An updated and more refined version of this graph.
Left to right, the ratio of visits on Hardcore for Nerds received from each state (August-November 2008) to its share of US population (adjusted for broadband penetration). And on the vertical axis, the positive or negative vote-margin in each state for Obama-Biden (Delaware, Hawaii and Illinois have been re-adjusted to 2004 levels). The trend (regression) line has an r-squared value of just under 0.55, which is an expression of how well the date points conform to a linear trend (answer: moderately well).
For example: Pennsylvania (PA) had 1.54 times the number of visits that would be expected from its population size (against the number of readers from the US overall) and broadband penetration, and went for Obama by a margin of 10.37%. It's also quite close to the trend line, meaning it's not an outlier...
Alaska, what's up?
D.C., rock top!
Mississippi, you need more punk...
Addendum: same graph with the readership expressed as visits per 100,000 population (adjusted for broadband penetration) here.
I (cont.): (i) Arthur Koestler, (ii) Cold War Kids and (iii) FiveThirtyEight.com
As I've indicated before, this set of posts is intended to express some of my feelings about the Obama victory and to tease out some of the relations between culture and politics on the blog. It's about reflecting on a moment, an undeniably historic occasion but also one which is tied into ordinary things.
This past week - as in, the period leading up to the election result - I've been reading through The Invisible Writing, the second half, beginning in 1932, of Arthur Koestler's autobiography. The action is entirely coincidental to the election - it's been on my shelf for about six months - but nevertheless, the book contains some deep political history, and is just generally a fascinating thing to read during the last days of a doomed Republican campaign and the emergence of a transformational, left-of-centre Democratic candidate as President-Elect of the USA.
That would ideally be a post for Steady Diet of Books - I will hopefully keep that for one of Koestler's novels - but here I'll pair it with an album that I've been listening to a lot this and previous weeks as well. The Cold War Kids' second album, Loyalty to Loyalty is a bit of a slow burner and a fair improvement on their previous Robbers and Cowards, but what it most represents in this context is a small collection of semi-mainstream and semi-left field albums that are coming at me from quintessentially American culture, or counter-culture as it may be; the jazz-rock blues of Cold War Kids, or the faux-Springsteen post-punk of the Gaslight Anthem's The '59 Sound.
And finally, there's the overtly political internet culture of this 2008 election. I visit Organizing Grievances frequently, as it's the blogging home of fellow Hoover (the band, not the president...) aficianado, Lex Dexter but also a group of Oregonian union-involved lefties (hence the name). The partisanship can't necessarily be described as good-humoured, but it is usually quite funny. For more statistical knowledge I head over to the excellent site FiveThirtyEight.com - Electoral Predictions Done Right. It's from there that I got a well-founded certainty about the result, more so than from snapshot polling and trickle-down Republican spin. (The image above is a composite of - bottom -their final projection - and top - their 'call' as yesterday of the electoral college [since when, they have called the Omaha district of Nebraska for Obama, and Missouri for McCain].)
(i)
"Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest in 1905... For six years (1932-38) he was an active member of the Communist Party, and was captured by Franco's troops in the Spanish Civil War and imprisoned under sentence of death. In 1940 he came to England, adopting the language with his first book, Scum of the Earth. His publications manifest a wide range of political, scientific and literary interests, and include Darkness at Noon, Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing. He died in 1983 by suicide, having frequently expressed a belief in the right to euthanasia."
(from the frontispiece to The Invisible Writing)
Darkness at Noon is one of the best novels I've ever read, and certainly the most affecting in simultaneous political and personal terms. The story of Rubashov is equal to its significance to any individual tale of the Jewish Holocaust, or the actual Russian novels of Solzhenitsyn. It's an indictment of the Soviet state - as of all totalitarianism - and of the theory of Communism. Darkness at Noon forms the middle part of a progressive trio of 'invisible writing' begun while Koestler was still officialy affiliated with the Communist Party, with The Gladiators, a historical novel about the Spartacus rebellion in Ancient Rome (I'll admit that I haven't yet read the final work, Arrival and Departure).
The Invisible Writing is Koestler's memoir of that period, both in his personal life and in the tumultous political events of the 1930s. As the quote from the Observer on the back of the book states, it is "a brilliant and deeply moving record of a whole generation as well as of an individual". It was a generation of change, of charismatic but demagogic leaders, and of three conflicting ideologies: fascism, liberal democracy and socialism/communism. That last, the Left, was itself conflicted before, during and after the brief rise of the Popular Front in 1936, and it was this conflict that Koestler lived and wrote through. His European, twentieth-century and fundamentally critical perspective on 'socialism' provides an interesting bas relief for that last, most farcical part of the McCain campaign:
"Every period has its dominant religion and hope, and 'Socialism' in a vague and undefined sense was the hope of the early twentieth century. So much so that German 'National-Socialists', French 'Radical-Socialists', Italian 'Christian-Socialists' all felt the need to include the fetish-word into their names. In the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics this hope seemed to have found its incarnation; and the magic worked, and still works, with various degrees of intensity, on a considerable portion of mankind. The realisation of the full truth about the regime which now rules one-third of the world : that it is the most inhuman regime in human history and the gravest challenge that mankind has as yet encountered, is psychologically as difficult to face for most of us as an empty heaven was for a Gothic man. The difficulty is almost the same for the illiterate Italian peasant as for a highly literate French novelist like Sartre, or for a highly realistic politician like the late President Roosevelt - who sincerely believed that Stalin's regime was a kind of uncouth, Asiatic New Deal; and that after the war America would 'get on very well with Stalin and the Russian people', and that the only threat to post-war peace would come from Britain's imperialistic designs. That the great American President could believe this, in spite of all the available evidence about Communist theory and Soviet practice, that experienced democratic politicians all over the world could believe this, not to mention scientists, scholars and intellectuals of every variety, is an indication of the deep, myth-producing forces that were and still are at work."
The Invisible Writing, p. 475.
