What Is Anarchist Music?

Why are those you listed 'anarchist music'? Personally I don't know what anarchist music is. I've met anarcho-punk bands and many of them seem to equate anarchism with swearing a lot, undecipherable lyrics and just making a fucking racket.

I’m an anarchist. I write/make music. Is my stuff anarchist music? Some of it is ‘political’ in an obvious sense but even those songs that are not overtly political are written from my world view which is anarchist.

Does it really matter? Music is music. Some people make a living out of it. Others do not and do it for fun. Some get very rich. Some well known musicians obviously look at the world from a perspective that anarchists can relate to even if they do not call themselves anarchists, for example Steve Earle, Joe Strummer, TV Smith, The Levellers, Chumbawamba, The Waco Brothers to name a few.

Can anarchist music be commercial in the sense of being popular or does it have to be something only a minority like?

Anyway just some random thoughts in between work and having my tea.

Yeah you haven't even got The Sanity Clause.

any others?

Don't push me Gav. I've got thousands.

Should be about non-hierarchical self-organisation within both the making of the music itself and the economic relationships within that process. Fundamentally any anarchist or other political content has to come from the production of the music itself - the economic and aesthetic relationships between musicians, and between those musicians and their wider infrastructure and audience. Otherwise it may as well be an anarchist t-shirt or an anarchist burger for all the relevance it has towards the achievement of libertarian communism.

Fair enough, but it sounds very narrow and quite dull.

Isn't it possible for non anarchists, even a facist like zappa, to produce art that is anarchist in nature and effect?

The sound of a guillotine in a super-wealthy district.

no

Sheer foolishness indeed. A superb post but wrong.

Bach was evidently rigid in form, but that gave way to depth never thought of by mozart. Depth of spirit that is. No Bach, no trance. No Mozart, no adverts.

I've been drinking all day.

Obviously the Marriage of Figaro was a popular opera openly attacking the decadence of the aristocracy and calling for class warfare at the height of peasant unrest in austria. Clearly that places mozart to the left of bach, as bach as far as i am aware was a stalwart supporter of the german establishment.

The rest of your arguement is nothing but crude post-modernism and sujectivity.

I would consider your arguments if it weren't for the fact that

a) you are 54% more middle class than me

b) you can't do cartwheels and I can

cantdolongquestions said why should anarchist music be about self-organisation?

because making music is either work or leisure.

In terms of work, over the past 150 years the process of making it has been subjected to the same kind of industrial processes as most other production - division of labour and alienation starting most clearly with the romantic orchestra - each playing parts without being able to hear the total result or influence the direction in any way.

More recently, many of the people involved in producing a recording may never have any contact with each other at all (even on the internet, not talking about this sort of communication, none whatsoever). drummer, bass player, singer, engineer, masterer, arranger, post-production, song writer, are often contracted completely separately, and go in at separate times or even across different months to contribute to a three minute track. so the direction of the music is in the hands of the A&R people and producers, with musicians reduced to providing entirely manual labour devoid of any creative input (at it's worst, obviously there are degrees). This leads to a similar kind of alienation from labour as there is in office and factory jobs (which is why I've done office/teaching jobs as well as music gigs so I don't have to do shit music gigs - I honestly prefer office jobs to some of the shittier music options out there). This is most noticeable in situations like west end shows, which although they're much more organised than pay-to-play rock bands in terms of labour rights and wages, they have to sit and play exactly the same music 12 times a week for maybe years. No worse than an office job, but no longer a creative pursuit as far as I'm concerned. And many musicians in London who've done that kind of work have become bitter people who don't like music anymore. Live shows very regularly use backing tracks which drastically reduces employment opportunities for musicians (automisation) and results in a culture where labour is often unskilled (look at the spice girls) and easily replaceable (look at girls aloud). This doesn't even begin to address music as part of a wider lifestyle branding exercise - which applies as much to Britney Spears as it does to Marilyn Manson as it does the Nonesuch Explorer Series - just different subcultural communities with music as one of several identifiers based around consumption.

With music as leisure, this is combined with a simultaneous degradation in the practical musical experience of people who aren't professional musicians. People can listen to whatever they want just about, but access to instruments and especially collective music making has been significantly reduced over the past 150 years (although there's definitely been a resurgence recently as computer-based music has become cheaper - that doesn't address the collective nature of playing with other people though, same as internet communities don't necessarily address the atomisation in other communities). The way that music is taught in schools discourages any form of experimentation or collaboration - kids are often set tasks with headphones which reinforces music as a private pursuit, and sets emphasis on learning basic, and often marketable skills - a lot of 14-16 qualifications now have significant business requirements within the curriculum for example.

