Pt. 2 We Going Tech

Right at the tail end of 2012, a thread was started on the music forum I frequent, dissensus, calling for a discussion on "Shuffling / House Music / Cutting Shapes", referring to the shuffling/shape shifting/cutting shapes dance style which had taken the capital by storm - essentially a revamped charleston, or a take on the kind of fancy foot-work that proper dancers have been doing to house music since it began - and the deep tech house music pushed by DJs like Mark Radford and Majesty which these shufflers were dancing to.



I clocked the thread, watched a few of the videos, listened to a few of the tracks, thought the dance was good fun and the music alright but a bit pedestrian, and then basically didn't give it any serious thought for the next half year. Because why would I need to when jackin existed and it was a gift from the EDM gods, a music that could have been custom made for me considering how exactly it hit all my raving-erogenous zones, with a thriving club scene and massive tunes coming out faster than I could keep track of?

Yet as the summer wore on and I found myself having to search harder and harder for less and less jackin trax, I began looking elsewhere for tunes to fill my sets and I thought I'd give "shuffle house", as I thought it was called (it is not, it's called deep tech), another look. Credit where credit is due, "give another look" meant "give another look through the dissensus thread", and it's simply the case that without that thread, and without the advocacy of posters like Continuum and Trilliam in particular, I would have never clocked the sound (clocked it from Tokyo? are u mud??), I would have never clocked the big tunes, and the second half of 2013 might have been spent in total musical/existential crisis mode, rather than gleefully exploring a whole new genre's worth of beats and bass and #danger.

One of the first deep tech tunes I "got". Total scene anthem, crowds singing all the words sort of flex. Wicked vocal and lovely rolling bassline, very easy to see how this fits into a UK tradition of tuneful bass bangers.


Whereas with jackin I was hooked at the first donk, with deep tech it took me half a year to get from "I don't like it", to "I don't really like it, but some of the tunes are alright for warming up jackin with", to "I don't really like most of it, but some of the tunes are big, still", to "I like it, but it's not very original" to finally just admitting "fuck it, I really like it".

If that sounds like a lot of umming and erring over a few tunes, then I'll justify my caution by saying that, deep and tech house has been, in a very tangible way, ruining my nights out in London for the last 2 years. This is not some inverse hipster snobbery about the inherent superiority of British urban dance musics compared to european house music (though duuuuuh, that music sucks and our music is great), but I mean I have been to countless club nights across the capital where the DJ I liked has stopped playing, and the next DJ would come on and start playing some fucking boring standard house music, and on a visceral level I would stop having fun, would no longer want to dance, would want to go home.

 (I remember one party in particular where Marcus Nasty had been playing a jackin set, smashing up di place, me and my mates feeling jolly with a couple of pints and a spliff in us and having a great time. The next DJ comes on, we're not really paying attention, he wheels a track, we sit up to take notice, the track drops, it's some tedious deep house bullshit, my mate Becky says "this sounds like... HOUSE music!" and we down our pints and leave...)

Another one of the first tunes I was feeling. Though it's difficult to identify a single sonic innovation there is a certain swagger and menace to the track that has been absent from house music for a long time now. Spooky ghost noises, sleazy/chugging bassline, an almost breaks-y shuffle and complexity to the rhythm section, and a fuck off massive second drop all speak of its UK origins.


It took me half a year to realise that deep tech is not simply deep or tech house, although the ridiculousness of that sentence does belie the slight undead quality to UK rave music as we go full circle on the 25th anniversary of acid house...

Like Lorenzo with jackin, the birth of London deep tech can almost be entirely attributed to one person - Mark Radford. Whereas Lorenzo's path to jackin involved slowing down a UK genre - bassline - to house tempo, Radford's "innovation" such that it was one, was to see the UK tuffness immanent in the best of Euro and US deep and tech house, but crowded out by the filler:



"I'd go to raves and hear 3 hours worth of music, and out of them 3 hours of music there might have been 3 tunes that I thought "if someone put a set together, of all that sort of music, they're gonna kill it", I did, I killed it!"

Radford's own story is the perfect example of the hardcore continuum theory - which states a genealogical and scenelogical affinity that runs through nearly every major UK underground dance music from the time of acid house through to the present day, and is proof positive that this deep tech stuff fits into that lineage. 
"I've been through every genre of what you could possibly say is the London dance scene. Started off back in the early days with, like, the acid house raves, then I got into jungle, drum & bass, then moved on to garage when I felt that drum & bass had lost a lot of its soul, then the same thing happened with garage, so I moved onto soulful house and then where I am now, with like the deep tech stuff. 

In the same video he talks about a marriage of "mad noises" and "groove" that is more or less the perfect summary of what it is that holds genres as disperate as hardcore, jungle, garage, UK funky, bassline, jackin and deep tech together.

Interestingly, there are more or less three separate groups of producers who all come to deep tech from very different backgrounds, but all contribute to it being more that just deep house in very different ways:

1. Old Dons
One of the most interesting thing about deep tech is the prevalence of old dons, guys who've been through every hardcore genre like Mark Radford, and many more who had their moment many years back, and have found deep tech the perfect forum for their comebacks. The list is kind of astounding, from garage you have Ed Case and Sticky and from jungle you have Bizzy B(!?!!) Best of the lot however are Martin Ikin, a G making hardcore back in 92, and darkside, breakstep/dubstep pinoeer Darqwun/Oris Jay making tunes under the name of RS4.

Marin Ikin's deep tech sound can be heard best on the magnificent, Nightmares On Wax sampling Nothing To Fear:

Old hardcore vocal samples, deep, subbass heavy rolling jackin basslines, a bleeps and bloops that flicker like vague memories of the entire history of UK dance music - watch for the Soft Cell - Tainted Love bleeps at the drop. A masterful blend of the bouncing, raw-danceability of deep house music, with the sonic debris of UK rave music, this was one of my tracks of the year, and one of the tracks which taught me how to stop worrying and love deep tech.

Even better is RS4, which is no surprise considering just how sick Darqwun was back in the day (Said the Spider, top dubstep tracks), but what is somewhat surprising is that a figure so foundational in early dubstep, but only really remembered among the DJs he influenced and not the massive at large, managed to reinvent himself to be so thoroughly relevant in 2013, using his years of production practice to show up all the young upstarts.

Essentially every track track he's released or previewed on his soundcloud has been pure fire, with killer remixes of Walk On By and L.F.O but for my money, the best of them are his remixes of Soulstar's Locked On You and Sia's Little Man.


(This version unfortunenly cuts out before the wicked second drop, but you can hear a longer version here for now from about 7:30 into this mix - http://podcast.dgen.net/rinsefm/podcast/MarkRadford071213.mp3)
If Martin Ikin's tracks meet somewhere between house and hardcore, Locked On You strips the house elements down to a mere skeletal structure, 4x4 scaffolding to build his monster darkcore riddim. For Locked On You sounds like nothing more than that moment around 93 when hardcore turned to the darkside, the drugs stopped working and euphoria quickly turned to its opposite. Panic attack synth stabs, an undulating, slimy bass lines, militaristic rolling snare drums and haunting synth strings which sound like they're about to snap all made this one of the spookiest tracks of the year, and one of the best.

Equally sick is the "monster remix" of Little Man, a classic garage vocal rerubbed on pure darkside 2013/2014 flex.

This one's a proper scene anthem and got wheeled twice - once for each drop - when it got dropped at Scala on Boxing Day. Though it might sound restrained compared to the exuberance of the original, it throbs with a compacted energy, like jungle slowed way way down, and grows on you slowly. By the time the swamp monster squelches come in, there's not a hand in the rave not bussin gun fingers.



2. The Bandwagon

Another major source of deep tech producers comes not from such old veterens, but producers from recently extant scenes which have been loosing their zeitgeist luster - grime and funky primarily, but more recently from bassline and jackin too.

Of the grime guys, it's Black Ops' Charmzy who's been making the biggest moves for me with his Shape Shifting EP, specifically the icey cold Dirty Disco:
http://www.beatport.com/track/dirty-disco-original-mix/4541389

The biggest contingent however come from funky, who's death was intimately tied up with deep tech's rise, and who can be said to have bequeathed this new scene not just a large number of DJs, producers and MCs, but also much of its clubbing infrastructure, and perhaps the entirety of its audience. 

Carnao Beats was one of the earliest defectors, having been edging his funky towards a deeper sound as early as 2011 with his VERY cleverly named Deep-ception EP http://www.beatport.com/track/infected-by-house-original-mix/206353/, before switching decisively to the deep tech sound in 2012. With a number of releases out on Audio Rehab, half of his tunes being scene anthems, and being a mainstay at deep tech raves from London to Leicester, Carnao represents one of those figures who was a bit tangental in one scene - funky - but has become central to another.

His sound is defined by mental, polyrhythmic, almost acid house basslines, with a distinctively 80s, electro vibe to his drums. His hit rate is high, but my favorite tracks are the hypnotic, shuffle-tastic, bleepy and bassy H.O.U.S.E


And the recent top-40-hit-by-any-other-name Gone in the Morning, with the ever shape shifting Donao, who's also jumped from funky to deep tech right on schedule



Also from the funky diaspora is Tazer, producer of the house-music-for-people-who-hate-house-music masterpiece, the slow-fast, Notorious BIG sampling Wet Dollars

An absolute anthem in the scene, this got played about 4 or 5 times at each deep tech party I went to in December. It's difficult to pin down just what it is exactly that makes this track go so goddamn hard, but there's some magic in the percussion section for sure, with those memetic ravey woodblock stabs that linger in the body hours after hearing them on a system. One of my favorite tracks of the year, if you don't get this one, then you won't get deep tech.

My favorite crossover artist of the bunch though is Arun Verone, the new deep tech alias for bassline/UK B badman DJ Pantha, coming hot off the heels of his jump to jackin last year, which produced some stone cold bangers:


With his deep tech stuff Arun Verone has brought some of that bassline/jackin rowdiness, and has brought the full force of his knowledge of big, bouncy basslines to bare on the house template, making for a much needed anecdote to the sometimes-too-serious vibe and aesthetic of the deep tech scene.
With only a couple of free downloads and hardly any official releases to his (new) name yet, the best way into Verone's stuff is through his mixes:

And it's a lucky coincidence that he happens to be one of the scene's best DJs, with a proper grimey cutting and chopping, wheelups, fast mixes, constant energy-vibe-hype-flex to his sets. (For what it's worth though, the quality of DJing in deep tech as a whole is infinitely better than in jackin, where apart from Marcus Nasty, there isn't a really top class DJ among them, though the best of their producers, IE Lorenzo, is objectively the greatest UK producer of the last half decade - seriously, name anyone who comes close...)

Vocal hooks a-plenty, wompy, warpy wobblers, sharp plasticy drums and a certain reek of noir/dread that hovers over his sounds like old skunk make his sounds a perfect entry point into deep tech from other UK genres, and give all of his tunes that vital edge.




3. Young Blood

The last major group of artists keeping deep tech gully and UK is the new school of producers for whom deep tech is their first foray into UK rave music, for whom DJs like Mark Radford and Majesty were their path into the music and who come to it, consequentially, unburdened with and largely uninterested in the long history of house music, and questions of how house music 'should sound'.

This perhaps represents the largest group of the three, with many of the artists of Radford's essential-listening Audio Rehab label, seemingly having no name to speak of in any genres before the current deep tech wave.

This group would seem to include massive-in-the-scene names like Playtime Productions:

(check the hip hop meets house in East London vibez on this one, and the wobbles)

And Lance Morgan:

(Absolutely love the noir swagger on this one, perfect music for driving around London at night)

As well as some very recent debuts such as Truce:


And indeed, a whole new Audio Rehab imprint, +Recordings dedicated to highlighting the work of new producers exclusively, starting with the 'ard-as-fuck debut from the Area 8 boys, which sounds, of all things, like Pulse X at house tempo



Cutting Shapes

So, having got over my initial distaste at the name and the music's proximity to deep house - I've never liked a music more that has verged on music I dislike so much - I think the quality of music speaks for itself. If you're not listening to deep tech, then you're missing out on a lot of the best music in the UK at the moment, and that's never a good idea.

Getting into the music slowly over the year, as a DJ, miles removed in Japan, I was lucky enough to experience it in its proper context, in a rave, when I was back in the UK over Christmas. First, DJing it out at 02:31 in an absolutely mental night which started when my plane got in from Tokyo around 4 in the afternoon, getting a lift from Heathrow back home from #Mum (big up!), shaving, showering, burning my CDs/USBs, wistfully looking at my bed and thinking it looked GREAT, then grabbing my 17 year old brother, rushing to Euston and grabbing the 9:05 to Birmingham where it just so happened that a group of 4 girls - deep tech ravers - were VERY publicly taking balloons, talking about Arun Verone and Lance Morgan, and running house which sounded EXTRA deep on their tinny mobile phone speakers, before getting into Birmingham New Street, hitting the Rainbow, and playing the 12-1 warm up slot with a set of 90% deep tech to a crowd of about 5-600 people and absolutely tearing the place down if I do say so myself, which, you know, I do.

My other experiences were at a couple of club nights over Christmas, House Passion at Scala on Boxing Day, and Rhythm N Funk at Dukes the weekend before New Years. 

I had been curious to see deep tech music in a rave for a long time, and was interested to see how the club experience of the music that was taking over London compared to 02:31 and the jackin scene in Birmingham. Unfortunately, but not really surprisingly, neither event even came close to the standard vibes of 02:31 on an off week, let along their big blow out, monthly 10:31 specials. But it's not really a fair comparison, because I've never been to any rave ever which is nearly as good as 02:31. If you're into bass music, it's probably the greatest event on the planet right now.

But on their own terms, both House Passion and Rhythm N Funk were good, really damn good in fact, the best party experiences I've had in London for a long long time. Both had sound issues - Scala's a live music venue and it had a live music soundsystem, all the low frequencies were there, but it was not exactly a bodily experience. Rhythm N Funk had a MAJOR problem for half the night, the problem being that the sound man at Duke was a prick and had the limiter set insanely low, so that you really couldn't hear any sub frequencies at all. If by some insane coincidence the sound guy from Duke reads this - fuck u thnx. It got sorted at the end of the night, and was a bit of a lesson in how this music is of course, UK bass music and needs rasclart bass.

Both were very vibezy. The crowd was a bit older than 02:31 (average age, say, 26 as opposed to 21) and blacker (maybe ~60% to 02:31's ~10%). Both had a mixed crowd, mostly quite street, with plenty of those new-school house band wagon not-hipsters-but-still-wearing-Raybans sorts, with a spattering of proper cockneys shouting OI OI and FUCK OOOORRRFFFF at the big drops. Plenty of people on MDMA, but not particularly a communal loved up vibe - more like drug/music induced personal hypnosis. Skunk smoke everywhere. Most importantly, EVERYONE was dancing, shuffling, cutting shapes, going #ham. It was wicked to see, some really great moves, and it looked like it must be loads of fun to be able to do it to the music, which compliments it really well. Actually felt like a bit of a prick for wearing a t-shirt not a shirt, and not being able to shuffle. 

Would definitely recommend that anyone in London checks out some of the raves, because to my mind you're unlikely to find better vibes or better music in any other scene in the capital. 


Back to the Future

So in short, after a year of being aware of the music, and 6 months of actively attempting to get into I end 2013 and begin 2014 big into deep tech and excited about what the future holds. Which is good, because if I didn't like the stuff I think I'd be in a very bleak place musically right now. 

That said, it doesn't move me like jackin at its best did, and there remain legitimate criticisms of the sound, least not the question of its novelty and innovation. For while the questions of "is it really its own sound?" and "Isn't it just deep house music?" have been answered ("yes", "no")  the question of "is there anything new here?" is still open. 

For all it's many qualities - darkness, toughness, danceability  big badbwoy basslines, hip hop vox, diva vox, slinky riddims, fact that it's an actual massive scene people are raving to -  there really isn't anything about the sound you can call totally unique to deep tech or totally new. Though there's something future about it in terms of spaceaged sounds, cold minimalism, tech-noises, it's a sort of Robocop-retro futurism, with a massively strong 80s influence running through the sound. This is hardly a bad thing, as it's great to hear those old 80s synths and bleeps and drums brought into a new context, but it does feel like the hardcore continuum going back to its roots rather than opening new horizons of possibility. 

We're living in retromania, and the fight for the future remains more important than ever, there is a point where if you don't compromise a bit, you're either going to end up listening to experimental but vibeless wank (see "poststep", or don't), or just not enjoying anything at all.

For me, the fact that dark, trippy rave music is taking over London again - and looks poised to infect the heart of the mainstream like no genre since garage - is reason enough to be hopeful for 2014.



Tokyo, you've got the rhythm in you

Though I've gone on these last two posts about the state of UK rave, the truth is that I spend most of 2013 in Tokyo. It wouldn't be right not to end with a shout out to some of the incredibly talented musicians I've had the privilege to get to know this year.

