition of human preconceptions. The means of achieving peace it advocates is not idealistic dreaming, but rather the unlearning of several ideas that have been invented by humankind, and which have become so entrenched in society that it is difficult to imagine a world without them.

“Imagine there’s no heaven…”

This is a strange line to open a song about a desired world peace. Surely heaven is a positive idea, or, at least, not detrimental to society? Lennon, however, is not singing about a utopia. He is proposing a world that no longer needs heaven because life is enough. As Douglas Adams said: “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

The first verse continues:

“It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky.”

Heaven and hell are the concepts in the song most demonstrably the imagined creation of humankind. The existence of these posthumous destinations for the soul can be neither confirmed or denied because nobody can experience death and return. Lennon is arguing that without the expectation of reward or punishment in the afterlife, people would instead focus on the importance of the journey and living in the moment because life, which it is much harder to argue against the existence of, is all that matters: “Imagine all the people living for today”.

He expands on this theme in the second verse with the line “and [imagine] no religion too”. Like heaven and hell, religion is also the invention of the human mind. (If you are religious, at least admit that the religions you do not follow are such). Religion can have both good and bad consequences. It follows the line ‘Nothing to kill or die for’, so the emphasis is on the negative effects, such as religious fighting, but since he is imagining ‘Above us, only sky’, it is not only these but also the positive repercussions, such as being a good person to get a ticket to paradise, that he imagines not existing.

The second verse begins with the line “Imagine there’s no countries.” Countries are also the invention of humankind. The world is just the world and it is only people that have divided it up into separate entities like a spherical blue-green cake. The world we live in has countries only because of a consensus that they exist, and even then, the boundaries are unstable. Look at Russia reclaiming Crimea in 2014, the fighting between Armenians and Azeris over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020, and the revelation that President Trump enquired about purchasing Greenland from Denmark in 2019. Sometimes there is no consensus: Kosovo, Israel and Taiwan are all unrecognised by some states.

If this is hard to accept because the idea of countries is so ingrained in how people view the world, a passage in Book III, Chapter VII of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, when the world population is reduced to less than 100 people journeying from France to Switzerland, might help explain it:

“We first had bidden adieu to the state of things which having existed many thousand years, seemed eternal; such a state of government, obedience, traffic, and domestic intercourse, as had moulded our hearts and capacities, as far back as memory could reach. Then to patriotic zeal, to the arts, to reputation, to enduring fame, to the name of country, we had bidden farewell. […] To preserve these we had quitted England–England, no more; for without her children, what name could that barren island claim?”

Without people, there are no countries. Of course, Lennon is not imagining a world without people but with “all the people living life in peace”. What he dreams of is a world not without humans, but without the delineated borders of countries created by humankind.

The line “Nothing to kill or die for” follows this after “It isn’t hard to do”. Take, for example, the current Nagorno-Karabakh conflict: The two belligerents are fighting over control of the enclave to say “that region is in my country”. If there were no countries and borders imposed on the world by humans, such fighting would never take place and there would be nothing to kill or die for.

The final verse begins with the line “Imagine no possessions”. Possessions do not exist without the human belief in ownership. There are things, and who owns them is, like the borders of countries, a matter of popular consensus and legal definition created by governments, rather than unmitigated truth. The line reminds me of a verse in the Billy Bragg song, “The World Turned Upside Down”:

“The sin of property
We do disdain
No man has any right to buy and sell
The earth for private gain.”

Lennon is asking the listener to imagine a world without the concept of ownership. As the quotation from the Tao Te Ching at the beginning of this piece says: “Throw away industry and profit/and there will be no thieves.”

There is a concept in Taoism called ‘Pu’, most commonly translated as the ‘uncarved block’ but which is perhaps better translated as ‘unworked wood’ or ‘unhewn log’. It refers to natural simplicity without any unnecessary complication or human interference. (It has other connotations, but this is the most relevant to Imagine.) What Lennon is actually asking the listener to do is to return to this state of being, before humans imagined these notions; the afterlife, religion, borders, countries, the concept of ownership, and possessions; to perform a miracle and uncarve the block of life by undoing the layers and layers of concepts humankind has constructed and sewn into the fabric of our perception.

