Prog-Rock Politics

...And there is no good book on Krautrock. ;)

Thanks!

Whats the story behind Toyal Wilcox's right wing leanings?

P and indeed shaw! what does this mean?

is anyone else here aware of the musical tastes of a cohort of John Tyndall (notorious British neo-Nazi leader) named Andrew Bower?

Actually, aren't we all full of contradictions, meaning that a) anti-asylum seeker racists will whole-heartedly cheer the liberation of France and b) listen to 'black people's music' while they do it and c) my local 'sexiest dance and r'n'b station uses Kula Shaker's 'Hey Dude' as backing for one of its things AND played Tattva during its golden hour segment recently.

i don't know which of the many prog threads to bump, so i'm going to bump this one

i was reading peter blegvad's wikipedia entry and came across this lengthy anecdote:

"Blegvad would later reveal (in an interview for the Hearsay fanzine) that "the piece that got me kicked out was "Living in the Heart of the Beast". I was assigned the task for the collective to come up with suitable verbals, and I wrote two verses about a woman throwing raisins at a pile of bones. Tim Hodgkinson just said, I'm sorry, this is not at all what we want. And he wrote reams of this political tirade. I admired his passion and application but it left me cold. I am to my bones a flippant individual, I don't know why I was created thus or what I'm trying to deny, but it clashed with the extreme seriousness. People who take themselves very seriously make me giggle, unless they're pointing a weapon at me or my loved ones".[1]"

1. "living in the heart of the beast" is a fucking fantastic song.
2. it would be better if it were about a woman throwing raisins at a pile of bones
3. i will never quite forgive henry cow for breaking up slapp happy.

1. Yes.
2. No. I like the words.
3. Maybe.

fuck it, let's do this here, past the (whole) point of no return (cheeky Wyatt reference innit)

notwithstanding that the ukpol thread has radicalised its posters not into IS or any Baader-Meinhof cell but merely into being total wankers, it does seem that for the politically-straitened, any hint of prog or indie 'excess' codes as somehow centrist or anti-revolutionary, even when coming out of the mouth of someone as blatantly left-wing and anti-establishment as Richard Dawson

i don't really have much of a point beyond this, but it is curious how artists of bygone eras like Wyatt or the RIO gang are rightly hailed as firebrands, but contemporary artists who mix musical complexity with politics are being dismissed by a noisy subsection of the boards as posers

i think you're misreading me, obviously i can't speak for alph. most of my complaints have been "not interesting enough".

and that's fine on its own but that wasn't exactly what you said iirc

look i don't want to fight you NV and 'total wankers' is affectionate exasperation more than FRIENDSHIP ENDED WITH but we can't go cancelling all of indie rock is my point here

i'm not asking anybody else to cancel it but as a style now it's largely regressive and yeah reactionary and that seems to me at odds with bold claims about politics etc - which as far as i'm concerned are never really a reason to enjoy a piece of music on their own anyway.

it's not unlike some of the twee-er, keep calm end of let's be generous and call them the "nice" wing of the soft left. in amongst all the affectionate slightly self-lampooning takes on their own class status or vision of nationhood they end up reflecting or playing with the same ideas as the people they're allegedly against.

i was unnecessarily gruff yesterday which kind of started out as joke trolling but my hangover picked it up and ran with it, and i'm sorry for that. didn't mean to come across actually nasty. a couple of caveats tho. it's not unheard of for you and some of the other ilm friends of meat and potatoes rock and roll to be disparaging about other acts or genres you don't really get, so y'know, fair play. and really it's not hard to dismiss me or anybody else doing a tired old "lol indie" shtick on a bad day. i mean it's there to be lolled at, sometimes.

i reserve the right to draw idiosyncratic rules about what does or doesn't suck and personally i don't like most "this sucks" nonsense but sometimes i don't know what the hell, scratch the itch.

politics thread is a whole nother conversation for another time and place, all i can say is that some of the radicalisation and yeah tedious fucking repetition of the same angry sloganeering comes from a place of having felt under attack from alleged allies and genuine tiredness and despair and irl precarious terror.

...my point being that those emotions are precisely those being discussed in that indie rock song you repeatedly laid into

and sure, I've been known to be a bit quick to judgement before - even perhaps once or twice during this EOY rundown - but I'd like to think that having said my bit I've gotten more accustomed to both leaving it be and also listening to others' reasons for why I'm wrong

a more sophisticated musical style does not equate directly onto a softer and more collaborationist politics

The problem isn't political music, the problem is indie music.

