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Molchat Doma (Quiet at home), Belarus’ answer to Depeche mode, have released a new track for their upcoming album, Monument. It’s called ‘there’s no answer’ and it’s about a break up. They imagine an absurd, ugly gift given by this old flame, and assume that she’s already forgotten. Yesterday it was us and today-I. In Ne Smeshno (It’s not funny), the showed their political chops, as well as in interviews standing up for the working class and democracy in Belarus. In the wonderful Diskoteka, they produced a danceable  and sung about the beautiful possibilities of that same dance floor. It was interesting to hear a more gloomy love-lament from the band: I would say it fits their musical style better, but the great thing about this kind of music from the 80s was that it wasn’t necessarily sad even when it displayed a melancholic aesthetic. Molchat Doma are a remarkable band, about whom many Spanish and English speaking people around the world are hugely excited - the language barrier seems to be deteriorating in music these days, but I have to say I appreciated their music a lot less when I didn’t understand Russian. 

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Bulgarian Reality 3 is the third song in as many years which parodies the aesthetics of pop-folk and Bulgarian culture more generally - the Rubber Bandits use rap and catchy hooks to give us all a good time. The hook captures an issue close to all Bulgarian hearts, and that’s the state of the country: ‘I’m starving, I’m dying, I have to emigrate. I’m starving, I’m dying, I’m saving for a Maybach' Momcheto wears a cowboy hat and does folk dances, but he also namechecks ‘mutri’ [post-communist gangsters with big bellies and tattoos] politicians, and hopes for new ones. He gives us images of luxury drinking becks on Peevski’s yacht, Peevski being one of the Mutri. Dim4ou dresses like a summery dad and gives us gangster realness, Kapo Verde cuts Duner with a sword and claims to be a samurai polyglot. I also didn’t understand much of V:RGO’s verse but there’s a lot of absurd autotune stuff and then he says ‘boyko lied to me’. 

Bulgarian pop-culture is ripe for parody and yet again they’ve made a really funny song with catchy hooks, great bars and a surreal video. They’re not the only rappers who make political references but they manage to make it sexy and not bore us with grandstanding. 

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Devitsa sings in Bulgarian in this song, in another she sings in Russian. She announces at the start: ‘I’ll write a tender song about you’, and the video shows her in various candid/plandid situations over a moody-broody techno-pop instrumental. I struggle with some of the lyrics, but her performance is mercurial and the words ring out like memories alongside fragmented clips. She talks about filming the object of her affection, and then showing the film to them. The video is the cameraperson watching the star (devitsa) watching the cameraperson, the song and the clip are all about the looks of love and how we stare at people. There’s something melancholic in the thudding of the drums and her voice, despite it being a song about infatuation. 

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This is an incredible film by John Akomfrah and the black audio film collective. It’s about the 1985 uprising in Handsworth, Birminigham and briefly about the Broadwater Farm uprising in the same year. It makes a very clear point, but goes about it sinister avant-garde fashion. The film-makers look backward with archival footage of black and white babies playing together, new migrants dressed in suits arriving off boats in the 1940s, and mixed dances that look to be from the 1940s/50s. Importantly, they also show the kind of work that people took when they came to the UK, correctly identifying black migrants as a labour force whose standard of living was to be lower than whites’. 

These images have a macabre tone when contrasted with the contemporary scenes of anger and protest against police violence, and the racialised class inequality which the police’s treatment of black people sought and seeks to uphold. There’s an atmosphere of disbelief among whites, politicians, and some of the South Asian community in Handsworth, but others interviewed, namely black people on the streets or South Asians meeting in homes, were not surprised that in a climate of mass unemployment, people had taken to the streets. 

