the kniφe - shaking the habitual

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

^ this

I genuinely felt, ah, "my habits was shook" on the very first listen to "Full of fire". Instead of hooks, they have these musical phrases that slide into view, don't repeat themselves, slip in and out of time and audibility, and are in this constantly changing state. i.e. fluid, like gender. Here's lex with "where's the hooks? love the Salt-N-Pepa reference tho" but I felt the Salt-N-Pepa ending was too on the nose, explicitly writing out what was already musically implied.

Now tho I love the ending, a song that long and that serious needs a wink

It's also a reference to an article on gender & language linked above somewhere.

You're right about how this album moves and flows and the economy it uses in its transcendent moments. These seem all the more important precisely because they haven't been milked dry through repetition.

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

not disagreeing with you about The Political Is Musical, but i feel this in particular is a failure as political statement merely by dint of how people consume albums in 2013: compare and contrast nicki minaj's own "fuck you and your idea of how an album should be" with roman reloaded pandering to each of her fanbases at the same time

By "people" you mean yourself, though, and I'm not saying your listening is better/worse/more typical/less typical than anybody else's, but lots of people are listening in 2013 to The Knife in one sitting, on a stereo