"but we can't go cancelling all of indie rock is my point here"

Why not? If the music is bad then why do I owe any of my time to listen to it?

yeah i mean how many times can i say "it's not more sophisticated" and y'know sophistication be damned anyway, i wouldn't describe his prior stuff as sophisticated but it felt, at least, more personal

i mean i think the idea that lumbering along with a few off-tune blues chords is inherently "more sophisticated" than something else might be an ish for me

"notwithstanding that the ukpol thread has radicalised its posters not into IS or any Baader-Meinhof cell but merely into being total wankers"

Sure am a wanker for seeing through the bullshit of tactical voting. Maybe my politics will be actually radical someday, like the um, IS.

What's this all about >:(

It's from the tracks thread.

Not sophisticated, knew that was a bad word. I was in a hurry and being talked to by a client. More...idk, melodic? Knotty? Prog?

What about calling IS radical, was that bad too?

I don't want to speak on anyone else's behalf but I didn't get the impression anyone was arguing Richard Dawson's music was reactionary *because* it's complex (or knotty or 'difficult' or anything along those lines)? I mean there are aspects of the criticism I don't agree on (I like Dawson's recent stuff a lot!) but I don't think that was the gist of it.

No idea what this is about and not going to trawl through a 3000-post thread to find out, but:

1. "living in the heart of the beast" is a fucking fantastic song.
2. it would be better if it were about a woman throwing raisins at a pile of bones
3. i will never quite forgive henry cow for breaking up slapp happy.

1. Yes
2. I quite enjoy the clumsy didacticism of the lyrics but yes it would have been better on a raisin theme.
3. That's like blaming the new flame for breaking up a marriage, it was probably written in the tea-leaves anyway.

A friend read the Henry Cow book so I didn't have to, apparently Fred Frith was a king shagger and it was all a bit dysfunctional, so much for revolution eh

I don't want to speak on anyone else's behalf but I didn't get the impression anyone was arguing Richard Dawson's music was reactionary *because* it's complex (or knotty or 'difficult' or anything along those lines)? I mean there are aspects of the criticism I don't agree on (I like Dawson's recent stuff a lot!) but I don't think that was the gist of it.

― Gavin, Leeds, Friday, 31 January 2020 15:23 (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I guess this wasn't quite it either, although Weyes Blood also drew criticisms based on her musical stylings. While she and Dawson obviously hark back in their music, you can't call either reactionaries - there are far too many modern or idiosyncratic touches in the production and composition to say that they're simply rehashing old ground. What they certainly have in common is a way with a complicated melody, which is why I drew the inference that this might be the off-putting element. They're both very maximalist and they don't keep it simple - on top of them operating within supposedly dead genres, I really do think a lot of the opprobrium comes from a place of wanting music that doesn't fuck around

I think at the time Blegvad was quoted as saying, "The Cow is full of bull".

Matt DC and others were hailing Billie Eilish as sweeping in a new ultra-minimalist aesthetic that's supposedly going to dominate the 2020s - I do wonder if ILX might have bought into that narrative a bit much. I don't think the 2010 pop narrative was nearly as maximal ist as they think, and there's a lot of directions maximalist pop hasn't really tried yet (tt said to me last night that she thinks a big theme this year will be overt genre-blending, a la Poppy). And then there's yer Herndons and Gatelys and their computers. I'm not saying Eilish is leading us to a dead end, but...well, by definition there's less you can do with minimalism. Let's see

I think Dawson got attacked because comrade alphabet didn't read the lyrics and thought it was about exercising.

It's the first thing I do before listening to a song, read the lyrics.

I thought it was just because he's shit tbh

Probably a melt cunt as well! I heard he once talked to a racist!

stop embarrassing yourself.. Louis

I think Weyes Blood and Dawson are two really different artists. Dawson comes from a folk background, and at least his last few records has been made with community and solidarity in mind. 2020 might sound like a prog-influenced indie-rock album, but to me it's pretty clearly a leftist attempt to make a rock album that both sounds contemporary, and can actually matter to people today. Instead of just being a punk rehash or something. I'm not sure I can figure out where Weyes Blood fits politically, but it's more baroque retro-indie to me. Yeah, a few contemporary strokes, but I feel like it's less than some would like it to be. I think there was a pitchfork review where it was pointed out that she wore modern shoes on the cover, and that showed how the whole thing is a mix of new and old. It's not really, it really wouldn't sound that crazy on radio in the seventies. But the hits are undeniable to me.

She fits politically next to Bernie Sanders, hence the picture that got posted to the 77 thread, and comes from an explicitly folk background - listen to her last-but-one album The Innocents. Obviously there are differences in style and subject matter, but even there, both explicitly deal with issues of loneliness and fragmentation in late capitalism

They both also explicitly have drawn influence from medieval music

Working class music is the music the working class listens to. Which, as we all know, is homogenous and easy to pinpoint because all working class people listen to the same music. Glad to have cleared that up for y'all.