(ii)
Cold War Kids, 'Against Privacy' from Loyalty to Loyalty (2008)
I haven't found out that much about Cold War Kids, either about their religious influences or which specific generation the name refers to. I was born in '87, so technically I was around for the last years of the Cold War, but I'm guessing it's more aimed at people who spent their whole childhood under the spectre of nuclear annihilation.
Pitchfork give their album from this year a middling 5.1; a marginal increase on the 5.0 for its predecessor, of which the review says: "With superficial storytelling, monolithic melodies, and the heavy-handed symbolism of a school project, Robbers and Cowards insults our intelligence a few times too often." I wouldn't be so inclined to defend the latter; apart from the instantly impressive 'We Used to Vacation', 'Hang Me Up to Dry', and 'Pregnant', the album kind of fell flat on me. However, the first single for Loyalty to Loyalty, 'Something Is Not Right with Me', caught my attention again. Though the album happily has a far more consistent quality to it, the single is not entirely representative of the new subtler, stripped-back sound. The off-key but beautifully expressive voice is still very much there, which might be a problem for some people (e.g. Pitchfork) but not for me.
Cold War Kids "carry a topicality absent in much of modern rock", which for Pitchfork is merely a mitigating circumstance:
"Opener "Against Privacy" somehow turns out to be heavy-handed about its opacity-- you can imagine it's about Republicans from the few lines that take, but it trips up on Willett‘s conspiratorial Yorke-isms ("Forget ex-girlfriends/ We want little governments") and a complete lack of a hook"
You can decide the last part for yourself, but I think it's a great song. As I said, compared to Robbers and Cowards it's much more understated. It opens with jazzy percussion and ethereal, muffled melodies, then leans towards propulsive rockiness and that wonderful clanging, metallic bass sound straight out of The Boom. And that's why I like this album so much - it feeds into a sort of an atypical, Left Americana that I hear in the more obscure - and arguably more authentic - sounds of The Boom, The Sorts, Just A Fire, Regulator Watts, etc. I don't know their exact ages, but I'm assuming that the members of Hoover were in or around their late teens early twenties in 92-94, which would make them (and most of their contemporay listeners) Cold War kids as well.
The other album that I was listening to throught last week was the latest album from The Gaslight Anthem, The '59 Sound. Again, another stunning single - the title track - but it took a recommendation from Worship and Tribute to make me actually listen to the album. The title track, and most of the album, is total but brilliant Bruce worship (they're from New Brunswick, NJ, by the way). There are slow songs that sound, vocally at least, a lot like the Killers, but contrary to expectations it actually works out very well. As Springsteen-esque pop-punk goes, this is better I think than the Hold Steady (who never gained my attention much beyond mentioning Sal Paradise in a, in hindsight, typically pretentious way) but not as good as the Bouncing Souls on either Anchors Aweigh or The Gold Record. It is appropriate, then, that those two albums can be relegated to history as statements of defiance and hope during the Bush era.
(iii)
And finally to the internets, something which was never McCain's strong point. I should have added Organizing Grievances into the section above, because in addition to Cold War Kids and The Gaslight Anthem I was listening to Lex Dexter's Prisonship Tape: Formats EP mixtape: four songs of modern American rock, all of course left-wing approved; Teenage Fanclub, Prisonshake, Ryan Adams and the Cardinals and the fascinating and quasi-Slintish The New Year, featuring guitarists Matt and Bubba Kadane of Bedhead, and Chris Brokaw, one-time member of Codeine, on drums.
And so on to FiveThirtyEight.com, named after the number of delegates in the electoral college, my go-to place for polling, prediction and general 'poli-sci' - as you say in the States (or Sciences Po as they say in France) - information on the election. Run by Nate Silver, a professional baseball statistician, the site's purpose is: "Most broadly, to accumulate and analyze polling and political data in way that is informed, accurate and attractive. Most narrowly, to give you the best possible objective assessment of the likely outcome of upcoming elections." (from the FAQ and Statement of Methodology). Basically, it collates polling data, but on top of that it runs a whole series of statistical analyses culminating in a simulation, 10,000 times, to create a 'probabilistic assessment' of the elections outcome.
In the final set of predictions, of those 10,000 scenarios Obama won the popular vote in 98.67% of them, and McCain in 1.33% (and the outcome of McCain losing the popular vote but still winning the election, 0.31%). From the maps above, you can see how accurate their predictions were on a state-by-state basis, with only Indiana (and the Omaha district of Nebraska) being mispredicted, as a 'lean GOP' (Omaha was 'likely GOP'). Behind those graphics, of course, was a wealth of statistical information, openly presented and explained.
With those kinds of numbers, I really had no reason to stay up on Tuesday night. Irrationality and curiosity kept me up, while the news media continued to act like McCain had a chance (that is, a chance of more than 2%) of defeating Obama. People told me "well, Kerry was ahead in the polls last time"; BBC Newsnight went on a trip to Pennsylvania to talk to drive-time talk show hosts who said the state's blue-collar democrats resented Obama's gun control stance (guns being necessary for hunting, fishing and camping apparently - I get the first, but the other two?) and his "socialist, even communistic I would say" economic policies. And, in the end, that was all just a waste of time.
Hindsight is 20/20 (it's not actually, as any reading of conflicting history books will tell you) but that doesn't mean foresight is irrational. There's a 'Super Tracker' trend-line graph on 538, part of which - showing McCain last ahead in any of the polls sometime in September, and a steep climb and minor arc for Obama thereafter - reminds me of the 'hockey-stick' graph for man-made climate change; incontrovertible statistical evidence that events have gone one way, and only an impressive amount of spin can convince people otherwise.
Next up - New Beginnings: Part Two - Hoover, 'Side Car Freddie'/'Cable'
DD - "What kind of an eruption are you talking about?"
GV - "Well... may I talk the facts of life to you? The BBC audience I know very well, and they like the facts of life..."
From the BBC election coverage on Tuesday night, I think shortly after the overall result was officially called by the networks - they didn't show a clock on screen, just like a Las Vegas casino. David Dimbleby is a well-known television presenter for the BBC, while Gore Vidal is a somewhat longer-established cultural landmark of US literature. So it's quite funny when Vidal says "well, I don't know anything about you", and also with everything else he says. But there's plenty of serious talk in it too.
