Hype!

Suspending normal service for a little bit of promotional business. The reviews are coming in, and I reserve the right to only post the nice ones here:

“Anyone with any interest in rock ’n’ roll or politics will find multitudes to enjoy here: would that all books about rock ’n’ roll were so intelligent, and all books about history such fun.” – The New Humanist

“Excellent and exhaustive… a fascinating journey.” – The Sunday Times

“Majestic…panoramic… packed with anecdote and detail…profoundly moving.” – The Sunday Telegraph

“Lynskey’s ability to link history, culture, politics and music makes the argument not just for the potency of protest but the need for music journalism. The stories he tells are as epoch-shaping as the songs themselves. 8/10″ – NME

“Amazing… very long and somehow in these times very important.” – Nicky Wire, Manic Street Preachers

“An admirable piece of work… This is a great story book. Each one of these songs has a story and is a story in itself.” – The Irish Times

“Lucid and authoritative” – The Guardian

“A scrupulously researched, elegantly written and highly absorbing account of the intersection of politics and music.” – The Independent

“Excellent” – Lauren Laverne, Grazia

“A gem for history and music buffs alike” – Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

“I can’t recommend it enough.” – Kerry McCarthy MP (Lab, Bristol East)

“Quite an undertaking… It will send you back — or for the first time — to an array of extraordinary songs.” – The Observer

“A panoramic sweep through pop and rock’s insurrectionary past.” -
The Jewish Chronicle

“You’ll never listen to the radio the same way again… Lynskey brings songs you take for granted back to life while making ‘difficult’ songs seem approachable.” – Elle

“Brilliant… Each track is the starting point for a thought-provoking, fluent discourse on a theme. It’s witty, well researched and contains excellent appendices, sources and epilogue.” – Telegraph.co.uk Culture

“Excellent… He mixes interviews new and old with diligent research and plenty of fresh insights. 4/5.” – Time Out

“A meticulous picture of the role of protest in popular music… a compelling, informed and enlightening read.” – The Big Issue

“Superbly written and expertly researched. 4/5.” – Shortlist

“Compassionate.” – The Daily Telegraph

“An extraordinary piece of work… it will undoubtedly take its place alongside Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up and Start Again and Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming as a classic of rock scholarship.” – State (Ireland)

“An intensely satisfying read.” – The Stool Pigeon

“There are some powerful narratives here, which stand as exemplary essays on their subjects… The book’s achievement is not only to make me want to listen to the songs, but to experience more widely the people behind the music.” -
John Self’s Asylum

“Impressive and extensive.” (4/5) – The List

“33 Revolutions Per Minute argues, in an entertaining and readable style, that songs have had the potential to elicit change. 4/5.” – Metro

“A highly read­able and engrossing history of a certain kind of popular movement, with whole sections that can just be dipped into when you’re in the mood.” – The Socialist Worker

“A thorough if necessarily left-wing history of political dissent since the Thirties.” – The Spectator

A piece I wrote for NME.com.

One for the Observer.

A feature and review at The Quietus

An interview with Nemone on 6 Music (starts around 1:08)

And one on Radio 4′s Front Row (starts around 7:20)

And an interview I did with the Scotsman. After 15 years of interviewing people, this is the first time it’s happened to me and it’s an interesting process because you see how, even with a professional, conscientious interviewer, wires can get crossed and errors slip through the net. Celebrities often complain about being “misquoted” or having quotes “taken out of context”, as if journalists are all pernicious muckrakers trying to trip them up. I wonder if what often actually happens is a simple misunderstanding. So I have no criticism at all of the interviewer (because he was great) but in the interests of accuracy:

My parents weren’t true-blue Conservatives. My mum’s a swing voter who voted Conservative in the 80s and Labour in 1997, while my dad never told us who he voted for — my mum thinks it was Green.

My bandmates weren’t from the squat scene, although I did have friends in that scene, living around Lewisham and New Cross.

Burn Baby Burn was about the LA riots of 1992, not 1984.

