the kniφe - shaking the habitual

I quite liked this from songmeanings.net:

I'm basing my interpretation on both the short film released as the official video for this song and the lyrics. I just watched the film, and found it really interesting, if maybe a little predictable. Makes me think of early 'nineties identity politics theory, and queer theory. Having been immersed in this theory back then, the video feels like a throwback to that period of passionate "New Queer Cinema" but still seems fresh and edgy today, which shows how slowly power is wrested from those who wield it. Maybe that's the point? To draw attention to the scary rise of right-wing conservative reactionary politics, maybe even more overt in Sweden than N. America. There's some comment on representation, who gets to write the story? What is opinion, your view, your story, and what is his-story? The guys, the signori ("sirs" or "senior" homophonically, superiors) vs. the queers, the freaks, whose desire is outside the mainstream, challenging gender-bound power. Our fantasy lives, our identities, our stories, who we think we are intersect private and public spaces. The lady in red who can't pee on the street like a man, so squats down in a kind of occupy the gutter action, bringing attention to herself from passerby, by defying taboos against women's bodily needs expressed in public spaces (urination, breast-feeding, menstruation). The elderly woman cross-dressing as a man, and fantasizing about a beautiful woman in pearls. Just a stroll in the city, but politicized because of what is going on in her heart and head, her screaming in frustration, rage. The child who sees the injustice that her parents do not see, the sadness and rage of the working class, the maid's private rebellion of breaking the wine glasses, the delicate objects of the rich. Only the little girl sees the aftermath of her tempest in a teacup. The power switch where the policewoman yelling at the protester turns into a pick-up scene and they walk off smiling, the protester in kinky handcuffs. In a sentence: our desires are political. Maybe it's a good time to be reminded of that so we can connect with the fire within that motivates societal change.

christ that VV article is such a load of old bollocks. i personally didn't read any press releases or reviews or hype about this record before i bought it; in fact i really wasn't all that excited about a new knife album until i heard it, but it's quite obviously political just looking at the sleeve and listening to the lyrics. it's not public enemy, but that's because public enemy are public enemy. there's been a dearth of political music in the last decade (because, well, levellers), but now that it's coming back it's had to do so in a different way from the explicit agit-prop of old.

dog latin otm. the fucking opening lines of the first song on the album:

Under the Sun
Look what we have got
And those who haven’t
Bad luck

We’ve been running ’round
Pushing the shopping cart
January twothousandtwelve
Even in the suburbs of Rome

A brick in a castle
A camp for those on the run
Dance as weapons
Release my

Eyes eyes eyes eyes tell me you
Some other kid is sucking on my thumb
Eyes eyes eyes eyes tell me you
Another kid needs to suck on my thumb

politics isn't an extra-textual narrative foisted on shaking the habitual by overeager fans. political concerns are among the core themes here, expressed again and again. "raging lung" kicks off the second disc on uncompromising terms:

Don't know the hand you're holding
Paying someone to put them to bed again

And that's when it hurts
The difference
This is hot blood
And a difference
What a difference
A little difference would make

Hear my love sigh
I've got a story that money just can't buy
Western standards
Poverty's profitable

...Don't leave me now
Don't fall asleep
We need to rest sometimes
But don't take long

It's something in the system
That still circulates
We'll dig a hole in the backyard
And drain the blood

and sure, it's not fear of a black planet. it's a good deal more fragmentary and indirect. but art need not be obviously polemical to qualify as "political". hell, the ambiguity that seems to have baffled and defeated the village voice's reviewer is political in itself. the lyrics attach significance and power to multiplicity, indeterminacy and difference, to states of confusion and flux. this clearly connects the approach with the queer/feminist/radical thinking the author can find no trace of in the music. idiot.