Imagine, therefore, is not about imagination. It is about a reality unencumbered by the intervention of human preconceptions. The children who do not know who John Lennon is, whose minds are yet to be ‘carved’ by the preconceptions of their ancestors, are perhaps the ideal form of this concept, the people who could grow up to make Lennon’s dream a reality. Can you imagine that?

Jeffrey Lewis – Keep It Chill! (In The East Vill)

03 Monday Aug 2020

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“No, my prophecy will come bright, charging full at the eastern rays of the sun!”

 – spoken by Cassandra in Agamemnon by Aeschylus, as translated by George Theodoridis

On 24 March 2020, the singer Jeffrey Lewis posted a video of the song “Keep It Chill! (In The East Vill)” to his YouTube channel. It was a solo piece on acoustic guitar written in response to the COVID-19 outbreak reaching New York and the subsequent shutdown. Just over three months later, many of the worries and fears he enumerated in the lyrics have become eerily prescient.

In the third verse, Lewis predicted that rats are ‘gonna run out of things to eat’ because there’s ‘no one in the street’ and ‘it won’t take long ‘till they’re a billion strong.’ There were more sightings of rats after the implementation of the lockdown in both New Orleans and New York, and the reopening of outdoor restaurants and other eateries in the Big Apple has brought a surge in visible rat activity.

The verse continues with the lines ‘They’re sure the food they’re missing’s/now stored in out kitchens,/so look out, here they come!’. In the UK, a report by Aviva found that there had been a 42% increase in rat infestations for JG Pest Control between January to March 2020 (Q1) and April to June 2020 (Q2), a 120% increase in rodent-related callouts between Q2 2019 and Q2 2020, and that residential rodent cases for the first half of 2020 was equivalent to 90% of cases in the whole of 2019.

Lewis finishes the prediction with the lines ‘So each virus life we save/is gonna die in a mighty rat tidal wave’, which has not happened yet, thank goodness, and may never happen. Recently, however, the first case of tick-borne babesiosis was diagnosed in England. Babesiosis is a disease ticks acquire after they have fed off infected cattle, rodents or deer and then pass onto humans with bites. At present, there is no evidence to suggest this case was because of rodents, but the aforementioned increased human proximity to rats will likely lead to the spread of other diseases.

In the second verse, Lewis forecast that ‘the teeming hordes that can’t take no more is gonna loot the stores and then they’re coming for us’. Following the police killing of the African American George Floyd on 25 May 2020, there was widespread civil unrest that included, but was not limited to, looting, although the vast majority of it was peaceful Black Lives Matter protests. The section is concluded with the line ‘there’s blood that’s gonna spill’, and (graphic content warning) blood did spill, but from police brutality rather than rival looters.

In the fourth verse, Lewis refers to President Donald Trump as the ‘orange clown who runs DC’ and provides a list of actions he expects the leader to take. This begins with the President seeing ‘there’s perfect cause to declare martial laws’. Although he has not, in fact, declared martial law in response to the civil unrest, he has taken it upon himself to use a military general for a photo opportunity, threatened to deploy the National Guard, and sent federal agents in unmarked vehicles to detain protestors. So, while martial law itself has not been invoked, everything but martial law has been.

Later in the verse, Lewis sings that ‘all his Klu Klux kranks/patrol the streets with tanks/saying “Behave and you’ll be spared!”’. The use of ‘Klu Klux kranks’ to make reference to the Klan carries with it the connotations of racism the police have been accused of, and their anonymity, hiding under the hood, also anticipates the anonymity used by the officers in unmarked vehicles.

Lewis follows the ‘perfect cause to declare martial laws’ with ‘and pause elections indefinitely’. On 30 July 2020, the President tweeted: ‘Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???’, saying it will be the most ‘inaccurate and fraudulent’ election in history because of ‘universal mail-in voting’. Although later in the verse, Lewis opines that ‘you can’t send mail out’, the coronavirus outbreak means that a lot of people will be choosing to post their ballots. In Nevada, for example, lawmakers are looking to provide every registered voter with a mail-in ballot, much to Trump’s chagrin. The President has dangled this proposition of a rescheduled poll, and although the constitution clearly states that only congress has the power to authorise it, it would not be surprising if he attempted to carry out such a threat.

