Squint Live In Oxford

Port Mahon, Oxford, Tuesday 20th April 2010

(Phil Wachsmann, Eric Clarke: violins; Jill Elliott: viola; Bruno Guastalla: cello, bandoneon; Dominic Lash: double-bass)

There were moments when one might have said that Squint's improvisations sounded a little like composed pieces by Lachenmann or Per Norgard. This was primarily due to the particular instrumentation, to the use of extended techniques (with the whole body of the instrument as sound-making device) by an all-strings ensemble, which one would not associate with the more jazz-associated aspects of free improvisation as much as with 'modern classical'. That said, the fact that things were completely improvised ensured a more fractured approach than that allowed by written material; the players were less likely to work in and around the same melodic material for lengthy periods, more likely to move on to another section if they felt that the music had begun to stagnate in any one kind of sonic area for too long.

One might also note the fairly considerable diversity in the backgrounds of those playing: Wachsmann studied with Nadia Boulanger and emerged initially from an indeterminate/ Cageian/ art music context; Clarke is a professor at the University of Oxford with extensive academic research on music under his belt; Elliott has been involved in classical, folk and contemporary music in Oxford for 20 years; Guastalla works as a maker and restorer of violins and cellos, as well as playing in a number of Oxford-based free improvising groups; Lash has played with the late Steve Reid, droned with Tony Conrad, plucked in straightahead jazz contexts, scrabbled away in free jazz settings, and participated in quiet textural improvisations. Such diversity by no means led to a clash of approaches: motifs and techniques were passed round in overlapping relays and leaping exchanges.

At times, one might think that one had pinned down the 'role' someone was playing in the group - Clarke as the most melodic player, tending to focus on longer bowed notes and lengthier phrases; Wachsmann as the one keeping things on edge, abrasive, physically engaged; Elliott plucking round the spaces left by other players; Lash providing the lower end of the music in a supportive role, bowing secure underpinnings or plucking harmonies; Guastalla laying out for a few seconds and then launching in with ferocious energy onto a particular idea or type of sound (notable in this regard was his use of a piece of wood against the strings to create a fantastic loud groaning that sounded as if it could almost have been electronically manipulated). But this was most definitely not a music where one could pin down any one player to any one role. Sometimes two musicians would play in near-concord, shifting echoes of one another's phrases, edging round a tonal centre, soon snapped out of it by someone (often Wachsmann) scraping or unleashing plucked flurries. Sometimes there would be contrasts across the ensemble, players dividing into short-lived separate groupings, pairings: Clarke's groaning ship's mast over brief violin harmony, Elliot and Wachsmann tapping out quiet motifs in the midst of the lower instruments' thunder. At other times, the whole ensemble would dig with slow bowed drones, or some would drop out to leave near silence, the thread of the music hanging on a wisp of sound from bow on wood or string.

This was the group's first gig (though there had been a few private sessions beforehand - it wasn't one of the ad-hoc blowing groups you sometimes find in free jazz contexts) and there were perhaps times when things felt a little tentative: the division into separate pieces (of roughly ten minutes in length) diffused the intense concentration that a single, longer piece would have yielded, for applause means you have to build things back up again, in the process losing the atmosphere and focus of the previous minutes. It must be noted, however, that little hesitation was shown on the re-starts, and furthermore, any sacrifices in terms of total cohesion were more than made up for by the variety of sounds, levels of volume, types of interaction, and musical alliances across the group. The result was intensely absorbing, and it is to be hoped that this group might further develop the many interesting directions they created for themselves during this debut public performance.

Redemption in 'Bad Lieutenant' (1992)

Starring: Harvey Keitel
Music: Joe Delia/Schooly D/Johnny Ace/Abel Ferrara
Director: Abel Ferrara
Screenplay: Zoe Lund, Paul Calderon, Victor Argo, Abel Ferrara
Director of Photgraphy: Ken Kelsch

Ferrara’s film is commendably anti-plot, with the narrative trajectory of the central character’s descent to a nadir and subsequent redemption not as glaringly obvious as it could have been – at least, not until the final third, and perhaps not even then. The style is generally observational rather than participant in the alternately frenzied and hollowed ‘sequence’ of things – one might place this in contrast to the flashiness of Scorsese, although it’s also possible to see ‘Bad Lieutenant’ as a kind of continuation of the final third of ‘Goodfellas’: Henry Hill’s drug-induced paranoia a few months down the line, where even the semblance of an ordinary family life has been abandoned as the addict (in this case a cop rather than a criminal, and with even less of a sense of loyalty to a hierarchical structure than a Mafia man) stumbles from dealer to dealer, crime scene to crime scene, taking and taking (money, drugs, alcohol) while at the same time hollowing himself out, glutted yet empty, incapable of fulfilling a need or desire. There is some hand-held/steadicam work (for instance, when Keitel stumbles, paranoid, down some dark stairs), but things are mostly restricted to lengthy, unsparing medium-shot takes (see particularly the “show me how you suck a guy’s cock” scene). There’s little obviously ‘significant’ dialogue as such, or characterisation of any of the other people in the film; they appear as ciphers or vague, almost ghostly figures who the lieutenant happens to cross paths with. That’s appropriate, given his drug-induced isolation and alienation from anything outside his orbit; and one might also note that he himself is hardly ‘characterised’, if by that we mean given an in-depth back-story or a series of recognisable traits/quirks. This doesn’t make him a symbolic blank canvas though: Ferrara’s film isn’t quite the allegory or morality play that some might like it to be – indeed, one might argue that where it fails is precisely in its attempt to turn a piece of observational, semi-exploitative grime and grit (‘Driller Killer’ territory) into something with religious pretensions.

