Music Notes – July 2021
1 Fugazi – In on the Kill Taker
A piece early this year in Uncut prompted me to dig out this one for a recent road trip. Still my favourite Fugazi record.
2 Various Artists – Shall the Circle Remain Unbroken
Another tribute to the late, great Roky Erickson. Especially check out Alison Mosshart and Charlie Sexton’s take on “Starry Eyes” and Lucinda Williams’ crackling version of “You’re Gonna Miss me.”
3 The Linda Lindas – “Oh!”
New single from the Linda LIndas. Another punk-pop gem.
4 Acid Dad – Leviathan Sessions
Sad that the Jesus and Mary Chain and Spacemen 3 aren’t making those early records anymore? Your new favourite band. If that sounds as if Acid Dad are simply rip-offs, they’re not. THis is well worth a listen.
5 Beastie Boys Story
You can ignore the Pitchfork review which is basically a complaint by the writer that the movie isn’t the movie he wanted . Mike D and Ad-Rock narrate the story of the band. At times funny, embarrassing and sad, but never dull.
6 Various Artists – The Roots of Psychobilly
Nice little 2 CD compilation of tunes near and dear to fans of the Cramps. All the usual suspects are here: Link Wray, the Trashmen, Dick Dale, Hank Mazel, Screaming Lord Sutch and plenty more.
7 The Courettes – Here We Are the Courettes
A Brazilian-Danish garage rock duo. That’s really all you need to know to check this out.
8 Rumble: The Indians that Rocked the World
If you live in Canada, you can watch this marvellous documentary of CBC’s GEM service. If you don’t. you might try to track it down anyway. Fantastic film about indigenous rockers Link Wray, Buffy Saint-Marie, Robbie Robertson, and many more. Some incredible footage One odd thing, Karen Dalton’s “Something on your mind” plays over the closing credits, but she isn’t mentioned in the film.
9 Esther Rose – How Many Times
A new country sound for me. Such a pure voice.
10 33 1/3 Books
Picked up a couple of title from the closing sale at Soundscapes last week. 33 1/3 . Paul’s Boutique and It’ll Take a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back. Not always a success, but if you’re a fan, there’s plenty to enjoy.
And yeah, I’m still in love with “Black Hole” by Griff. Thought I would be over it, but I’m not…
Trump and Fascism (Redux)
I didn’t think I’d be writing about Trump again so soon. Like many, I expected that he would more or less quietly morph into the old man shouting at clouds personna like the Sarah Palins and Newt Gingriches of this world. Obviously Trump had a great impact than they did, but it seemed likely he would travel the same path albeit more slowly. Clearly that’s not going to happen in the short term (I’m not making any predictions about the 2022 mid-terms).
If anything, after a brief period where some Republicans moved to distance themselves from him, Trump seems more important than ever. His grip on the Republican Cult, excuse me, Republican Party does not appear to be lessening, and with the publication of three new books discussing the final disastrous year of his presidency, his name will remain in the news for some time. Without his Twitter bully pulpit, Trump is not as prominent, but he is not fading away.
Why this route and not the traditional one? Of course, there’s the official reason and the real reason.
Three things drive Trump
- Narcissism – There’s no question that Trump craves attention. Like a junkie seeking that next fix, attention is Trump’s drug of choice and he has a wicked habit. How else to explain Trump’s willingness to sit down for an interview with Michael Wolff for a third book after Wolff had written two critical books on Trump? Any parent will tell you that for a toddler seeking attention, any attention, even bad attention, is still attention. (there’s also some suggestion that Trump is deluded enough to believe he can sway the interviewer with his words) Being president provided Trump with the purest high (although he never really seemed that interested in doing the work), and the rallies and media coverage fill that need.
- Revenge – John McCain has been dead for almost three years and Trump is still raging against him. One of Trump’s most unpleasant characteristics is his inability to forgive a perceived slight, or to forgive those who he has deemed insufficiently loyal (“after all he’s done for them “). There’s no doubt Trump loathes Joe Biden, but a great deal of his ire is reserved for Republicans who he believes have betrayed him (current target is Supreme Court Justice Bret Kavanaugh) While he contemplates his revenge against the RINOs who let him down, Trump is positioning himself as currently posits as kingmaker and the man who can break Republicans he sees as enemies.
