There’s this interesting tension within The Free Association. Our name has two or three connotations. One reflects Marx’s idea of communism as a ‘free association of producers’. This suggests quite an open group, receptive to new members as well as new ideas, a group with a fluid membership. We have, in the past, collaborated with others under The Free Association moniker. Perhaps we will again.

But in another way, we’re quite a closed group. It’s not that we’re not open to new ideas and new experiences. We are. It’s not that we’re not open to the potentials of working with other people. That’s exactly what we’ve done with the Turbulence project. But we’re quite a tight-knit group. We share a gang mentality. And that’s precious. It’s the result of more than 15 years’ friendship (the course of which, like true love, has not always run smooth). We break bread together, so we’re compagni. And we’ve shared all manner of accommodation — not literally barracks, but ferry cabins, beds in plush hotel rooms, tents, sodden forest floors, even tarmac roads — and so we’re comrades. We’re definitely comrades. We’re cracked more smutty jokes than you could shake your stick at and been in more than a few dicey situations together. We’ve been on the receiving end of no end of abuse and we’ve usually given as good as we’ve got. The name Leeds May Day Group perhaps better reflected this hard-edgedness.

One of this year’s collective projects — very much in keeping with the gang identity of the group — is to all get tattoos. Brian had been on about getting an Omnia sunt communia tat for several years, but kept prevaricating over the design. Then back in April Keir suggested all four of us do it.

Brian finally sorted his out a couple of months ago. Nette and Keir are still working on their designs. I went under the needle yesterday.

The design is Brian’s of course. The font is William Morris’s ‘golden type’. William Morris was a revolutionary as well as an ‘arts and craftsman’ and some of his thoughts have popped up in our writings. The lion is there for that verse in Percy Shelley’s poem The Mask of Anarchy, written in response to the British government’s Peterloo (Manchester) massacre of 1819:

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many, they are few

Fast forward a century and a half. We’re still in Manchester and it’s 1975. Peter McNeish reinvented himself as Pete Shelley. With Howard Devoto he formed Buzzcocks, one of the ‘first wave’ of punk groups. Punk is, as is well known, a recurring motif in LMDG/TFA musings. Pete Shelley went onto to become one of England’s finest songsmiths and his words too have graced our writings.

Everything is connected!
Everything is common!

“It’s true that there is in you a kind of air of communist youth, summer camp, ‘onward comrades!’ and all that. It’s leftist kitsch. But this is only one of your aspects, because, on the other hand, what moves you in all of this is a kind of passion for the currents of active energy that blow gusts of air into the social body, which then starts to pulsate, in an alternation between the destabilization of the reigning cartographies and the mobilization of a blast of collective intelligence which invents new forms of life. Every time it happens, you become chidlike. Godard said that men don’t have much childhood and are very childish. Well, if what mobilizes your childhood can be called a “people,” making you radiant, running in all directions, in this case the “people” isn’t a thing – it isn’t a class, or group, or nation. “People” is the name of these currents, which are not to be confused with the places that they agitate, with the historical contexts that they help to create…

It’s toward these currents that you have spent your life travelling. It has more to do with comets, as Teca said, with a “becoming-comet,” than with a “becoming-scout” or a “becoming-priest.” Perhaps the boy scout and the priest appear because they are the only way, or the age-old way, that we have for dealing with this kind of thing, which lacks a language of its own. That’s why they’re so kitsch. But, behind or through this priest and/or scout, what most draws the attention in the quality of your presence is precisely the opposite of these figures: your insistence on the importance of being attentive to the creation of a different logic, new languages – “minor languages” as you and Gilles call them – your desire to participate actively in this creation.”

(from Molecular Revolution in Brazil)

I really like this quote. It’s Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik complimenting Felix Guattari, after a 1982 trip they made through Brazil where they met and discussed with different activist groups and in particular with members of the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores – Workers Party) including with a young Lula, now the Brazilian president. I like the image of active forces gusting through different bodies and animating them. I also like this concept of becoming-comet, as a subjectivity that starts blazing when it comes into contact with active forces, but has to take its place alongside the child-like enthusiasm of the becoming-scout and the holder of received wisdom of the becoming-priest. As Rolnik says you need: “the coexistence of all these characters and many more still.”

What would a diagram of a becoming-comet look like? Well it can’t be seen when it’s moving through the stillness of the outer solar system but when it comes within the influence of solar heat and wind it bursts into visibility. In fact it makes those active forces visible. We can only see such forces in their effects on bodies and at certain times, particular bodies have affects that illuminate particular forces. Guattari might have been one and Johnny Rotten at a very particular point in time and space might well have been another comet, one that gave off such a bright detritus that you can still just about make it out. But the important point is we mustn’t mistake the body for the force. Those forces move on or change direction and effect; the body in turn might stop being receptive or be unable to find the right affect or combinations to detect those forces. Then all you are left with is the burnt-out husk, a mere cinder of what was. Such is the present-day John Lydon – trapped in a caricature of his younger self, not the vital embodiment of the emergent common that he once was.