Another thing Lewis expects Trump to do is ‘call the banks’ and say ‘let’s all join ranks/unless their money might get shared’. The $2.2 trillion stimulus package passed in the senate on 25 March 2020 included a provision of $500bn for businesses in what was criticised as a ‘corporate slush fund’, as well as $400bn in loans for small businesses to be made available through banks and credit unions, which resulted in ‘larger companies with connections to major national or regional banks’ getting ‘priority treatment’. It did, however, include sending cheques to individuals, so Lewis’s fear that ‘you won’t get no bailout’ proved to be unfounded, but not far off, given the unprecedented increase in unemployment and the lapsing of rent protections paving the way for mass evictions.

Lewis also worries that “if the internet’s not a memory yet/it’ll get surveilled outright at will’. On 29 May 2020, President Trump signed an executive order targeting Twitter after it fact-checked one of his tweets. A lawsuit against it has been brought by the Center for Democracy and Technology, claiming the order could ‘discourage other platforms from exercising their free speech rights’. Add Trump’s intention to ban TikTok from the US to the mix, and the internet is not just being surveilled, but the wild west of the world wide web is becoming increasingly regulated.

Despite all of this, Lewis ends the song on a happy note, claiming there is a chance humanity will take ‘total warning about global warming’, that the shutdown will ‘slow greenhouse gases’ and ‘makes things greener and the whole world cleaner’. He also says there could be a ‘full-on call for healthcare for all/and better safety nets rolled out’. The hope is that these calls are answered and, unlike Cassandra, the warnings are heeded, because Lewis’s future-telling hit-rate of ill omens in one song is frighteningly high, so there is grounds for optimism that his harbingers of happier times will be too.

Emmy The Great – Dandelions/Liminal

27 Monday Jul 2020

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“Funny, although [Malaya] was going through civil war, in lots of ways it was more straightforward than Hong Kong. You’d know where you were most of the time. Not really like that here, is it?”

“No, it’s all about layers here,” I said.

“Layers. That’s a good word for it. Layers.

 – John Lanchester, Fragrant Harbour

Emmy the Great’s Dandelions/Liminal, the first single released from her upcoming album, April, is about the final stages of a relationship when you know the end is coming but some of the embers of that first flame still glow. It also examines the dichotomy between societal expectations on the one hand, the natural world and intuition on the other, and the blurred edges between them.

The forward slash in the title gives the song three potential names: it can be either Dandelions, Liminal or Dandelions/Liminal. Dandelions is a concrete noun, while liminal, which can mean either a transitional or initial stage of a process or occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold, is an abstract adjective. This is a reversal of the expected grammar: an adjective is usually put before a noun to describe it. It also means the title itself has a certain liminality to it, unable to settle on either word or both.

Emmy The Great was born in Hong Kong, a fact mentioned in both the press release for the single and an interview on Sunday Morning Live that aired on 19 July 2020. Having also lived in the UK and New York, Emmy occupies a liminal space where she is able to sing in both English and Cantonese. I first heard her sing in Cantonese when a friend of mine, Laura, and I went to see her at the Village Underground, and Laura identified one song as a version of Faye Wong’s cover of Dreams by The Cranberries featured in Wong Kar Wai’s 1994 film, Chungking Express.

Hong Kong, which was a British colony until 1997, is a liminal space, sitting, historically, if not geographically, on the threshold of East and West. As a special administrative region of China under its ‘One Country, Two Systems’ policy scheduled to last until 2047, it is in the process of changing jurisdiction. At present, with the controversy over its National Security Law, democracy protests, and threats by the Chinese Government to stop recognising the British National (Overseas) passport, it is also a battleground between Western, especially English-speaking democracy and control by the mainland.