While quite a different film on the surface, Carol Reed’s ‘Odd Man Out’ might be a useful point of comparison here. Kietel’s lieutenant stumbles through the city in a crisis of his own making; James Mason’s wounded IRA man is more the victim of circumstances, as he stumbles through the city and is taken up by various characters who want to use him for their own purposes. Everyone wants something out of the central figure: most memorably, Lukey, the crazed artist, desperate to capture a man’s dying features in order to paint his masterpiece, a depiction of Christ – and it’s with this sense of art as essentially greedy, taking rather than giving, that the film comes close to self-commentary, commentary on the narrativizing of life that films (and allegories) propose. At the same time, there’s a sense that the film uses Mason for symbolic purposes of its own. By contrast, ‘Bad Lieutenant’ is so insular, so claustrophobic, that there’s no space for such a series of angles on its central object of study; at times he seems to be watched like a caged animal, the subject of an experiment, at others the film seems to have been taken over by him, so that there is no chance of going beyond the blinkers of his own vision. Even the use of music is generally restricted to something which, if not strictly diegetic, feels as if it might be coming from a radio or tape deck somewhere on the scene, with the reprise of ‘Pledging My Love’ in the final scene being the notable exception, as well as a consciously ‘in’ reference (it was used in the Keitel-starring ‘Mean Streets’, another tale of crime, corruption and Catholicism with perhaps a slightly less hysteric bent). One might further speculate on the fact that it was released after singer Johnny Ace’s death from drunkenly playing around with a loaded pistol: there’s something here about the disjunct between pledges of eternal fidelity and self-destructive, violent realities. Perhaps the latter arise from the craziness of the former – amour fou pushed so far that it can only express itself as occasional bursts of wild and senseless rage and despair alternating with moments of near-emptiness. Though it’s not the theme I’m interested in exploring here at length, the notion of addiction is undoubtedly a key one in ‘Bad Lieutenant’ as well as in Ferrara’s other films (most obviously, ‘The Addiction’). Zoe Lund, as Kietel’s dealer: “Vampires are lucky, they can feed on others...We gotta eat away at ourselves till there’s nothing left but appetite.”

What narrative the film has is mostly concentrated in the nightmare, self-destructive betting scenario (which is actually given more prominence than the rape of the nun, until that particular ‘storyline’ is amped up to ‘religious’ proportions towards the end). As I’ve already mentioned, Catholic guilt and gangsterism/corruption are clear thematic links with Martin Scorsese; Ferrara’s film is at once more melodramatic and (perhaps) more cynical in its attitude towards the Church. It’s hard to know what to make of the scene towards the end of the picture where Keitel finds himself on a church floor, bawling at a vision of the crucified Jesus. Things are pushed so far over the edge here that we seem to have descended into a black comedy – especially when you pair this scene up with other moments such as Keitel shooting out his car radio when sports results go against him, or, mid-way through an ‘orgy’ with a couple of prostitutes, assuming a Christ position and nakedly dancing to ‘Pledging My Love,’ off his face and whimpering. It’s this kind of excess that makes the film seem both more exploitative than it perhaps is (there’s little actual violence or even sex shown, compared to, say, most Hollywood action pictures that get made today), and that seems to run away with itself to a point that Ferrara might not have wished: for, unlike Wener Herzog with his bizarre Nicholas Cage ‘follow-up’, I suspect Ferrara is nigh-on-deadly serious here (after all, doesn’t the tragic usually verge on the ridiculous?).

In any case, having cried a bit and called Christ a “rat fuck” before begging him for forgiveness, Keitel has had his ‘crisis’/moment of self-realization and can now stumble out to deal with the rapists, through whom he seems to think he can redeem himself: at first, by killing them, and then, as it turns out, by forgiving them and letting them go. But is this act of forgiveness really redemption? Is the Bad Lieutenant’s dilemma that he can forgive others but not himself? Are we really meant to go along with the nun’s forgiveness for her attackers, which seems to prompt Keitel’s actions after his initial incomprehension? What we have here is, it seems to me is a mixture of points of view, a simultaneous criticism and identification with religion about which Ferrara is as confused as anyone: ‘Bad Lieutenant’ is not quite the “powerful tale of redemptive Catholicism” envisioned by Mark Kermode (fresh from watching Catholic horror flick ‘The Exorcist’ for the umpteenth time, no doubt), though at times it does seem to be moving towards a total acceptance of the Catholic dogma of guilt, forgiveness and bloody redemption (the Lieutenant sees a religious vision; performs a decisive action; and dies in the final reel for the journey to be completed). As tempting as it would be to view the film this way, the presence of something more questioning and less centred on ‘closure’ nags away through little hints, little pieces of dialogue.

In the confession scene, it seems the nun has been in some way conditioned by her religious upbringing/vocation to accept her rape as an act of love: she tells the priest how she turned the rapists’ “stale semen” into “fruitful sperm,” a religious justification of victimhood in which men can have it both ways: women must be whores, penetrated at will, but also virgins who remain ‘pure’ because they ‘forgive’ any wrongs done to them. This seems like a refreshing attitude to female victimhood, which one might compare to the equally-controversial ‘Hostel’, where women become objects, stimulants like alcohol or drugs (and where the ultimate stimulant, the ultimate thrill is torture and violence – both as punishment for over-indulgence (the American frat-packers who’ve messed around with the girls too much) and as extension of that indulgence (the older businessman preying on the younger female tourists with a chainsaw in ‘Hostel II’)). So, if ‘Hostel’ is – as well being an uncomfortable exploitation movie – a criticism of the capitalist tendency to treat everything as my property, at the whim of my pleasure – both wholly owned by me, and wholly disposable because of this – ‘Bad Lieutenant’ becomes a criticism of the victim mentality brainwashed into people (especially women) by religion. (Something of that male, acquisitive, violent (and ultimately self-destructive) drive is exhibited, not just by the characters in ‘Hostel’, but by Kietel’s corrupt cop, violating the tableau of family life by sitting dazed, stoned and drunk on the sofa while the women gather at the dining table, snorting coke off the family photos, and taking bets at his daughter’s first communion, and abusing his position of authority as a force of law by pulling over two girls for traffic violation and then verbally raping them while jerking off outside the car door.)