- Money – As long as he has been around, it’s always been about the grift. While Trump’s rallies are ways of reminding the faithful how the “deep state” stole the election, it’s interesting how the fundraising is not moving in this area. One of Trump’s PACs has raised over $75 million since the election, but according to the Washington Post not a single penny has gone to support the various “Stop the steal” audits or lawsuits. The money has essentially become a slush for for Trump’s expenses and a war-chest to support candidates he approves (cash the cheque right away). In practice Trump’s ongoing public visibility allows him to continue begging his followers for money.
But onto more serious stuff.
In February of this year, I wrote a piece entitled January 6th and the Rise of the Far-Right The post was written as response to an article by Sander from Internationalist Perspective The Storm That Gave Biden Wings (It was published on the IP site as a comment on Sander’s piece, but when IP moved their server, it disappeared along with comments about other articles)
I stated in the introduction that while I broadly agreed with Sander, but my feeling was that IP had missed something, namely the further mainstreaming of white supremacist and neo-Nazi ideas. Time was once it was a no-brainer than Nazis were bad. No politician would have argued that moment. But from the moment in Charlottesville, that Trump drew an equivalency between racists and anti-racists, the ground beneath that certainty began to give way. We haven’t reached the point where a mainstream politician can openly praise Hitler, but according to Michael Bender, Trump did tell his one-time Chief of Staff John Kelly that “Hitler did some good things.”
With six months perspective what was January 6th? Was it an attempted coup or a police of political theatre?
In my original piece I referred to the events of January 6th as a “lazy barely-competent proto-fascist attempt at a coup.” Let’s agree first of all, that there was little chance that the rioters, such as they had any program beyond “stopping the steal,” could have succeeded. They simply lacked firepower. Had there been a decisive confrontation of any kind, the National Guard or the US army, sooner or later, would have wiped out the insurgents. As such, it was doomed to failure. If people wish to substitute a better terms than (attempted) coup, I do not have a fundamental disagreement, although political theatre seems too even handed. Still, do we judge the seriousness of an event solely by its success or failure. (think of the many great failures of the workers movement that we justly celebrate the endeavor. Sadly, rightist forces are also celebrating their success on January 6th: They proved it could be done
A not-so-subtle revisionism has taken place. In the days that followed, Trumpists of all stripes argued Trump had nothing to do with the riot despite the tone of his remarks, and the crowd’s Trumpist slogans and regalia, but that the rioters were actually Antifa agents. Then the narrative switched to downplaying the actions and redefining the participants as patriots (actually Ivanka Trump’s original position) Recently Trump has repeatedly talked of the “love” in the crowd. How long before, the argument is made by “mainstream” Republicans that the events were a good thing that ought to be repeated? During last month’s CPAC convention, at which Trump spoke, III Percenters and Oath Keepers were welcomed. It is the mainstreaming of neo-fascism.
But why Fascism?
When asked about this recently, former National Security Advisor John Bolton scoffed, at the idea Trump could could be a fascist, noting being a fascist required ten seconds of thought. It’s certainly true that anyone looking for or expecting a return to the classic Italian or German patterns of fascism is likely to be disappointed; however, there are signs.
Trump has always been an authoritarian fascinated by violence (although little evidence has emerged about his personal willingness to soil his hands – reportedly he dislikes even firing someone directly). Proto-brownshirts such as the Proud Boys and III Percenters have a more visible presence that the militia movements as advocates of a fictionalized “pure” America free from POC, leftists and others. (The MAGA movement even has its own Horst Wessel in the person of Ashli Babbitt). Lastly, the acceptance of ideology detached from objective conditions represents a dangerous path. Here, it is not just the deranged devotees of QAnon, but the level of Covid denialism in the MAGA ranks)
One swallow does not make spring, but the signs are there. One of Trump’s favourite verbal assaults is loser. (Which is of course on a personal level why he cannot admit to having lost to Biden. As such, his movement has adopted the term, which explains one reason for the return to January 6th. They do not see it as a loss, only the first round.
Fun Facts from the Left… (First of a possibly ongoing series…)
- Politics do make strange bedfellows. In 1972, Stan Newins, a Labour MP and a member of Tony Cliff’s Socialist Review Group in the 1950s who died earlier this year, wrote a book called Nicolae Ceaușescu: The Man, his ideas, and his Socialist Achievements. Huh?