Pakin - Probably the most important grime MC in East Asia

First up is my mate Pakin (パ禁）which is short for 中途半端 chuuto hanpa　禁止 Kinshi - which means "being halfhearted/half-arsed is forbidden" or "don't fuck about". An old school hip hop head with a massively knowledge of JP-hop hop, he got into grime nearly 10 years ago by reading about Dizzee Rascal in a magazine. One of the hardest working guys I know - in the context of the fickle Tokyo nightlife scene, his event Gum has been running bi-monthly without fail for 5 years and recently had its 30th event - and also one of the safest. I've seen his MC skills grow sharper and sharper in the year I've known him and seen him doing his best to promote an authentic Japanese grime culture, teaching hip hop MCs about wheelups, and encouraging them to pass the mic and spit over DJs grime sets.

His hard work has paid off with a number of collaborations with Birmingham's Dark Elements crew (including the likes of Devilman and Darx), cumulating in him going up to Brum when he was visiting me over the summer and recording this:


Seiho feels rave

Though there are many talented DJs and producers out in Japan, it's often said that the Japanese are better technicians than innovators and not many have a uniquely Japanese sound. I think this is racist as shit - the idea of Asians as hyper rational, lacking soul, orientalist bullshit - even though many Japanese would say the same thing and it is true that many Japanese artists judge their own success via its proximity to a Western source material.



Seiho however is a true original, fusing sugary sweet J-pop influences with rave, trap, footwork, trance, hardcore, and anything bright and euphoric in his own productions, and DJing with a controller and midi keyboard, adding live piano vamps, speeding up and slowing down songs to double or halftime, dressed in mental-stylish-mental combos of colours and patterns while dancing like a maniac and singing along to his own stuff. He's wicked basically.




Part2Style have more dubs than you

Part2style are purveyors of "future ragga". Doing exactly what it says on the tin, they're sets consist of dancehall, dub, dubstep, grime, jungle, dnb, footwork, garage, and house , everything and everything as long as it's got a strong ragga vibe. Their mixing and selection is sick, reaching deep in the bag for old gems and pulling up new tracks which haven't been rinsed out. Nearly everything they play is an exclusive dub, with some absolutely massive names giving them a shout out including General Levy on their dubplate of Incredible. Their sets are packed full of energy with super authentic ragga-style MCing, and I've never not seen them mash up the daaaarnce. Regulars at Outlook Festival, and booked to play Fabric later this year, they might just be the first Japanese DJs to break the UK. Watch the fuck out.


Frankly$ick has more grime than you



Not /strictly/ Japanese although 100% fluent in the language and poised to be out in Tokyo for, I dunno, the next decade or something, he gets to be on this list because he's such a fixture of the Tokyo bass scene. DJing a bit of everything, but specialising in grime and bassline, he's one of the most technically on-point DJs I know, and the only person I can think of who still puts in the legwork, crate digging, hitting up producers - big and small - to get exclusives, and overall hustling like mad to keep his sets full of gully, future, non-wishy-washy-seapunk-Visionist-eskiwank up-to-date grime music. A DJ who'll have you reaching over the booth and asking "what the fuck is thiiiiiis?????" he's $ick and you should check him out.




2014

This last year was the first in recent memory where I literally could not keep up with everything I wanted to. Trap, footwork, UK 130 shit, and pop were all popping off, and I simply did not have time to get as into Miley Cyrus as I wanted to. Every just focussing on the current UK house stuff took me so long that I'm now publishing my 2013 list in the second week of the new year lol. 

But it's probably a good sign, though economically, socially and politically, the world's probably more bleak now than at any other point in my lifetime, musically we're living in times of abundance. If you can't get excited by that then you're doing it all wrong.

Pt. 1 House & Bass all in one place

It's very difficult for me to talk objectively about music this year. It's been a year defined by both moving closer towards and further away from the musical scene of action for me. 
Moving closer, though jackin was my obsession for much of 2012, it was NYE 2013 when I first actually got to hear the music in its proper context, had one of the best raving experiences of my entire life, and began a love affair with 02:31, the Rainbow and Birmingham which has seen me go back another 4 times this year, including two 02:31 raves I had the privilege of DJing. 
Moving away, literally, in March I moved to Japan, where I plan on living for the next few years. In Tokyo I've made some amazing friends, met a lot of very talented DJs and producers, been to some wicked nights out and have had an great time getting involved in the Bass scene out there. But yet,  Tokyo's not London, there is no massive, there is no sense that musical activity is plugged into the lives of tens of thousands of people around the nation, there is no sense of the history which everyone with more than a passing interest in raving in the UK knows almost innately, there is no sense that any of it really matters, because to 99.999% of Japanese people, it doesn't. 
Still, I had a fantastic 2013, and if you can forgive that my vision is necessarily partial, unreliable both for standing too close to the sun (nearly half my weekends in the UK this year have been spent at 02:31 exclusively), and too far away (the biggest party I've seen in Japan had 200 people... It was sick!) then I hope you'll find me thoughts and feelings and not-feelings worth a read.
02:31/Brum/Jackin 
As anyone who read my yearly round-up last year, or basically had any sort of contact with at all knows, jackin was the single sound that defined 2012 for me. The first half of 2013 saw me grow even closer to music, ushering in the new year at 02:31 and going back again and again at every opportunity I've had. 
My obsession with the music itself continued on a similar level to 2012 for much of the year, as the scene continued to dash out banger after banger after banger at an insane pace. Indeed, lining up the top 10 or 20 jackin tracks of 2012 and 2013, you could even make the argument that jackin improved this year. 
Some of the tracks/vibez/flavours/artists I've been feeling this year are:

DARKNESS2013 was the year jackin did what we all wanted it to and went over to the dark side. Brent Kilner had been pushing his own dark, dubstep/dnb influenced take on jackin since last year's 02:31 anthem Too BadThis year he continued in the fine style, and it's really difficult to whittle down out of so many banging tracks (Too Bad VIP, Kelis's Milkshake refix, Dizzee's Old Skool refix etc etc.). So honestly, go over to his soundcloud, pick a track and random, and be treated to a darkside bass banger. Best of the bunch however has to be the very recent refix of Skeng, an inspired mix which speaks to Kilner's background in dubstep, is hard as f$$$ck and is just a few more follows on Kilner's soundcloud away from becoming a free download, so support the cause and follow him!
2013 also saw Lorenzo on a darker tip, most notably in his tracks with Pete Graham, starting with the half-step, screwface, "dark and creepy" Dorothy's Forest

And getting progressively weirder and wobblier with the likes of Dorothy's Armpit/Wom, Chu Ba Ka, The Twlight Zone and Who Dat.

Chris Gresswell, one half of the pioneering jackin crew Screwface, really came into his own this year, with a stream of twisted bassline bangers, including a likkle dubplate he did for me of the 2-step classic Stone Cold ;)

But nowhere was he spookier than with Silent Hill, sampling from the horror movie of the same name, complete with eery twinkle noises, whipcracking sharp drums, deep rolling bass and two wicked drops.


Come over to the dark side? Yeah alright then.
B list jackin

For me, one of the joys of jackin at it's best was the sense that there was so much energy, so much quality to the scene that even the second tier of tracks - tracks by artists who pop up and disappear again, tracks dashed out on bigtunes with no sort of promo or bloghype, tracks you might rinse for a month obsessively but that are unlikely to be considered classics or even remembered in a few years time - even these tracks are sick.

As the year went on and jackin turned increasingly professional, with tracks signed to record labels. drawn out release schedules and artists imposing stricter quality control/brand management to their releases, this B-list jackin suffered massively for it. We released that this abundance of B-list jackin, the ability to go on to bigtunes and find 10 tracks which were good enough to bang out in a club - if not necessarily good enough to have played at your funeral - was vital to the health of the scene as a whole.

So this goes out to the B-list.

This following one's actually a remix of some bate EDM tune, which I only realised after hearing the original in a connivence store in Tokyo.


Massive hardcore/euphoric vibes on this one. This track really sums up that thing I love about jackin where it rehabilitates fatally cheesy vocals, where you're left wondering during the build what the hell you're listening to and how the producer's ever going to redeem themselves, and then it drops and you do a nasty bassface and cop it into your bigtunes cart right there.


97 plays on soundcloud, but was my song of the month earlier the year, duppying a number of my first  DJ sets in Japan


Some dude called Phatfunk, who made this track and no others that I can remember. Wicked dancehall vocal from a DJ Zinc track, and absolutely love the slowed down donk bassline.


Hybrid Theory
Hands down the debut artist of the year, Brummy duo Hybrid Theory exploded onto the scene way back in January with 0483 and have put out nothing but bangers since.


Their sound encapsulates the blend of speed garage warps + bassline wobble + house beats + magical mystery ingredient that defines jacking, and they come with a toughness and grit that counterbalances the cheese and pop tendencies of other jackin artists.

Their soundcloud reads like a best of list for jackin this year, with track names like So High, Higher, Mind Games and Drop to the Max likely to set off screwfaces on anyone who's heard them in a club. Though choosing a favorite out of all of those basslines and beats feels nearly impossible, two special mentions have to be given to the wobbling stomper that is Screened for having one of the best second drops of the last half decade:


And the anthemic remix of Decibel's Skank featuring Flow Dan:

This track had me skanking round my room for nearly an hour when I first clocked it, even bussin' a cheeky selfie video of the massive screwface it induced. It's the gift that keeps on giving, 'dropping' about 3 times before settling into an un-fuck-withable blend of slinky 4x4 drums, owl bassline, and grime vocals. Top 5 tune of the year, and would be number 1 grime x jackin crossover if Cause & Affect hadn't upped the levs later on...

Nigurr
Number 2 breakthrough artist of the year. If Hybrid Theory is a genius producer, likely to be making waves for a long time to come, the South African(!?!?!) Niggur (a name which makes talking about the guy obviously hugely problematic for white people...) is rather only a good producer with a genius formula - namely putting bate, singalong hip hop and r&b vocals on top of You Want Me-style, deep and dirty, bouncy house beats.

Shake Dat

"Shake dat ass for me, shake dat ass for me" - it might not be clever, but it is big.

You Want Me Too

Perfect name for a track which basically acts as the sequel to Nick Hannam ft. Tom Zanetti's mega anthem You Want Me, sampling the classic Cassie track U & Me and guaranteed to get gyals and guys #emotional on the dancefloor.

Cause & Affect/Lorenzo
Yet despite new tallent entering the scene, no one came close to challenging Lorenzo's reign supreme over all that is jackin, either in his original productions with Kane as Cause & Affect, or engineering for countless other producers.

2013 was a big one for Cause & Affect as a duo, seeing their track Don't Like To Do That released on the massive Dirtybird label, with tours taking them everywhere from London to Ibiza to San Francisco.  It also saw their productions getting better and better.

Pushing the bass line as hard and far as it could go was Kamikaze, the name being an 'o so subtle statement of intent as to its impact on the dancefloor:

Coming like an 8 bar grime tune, with the same bassline played out in turns between a metallic, saber-toothed sin-wave bassline bass line and a jackin-owl-bass which sounds like someone's been handing out M-kat in an aviary, this was my go to dj tune for when I was mashed and just wanted to take things a bit nasty throughout the year.

On a completely different flex was the C&A remix of Stanton Warriors' (lol yes I know, bare with me) Cut Me Up, a spangling metamodern, back-to-the-future mashup of 'ardcore and 'ouse and bass.

It builds with a near era-perfect replication of a 92/93 hardcore-jungle build - piano vamps, diva voxs, rolling breaks, thundering reese bass, with only its too-clean production values to give its real age away - but drops in pure 2k13 ruffneck jackin style.

Best of the bunch was Battle, an absolute monster riddim featuring vocals from the Newham Generals, all the little orchestral/cinematic frills and trills that fill the C&A soundscape, and a rudebwoy bass line which can't help but make you pull a face like someone farted nearby. A sick tune that got us all very gassed at the possibilities of the grime x jackin crossover


Though much of Lorenzo's best work was in collaboration with other artists (though one never really knows what percent is Loz's input, you suspect sometimes that he basically just makes the whole damn track).

Particularly strong this year was his work with Tom Garnett, which resulted in the wonderfully tracky P.A.R.T.Y featuring party-hard lyrics from Tom Zanetti and a womping bass line which sums up everything jackin does best:


Perhaps winning the award for 'most inspired sampling' (last year's prize obviously had to go to Loz's refix of Running Up That Hill...) was Trouble

Which bounces along nicely until drop in the middle, where it smoothly slips into the original version of Woman Trouble by the Artful Dodger ft. Craig David. I can't conceptualise the human who would not be left beaming, singing along and bouncing around like a mad eejat when this kicks in. This has been one of the anthems of the year for me, played by me or someone else at nearly every party I've been to in Tokyo this year. It's the sheer will-to-pleasure that everyone who 'get's' jackin, gets.

The closest thing the scene had to a runnaway anthem in the vein of You Want Me this year was Darlin' a Lorenzo engineered Sleepin Is Cheatin' track featuring the lethargic and louche, day-after-a-night-taking-too-many-drugs crooning of Tom Zanetti.

With an almost-professional video feature TZ's adorable little son bussin moves in a warehouse, this was the jackin tune with staying power: I've heard it at least 3 times at every 02:31 event I've been to since it was released. It's also the only jackin tune I can think of that's crossed over, getting some serious play in deep-tech raves, radio sets and mixtapes too. Slow, druggy, donky, sick.

Track of the year!!! 
Finally, both in the sense of coming at the end of this too long (sorry!) rundown, and being the last major jackin track of the year - released earlier in December - is Up To No Good, a masterful rework of an old hardcore track done alongside the ever ravey Ill Phill

I could pick it apart and look at how every single element is perfectly engineered to to get UK ravers gassed as #f$$ck - but really it's just the best build and drop of the whole year - and then it insanely generously repeats the trick with the best build and 2nd drop of the whole year. A massive anthem, and for what it's worth my track of 2013.
Jacked out?

So, given that I've just spend a lot of words and way too many soundcloud embeds (sorry about that slow computer/internet users...) gassing about 2013 jackin, you might think that the scene is in rude health. The unfortunate truth is however, that over 80% of the tracks listed here came out in the first half of the year. Since the summer, things have really, reaaaally slowed down.

A large part of this would be down to the increasing professionalization of the genre. Whereas it used to be that a track would be previewed on soundcloud, a within the month it would be up for download on bigtunesmp3, now the vibe is, a track gets previewed on soundcloud, it gets signed to a minor record label whose sole act of promotion seems to be getting the track on beatport, and then you wait 6-9 months till you can get hands on it, with none of the producers willing to give the track as a promo because it's signed.

Though this false scarcity and label-support obviously makes sense from the standpoint of the individual producer, on a scene-wide level it acts as a major drain of energy, an aura killer, and has destroyed that scene you had earlier on in the scene's lifespan that there was just so much going on, so much creativity at work, that a producer would release a track a month because they could.

But if producers being more careful with there tracks was a cause of decline, it may also be the case that there simply was less energy, less momentum, less ideas floating about as the jackin brand exerted a weaker and weaker pull on tallent compared to house proper.

For much of the year even - to be honest, especially - among its biggest producers and DJs, you could not find anyone willing to defend, define, or even use the word jackin to refer to the bassline derived house sounds coming from Brum/Leeds.

When 02:31 got a weekly show on Rinse FM, they used the platform not to push jackin, but to push their own brand of 'house & bass' (which is the exact same thing but a million times less informative). As Lorenzo, Hannah Wants, Tom Shorterz have built well deserved profiles for themselves in the national scene, and have found themselves subject to interviews and magazine features, the words "house", "bass", and "house & bass" fly thick and fast, while there is no mention of jackin, the scene they made and that made them.

Chatting to Kane from Cause & Affect, he says the affiliation with house is due to having an eye on the long term - having seen jungle, garage, bassline etc. fall by the wayside, he would rather exert his efforts for the scene that never dies - house music. Of course, while house music never dies, neither does is come to define an era, or expand the possibilities of what is meant by dance music like those UK genres which shine too bright and die too fast.

Ultimately, I can't but see the abandonment of jackin as a name and genre to rally around as a massive shot in the foot - from the bottom of my heart wishing Lorenzo and co all the best in making a name for themselves in the massive, 30 year old, international house scene - but seeing this as less likely, and the rewards in fact lesser, than the patient work of building jackin as its own scene and having the mainstream come to them (ala 2-step).

For this reason, though 2013 was a great year for jackin, it truly saddens me to say, I reckon it will be its last. As the summer wore on and the weeks since I had bought anything from bigtunes piled up, I began looking elsewhere for tunes to fill my record bag and for that little hit of future. My search led me back to my hometown, and ironically given my dispair at jackin's direction, back to house.