For the nun, it seems, sexualised violence has become the ultimate moment of knowledge and union with God (in some way linked with an ecstatic tradition stemming back to St Theresa); the subjugation of woman (Virgin/Mary/nun) at the hands of man (God/the Church hierarchy/the rapists) has become enshrined in religious dogma, an enmeshing of sadism and masochism (Christ is both son and father of the woman, both suffering, bloodied servant, and the painful produce of the womb; the woman is both loving, protective mother, and helpless receptacle for male desire (if she doesn’t want to bear the Son of God, tough luck – he’s already inside her)). This problematizes the subsequent ease with which she tells Keitel she’s forgiven her attackers – who, OK, turn out to be a pair of stoned Latinos who don’t speak English and seem almost innocents, pretty much incapable of physical violence – and is the kind of attitude we might find justifying the cover-up of the widespread abuse of young boys by paedophilic priests that’s been making such waves of late. Something of the attitude towards sexuality and religion on display here harks back to the ‘blasphemous’ set-pieces of Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’, though the nun can hardly hope to compare with the central figure of persecuted human goodness embodied by Oliver Reed. In ‘Bad Lieutenant’, Ferrara chooses to show the rape, in the film’s most visceral and unexpected scene, which is thrown in with no prior explanation and no apparent connection to the ‘plot,’ loose as it is, so that one at first supposes it to be a sick fantasy occurring inside Keitel’s drug-addled brain. The way the rape is intercut with sudden zooms and cuts to a statue of the crucifixion and a live figure writhing and bleeding on the cross like something out of ‘Passion of the Christ’, seems at once a violation of sacramental ceremony (the crucifix used as a penetrative weapon) and in some way entwined with it (like Alex’s vision of a Beethoven-accompanied orgy of destruction at the end of a ‘Clockwork Orange’). It’s not at all clear, then, that this act, taking place in a ‘holy place, is the supreme act of desecration that it is in ‘The Devils’; in some ways, it even feels appropriate that it’s happening where it is. Such an ‘argument’ is conveyed not so much through dialogue or logic but through the disturbing force of Ferrara’s scene placement and editing.

And it’s this makes the ‘redemption’ climax ring hollow, intentionally or not. Perhaps there’s some sense that the Lieutenant sees something of himself in the rapists (I’m thinking of the scene where he lasciviously peers through the hospital door at the naked figure of the violated nun), and that, because he can’t forgive himself, and can’t be sure that the mute figure of Christ has forgiven him (despite his pleas), he has to forgive others. This then becomes a kind of self-absolution as well as a way of reaching out beyond the purely selfish acquisitive cycle into which he has been drawn, or has propelled himself. When Keitel sees the rapists off at the bus station and ‘Pledging my love’ comes on over the soundtrack, this isn’t just an ironic of music: rather, he has now demonstrated an actual act of love (as opposed to the parody of love that is his liaison with the hookers), has demonstrated that even the most corrupt is capable of doing other than wallow in his own corruption. Of course, it’s at this moment, when his faith in life might be said to have been renewed, that he starts bawling again, and is then killed in a drive-by shooting filmed at a coldly detached distance; death is, after all, the usual end-point of the ‘redemptive’ logic of gangster films and (arguably) of Catholicism: you’ll be perfect once you get to heaven, you just have to die first. Perhaps Ferrara wants to believe in some kind of redemptive trajectory, but at the same time he undermines this, whether intentionally or unintentionally, both through the earlier (implied) criticisms of the Church, and through the treatment of the actual ‘redemption’ itself. Is this the mark of a true artist – like Blake’s Milton, trying to “justify the ways of God to men” only to find himself “of the devil’s party without knowing it”? I’m not sure that it is, as I don’t think that he is either setting out to make, or making, what Premier magazine call “one of the few truly religious films of the 20th century.” To some extent the film is simply a journey into a mind warped by drugs, on which grounds it’s effective, if occasionally a little aimless; it’s also a showcase for its lead actor, though without the playing-for-Oscars kind of showboating that you might see in, for example, Clint Eastwood’s ‘Mystic River’. And finally, it’s an attempt to see and to show just how low someone can go, while staying (or perhaps failing to stay) on the right of the invisible line stretched between nauseated horror and farcical contempt. In the end, though, there’s a sense that Ferrara neither fully invests in, nor totally undercuts the ‘redemptive’ pay-off, with the result that the film’s denouement comes to seem not quite believed in – indeed, almost tacked on.

Eartrip 5 - Out Now

You can find it at this link.

Saul Williams - Amethyst Rock Star (2001)

I’ve been listening to a lot of hip-hop lately – which has been tying in with some of my thoughts surrounding the role of the oral and aural in poetry – and Saul Williams has been one of those who has most interested me. His use of contemporary rock elements, particularly on his more recent albums, isn’t always to my taste, but, lyrically, he’s someone I can very much admire as a true poet –as someone who bends and twists language like it was a physical thing, to make it mean to turn the head and spin the mind. Below are some extended notes on his first album, ‘Amethyst Rock Star’.