Comets have historically been seen as the harbingers of doom but perhaps that’s just a way to talk of them as the harbingers of change. They accompany momentous events. Of course we think we know about comets now, that we can predict their arrival but there are plenty of comets out there with such large orbits that from our historical perspective they are for all intents and purposes unpredictable in both their arrival and their course.

The band Crass had a big effect on some of us Free Associator’s lives. Indeed we’ve had a bit of talk about them here of the years. We’ve discussed the chances of a Crass revival, or whether, in fact, Crass are beyond recuperation. In fact Brian brought up the topic just the other day. Well M’lud, I present above exhibit A, nicked from the ever interesting Uncarved Blog. Angelina makes a strong case for the recuperation argument. The important point though is does it matter This seems timely because Crass have actually had a bit of a revival recently. Firstly Anti-Folk Anti-star Jeffery Lewis released a great album of 12 Crass covers. Then ex-Crass lead singer Steve Ignorant did a couple of gigs playing the Crass album “Feeding of the 5000″, alongside a load of reformed anarcho-punk bands from the time. Check out this video of him doing “Big A, Little A”. Given the heavy moralism of the scene around them at that time, these events have caused plenty of discussion. Out of it all I particularly liked this post:

Also, those early Crass gigs weren’t just about the people on the stage playing instruments and singing, it was about the whole event – being in small, claustrophobic venues, with all the rumours flying about that there was going to be trouble, but still choosing to be there, the people going around selling their hand-produced fanzines and cassettes, the films, the poets, the handouts and badges, mingling with all the odd-balls, misfits, hippies, punks and creatives and general outsiders to mainstream society who would turn up, being introduced to often new and challenging ideas and ways of thinking, the tension and energy and that whole sense of being ‘in the moment’ and not quite knowing what was going to happen, either during that evening or in terms of where ‘the movement’ might be headed – sometimes it really did feel like being part of a revolution… naive though that sounds now that was the kind of energy and buzz that you’d get at a Crass gig back in the day. Sometimes it was about the empowerment of realising that you weren’t the only one who thought this way, and gaining confidence from the whole DIY and ‘there is no authority but yourself’ ethic to believe in yourself. A revivalist Crass of old geezers on a stage going through the motions would no more recapture that spirit than The Sex Pistols doing huge stages in public parks recaptures what it must have been like at the 100 Club Punk Festival or Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1976, or that real sense of ‘Oh shit, society is about to collapse!!’ I had as a kid when Steve Jones swore on the Bill Grundy show… Which isn’t to say the Crass night wouldn’t be a ‘right good laugh’, but it does feel as if theres something slightly sad about the whole thing.

In a way this guy is right. These are singular moments in time and space, that can’t just be recreated. It’s a contingent coming together of ideas, subjectivities, bodies, technologies, practices that at a particular moment in time opens up potential for the creation of something new, that elevates a time and place as a singular moment. It’s not something that is carried in one person as though you can find the reason for singular moments in a person’s biography. On the other hand such moments are fairly rare and perhaps you can re-visit events to re-examine their potential, to see if that potential can be re-actualised in different conditions, which I think was partly the idea that Jeffry Lewis was playing with on his album. He even has a comic strip about Trojan horses on the album cover and wonders if you can smuggle the ideas across without the harshness of the original presentation. I mean who can tell what would spark off those affective refrains in someone.

The other thing it makes me think is just how strange it is that a certain style of dressing or a style of music can carry such potential at a certain times and places and not in others. I was reminded of it earlier this week when I went to see a play by the Belarus Free Theatre. Back home in Minsk they perform underground, that is in semi-secrecy, with the constant threat of arrest for them and their audience. To recreate that atmosphere they followed the practices they do at home in Leeds. We had to gather at a redirection point and then follow a guide to where the play would take place. Of course we’re familiar with these tactics from political actions such as Reclaim The Streets. The group then performed a medley made from Harold Pinter’s plays, alongside excerpts from Pinter’s Nobel acceptance speech as well as testimony of torture from their own country. It was pretty powerful and vital stuff: the staging and performance left you with an overwhelming sense that this stuff really mattered, that Pinter’s plays and style really resonated with their situation and that underground theatre was an important art form in their country. This must reflect the cramped conditions in which it’s made but you wonder how long it would stay so vital under different conditions. So does recuperation matter? Well recuperation does describe something that happens, it is a material process but it isn’t the only process that occurs or come to that the most important one. Perhaps what we need to think about is whether the recuperation prevents the new from emerging. I quite like the way Sadie Plant puts it in an old interview:

I used to be fascinated and very concerned by this dilemma – the situationist notion of recuperation is still a very good way to think about it, and that’s how I came to be so interested. But I now think that what is really important is the sense of momentum and dynamism in the system – the fact that small scale, grass roots movements continue to emerge. Even if or when they do become absorbed into the establishment, political or artistic, there are always new tendencies coming up behind them. If one looks at dance music, for example, which moves very fast and continually changes, it is probably a mistake to regret the fact that, say, jungle or drum’n’ bass get absorbed or recuperated into the mainstream – what is vital is the emergence of new music, new undergrounds in their wake. Even if they are destined to become part of standard culture, they can still stir things up in the meantime. What I really fear, and what it is perhaps most important to oppose, is the possibility that such a dynamic would cease to operate: it’s the movement, the continual emergence of activity, that is really important.

Oh yeh and as to Brian’s suggestion that we call an anthology of our stuff “When Two sevens Clash” – here’s a potential front cover.

I really like the image of affective refrains created in more intensive moments behaving like disorganising, destabilising barbs of other potential presents, pasts and futures lodged in our organised bodies and occasionally helping to dissolve them. And I want to say bodies not just subjectivities because as we know these refrains can be corporeal – how we hold our bodies, where our bodies end –Cue Hives anecdote 3a. One of the pitfalls with all this is it’s a little like looking at a photo album – a narrative constructed out of flashes means nostalgia must be guarded against. But then again we can’t just leave the past alone as though it’s all over. The past is unwritten or at the very least every present includes a re-writing of the past. Relatedly time is not homogenous, there are periods of intensification and drastic divergence when the future does seem unwritten and then there are periods of cloying, clagging impotence when the present seems utterly effaced by an unalterable but still fictional future.

 Anyway something else I watched last week was Paul Morley’s “Pop! What is it good for?” and one of the things I got from that was the idea that songs carry ‘invisibles’ around with them. The power of pop is that we can’t get it out of our heads. It enters by osmosis and provides us with the refrains out of which we build our worlds. There was a section where Richard X was commenting on his mash-up “Freak Like Me”. He claimed that the creativity of the mash-up is recognising and playing with the invisibles – the affects, feelings and associations that songs bring up. It’s the mashing up of these that are the element of creativity. More than just Mash-ups all pop trades on these invisibles As it eats itself. In another section Suggs talked about how the influence of vaudeville had unconsciously snuck into Madness, and punk, through the influence of parents and wider culture. This is another way of thinking about invisibles. In fact that same point was brilliantly made in Julian Temple’s other Punk film: “The Filth and the Fury” when he shows Max Wall’s influence on the Johnny Rotten persona.

Pop trades on possibilities, re-invention. On the creation of the new out of repetition and imitation. At its best it’s about the introduction of a strangeness into the everyday. That strangeness is a moment in the repotentialisation of everyday life but capital is about depotentialisation. Capital needs to subordinate all life and creativity to it’s own life, that is it’s need to grow. And surely that is the story of pop music – How the residue of moments of autonomous creativity are carried as invisibles into music made for purely commercial reasons. Then vice versa how the potential of those moments and affects are eaten by capital’s need for a novelty that changes nothing. Yet the whole idea of recuperation always seems too pat and easily done. What about the idea that capital constantly has to eat stuff that contain elements it finds indigestible. As capital circulates, as it has to, it also spreads those invisible indigestibles. As a quote from Howard Slater puts it:

What should be stated is that music is not revolutionary per se but carries with it many presuppositions of an awareness of a need for social change; not least in terms of its activation of desire in the listener, its opening up of unconscious and imaginary terrains and its proclivity towards social interaction. It can be rhetorical, propagandist and a source of optimism and hope, and from jazz scenes through anarcho-punk to rave and techno, music has always been attached to counter-cultural and political movements, exacerbating dissatisfaction with the status quo and working the contradictions between ideas of reality and what it could be transformed to be…          