This was the best election coverage available to me (the competition being RTE, which was quite good, and Sky News and CNN, which were not so much). Not sure if there's anything good on YouTube of Simon Schama vs. John Bolton, or John Bolton vs. the BBC reporter in Phoenix (you display "a fundamental ignorance of the Republican Party" - Bolton said that, not her).
After they pack it in with Gore Vidal here in this clip there's a minute or so of analysis with one of the pundits - the one with the moustache - who's name I've forgotten, but earlier in the coverage he described a historic bias in exit polls, in favour of Democrats, as due to Republicans "being more suspicious of the news media". Sad - and scary - if true. Because it can really be rather entertaining.
Last night I stayed up until about 2.45 AM (GMT, EST+5) by which time the BBC - taking their lead on exit poll projections from ABC - had called Ohio for Obama. I could then go to sleep with the virtual certainty - not that there was much call for doubt before then, a point to which I'll return - that he had won the election. Sure enough, the first thing I heard in the morning on the RTE news was a mention of 'President-Elect Obama'; and from that point on there seemed to be more sunshine in the late autumnal - or as you so quaintly call it, 'fall' - vibrancy of the day.
I'm not an American, of any type, in case you haven't noticed: that is, except for the majority part of my CD and record collection; my bookshelf, not so much, other than the Kerouac/De Lillo/Auster/Palahniuk section; and also the creeping use of idiom by the influence of blogging. 'Hardcore for Nerds' is in its original essence - emo - an American term and invention. While my politics are naturally Irish and European, as well as global, my interest in culture is predominantly American in its source and in its direction of exploration. Yet culture, in either its social or artistic forms, can hardly be separated from politics; so in short, we're back to Obama again.
However, my interest in the Obama phenomenon - the Obama actuality - is not wholly, or even mostly, cultural. I am a student of politics by both scholarship and temperament, just as am one of history and historic events. The quote above I probably haven't used for about five years, the last time being a school essay on the diplomacy of great-power Europe. There are plenty of things that I wouldn't want to compare between Bismarck's Prussian imperialism and the actions of a 21st-century US politician, but no analogy is perfect. In fact, it's not even an analogy: it's a classic statement of realism, which can be deliberately twisted to fit the idealism - the hope - of today (and a riposte to those who see an Obama presidency as inevitably and harmfully not living up to expectations).
This past week I had been toying with various ideas for a pre-election post, something to express my ideological support for this candidacy, while not seeming to interfere in the sovereign democracy of America or generally play up my snooty European-ness. The obvious answer to the first problem is that the election of the so-called 'leader of the free world' is a global issue, and a huge part of the international support for Obama is due to his more reasoned stance on foreign policy issues, and the expectation - critical amongst Americans abroad - that he will rehabilitate the US's image around the world.
Outside that sphere, the differences between social democratic Europe and fiercely individualistic America seem to hinder communication over domestic issues of economy or society. In the eyes of the more critical, and perhaps discerning commentators, the Irish and European almost one-sided attitude towards the Obama/McCain conflict was an illusion based on these differing domestic spheres (in Ireland, for example, abortion is almost completely illegal and the vast majority of primary schools are run directly by the Catholic Church, but we still look at Sarah Palin as if she's a crazed dinosaur).
There was one rather interesting and major argument put forward for why the Irish shouldn't be so supportive of O'Bama - his tendency towards economic protectionism. Compared to John McCain's firm support for free trade, Barack Obama's stated intent to dissuade US companies from availing of tax advantages through setting up in (and therefore taking jobs to) other countries, directly threatens the huge section of the Irish economy that is based on attracting US IT and pharmaceutical corporations with our skilled labour force and low corporate tax rate (12.5%). I'm not too worried - either way - however, because a) I'm opposed to a low-tax economy in the first place, either as the basis for under-funded public services or as essentially an unfair or unearned comparative advantage in global trade (profiting chiefly the owners of the large corporations), while b) a significant part of Europe wants us to get rid of it anyway - pace Lisbon - and finally c), see the quote above. He can't do everything.
...
I (cont.): Arthur Koestler, The Cold War Kids and FiveThirtyEight.com
"….More generally, the Frankfurt theorists contended that, quite contrary to the optimism of such liberal-pluralists as Edward Shils, the media made the world of serious culture made widely accessible only at the price of depriving it of its critical substance. For the media, by bringing culture into everyday life, wrenched it from the tradition which had guaranteed it its separateness just as the techniques of mass reproduction deprived the work of art the ‘aura’ of its uniqueness on which alone its critical function could be predicated. Marcuse argues the point with force and clarity:
The neo-conservative critics of leftists critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth. The intent and function of these works have thus fundamentally changed. If they once stood in contradiction to the status quo, this contradiction is now flattened out. (Marcuse, 1970, p. 64)
It is this aspect of the Frankfurt critique which has been taken up most frequently by cultural theorists on the left. In particular, mention should be made of Walter Benjamin who argued that the development of techniques permitting the reproduction of works of art on a limitless scale, depriving them of their ‘aura’, the uniqueness of their singular existence, had created the technical preconditions whereby art, in being freed from the sacredness of its singular presence, was able to enter the domain of politics in a form in which it could be both produced and appropriated by the masses (Benjamin, 1970).
This was decidedly not the perspective of the Frankfurt theorists. Art, they argued, could fulfil its oppositional function only by refusing any compromise with reality. But, by the same token, it was thereby unable to have any impact on the consciousness of those whose minds are forged in the midst of a compromised reality. If art did compromise so that it might be made available to the masses it would, by the same token, lose its oppositional value. Adorno summarised this dilemma as follows:
The effect that they [works of art] would wish to have is at present absent, and they suffer from that absence greatly; but as soon as they attempt to attain that effect by accommodating themselves to prevailing needs, they deprive men of precisely that which they could.. give them. (Cited in Slater, 1977)
- Tony Bennett, p. 45 (1982) "Theories of the media, theories of society" in Gurevitch, M. et al Culture, Society and the Media (London: Meuthen). Emboldens are my own.