Continued in Part 2

2K12 IN MUSIC

Yo, this blog post will be in two sections, Part I dealing with my own personal year-in-music, and the second a more critical look at some of the major musical trends this year.

PART I 

2012 was a good year! Started the year doing a dissertation/parring it in Cambridge and finish it as a graduated real human about to move to Japan for the next few years :O

On a personal musical level it's been interesting as well. Though I've been out raving less than in 2011, this was the year I really pushed myself with DJing and began to develop a (very small) name for myself. As I say, my first couple of terms at Cambridge were a big parr, and it was bedroom DJing that made most days bearable, so I did a lot of it (big up my neighbour Leeana for her tolerance!!). Coupled with getting far, far better technically, my residency slots with Rudimental and Voodoo Rave, and later on in the year, my slot on Innacity FM, gave me space to develop a sound and the motivation to constantly hunt for new music to keep things fresh. I can now say "I am a DJ" without feeling like a wanker.

As a punter, a few of my major moments came on the dance floor - Champion dropping Mosquito at Cable, Beneath's whole set at Rudimental, Manny and J-Cush slaughtering the dance in Brooklyn - but just as often came from intimate moments with friends - discovering Call Me Maybe at Jambie's Jubilee BBQ,


And a very high, very magic May Week evening listening to Will Saul's old Fact mix by Mill pond with good friends.

But in true 2012 fashion, the defining musical moment of my year, my epiphany/I-have-seen-the-future/I-like-music-again/this-is-why-I-rave moment, came not in collective euphoria on the dance floor, but in the atomised setting of my dorm room on headphones, when I clocked Marcus Nasty's jackin podcast, thus instigating the most exciting 6 months in music I've ever had. More of that below.

PART II - TRENDS


'UK Bass' AKA post-dubstep, AKA intelligent zzzzfest AKA HOUSE MUSIC… AGAIN!!!!! 
Hessel Audio, Hypderdub, Hemlock, Night Slugs etc. Are all banished to the 'boring until proven exciting' corner.

how do u even dance to this I don't even
For London producers working under the 'Bass' umbrella this year, not a single gun finger was busted. Postmodernism has not treated UK dance music well, and the atemporal, internetty, vybless music coming from the capital - a mush of vaguely dubsteppy bass, house rhythms, washy synths, 808s and AALIYAH SAMPLES MADE BORING HOW DO U EVEN DO THAT?!?!? - has lost all sense of FWD progression and all sense of fun. 


This is literally Pearson Sound pressing the 'make Pearson Sound track' button on Logic. Dead-Out.
One notable exception to this rule has been the output of Keysound records, and Dusk and Blackdown's Rinse sessions. Here a sense of teleology has been sculpted by the curation of a tight aesthetic - dark, grimey, jungalistic, syncopated rave music:



Yet otherwise there was next to zero signs of life here. Wake me up when London artists stop talking like critical theorists and when somebody, anyone makes a BANGER. Until then Fuck u-K bass.


 UK FUNKY 2007-2012 RIP 
Well it had a good run; maintaining a sense of cohesion and progression, constantly putting out great tunes, and balancing light and dark elements for a good five years, even as it was loosing support to the most stale of deep and tech-house for three of them.

2012 even saw a number of great funky releases, notably from Beneath, who's combo of dank 2006-dubstep dread vybez with ass-shaking tribal soca-flavored skank riddims make him a sub-genre unto himself.
DANK
Mosquito by Redlight's Lobster Boy alias is possible one of the greatest funky tunes ever, and gets a special mention for providing my most memorable and documented rave moment of the year:



Champion's one of the best DJs in the country, and his Crystal Meth EP showcased the gully possibilities of entwining funky even further with grime.



Still, though the massive left funky in 2009, for a few years still there was a constant stream of great music being made by people like Roska, Lil Silva, Cosmin TRG, Swing Ting etc. By summer 2012 that stream had truly dried up. UK FUNKY R I P


EUPHORIA 
Not so much a movement as a feeling.

This year, we climaxed. 

100% of humanity has climaxed to this song
We've gone up up up up up uuuuup.

And we wailed where have you been all my life. 


Yes. Yes yes yes. 
TEKLIFE OR NO LIFE
Imagine what music/culture would be like right now if footwork didn't exist? It's a truly depressing thought. For musical modernists, footwork is pretty much all that that stands between us and the end of history. There is quite literally no other movement across the arts - music, literature, visual culture - that is more radical, more important right now. 
Yet the radical rhythmic/music-structural disjuncture that footwork represents is a large part of why the original sound itself has been limited in popularity to the Chicago demographic that created it and the global avant-hipster class who live for that future rush. 
Where its influence has spread, it has spread in watered down forms - from UK bass to trap. The fact that the for the first time in musical history the UK has responded to an American innovation by tempering it:
And not by roughing it up:


Is in itself a telling sign of the relative decline of the London based hardcore contiuum vis-a-vis ghetto America.
This year was a particularly great one for footwork, and once again the Teklife crew of Chicago fought off new pretenders and reasserted their place at the top of the footwork food chain. 
The undeniable king of footwork is and remains DJ Rashad, who this year helped to launch the Lit City label to showcase the best of the Teklife massive. The first album on the imprint, Welcome To The Chi, showed footwork reaching a new stage of maturity and production values, and showed it turning outwards towards the world by incoperating influences as diverse at Jungle and Grime:

The dreadest track on the album, We Trippy Mane, brought footwork at it's most avant-'ard, evoking the minimal grime instrumentals of Alias and Wiley:

Back in the summer I was privileged enough to make a trip to Chicago to witness a footwork battle in a closed-off shop front down on 87th street. The vibe was insane - dark outside, bright florescent lighting inside, no drinks or drugs (just lots of soda), fuck off pounding sub-bass, a circle of dancers kicking their limbs at speeds your eyes can't register, DJ Spinn MCing like a total joker, and 200 tracks just like this - the dark, minimal, brutal ones they call battle trax - mixed deftly by DJ Earl. It was like witnessing the limits of human cultural expression expanding before my eyes.
Fellow Teklife badman Traxman also killed it this year with his Da Mind of Traxman over at Planet Mu, which engaged the rhythmic NOW of footwork in a dialogue with black America's musical history - namely jazz, funk, and disco. 

Planet Mu were also responsible for a number of the other footwork highlights this year, particularly the scholarly undertaking that was Bangs & Works Vol 2 - which showcased footwork in all its wonderful diversity



And they brought us the dancefloor duppying experiments, the metamodern mashup of Jungle/Juke/Jukle/jUKe/Foot & Bass with Dream Continuum's Reworkz e.p.


The experiment worked and it remains to offer a fascinating path out of the UK's dancefloor malaise and a good answer to the question of how to deal with an import scene like Chicago footwork. Here's to more of it in 2013.

Jackin AKA Jackin House AKA Jackin Bass AKA "bouncey wobbly mucky in ya face catty phat beats (real house music)" AKA THANK FUCK NOW I LIKE MUSIC AGAINN!!!!! 
Anyone who's friends with me on facebook, or who's held a conversation with me over the last 6 months will know wot music won 2012 for me. Ever since clocking Marcus Nasty's 6th of June Rinse podcast, northern/midlands jackin house has made up the vast majority of the music I listen to, buy, think about and DJ.
Never since getting into music have I been so interested by a current scene that old music ceased to grab my attention, but since Jackin my DJ sets have gone from predominantly old school Garage retro-fare to 80% traxs from the last month or so. Every month brings out as much good music as I was used to getting in half a year. It is quite simply the most exciting thing happening in British music, and if you disagree, you're wrong. 
What is jackin? Jackin is what happened when the police shut down all the bassline raves up north and all the bassline ravers, DJs and producers started going to house events, and eventually, started making house music.
Bassline RIP
From house jackin got its "neck snapping" 4x4 riddim, defined by propulsive open high hats and straight forward snares. From house, jackin got its slower BPMs (124-130, with the sweet spot at 126), and from house jackin got its sense of 'cool', 'sexy'.

From bassline, jackin got its penchant for big, mellifluous diva vocals, good-times-toasting MC patter and cheeky pop bootlegs. Most importantly, from bassline jackin got its bass: big, bolshy bass; bass that overpowers the other elements; bass that would be turned away at the door at classy house events. 

But those these elements - snappy 4x4 beats, cheesy, crowd pleasing vocals, oversized bass lines - are the core of jackin, there's more to it than that. At its best Jackin is kitchen-sink UK house, in the tradition of Basement Jaxx and Groove Armada, both of whom have been serviced with the jackin treatment to great effect.
More than that Jackin is a topography of a specifically Northern British dance tradition - evoking everything from bassline to Northern soul, via organ house, speed garage, happy hardcore, donk and jungle, and at times reaching to a pan-UK pop history which includes 2-step garage, dubstep, and the imported RnB and hip hop American hits that topped the charts here.

The difference between this music history in a blender and the internetty mush I decry in London-centric UK Bass, is that Jackin is the response to a specific Northern tradition, it's not a random assortment of influences gathered from soundcloud and youtube (thought the artists are all very much plugged in, the music disseminated through 2k12 digital channels), but local influences absorbed into the music through a regional IRL scene, and absorbed through the memory of other local scenes. Simply put, jackin is exactly what you'd expect Northern rave music to sound like in 2k12, and it's strong because of its basis in The Real. 


Apart from this Jackin succeeds where UK Bass fails not only because it takes itself far less seriously:
The Anchorman sample ALONE here cements jackin as the true heir to 'ardcore
But because it is a scene which corresponds to a sound. Whereas if you say a song sounds like UK bass I have 0% idea what you might be referring to - in regards to its rhythmic pattern, its sound pallet etc. - if you tell me a song has a jackin bass then I know what to expect from the bass line. This is a sign of the scenius at work - a creative community that is stronger because its members share good ideas, not one in which such a premium is given to individual expression that there's no sense of collective purpose. 
I've seen this drop do things to people... 
Specifically, jackin doesn't just have a sound, but it has a new sound, a sonic innovation, in what I call its hollow-donk-warp-owl-bass.
Check at 1:14
Reliable sources tell me that the sound was one hidden away under layers of midrange in bassline, and  that the innovation here consists of bringing it to the forefront, giving it space, and making it "cooler". The sound is made by taking a speed garage warp:

2:05
Then ramping up the attack, and filtering it through high-end, spacey/contemporary F-X. If dubstep innovated by giving the sub-bass some space, and then through its wobble, jackin runs with these innovations and furthers them by making the bassline carry the melody, wobbly arpegiated melody.


It's space aged shit, and its impact upon the body in the dance is like nothing else before.


Tracks which meant a lot to me in particular include Tom Shorterz - We Are The Stars
Garage to the future, this track perfectly evokes that moment in 1995/1996 when the Brits first tried their hands at American garage house - labels like Nice and Ripe, Confetti etc. but it updates this pallet for a 2k12 sensibility. The track is glorious and euphoric throughout, but something rather magic happens at 2:45 when the female MC and organ sounds come in. 
Donkie Punch n Lorenzo - Snapbacks & TattoosTo pick just a single Lorenzo tune would be to commit a great violence, and indeed, if you look at the tracks throughout this list the tag '& Lorenzo' appears again and again. Lorenzo, one half of Cause & Affect is without a doubt the greatest producer of the year. Lending his engineering skills to countless collaborations which populate and dominate the bigtunesmp3 best selling charts, as well as his work with C&A, I count no less than 41 tracks this year in my iTunes folder, of which perhaps 30 are total classics. There has not been a producer with this kind of hit rate since Wiley, or perhaps the DMZ guys if you're being generous. The year wouldn't have been the same without him.
Majestic - Let's Go Back (Cause & Affect remix)The first track on the Marcus Nasty mix, the track which started it all, the track that was so good I had to wheel it about 10 times before I could bring myself to move on to the next track. This one's a true collaboration between Majestic's nostalgic vocals and C&S's futuristic production. It starts with one of the most perfect build ups in dance music, going from the shuffling two-step, filling in with the thudding 4x4 bass drum, before pausing to build and then.... and then that drop. SNM
TUNE OF THE YEAR: Nick Hannam & Tom Garnett ft. Tom ZanettiNo competition - no single song got wheeled as much, got as much play on my iPod, made me and my friends smile so hard or gave me more faith in UK dance music's ability to revitalise itself. 
The tune combines Nick Hannam's signature sound - deep, haunting, crisp-yet-murky, silly-yet-sexy - with Tom Zanetti's cool, bubbling, pure-Leeds-vybzin vocals, and that Said Ama sample. It sounds great at its native 124 bpm or pitched up to a ravey 132, on a poor quality pirate stream or a massive club system. 
This is the perfect British pop song. Perfect. If there was any justice in the world this would have been number 1 in the charts, sung at school discos, sodcasted from people's Blackberries at the back of the bus, wheeled up and sung along to at raves across the country.
It helped make this year the best year I can remember for music. And just to reiterate, 2012 was a great year in music. Let's push the sound and make 2013 even better.
Happy New Year! XXX

YO. Haven't blogged in ages and thought I'd ease myself into with a big splurge of youtube.


Big debates going on ATM about the state of the scene.

Some people think that a return to first principals - in Dance music, this means House - is just what the doctor ordered for the Dubstep scene, and that the space where 'UK Bass' - a vom inducing term that tries to hide that we don't got a sound at the moment - and House collides is a particularly fertile one. I think it probably makes House a bit more interesting and UK music a fuck lot more boring.

But also, I don't see why there's any need for it to happen, when around 2006 Grime producers cottoned onto American and European Funky House - like this:




And rather than subtly incorporate a few UK influences around the edges of this, totally transformed it into something hard, gully and ridiculously fun, bringing it into an amazing tradition of hyper energetic, multi-cultural UK dance music that reaches back through Grime, Dubstep and Garage all the way to Jungle and Rave. UK Funky. This post is basically a 'fuck me, UK Funky was/is/can be so good! LOOK HOW GOOD IT IS.

This time round I'm going to be focusing on the darker, ruffer stuff from 2007-2010. What was great about UK Funky though is the way it mixed this harder aesthetic with loads of amazing gyal tunes, big poppy vocal numbers and kept the ideas of light/dark, male/female, pop song/dj tune gloriously in tension, so I'll look at some of the other strands + the more recent output from the scene in later posts.

There's been a lot of opinion written on the #londonriots. The main divide seems to be between those who think this is 'pure and simple', 'just criminality', and those who see the matter in its complexity. The first view point is understandable from the standing point of the ruling classes. If this matter were complex, more than an act of mindless animals, then that might necessitate a rethink of an action like scrapping EMA. It would necessitate the entire political class, all the major parties to admit the abject failure of the Neo-Liberal project. It would also force a wider rethink of our own negligence of communities such as Tottenham and Brixton, our own role in the hollowing out of the social sphere.

Those who seek to probe the causes of these outbursts beyond shouting 'thuggishness' (say it aloud over and over again) are charged with the difficulties of articulating the questions of blame and causality and potential plans of action to be drawn from these.

Seeing the enormity of this task, I thought I'd restrict myself to trying to answer the question 'what about these protests is political'. The question is not 'are these protests political'. I'm a Marxist. Of course they are. But they are not political in the sense that most liberals/lefties have argued so far.

The argument runs like this:

"I understand that there are legitimate concerns with police brutality and cuts to youth services etc. But there are people out there who are just using this as an excuse to get a new TV".

This forms a neat parallel with what was said of the student protests:
"I'm against tuition fees but some people are just using these protests as an excuse to smash shit".

But these riots are not the student protests, and though the Left was right to challenge the division of 'good' and 'bad' protesters then, they are wrong not to see that there is a big difference between the vigil for Mark Duggan and the mass looting taking place across the country. The latter are far more 'political'.

The idea is meant to be that there are some people with legitimate political concerns re: police and poverty and that there are others who are 'stupid', 'greedy', 'selfish', with no higher motive than acquiring a new pair of Nikes. Every society everywhere has some people who are willing to clash with police, who are willing to risk jail for their political beliefs. But what the fuck does it say about our society that there are so many with no higher motive than acquiring a new pair of Nikes? What does it say about our society that there are so many who would have no guilt in stealing them?

I wouldn't mind getting a PS3 for free. But I could never steal one. For one I'd feel guilty, because stealing goes against social conventions and society's treated me well. And secondly, I'd be scared, because I'm part of that tiny minority who are privileged enough to have received an expensive education providing the skill-set and the networks/networking skills and all the life opportunities that arise from that. If I were to steal a TV and get caught doing so, it would fuck up those opportunities. Clearly my life is too good for looting to be worth it.

The majority of people have something that means that the risk of prison or social exclusion for stealing a £50 pair of shoes isn't worth it. You don't need loads of money for the algebra not to add up. A caring family might be your dissuasion. Your religion. Your diploma course. Your part time job. That tune you're working on in Reason. Some of us have every reason, and most of us have a few, to think "should I go riot? Nah". The people out at night on the High Streets of Britain now, have none.