Although it’s true to say that my band was pretty terrible, it was called Vida Loca (no “La”), after this highly recommended comic book:

Suze Rotolo 1943-2011

Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan’s former girlfriend and muse, died last Thursday after a long illness. I came to admire her a great deal while researching my book. As a so-called “red diaper” baby and member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), she had the radical upbringing that Dylan lacked and she prodded his political conscience into life. Without her input, it’s by no means certain that Dylan would have ever have written Blowin’ in the Wind or Masters of War. She even illustrated several of Dylan’s protest songs when they first appeared in Broadside magazine. After the couple split, and Dylan began to divest himself of what he saw as political baggage, she continued to work as an activist and artist. Here’s the relevant section from my book, the scene being Greenwich Village, 1961:

In some ways, the most important person Dylan met during those first few months in the Village was not an industry figure, but a smart, beautiful seventeen-year-old named Suze Rotolo. They were introduced in July and fell in love almost immediately. At the apartment they shared on West 4th Street, Rotolo fed her boyfriend’s gargantuan appetite for new stimuli with the likes of Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Graves and Bertolt Brecht: he devotes five pages in Chronicles to the ‘outrageous power’ of Brecht and Weill’s ‘Pirate Jenny’ and its terrifying black freighter. Crucially, Rotolo also awoke his political conscience. She was working as a secretary for CORE and came home each night with stories about the civil rights struggle. One day towards the end of January 1962, with a CORE benefit show looming, Dylan composed ‘The Ballad of Emmett Till’, about a black fourteen-year-old who had been beaten and shot to death in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white woman. Bob Dylan the protest singer was born.

Dylan denies he was ever a protest singer, but then he didn’t think Woody Guthrie wrote protest songs either. He argued instead in terms of ‘topical songs’, like those written by his Village contem- poraries Tom Paxton and Len Chandler. ‘He didn’t read or clip the papers and refer to it later,’ Rotolo told Dylan’s biographer, Anthony Scaduto. ‘With Dylan it was not that conscious journalistic approach. It was more poetical. It was all intuitive, on an emotional level.’

News!

The book is in the shops today, a bit earlier than expected. You can get it from Amazon or Waterstones or support your local book shop. Mine just closed down.

I also have a few promo bits coming up that may be of interest. First the live events:

Jewish Book Week, Royal National Hotel, 38-51 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AP, Sunday February 27, 3.30pm, tickets available here
Waterstones, 82 Gower Street, London WC1E 6EQ, Tuesday March 1, 6.30pm, tickets £3 (redeemable against purchase of the book) from 020 7636 1577 or events@gowerst.waterstones.com
<strong>Aye Write! literary festival, The Mitchell Library, North Street, Glasgow G3 7DN, Wednesday March 9, 6pm, tickets available here

And on TV and radio:

BBC Four News – BBC Four, Wednesday February 23, 7pm
Night Waves – Radio 3, Wednesday February 23, 9.15pm
Nemone – 6Music, Monday February 28, 3pm
Front Row, Radio 4, Tuesday March 1, 7.15pm
Robert Elms – BBC London, Wednesday March 2, 1pm
Up All Night – BBC 5 Live, Sunday March 13, 1-5am

And for those who can access Spotify, here are two playlists.

This one features 50 key songs in the book – the 33 chapter titles with a handful of additions, substitutions and omissions. The relevant songs by Bob Dylan (covered here by Odetta instead), Victor Jara, Crass, Huggy Bear and Radiohead are not available on Spotify.

This one features most of the songs mentioned in this blog and will be updated regularly.

