This week's obscurist question

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There is discussion of punk and the Clash, and whether it/they are not perhaps "fascist"?

!!!!!!!!!!!!!Watch this space!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sometimes people overestimate my expertise. I'm sad to tell Norman that I had never heard of such an incident until two minutes ago :).

Bear in mind I'm working under a slight handicap: Mike so-called Barnes borrowed my CORNELIUS CARDEW: THE MEMORIAL CONCERT two-fer abt five years ago, for a Wire Inv.Jukebox, and is still "forgetting" to return it. I tried playing CORNELIUS CARDEW PIANO: THALMANN VARIATIONS instead, but it's worse than the Mel Smith movie, frankly, so I'm writing this to LIVE AT THE WITCH TRIALS.

OK: Cardew was born in 1936, into a famous upper-middle-class Arts & Crafts family, father a great potter, brother ditto, the Cardews second only to the Leaches in the skewed ceramic pursuance of the ideals of Morris, Ruskin, Owen et al. He broke with this, and went to study under Stockhausen in Köln, working on Carré, where KS proved to be a jerk of WORLD HISTORICAL proportions, refusing to give participant-creator where CC felt he'd earned it.

From 1958, he moved more towards the Cage/Brown/Feldman graphic-score don't-call-it-improv school. Back in London he wrote TREATISE, and later THE GREAT LEARNING, two monumental (and beautifully designed/ drawn) graphic scores which require that the players decide for themselves what the scoring (which resembles saff-work w/o actually * being* staff-work) means. From 1966, he teamed up with AMM, who he decided — as pioneer Euro free improv with added, er, electronica — were the best people to work out how his composition should go.

At this time he was a Confucian, if anything. Potter Bernard Leach was one of the great vectors of Chinese/Japanese culture into Arts-and- Crafts modernism, more even than Pound. Cardew had considerable * visual* talent, as a glance at any page of TREATISE proves.

c.1969, formed the Scratch Orchestra: of amateur (or worse) musicians, the very *60s* idea being to Free Music from, well, All Chops Ever Devised, basically. (Defn of "chops": cf Image vs Talent thread).

Round abt now he wrote STOCKHAUSEN SERVES IMPERIALISM. Great title, indeed.

By 1971, this hostility to technique pushed him towards (a) Maoism, and the (tiny) Communist Party of Great Britian (Marxist-Leninist) (b) the rejection of all bourgeois avant-gardism, experimentalism, whatever. "Tape-loop squiggle stuff": well, yes and no. I think he'd never "wrote" or constructed any such, after his Stockhausen experience — but AM continued to flourish durng all of this, albeit in strained form. (They did at least one tour as TWO separate DUOS, ideologically incompatible — Rowe and Cardew, and Prevost and Gare.) Relations broke down in 1975 and Cardew left.

In 1981, he was knocked down and killed by a hit-and-run driver in East London. For a while, the CPGB(ML) declared that intolerable mystery surrounded this incident, and that he had in fact been assassinated by MI6.

On the sleeve to THALMANN VARIATIONS (from a concert recorded in 1975), the Cornelius Cardew Foundation wish to "make it clear" that "later in his life Cardew rejected Maoism". CC's own spoken intro to te concert includes the followign analysis: "The most diverse sections of the artistic community are raising their voices in support of the oppressed classes and peoples. Why is this? It is because the struggles of the oppressed for national liberation and revolutionary goals are surging forward in the present crisis of capitalism. And larger and lrager sections of the population are being drawn into these struggles." Surging! Larger and larger!!

In May 1977, the Socialist Festival of Music took place a Battersea Arts Centre, featuring workshops, and three concert-debates, 'Culture and Tradition', 'Women in Music' and 'Musical and Political Action'. Henry Cow and Tim Souster's 0dB played on the first evening: the second evening saw (endured) a "ong and detailed discussion on the music industry", a film abt the Sex Pistols (who BY?) and another abt Pierre Boulez, and performances by Bicycle Thieves and Dave Holland. In August, in Musics #13 (ed.David Toop and others), a ten-page report was published.