(0.) Punk set out to be, or should have achieved the status of, the ultimate oppositional form of art, and post-punk was a recognition of the failure of that agenda. Or that Adorno’s remark could be used as a brief history, rise and fall, of punk rock in the 20th century.
In this previous post I mentioned Nicholas Rombes's statement in his essay on the Ramones' first album for the 33 1/3rd series of music books that “Ramones is either the last great modern record, or the first great postmodern one”, and then I drew a comparison to ex-Mclusky Shooting at Unarmed Men's Triptych from this year. Postmodernism is a tricky subject (= can be a load of shite), but a valid one nevertheless, and absolutely crucial to understanding the (current) relationship between art and reality.
1. The Wire as a realist, but not realistic, show. This was dealt with I think somewhere on Heaven and Here, and it's important to use in answering the (minority) critical backlash to what is seen as a sycophantic consensus on the Wire's status as televisual art and its literary honesty. While the Wire reflects reality - in multiple levels of political, economic and social injustice - it does this in the process of producing not a documentary, but a drama and a novelistic work of art.
2.Lungfish as an obscurantist band. If they are indeed separate from the punk/post-punk/hardcore/post-hardcore division of intellectual labour in Western alternative music, and really represent a rock group that transcends even the concept of transcendence in rock music; does this explain why the metaphysical, utterly vague yet heavily image-centred lyrics and repetitive, reproduced sound expresses so simply a certain rawness and uncompromising reality of their art?
3.Shooting at Unarmed Men as a postmodern take on the ‘reality’ of punk rock. Triptych takes layers of garage punk rock and post-punk experimentalism, the directness, urgency of lo-fi and the expansiveness, ambience of post-rock; and it melds them all into a three-part album which expresses both the archaic coherence of the 'album' or record and the fragmentation of progressive art after the modern era. Triptych may be the most exciting punk rock album I have heard this year, and the most novel but also the most rooted in the fluid, constructed truth of that musical genre. The oppositional art in the postmodern world of politics.
Shooting at Unarmed Men - 'The Cock-A-Doodle-Doo of Democracy'
Click the picture to enlarge. Further explanation (kinda technical) added below.
I've been wanting to do this for a while...
From left to right is the distribution of Hardcore for Nerds readers from the United States, in terms of the percentage of the readership (via Google Analytics) from each state, relative to its percentage of the population overall. It is expressed in terms of % difference: for example, New York on the extreme left makes up 6.31% of the US population and 10.31% of visits to this blog from the US, hence a percentage point difference of almost exactly (+)4%.
The clear columns going up and down are the distribution of red (down) and blue (up) states, according to FiveThirtyEight.com as of today [Friday Oct. 3rd]. So while Florida (second from the extreme right) may switch to a red state in the end, Alaska on the left is not realistically going to switch to blue. You can adjust the exact data points according to whatever predictions you follow, but the overall trend is clear.
And also, I suppose, fairly obvious to begin with. However, this is the statistical proof* that Hardcore for Nerds is a blue state blog...
* as a politics student and someone who is generally very good at mathematics, I absolutely do not stand over the validity of this exercise in any way.
EXPLANATION: Basically this graph shows a strong correlation between whether a state has above or below average readership of the blog (as against its share of the national population) and whether it is a 'red' or 'blue' state in current electoral terms. (Blue for Democratic - Obama - and red for Republican - McCain, incidentally in complete reversion of the traditional British-Irish/European political scheme, which assigns blue for conservative and red for left-wing or socialist)
The switch from blue to red occurs almost exactly with the point that readership drops from exactly average (no difference between % of readership and % of population) to below average. With the exception of Alaska, all the above-average readership states are blue, leading to the statement above.
On the below-average side, it's a little bit more complicated. Some of them, like Delaware and (I guess) Washington, are firmly in the blue camp. Others are more easily identified as swing states: Ohio, Michigan, Florida and New Mexico.
Please note that the order of the states on the graph is in decreasing positive (and then increasing negative) magnitude of difference between % of readership and % of population. They are not adjusted for population. So a large magnitude of difference does not necessarily represent a huge disparity of readership; rather it represents a relative measure, a function of a) the population size and b) the actual disparity of readership per head.
Therefore the fact of whether a state is close or far away from the centre of the graph (low % difference) changes its significance according to where the state stands in terms of its population size. States that are large should be closer to the edges - if they are not, then they have a more average level of readership than those that are; and small states should be in the centre; if they are not, then they have a high disparity (for example Connecticut, which probably has a lot to do with this blog.)
For bonus marks, you can tell me why this means, statistically speaking, that the three swing states on the far right could be expected to be in that position, or - to phrase the question differently, and a slight hint - why the states in that position could be expected to be (important) swing ones?
Over at my other blog, Steady Diet of Books ('unveiled Fugazi reference') I've made the first post in a good while, on a book that I've barely just finished reading, Jon Savage's Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture. The whole book is fascinating, from a historical, social and cultural perspective, but what was obviously going to be of particular interest to me was the chapter on "German Swing Kids and French Zazous". The first being the inspiration for the 90s San Diego emo/hardcore group, but the movement being in general a fascinating expression of rebellion through the cutting-edge music of the 30s and 40s, jazz (and a mirror to a lot of the later youth rebellion of punk).
Hence, after a cursory description and review of the book, I spend most of the post providing a summary of the relevant chapters.
The picture above is nothing to do with jazz, it's just on the front cover. 'Swing High' was, apparently, the adopted greeting of the 1930s Dusseldorf-based International Rhythm Club.
'Moments Pass’ from Moonpies for Misfits (EP), No Idea Records 1999.