The left have talk much of 'simmering anger', this is certainly one component in the mix of social unrest, but what about simmering boredom? The question on people's lips is 'why are these people rioting', but perhaps the question should be 'why wouldn't they'?

Politicians can't see any political message to be drawn from the eruption into the public consciousness of thousands of people around the country with so little stake in society, so little to loose, so little to do with a long hot summer and no EMA, no spending money, no youth centres to do anything in that they're willing to risk jail time for the thrill of a firebomb and a new TV. If they want to see an end to #londonriots11 and avoid #londonriots12 they better look a bit closer

!!!!


!!!!@1111?!11


come 2 this this this this this this this this this
U NO IT MAKES SENSE.

Definitely come, you've got nothing better to do and there's nowhere else in London you're going to hear any Juke or Bassline in the next 6 months xxx

Crisis averted.
The future of the Hardcore Continuum is secured.

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This article is obviously not going to be a list of fashion tips for the Far-Left. That would be a stoopid article. What I would like to do is talk a bit about the relationship between emancipatory politics and fashion. Firstly because fashionistas seem to be quite bad at defending the political and social worth of what they do, and secondly because there's a current of philistinism in the Left which I think is misguided and perhaps even counter-productive.

At its worst fashion is vacuous and self-obsessed. The Fashion Industry is notoriously cut-throat and bitchy. Fashion marketing is perhaps the worst culprit in the "YOU ARE WORTHLESS/UGLY - BUY OUR SHIT AND YOU WILL BE WORTHY/PRETTY" line of work. This, combined with the size-zero culture of the cat-walk can probably take the majority of the blame for the heart-wretching rise in anorexia and other eating disorders in the developed world. High Street fashion has its brutal sweat-shops. High End fashion has its fur. To judge someone for their clothing seems to be the most brazen example of book/cover and is riddled with the risk of enforcing cultural stereotypes and classist prejudices. The very concept of fashion itself - that something is 'in' one day and 'out' the next - seems like it was concocted by evil genius/idiot to rape the planet for the lulz of it. It enforces destructive and archaic gender roles. Yes, with a list of crimes like this it would seem like it was duty of the Left to find fashion guilty and revert to Anarcho-Primativism/German nudism. Which I'm not wholly opposed to

However, fashion is important. In fact, to define 'important' narrowly, fashion and architecture are the most important of arts in that they are both the only completely unavoidable arts in modern society. Everyone wears clothes, and every street has buildings. Fashion weighs heavier in our cultural memory than perhaps anything else. If you think of the 60s, you see hippies in floral dresses and tie-dye whatever. Think of the 70s and you see flares and punks. Think of the Japanese and you either see terrifying panda-girls or geisha and samurai. Think of the Mexicans and you see sombreros. Considering the aesthetic ubiquity and social significance of fashion I would rather say that it is the duty of the Left to firstly understand fashion and to ultimately appropriate it for our own ends.

I think the first step to defending fashion is simply to recognise that some people really really love it. The number of lefties in the world of music is probably disproportionate to their numbers in the general population, so when I talk about a passion for music I think it's a language most of us can understand. The world of work and our pop-culture at large are incredibly alienating. In the workplaces of our regimented jobs there is no community, and as mass-culture becomes ever more commodified it provides no space for individual expression. We get the isolation of individualism but the conformity of communalism. 8 hour routine jobs then 6 hours shit TV then bed then death. The people who are best able to survive in today's world are those who have something they truly love to escape to. You can call this escapism, you can work it into the framework of John Holloway's Crack Capitalism, or Hakim Bey's theory of Temporary Autonomous Zones, you can even get old-skool and Marxy and talk about religions and opiates. Religion no longer matters to anyone, but music does, and the important thing to remember is that if somebody's leg has just been cut off you sure as fuck don't take away their opiates! Playing in a band is a very obvious way of creating the space for the best of communalism and individualism, but I would argue too that a real love for the listening of music is a qualitatively different thing to the mere consumption of it. And in the same way my life is richer and more meaningful for debates about the difference between 4x4 and Speed Garage and piecing together the roots of Burial back into old Foul Play and El-B tracks, people's souls have been saved, not only by the creative/colaborative act of designing clothes, but by recreating outfits from old films and perusing 50 vintage shops in search of the perfect cardigan. And in the same way Dubstep moves beyond necessary escape-route into a revolutionary weapon when it's used to soundtrack kettle-breaking, a good suit takes on a new political baggage when the person inside it abuses policemen with Byron. You can't get away with smashing a Starbucks unless everyone's dressed in all-black.



I think this last point relates to the notion of fashion and tribalism. Though fashion can be an individual act of playfulness, it almost always has a social role in projecting an image to others. It's for this reason that I think it's misguided to think that those who spend a lot of effort on their clothes are necessarily narcissistic, as a carefully constructed costume can just as much mean "I'm making an effort for you". But regardless, an interesting element of fashion is its role as a social signifier stating one's membership of a group. When we talk of teen tribes we mean groups of young people who wear similar clothes and hang out with each other. Fashion is not the only thing that defines these groups, music, drug choice and all sorts of rituals play their part, and so we can be pretty sure that the kids in one corner of the canteen in the hoodies listen to grime and the kids in the other in Nirvana hoodies and baggie jeans listen to, well, Nirvana. This seems like a negative thing. There are often tensions between the groups that can escalate into violence, it seems a means to divide people of the same class background and with the same material interests. If Socialists are to reject Nationalism, we should surely reject all fashion tribalism, right? But to me there is probably something more healthy about people organizing themselves around communities based upon shared interests and tastes rather than the wholly arbitrary divisions of the nation state. Socialists may call for the abolition of the nation state, but we certainly shouldn't call for the abolition of cultural and regional diversity. And one of the most inspiring things about this recent Student Movement is that is has brought together pretty art-school students in fur coats with indie kids and revolutionary Rastafari and grime'eads from council estates all in the same place at the same time fighting for the same thing. And it's the presence of all these different fashion cultures that allows us to talk of a broad coalition and not just a big interest group. Of course, when crunch-time comes, people must know that their true loyalty is to the struggle and class solidarity and not their tribe, but to the extent that class solidarity is achieved then I think the spaces of aesthetic nationhood can be a breeding ground for communalist sentiment and cultural-assertion and the diversity this brings is only a good thing.

The final topic I was to address is fashion and class relations. It would seem like the easiest criticism of what I have said so far is that it is incredibly class-coded and that it's all very well for me as a posh Socialist to talk about how great clothes are but that many people just don't have the money to dress well or the time to think about it. Yes, Fashion is incredibly class-coded and clothes are one of the most instant tip-offs of someone's wealth and status. Of course single mothers with 3 kids who are living on the appallingly inadequate welfare state don't have the means to be fashion conscious, which is to say nothing of the developing world where so many of our cheap-clothes are sweat-shoppingly sweat-shopped. Nor is any of this is to deny that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that different cultures and classes have different notions of taste. However I reckon that class barriers to fashion are less now than they have ever been, that the class-coding of fashion is something that can be manipulated and played with, and that just because many people can't afford to dress as they like it doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to.

In fashion as in politics the internet has seriously eroded many of the old hierarchies and power structures. Blogs are able to prove that what the big fashion magazines say is 'in' or 'out' bares no relation to what people actually like to wear. Street photography means that anyone with the ability to put together a creative and unusual outfit can show it to millions of people without having to be spotted looking like a stick-insect and working up through the fashion industry. On a rather less technological front, the rise of second hand/charity shop/vintage fashion - through predictable gentrified and co-opted into fancy overpriced shops, like all good things - has made interesting clothes from throughout the ages widely available and highly affordable, seriously damaging the Tax-Dodging-Top-Shopping-Next-Oligarchy's ability to make everyone look the same. Furthermore, owing largely to Labour's (too-few, too-meager) wealth redistribution schemes, perhaps most notably EMA, millions of kids for the first time in their life have had the money to go out and buy some nice clothes. Incidentally, when people say we should replace the EMA with something more targeted like free transport for the 16-19s and free school books, the answer is no, we should supplement EMA with such schemes, we're not fighting for a world in which everyone has just the bare material necessities, but one in which people can actually enjoy their lives. Some of my most fashionable friends are those on the dole and conversely, as a student in Cambridge, I can assure everyone that money does not buy taste. Fashion in the abstract then, is less exclusive than ever.

However, in as far as clothes still do tell a tale of class and fortune I think there are radical opportunities for subversion and assertion. I think we feel uncomfortable with the culture of fake Burberry not just out of some Kunderian concept of totalitarian kitsch, but also because it reveals how deeply the poison Thatcherite notion that 'we're all middle class now' has permeated into the working class. Likewise as mentioned before, there is something tragic about gentrification, about the ability of capitalism and the ruling classes to steal the most vibrant elements of working class culture, package it, and sell it back to them for a profit. Hence £3 cardigans from Portobello Market going for £50 down the road in Notting Hill and John Lewis selling pink/punk baby t-shirts. For Punk, of course, was a working class culture which beautifully displayed the subversive potential of fashion. It inverted dandyism and said 'what ever you say is ugly we say is pretty' and genuinely created a moral panic and rupture in the social fabric of Britain. I think we need a punk for the 21st Century. I also think we need to learn from Caroline Lucas. Caroline Lucas is one of the top-5 radical voices in Parliament (others: Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, somebody help me out here). The Green Party advocates for a maximum wage and the nationalisation of transport, yet she wins votes from Conservatives. This is no doubt because she is highly intelligent and a brilliant advocate of the cause, but it is also because she is able to articulate radical policies while not seeming like a radical. This is partly because she wears a nice suit. The problem with New Labour is that they thought "this country is full of Right Wing reactionaries who read The Daily Mail, we can never win an election on a platform of Social Democracy, what we have to do is publicly espouse Right Wing reactionary policies and sneak whatever scraps of progressivism we can under the table to the dog/working class while nobody's watching". Really they should have realised that nobody believes in anything anyway and people will vote for an 80% upper rate of taxation and the abolition of the army if they're told to by somebody reasonable sounding in a nice suit. We need more Socialists in nice suits.

The final argument is that in a world where people are dying every day of curable diseases and the wealth divide is ever increasing, it is frivolous and exclusionary to care about fashion. The problem with this is it borrows the language of the mushy centre, the Social Capitalists who say that pushing for revolution in a world where there are so many problems in the here and now is dangerous and delusory. Don't join a revolutionary party, just give to Oxfam. We can have a revolution once we've dealt with Africa. Of course this is a fallacy. While accepting that of course charity keeps people alive within a brutal system, if you don't work to destroy the system itself and put something better in its place then there will always be unnecessary deaths. In parallel to this, fashion, music, art, are all in fact more important than feeding the poor. Bare with me, I'm going to get a bit Wilde here. We want a world in which everyone has enough food to survive, a roof over their heads, freedom from aggression, clean water, free education, free high-quality health-care. But we don't want this for it's own sake. The fact is this is simply the starting point for something much, much better. Feeding Indian children in 2011 is 100% necessary, and it's also a complete waste of time and effort. Nobody should have to dedicate their life, their altruism and energy to feed the poor, because we should have a system where the equal and just allocation of goods takes place as a matter of course. It is not a lack of resources and technology that causes hunger, but an unequal distribution of them. When we have a system of equal distribution in place, the human mind will be free to focus on far more challenging, far more creative, far more fulfilling things. Like fashion.

I started writing this when thinking about the stereotype image of the scruffy Left. Then thinking about the partial truth of that image. Then I thought about the the wicked-cool Marxists who own the vintage shop at 295 Portobello Road. Then I saw this post on a friend's fashion blog And the more I thought about it the more I realized how everyone I know involved in fashion in some way is pretty right-on, and there must be something to it. The occupations are amazing spaces were all voices are listened to equally regardless of gender, sex, party political background, race, class, and regardless of if you're decked out in a sharp suit or an old "Hostky for Trotsky" t-shirt (these don't exist, but I want them to). But within the Left at large, on a lot of internet discussion there's been a vibe of hostility towards students in suits and anyone who looks a bit middle class. This can been seen in some of the nasty and overly personal sniping at (and not the justified 'no enemies on the left' tactical critique of) Laurie Penny from Far-Left or the language of the debate around Charlie Gilmour and his outburst of patriotism. This is A Bad Thing™. I would never try to imply that those who just aren't interested in fashion should be, and I would never try to dictate my own personal aesthetics on anyone else. But I argue that the term 'Fashionable Leftist' is not a contradiction in terms nor a hypocrisy. If we can excuse his old-fashioned notions of gender and his technophobia, I'd like to bring in some William Morris. In his fantasy piece of the Socialist utopia - 'News From Nowhere' - everyone spends their time writing poetry, carving tobacco pipes and making and sharing beautiful clothes. I dig.

Within this beautiful student movement there has been an ugly undercurrent of un-comradely reds-under-the-bed style attacks on the far-left. To the extent that our focus remains outwards and that we're all moving towards a similar goal, diversity and debate within the movement is only a good thing.
Emily Davis' notion that a "coalition of social-democrats and democratic-socialists" would constitute some sort of broad front is risible. So too is her Godwin baiting claim that "[Communists'] views are comparable to Fascism" in what is meant to be an article about left wing unity. The centre-left and the far-left can and must work together. Here are a couple of reasons why:

1) We share the same goals.
I am a Revolutionary Socialist, but I'm not a very revolutionary personality. Violence kind of scares me and I tend towards searching for practical solutions for immediate issues. If I believed that legislation and changing social attitudes could result in a global Norway; If I believed that reforming capitalism to purge it of its worse excesses could end with Zimbabwe having full employment on a 35 hour work week with a generous paternity and maternity leave system in place, then I would be a Social Democrat. Unfortunately I'm convinced that this isn't the case. The capitalistic economic system is a totality that absorbs and neutralizes dissent. This is why something radical like the post-Stonewall LGBT Rights movement ends up in the position today where its biggest public cause is the fight to allow LGBT people access to the reactionary institution of marriage. This is why seemingly permanent gains in people's living conditions, brought about by the welfare state, are in retreat across the developed world, even in the Nordic countries. Though the word 'revolution' seems big and scary, at its most basic it just refers to the need to change the basis of the economy away from one in which the market allocates goods and dictates price towards something different.

2) We need each other.
To look at Europe, the countries with the strongest and largest far-left organizations are those with strong centre-left traditions. A Marxist systemic analysis of the inevitable failure and end of capitalism, though objectively correct, is certainly less able to capture the public imagination than a pragmatic call of "let's raise wages". A strong centre-left provides a certain level of class-consciousness and the narrative of asserting one's rights which the far-left requires. But this relationship goes both ways. The Soviet Union was a Very Bad Thing™. But we in the developed world also owe the Social Democratic gains of the post-war to its existence. If it wasn't for the threat of this alternative economic system which completely did away with their class as a whole, the ruling classes of the Western World would not have so easily made the concessions of the welfare state that they did. It is significant that it is after the fall of the Berlin Wall that we see the rise of the 'Third Way' among the mainstream left, the Thatcherite pact with the devil pledging "there is no alternative". It takes a strong revolutionary current to scare the ruling classes into reformism.

Their are other benefits that we westerly comrades bring to the movement that the centre-left would do well not to forget. Our tradition and experience of direct action, our ability to get feet on the ground for demonstrations, our strong presence in the trade union movement and our ability to put students and workers in direct contact. I may disagree with the means of Social Democracts as ultimately ineffectual, but I would also hope to engage in productive dialogue in the spirit of solidarity and not aim to exclude them from the movement. To suggest that it was my place or Emily Davis' to decide who's in and who's out would run contrary to any notion of democracy. Social or otherwise.

From the free-party and rave scene of the early 90s through to dubstep, grime and UK Funky today, there has been one force, one culture at the heart of Britain's alternative electronic music scene. This cultural phenomenon has been called the Hardcore Continuum ('nuum'), taking its name from the early days of Hardcore Rave and a simple time-line of it might read Rave>Hardcore Rave>Jungle>Drum and Bass at which point (sometime in the mid-90s) a lot of the big names and the mass of fans found things getting stale, moved into the second floor of the club, which played American Garage House, made it faster, bassier, darker, better, and then we get Garage and eventually its bastard daughters and sons; Dubstep, Grime, Bassline and more recently UK Funky. It has in other words pretty much contained every exciting strand of electronic music to come out of the UK this last 20 years. It is a continuum, or rather culture, because although its constituent parts sound nothing alike (rave and garage, grime and jungle), it has the same demographic (multi-cultural working class), the same hubs of activity (South and East London, outposts in Bristol and the North East), often the same DJs and producers (Steve Gurley who went from Jungle to Garage to Dubstep, El-B who went from Garage to Dubstep to UK Funky etc) the same means of distribution (pirate radio, small record shops, giant raves) and alongside an intense look-to-the-future Modernism, and sense of its roots in those that came before.