Cardew and Geoff Pearce spoke for People's Liberation Music, Progressive Cultural Association. I'm not going to quote to be fair to their argument (which is in fact totally puerile), but just to give a taste of the frightened fifth-hand hermetic impotence — as expressive language, as embodied intellect — of a then-respected fragment of oppositional culture in those *very* far off times: "Thus [these two prominent musical trends on the 'left'] inevitably _drag the people back_ to wallow in reactionary culture. The swiftness of this process is shown in a recent issue of _Socialist Worker_, where Johnny Rotten — spokesman of 'Punk rock', a fascist cult associated with self- mutilation, exhibitionism and the glorifcation of decay and despair — was given a full page interview and virtually upheld as an example to youth" (CC) and "Clash say they are clashing with authority and also calim they are anti-fasdcist. Let us examine the facts: [Stuff abt CBS, then] "Clash come on stage wearing swastikas next to pictures of Karl Marx and Red Guard armbands." (Socialist Worker). The Nazi party in Germany did exactly this. Hitler calls the party 'National Socialist' and they wore red armbands with the Nazi swastikas. It confuses the class nature of fascism and so has the intent of diaarming the working people in their struggle for socialism against capital. On the cover of the Clash LP they have on one side a photo of the group in aggressive poses with one of them sporting a Union Jack on his shirt... On the other side is a picture of the police, truncheions drawn charging into a group of people, Propaganda for the state forces..." Etc etc. Pearce's "review" of the first Clash LP goes on for another 200 words: it gets no smarter.

(Did 'Clash' ever wear McLaren's notorious Marx-with-swastika shirts? Maybe, in the early days: the Pistols certainly did.)

Nick Hobbs (Henry Cow administrator, later of the Shrubs [?I thin?]) and Chris Cutler ("of but not for Henry Cow") redress the balance in re punk, and Cutler rips apart Cardew's cultural politics, in language unfortunately every BIT as turgid, inelegant cliched in style and pedantically self-regarding (a Cambridge man, you see). Even his crit of PLM's playing style is ridiculously pompous: "The quality of their performance was wooden and devoid of musical interest. I saw no evidence of skill put at the service of the audience, of any congealed human aspiration, of any struggle with technique or expression. It was, in short, mechanical..." (Always nice to see the word "congealed" used in a postive sense, mind.)

I don't know if punk killed off Prog: but it really really did kill off this sad little political sub-cult. The CPGB(ML) was the Uriah Heep of 70s Revolutionary Struggle. The SWP, larger, somewhat smarter, much looser, less irredeemably middleclass, and ultimately somewhat creatively opportunistic — at least over the next two or three years — survived and even prospered, from its bandwagon-jumping (the proximate cause of *most* of the resentful venom in the PLM position). The next issue of Musics carried a cheerfully Swells-oid prolepunk-raspberry at all this: not much less sentimental and naive, and of course dense with the Correct Names (ultra-left politics can sometimes be a bit like Pokemon in this regard), but energetic and impatient and, y'know, HUMAN.

I think Cardew was a basically decent, well-meaning man utterly tormented by class anxiety and guilt at his nice posh upbringing. I think he was a political NITWIT: Western Maoism was an unbelievably rubbish philosophy at the best of times, but the leftbanque poseurs over at Tel Quel were nevertheless way better writers and better thinkers.

AMM are totally cool, of course.

I've been struggling to dream up a "third thing" for Sterling: I'm stumped, tho.

Have also been scratching my head abt Sterling's third "good product of the Cultural Revolution" - nearest I can come up with is some of J-L Godard's late sixties/early seventies movies - 'La Chinoise' etc. They're full of muddle-headed maoism, but also brilliant moments of parody/critique.