Choosing A Flight and a Crash as one of the standard bearers of punk rock in the 21st century didn’t go down too well, but by and large I stand by my choice. However, I am a bona fide fan of old school Hot Water Music, and yes, I could see Forever and Counting (vinyl repress in the mail!) as my favourite too, or Fuel for the Hate Game, or No Division. Moonpies for Misfits is a four-song EP that fits, musically, in between Forever and Counting and No Division (it was released on the No Idea label in the same year, 1999, as the latter album was on Some Records).
It may not be the very best HWM record (for that, see above) but it’s still almost perfect in its own way. I found this review on Amazon which sums it up pretty well:
“The little DIY outfit from Gainesville that could. Hot Water Music have kept their integrity intact throughout their rise from Florida emo-core legends to mid-major label rising stars. This EP offers 4 songs from an era when the band was just blooming and realizing the extent of their artistic ability...”
Or, more generally, consult the emo non-bible that is Fourfa, which says (in reference to Finding the Rhythms/Fuel For the Hate Game, which is a few years earlier, but still the old Hot Water Music style):
“Takes the best of the Fuel/Fugazi twin vocal/twin guitar drive and adds a sweaty Avail pop-punk pulse, with scratchy, gruff singing that doesn't need to be beautiful to get the point across. This band positively embarrasses bands with only one singer.”
If you want a great overview of the Hot Water Music sound from Finding the Rhythms up until No Division (and including a brief diversion into the Blacktop Cadence’s Chemistry for Changing Times), head over to Music for the Working Man and download the two podcasts available there. Mostly, he lets the music speak for itself, but adds in some of the story too and - best of all – isn’t afraid to say the word ‘emo’ or ‘emocore’.
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’Moments Pass’ opens up Moonpies for Misfits with a relatively unusual, for Hot Water Music, sideswipe of feedback - and then kicks, or rather chugs, into life. Sometimes earlier HWM sounds too dense, too full of weight, to be easily accessible – and this might turn a lot of people off – but what this song demonstrates is the melody suffused into the hardcore drive, a legacy of the ‘emocore’ genre in general and of the album Forever and Counting in particular. ‘Moments Pass’ is a song about seizing life as it comes, or as the liner notes to Live at The Hardback say: “this song is about taking advantage of the time we have with our friends or loved ones now. Mainly because we never know what tomorrow will unfold.”
“and up to yours to sit down for a fucking cup of coffee and shoot the shit.”
‘Another Way’ is one of Hot Water Music’s personal/political songs, like ‘A Clear Line’ from A Flight and a Crash. “Say what’s wrong with this way, beside the fact it’s not in the book you read”. Independence, tolerance, plurality and “no division” are all elements of the Hot Water Music philosophy; but it’s personal too, a way to live one’s own life in co-existence and in community with others, despite all the difficulties inherent in that approach. E pluribus unum, and all that. I’m not sure if I should really mention Obama (again) here, but from what I see the US has immensely polarised politics – compared to a broadly social democratic Europe, at least – and this is something punk hasn’t often helped with. Often with good reason, of course, but I’d much rather see an emergence of Obama (left of-)centrism than a re-run of anti-Reagan (and anti-Bush) punk rock with McCain as presidential hate figure.
"Day by day we all change. Systems change.
So why can’t we accept other ways, in respect
to learn for our own?"
‘Where We Belong’ is a relationship song, a “song as a story of a crucial turning point in two people’s lives. Two people who found a peace through love they thought they would never know and learned how to keep it… from rooftops then, to rooftops now we’ve seen why we’re still here and who we’re both about…” (Live at The Hardback liner notes.) A lot of this song sounds more like Fuel For the Hate Game, a rawer, rougher sound, before it moves into a meandering, melodic passage straight out of Forever and Counting. Climbing and building, ever upward and rhythmically.
“Start now. Start right. Stay strong. Stay tight.
And we can rise side by side."
'Moonpies for Misfits' is another song that tells a story, of change from youthful arrogance/indifference to similar but more mellowed adulthood, still as strong and as forthright but more lastingly so: "face to face here we stand strong, but this time we stand for good". It's the quintessential post-hardcore song, the sound and the attitude from after the heady excesses of punk. Just as heavy - though a slower song than the other three - and fundamentally moving, it also has that profound sense of repose, of position, of difficult calm, that inhabits Hot Water Music's best work.
Moonpies for Misfits is out of print at No Idea, but plenty of copies are still available on Amazon. Live at The Hardback is still for sale on vinyl or CD from No Idea.
* Moonpies, for non (Southeastern?)-Americans, are a trademark type of biscuit (‘cookie’) consisting of two round Graham crackers sandwiching a marshmallow and dipped in chocolate. The English translation of ‘Moonpies for Misfits’ would essentially be ‘Wagon Wheels for Wankers’.
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(Click to expand & read liner notes)
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A final note on the cover artwork. Just looking at it on the screen now, it's amazing. There are equally good Hot Water Music covers, such as the discombobulated man on A Flight and A Crash or the bellicose mutants on the front of Fuel for the Hate Game. In fact, all their album covers are of superbly high quality - because they are all done by the same artist, Scott Sinclair (SINC, as you can see in the corner.)
It's a pity, because of the high quality, that there isn't much on the internet about Sinclair's work - although he is a professional artist. He has a Myspace and a website in construction (there's nothing there at the moment, other than a damn cool title picture). I remember he used to have a site where one could look at a variety of his work, HWM and non-HWM.
I'm no art critic, but I guess I could describe SINC's style as a sort of modernist, semi-cubist form. Although it has evolved just as much as the band's sound, it has always matched Hot Water Music's vibe: hard edges, muted colours, but a whole lotta feeling and pathos put into the image. 'Moonpies for Misfits' has the one central figure, a man stripped to the waist and apparently carrying a pick-axe. In its stance, it could almost seem like a Socialist Realist tableau - but the figure appears just as skinny and emaciated as it does muscular - more Picasso-like. SINC's artworks, particularly his skeletal, awkard male forms, often put me in mind of Picasso's The Old Guitarist - although it's a Blue Period painting, not (directly) a Cubist one. Either way, there's that sense of physical tragedy, of the conflict between the weaknesses and strengths of the human form.