As might be apparent from the title of this, his debut record, Williams is not your easily categorisable artist. While what he does has some affinities with ‘conscious hip-hop’ in the vein of Common or Mos Def, its musical setting is often quite different, and, lyrically, it tends more towards the ‘spoken-word poetry’ with which he made his name than to the tropes of rap, which are included as part of a word-play centred commentary (“While you rhyme about being hardcore, be heartcore”), as objects of reflection rather than as carriers of the message. Such a refusal of category conventions arguably originates from hip-hop’s own use of sampling to provide a wide range of generic backdrops to the vocals – including not just music but snippets of film dialogue and ‘slice-of-life’-style conversational interplay as part of a line-blurring performance act – but, given hip-hop’s emergence as a much more marketable, solidified, and less fluid thing than it was in the past, Williams’ category-dodging is fraught with both entwined musical and racial tensions that complicate the critical position taken on his work. On ‘Amethyst Rock Star’, Williams is working with (a) politically-conscious aural poetry (b) such poetry as it shades into ‘hip-hop’ (c) rock music inflections. Thus he announces himself not as a ‘rapper’ (though from comments he’s made in interviews, it seems that producer Rick Rubin was trying to get him to make a ‘hip-hop’ record), not as a ‘hip-hop artist’, but as a rock star – and not as just another rock star either – rather, as one restoring to the word what it has lost in terms of its stellar potential, its light-filled metaphoric power (Williams as a poet is much into outer space (as Sun Ra): the use of space as a fantastic realm which, rather than just providing escapism, liberates into a new understanding of the world away from hackneyed modes of perception, racial social cultural models leading to a slow dying which extends to the way life is lived as much as it does to the preponderance of death). At the same time, the notion of the ‘amethyst rock’ succeeds in bringing things back down to earth – to the first line of poetry that Williams ever wrote (see the Introduction to ‘The Dead Emcee Scrolls) – “I stand on the corner of the block slinging amethyst rocks” – which is at once the (generalized) nonchalance of the man ‘just hanging out’, watching, observing, waiting, and (given the story surrounding the creation of this poem) the very personal experience of the poet discovering himself in a moment of inspiration that seems hardly explicable by means of ‘rationality’, but as part of the same kind of logic as dreams, as the surreal. This process of transportation is prompted by a physical object – the piece of amethyst Williams carried around with him in his pocket – valued at once for its material qualities and for the spiritual awakening that somehow surrounds it, becomes associated with it. I’m sure that what also appeals to Williams is the notion of the rock star as an individual set apart from the crowd, though very much an embodiment of a collective will – as a voice channeling and having an impact on the thoughts and feelings of (sometimes) a whole generation, as vehicle for the people (and the spirits) to speak through.

As this star like a precious stone, Williams also plays off the ‘bling’ culture of contemporary hip-hop, suggesting a spiritual power rather than the mere glitter of baubles – an insistence on the divinity of the human (a la William Blake) which extends into what many might see as an excessive egotism (in itself another familiar hip-hop trait – bigging oneself up at the expense of others, the bragging song – though Williams isn’t about cursing out his rivals as the mere trading of insults; rather, he castigates those in power or those pretending to a ‘gangster’ cool, to ‘keeping it real’). This reaches its apogee on the final track where the poet shouts out the words: “So never question who I am, God knows/ And I know God personally/ In fact he lets me call him me / In fact he lets me call him me” – which he follows up with a hint at the matriarchal, eastern-oriented God of his book, ‘Said the Shotgun to the Head’ (as opposed to the phallic, male, western model, its apogee found in the shotgun pointed to the head, the suicide of civilisation): “And I know God personally/ In fact she lets me call her me/ In fact she lets her call her me.” It’s a suitably overblown climax (and really quite exhilarating – though more so when he digs into his chanted rhythmix than when he bellows out the sung chorus), bringing things full-circle from the record’s Wu-Tang-style opening: “Nigga you better drink half a gallon of Shaolin before they play on the strings of my violin.” That opening is typical of Williams in its word-play twists, as a colourful boast moves into the more complex notions suggested by “my life is orchestrated” – at once a kind of tight-wired organisation (against the forces of oppression), and something weighted against by the deadening organisations of routines and category-placements – as well as a claim to equal legitimacy with the bastions of white culture (“london symphony, concentrated”), and a move out beyond America (to be taken up on the Greek and Egyptian references later in the song).

