ALEXI LALAS Far From Close 1996
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Saturday, 13 August 2011
Real Scenes: Detroit
You can't talk about electronic music without mentioning Detroit. That's why in the second edition of Real Scenes, RA and Bench went to the city which birthed the genre we now call techno.
Detroit has always had a creative streak, due in large part to the boom and subsequent bust of the auto industry. Quite simply, Detroit is a city of extremes, and its music reflects that. These days, Detroit's importance in the global electronic music scene is often referred to in the past tense. When we visited the city, though, we found a number of artists with their eyes (and ears) firmly set towards the future. After our time in the Motor City, it's clear to us that Detroit will endure and innovate for years to come.
Visit the feature page on RA: residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1382
The Invisible Committee - The Coming Insurrection (2005)
The sphere of political representation has come to a close. From left to right, it’s the same nothingness striking the pose of an emperor or a savior, the same sales assistants adjusting their discourse according to the findings of the latest surveys. Those who still vote seem to have no other intention than to desecrate the ballot box by voting as a pure act of protest. We’re beginning to suspect that it’s only against voting itself that people continue to vote. Nothing we’re being shown is adequate to the situation, not by far. In its very silence, the populace seems infinitely more mature than all these puppets bickering amongst themselves about how to govern it. The ramblings of any Belleville chibani contain more wisdom than all the declarations of our so-called leaders. The lid on the social kettle is shut triple-tight, and the pressure inside continues to build. From out of Argentina, the specter of Que Se Vayan Todos is beginning to seriously haunt the ruling class.
The flames of November 2005 still flicker in everyone’s minds. Those first joyous fires were the baptism of a decade full of promise. The media fable of “banlieue vs. the Republic” may work, but what it gains in effectiveness it loses in truth. Fires were lit in the city centers, but this news was methodically suppressed. Whole streets in Barcelona burned in solidarity, but no one knew about it apart from the people living there. And it’s not even true that the country has stopped burning. Many different profiles can be found among the arrested, with little that unites them besides a hatred for existing society – not class, race, or even neighborhood. What was new wasn’t the “banlieue revolt,” since that was already going on in the 80s, but the break with its established forms. These assailants no longer listen to anybody, neither to their Big Brothers and Big Sisters, nor to the community organizations charged with overseeing the return to normal. No “SOS Racism” could sink its cancerous roots into this event, whose apparent conclusion can be credited only to fatigue, falsification and the media omertà. This whole series of nocturnal vandalisms and anonymous attacks, this wordless destruction, has widened the breach between politics and the political. No one can honestly deny the obvious: this was an assault that made no demands, a threat without a message, and it had nothing to do with “politics.” One would have to be oblivious to the autonomous youth movements of the last 30 years not to see the purely political character of this resolute negation of politics. Like lost children we trashed the prized trinkets of a society that deserves no more respect than the monuments of Paris at the end of the Bloody Week- and knows it.
There will be no social solution to the present situation. First, because the vague aggregate of social milieus, institutions, and individualized bubbles that is called, with a touch of antiphrasis, “society,” has no consistency. Second, because there’s no longer any language for common experience. And we cannot share wealth if we do not share a language. It took half a century of struggle around the Enlightenment to make the French Revolution possible, and a century of struggle around work to give birth to the fearsome “welfare state.” Struggles create the language in which a new order expresses itself. But there is nothing like that today. Europe is now a continent gone broke that shops secretly at discount stores and has to fly budget airlines if it wants to travel at all. No “problems” framed in social terms admit of a solution. The questions of “pensions,” of “job security,” of “young people” and their “violence” can only be held in suspense while the situation these words serve to cover up is continually policed for signs of further unrest. Nothing can make it an attractive prospect to wipe the asses of pensioners for minimum wage. Those who have found less humiliation and more advantage in a life of crime than in sweeping floors will not turn in their weapons, and prison won’t teach them to love society. Cuts to their monthly pensions will undermine the desperate pleasure-seeking of hordes of retirees, making them stew and splutter about the refusal to work among an ever larger section of youth. And finally, no guaranteed income granted the day after a quasi-uprising will be able to lay the foundation of a new New Deal, a new pact, a new peace. The social feeling has already evaporated too much for that...
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Reading The Riots: 5 Books That Told Us What Was Coming
The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.” - J G Ballard, Kingdom Come (2006)
Many people seem to be struggling to comprehend the UK riots. They gaze at trite aphorisms on Twitter and Facebook, listen to clumsy, inappropriate and leading questions from news reporters, frown at the exasperated cries of shop keepers and wince at the hollow and image-conscious scripts of politicians. None of these sources are providing clear, decisive or useful answers. The message is lost in the medium.
Perhaps we should turn to books instead. There have been many warnings in literature by writers and thinkers who have been aware of, and to some extent predicted, the likelihood of the events of the past few days. On reading these books, the riots are less of a surprise, as all the ingredients that have coalesced to become an insurrection have clearly been fermenting in policy and society for decades.
J G Ballard - Kingdom Come (Penguin Books, 2006)
Ballard was a tireless observer of society and behaviour. He wrote 18 novels and many short stories in response to contemporary culture. Towards the end of his life he became pre-occupied with the underlying collusion between consumerism and fascism. He argued that consumerism creates an insatiable demand that can ultimately only be satisfied by violence. This novel perfectly illustrates how an alienated class can be whipped into a wild frenzy by the relentless advertising and promotion of unattainable consumer products. The novel ends with a local community invading, looting and destroying their only ‘cathedral’, a shopping mall. If all we have to offer today’s young people are relentless instructions to buy consumer goods without providing the means to do so, perhaps the outcome is inevitable...
A great list and particularly good to see Owen Jones' book included...
Many people seem to be struggling to comprehend the UK riots. They gaze at trite aphorisms on Twitter and Facebook, listen to clumsy, inappropriate and leading questions from news reporters, frown at the exasperated cries of shop keepers and wince at the hollow and image-conscious scripts of politicians. None of these sources are providing clear, decisive or useful answers. The message is lost in the medium.
Perhaps we should turn to books instead. There have been many warnings in literature by writers and thinkers who have been aware of, and to some extent predicted, the likelihood of the events of the past few days. On reading these books, the riots are less of a surprise, as all the ingredients that have coalesced to become an insurrection have clearly been fermenting in policy and society for decades.
Ballard was a tireless observer of society and behaviour. He wrote 18 novels and many short stories in response to contemporary culture. Towards the end of his life he became pre-occupied with the underlying collusion between consumerism and fascism. He argued that consumerism creates an insatiable demand that can ultimately only be satisfied by violence. This novel perfectly illustrates how an alienated class can be whipped into a wild frenzy by the relentless advertising and promotion of unattainable consumer products. The novel ends with a local community invading, looting and destroying their only ‘cathedral’, a shopping mall. If all we have to offer today’s young people are relentless instructions to buy consumer goods without providing the means to do so, perhaps the outcome is inevitable...
Murdoch Hacked Us Too
A day or two later, I was walking across the South Street newsroom when I ran into a young Australian reporter on the staff, Jane Perlez. You must know something about Rupert Murdoch, I said, feeling quite upbeat about our white knight from Down Under. Jane would have none of it. “He’s bloody why I left Australia!” she replied...
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Hell in Paradise (1978)
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Pat Ivers @'Stupefaction'
'If you're as much of an ephemera or original source geek as me, you'll be happy to see this photo of the actual tapes from the Nightclubbing collection of that infamous show.'
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