Nobody deserves this

“They were scared, oh yes, really scared, when we pointed out to them that the poor, the humble, the ones they wanted to help with alms, in order to ease their mercantile consciences, aspired to steal their purses and cut their lovely white throats”
-Q

In retrospect this was always coming. We knew it was squatting there in amongst the tents and acoustic guitars. We got the shitty ‘folk’ album we deserved for not putting in the effort intot he occupy movement while we had a chance.

Actually, nobody deserves this.

Nobody deserves a version of ‘folk’ that is so removed from any actually existing musical practice: “Folk makes sense because it’s traditionally the music of protest,” he said. “It’s the music of the people. It’s very appropriate for the first album to come from that tradition.”.

Yet who made the music of Chumbawumba, Get Cape Wear Cape Fly and Billy Bragg the ‘music of the people’? Theirs is a distorted account of populism, fuelled by the same pathetic logic that drives the ‘folk’ of the right (which apparently seeks to reduce folk to ‘white people with acoustic instruments’), and speaks of a collectivity which has unpleasant connotations. This is, to all intents and purposes, the left wing of Mumford and Sons.

The Folk tradition in my view was never inherently radical- it has had as much bigotry, misogyny and is often as violent any other form of music- but even more so as a ‘music of the people’ it doesn’t have a single, coherent narrative form it can be reduced to. ‘Folk’ even in its narrow form can be powerful and speak of the marginalized, but it can also be bawdy and crude. The exact nature of ‘Folk’ and what such a term means cannot be reduced to a crude set of justifications for ones own tastes, least of all to a convenient set of political ideologies for the occupy movement.

Nobody deserves a protest album so divorced from the actual act of protest and refusal. As Dan Hancox points out, the music being played by the angry young people on the street at demonstrations, the sound of the ‘British banlieue’. is not Bragg or Duckworth; it isn’t even consciously political, but instead speaks of an effervescent rage, a desire to take what could never be got through labour, and the necessities of survival today. It also has a sense of humour that speaks to its own internal rules. I’m no expert on these kinds of music, but it seems to me that this is protest not in terms of placards and banners, but closer to protest as a big ‘fuck you’.

There are also countless recording artists, producers and labels running themselves in ways which attempt to explore alternatives to a market-model (often without insisting that everyone they work with share their own aesthetic and political niceties). My friends at Records on Ribs have one such project, but I’ve also long admired independent labels (like Constellation) and projects like UbuWeb for creating platforms by various means for providing visibility to marginal forms of music and art that don’t attempt to cater to everyone’s tastes. Such projects are found across genres- there are many more I’m sure that I don’t know of. Occupy Records looks like its bypassing the majority of people actively involved in actual anti-capitalist and alternative practices in music production. Is it going straight to big-name rent-a-folkie sources? Either way, it is simply bad practice in terms of building solidarities to overlook some of these projects.

This record may exist to raise much needed funds and awareness, it may be free to those who want to download it. But it also serves to police the limits of politics; when I visited the Occupy LSX camp back in the November of last year, surrounding the tents was a line of tape with ‘another world is possible’ written on it. The horizon of the possible was drawn in the letters that told us there was no horizon. ‘Folk the Banks’ will sing us the horizon of the thinkable political music.

And how many ears must one man have,
before he can hear people cry?
-Bob Dylan

What everyone’s asking you whens the next tune?
This is the fucking next tune, are you dumb?
-Tempz