And overblown boasts or aspirations to the divine within are not the records’ only lyrical themes, with the debts owed to others figure just as strongly. The most noticeable example of this is the massive shout-out list mid-way through ‘Coded Language’, where the chanted names take on the quality of a ritualistic utterance, an incantation, magic syllables – it’s as if Williams thinks he can actually channel the spirits of these predecessors the louder and more forcefully he yells out their names, and, listening to it, you might almost come to believe that yourself. As throughout the record, this wouldn’t have the same impact translated onto paper – it lives and breathes as sound, language as larynx, as breath and lung, as tongue and teeth. The best approximation I can think of this effect, beyond listening to the album itself, is provided by the computer’s sadly inadequate caps lock-key: “in the name of: ROBESON, GOD'S SON, HURSTON, AHKENATON, HATHSHEPUT, BLACKFOOT, HELEN, LENNON, KHALO, KALI, THE THREE MARIAS, TARA, LILITHE, LOURDE, WHITMAN, BALDWIN, GINSBERG, KAUFMAN, LUMUMBA, GHANDI, GIBRAN, SHABAZZ, SIDDHARTHA, MEDUSA, GUEVARA, GUARDSIEFF, RAND, WRIGHT, BANNEKER, TUBMAN, HAMER, HOLIDAY, DAVIS, COLTRANE, MORRISON, JOPLIN, DUBOIS, CLARKE, SHAKESPEARE, RACHMNINOV, ELLINGTON, CARTER, GAYE, HATHOWAY, HENDRIX, KUTL, DICKERSON, RIPPERTON, MARY, ISIS, THERESA, PLATH, RUMI, FELLINI, MICHAUX, NOSTRADAMUS, NEFERTITI, LA ROCK, SHIVA, GANESHA, YEMAJA, OSHUN, OBATALA, OGUN, KENNEDY, KING, FOUR LITTLE GIRLS, HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI, KELLER, BIKO, PERONE, MARLEY, COSBY, SHAKUR, THOSE STILL AFLAMED, AND THE COUNTLESS UNNAMED.” Of course, this isn’t quite as simple as it seems – it’s not just another list of African-Americans of note, for it incorporates Hiroshima and Nagaski, and blends said African-Americans with white poets, South American revolutionaries, English playwrights, Russian pianist-composers, and Indian Gods. “In the name of” – that opening phrase, which takes on something of the quality of an intake of breath before the great exhalation of words, echoes the ‘exorcism’ conducted at the end of ‘Penny for a Thought’; Williams takes on the language and tonal gravitas/fever pitch of religion and translates it into his own idiosyncratic cry for a new way of seeing. This new path incorporates diverse and esoteric religions, political figures, and reconfigured attitudes to sexuality, class and race – “we enlist / every so-called race, gender, and sexual preference”; reconfigured relations between humans and, ultimately between humans and the world – “Climb waterfalls and trees, commune with nature, snakes and bees.” The aim is not to draw up a simple “list of demands” that can be ticked off some bureaucrat’s checklist as if that erased the stains of past guilt and continuing injustice – the aim is (and Williams seems to mean this literally), to “uplift the consciousness of the entire fucking world.” And this is not merely a utopian dream content to remain simply as a dream, the goal stated so as, in effect, to maintain its difference; it is a battle-cry designed to be implemented, for such uplifting is a responsibility: “Every per-son as beings of sound to acknowledge their responsibility to uplift the consciousness of the entire fucking World.” These are aims that other hip-hop artists – even the most conscious and ‘right-on’ of the lot – don’t even come close to approaching, and it’s these aims which make Williams’ poetry so refreshing, so invigorating, so necessary.

On the more subdued moments – for they do exist as well! – there is just as much to admire. ‘Robeson’ has its ostensible subject and atmosphere the surrealism of a dream in which the human and animal disconcertingly entwine through the distortions of a marriage ceremony, overseen (and burdened) by the ghosts of oppressed ancestors and those (like Robeson) who spoke out against that oppression; but ends up as Williams’ earnest plea for his daughter to forgive him for his neglect – though no coincidence here that her name is Saturn, thus connecting the responsibilities and emotional niceties of the domestic with the longings and the upward reaches of the cosmic, the necessary entwining of ‘real life’ and imagination (because the two are one): “How could I ever neglect to hug you? You are a planet hugged by a rainbow”. Williams is acutely aware of the dangers of having one’s head filled with dreams of the cosmos and of total liberation – political, social, cultural, sexual, spiritual – which might lead one to neglect relationships with the very human beings for whose benefit and in whose name this revolution is supposed to exist. It’s characteristic that he chooses to address this through a fusion of the two modes – the elevated poetry and the simplicity of his care for his daughter (“God’s will be done. I love you.”) I’m not sure that we’ve heard such penetrating honesty since Michael Franti’s ‘Music and Politics’ (“If ever I would stop thinking about music and politics, I would tell you that sometimes it’s easier to desire and pursue the attention and admiration of 100 strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of those closest to me….If ever I would stop thinking about music and politics, I would tell you that the personal revolution is far more difficult, and is the first step in any revolution”).

In terms of the music, this is a rap record with a rock band – rock would manifest itself even more explicitly in Williams’ following releases: ‘Saul Williams’, where he ditched the band for backgrounds which he mostly produced himself (though, rather than sounding home-made in any lo-fi way, they tend to come across as rather standardised, Rage Against the Machine-style rap-rock – repeated hooks blared loud with the focus moved away from the words and the pell-mell or reflective delivery they generate, which is where the subtlety and interest is really at), and ‘The Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust’, where he covers U2 (nice to hear a contemporary American rapper talking about injustices outside the usual remits – in this case, Northern Ireland) & whose title responds to shape-shifter white rockstar David Bowie. Mind you, ‘Amethyst Rock Star’ doesn’t really feature a typical ‘rock band’ as such – primarily because it includes cello and viola alongside the bass, drums and guitar. In fact, the cello appears to be electric and is often used to double or complement the guitar, to play guitar-type riffs – which can be rather effective, as on the storming 11-minute concluding track, ‘Wine’, or the urgent propulsion with which it begins ‘La La La’. What we don’t have here is the sampling culture of hip-hop; but then again, one might argue that, in Williams’ case, the sampling is in the words, which, seemingly carried along on the weight of their own propulsion, bring in whole cultures and frames of references that you could all too easily miss if you switched off for a few seconds. And, as I’ve said before, Williams isn’t exactly a hip-hop artist, in a strict sense, anyway – and neither he is ‘just’ a slam poet – he is not ‘just’ anything. And thus, on his debut ‘hip-hop’ record, he operates over a drum n’ bass hook (the title cut of DJ Krust’s ‘Coded Language’, reprised on this album), his voice switching to lilts of half-sung Rasta (“seven mountains higher than the valley of death”), his words full of metres and rhymes that spill over the standard couplets of rap, his interests (as I’ve been stressing, and as he’s admitted in interviews) very much embracing rock (this embracement of a piece with his strategy to dare and to defy – to reclaim rock, a whitened version of black music, and in doing so to connect with the neglected the work of the Black Rock Coalition as well as with all those blues forebears). And finally, given his criticism of the trend towards “realness” in much modern rap – “keeping it real” as promoting an ersatz sense of how things are, when the necessity is to change them – it’s entirely appropriate that his reconfiguration of the racial stereotyping of the black man and woman is also part of his quasi-mystical philosophy: “The role of darkness is not to be seen as, or equated with, Ignorance, but with the unknown, and the mysteries of the unseen.” From where we are to where we could be and back again with that changed perspective: Williams is nothing if not ambitious, and ‘Amethyst Rock Star’ remains a clarion-call whose vibrations continue to ripple the air nearly a decade after its release.