SINC's figure stands against an abstract background of back-and-forth arrows, all except one bright red arrow painted in muted colours. But they are not so abstract as to be unreal - the figure casts a definite (and harsh) shadow against them. All surfaces exhibit the same coarse painted texture, except for the figure's trousers and the upper block of the image, which are scoured rough, lending the whole a tactile but indistinct feeling. In front of the other elements, white shapes fall from the sky, their identity ambiguous - they could be raindrops, feathers or leaves. Finally, whatever they are, they reflect the same pallid white glow as comes from the bare torso and head of the figure, and the understated but by now emblematic rough lower-case text of 'hot water music' in the upper left.
The link above to 'The Old Guitarist' includes a modernist poem, possibly inspired by the painting, and written by American poet Wallace Stevens, 'The Man with the Blue Guitar'. The first six lines:
"The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
I'd like to think that the painting and the poem both reflect something of Hot Water Music. What exactly though, I'm not sure.
Haven't done one of these for a while, so I thought I'd start it up again. This is a game we all like to play, of course:
Punk:
Dennis Kucinich's 'Wake Up America' speech at the Democratic National Convention
I feel slightly uncomfortable butting in on US politics, but speaking as a global citizen, the prospect of John McCain taking on the role of policing the world for four years fills me with dread; and for all of you under a Republican administration who don't want to be under one, you have my sincerest sympathies.
What's impressive about this video is not just the truths being said in it; but the fact that they are, and the way that they are, being said. This probably doesn't fully match up with Obama's 'leading from the center', but it still needs to be there. Most of you probably don't really know who Dennis Kucinich is, and neither do I all that much, but suffice to say he's a bit of a maverick in the Democratic Party (and erstwhile candidate for the nomination).
(Credit to the bloggers over at Organizing Grievances, and also to *#..(brad who posted another link in the comments for the Refused post)
Not Punk:
Crimescene's 'Outcasts', one of the very worst music videos I've ever seen
I'm not much in the business of being negative about bands, not even in my own head (I'm, like, way too Zen for that.) However, this is just some hilariously bad shit. It's not quite as magical as when I first saw it, which only proves that if this was in any way intended as a joke, the novelty will start to wear off. Otherwise, this is just a sad, sad example of how wrong a good genre of music can go (admittedly after a rather lengthy, ahem, creative journey). I first saw this somewhere after my weaning off of Pennywise (an actually rather good surf-rock/political hardcore band a lot of the time) and onto bands like Hot Water Music and Fugazi, and before discovering truly obscure genres of hardcore. Hence I thought of this when compiling my Shape of Punk list below, as a sort of unbidden antithesis in almost every way, shape or form.
Everybody likes listening to indie songs with over-the-top production and reading about political theory and/or political philosophy, right? Good.
While over in the USA you are all talking about Obama and the upcoming presidential elections (well, five months seems to count as 'upcoming' there) here in Ireland, and more generally in Europe, we're still pondering the Lisbon Treaty defeat. I originally thought the Guillemots 'Get Over It' would be an appropriate record to post after a week or so of post-referendum 'period of reflection' (and I could work in clever allusions like "in another life, I'd be drenched in sweat with you" for "enhanced co-operation" among EU member states). Alas, politics isn't that simple, and a week or so is definitely a long time.
Here's the record, on cool-as-the-bee's-knees picture disc, but I've no neatly ordered thoughts to lay out about one of the most important political events of my lifetime - certainly since I've been eligible to vote, which I wasn't at the time of the Good Friday Agreement, abortion/divorce referenda, or even Nice (the previous EU treaty) for that matter. Fellow Irish blogger (and Yes voter) No Ordinary Fool has done the sensible thing, and announced a sabbatical on the subject. But I can't quite let the itch go, not least because it's still a live issue in Europe.
This weekend, The Irish Times carried an article by renowned German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, under the heading "Irish vote should be signal to call a halt to elitist European Union: More ground-level democracy in the European Union is the correct response to the rejection of the Lisbon Treaty - not less".
Habermas is best known for originating the ideas of the 'public sphere' and 'communicative rationality', in sociology as well as politics; in general, his theory is one of advancing human emancipation and democracy. Last year, (2nd year/sophomore) I did one of the most interesting courses of my university career so far, titled 'Power, Discourse and Political Action' and focused on the tension between the theories of Habermas and Foucault. (I aced that one easily enough, but more ominously for my discussing the Lisbon Treaty referendum, I only scored a B on 'Democratic Theory' this semester just past)
In the article, most of which I would have to agree with in broad terms, Habermas speaks of paternalism, cyncicism, and a "bureaucratically engineered" response to the institutional difficulties of the newly expanded Union, pushed forward by a political elite but come up against "the burdensome exception stipulated in the Irish Constitution" (that requires us, essentially, to have a referendum on any EU treaty. To be clear, it's not actually in the constitution, but follows from a judicial reading of it). He asserts:
"The failed referendums are a sign that, thanks to its own success, European unification has reached its limit. This can be overstepped only when the pro-Europe elites stop touting the virtues of parliamentary democracy as a way to avoid the messy business of actually listening to citizens.
A schism has opened up between the political decision-making powers that have been transferred to Brussels and Strasbourg on the one hand, and the opportunities for democratic participation that have remained in the member states on the other."
Habermas argues that the grand forces of expansion and unification operating in the European Union have brought the whole project beyond the limits of political clarity or democratic consensus; "we should expect two things from our governments: they must concede that they have run out of ideas; and they have to stop pretending that a debilitating lack of consensus does not exist". Of course, while this has translated on the ground in Ireland into much more disparate fears about the direction of the European project, it has also been reflected in the difficulty of 'selling' the complex legal treaty to the voters by the political establishment. This, in essence, was the problem with the Lisbon Treaty referendum.