The Curious Case of Socialist Appeal
According to reports in the British press, the British Labour Party is about to proscribe four groupings within it, leading to the possibility of the expulsion of up to a thousand members of the party. The four groups in questions are Labour Against the Witchhunt, Resist, Labour in Exile Network, and Socialist Appeal (but oddly not the Alliance for Workers Liberty or Socialist Action).
I don’t know the three other potential expellees, but Socialist Appeal has a long history. The group came into existence in the early 1990s as flush with “success” from the anti-poll Tax struggle, the Militant tendency under Peter Taaffe began to abandon its decades long entry strategy within the British Labour Party in favour of an open party organization. Sections of the leadership around Militant founder Ted Grant resisted the change in orientation and were expelled for their trouble. They immediately established Socialist Appeal, and along with their supporters throughout the Committee for a Workers International created the International Marxist Tendency (In Canada, they are known as Fightback!). The IMT and its member sections follow the classic Militant tendency strategy of working within the mass social-democratic (and occasionally bourgois-nationalist) parties organizing as “supporters” of a newspaper.
But here’s the thing. While Socialist Appeal is clearly an entrist organization that sees itself as winning the “mass organization of the working class” to a Marxist perspective, from the point of view of the Labour Party, is that such a bad thing?
Many years ago I had a conversation with a New Democratic Party campaign manager who told me he loved it when the Trotskyists came around to work on campaigns despite the party leadership’s efforts to remove them. At the time, the NDP was attempting to rid itself through individual expulsions of members of the Revolutionary Workers League, the Canadian section of the USFI (in all fairness, I should point out that the RWL had already been banned, but no longer considered itself Trotskyist, being a part of the Pathfinder tendency led by the US SWP and Jack Barnes, but I digress)
The organizer, whose name sadly has passed into the mists of time, noted that the Trotskyists were some of the hardest working and most reliable of the volunteers he had: they always covered their polls, they knew the line better than many other NDPers, and their poll counts were always the most accurate. Now if that meant they also tried to sell the occasional copy of Socialist Voice, then so be it.
Socialist Appeal is no doubt little different. Its supporters are the most pro-Labour Party. Unlike other entrists within the BLP (and the NDP), they will never leave the party or run candidates against it – their origin was to part company with Trotskyists who wished to do just that. While Socialist Appeal often dresses up its arguments in “Marxist” rhetoric, the differences between that an official Labour policy are of degree not fundamentals. So come on Labour, why kick out Socialist Appeal? They’re your biggest fans.
The Beautiful Game (II)
Written earlier this week, but oddly enough not published then…
Not so beautiful as it turned out.
Of course I was disappointed that England lost in Sunday’s European cup final to Italy. But what a game. An England goal in the second minute of the game raised spirits, and shocked Italy; it took them almost half an hour before they fully recovered and began to dominate. The equalizer came early in the second half. And yet, while Italy were the stronger team, they couldn’t quite put it away. Ninety minutes, then an extra thirty, and finally the dreaded penalty kicks (the worst way to lose a game). Penalty kicks have such a capricious feel about them, that it might be easier to decide the game on a coin toss. Still, penalty kicks it was, and after the shots, Italy had come out on top. After decades of fair to mediocre play and nostalgia for the glory of 1966, England had a team that looked as if it would capture the cup; it was a team that made people proud, going beyond expectations, but it did not clear the final hurdle.
But then the awful aftermath. The signs were there ahead of time: The booing as players took a knee tacitly endorsed by the government (cultural Marxism can only do so much it seems); the booing of the Italian national anthem; the violence before the game as fans tried to get in without a ticket; English fans setting off fireworks at 2AM on the day of the final near the Italian team’s hotel, and let’s not forget, try as we might, the sight of a fan with a signal flare stuck up his arse belching red smoke. And, as tearing down others is Britain’s other national pastime, it didn’t take long it didn’t take long for racist trolls to begin spitting invective against Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford, and Jadon Sancho.
Despite stoking the fires, Boris Johnson and Priti Patel both issued statements deploring the racist outbursts. However, a more telling incident involved a Conservative MP from Dover, Natalie Elphicke. After the loss, Elphicke tweeted, “Last night I shared the frustration and heartbreak of millions of England fans. The team gave their all. Congratulations and onwards to the World Cup!”