The artwork released alongside the single is a diptych of historic photos of Hong Kong, taken from the vantage point of Hong Kong Island and overlooking Kowloon across Victoria Harbour, a natural division within the territory of Hong Kong itself. The photos overlap, so that the leftmost edge of the first photo comprises the rightmost edge of the second photo. This is the same structure as the title, with the word/photo you expect to be on the left appearing on the right. There is also a picture of what I assume is a dandelion on the left-hand photo, although it is hard to tell, and a clash of the natural world and urban settlements in both, but more distinctly in the right-hand picture.

The very first line of the song, ‘Oh it was terrible the trembling/back when the leaves were turning brown’, introduces this idea of liminality. The first clause is backed by tremolo strings, reflecting the trembling in the lyrics as they slide back and forth across the notes, while the second recalls the process of autumn, one of the subjects Emmy has said the album was about in a pinned Tweet.

But there is also the overlap between societal expectation and natural intuition, as demonstrated in the first verse after the first chorus. It opens with the desire to have a leisurely riverside stroll, but undercuts it with the question, ‘Isn’t that what people do?’, transforming it into a romantic ideal the couple is attempting to imitate without the underlying affection required to rekindle those spontaneous early days.

The next line, ‘You say we’ve lost touch with Mother Nature’ follows perfectly on from this, because the natural experience has been subordinated to societal expectation. By the time the final line, ‘And I say, I need to call my mother too’, comes around, we’re back completely to societal convention, away from intuition and without a mention of the natural world, as Emmy needs to use technology to fulfil what is expected of her.

An earlier couplet, ‘Let us dance a little more/they’re playing music in the store’, also deals with the way these two ideas interact, as the primal need to dance is changed once you realise that they are in a store, where that urge is not expected to be satisfied.

In fact, the other person in the song, her lover, acts as a sort of proselytizer for natural world. The three times they communicate are a note to say they are leaving town, saying that they have lost touch with Mother Nature, and that their official line is that heartache is healthy for the body. The last of these is followed by Emmy singing ‘If pain is healthy for the body, baby, you too could have a body like mine’, referring to a real advertising slogan used for several products, most notably for bodybuilding. The ‘official line’ becomes blurred because, depending on whether or not heartache is healthy for the body, the following line could be a validation of their outlook or a sarcastic joke.

This verse also introduces backing vocals singing ‘da da da da da da da’, which, aside from being much more interesting to hear than to read, is the first syllable of dandelions, the other half of the title, repeated as if literally scattering all over the place. Various other text painting techniques are used throughout to evoke this scattering.

The first time Emmy sings ‘scatter all over the place’, the first four syllables are quavers or half-notes, taking up a period of half a beat, and the fifth note, the second syllable of ‘over’ lasts for a dotted crotchet, or one and a half notes. The ‘the’ lasts for one quaver or half note and ‘place’ lands on the first beat of the next 4/4 bar.

The drum pattern also changes during the singing of this phrase, with the snare drum now landing on the first beat, the second half of the second beat and the fourth beat. All that has really happened is that one beat has been dropped and another moved half a beat, but the effect is that the backing seems stretched out, reflecting the scattering, which is further emphasised when combined with the rhythmic pattern of the lyrics.

The second time Emmy sings ‘Scatter all over the place’, the pattern changes. The six notes of ‘scatter all over the’ are stretched equally over the four beats in a set of crotchet triplets. The effect of this is that the words themselves seem to scatter over the beat. The fact that it is a different pattern of notes singing ‘scatter all over the place’ to the previous one calls further attention to the randomness of the scattering dandelions.

This scattering is also reflected in the final passage, where Emmy sings ‘Don’t give me anything except your time’ and a chorus of voices sings ‘scatter all over’. The chorus then echoes ‘your time’ and Emmy takes up ‘scatter all over the place’, so that the words themselves switch places to echo the scattering of dandelions.

The song combines this series of liminal motifs; the bittersweet twilight of a relationship, the inevitable passage of time, the natural changing of the seasons, intuition versus societal norms; into a song that slides effortlessly between conflicts. A breakup song without a breakup is difficult to categorise, to the point where it has a choice of titles, but that’s the point. It’s about the porousness of boundaries, the liminal spaces between layers. That’s a good word for it. Layers.