Gil Scott-Heron: I'm New Here (XL Recordings, 2010)

Let’s not talk about the release of this new album as an ‘event’, if we can help it. Yes, Gil Scott-Heron, ‘godfather of rap’, a hugely important voice in bringing socially-conscious messages to both black and white youth, has not recorded an album since 1994’s ‘Spirits’. Yes, he has been in and out of prison, has had plans for recordings and for books planned and then postponed, has made intermittent public appearances but been generally been shrouded in rumours of ill-health and personal breakdown. Yes, all this has happened – and the record’s title suggests a very specific engagement with the notion that Heron is a quote-unquote major artist who must add to his legacy, must teach us all once again, must justify his absence with another classic. Might it suggest that Heron is a new man, reborn, coming out of hard times with his head held high once more? And would that mean a return to the Heron of the old days, or would it mean a re-invented, re-invigorated artist, starting over just as strong but in a different place?

These are all questions that Heron does not need to answer: he has done enough, whatever the critics may say about missed opportunities, not to have to make another statement if he does not wish to; his position is assured. But, as listeners, as critics, we cannot help but make them – we cannot pretend to listen in a vacuum. And so the comparisons begin almost as soon as we press play.

First off, after we get past the spoken-word of the opening track, we’ll notice that Heron sounds less comfortable singing now (perhaps explaining the choice of Smog’s neo-folk acoustic number ‘I’m New Here’ to cover; in the original, Bill Callahan’s sung voice was always on the brink of shading over into laconic, spoken reflection, and here, Heron speaks most of the words, singing only the short, recurring chorus). His voice is now partially possessed of the ‘lived-in’ croak that characterises latter-day Dylan and Tom Waits. Though that has always been part of Waits' cigarettes-and-alcohol mystique, and seems to have become an accentuation of Dylan’s famously less than smooth vocal stylings (albeit one so extreme that its burden must be borne by his status as a ‘living legend’ fondly canonised by both a generation of fading hippies and Professor Christopher Ricks), in Heron’s case, as his voice was quite mellifluous before, this may have necessitated a stylistic change, as it can’t quite carry the righteous soul style. (It will be interesting to hear what material Heron tackles in his upcoming live shows – one would have thought that a record like this wouldn’t really be feasible as a stage show, and a return to the jazz/soul instrumental styling would seem likely.)

But, given all this, one must remember that spoken word is how Heron started off in the first place – his debut record announced him as ‘A New Black Poet’, and it is as poet as much as singer that he appears here. Despite the apparently low-key title of that record (‘Small-Talk at 125th and Lenox’), the wide-ranging subject matter and the urgent desire to speak political realities meant that he was soon aligned with the poet-teachers of the 1970s African-American urban experience: June Jordan, Jayne Cortez, Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka, Father Amde Hamilton, Otis O’Solomon, Richard Dedeaux, Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, Abiodun Oyewole, Umar Bin Hassan. Of course, such a reduction – to a list of names – would mitigate the approach that all these artists shared, one that was about ‘the revolution of everyday life’, rather than about soapbox sermonising or political platitudinising divorced from the thoughts and feelings, the insults and injuries, the imposed or unwitting failures, and, yes too, the joys that occupied every minute of every day for vast numbers of ordinary people. Thus, while all the reviews will focus on the fact that ‘I’m New Here’ is a ‘personal’ record, a chastened Heron’s reaction to years of silence through addiction and imprisonment, it’s worth noting that the material which made his name was precisely defined by its absence of sloganeering (this is the narrative of ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ – moving revolution, as a movement, away from the simplicity of oft-repeated clichés, catchphrases, and images), and by its focus on the inseparability of the personal and the political (think of the way the narrative of black poverty and institutional callousness in ‘Pieces of a Man’ is filtered through a sentiment of personal and private grief). Nonetheless, while Heron, particularly as time went on, did take on the position of spokesman (shouting out against the Reagan era, then advising the hip-hop artists who followed in his wake to take more account of their social responsibility, as potential teachers of, and voices for their generation), his absence from the scene perhaps mitigates against his effectiveness as the wise elder – having passed on the mantle, he can self-reflect, in a manner of course still tied to the forces that shaped him, but with the specifics of political concern not voiced explicitly.

Instead, what seems a more imaginatively exaggerated world emerges. This may result as much as anything from the ominous sound of the music: its samples and murmurs, its hisses and whirrs are a world away from the soul-drenched piano chords and jazz bass of the more familiar work, though the references to Charon and to Satan, and the flickering, high speed urban ghosts of the video to ‘Me and the Devil’ certainly have their say in the matter too. Given further reflection, however, one realises that the words frequently turn on themes familiar enough to count as archetypal. The personal demons of alcohol-fuelled sleeplessness and the drudge of routine (‘Where Did the Night Go’) form a quieter, more intimate variation on ‘The Bottle’, while, elsewhere, it is the classic themes of the blues that are returned to: the old theme of urban decay as contrasted against the simplicity of a poor, but perhaps more ‘honest’, rural past (‘New York is Killing Me’), the attractive yet unsettling force of the supernatural (‘Me and the Devil’) – where the supernatural becomes a potent force, not so much structured into simple moral schemes but as figured as part of the complexity of human behaviour, and – crucially – part of the complexity of the traditions formed over centuries by African-Americans reacting to their transplantation and subsequent isolation in ‘the land of the free’.