PJ Harvey’s universal soldier

You know, I wrote Gladiator 2. Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott read the Proposition and asked me to write Gladiator, and I did write that. And luckily it was so completely unacceptable they didn’t even ask me to do rewrites. It wasn’t makeable. I wanted to write an anti-war film and use the gladiator as a raging war machine. It ended up in Vietnam and the Pentagon. He died in the first one so he comes back as the eternal warrior. It was just this really wacked out script. — Nick Cave to this writer, 2006

I was wanting to show the way history repeats itself, really and so in some ways it doesn’t matter what time it was, because this endless cycle goes on and on and on. — Polly Harvey to NME’s Emily Mackay, 2011

The first time I heard an advance copy of PJ Harvey’s extraordinary new album Let England Shake last December I knew I loved it but I didn’t really understand it. It looks like a message album but the message is occluded and I’ve been puzzling it over ever since. There is so much meaning to unpack and untangle, and even the simplest claims you could make (“It’s about England”; “Its about war”) are problematic. This is the record you get when a very clever, conscientious songwriter sweats to find a new way to deal with very old material.

War songs are about as old as war itself, whether celebrating the righteousness of combat, mourning the cost or simply longing to return home safely. What more is there to say about it? It’s sometimes necessary; it’s always awful. Hence Let England Shake is an anti-war record only in the sense that any vivid description of conflict will be anti-war — it contains no pacifist truisms. Harvey has always been interested in primal urges and the violence that people do to each other; now it is on a political scale.

Harvey has described her role here as bearing witness. “I know there are war poets and war artists and I thought well, where are the war songwriters?” she told NME. But she isn’t observing war firsthand like those poets and artists, nor even (with a couple of exceptions) wars within her lifetime. She is turning to the existing vocabulary of war and creating a collage of different perspectives in a way that reminded me of something former poet laureate Andrew Motion said on Radio 4’s Start the Week on Monday:

I am very aware when I’m reading war poems written by people who haven’t directly had experience of fighting on the frontline that however good their intentions are… there is a danger that they may aggrandise themselves by associating with the subject if they leave it purely and simply in their words… And I thought that by interviewing soldiers, reading books in which soldiers give their witness, and accommodating in my own words some of their thoughts and words, then I might get around that difficulty.

So I disagree with the New Yorker’s Sasha Frere Jones when he calls This Glorious Land “a thunderously obvious protest song”. The language is surely meant to sound blunt and ancient. As the album credits acknowledge, some of her lyrics (All and Everyone, The Colour of the Earth) were taken from the words of soldiers who fought at Gallipoli, others (The Glorious Land, In the Dark Places) from Russian folk songs, still others (The Words That Maketh Murder) from Goya’s brutal series of prints, The Disasters of War. Let England Shake is perhaps not so much about war as modes of representing war, and what they tell us about the endless, bloody cycle of history. The different voices cluster into a single combatant: what Nick Cave calls the eternal warrior and Buffy Sainte-Marie called the universal soldier.

The more you notice, and the more Harvey reveals in interviews, the more clues you find embedded in the record. She has already talked about finding inspiration in Harold Pinter and Jez Butterworth, Dali and Kubrick, the Doors and the Pogues, memoirs of the First World War and blogs from Iraq and Afghanistan, folk songs from Russia, Iraq, Cambodia and Vietnam. For example, the belly dancers in the opening line of Written on the Forehead are taken from New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid’s account of everyday life during the occupation of Iraq, Night Draws Near.

Her quotations and samples are often unusually intrusive — voices from the past poking through like restless spirits, reminders of what went wrong.  (The first time I heard the jarring bugle call on This Glorious Land I thought I had another browser window open.) “All of the samples I used add meaning to the song, and the lyrics I’m singing,” says Harvey. It’s educational tracing them to the source. The voice snaking through England is from Said El Kurdi’s Kassem Miro, a Kurdish song recorded by the Gramophone and Typewriter Company (later EMI) on a talentspotting trip to the British Mandate of Mesopotamia just a few years before it became independent Iraq in 1932. The apocalyptic rasta chant on Written on the Forehead is Niney the Observer’s 1970 hit Blood and Fire, the first of many doom-laden releases as Jamaica plunged further into social and economic chaos.