Another defining feature of this culture has been its almost total lack of political consciousness. Despite its roots in the self-assertion of the most marginalised sections of British society, despite the fact that the music itself is dark, anarchic and avant-guard to the extreme, despite how much energy and passion goes into the creation and expansion of this music (check this for an example of the insane lengths people went to to set up pirate radio stations), despite an explicitly combative stance to 'the mainstream', despite its energy and innovation deriving from the collectivity of the 'scenius' (good ideas are generated randomly, spread rapidly, with no question originality or providence) rather than the auteurship of select genius individuals, despite it's hyper-modernist dedication to progression - moving forward, the scene was never overtly political.

This has been to the immense detriment of the Left. Politics happens when an intellectual understanding of what is wrong combines with an emotional impetus and arrives at the anger to act. Culture, for many, is this emotional impetus. It's a love of cultural traditions that makes Nationalism such a potent and WHY WONT YOU DIE persistent force in the face of its obvious, objective falsehood. But culture is also at the heart (as opposed to the head) of the best movements of the Left. Thatcher killed off the mining industry - that was so economically successful that it subsidized the rest of nationalised British industry - because it supported a way of life and culture that was antithetical to her plan of creating an island state of island people. That this large body of angry self-organised, self-consiously outcast, intimidatingly creative people never in a moment of bass endued madness decided to leave the club and clobber and burn down the buildings of Parliament Square, is a waste of potential and talent on a (failed) apocalyptic scale.

But something new happened in November. While 5,000 of us assembled outside of the TORYHQ at Millbank, kids with boomboxs blasted out wub-wubbing dubstep and bmttsttskkattskatsskabmttsbmkatsts of Drum and Bass. It worked really well and ever since British Bass music has been a recurring feature of the student protests, often brilliantly accompanied by live drum groups. The most radical music to come from Britain since Punk is finding its place within radical politics. This is proof of the novelty of our movement. When the drop comes in we charge. Smash the window in time with the bass.

But there is one problem. The kids with the speakers - their taste is shit. Richard Dawkins help the university student who thinks they know better than the sixth-formers, who thinks they can lead the way for those living life on the edge of this governments axe, but I will allow myself the patronizing tone - not an older and wiser-political entity, but of a massive geek - when I say, wipe the Pendulum and Rusko from your Protest Playlist, and try out a couple of these:


DJ Crystal - Warpdrive - 1993

Omigosh, this is the sort of tune which makes one baffled to think of how the Hardcore Continuum didn't achieve the revolution. The beats talk of destruction, the melody of creation.

DJ Tango - Think Twice - 1994

It's dark. Play this. Set off flares. Confuse Police.

KMA Productions - Cape Fear - 1996

The squelching bass kind of reminds me of a crowd pushing and being pushed. The 4x4 beat keeps you pushing. I also think you'd get points for get battoned to garage.

Photek - Smoke Rings -1997
Photek - Smoke Rings at Hype Machine
Makes you want to hit things while writhing on the floor. Which come to think of it isn't especially wise considering the police's medieval cavalry tactics of late. Maybe it will help you violently roll away.

ES Dubs - Standard Hoodlum Issue (Z Bias mix)

Wriggle right past the police line.

Vex'd - Angels - 2005

Scary.

Burial - South London Boroughs - 2005

I think this is a good one for those times when you've been re-kettled on a bridge 5 minutes after leaving the last one.

Distance - Traffic - 2006

The ravey high parts sound like the sound of sirens come, the bassy roars sound like wolves or bears or something.

Code 3 - Response Call - 2010

For plotting.

Jack Sparrow feat. Ruckspin - Dread 2010

I'm pretty sure the vacuum-scuffle-boom sounds the right temp for heave hoing a metal fence.

Bonus Track (not British, not Bassy) for those who like their riots with 20 minute build ups:
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Providence - 1998


------------------------
Bibliography of others talking about music and politics

Simon Reynolds (coined the phrase Hardcore Continuun, started all of this, is the most ravey of the academics and the most academic of the ravers - this blog is essentially 90% ripped off him)

An early Wire article of his
A pre-protest blog on the failure of the 'Nuum to politicize

BBC Article on dubstep and protest

An [incorrect] counter point

Counter-counter-point/wider view (Good article~)

Can we get a consensus on that?


This question has calmly exploded - like Erik Satie played through Notting Hill Carnival sound systems, or rather N.W.A. on a harp - through the halls of at least 34 universities these last few weeks. Thursday will require some more discussion before we can even bring it to a temperature check. I can't tell if we're standing at the beginning of The Revolution or at the end of an Autonomist LARP.


Like many students around the country I have been in occupation. Across the country we have learned how to clap silently and facility a democratic meeting. We have learned how to communicate with the media and how to get favorable coverage. We have learned how to form and break blockades, how to avoid arrest and what to do if arrested. In a matter of weeks some have gone from apolitical to articulate class warriors, for others of us stale debates of anarchism vs. socialism, consensus discussion making vs. democratic centralism, revolution vs. reform left the pages of unread journals and unvisited websites and became living and lived-in discussions which reached into reality.


For me it felt like a completely new movement. It starts with Milbank, where we showed what we were fighting against, which directly lead into the occupation movement, where we showed what we were fighting for. Then one realises that the hand signals have been used in anarchist circles since the dawn of time, that many of the more experienced occupods cut their teeth at Climate Camp, and that sit ins have been going on for generations. But if it's not a wholly new movement it is at least a brand new moment. It is the voice of our generation that bellows out of the same megaphones. When I am optimistic it is because the signs saying "Down with this sort of thing!" and "Fine then, I'll just become a prostitute" tell us the ironic and detached Generation Y has got the message on Facebook, 'liked' Revolution and then got the bus down to actually do something. When I am ecstatic it is because I hear dubstep and drum'n'bass (even if our 6th form comrades' taste in both is overly bate) soundtracking kettle-breaking and see that AT LONG FUCKING LAST the hardcore continuum is fusing with radical destructive/emancipatory politics. The reason the media is finding it so difficult to characterize this movement is because it contains all the contradictions and aesthetics of our generation as a whole. It is anarchy for gleeks and grime-heads. Despite either not being alive, or being too concerned with watching the Power Rangers and not eating broccoli to have noticed the last Tory administration, whether passed down through folklore, or simply existing in the collective unconscious, we all know what dangerous reactionaries they are. We just express it mostly using the word 'dickhead'. Roots'n'future innit. I digress, this text won't be kettled.


The occupation is the best week of my life. Cambridge under snowfall and Solidari-tree on stand, it's also the most Christmassy I've felt since before Christmas stopped being OHMYFUCKINGGODITSCHRISTMASINONLYONEMONTHAAAAAAAH and started being like, oh yeah cool, presents and food are nice. The occupation ends but I've still got a bit of that trouser-pissingly excited vibe about Thursday. Everyone else in the country would have been in occupation, doing the same training, having the same conversations and pulling the same stunts. We've built bridges with the Trade Union movement, with teachers and charity workers, absolutely everyone will be there supporting us. And last time they said there would be 20 thousand and there were 52, this time there should be 100 thousand of us on the streets of London. At least. The movement had learned it's lessons and was going to avoid being kettled by conducting hundreds of autonomous actions all around the capital. The vote wouldn't go through, because no Tory MP would be able to make it to Parliament. Be realistic - demand the impossible! And I did.


What's the difference between a highly prominent and vocal set of non-leaders, and a set of elected leaders with limited powers? The whole world. And the presence of the latter at THE OTHER OCCUPATION we stayed the night in (we'll occupy anything) was the first sign of trouble. With the NUS calling for a national day of pillow fights (Note: Health and Safety legislation forbids the use of actual pillows) against cardboard cut-outs of nasty mean-faced Lib-Demmy-wemmies and a scheduled cry-in after the vote had passed, it was up to ULU, one of the most militant (read: cool) student unions in the country to actually organize a protest which involved protesting. The Cambridge plan, in as much as EFF ESS YOO EFF ESS YOO counts as a plan, was to cause some trouble with a small group (50-100?) in the morning (popping Tory tires, shutting down major London arteries etc) in the morning, before joining the big ULU march in the afternoon. The Facebook event had after all, called on us to 'shut down London'. There were not 50-100 people willing to wake up before 8 in order to plan an attack on some politically or economically significant target. There were not 300 odd autonomous affiliation groups able to target every Tory MP in London and stop them getting to Parliament. There was the main ULU march on Parliament, then the diverted LSE march on Parliament. Parliament square is a kettle fest. It's a square, and it's right outside Parliament. *sigh*


So we joined the ULU march, because that's where we said we'd meet people. And we shouted and we marched. And we marched right past the police when they were blocking roads they didn't want us to march down. It's not an occupation when you rent the room, and it's not a protest if you go where they tell you. Listen guys, pass it on, when the police say turn left, we go straight forwards, on to Buckingham Palace, past the police line. This protest won't be kettled. Moment of truth, moment of truth, wedge-formation CHARGE! A small scuffle, 30 of us get pushed around a bit by the police, thousands behind us march gormlessly leftwards. People have been talking a lot about disappointment. Disappointment at police brutality. Disappointment at student violence. For me the real disappointment was at the passivity of the majority. It's not an occupation if you rent the room, and it's not a protest if you go where they tell you. A demonstration or political march is affective because it's a break in the all-encompassing narrative of capitalism. The public space of Oxford street is only public if you want to shop. If you started selling things you'd be breaking licensing laws. If you started leafleting you'd be told to move on out the way to the designated charity recruitment zone outside the computer shops at Tottenham Court Road and book a saturday afternoon. When you stand alone and start wailing into a loudspeaker on Oxford Street, you are breaking the narrative that PUBLIC SPACES ARE FOR SHOPPING. You are making a statement that they are for wailing too. When you march you are saying that this is not just a commercial space, but it is a political space too (or in other words, it is not just a space for capitalist politics, but for revolutionary politics too). But marches are now normal. You can book yourself a slot in the marching time-table. You may march on this day between these times and on these streets provided you fill in the forms and get them in promptly. This was the failure of 1968, that capitalism absorbed protest and now we talk about A REVOLUTION IN THE WAY WE DO DISH WASHING. 1,000,000 marched peacefully against the Iraq War and the total affect was to allow Bush to say to Blair that they were invading in order to give the Iraqi people the same rights to protest as we enjoy in the West. FACEPALM. 52 thousand students marched on the 24th of November this year, smashed a building owned by a man worth £5 billion, and suddenly the very foundations of parliamentary democracy seem shook. It's not a protest if you go where you're told, it's not a protest if THE DAILY MAIL likes it.


We scuffle with police here and there, they're offish and thugish. They're on their high horses already. We're unable to get into the Department of Business Innovation and Skills, we're unable to get into the Lid Dem HQ. Should we join the Parliament Square kettle? Apparently it's jokes. Except it's not a kettle yet, apparently. As we walk in each and every one of us is told that we can exit at Whitehall if we want to. I now don't know if this was true, and I don't know if this makes a difference. But at the time it meant we had joined the mass of people, it was indeed jokes, we could leave at any time, so we might as well eat our kettle-snacks now. Digestives digested. Funny isn't it, one minute ago we were breaking through police lines, now we're having lunch. Oh shit, oh shit, stand up, stand up. The students started it. The police had been offish and thuggish all day, there had been isolated incidents here and there but at 14:00 in the north-west corner of Parliament Square, the students started it. They charged with pre-made kettle breakers, and threw paint bombs and flares. Having been lied to later in the day about being allowed out of one corner of the Square when this wasn't the case, perhaps the exit at Whitehall was non-existant too, but from where I stood I saw a group of students trying to break out of a kettle that was not a kettle.


Within the activist community direct action is often planned using affiliation groups. When one is going on a protest and there is any chance of confrontation or disorder, it is simply common sense to find a 'buddy' who will watch your back and have you watch theirs. Pairs of buddies form larger blocs of affiliation groups, connected by a shared level of militancy. A pair of buddies who don't mind taking a horse hoof to the face for the cause would not affiliate with a pair who are more comfortable writing polite letters to their MP. It's a good system which gets things done. Yet activism entails on-the-job political morality and self-character judgement. I look at friends I know better in the context of cups of tea together and film nights. And I wonder how far will they go, and how far will I go, and they don't know, and neither do I. I'd rather not take a battontotheface thankyouverymuch if it could be avoided, but perhaps I could muster that courage if surrounded by people I trust absolutely and knew that by doing so I was helping the protest, that in doing so I was facilitating the storming of Parliament of Buckingham Palace. That day, when from where I stood I saw a group of students trying to break out of a kettle that was not a kettle, I could not muster that courage. One should chose one's battles, and I felt that battle stupidly chosen.


In stark terms, at 14:00 in the north-west corner of Parliament Square, there was no need to charge the police. But the police were charged, by 15-20 year olds who's physical standing might be best understood by the sign saying "I'm only here to get out of P.E!" And the police, in their Storm Trooper armor, with their bone-breaking batons charged back. They smacked teenagers in the face. They pulled their horses back only to gallop them forwards onto and into the crowd. A friend of a friend got her collarbone trampled. What is this shit, medieval? People standing 3 meters in front of me have already told in far more harrowing detail than I could relate the depths of police brutality, more blow-by-blows, each of which telling the story of how the state exists to protect the status-quo and private property and not it's citizens. But I was paralyzed between bewilderment at our charging, and disgust at the police's.


From that point on this was a kettle that was a kettle. Sweet thinking by the way, locking all of those people you feel to be so dangerous in a square housing a bunch of buildings of immense national importance. From that point on it was also a kettle that was an occupation. For those cold hours, we owned Parliament Square, and with graffiti stating 'education is right' and 'make the bankers pay', more political wisdom was told outside the seat of government in a day than had been spoken inside it for a generation. We build bonfires to stay warm, and set of fireworks to keep ourselves entertained, and the merry spirit, not so much of May 1968, but more of November 1605, filled the winter air. Soon we gathered to hear the result of the vote. There was no big announcement, there was no collective booing or tears. Despite what the media say, the news of 21 individuals betraying their voters and dooming future generations to a deeper social divides, less art, less historical conscience, more debt, worse education, less education, this news dispersed slowly "did you hear", "apparently", and there was no reaction. What should have followed was a banshee scream of rage, and then a round of "THIS FIGHT - GOES ON" while a group formed a wedge to push through the police line surrounding Parliament while the rest of the crowd backed them up. 30,000 people marched on Parliament, and only 30 of us thought to get it. We turned around and the crowd was gone, more than half was orderly queuing up to leave.


A day's march, a shrug then a pub and a pint and a pat on the back does not a mass movement make.


Many of the more militant elements had already charged through police lines out of kettle and were off generating THE BEST DAILY MAIL HEADLINES EVER elsewhere. A huge queue formed in the north-west corner. People lined up one by one, one head per five minutes. I think had the attack on the treasury not occurred I, perhaps some of my comrades too might have gone home crying that night. The attack on the treasury reaffirmed my faith in the movement. People still cared, people are still angry, people are not done yet. The rhetoric goes "this is only the beginning", the people attacking the treasury affirmed this. The treasury was sacked, police vans stood on, and the actors in these dramas bowed and left the stage. It is nearly 21:00 and the only people left are those who chose to passively wait in the queue and those who were sticking around to see what would happen. The police have not been voluntarily letting anyone out at all for an hour now, many in the queue don't believe this when they are told. The police then tell people that they have to leave on the other side of the Square. There is no way out on the other side of the Square. When we return to see why they won't let us leave, they have assmebled into a line and have begun marching across the Square, sweeping away the riff-raff. Westminster Bridge is now open to leave, or rather you must rush towards Westminster Bridge of face the police baton. Over 7 hours after they first kettled us into Parliament Square we are told we are finally free to leave. We march, we sing. We have to, because it's so, so cold. But of course the police have no intention of letting us off that bridge. Around 2 thousand of us are re-kettled on a wind-swept bridge for over two December hours.