Transformation is a major part of this experience – the practice of ‘signifying’ – jazz’s transformation of white instruments through black music – Sun Ra’s transformation of a multitude of subjects, from spirituals to space travel – Ray Charles’ transformation of gospel styles from the sacred to the profane – Heron’s non-televised transformation of the slogans of consumer culture into their negation. And ‘I’m New Here’, too, is about transformation – two of the stand-out tracks are covers, back to the roots with Robert Johnson’s ‘Me and the Devil’, and, more surprisingly, turning to acoustic guitar and the (musically) lilting, (lyrically) self-interrogating ‘I’m New Here’ by Bill Calahan (a.k.a. Smog). Connecting the subdued, whimsical delicacy of white folk-tradition in the latter, with the blues’ more extrovert, dramatically strident position doesn’t so much seal their differences as emphasise the common thread of vulnerability and personal honesty underlining both – as well as the fact that such apparent straightforwardness is always an assuming of a role, a self-dramatisation that stands, often ambiguously, for a truth, rather than presenting that truth direct in itself. This is a balance between frailty and strutting confidence that the record treats as central. It doesn’t shy away from the increased weakness of Heron’s voice; rather, the production takes account of it, even foregrounds it – rather than compensating with a thicker background texture, it keeps things sparse and stripped-down, to emphasize rather than to hide.

This turns out to mean that we have here a striking generic difference to previous Scott-Heron albums. The aforementioned production is decidedly lo-fi (with tape hiss and sparing use of murky samples), and its sparse, semi-industrial sound owes much to the spaciousness, to the minimal, almost empty ghost-traces of dub-step, where samples drift in and out almost un-noticed, where tracks float along on skeletal beats that pound with mechanical precision but that never feel fast or driving. There are no saxophone, flute or piano solos to add more complex improvised variations over the song’s basic structures; instead, there are the pauses between phrases, the tension hanging on each word, the wait for each weighted-syllable.

And, given that the fifteen-track record lasts for only 28-minutes (including a number of ‘interludes’ – 10-second, reverb’d snippets of Heron in conversation), each syllable is most definitely weighted. Such brevity makes it important to experience the whole thing as one, continuous, flowing entity: the recurring Kanye West sample which opens and closes the record, giving it an element of circularity; the transference of mood from tales of spirits and the threat of damnation (‘Me and the Devil’, ‘Your Soul and Mine’) to personal ruminations hung-over with depression and unease (‘Where Did the Night Go’, ‘Running’), to warmer reminiscences and reflections on a life – the way it was lived, the influences that shaped it (the short spoken-word snippets). Though the songs themselves generally have a clear and simple structure, the predominance of spoken word and the sparseness of the background mean that tracks don’t split as easily into single entities as they do on, say, ‘Pieces of a Man’. Because of this, some might slant this as a record of half-started (or half-finished) demos and sketches, spliced together and put out there before it’s reached the stage of a rounded, completed artistic statement. Indeed, the quick-fix critic in me suggested that very angle when I first heard these tracks, but, in trying to actually listen to and experience the album with an open attitude, I realised that trying to impose such a structure would not be to take this record on its own terms – which is the only way it is going to make sense. Forget pre-conditioned ideas about how an album ‘should’ be constituted – as much as you can – and, allowing that the distance of time may allow a more finely-balanced judgement once a few years have passed, I think one can say that this is a good piece of work: sincere, not bombastic, not expected; unsentimental but frank, not directed towards melody as on the classic albums but with enough melodic aftertaste to satisfy. And in that sense, assessment as to whether it is a ‘major album’ or an ‘important comeback’, and attempts to place it into a particular model of ‘late recordings by former legends’ (all the Johnny Cash comparisons we’ve been hearing), come to seem rather unnecessary, rather out of place. You can hear it for what it is, and you should.

"Threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress"

This story emerged in The Guardian last week. In sum, it seems that carrying placards and shouting slogans at British soliders is now enough to get you arrested (retrospectively arrested, too – if we decided we don’t like what you’ve done after you’ve done it, we’re going to come after you).

It really goes without saying that this is an obvious manifestation of a worrying trend that has emerged in recent years in the UK; a trend towards racial, social, and cultural profiling. (Of course, this is something that never went away, as the ingrained Thatcherite mindset of our times could too readily attest, were enough attention paid to it. For example, our newspapers & politicians have often told us (though not in so many words), that miners are brutish, unrefined working class animals – or at the very least, unfortunately, regrettably, expendable. Names, labels, faces, modes of dress, and justifications for singling out those possessing these, may change, but the motivating force remains at root the same.)

