Friday, 28 November 2014

Bruce Johnson & Martin Cloonan: Dark Side of the Tune - Popular Music and Violence (PDF)

Written against the academically dominant but simplistic romanticization of popular music as a positive force, this book focuses on the 'dark side' of the subject. It is a pioneering examination of the ways in which popular music has been deployed in association with violence, ranging from what appears to be an incidental relationship, to one in which music is explicitly applied as an instrument of violence. A preliminary overview of the physiological and cognitive foundations of sounding/hearing which are distinctive within the sensorium, discloses in particular their potential for organic and psychic violence. The study then elaborates working definitions of key terms (including the vexed idea of the 'popular') for the purposes of this investigation, and provides a historical survey of examples of the nexus between music and violence, from (pre)Biblical times to the late nineteenth century. The second half of the book concentrates on the modern era, marked in this case by the emergence of technologies by which music can be electronically augmented, generated, and disseminated, beginning with the advent of sound recording from the 1870s, and proceeding to audio-internet and other contemporary audio-technologies. Johnson and Cloonan argue that these technologies have transformed the potential of music to mediate cultural confrontations from the local to the global, particularly through violence. The authors present a taxonomy of case histories in the connection between popular music and violence, through increasingly intense forms of that relationship, culminating in the topical examples of music and torture, including those in Bosnia, Darfur, and by US forces in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. This, however, is not simply a succession of data, but an argumentative synthesis. Thus, the final section debates the implications of this nexus both for popular music studies itself, and also in cultural policy and regulation, the ethics of citizenship, and arguments about human rights.
HERE

John Cale: Heroin, Wales and Me

John Cale - Live on KEXP

John Cale performs live in the KEXP studio. Recorded December 5, 2012.
Songs:
You Know More Than I Know
December Rains
I Wanna Talk To You
Guts

David Bowie: Cracked Actor

Dead People

Via

Fela Kuti: Music Is The Weapon (1982)

Beyond cute children: the new transgender conversation

Jim White: 'So the cop levelled his service revolver at my chest and screamed FREEZE!'

So the cop levelled his service revolver at my chest and screamed FREEZE! I was half in and half out of my car at that exact moment and seeing the barrel of the gun drawing a bead on my chest made me go momentarily crazy.
My arms didn't work like I wanted them too. I was begging my hands to rise into the air submissively but they refused. They were arguing that if I threw my arms into the air too quickly that the cop would get spooked and shoot me dead. They might have been right---the cop looked that scared. At any rate my hands stayed put, holding onto the door and roof of my car.
The cop shouted FREEZE! again, and since I was already frozen this confused both me and my hands. I started to shake all over, wanted to speak, to tell the cop I meant him no harm, but no words would not come out of my mouth, which was suddenly shot through with both the taste of burning metal and the feeling of being stuffed with wads of dirty cotton.
After about 20-30 seconds, which seemed like an eternity both to me and I'm sure the cop, I found my voice and managed to make a plaintive sound that said, "I'm a paperboy. I'm delivering papers."
It was 5am, pitch black dark still, and the cop had just pulled me over after I banged my Chevy Nova around a corner, headed for the next run of throws. I guess he hadn't seen the papers flying out of my windows on the previous block, because when he pulled me over he immediately went for his gun.
I'm sure I looked wrong---this was the mid 70's and I had hair down to my waist and was wearing a pilot's flight suit, as it was winter and it was the first thing I grabbed daily when I awoke to throw my morning route.
The cop's gun hand began to shake and tremble and I worried that he was going to a accidentally pull the trigger so again I informed him that I was a paperboy, and this time managed to sound a little more convincing.
He inched closer to me, then shouted for me to slowly put my hands on the roof of the car. My arms managed to cooperate better and at that point the cop rushed forward, frisked me, slapped a pair of handcuffs on me, then threw me in the back of his cruiser.
A moment later a swarm of cop cars descended from all directions. Blue light convention. Uniforms and plain clothes, even a few detectives. They were rifling through my car and seemed amused. They were showing each other the neatly folded newspapers. I finally caught a snippet of what the lead detective was saying to the cop with the gun, the one who'd pulled me over. "Good work." he smirked, "You caught a goddamn paperboy."
With that the swarm of cops departed, leaving me and the cop with the gun alone there. He opened the door to the cruiser, helped me out, unlocked the handcuffs and apologized. He explained that the night before a cop had been shot in a neighboring city and my car matched the description of the car involved. He'd seen me driving erratically (I used to drive with my knees while I threw papers out both windows) and thought he'd found the shooter. When he pulled me over and I innocently started to get out of my car to see what the problem was he got spooked and drew his weapon.
He said that each night before leaving for work his wife would make him promise to not come home dead. He'd made that promise to her that night and intended to keep it. With that he shook my hand and wished me well.
It took me days to get my head back on straight. I got flushed with nausea at the drop of a pin---post traumatic stress related I'm sure. I was eighteen years old, the same age as Michael Brown.
We all run these narratives in our minds about how we'll behave in moments of duress, but those narratives are the stuff of fantasy. When the gun is pointed at your chest you don't behave rationally, your body disobeys simple commands and that leads to some real problems, which is why drawing guns should be a last resort, not the first.
Thinking about Ferguson, it occurs to me that if my skin were not the same color as the cops, I might not be here today. I was white, as was he, so he held back and reserved judgment. Had I been black maybe things would not have worked out so well for me. So I guess I'm thankful for that, but it's little consolation.
Jim White

The Bill Laswell Interview: 'A Visionaries Means of Deliverance'

(Thanx Stylo!)

Nico - Icon (1995)

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Via

Thursday, 27 November 2014

Izabel Caligiore - Higher Love II Mix

Izabel used to host the Lullabies For Insomniacs radio show on PBS 106.7FM here in Melbourne. At the moment she lives in London and as
she says: “The mix I have done for you is inspired by Autumn in London, visiting the Sigma Polke
exhibition at the Tate Modern and Paul Virilio’s ‘Speed of Politics'”

Tracklist