The same is true now. It is not a question of ‘why are people protesting now’, but rather ‘why have we not overthrown our rulers before now?’ Why doesn’t it get violent every summer? We live in a country of real wealth, and profound inequality. What Akomfrah and co’s film identifies is that so-called riots are refusals of a violent, inequitable status quo that threatens people’s lives. In the midst of an epidemic that has disproportionately target black and brown people, 3 years after grenfell and years into a hostile environment scandal whose uncovering hasn’t led to any change, two things are clear: the protesters are right, the rioters are right. Long may they continue to put pressure on power. 

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Deborah Orr - Motherwell

This is a searing book. It was at times very painful to experience this open and reflective memoir of a childhood spent with parents who were part of 'several narcissistic cults’. What was obvious, though, was the work Orr had personally gone through to make sense of and feel her childhood pain. 

The details she remembers are maddening, but funny too. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who doesn't want to reflect on their own childhood. She doesn't accuse both of her parents of being narcissists, but she argues that there were various 'narcissistic cults' in which they participated - patriarchy being the most significant. 

She's unapologetic in her reminisces, perhaps because she had to mole down so far into the depths of her personality to find them. It reveals a lot about how someone can go through life rarely putting their own perspective or aims first - especially women. You can plod along just trying to make it to the end of the day, and never see outside of your survival mechanisms. However, she did get out eventually, albeit 4 years before she would eventually die. My mum's own maxim: 'everyone should have therapy before they have children' rings most true when I think about this book. It would have been absurd to suggest in 1961, but now in a time where mental health stigma seems to be diminishing, would-be parents should consider it.

I would like to say it inspired me to take more risks, to make slightly illogical decisions because I want to, but I don't think it can temper my practical internal parent. Orr's quick wit, attention to detail, and strong sense of injustice make this book a real joy to read.

Even though it's a difficult topic, and contained some really traumatic memories, her descriptions of the people in their lives made them into fully-realised characters. Her skill as a memoirist is in creating real figures out of her own (skewed - but truthful) memories of her parents. Read it if you want an excavation of childhood trauma that also functions as a character study. 

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The Village Against the World - Dan Hancox, 2013

Utopia is banal. I first read this book in 2014, when I was 18. It was the summer after A levels. I was a lot more naive and in a way earnestly excited about the future of the world. I believed that in this book were contained potential solutions to my personal unhappiness.

It's about Marilaneda, a small village in Andalusia, which had been at the centre of a 30 year struggle for land and dignity. Led by the remarkable Juan Manuel Sanchez Gordillo, the villagers have been on 'hunger strikes against hunger' and occupied the estates of powerful landowners. Their achievements are remarkable - at a time of high unemployment throughout Spain, especially in Andalucia, Marinaleda had an unemployment rate of about 5%.

They used the land that was ceded to them after years of struggle, to grow products (olives, oil, artichokes) and created a processing plant for these. It seemed like the most incredible world had been created which, on a small scale, showed what can happen when people work and struggle together, with clear and achievable aims. It filled me with joy and hope.

While I was less moved reading it this time round, a few things stood out. Despite the beautiful colours on the cover, and Hancox's way of bringing life to the pages, my view of life is different and my reading of Marinaleda is too. They had created a village in which people had real obligations to the collective, to do clearly tiring and dull work.

That might temper the romance of the olive-producing Southern Spanish pueblo, but it doesn't reduce the magnitude of Marinaleda's achievement. So what I see now, with sobriety, is that any attempts at building a better world (socialism? collectivism? post-capitalism?) will need a labour force to do boring and undesirable work. There will be joy and wish-fulfilment, but we'll all have a responsibility to contribute in quite mundane ways. The boring, tiring work, the constant threats to the existence of Marinaleda - things I saw as threats to my utopic sensibilities 6 years ago - are now clearly necessary and unsurprising aspects of any attempt to build socialist plenty.

Hancox says all this and more, and he writes in a kind and insightful way, and even gives us bread and roses - I particularly enjoy the images of people drinking bottles of beer and munching on olives on hazy summer nights. There's an almost erotic intensity to my experience of such scenes in this socially distant time. This book, then, is as worth reading as ever, whether you want to think about utopia, leadership, community, anarchism, or just hear some good yarns.