However, at the same time in a Tory chat group of over 200 MPs, she wrote “They lost. Would it be ungenerous to suggest Rashford should have spent more time perfecting his game and less time playing politics.” Soon afterward, one of her colleagues leaked the offending text (the right wing rag The Daily Mail suggested Elphicke had been “forced” into a “grovelling apology,” indicating they agree with the original comment) Elphicke’s apology read in part, “I regret messaging privately [Emphasis added] a rash reaction about Marcus Rashford’s missed penalty and apologise to him for any suggestion that he is not fully focused on his football.”
I like the beautiful game, but it does not exist in a vacuum outside of and separate from the society in which it is played. The ugly nationalism, the racism, the desire to win at all costs, are not separate from the class society in which the game is played. As Orwell once noted”
On the village green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved. it is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise: but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused. Anyone who has played even in a school football match knows this. At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe — at any rate for short periods — that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue….Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.
George Orwell, “The Sporting Spirit” (1945)
The Beautiful Game
“Every football club has its ‘supporters’ and a supporter can be someone who has never kicked a ball in his life. He goes to the match in his car, or by bus or the metro. He participates in the action and plays sports via an intermediary. He quivers with enthusiasm, he fidgets frenetically, but he never moves from his seat. A curious kind of ‘alienation.’ Sport is an activity which is apparently incompatible with illusion, and yet in fact it confronts us with a reverse image, a compensation for everyday life.“
-Forward to The Critique of Everyday Life
If you’re playing some kind of trivia game, you want me on your team. No brag, but my head is filled with trivia and stuff that has no use except for competing in trivia contests. However, I have a blind spot: Professional Sports. This wasn’t always the case. When I was younger I loved tennis, and like every British schoolchild, I loved football. All you needed was a place to play, a couple of mates to divide into teams, coats or school bags to serve as goalposts, and a ball. I supported Arsenal, but never saw them play in person. When I moved to Canada in 1981, my interest waned. Sure, if there was a match on, or an international competition I might watch, but it was no longer fever pitch.
In 1998, I worked at an international ESL school in Toronto during the World Cup. After the first couple of days of play, the school re-arranged its class schedule because none of the students were coming to afternoon classes when the games were on (didn’t matter who was playing). Bowing to an unstoppable force, the school moved one of its big TVs into the common area so any student who wanted could watch the game (and they wanted!) Students would ask me if I was a big England fan – I told them I was, but it usually didn’t require much long-term commitment.
When football it played well, it truly is the beautiful game. But there’s so much baggage that goes along with it. In the passage quoted above Lefebvre noted the displacement by sport, similar to the Surrealists’ critique of museums. of watching, but not doing. This voyeurism reaches its illogical (or perhaps logical) conclusion with the various unboxing videos that fill YouTube channels.
In 1992 and 1993, the Toronto Blue Jays won the World Series (so named for a competition in which the teams are almost exclusively from one country). The streets overflowed with people. It was a remarkable moment of public joy. (A similar event took place in 2019 when the Toronto Raptors won the NBA Championship) . And yet…most people did not the know any of the players personalty, and the players themselves were not from Toronto. In addition, the team that won the second championship was significantly different in membership that the first. No one offered to buy me a drink because I was from Toronto. And yet “our” team had won.
And there’s that…”Our team.” English football fans have a long and largely deserved reputation for bad behaviour, but they are no means alone. The “wars on the terraces” has a long and ugly international history, between clubs, between countries, and of course if you throw race into the mix…. the fascists of the National Front and the British Movement actively recruited in the stadiums, and a quick scroll through any social media reveals the racism directed against players who do not fit the “proper” profile (admittedly, if they are responsible for a victory, this ugliness ebbs only to return in the event of a defeat). Listen to the boos as players take a knee – though a number of waggish commentators have noted that England’s recent performances have dovetailed the practice, leading some to speculate, did England have to adopt Marxism to be good again?
So to the European Cup. At time of writing, England are in the semi-finals against Denmark on Wednesday. I’ve watched all of the England games, and have thrilled as they triumphed. But I haven’t succumbed to appeals to the Spirit of 66, the year England won the World Cup (I was two years old, and none of the current team were born, not even manager Gareth Southgate). I’ll be disappointed if England lose to Denmark or either Spain or Italy, but I won’t be committing acts of violence if they do. After all, it’s just a game.
Notes from Underground 