Habermas's solution is a Europe-wide referendum, where
"The phrasing of the question must be sufficiently clear for voters to know the consequences of their vote. And citizens across Europe must be able to vote on the same day, on the same topic and according to the same method. A problem with referendums until now has been that debates have been held in each national context, cut off from the outside"
Also - and this is a proposal resisted with great fervour by most Yes campaigners in Ireland, on account of the influence and benefit we would lose - the possible establishment of a two-speed Union: "...for member countries that are initially sceptical, a politically successful nucleus at the heart of Europe would have a stronger gravitational pull. After all, internal differentiation, albeit legally complicated, would simplify the controversial expansion of the Union."
I don't agree with everything Habermas says, and as a letter writer to the paper pointed out, he was not directly aware of what passed for discourse on the Treaty during the referendum campaign, which would hardly match up to his standards of 'communicative rationality'. That refrain aside, there are serious questions about democracy - the importance of one person's vote, the true political progress of Europe - inherent in this current dilemma.
Finally got some proper layout back on the blog. Paragraphs are now somewhat subtly placed apart, and block quotes have ordinary line spacing. Maybe I'm a perfectionist, but the absence of those features was really wrecking with my head and my ability to write a good blog post.
(It turns out there was a p missing in my .post-body {, and hence the margin settings weren't affecting my paragraphs. The blockquote line spacing had just been reset. All thanks to a universal Blogger update of the CSS template... darn mysterious interweb.)
I only know a little HTML - pidgin HTML if you will - so it took a couple of weeks before I finally sat down and realised what I had to do. Not much thanks to the various blogger support groups, but at least the various instructions for editing CSS pointed me in the right direction. That's not really the reason why I haven't posted in a little while, but it can do for now.
The above two albums are post-Husker Du releases from Grant Hart, the drummer and other creative powerhouse of the band along with Bob Mould. I posted his first post-Husker Du release, the 2541 EP, here already. These are full-length albums, one under his own name and the other with his relatively short-lived band, Nova Mob. Good News For Modern Man in particular is absolute pop gold; the 'concept album' of Last Days of Pompeii is less successful, but it's still a lot of fun to listen to. The prime Grant Hart solo release, as I understand it, is his first full-length, Intolerance; and while his post-Husker Du career isn't quite as productive as Mould's, even these two albums represent some brilliant moments.
Good News For Modern Man is an album I picked up from eMusic some years ago, after having heard Metal Circus and possibly Zen Arcade. On that basis, it comes as quite a shock - it's pure pop kitsch. Considering Husker Du's later albums, and the direction Hart took his share of the band's songs into, it's less surprising, but still it stands out as twee, jangly nostalgic pop - something I have a soft spot for when it's done with the right kind of style. And whatever about style, this is also one of the most likeable albums you could ever hear.
Probably my favourite song on the album is 'Run Run Run To The Centre Pompidou' for the infectious exuberance of the chorus, but in truth all the songs are just as catchy and hook-laden as each other. 'A Letter From Anne Marie' and 'In A Cold House' are wonderfully and simply evocative, alternately loud and meditative, but the sonic masterpiece of the album is the atmospheric 'Teeny's Hair'. Lyrically, it has something to do with Apollinaire and Duchamps, but musically it's like an apotheosis of Zen Arcade-type experimental pop.
Less directly or accessibly pop, and far more experimental, is The Last Days of Pompeii. Preceding Good News for Modern Man by about 8 years (it came out on Rough Trade in 1991, a few years after Intolerance) this is a frankly bizarre debut for the band. The idea seemed attractive - after all, Zen Arcade was a concept album of sorts - and I spent some time hunting this down as the second addition to my Grant Hart collection. After the effort, it turned out to be a bit of a disappointment although when I go back to it, I still quite enjoy it.
The Last Days of Pompeii is unfortunately, much more disjointed and patchy than the sublime genius of the other album. It's, essentially, a bunch of atmospherics, weird songs, a few weirdly catchy songs, and a theme about the destruction of Pompeii amongst other historical events. On the last part, these sort of meanings tend to pass me by, but Wikipedia mentions an 1834 novel by the same title
"written by the baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1834. Once a very widely read book and now relatively neglected, it culminates in the cataclysmic destruction of the city of Pompeii by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. The novel uses its characters to contrast the decadent culture of first-century Rome with both older cultures and coming trends."
which sounds quite close to the apparent 'concept' of this album. Musically, it has some pop moments as good as anything on Good News for Modern Man. It has that great Grant Hart sound, perhaps not crafted into the strongest of albums, but still there nevertheless. From the stirring introduction and bombast of 'Woton', the lighter exuberance of 'Getaway (Gateway) In Time', 'Wernher Von Braun' or 'Where You Gonna Land (Next Time You Fall Off Of Your Mountain', to the evocative atmospherics of 'Lavender and Grey' and the closing song with its 'Benediction' of an erupting mountain (sorry to give the ending away, I guess), it's a fun ride. It doesn't hang together perfectly - it wanders off into a track pretty upfront-ly entitled 'Space Jazz', for example - but the parts that it is intended to hang on, like the two versions, regular and 79 A.D., of 'Admiral of the Sea' are memorable enough.
This doesn't have anything much to do with Grant Hart - although Nazi Germany might be a sub-theme of Last Days of Pompeii, in which case this video fits right in: it's a mash up of one of the scenes from Der Untergang (Downfall), the recent excellent film about Hitler's last days in his bunker, and the imagined reaction of Irish Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, to the Lisbon treaty result as it came in. It's just brilliant.
This issue (Lisbon) being another part of the reason why I haven't felt quite like posting recently, I'll post it up just for the laugh. It's so very wrong, perhaps, but the matching of the dialogue to the emotions is hilariously and subversively perfect. If you're not au fait with Irish politics, you'll probably miss some of the more specific references, but the gist of it is pretty clear*. Satire at its novel (though this has been done for other situations, apparently), focused best. Especially the first 1:00...
(you know the ‘clunk’ that happens when a record player stops playing and returns the arm to the rest position? That’s a bit like what Irish politics sounds like now, only more ominous)
Previous image here; and explanation for why I'm doing this here. Some more recent wider reactions are covered in the second half of the post.