This leads again to reinforcing people as consumers of music produced by other people, or in a few cases, producing that music for other people, but in both cases removes it from it's social context as an integral part of community. I'm not saying family sing songs around the piano or cornish folk clubs or morris dancing whatever are anything worth going back to, or that contemporary western europeans should be emulating non-western social rituals - although there are clearly people who do all these things for some reason or another. That'd be both romanticisation, bad taste, and most significantly, as with those people who do try to recreate old forms due to some kind of nostalgia for the community they used to represent, it fails to provide any kind of socially produced music which addresses the changes in society since those methods of music making were sidelined (a bit like primmies).

Many people, even doing the most marketable music, are playing at a loss, or not making much money out of it with day jobs as well. Music is often seen as a very neutral occupation in regards to capital - despite the oligarchal presence of only four (or is it three now) major record labels in the world (although the kind of music I play many musicians run their own). It's often seen as one of the few remaining options for social mobility - I can't count the number of people I've met over the years who do 'showcase gigs' where their friends get ripped off £8 to hear them play for 20 minutes alongside 9 other shit bands and pay £3 a pint for the priviledge, and they either have to pay money to the venue or get nothing at all - because "label people might be there" (which they aren't) and "it's exposure" which it isn't - it's playing to your mates and the mates of the other bands who'll fuck off down the pub before you even start. I've fortunately had minimum experience of this, but even quite sensible people can have blinkers on when it comes to this and it's very different from working a shit job when you have to - it's choosing to be ripped off by venues and promoters on a regular basis.

There's plenty of reasons therefore for trying to set up self organised structures which cut out promoters/venues/labels altogether. Music as a field is too competitive for any kind of organised movement within the dominant companies to have any effect - at the end of the day they make more money from back catalogue or djs than live bands anyway. If music isn't seen within the prism of professionalism and/or label deals, then I think its content changes drastically since so much of the outside pressure is removed. There are the same risks of developing subcultural marketable tendencies as in any other pursuit, but it's less of a problem having a bit of that in it for me than the subcultural marketable tendencies in anarchism - which shite politics bands like the sex pistols have maintained.

I am an anarchist, I am an antichrist.

yeah whatever mate stop spitting on me.

That's sort of my point, although perhaps I could've just said that.

Either anarchism is the self-organisation of the working class or it's some kind of cultural commodity. If it's the self-organisation of the working class, then us lumpen musicians need to start organising ourselves in one way or another. If it's a cultural commodity it can fuck off, frankly.

Since conventional unions and strike action are next to useless in a field where labour can be entirely automated (CDs), (although I don't rule it out in some places despite a potentially endless pool of scabs - Britney's on strike, oh shit, well let's get Laura who'd love to scratch her eyes out anyway), then in my view co-op like institutions or amateur associations offer the best way of organising the production of culture. Ultimately, communism would allow the liberation of work to the extent that although people would still become very skilled musicians, the practice of music would become an intrinsic part of social life rather than the strong division between production and consumption as exists now - the end of professionalism. Same for the rest of the Arts and most production overall.

Is food produced by self-organised non-hierarchical producers anarchist? as you point out, the food itself can't be anarchist, which means only the structures which create it can be.

is food produced by self-organised producer co-ops a good example of the possibilities of libertarian communist production? hopefully yes, unless it tastes like shit.

Is libertarian communist production possible under capitalism? no it isn't, some things exist which allow us to project what libertarian production might be like, but they all work within a capitalist framework, that doesn't preclude working stuff out through the process of self-organisation now. As such you can have music about anarchism, or about anarchists, or anarchist ideas, or organised under anarchist principles, but the idea of anarchist music is simply to attach a specific label subjectively to a whole range of cultural practices that may or may not be related to it as an ideology.

What it certainly isn't is music that anarchists happen to like. I like Japanese Imperial Court music ffs, doesn't make it anarchist, or me not anarchist.

Er but music IS something you consume, in the same way that food, heating and film are all things you consume, thats a good thing.

Well yeah, obviously the larger media corporations run a highly planned market these days. However that doesn't make setting up entirely ''outside the system'' a great idea either. I mean look at crass and all those horrible crusties

I mean say you were trying to run a politically motivated club night, you wouldn't want to play all ''non-commercial music'' because that would be a bit shit really wouldn't it.