"stay out here" relates to occupy wall street i think?

yeah, that's an interesting suggestion. i hadn't considered that. it's hard to reduce "stay our here" to a single idea or concern. it seems to relate primarily to the condition of change, the experience of it. when we're pushing our way out habitual systems and patterns, we're necessarily uncomfortable and confused. we're unhoused, on the street, moving through "open ended" space:

lose a wall love me
as i move that street
as i walk blockblock

it's i plea, i suppose. it locates love in solidarity, begs those who find or place themselves outside to stick together & keep moving. perhaps to mount a meaningful opposition to those who "work the world as it will be"?

plus the refereneces to the euro, times square...and also the music, it's a chant, a march, rabble-rousing and aggressive

this album is way more political than it needs to be to be fairly called political in a world whose most prominent Anticapitalist Rock Band is radiohead

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2013/04/we_should_be_le.php?page=2

xxp - makes sense, i'm convinced

plus, duh, the "wall"/"street" connection in the chorus i quoted could hardly be more obvious

Given their audience, it's political, but not particular challenging or confrontational (now give a country dude the same lyric sheet)...

this album is too political

(OT sanpaku, i keep waiting to hear your opinion on >this<.)

this album is too political

― Mordy, Tuesday, 23 April 2013 22:30 (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my suspicion is that it's working on a level of ironic critique of, like, social justice kiddies. (let's talk about gender, baby!)

the more interesting angle is if they're doing it unironically

irony isn't a binary

nor is gender!! kill me

is everyone drunk here

only ironically

dropping the p-bomb in a chorus was unforgivable

lol i just noticed that the packaging gives sources for everything quoted in the lyrics

jeanette winterson, marit ostberg, fugazi, gayatri chakravorty spivak, salt-n-pepa, agnetha faltskog, and nina bjork & karl marx (?). plus a guiding quote from michel foucault.

http://prospect.org/article/lets-talk-about-gender-baby

i don't get any sense of irony from this album's use of the political. it all seems quite earnest, in a good way.

Given their audience, it's political, but not particular challenging or confrontational (now give a country dude the same lyric sheet)...

uh, sure? would you really prefer that they'd issued a reactionary screed so as to "challenge" and confront their ostensibly liberal audience? personally, i'm glad they didn't go that route.

to be clear: irony is a political statement too

i don't deny that. i just don't hear it here.

This discussion is very interesting to me since I've listened to the album a few times without noticing the lyrics much at all.

I'm not sure I ever really noticed them on Tomorrow in a Year either tbh.

Given their audience, it's political, but not particular challenging or confrontational

nahhh, maybe the hardcore superfans, but the knife are now in a place where they get a lot of casual interest just by dint of their stature - they're an automatic part of any music outlet's news cycle. judging by a lot of the reactions - from the "lol how CRAZY and WACKY and BONKERS they are for being political" to the dismissive "NO WHY ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT PRIVILEGE WE DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT PRIVILEGE IT'S BORING" set, i'd say they're being challenging and confrontational to a depressing extent

Lex OTM. These reactions - like the one in the VV, but also coming from those who chide others for being politicised - are arguably as bad as those who are coming from an opposing political viewpoint. This whole 'Who do you think you are trying to talk about "issues", BORE OFF!' thing that you see on social media is a poisonous indictment of how little politics and pop culture have come to interact with each other up until fairly recently.

"I don't like protest music", "Music and politics shouldn't mix", "I want escapism, I don't want to hear about the news" - these are all things I've heard at one point or another, and in many cases I agree. The difference between The Knife and your average agit-prop dissident is that they don't just make the political personal again, but internal too. By making its message so implicit, Shaking the Habitual addresses its subject matter in such a way that it becomes an essential part of the every listener's core character and psyche. Rather than railing against the TV or a specific political entity, there's a kind of solipsistic anarchy at work here: You DO have the right to an opinion because YOU are in control of your own destiny no matter what historical hegemonic structures have been put into place to make you think otherwise.