The title track’s melody from the Four Lads’ 1953 novelty hit Istanbul (Not Constantinople) takes us back to the 1920s, when the Republic of Turkey, rising from the ashes of the defeated Ottoman Empire, insisted on its capital’s new official name. Hanging in the Wire quotes Vera Lynn’s Second World War comforter The White Cliffs of Dover (echoes of Harvey’s 2007 album White Chalk too). And as other critics have already observed, the sardonic quotation from Eddie Cochran’s Summertime Blues (“What if I take my problems to the United Nations?”) throws the reader back to the Cold War 1950s, then further (by association) to the League of Nations’ doomed attempts to broker world peace after the First World War, and then right back to the present day, when the beleaguered UN is no guarantee of peace nor protection.

All this internationalism at first made me think it was meaningless to call Let England Shake a record “about” England but then I realised that England (or rather the United Kingdom) is where all roads lead. Who granted independence to Iraq and Jamaica and ceded it to the USA? Who defeated the Ottoman Empire? Who was a founding member of both the League of Nations and the UN? Who invaded Iraq in 2003? The England that Harvey loves, a place of fog-wreathed mystery on White Chalk, is here a bloodied and bloodthirsty entity. It would not be what it was without the wars that it won and the wars that it lost. “I live and die through England,” she sings. “It leaves sadness/It leaves a taste/A bitter one.”

I think it’s a masterpiece — certainly the most persuasive and original album of political songwriting in many years — and I hardly want to listen to anything else. The mood is hazy and elusive, with simple melodies and a high register chosen (she has said) so as not to make the record overbearing and didactic. The sound is airy, though every song mentions some combination of greedy mud, clawing branches and deep waters, suggesting that war is not so much an offence against nature as a manifestation of it. The earth devours its dead. The universal soldier marches on.

Note: From the top, the pictures are: ANZAC troops during the battle of Chunuk Bair, Gallipoli August 1915; Goya’s Great Deeds! Against the Dead!, from his series The Disasters of War, inspired by the Peninsular War 1808-14; Dali’s The Face of War, inspired by the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939.

Note 2: One influence Harvey has cited is Abel Meeropol’s Strange Fruit (Bitter Branches recalls Meeropol’s original title Bitter Fruit), which I discuss in the first chapter of the book and in this excerpt in today’s Guardian.

“I was born this way”: Lady Gaga, Carl Bean and the disco protest song

So, Born This Way. If you have any interest in pop music then you’ve probably heard it, or at the very least heard about it, this being the most anticipated release since Aung San Suu Kyi’s. I think it’s fine, if effective rather than innovative. Using Madonna maths, Born this Way = Express Yourself (imperious self-help vibe) + Vogue (deadpan spoken-word bit) x Confessions on a Dancefloor (whooshy electro-disco rampage).

What I like about Gaga is the way she endeavours to put some political weight behind her celebration of her “little monsters”, the underdogs and outcasts she considers the core of her fanbase. By speaking out against Arizona’s tough new immigration laws and campaigning intelligently for the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell last year, she connected the self-conscious, stylised outsiderdom of the pop fanatic with the genuine persecution of certain social groups. Interviewed about my book recently, I told someone that I dreamt of a huge, undeniable protest song coming straight from the heart of popular culture, which in 2011 basically means Lady Gaga.

Though she calls it “a message song”, Born This Way isn’t quite the real deal. It’s calculated to be a Gay Pride anthem but one that won’t scare the straights, or indeed anybody else: “No matter gay, straight or bi/Lesbian, transgendered life… black, white or beige/Chola or orient made…” That just about covers it. Unattached to any specific community, the message of overcoming obstacles and “lovin’ who you are” is pretty much the same you could get from Oprah, albeit with a whiff of amyl nitrate.

I hope it will lead some people to look up the inspiration for the title, Carl Bean’s 1977 disco anthem I Was Born This Way. It was written in 1971, just two years after the Stonewall riots, back when there was no such thing as a gay anthem, at least not an explicit one. Bunny Jones, a straight, black, Christian woman, ran a string of beauty salons in Harlem and was shocked by the bigotry suffered by her gay employees. The lyric says homosexuality “ain’t no fault, it’s a fact” (compare Gaga’s “God makes no mistakes”) and builds towards the joyously blunt chorus, “I’m happy, I’m carefree and I’m gay/I was born this way.”