Those charged by the police were Muslims. One might well ask whether more worried heed would be paid to these arrests if those arrested were concerned white liberals protesting the BNP. Of course, this would never happen, as the BNP are a group we can all unite in hate against – they are the bogeymen we can all agree to loathe. (I don’t in any way mean to smooth over the worrying rise in their popularity, and the genuine concern felt by many at this rise; but I do wonder if they provide an easy way out for the increasingly right-leaning ‘mainstream’ parties– by being so openly racist and all the rest of it, they allow, for example, the Tories to present their own policies as eminently reasonable)). Well, white liberals might have been one thing – though of course they are much less worrying than evil hardline leftists like those nasty anarchists who have quite rightly been cracked down on in Greece or in London if G20 provokes them into their bestial action. These anarchists are acting merely to create turmoil, to disrupt our tourist snaps and the picture-perfect political co-operation of our leaders. No, not to dream of or to provoke the dissolution of insane systems of ingrained cruelty and of a loss of compassionate relation beyond the packaged tendresse of ‘charity’ (through which we can have the sensation of smoothing out troublesome creases in the fabric of society, through which we can feel good about ourselves, can bask in the warm cocooned glow of self-satisfaction with the excuse that we are really feeling good about helping other people.) Not to reflect, along with Martin Luther King, that “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring”; not to reflect, along with Blake, that “Pity would be no more/ If we did not make somebody poor/ And mercy no more would be/ If all were as happy as we.” No, the message is: smash no windows whatsoever, straighten your tie, and smile as you actively benefit from the misery of spirit and material circumstance suffered by others.

The terms are set, it seems: both as to who can protest and who they can protest against. And they most certainly cannot protest against ‘our brave boys’, who are our ‘heroes’, fighting for ‘freedom’ ‘on our behalf’ (forget ‘not in my name’ and all that bullshit, OK?). Yes, you may question (within the timid terms of tremulous liberal anxiety) the cause in which they have been sent to torture and ravage another’s country, another’s land, to commit everyday cultural rape. But they themselves are blameless as lambs.

Well knock me down with a feather if the real situation isn’t a little more complex than this nice fantasy. These soldiers, apparently so sensitive as to need the police to protect them from insults, are known as ‘The Poachers’, a name that implies that they hunt their prey as mere animals to be killed. Not exactly the most shy and retiring souls then – and perhaps, if their mindset is as suggested by their name, they view the use of force as the most obvious and logical ways to solve all disagreements (hence the police intervention; the soldiers themselves could obviously not lash out at citizens of their own country – at least, not yet, as the climate is still not quite ripe (though I venture to suggest that the time when such a response would be accepted is not far off, and is not merely the cautionary and never-realized warning of dystopian sci-fi)).

OK then, so I find ironic and bitterly laughable the notion that soldiers need defending from a few insults thrown (aren’t these the people whose job is to have deadly missiles thrown at them, and to throw deadly missiles back?). But I also find it worrying, as the obvious clampdown on civil liberties, on the right to protest, that it is; I find it worrying (though by no means surprising) that ideologically-motivated force is being exercised in the name of ‘law and order’. ‘Keeping us safe’ is always the excuse, though it’s unclear who ‘we’ are and what exactly our position is in the citadel we inhabit. Well, whatever the answers to those questions, the message here is ‘think twice about expressing dissent if you’re a Muslim, and keep your fucking trap shut.’

[Before anyone accuses me of spitting out one form of repression (right-leaning white western government) only to implicitly favour another (‘Islamofascism’), I should point out that I certainly do not support the use of religiously-motivated insults such as “British soldiers burn in hell” (though I would not go as far as to censor them by means of police intervention); I am firmly against repression and intolerance in the name of religion generally, let alone in the name of Islam. (And I'll note that a number of those arrested waved a placard reading, "Islam will dominate the world, freedom can go to hell.") But I would point out that slogans about hellfire and damnation do recall those used by White Christian Fundamentalists picketing ‘Jerry Springer: The Opera’. (On his website, Stewart Lee has published an example of the many hate mail letters he received; it warns him that, unless he repents, he will burn in hell). Now, forgive me if I’m wrong, but I would have thought that writing a satirical musical was less grounds for burning in hell than going to a foreign country and shooting people – though, evidently, that’s not what the police and other instruments of ‘law and order’ believe.]

Bill Dixon: Tapestries for Small Orchestra (Firehouse 12, 2009)

As Stephen Haynes notes in his online journal/blog on the recording sessions for this project, one of the challenges involved was providing enough distinction in the sound mix between five trumpeters/cornet players with similarly dark sounds. But Dixon does, after all, favour a dark palette, as amply demonstrated by his previous orchestral release, ‘17 Musicians In Search of a Sound: Darfur’, where the slightly larger ensemble produced slowly emerging chord-clouds and slowly shifting unison passages in which the ensemble mesh was produced by individual instruments in near, but not quite, total alignment. The effect is a kind of blurring, produced by a very careful manipulation of individual detail; a more horizontal than vertical approach, with solos emerging as parts of the texture – like a colour highlighted in a particular portion of a canvas – rather than as monologues supported by an ensemble background. This has always been the case with Dixon’s own playing, particularly given his use of electronics, and the fact that the other trumpeters also deploy electronics, in some cases seeming to mimic his approach – muted growls, breathy whispers, repeated mid-register notes, high-pitched flurries cascading into silence – adds to the collaborative feel. That’s not to say that there aren’t solo spots, though – for instance, ‘Motorcycle ‘66’ starts with melodic material for unaccompanied bass which succeeds in forcing an initial concentration, in ushering the listener in to a music which needs to be heard with open ears. In any case, neither ensemble nor solo passages contain a wasted note; as Dixon puts it: “Listen to the space in the room. If you can't do something more beautiful than that, shut the fuck up.” The result is a kind of substantial minimalism – very slow, seeming to lack any overtly linear development, predominantly atmospheric, almost trance-like. And yet even this apparent lack of activity – most pronounced on the sustained hush of ‘Adagio: Slow Mauve Scribblings’ – reveals itself upon closer inspection to consist of complex structural balances and connections. Low, slowly-shifting drones, shimmering vibraphone, occasional electronic tweaks, overlapping melodic lines, repeated upward flurries all combine to create a sound field that is unique in modern music. Inexorable yet fragile, ‘Tapestries for Small Orchestra’ is slow-moving, meditative, and deeply affecting.