Over those two hours, the police created 2 thousand radicals. We started with chants of "NO IFS NO BUTS NO EDUCATION CUTS" and ended up with "NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE, FUCK THE POLICE". Kettling is an anti-democratic tactic designed to break your spirit and make you regret ever opposing the government. It is a collective punishment designed to make you feel guilty for being near people engaged in direct action. And as an aside, property damage is direct action and it is not violence - windows don't bleed. It is brutal, I think of the pensioners with lung conditions who joined us in solidarity, the school-children who didn't know how to get home at that late hour and had school the next day. Sure enough, despite our singing and dancing, our trying to keep spirits high, by the time they tauntingly started letting people leave one by one by one, drip drip drip, I was frigid and dejected, not revolutionary. As we left one evil fucker made snide remarks to each of of such as "thanks for coming", "hope you enjoyed your stay", "come back any time". Seeing now the depth and breadth of fury at the police, the widespread loss of belief and respect in this countries Parliamentary institutions, and the fear and anger brewing at all the spending cuts, I will stay optimistic that this movement can overcome its timidity and say "we'll take you up on your offer, dickhead"

POLISH EU STUDENTS UNLEASH MUSLIM PEDOPHILES ON PREGNANT POLICE: JORDAN TELLS ALL

So spoke The DAILY MAIL and thus it was so, and thus it ever was. 52,000 students woke up before daybreak, on a freezing November morning. We packed into coaches from all corners of our pointy and many cornered island to exercise our democratic rights. We're all fucking terrified. This does not look like normal politics. This does not look like an economic debate between the Keyensians and the Neo-Liberals. This looks like an attack on all things good about our country. Without a word in anyone's manifesto, the NHS's finances are to be given to a bunch of doctors with as much clue on the running of budgets as I have on open-heart surgery. Backdoor privatization. Changes in housing benefit mean that soon London, and not long after the rest of the South, will be a "No poor people" zone. A Britain of Comptons and Beverly Hills. EMA, which insured many hundreds of thousands of students could stay in school where they previously had to have quit at 16 to get a job: Cut. Disability benefits: Cut. Child support for the working class: Cut. And University, the furnace room of social mobility, degrees, the ticket to a reasonable wage, is to cost £9,000 a year. Nine Fucking Thousand Pounds A Fucking Year. Fuck.

We're all fucking terrified, we're all angry, and we want somebody to listen. We want somebody to make this stop. 52,000 students arrived in London with a message: Make this stop.

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The protest started slowly. Are we marching yet? It was slow because so many more people than expected showed up. 52,000, the single biggest demonstration in the country since the Stop the War March of 2003. Who were these people? To be sure the usual lot were here. Socialists of all different flavors were out in force, giving out placards and selling Lenin's critique of the German Social Democratic Party and soliciting signatures for causes and stuff. There were undoubtedly more socialist placards than socialists. But what about the lovies? Why won't the media mention the lovies? British protests are meant to be full of students in £1 German khaki jackets and rainbow beanies. Of course, the protest was full of students in £1 German khaki jackets and rainbow beanies. But what was notable was that they were accompanied by pretty fresh-face girls in (faux?) fir jackets and vintage skirts. Pretty fresh-faced boys in skinny jeans and pointy shoes. And they giggled. And then they shouted. They would try to start a shout, but would end up giggling. But they'd join in the chorus of shouts all the same. They shouted and the students in £1 German Jackets and rainbow beanies, and the kids in trackies and hoodies, and the kids from universities you've never heard of, and the 60 year old mature students, and the parents with their sons and daughters all shouted. We all shouted and giggled, because calls of "WHEN I SAY NICK CLEGG YOU SAY DICKHEAD - NICK CLEGG - DICKHEAD - NICK CLEGG - DICKHEAD - NICK NICK NICK CLEGG - DICK DICK DICKHEAD" were meant to be shouted and were funny.

Parents and children aside, the majority had little to personally gain from being here. We're in uni already. We're sorted. This was altruism in action. And this was the single thing that connected the most diverse and motley crew of bodies to descend upon the capital in an age: We were all better than the people sat at home eating crisps and disapproving of us. We all woke up early and marched in the cold (the beautiful, sunny cold, it must be said) because we care about our younger brothers and sisters, and the young we don't even know.

AH WE'RE MOVING WE'VE MOVING THANK FUCK I'M COLD. There's only so much that shouting DICKHEAD can warm you up after all. So we got going. We bantered with the police along the way. Cars and Lorries honked their horns in approval of people doing something. The builders applauded from the scaffolding and bid us to cheer, and we cheered.The guys in morph suits baffled. Girls in quiche school uniforms recycled their Halloween blood (the death of education - geddit?). We posed for tourists' cameras. Brass bands played. As did the bagpipes. It was a festival of political passion. It was a truly 21st century protest - with our phones and cameras we were the participants and the journalists. Me and a friend once argued about the soul of our age. I said we were an apathetic lot, we were too ironic to be passionate about anything, too detached to call for change. He said I aught to reserve judgment and there was revolutionary potential, threads of radicalism within the culture of these times. But I finally caught a glimpse of what it means to be a revolutionary - scrap that - a human in 2010. We are the generation holding signs saying "Down with this sort of thing" and "Can't we all just get along?" while shouting "NO IFS NO BUTS NO EDUCATION CUTS".

We passed by Parliament - turn and face them, nicely nicely, two fingers up - "NICK CLEGG DICKHEAD", "NO EDUCATION CUTS", "TORY SCUM", all very good, moving along now. We passed by a lot of buildings. Millibank, what's this one? "It's the place where politicians have their lunch I think?" "No no, it's the Tory Party HQ". Turn and face them, nicely nicely, two fingers up "TORY SCUM" "WHEN I SAY CUT BACK YOU SAY FIGHT BACK - CUT BACK - FIGHT BACK - CUT BA-". And then there was a commotion. You hear cheers, so you cheer, you see people rushing in one direction, so you rush. Some students had pushed through into the Lobby and were having a sit-in.

---------------------------------------------------------------

It began with a sit-in. The majority of us were outside, cheering the sitters on, because sit-ins are a good thing, are a part of the tradition of non-violent direct action. If anyone tells you the majority of student who could make out what was going on (and you must never underestimate the numbers of people who did not, who's presence was an act of inquiry) did not support the sit-in, they'd be lying. So we waited outside. When the police rushed in and overstepped the mark as they had done against anti-fascists at EDL marches, as they had done at the G20, were were going to be their outside, supporting those sitting inside. We waited outside because this is where action seemed to be, and because we all expected that there was safety in numbers. We built a bonfire, because we could, and we were excited, and it was fucking cold. We shouted at the windows. Why? Sure enough, the good vibes, the message of passion for protecting the futures of the young, changed when we entered the citadel, the epicentre of this destructive force of "cuts' that is killing our institutions and the social fabric of this nation. What had been a message of "Fuck These Cuts" had soured, curdled by that strange decades-old toxin that lurks in the air of the Left that says "Fuck Tories. This was regrettable, we should have restrained our impulses and kept on message, we shouldn't have forgotten the good vibes of solidarity and altruism that brought us all there in the cold in the first place. But this was not the only reason we stood outside, burning things and shouting. Deep in the back of our minds, deep in the back of our minds, their was still that mixture of fear and frustration and sadness that called out "BUT WHY? BUT WHY?"

They are so patently wrong and we are so patently right. Cutting the deficit in the midst of economic uncertainty, with no international export market and the lowest inflation rates in God knows how long is so patently wrong, while supporting the economy by investing in infrastructure, education and research is so patently right. Cutting rates of business taxes, and allowing giant multi-nationals to get away with not paying their taxes, allowing bankers in charge of an unprofitable business to give themselves FUCKPENDOUS bonuses is so patently wrong, while taxing our untaxed rich to pay for public services is so patently right. The idea that doubling, tripling university fees will not stop poor students from going to university is so patently wrong, whereas our fear that class divides will undoubtedly worsen and harden are so patently right. So we stood outside, waiting, because deep down we were hoping that somebody would come out of that building and go

- "Actually, I'm so sorry, what the fuck were we thinking? We'll sort this out right away, don't worry about the mess, and would you like a cup of tea for your troubles?"-

Because when we are so right, what else could we hope for?

So the NUS told us to move on, and we ignored them. And then we got bored and left of our own accord and checked out the ending rally. Seriously, who the fuck is Aaron Porter, or any of these NUS bureaucrats, and why do they think we want to hear them talk? If you want people to come you've got to have some star names. I'm sure Tony Benn would have been up for it. Where was Ed Milliband? So we quickly grew bored of the shout-outs over the loudspeakers "Thanks to all you guys from Reading University coming down, you've been faaaab! And a big thank to all of those who made it from Brighton University, you've been..." and would wander back to the Millibank to see what was happening. And there were drums and there was dancing and there was shouting and there were many students seeing what was happening, and there were some dickheads throwing stuff and getting booed and a window had been smashed.

-----------------------------------------------------------

We get the bus and leave. Ish. The bus is of course and hour and a half late and we were of course an hour and a half cold. On the bus I check the news on my phone. Student Riots. Violence Overshadows Protest. Tory HQ Stormed. Of fucking course that's what the media would take from all of this. 52,000 people get off their arses and come to London to make their voices heard. "This isn't going to win public support" the papers say. I've got a joke: What do we you call 52,000 diverse and passionate people who march on London to protest in favor of a vital public service? Not "the public" that's for sure. That honorable title goes to those at home, complaining. It's a crying shame that some police officers got hurt. It's a crying shame that a minority within a minority within the protest threw things at the police. The TWAT who threw a fire extinguisher from the roof deserves jail time for endangering lives and the cause. It's also a crying shame that all this gets the headlines, while the sheer numbers, the sheer diversity, normality of the protesters, and the protesters' cause and arguments get shafted aside. But then, thus it was so, and thus it ever was, The protest would either go down as violent rampage, or it would go down as a page 7 filler piece. The urge to appease the right wing media proved the down fall of Labour, and is an urge that must be fought all the way.

I won't shed tears for a broken window and the employment opportunities it provides for window repairers, but I truly fear what will happen to our country if this government does not heed yesterday's message.

And gone.
And in the interim I've been and done all sorts of things, updating this blog not being one of them. Sorry about that. Anyway I'll try to update more frequently with thoughts and words and stuff, but for the mean time I thought I should start making a dent in the hundreds of photos I'd like to share by welcoming a hot Japanese summer with photos from the height of Japanese Spring. As always click the photos for a big version not cut up by silly blogger.com.
Enjoy xxx



















Philosopher














One of my favorite photos I've ever taken~




These were taken at Ninanji (Ninan Temple) where I went with my wonderful Ma' and Sis'

KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA KOREA

That is all.

Hello everyone, sorry for the brief delay.

Why haven't I been blogging? Well the short version is simply that life as a student is very different to life as a traveler, and as the latter one is constantly doing new things, going new places and has their camera on them at all times - traits conductive to bloggification, whereas as the former tales of adventuring you want to post to friends and relatives halfway across the world are rather less frequent. That and I suppose I've fallen out of the habit.

But an update, some musings, some photos and thoughts: you know how it goes.
I'm on my spring holiday and will be until April the 8th. It has been Christmas and New Years and my 20th Birthday since I last wrote here properly. Can I technically say I've not written here for a decade? I'm going to Korea for a week in a couple of weeks. I'm revising for the Japanese Level Proficiency Test (JLPT) Level 2 to sit in June, the qualification which would let me work in a lot of Japanese companies. It's all pretty good.

Things are good partly in reaction to how bad, or at least boring they were earlier this winter. Japan is known for being a society which delegates seasonal changes a lot of cultural and emotional significance. I think I talked in an earlier post a bit about Waka, the Japanese poetic form from which Haiku would eventual spring, whose subject matter mostly consists of courtiers crying because they like flowers. If I were to romanticise the situation, it was a case of tapping into these deep wells of cultural riches and finding the desolation of winter too much for this poor aristocratic soul to bare and partook in that ancient Japanese tradition of hikikomori (引き蘢り), retreat for the tragic ways of this floating world. In actuality I got lazy, found the cold too unwelcoming, and apart from some lovely big get-togethers on Christmas and New Years, wasted away my winter break in my room, missing the short hours of daylight and not even getting any work done.

Returning to school was a fair bit better, but after a few weeks of lessons it was then exam time, but the exams being neither difficult, significant, or interesting enough to justify "crunch time" or "getting my act together", nor quite easy enough to simply ignore and take as them come, they were mostly a slightly annoying time of either doing a bit of work and begrudging it, or not working and thinking I should be. Oh, apart from a 5 page report on a subject of our choosing (as long as it contained statistics) we had to write in Japanese. I naturally set myself the title "Is Japan really a conservative nation" and wrote in the best, most academic Japanese of my life, remembering the nerdy satisfaction of hard work paying off that I've not felt in too long.

But anyway, I'm on holiday now. The weather's been slowly getting better, and we had our first day of real, beautiful warmth and sun for months just today. And with the thawing of winter comes too the thawing of my soul, or something? Rather than any big adventures just yet it's more been a case of enjoying Kyoto, seeing friends and actually doing a bit of work. It's amazing how pleasant actually doing some work can be when you're A) not told what to do and B) Working in a peng Japanese cafe with a friend while eating cheesecake and drinking too much coffee.

This as far as thing's get roughly chronologically, here are some things and thoughts.

It is not the year 2010 and I am now 20. These things are related in that they both happened recently and I think the latter might have caused the former. Back in December there were a lot of naughty (ooh err)/naughties retrospectives on everything from music to politics. It's quite an interesting idea that, summing up a decade, and it says something interesting about humanities inner geek/superstition that we attribute real significance and identity to a 10 year block of time (think 'The 20s' or 'Swingin' Sixies') that by all rights should be no more significant than a car's meter going from 999 to 1,000 miles. But the interesting themes which seemed to come up in a lot of articles were the related one's of the rise of the internet and the decentralisation of our collective cultural lives. It's certainly true that you can't put a particular image to the 2000s, like hippies to the 60s, or latex and the 80s. But it is interesting that all of groups continue to live on and even grow today, where like-minded rocker-billies or Neo Nazis, or Friend's Fanatics or Furries can meet on a forum, arrange and annual conference in Norfolk and get together for some old fashioned wearing leather/racism/sarcastic setences in sarcastic voices ending in the word "NOOTTT!!!"/having sex while dressed in animal costumes. With the mainstream belonging to whichever specialist group has the plurality for 2 weeks and the sub-culture replacing culture. Apart for the consensus on the death of consensus, was the consensus that the decade was shite. Lefties talked about Iraq, and the fact that the government has less and less control over the actions of big capital and more and more control over the lives of their people. Rightys just thought there were too many Blacks and Poles about. But whether it was because teenagers were becoming out of control and drinking too much at ex-church-strip-cubs, or because teenagers were so boring and didn't know how to party like we did in the 70s, whether because we bombed two Middle Eastern countries too many or one (Iran) too few, there was a heart warming consensus that the last 10 years where shite and we're glad to move onto the next lot.

I'm sorry, but being the decade I went from a quasi-fetus at 10, to a fully functioning real-boy-human-being-adult-all-around-man-about-the-town-and-gallant-extraordinary at 20, that was /my/ ten years and I'll kindly have you leave them be. Which is to say simply that in the macro-cultural-social overview of an era, it can be easy to forget the micro, as in, the people who live through it. Whether on nor the decade was any 'good' or not is completely irrelevent where I'm standing, as it was essentially the period of time in most of my life has taken place.

Which reminds me WAAAAAAAAAAAH I'M TWENTY NOW. Allow not being a teenage. 10 years ago I was 10, in 10 years I'll be 30, I'm practically dead. Apologies to anyone over the age of 21. I SUUPOOOOSE there is the fact that every year since the age 15 has been unquantifiable and near unbelievably better than the last. But shhh, I'd never let a good opportunity for an existentialist crisis go to waste ^ ^

Wheelup, cut, next topic.

One of the reasons I think I've been finding it hard to blog is my lack of big insights into Japan. The dedicated among you might know that this is my 4th Japan Blog since I was 16, and they have all contained a similar mush of comments on Japanese culture and more straight forward travelogue. By now, all of the big, bloggable realizations about Japan that have hit me and I've wanted to share I have, or at least am so used to that I'm no longer conscious of them. Instead a lot of what I've discovered this year, and a lot of the joy of this year is in the language, little discoveries of how a word can be used in different and interesting ways, or what an element of grammar says about the thinking behind it, or some ghetto localism, things which delight the inner grammar geek in me I never knew existed but who's charm I can only share with the other people studying this language and definitely do not want to bore you guys with. That or things I pick up campaigning and working with the homeless, little tragedies or outrages, moments of connection, stories I would like to be telling but need the right level of polemic desire and thematic approach to do so.

Which brings me to two things, the first being that yes, I'm still campaigning, every week when possible and it's just about the one thing (outside school) I've ever done this long without wanting to give up or slack off on. The second is that I'm pretty sure I'm loosing the ability to speak English. Hanging around other British Japanese Studies students when not with Japanese friends, we can all speak a nice Japlish, weaving in and out of the two languages and realising that there are some things Japanese can say with the exact perfect nuance, with the right sounds, so clearly, which are difficult or non-existent in English and vice-versa. But when it comes to this blog, or writing messages to my friends I find that unlike in Japanese, where the equivalent terms are casual and easy to use, you can't just drop a "from here on", or "by all means", or "in this manner" into an English sentence, can you?