Sometimes people overestimate my expertise. I'm sad to tell Norman that I had never heard of such an incident until two minutes ago :).

Well, after Mark S' long-form response, aren't you glad I posted the question? :)

Mark, that was great - Exactly what I was hoping someone would come up with. Interesting-ish/ironic-ish (to me, anyway) that you say (prob. correctly) that Cardew was tormented by middle-clarse upbringing, just like Joe Strummer, who is called "fascist" by the kommunizt party folks referred to.

I'd love to see yr hax0r-speak review of the new (bleargh) Mel Smith film. Truly, I'm sure it wd be 31337. Or something.

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BTW, I found a really good write up on Franco Battiato (in another thread)...I'll condense it over the weekend- VERY interesting story!

The difference, I suppose, is that CC's solution was to purge his work of anything that seemed to him tainted by bourgeois WHATEVER, which ended up meaning anything energetic, exciting, contradictory, cheeky, etc etc etc. I never heard PLM, mind, but — as I recall — the stuff on the Memorial LP (as played by the survivors? I forget) is, well, there used to be a cliche about officially approved rock bands behind the Iron Curtain and how uttterly dreary and polite and forlorn they always were...

Whereas Strummer, long-form shithead that he is, always recognised the need for thrill, glamour, for getting in among an audience's feelings and all ruffling them up — and risking being silly, come to that.

But: I like this idea that they're closer than you'd think. Didn't spot it when I was writing, that's for sure.

It's very easy to say that now. In the years 1917-1989 those were very real issues. Post-Kruschev and into the 70's, many people were quite idealistic about China, seeing it as a standard-bearer for a new order, a role previously played by the Soviet Union (Bernard Shaw and the Webbs had their pro-Chinese equivalents - like Cardew, I suppose).

The Maoist denunciation of Punk is obviously absurd but again it makes sense in the context of the time (ie a new 'crisis of capitalism' that gave hope to revolutionary groups and appeared to vindicate their analysis).

The Clash were certainly flirting with the idea of their own *political significance*, and using snippets of left wing ideas (but simultaneously straying into dodgy areas - cf 'White Riot' - that would not surprisingly lead to the National Socialist comparison from the Maoists). The joke of course is that, in reality, neither the Clash nor their Maoist critics had any real political influence. As for the Pistols, they did use swastikas; and in a classic Marxist- Leninist view they must have appeared to be a perfect example of a decadent cultural product of a capitalist system entering its last years.

And I'm sure the convention of the 50s - that if you were "of the left" you denounced all pop culture as decadent - would still have survived to some extent in the 70s (within far-left groups, that is; obviously the Labour Party definitively left it behind with those MBEs for the Beatles in 1965).

And within those far-left groups there was both an ideological justification for such denunciations (pop culture = decadent product of moribund capitalist system) *plus* a residual, sub-conscious Hoggartism (as you suggested) at work (because the revolutionaries were mostly from the middle classes and their 'cultural and political cleansing at the hands of the proletariat' was not yet complete).

(yup, had to finish a review of the NEW MEL SMITH movie!! Which blows major goats, obviously, but unfortunately I had to RE-write, since my critical style now all full of ILM now: "?¿?¿thIs mOvIe sUxOr!¡!¡!" etc etc etc).

Well, yr man took darling wife to see "Capt. Corelli's Mandolin" thee other night. What should there be but a trailer for the NeW MeL $/\/ \!+|-| movie. (I presume thiz iz thee one Mark S refers to - it stars RoWR Minnie Driver) JEZUZ XRIZT it looked terrible!¡!¡! However, the trailer for "A.I." looked even worse! /<-kreepy! You could almost hear the audience thinking "NO WAY am I going to see THAT¡!¡!¡ I think we can all guess what the worlds first domestic android is going to be, and it sure as fux0r isn't going to be a perfect child for childless couples.....

Blah blah blah (feeling somewhat off-topic)