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Malcolm X - a public intellectual of the streets

In a way this is an arrogant thing to say, but I didn't necessarily learn or get any incredibly new theoretical perspectives from this book. I think that's because I'd already read, watched and listened to enough to understand something of Malcolm's life experiences and his stinging indictments of racism.

X's life is interesting because it's both unique and typical. He experienced the murder of his father by white people at the age of 6, he was patronised and discouraged as a black boy in a white-majority school. The reason I'd say he's unique is that he lived many lives. 

He went from model student to small-time hustler, and grew in power in the criminal world while off his face most of the time befriending musicians. He then when sent to prison (he received 10 years for crimes which might have had him in jail for 3 or 4 had he been white), during which he converted to join the Nation of Islam, thanks to his brother Wilfred. 

After leaving prison it seems that he found his calling as a minister of the Nation, and spent 11 years preaching morality and universal oneness, and indicting white violence wherever it was to be found. The reader can sense a great deal of (willing) self-denial in X as a member of the Nation of Islam, until he experienced physical and psychological divorce from the Nation after asking Elijah Muhammad, the spiritual father of African-American Islam, to publicly admit to moral lapses (he had fathered the children of 3 of his secretaries).

After this divorce, traumatic though it was, it seems that Malcolm X came to see the world in a different way. There had always been a joyful, unmatched energy about him, even as he was indicting the horrors of white terror, but the impression one gets is of a real unleashing of that energy, a rejection of that former self denial. He was utterly devoted to Muhammad, and that's clear from his reticence to condemn the man who, ultimately, changed his life and the lives of many for the better.  

Another thing that comes through really clearly in this book is Malcolm X's concern with, and intelligent use of, the cult of celebrity. It makes him a recognisably mid-20th Century American figure - and I get the impression he wouldn't have wanted to deny that either. He knew how to gain fame, or infamy, and always associated himself with, even was in thrall to, public figures. He was an expert operator in the era of mass media. I'm sure he's as interesting to media analysts as for historians and sociologists.

He didn't have ideas that people should follow wholesale - certainly when it came to gender - nor indeed did he actually lead specific protest movements that had a material and noticeable impact. He was, rather, a masterful critic of white psyches and power structures, and an extraordinary advocate for raising up black people, in America and everywhere. He was the most prolific and significant public intellectual of the streets, whose like had never been seen, and hasn't since.

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Let’s share a sip of dysfunction

This isn’t really an album review. It’s more of an attempt to understand why The Weeknd’s music often hits me in the gut, even though you could uncharitably call it pretentious fake-deep sadboy pop. 

First of all, his musical stylings become increasingly nostalgic. The production of ‘House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls’ (2011) was all vigour and youthful novelty, but his last two albums have deliberately looked to the past. This is probably driven by two things: the popularity of 80s aesthetics in alt-pop, and the near-impossibility of producing truly original music in this strange era. 

However, knowing the commericial and faddish reasons for this shift doesn’t make me any less of a sucker for it. I was addicted to the Initial Talk remix of Dua Lipa’s New Rules, and i feel the same way about The Weeknd’s music. A big part of my taste in music is 80s cheese which allows me to grope forlornly for a time when I wasn’t even alive. So while on a cultural level this musical trend is damning of the (un)originality of contemporary music, it still hits the spot for me. 

The other thing to consider is The Weeknd’s lyrics. He used to talk about drugs and sex almost exclusively, but it would probably be a mistake to ignore the deep sadness and not-so-faint hints of malice that undercut the Trilogy-era. This macabre side to those tracks is even more obvious to people like me who listened to it primarily at afterparties or on glum post-weekend trips to work/uni/the supermarket (maybe that was literally only me, actually). 