Anway, that's words, here are some pictures.
Woah, actually, here are over 70 pictures o___o

I've been mostly eating good food:










(TINY EXPENSIVE COFFEE)


In good cafes:














And these cafes are in some cities:
Like Kyoto:












(This is a playground inside a temple)


And Osaka:


























But sometimes in Kyoto there is nature:























(That's the Kyoto International Conference Center, where the Kyoto Protocol was signed and saved humanity from it's own grievous indulgences... ish)




And sometimes there are night times:















(Though sometimes at night time Kansai comedian's are stripped and thrown into rooftop jacuzzis)














And sometimes there are silly pictures of me:













And sometimes there are miscellaneous:






















And that's about it. See you next time, hopefully a bit sooner~
ラッブアンドピース！
RUBBUANDDOPIISU
xxx

I interrupt a long pause in blogging to bring you this:
Owing to the good offices of Mr. Tea Warrior (茶武さん)

I now have a name in Chinese (meaning literary Japanese) characters.
Dominic Lucas Morris, A.K.A Dominiku Morisu is now Domu Morisu, as in:
怒武　森守

"Angry warrior, protect the forest"
I'd say that's about the best name an eco-socialist could hope for~
xxx

We are currently living through two weeks which will determine the living standards, and indeed, lives of billions of people. Typing that feels unrealistic. I'm sure reading it does too. But while we debate what to eat for dinner tonight, and lament another 4 days of work or school until the weekend history is being made in Copenhagen. The question is whether it will be made by the few of the many, whether we will hand over our voice to governmental representatives, whether our democracy extends to one day every 4 or 5 years where we cast a vote, or whether we take advantage of our freedoms in these two weeks where they matter so much and speak out as global citizens in order to secure a future free of the ills of climate change.

These ills are many and they are harsh. They are also indisputable, the leaked East Anglia Emails may show some poor professional morality on the behalf of a few scientists but they do not prove a conspiracy. Indeed, none of the claims of the climate change deniers stand up to the facts, and none disprove the research, supported by /Every single national and international scientific body - "With the release of the revised statement by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in 2007, no remaining scientific body of national or international standing is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate change".
And for those who think that it's all an argument about plastic bags and polar bears, I would urge you to think of it as a problem with food. Africa will obviously be hard hit, but so too will Dear old Blighty... A fact which not even The Daily Mail(!) contests. But yes, the Polar Bears and Eskimos are fucked too.

I do not write this to moralise, or to nag, and certainly the last thing I want to encourage is at attitude of "we're all screwed anyway, so what's the point". The only reasonable attitude anyone can take to any of the problems with the world today, be it poverty, human rights, climate change or whatever, is that things are bad, but through human agency and action they can be made better.

So a simple request. In the next week, while the Copenhagen conference is still ongoing, make an action, any action, in solidarity with the campaign to avert climate change. It makes a difference, it was not the benevolence of our politicians that has given Britain world leading emissions targets and laws, but the action of many.

Make a donate to Friends of the Earth, where your input will currently be doubled.
Or any other great eco-charity, like Greenpeace, Campaign against Climate Change.

Join Plane Stupid, and partake in their protests, or just keep an open eye out for any events in your area, you never know what you might stumble into (see below).

Sign a petition calling our government into action... Sign two!

Use the power of the market and sign up to Sandbag, and ensure that Europe's emissions pledges are realized, not just promised.

Join 10:10 and do your best to cut your Carbon emissions by 10% in the year 2010, a goal supported by everyone from leftist campaigner George Monbiot to David Cameron and the Tory front bench.

Write to your MP and express to them your concern for climate change and get them to explain in detail their policy on it. If their reply is not adequate, write again and tell them so.

Change your energy supplier to Ecotricy, the only supplier in Britain who use every penny you pay them to build /new/ windmills and increase our supply of renewable energy.

There is a lot one can do. I ask that now, during this conference in Copenhagen that you do so.





Bonus pictures: protest can be sexy:

No I'm not. I don't like tattoos, my mummy wouldn't let me and there's no such thing as a Japanese alphabet you Absolute Follop.

However, I have been thinking of late about ways to write my name in Japanese.
Japanese has 3 syllabaries: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. The first two are purely phonetic, with Hiragana being the system used mostly for grammatical constructions and basic words and Katakana being the system used for foreign words and sound affects (and sometimes it is used like typing in ALL CAPITALS in English). Kanji is borrowed from Chinese and is the system where characters hold both sound and meaning. This is used for the majority of the Japanese vocabulary, including names.

Most non-Asian foreigners write their names in Katakana, trying to best aproximate their name within the narrow constraints of the Japanese limited phonetic range. My name in Japanese comes out as Dominiku, written

ドミニク

. My friends Frankie and Sam come out as Furankii and Samu,

フランキー

サム

But a few rare foreigners chose to write their name in Kanji, giving it meaning and making it look more Japanesey. A well known example is that of the foreigners rights activist, the ex-David Aldwinkle and current Arudou Debito. Which is a name which looks like
有道　出人

, which literally translates as "Exist Road Leave Person" and which he translates as "a person who has a road and goes out on it". This is kind of cool? But mostly really annoying. Like his activism is kind of pretty necessary, but he's mostly a confrontation self-righteous wasteman with a persecution complex.

But anyway, I've been playing around with the same thing. Sam has managed to come up with 茶武

, which means "Tea Warrior". For Frankie we've come up with 腐乱鬼

- "Decomposing Goblin" or my own hippy variation, 不乱気

- "Non-violent Energy".

So now to Dominiku. Sigh. Within my name there is a stark 'niku' - 肉

- "Meat", or even more depressingly a near percet match with 'minikui' - 醜い

- "Ugly". Compounded with the fact that "Do" can act as "Very", it doesn't start off promising. Right, round 1:
何味肉

or going upmarket, 何魅肉

- respectfully "What flavour meat?" and "How charming meat!"

Right then. I have been restricting myself with one thing. The majority of Japanese names are 2 characters long, all though a fair few are 3. Four is just not the done thing. So I can struggle on playing with Do, Mi, and Niku (In which case I should probably do away with meat in favour of 難

- "Hardship, Difficulty") or I can concede artistic defeat and break it into the unweildy Do, Mi, Ni and Ku...

To be continued! xxxx

It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark. Evening came on, the last evening of the year. In the cold and gloom a poor little girl, bareheaded and barefoot, was walking through the streets.

--------------

These are the first few sentences of Hans Christian Andersen's 'The Little Match Girl', which you can read in full here. I first read it in Belgium on the recommendation of my friend Heathcote and I have just translated the first few paragraphs of it for my written expression class homework. The post's going to weave in and out of a few themes, so stay alert, and if your attention wains, the important bit's under the stars~

As you know, and as the logo of this blog regularly reminds, I have been campaigning with the Communist Party of Japan. Everyday in the newspapers we are presented with politics as political, that is, the ins and outs of party politics, what Cameron said about Brown, which policies are directed to which voter block, which way the polls are pointing. Far more interesting to me is the relationship between politics and culture, and indeed it is very likely that my dissertation next year will explore Japanese modernist literature through the lens of Zizekian cultural criticism to explore the underlying messages and politics or the Japanese liberal intelligentsia on the brink of Japan's decline into Fascism. And I get pleanty of high brow academic politics with the JCP, whether it's discussing constitutional systems, the differing international meanings of Trotskyism or whether Japan truly experienced 'democracy' before the war. But as a person who is prone to thinking too much, to over-rationalising things, to neglect the practical in favour of the theoretical, I am grateful to the JCP for awakening in me that relationship which is so often overlooked, but yet is the most essential, which is that between politics and people.

Every Saturday, from 10PM to around 11:30 the JCP, together with the wider 反費困 - Anti Poverty Campaign go to the south side of Kyoto station and give food and clothes to the homeless. I've been going the last couple of weeks and intent to go whenever possible. It is a practical, humanitarian ethos that the JCP have revealed time and again in the short time I've campaigned with them. Beyond feeding the homeless, they conduct 'labour consolations' with young people around Japan, where they interview people on the streets, give advice about finding employment, accessing welfare or joining unions. This also entails getting people to fill in questionnaires about their employment situation (or lack thereof...) which are relayed to the welfare office so that welfare and employment policy can better meet the people on the street's needs. JCP city meetings are just as likely to what a certain homeless person likes to eat, or safe places for someone to get changed, as they are to talk about policy and election campaigns. The only other political party who dealt with issues in such a grassroots way that I can think of (though as a strictly non-violent party the JCP would surely dismiss the comparison) is the Black Panther Party and their Free Breakfast for Children program which attempted prove the worth of socialist ideology with a working example of a socialised distribution scheme aimed at alleviating hunger in the poor.

Yesterday was the first time I got to meet some of the homeless people the party devote so much attention to. One old man sleeping inside the station was doing better that some others. He had a wife and son in the city, but for reasons he doesn't speak he can't return to them. Owing to his life long work at a nearby market, he had something of a pension and basic health-care coverage. For this, he is still homeless. Another old man has traveled the world, speaks very decent English and still dreams of starting his own business in Hong Kong. For this, he is still homeless. And this seems like as good a place as any to jump into the Japanese welfare system. -

What is readily apparent to foreigners, and widely known about Japan is that it is a hierarchical society with much emphasis placed on one's vertical relationship to one's superiors and inferiors. What is less widely known among the lay-person is that there is also a horizontal axis known as 'in-group, out-group'. This social structure is (traditionally, and it must be stressed that Japan is a country of 130 million people with huge internal cultural and personal variation) so ingrained that it is evident in the grammar of the language, where the Worker A of Company A speaks to Boss A with respectful language that show's the boss' superior position, but when he meets worker B of Company B, Worker A will talk about Boss A with humbling language, because in the face of an outsider, Company A operates and one unit, one in-group regardless of the hierarchy within it. To do otherwise is not simply a faux-pas but is actually grammatically incorrect.

These relations are repeated in the economic structure. The first barrier against poverty is company welfare. This is the security system that ensures that those who work stable, full time, unionised jobs will, in return for working all out for long hours, be looked after, financially, legally, whatever. This privatised welfare system served Japan very well during the boom years, but now more and more people are working unsteady, part time, un-unionsed jobs, where they can be fired at a day's notice and have nothing in the way of a pension or health coverage.

Where company welfare fails, what is known as family welfare is often expected to pick up the slack. Here is where people borrow money from, or move in with parents, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters.

If you have a good job, and you have a good family, you are in the in-group. But as the presence of these English speaking, well educated homeless people shows, in this economic climate, people who were once 'in' have found themselves 'out' and this is where public welfare must step in. Increasingly the government is willing to play a role in protecting those who need it most. Though health-care isn't free (it is a universal system with the patients paying 1/3 of the costs), there is assistance for the poorest. Across the nation is the Living Assistance scheme, which provides the very poorest with a variety of monies for everything from money to buy nappies, to money to pay the rent. Kyoto, being a progressive city, holds days where free health care and check ups are given along with other services. Kyoto's pitiful 18 shelter beds are in fact comparatively high, and the city has negotiated a deal with a hotel with high vacancies to put the homeless up for free in these harsh winter months. All of this takes money, which is paid for by taxes. I have not met any 'welfare scrounges', rather simply people who's very sustenance depends on the public pocket and who are either physically unable to work, or simply unable to find work because they are old. Similarly, behind the tabloids' frequent stories about those who abuse the system, the vast majority of recipients of welfare in Britain are people who would work if they could or if there were any jobs to be found. Food for thought when complaining about taxes.

One can see the system for it's failures and successes. For the welfare offered, there are those who are unable to receive it. Some people literally are unable to walk all the way to the welfare office. Some people find it impossible to wade through the characteristically Japanese bureaucracy involved. Still more are unwilling to take the Living Assistance because of personal pride - an emotional response perhaps difficult to understand for Westerners but beautifully conveyed in the Studio Ghibli classic - Grave of Fireflies. It was touching to see the cycle of one man volunteering with us who had himself been a recipient of the Living Assistance, had got himself an apartment and now works with the Anti Poverty Campaign convincing others that there's no shame in accepting help. But for those who have slipped through all other layers of protection, the JCP and Anti Poverty Campaign are there providing hot rice balls and soup, blankets and socks.

*******************************************************************
Kyoto has very quickly become very cold. The Japanese boast that Japan, unique among nations, has four distinct seasons. Obviously the existence of the four words 'winter, spring, summer, autumn' bare no relation to this theory of Japanese-exceptionalism at all. But sure enough, right on schedule, a mere few days before the first of December the temperature drops to see-your-breath-in-the-air-and-3-jumpers-cold. There is an old woman called Noriko-san who sleeps in front of Kyoto Station. She's tiny and walks very slowly, when she walks, is very quiet but has a sense of humor and know what she likes and what she doesn't. She doesn't like being around people and is reluctant to take up the offer to stay in this hotel for free, though there is progress and week by week we push, we can only hope. She is talked about often and fondly among the volunteers and in official meetings. We gave her soup and rice balls, and her t-shirt and jumper not being anywhere near enough, wrapped her in 3 blankets. She looked sweet as could be, more blanket than body, and as one volunteer said, a lot like a snowman. Warm fuzzy feelings abound, this is what it feels like to save the world.
And then Iida-san, leader of the Kyoto Youth and Student section of the JCP, my go to guy in the party, in the midst of a lot of "isn't it cold" talk drops it. "Isn't it? She could die."

I cycled back home, nose running, scarf wrapped up to the mouth, looking forward to my heated room. She doesn't have a heated room. None of them do. She could die.

So this is my Christmas Appeal -
To my friends in Kyoto I like to get any old items of clothing, or perhaps more realistically a bit of money to buy as many Uniqlo HeatTeq clothes, and blankets as possible to ensure that this winter none of Kyoto's homeless have to die of the cold.

To my friends and family in Britain, I ask you to think of the homeless, and the millions in horrendously substandard housing around the country and donate whatever you can to Shelter, who are a ridiculously brilliant charity who's services are especially needed over these next few months.

If my story's not convinced you, go back to the top and read Andersen's, it's only short, honest.

Big love, sleep safe, tight, and warm.
xxxxxx

Though autumn arrives
for all men, I alone plumb
the depths of misery.
The sadness resides, it seems,
not in autumn but in me.

----------------------

That is poem 185 of the Kokin Wakashu (The Anthology of New and Old Poems), a 10th century classic of Japanese poetry (which you can read in Engish translation h-h-h-h-here)! The first few sections of the collection are organized by season, with a vague 'narrative' of familiar seasonal events, such as the arrival of certain birds, or the blooming of certain flowers, to give it a sense of direction.

Pervading the collection is a sense of 物の哀れ - mono no aware, which roughly translates as the 'pathos of things' but refers to the tragic beauty in the fact that all things fade. In the Japanese cultural psyche, this feeling is strongly linked with spring cherry blossoms and autumn leaves, which are ssen as all the more beautiful for their brevity. It's a phrase that is loaded with both Orientalist and Nihonjinron connotations, in the case of the former exemplifying how different the Japanese are to other nations, and to how effeminate, pre-modern they are, in the case of the latter proving how different the Japanese are to other nations, and to how much more sensitive, aesthetically refined they are. Few practicing Japanologists would use the phrase without heavy doses of irony or self-awareness (My literature teacher responded to a friend using the term regarding a Japanese film by drawing his fingers into a gun and shooting himself) but it's definitely apparent in everything from the canonical texts of modern Japanese literature to comedy coming-of-age anime/ It's an aspect of Japanese culture I find very attractive, as a person who can feel nostalgia for events as they're unfolding, or even experience nostalgia in anticipation of events that haven't yet happened. But anyway, this is pre-ample, the starting poem is especially, gloriously miserable, and here are some photos of Kyoto being pretty.

I accidentally cycled into a temple and found this sunset.















View from the first train after a night out in Osaka.









紅葉 - Momiji, Autumn leaves, on an amazing day out to the Kyoto Botanical Garden.

























































What am I like?



Enjoy! But also cry a bit, and then you too can be mono no aware.
xxx

And like, I'd never support the BNP, God no, I mean, that Nick Griffin, what a sleaze bag. But you know, they do have some good points right, I mean, it's not racist to say we've got an immigration problem...

Well, no, you might not be racist, but you are wrong. Furthermore, you're feeding the underlying sentiments that cause racism and that allow the BNP to prosper as they do today.

---------
As I'm sure any of you with English connections know, the leader of Britain's far right BNP party, Nick Griffin, was given a spot on BBC's Question time a couple of days ago. You can watch the episode in full here. Lots has been said about whether or not is was right for the Beeb to let him on. I think that the BBC had to treat him like the leader of a party with voters in the millions, though one could question whether Question Time was the right program and other such things. On balance, I'm sure some potential BNP-voters/ex-BNP voters were turned off by his holocaust denial, his obscene and outlandish claim that he shared the platform with a leader of a - not "totally non-violent", as he's been quoted, but more ridiculously - "almost totally non-violent" KKK sect, and all us liberal sorts feel good seeing him get the beating he deserved, but this has brought him more publicity than he could have dreamed and having got our vitriol out of the way, brings the BNP one step closer to the political mainstream.