The lyric became a song in 1974, with music by Chris Spierer, and the first version (by 22-year-old Valentino) was distributed by Motown. “No major company has ever had to deal with a gay protest record before,” said Jones. “No one ever stood up and said, ‘I’m gay.’” She soon found out why, because the record flopped. “When the song came on, immediately people would begin dancing, and then when people got to that one word they would stop dancing,” said poor Valentino. “It’s really strange how one word can upset so many people.”

Jones and Motown tried again in 1977, recording a much stronger version with Carl Bean, a gay gospel singer who once attempted suicide in anguish over his sexuality. It, too, failed to cross over but it was a vital and stirring statement in the same year that the Christian conservative singer Anita Byrant led a legal “crusade” against homosexuality. “I am using my voice to tell gay people that they can still feel good about being gay even if there are people like Anita Bryant around,” said Bean. I Was Born This Way still sounds both ecstatic and courageous because of those two words, “I’m gay.” Bean was singing about himself; Gaga is addressing her constituency. His specificity makes the song better. What’s more, Bean’s song (like those of his disco contemporary Sylvester) has a sense of liberating joy, captured in the space and movement of the arrangement; Gaga’s song is dense and unyielding, with that will-to-power hardness that Madonna brought to pop. Bean’s song sounds like it’s bursting upwards; Gaga’s sounds like it’s bearing down on you.

But I don’t want to use Bean’s record as a stick with which to beat Gaga’s. The hype around Born This Way’s online premiere breeds snap judgements (like this one) but I think the song’s significance will only become clear a few months down the line. In the disco era, Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive was a post-break-up song inspired by a potentially career-ending back injury; McFadden and Whitehead’s Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now was simply celebrating the duo’s emergence as major artists after years as underappreciated songwriters; and Sister Sledge’s We Are Family described the tight bond between the four sisters, but they all became anthems for black, gay and feminist listeners because that’s what the audience demanded. I can imagine Born This Way in contexts where it will sound radical and fierce, and others where it will be no more than glittery wallpaper. Listeners — the little monsters and beyond — will decide the song’s cultural fate, which is how it should be.

UPDATE: Jon Savage, among others, reminded me of yet another Born This Way, recorded by Dusty Springfield in 1990. I notice on YouTube that some people have posted it as proof of Gaga’s heinous plagiarism but it’s not – it’s just further evidence of the title phrase’s staying power.

UPDATE 2: The Daily Beast, in a piece called “Gays Turn on Lady Gaga”, spoke to Carl Bean about Gaga’s song:

Asked what he thought of Gaga’s latest song, Bean was diplomatic. After a lengthy pause, he said “Uh, it’s dance. I heard it. I can’t really critique it. I don’t like to judge other artists.” He quickly added he takes it as a “compliment” that Gaga did a song that is clearly, on some level, an homage to him.

Note: A couple of comments on this blog made me think more about how the born-this-way idea has changed over time. In the 1970s, it was a strong argument to use against religious homophobes — God made everybody so how could homosexuality be wrong? In 2011, not only has the debate moved on, but it actually contradicts Gaga’s usual argument about how you can be whatever you want to be, about remaking your identity, as she is constantly doing. But at this point I just accept that she probably latched on to the phrase because it’s catchy and don’t expect it to represent her views on genetic determinism and the nature of human sexuality. It is, after all, a pop song, not a research paper.

The revolution will be televised on Al Jazeera

Stuck for time so I present this without much comment: the song being pitched as the Egyptian protest’s hip hop anthem. I’m not entirely convinced by its artistic merits — it’s self-consciously solemn rather than rousing — but it had to happen and timing counts for a lot. For once the much-abused Gil Scott-Heron line is actually relevant: “”I heard them say the revolution won’t be televised/Al Jazeera proved them wrong/Twitter has them paralysed.”

Libraries gave us power

Nicky Wire writing about library closures in the Guardian.