While Starboy was about a wounded pop-king stuck between ecstasy and jealousy, Ater Hours is much more circumspect, with longing and melancholy the main order of business. Therefore it’s pretty much the venn diagram of my musical interests: sadness and synths. He’s been showing us his dysfunction for years now, but the genius of this album is in committing to it as the surface level interpretation of the character. If you think he’s a complex or contradictory figure, I disagree. The fundamental message of most tracks is: I’m not good, and I regret that. 

Wallowing in misery, jealousy, crude statements of love, whining, abdication of responsibility, sexism? All of the above. None of the criticisms of why The Weeknd is bad matter to me, because they are why he’s good. 

Playlist of related music here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2Q7XQDJW66yjlX2iU4Q6UT

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https://open.spotify.com/playlist/32SrQSsLYPR7PeTcidZKqY

I decided to make a playlist full of music that i like at the moment and music that i used to listen to but still like. there is no discernible theme to it other than that most of it is quite sad!!!!!! this is not a podcast but it is me trying to get back into music please enjoy

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FUTURE SHOCK review coming, in a bit

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Songs like this are symmetry, as close to perfection as I can really conceive. For the nine minutes and fifty-two seconds, nothing is particularly challenging or difficult to understand. I think we can keep going back to music because it will always be there, unchanged and comforting, even when everything else is changed. Even in good or quite stable circumstances, the familiarity of music is powerful.

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we having a celebration...

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‘I sometimes feel like, when people say, “if you don’t love yourself no one else will love you” that it’s punitive, and my response is like “oh shit, no one will love me??”’ Great article

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Thankyou Madlib, for bringing this guy to my attention. Beautiful music

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‘Have you seen the moon? Don’t you want to see the stars? The night of the full moon, don’t you want to see it again? You want to close your eyes? The people on the other side would like to take a look here and you want to rush over there?’

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This song exemplifies Andre 3000′s ‘The South got something to say.’ It’s like they say on the album, ‘If you think it's all about pimpin hoes and slammin cadillac doughs‘, you might just be missing the point.

‘I don’t recall, ever graduating at all.’

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This music makes me cry: Uli K - Elusivo

Uli K is part of the Bala Sound movement, which you should read about here.  

https://soundcloud.com/balaclub/sets/uli-k-elusivo

This project follows a theme of dejection, one that I can relate to a bit. The dejection seems to be mostly about a lover who left. That’s part of it, but the beauty of these lyrics encompasses a lot more: it’s just full of amazing bars about depression, and it’s more truthful than near any portrayal of hopelessness in music I can think of. ‘I can’t stop sleeping/there’s too many demons’, ‘I just want to feel ok’, ‘no one thinks of me when I go to sleep’. 

Every song is full of this amazing truth and honesty, but it’s also delusional in its negativity. If you haven’t been depressed you might not get it. It’s this permanent knot in your stomach. Saying you don’t want to be awake is a less extreme version of saying you don’t want to be alive: ‘let me go to sleep/let me rest in peace’. It captures the internal monologue so well - I’m hopeless, I don’t want to live, and it’s a sickness too. 

By far the best track is ‘U Can Have It’, apparently producer h!tkidd sent the beat to Chief Keef and that doesn’t surprise me. The instrumental is gorgeous, and he rides it with such pain but so well. All the instrumentals have a great low-key energy, in fact the UCHI one is upbeat, but that makes his monotone delivery and all the sad shit he’s saying so much stronger. In that way I get hope from this tune. It’s actually made me feel a lot better in a rough patch I’ve been going through, something about the delivery from him and Killavesi is really hypnotic too. Just an amazing song. All 5 songs are, maybe the one with Yung Lean is the weakest.

Uli K is subverting our expectations of rap in two ways: as a lot of people are, they’ve changed up the sound to encompass a slightly more ‘feminine’, melodic style. Most importantly though, it stands against recent rap’s fundamentally positive outlook; not everything is a linear journey towards greatness and fulfillment, towards getting paid or whatever. In fact, some of us are depressed. This honesty is really empowering and it’s helped me personally, as well as just being sick music.