But anyway, we all know the BNP are racist reactionary prick fucks. What really concerned me was the attitude of some of the audience members and the Labour and Conservative panelists on the show. An audience member asked if the recent rise of the BNP could in part be blamed on the Labour government's immigration policies. This audience member clearly meant "The BNP's recent rise is due to the Labour government's immigration policies". Jack Straw from the Labour party obviously said, that no, it's not Labour's fault, of course there are worries about immigration, but we're dealing with them, for example, for actually example of what he actually said as an actual good thing "asylum number have come down to around a third of where they were". Really! That's great Jack! I'm so glad to know that out country is housing 66% less people seeing relief from poverty, despotism, human rights abuse, racial, sexual and homophobic discrimination, genocide, etc. The other parties didn't agree, Labour haven't "done enough" about immigration, the BNP are popular because our immigration policies are too relaxed.

Watch the video, and observe the tone and language of the debate, and you will see what all of this amounts to. "The BNP are crazy racists, you don't need to vote for them, our parties are sensibly racist". When we cave in to 'tough on immigration' talk, we support the narrative that racism is based on. So let me start with the single preposition that will allow us to defeat this noxious ideology:
Britain does not have an immigration problem.

Of course, this is over simplified. Racism, for example, is a problem that plagues immigrants, and thus counts as a problem to do with immigration. There are others. I could go into sexism and homophobia in the Islamic community for example. Maybe I will explore it. But as middle class white people, as the majority of the readers of this blog certainly are, we've got more than enough blame on our hands to need scapegoats. So here I present the problems and not-problems of immigration.

Race - Not a problem. The one thing all the mainstream parties all agreed on is that the color of your skin bares no relation on one's nationality or character. The arguments of "scientific racism" have long since been annihilated, and anyone who thinks that race determines anything more than skin colour and a couple of hereditary diseases here and there can kind get the hell off my blog and out of my life. In fact, race only means anything when someone is treated different because of their skin colour. But this is where race issues become issues of...

Culture - We've got some problems. Regarding language, I think there is a strong humanitarian and anti-racist argument for compulsorily English lessons. I don't care if a person looks different, eats different food, and has celebrates different festivals to me. But obviously it's a breeding ground for mutual hostility when two people literally can't understand what the other is saying. And of course this doesn't exclude the fact that we Brits are by and large lazy when it comes to language learning and need a dollop of humility and perhaps a large dose of grammar cramming. Nor does it exclude the fact that more native English speakers should learn minority languages to facilitate English language teaching, and we should offer language teaching universally to those who settle in this country. But when multi-culturalism suggests we can co-exist without a common language I think it works against itself.

The second cultural concern I would raise is that of religious values. Quite frankly, the attitudes of large swaths of Islam towards women and sexual minorities are repulsive to me and have no place in this country or any decent society. But then quite frankly, I feel same way about the attitudes of large swaths of Christianity. Stick Judaism in there for good measure, but also include Jewish attitudes to Palestinians in their list of religious extremism. And you essentially find that in the modern world we have a religious problem, not an Islamic one. If we are to condemn certain immigrant attitudes towards women and sexual minorities, and indeed we must, the we must do so for a position of moral authority. Nick Griffin is not allowed to express disgust at Islamic treatment of women because he is the leader of a sexist party - we all remember that "rape is like force feeding a woman chocolate cake" line. And of course he's no defender of gay rights, which he finds "really creepy". But then, papers such as The Sun and The Daily Mail, which love to morally condemn Islam while presenting a 1950s vision of Britain in which most women stay at home in the kitchen and gays stay in the closest where they belong. The only position to condemn sexism and homophobia is from one of moral consistency that codemns racism and islamaphobia at the same time.

And one final cultural point about the loss of British culture. Let me just start with a couple of facts before moving to the argument proper. Where we have urban ethnic ghettoisation it is because white people move to the suburbs leaving immigrant communities in the city centres. And yet, this is happening less and we are statistically living in ever more diverse areas. To repeat, people of different racists are ever more living nearer each other. Furthermore, the 'ethnic group' that is increasing most rapidly in percentage terms is that of 'mixed race'. Far from the race war scenarios presented in the tabloids, our country is one where more and more people of different racial backgrounds are choosing to spend their lives with each other.


So is English culture dying off? In some ways, the answer is an obvious yes. But the culprits by and large happen to be rich white men (and one special rich white woman).
Immigrant culture is flourishing in this country, and English culture of an older sort (I will not here talk about 'native' or 'indigenous', but certainly diverse and traditional) is waning. In many ways we're quite happy about this, we're all glad about the culinary riches brought by Britain's immigrant communities, and most 'English' kids willingly choose to hiphop over English folk because they prefer it.
But regardless, English culture is not waning /because/ of a flourishing immigrant culture, but rather the immigrant culture does so well because the grounds on which the traditional cultures of these isles stood on have been dug from beneath them. Our culture has been thoroughly commercialized.

Since the 1970s and Thatcher's neo-liberal revolution, we have been fed an ideology that says that everything has its price, and it it doesn't turn a profit it's not worth making. The indigenous culture of the mining towns in the North was smashed in the name of this neo-liberal experiment. Whatever the economic justification (the mines, were in fact, profitable and subsidized other sectors of British industry), strong, proud local communities were destroyed in the pursuit of profit and a torn social fabric and institutional poverty remains today - the breeding grounds for BNP supporters. Our country, once the "land of shop keepers" has become the land of cashier. Where once stood hundreds of local shops producing unique cheeses, hand made shoes, home baked cakes, we now have out-of-town shopping centers and ubiquitous Topshops. So if you're concerned about local, English culture, you'd do better boycotting Tescos than the local kebab shop. Is it any wonder that immigrant communities would seek to preserve their own cultures when our relentless drive for profit has decimated what used to be England?

And just a quick point about those two great defenders of British culture, The Times and The Sun, owned by the Australian Rupert Murdoch. These papers consistently pit themselves as the enemies of two of the genuinely praise-worth British institutions, the BBC and NHS.

And to top it off, if we want to get rebuilding anything approximating a traditional culture any time soon, we best get over ourselves and start integrating better into the European Union. The EU is consistently portrayed as an enemy to national sovereignty and a threat to English culture. Bullshit. The EU has support for local cultures as one of it's founding goals. Through EU monies we have seen an increase in language teaching in Welsh and Scotch Gaelic. We also see initiatives such as the European Capital of Culture, recently awarded to Liverpool, which sees money directed to support local arts and communities.

If this section has seemed winded its way a bit too widely over too much information I apologize, but if there's one theme I hoped linked this all together is that what we perceive to be cultural issues are often in fact...

Economic - Racism, as with all prejudices, exists because it benefits capitalism for it to exist. When a poor white person's energies are spent attacking a poor black person, they are both distracted from the cause of their poverty. When poor white voters in the American south vote Republican because they dislike gays, they vote for a party who will cut the funds going towards their education and health care. When the white British working class complain that immigrants get a head start in the queue for social housing (this is simply not true), they ignore the fact that the problem isn't brown people taking social housing that should be going to white people, but rather more simply, there's not enough social housing! And Labour are fine with this because it means they can announce polices that promise that immigrants will not get a head start on social housing (they already don't!), rather than having to pledge money to build the social housing this country desperately needs.

Our country has a lot of immigrants because other countries are poor. Other countries are poor partly because of British government policy that ties third world debt reduction to privatization of third world assets and infrastructure, the profit of which ends up in the hands of the rich which the Africans are still unable to feed themselves. If we want less immigrants from Africa and India (and I will here accept the argument that as a small Island, immigration must slow down /eventually), the only humane way of achieving this is not with the stick that imposes harsh immigration laws for those seeking to enter Britain, but with the carrot that reduces poverty around the world and makes economic migration (as opposed to cultural migration or migration for marriage and the the like) a thing of the past.

If we are to support 'British' culture, then we must repudiate our fetishism of profit. The starts with support for cultural institutions such as theaters that can not survive on a for-profit basis, and ends with rolling back corporate Britain, urban planning that protects local businesses, a taxation and regulation regime that cuts the biggest companies back to size, and political reform that takes power away from these monied interests and puts it into the hands of local communities.

If we are to repudiate racism, we can not do so by accommodating it. Racism, sexism, homophobia and all other discrimination must be tackled together, and must be tackled with the awareness that they share a common route in dividing the oppressed peoples of the world against each other to the benefit of the ruling classes. The representatives of the major parties did their best to show Nick Griffin as the racist leader of the racist party that he is, and landed some good blows, but their attacks rang hollow for one reason. They are all representative of capitalist parties. And the only consistent way to stand against racism and for local communities is to stand against capitalism and for socialism.

Good Morning!
Is "Ohayo" in Japanese, and you say it at any time of day, because apparently "Konnichiwa" is just for nerds. This and other fun facts below!

Hey! As is becoming usual, it's been a while. I'm afraid I've lost the ability to write balanced prose, so I shall move from last post's polemic to photographic phluff. One of the things I've not been doing in Kyoto is campaign work, not quite yet, in terms of practicalities, I'm afraid rather more petty bourgeois concerns of job-hunting and the like have distracted me, but high on the to-do list is to use my contacts in the JCP and to get active!

A drawn out recap of what I've been up to since I've last written about, you know, being in Japan.

My dad came to visit! Wow, that was a little while ago now. It was only for a few days but they were fairly packed and it was a lot of fun. He's got a pretty interesting perspective on the place, having spent a lot of time here in the 80s, and beyond it simply being nice to see him, it felt like he was glad for the change of pace after a very long business trip.

We went to a gig of one of my favorite Japanese bands, Mama!Milk in an amazing gritty live house:







I found something about the accordion player unbelievably sexy, is the accordion known as sexy instrument? It should be!





Another day we hung out in Osaka:




Got Takoyaki:


Then got the train to Kobe for a public bath (one just goes with it, it's Japan) and some Kobe Beef:

I've said it before and I will say it again, Kobe beef is one of the greatest physical experiences to be had on the planet. We should all cut back on meat (especially beef), because it takes tons (literally!) of water and grain to feed a cow which could and should be used to feed people. But back in day, when people lived on subsistence farming, and the only time they would eat beef is when their cows reached the end of their milk producing lives, you can bet they enjoyed their beef as much as I enjoy the marbley delights of Kobe.

I show these pictures to my friends. He was well received. One friend said he looked like a suave film villain, another (girl) just said how young he looked. Pa, I think you've still got it~




In other news, I'm getting close to having a job! I've got an interview for a private English teaching organization on Sunday, and if all goes well I'll be getting between 3000-4000 Yen and hour for a one-on-on conversation class, which at the current exchange rates works out to between 10 and 12 billion pounds (£19-26).

But mostly I've not been up to news, I've been up to life. I now have a routine, and it's one which works pretty well.
A Day in the life of me.
I go to school at 9, EVERYDAY. I have lessons until 12:15. I eat lunch at the cafeteria then waste time chatting with friends for an hour or so, before either going and doing a practical job/looking around town, or go home and nap for a few hours. Then there's the early evening, at which point it goes like this:








Udon, Donuts and free refill coffee, Donuts and free refill coffee, free refill cofee, meanwhile, homework! Home by 12/1, chatting till friends until 2/3, go to sleep, then a healthy, happy 5/6 hours later, I wake up. The student life~

But essentially, Kyoto's just a really cool place:




















Oh, actually, one last thing:
?

...

!

!

!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Night night!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thoughts on how to save Japan/the World.

Japan needs more pride visa-vi the West and more humility visa-vi the East. Japan needs to assert itself against America and heed to the fears of China and Korea.
I was thinking about fat, ugly white guys dating sexy skinny Japanese girls. This is neo-colonialism. Literally, I swear down. Now, love is subjective, sure. But objectively, these girls are wrong. These guys might make lots of jokes, but they're not funny. They're only here because they can't get girls back home. Obviously, I'm really great, so this doesn't apply to me. But the fact is, as a westerner in Japan, one does, or can, feel like a big shot. People assume you're interesting, you can strike up a conversation with anyone and they'll appreciate it. One gets so much good attention as a white person in Japan. White people who say they experience racism are wrong: they are merely experiencing bad vibes brought about by being bad people.

Now the fact of the matter is that it is wrong to make assumptions about people based on their race or nationality and I fight for a society without the irrational and invented notion of what we call the 'nation state', but within existing perimeters, there is a truism in the fact that most of the white people in Japan think that the Japanese are cooler than them, and part of the reason is that the Japanese are indeed cooler than most of the white people in Japan.

The Japanese are too quick to heap praise on foreign actors, bands, films, whatever, without taking enough credit for or pride in her own cultural achievements (and this is not to talk simply ikebana and haiku, which do get a fair bit of attention, but rather Japan's modern literature, film, music, whatever - her culture which influenced by foreign culture and deserves to influence foreign culture).

But pretty Japanese girls dating fat white guys, cool Japanese kids listening to uncool British indie, these share common roots with the fact that Japanese foreign policy is merely a subsection of American foreign policy. Since Commodore Perry's arrival on big black ships in 1852, Japan has more often that not taken a highly subservient position to the West. This results in the world's second (but-soon-to-be-third-if-not-forth) largest economy having on the most cursory influence on world affairs.

This subservience to the West is closely related to Japan's chauvinism towards the East. Surely at least part of Japan's rough-handed attitude towards her weaker neighborhoods is due to her powerlessness within the old powers. At the turn of the century Japan was told to colonize or be colonized. She has been through periods of both and now enjoys the position of being emasculated from one side while making powerless imperial noises at the other.

Japan is at her worst when she is in this position. Her support for America leads her to aid the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Her imperial pretensions lead her to deny or play down the horrendous war crimes she inflicted on the peoples of Asia. And these positions support each other in a vicious circle. People often talk about the "national conservatism" of the Japanese people. Japanese conservatism is not natural: it is socially and politically engineered. In the Pre-War period, the education system raised generations of soldiers willing to die for the Emperor. In the immediate Post-War period American policy killed the emerging, vibrant Japanese Left in it's cradle by funded the conservative Liberal Democratic Party who were in power (with less than one year's exception) from 1955 until this years election. The LDP consisted of many people in positions of power in the war years. Many of these people's sons and grandsons remain in the party. While LDP members public play around either side of the line of historic sensitivity, many implicitly or covertly support the actions of the out and out Far-Right.

Japan's tight relations with America have fostered a political climate that keeps Japan distant from Asia, while her distance from Asia keeps her dependent on America.

But with the election of a new government things look positive. Though there are many gaping faults in the new government's policies (like their plans to cut the number of seats rewarded by PR, which would certainly reduce the influence of the Japanese Communist Party and the Social Democrats) and questions about their ability to enact even their best of policies (calls of change can ring hollow from a party packed with ex-members of their opposition) It seems things are on the right track. The new Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times. Conservative commentators called crazy and a communist. He's neither. Within this promising article he asks the key question - "How can we put an end to unrestrained market fundamentalism and financial capitalism, that are void of morals or moderation, in order to protect the finances and livelihoods of our citizens?" - and makes a key, though blindingly obvious, observation - "I believe that the East Asian region, which is showing increasing vitality, must be recognized as Japan's basic sphere of being". In fact, he's even been floating the idea of an EU-esq Asian Union. Though his plans of monetary union are highly unlikely, great Asian co-operation is clearly at the front of his thinking and, hopefully facilitated of a final exorcism of Japan's imperial ghosts, it is neigh on inevitable

A Japan based around Asia will be one with greater self-confidence and greater liberalism, less imperial hubris. But I also think this has progressive implications for the whole world. While on human rights, democratic rights, workers rights, America is clearly a better place than China, on they key moral, scientific, economic challenge of our lifetimes, China is now a more progressive force than America.

If North Korea is a failed state in feeding its own people, America is failed state in securing future provisions of food for the whole of humanity. America is failed state on climate change. With the vital Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change 58 days away, the chances to get a comprehensive global deal on climate change, one that will prevent run-away global warming and the immense /human/ suffering and death that this would cause, is getting smaller and smaller. (If you want to get involved, a good place to start would be here). America is playing petty politics with (literally!) hundreds of millions of people's lives. China is calling a spade a spade. America with her lopsided democracy gives god fearing climate deniers in Kansas and Wyoming, with their few millions citizens (but two senators each) a veto over the fate of the planet. China, with her dictatorship and reverence for science is ready to push through the necessary Carbon Cutting measures without having to worry about the public opinion of the stupid.

The world needs to start bullying America into doing her part to salvage a planet we can all live on from the wreack caused by her capitalism. Britain should jump ship to Europe. Japan should jump ship to Asia.

(Oh, I spent three days writing this. Which is definitely not an plea for you comment it or anything).