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[Friday, June 13th]
The Lisbon Treaty has been rejected in a referendum in Ireland, by a vote of 53.4% No, and 46.6% Yes, and on a turnout of 53.1% (reasonably high for an Irish referendum... and, um, not low enough for the government to do a 're-run' like they did the last time). My own constituency of Dun Laoghaire in Dublin county bucked the No trend, as it usually does on European referenda, and returned a Yes vote of 63.5% - the highest in the country. In total, only 10 out of 43 constituencies voted Yes, making this a seriously bad result for the government (and major political parties).
I bring you this news, partly to show I'm not immediately abandoning the issue because of an unfavourable result, and partly because the result means it now becomes even more important. Not only does it have a lot to say about the state of politics in Ireland - the blunt analysis is that rural and working-class voters voted No, and that middle-class urban voters voted Yes but in an insufficient degree to swing the result - but also for the progress of the European Union. Put it this way:
1. 862,000 voters (just over 1,600,000 if you include both sides; from ireland.com) have individually halted the ratification of a treaty for 495.5 million people (the total population of the 27 EU member states, according to Wikipedia.)
2. If that wasn't irrational enough, a large number, if not the majority, of those people have no tangible or constructive reason for voting No, and hence no points on which to 'renegotiate' the treaty, if that was even possible. That's not an entirely a criticism of the No side - I don't think this should really have been put to a referendum, at least not as the only country. The Yes campaign, in the most part at least, was willing to offer a constructive campaign - for a more effective, more efficient, more democratic Europe.
Instead we had commissioners, commissioners, abortion, neutrality and micro-chipping babies. Okay, so the last one was probably not a real No poster. But it sure fitted in well...
I feel an unhelpful rant coming on (as opposed to the preceding, well-constructed one) so I should stop now. I kind of want to come back and expand on a few points; my ire was originally meant to be directed at this Fox News report on the rejection - it's funny, because it's got most of its facts right, but slips in subtle anti-EU colour whenever it can; "the EU's power base of Brussels and other European capitals" makes it sound like an 'evil empire', while glossing over the whole 'political community' thing:
"Voters cited myriad fears over the rapid growth and ambitions of the EU. Anti-treaty groups from the far left and right mobilized "No" voters by claiming that the treaty would empower EU chiefs in Brussels, Belgium, to force Ireland to change core policies — including its low business tax rates, its military neutrality and its ban on abortion."
Here's it's description of the Dublin result in the constituency adjacent to mine: "In suburban south Dublin, a largely wealthy and highly educated district, the "Yes" camp triumphed with 63 percent of the vote. But a neighboring, scruffier district voted 65 percent "No."
While quoting Joe Higgins, no longer in fact "the sole Socialist Party member in the Irish parliament", as he was voted out over a year ago in the last general election, it gives the last word - or rather, curiously mixed metaphor - to a closet Socialist Worker's Party (SWP) member from my constituency (narrowly beaten from taking the final fifth seat, by the Green Party candidate, whom I voted for):
'"People felt a convincing case for the treaty had not been made, and they felt hectored and bullied into supporting it while the wool was being pulled over their eyes," said Richard Boyd Barrett, leader of a hard-left pressure group called People Before Profit.'
(You can read a much better international report from the NY Times here)
What next for Europe, and for Ireland?
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[Saturday, June 14th]
Some interesting things coming out in the news this morning. For a start, there's a realisation that I probably shouldn't have been reading the Irish Times if I want to understand the No vote. On the blogosphere,
No Ordinary Fool reckons South County Dublin should secede from the rest of the No-voting country; (he's joking of course)
Unarocks reckons, of course, that it was the Micro Chips wot did it;
Head Rambles reckons yesterday was "a very good day for democracy" and "a quiet rebellion by the People of Ireland for being treated like fools".
In today's Irish Times, Richard Sinnott - a professor of political science in UCD whom I had as a lecturer during my first year there - has a very good analysis. He was the commentator who worked out the mainstream interpretation of the Nice I and Nice II votes (namely, that the number of No votes stayed the same, but the Yes vote increased dramatically with turnout, winning the second referendum). Using an Irish Times/MRBI poll that predicted accurately the result of this referendum, he attempts to tease out some of the demographics behind the No vote: (full article here)
"Among the myriad of individual reasons underlying the actions of individual voters, two overall categories stand out.
The first was a lack of confidence in people regarding the issues. Those who felt they had some understanding of the issues indicated an intention of voting Yes by a two-to-one ratio.
Among the very substantial proportion that didn’t know what the treaty was about, Yes voting fell to one in 10."
I think the last line of that is especially telling. Arguably, voters who felt they had insufficient knowledge of the issue at hand should have abstained - or spoilt their vote. The fact that so few did - spoiled votes making up, I believe, 0.3% of the total - indicates the success the No campaign had in convincing people that "if in doubt, vote no". A lack of knowledge, whether one can blame it on failings of the Yes campaign or even on the unworkability of a plebiscite of this nature, was fatal to the treaty
There were, however, further obvious divisions between the constituencies which supported and which opposed the treaties. On these, Sinnott remarks:
"substantial voting contrasts across the social spectrum… are particularly striking in a political system with almost no class differences between the main parties. However, it is also possible that social class differences in support for the Lisbon Treaty may reflect occupation-related differences in exposure to and vulnerability in the face of globalisation."
Sound advice for all dismayed Yes voters:
“There will be a temptation to blame the voters – a temptation that should be strongly resisted. Rather, the reasons (and emotions) that lie behind the No vote need to be determined, as well as the way in which the Yes campaign failed to persuade a large swathe of the electorate of the merits of the case for ratification."
The wisdom of dead Germans
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First as tragedy, then as farce? There's nothing to be found in Victorian
ideologies.
Are there self-identified "farces" I should view that meet the criter...
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Hey! I entered a tee shirt for submission at Threadless.
If you like it, please take a moment and click the above image to go vote.
VOTE HARD!
If it wins...
Murder By Death/O'Death Split 7"
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"Murder By Death are releasing the first of 7 records in a 7" series where
they trade covering songs with other bands they know. The second 7" will
featu...