This record strikes me as political in the way that early 00s Radiohead were political, they obviously know their stuff but it manifests itself in the music through chopped up fragmentary lyrics and soundbytes and while that's admirable for similar reasons it also fails for similar reasons.

why would you say it fails in this case?

it's not a crass record

I'm fascinated with the "handling of material"-- fascinated? I mean dumbstruck, this is a game-changing album, generative dance music. This is a big album for me

xxxpost I sort of agree, but Radiohead always seemed to harbour a relatively unguided sense of despair towards the modern world. Thom couches his malaise in gnomic imagery that flits between the nonsensical ('woke up sucking on a lemon') and the opaque (cars are bad, people die in them and stuff uhm...) Whenever Thom's lyrics got explicit they seemed ever-so slightly hamfisted or placard-waving, as on Hail to the Thief. I enjoy that period of Radiohead, but I don't once remember something like '2 + 2 = 5' making me think of anything beyond 'There's no hope, Thom's shouting but it's just coming out as garbage. He's waving his hands in the air but he's floundering and being drowned out'. HTTT is nihilistic in its outlook, overwhelmed by the world whereas STH is very much focused in its subject matter as well as offering equality and justice as a means of change. It's why when I listen to this Knife album, I find myself wanting to unlock the lyrical codes as opposed to with Radiohead when I was quite happy for Thom's voice to become another instrument.

Many of us are guilty of thinking politics is a substance you inject like a steroid into music when every song by its nature is political: Rihanna, Brad Paisley, whatever. The transgression I hear in The Knife isn't in the lyrics, from which after several weeks I've managed to pick out a couple of conjunctions, a transitive verb, and some Raymond Williams keywords.

it always ends up drivel?

xpost

eh what now Alfred?

agree with this:

every song by its nature is political

eh what now Alfred?

was quoting Yorke's best-ever lyric.

OIC, never liked that song, but I guess that's a very good summation of how politics get treated when it comes to music. Too much focus on a single issue and you end up sounding like a soapbox punk-poet; conversely if you make everything too oblique the original message gets lost.

Many of us are guilty of thinking politics is a substance you inject like a steroid into music when every song by its nature is political: Rihanna, Brad Paisley, whatever.

Disagree somewhat. Songs aren't legislature, they are by definition non-political. Writing political discourse into your lyrics is no more than an aesthetic pose, like writing sex talk or sing-along.

I dunno – it's difficult for a gay man to view even a boy-girl relationship as non-political. I define "politics" more broadly; it isn't just depiction or analysis or engagement with George W. Bush or Iraq. Politics is the place where gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity get catalyzed.

No, of course, of course, I've said before that you can infer a band's political beliefs from the way the drums are recorded.

xxpost there's always going to be some degree of it, but i think Alfred's saying that complaining about the Knife's political angle by trying to remove oneself from the equation ('LALALALALA I'M NOT INTERESTED') is futile since any piece of music operates on its own political level. Rihanna is implicitly political. Writing sex talk is in itself political. Let's talk about gender, baby.

both otm

I've said before that you can infer a band's political beliefs from the way the drums are recorded.

Would be interested to hear more about this.

(unless it was a joke)

Definitely easy to listen to this without considering "politics" in terms of sloganeering etc., and from reading the transcribed lyrics here I'd say there's not that much to mine from them besides referentialism. But the sonic aggression, the vocal processing, even the commercial suicide of what could have built upon the success of Silent Shout - it's straightforward to see political meaning in these aspects.

xp DL you're correct, "I'm not interested in your politics" is a futile response, but "I find no beauty in the gesture of this political statement" is a valid one.

How is it straightforward to see political meaning in sonic aggression or vocal processing?

@ Sund4r I'm joking/not joking, I do believe it, but it's an extreme statement of the same impulse that drives people to hear "woozy" and think "wantrepreneur", or "reverberant" and think "naive", or "banjo" and think "douchenozzle"

Similarly I feel that the most politically charged statements on this Knife record are non-verbal. Most obviously the gorgeous drone interlude. It's a lot of "fuck you and your idea of how an album should be", with "album" being interchangeable with what a hook should be, what a voice should sound like, how long a song should go on, how material should function, where the kick should fall, and so on