One of the most amazing things about public libraries remains their utter classlessness. You don’t have to have gone to Eton to make the most out of a library. They aren’t inhabited by the kind of people currently damning them. The closure of libraries in conjunction with tuition fees, the sell-off of our forests and radical reorganisation of the NHS are symbolic of the blatant power grab of this fiasco of a government. There is a way of solving these problems – it’s called higher taxation of the wealthiest 10% of the country. In the 90s, I’d have gladly included myself in that bracket.

We need to cherish these things while they still exist. Seek solace, seek knowledge. Seek power.

“Governments can go to hell”

Like a lot of people, I’ve been transfixed by recent uprisings in north Africa and the middle east. Like a lot of people, I’ve relied on writers with a far greater understanding of the region (like, say, the Guardian’s Ian Black) to explain why this is happening and where it might lead. It’s a lightheaded experience for most British observers — the thrill and joy of watching people overthrow, or at least shake up, hated authoritarian regimes, tinged with anxiety as to exactly who will fill the power vacuum, and a sobering sense of how little you really know about these countries.

But you can at least appreciate the spectacle. In 1967 Allen Ginsberg influenced the shape of US antiwar protests by arguing that “national politics [is] theatre on a vast scale, with scripts, timing, sound systems. Whose theatre would attract the most customers, whose was a theatre of ideas that could be gotten across?” A modern demonstration is part street theatre, in which long ignored voices suddenly break into the public sphere. You can see that theatricality in the homemade protest signs they hold up for the cameras, and you can hear it in the songs. I’m not yet sure what rallying anthems the Egyptian crowds sing but Tunisians have a rapper called El Général.

The Tunisian revolution began on December 17 with the self-immolation of a young fruit seller called Mohamed Bouazizi, who was protesting police violence and corruption. While he lay in a hospital bed, 22-year-old Hamada Ben Amor, aka El Général, posted an online video of himself furiously addressing “Mr President”: Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. One line — “I see too much injustice and so I decided to send this message even though the people told me that my end is death” — was more than typical hip hop bravado. On January 6, two days after Bouazizi died of his injuries, the rapper was arrested by a horde of plainclothes policemen and not heard from for several days. Meanwhile, demonstrations spread and dozens of protesters were shot by government forces. When, a week later, those forces refused orders to shoot anymore, it was game over for Ben Ali. He fled to Saudi Arabia on January 14.

DJ Alaeddine Ben Amor (no relation) told NPR that he played El Général’s song (which translates as either Mr President or Head of State) to celebrate Tunisian radio’s new freedom from censorship: “If I played that before, I’d be in jail. That’s it.”

Last Saturday (Jan 29) El Général greeted his audience for the first time when he performed his song to hundreds of supporters at an opposition party rally in a Tunis sports hall. “Now that the dictator has left, I can finally breathe,” he said with relief. The crowd, further energised by news from Egypt, chanted “Mubarak! Mubarak! Saudi Arabia is waiting for you!” Ben Amor had a new song for the occasion, celebrating the revolution and calling for more like it: “Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Morocco, all must be liberated/Long live free Tunisia!”

“It’s not music for pleasure,” one student told the Sydney Morning Herald. “It’s music with a real message. It helped people rise up.”

In 2007, I interviewed musicians from Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Morocco, who had come together under the name Music Matbakh. One, the celebrated Egyptian guitarist Ousso, told me about the Mubarak regime’s crackdown on the burgeoning heavy metal scene in 1996, when musicians were falsely charged with satanism. “I was very lucky,” he said. “But I would say 90% of the scene went to jail.”

The experience had made him cautious and canny. He paid the police to protect his underground music festival in Cairo and invited the children of government officials along. His expressions of dissent were subtle. “We have a message and if you want to understand it you will and if not that’s OK. You want to change things in a clever way and spend the longest time outside a jail.”

But if the mood in Tunisia in recent weeks made it possible for someone as blunt and angry as El Général to be heard and to prevail, then the kaleidoscope has been shaken. The region is changing, tongues are loosening and it will be interesting to see what they say out loud. As Ousso told me of his friends from across the middle east, “All musicians say [in private] the same thing: governments can go to hell.”