Hang on a minute wasn’t I supposed to be talking about the Strummer documentary? Well one of the interesting things about it was that the Clash weren’t really the main story. The stuff about the early Squatter, 101er days was great, it set up the DIY ethic and reminded you of the importance of that holey space where weeds can grow. Weeds of course are just plants that have escaped domestication. Then when it got to the Clash it was all a bit familiar and not quite as interesting. The real story of the film, though, was Strummer trying to recover from the harmful effects of fame. The beauty of it was that the recovery only came about when he engaged with rave, free parties and festivals – a new wave of that mix of music, politics and intense collectivity. The solution to celebrity is to dissolve into collectivity.A bit ironic then that the main fault with the film was that it was a bit star fucker. Loads of people were cut out of the story to be replaced by famous friends and admirer’s recollections.  Why does any of this matter?  Well one reason to talk about stuff like this is that it could help us deal with the danger of a new asceticism and purism the possibility of which can be detected in some climate change activism. The idea that ordinary people are the problem. An appreciation of how widespread the affects of revolutionary politics go may help with this. Also those affects have to be part of any calculation of what is possible. But also I think these sort of experiences are central to how we need to think about the role of the political militant. At least partly because the Strummer story is about how at certain times the creation of the common moves through a singular event. Such as the way Johnny Rotten’s style, his innovations, become the repository of people’s changing desires and then the means of their transmission. This can be a destructive experience for the people caught up in such singular events. John Lydon has obviously never recovered or dealt with its inheritance but Strummer did, or at least he made a good fist of it. Militants, and others, need to avoid getting trapped in the transcendent fictions of fame, which Strummer came to realise is illusionary. Just look at the elevation of Joss Garman from Plane Stupid as the latest activist celebrity. But it also relates to what Argentinean militants have called political sadness. Once you’ve been caught up in a singular moment – where you were an activist in your own life – how do you cope with its passing. When possibility closes up and you move from the joyful affect of powerfulness and increased collective capacities into the sadness that comes from those capacities and potential closing up. A life is made from such singular moments and “The Future is Unwritten” ends on a nice commentary from Joe when he offers us an ethic for living: 

“ And so now I’d like to say: People can change anything they want to and that means everything in the world… greed is going nowhere They should have that on a billboard in Times square. Without people you’re nothing. Anyway that’s my spiel.” 

As ever it’s more interesting to pan out a little and look at the wider context. Here’s something we wrote last year:

Let’s look at the refrain of the ‘entrepreneur’. For the left this is a dirty word, and with good reason: it conjures up images of Richard Branson, of creativity channelled into money-making. But it also contains a certain dynamism, an air of initiative, in fact an imaginary of a kind of activist attitude to life. Indeed we might be putting on free parties, gigs, or film showings, rather than launching perfumes, but we still act in ways somewhat similar to entrepreneurs: we organise events and try to focus social cooperation and attention on certain points. We’re always looking for areas where innovation might arise. The DIY culture of punk is a great example of how a moment of excess caused a massive explosion of creativity and social wealth. There is a difference in perspective though. A capitalist entrepreneur is looking for potential moments of excess in order to enclose it, to privatise it, and ultimately feed off it. Our angle is to keep it open, in order to let others in, and to find out how it might resonate with others and hurl us into other worlds and ways of being.

Seems a pretty accurate description of Tony Wilson. He was never too bothered about being correct; he was interested in making things happen. Or rather, he was interested in making conditions for the creation of new truths. In that sense he didn’t exist outside of his context (and over the last few years his pronouncements had started to sound more and more twattish – independence for the North West!?! – precisely because they weren’t resonating in the same way they once had). And I think there might be a connection here to ideas we’ve been tossing about on affinity and identity.

Crudely put, identity politics tends to operate on the basis of changing a world, which is ‘out there’, without any impact on ourselves. It suggests that battles are lost and won by shuffling pieces on a chess board: ‘OK, we need to link up with organised workers here, build a coalition with feminists from the global South here, and then maybe move in a gay and lesbian battalion here. But that still leaves our left flank exposed to counter-attack by native struggles here…’

From this perspective, Tony Wilson was a pain in the arse, a loose cannon, someone who got up everyone’s nose. But if we think about affinity, then there’s a little more method in his madness. It’s less about ideology or fixed categories, and more about shared affect. People moving together. Of course it’s messy and inchoate (this is dark matter, and dark energy after all), and for every ‘success’ there are a dozen fuck-ups. But each success itself only creates further openings, further problematics. So it goes… This is how it was with punk. Which is why the least interesting thing about punk was the squabbles between ‘first’ and ‘second’ generation punks: once punk hit the headlines, any attempt to restrict it to those in the know was doomed to failure. The tension between punk-as-hip-minority and punk-as-mass-movement was just that, a tension rather than a divide. There was the same tension in the Madchester scene, with the usual scramble to claim authenticity. And it also relates to the tension between audience and public. The audience are the paying punters, but at some stages they can become the public who are inextricably part of the performance. Think Woodstock or Spike Island…

Once the public/audience/performer thing breaks down, who knows what can happen… I’ve just finished reading a book which tries to link today’s globalisation struggles to the working class battles which raged over the past two centuries. It’s more micro-level reportage than analysis, but I came across two fantastic passages which are worth noting.The first relates to the wave of factory occupations in France in 1936 (emphasis added):

Contagion, imitation, certainly played a decisive role in a large number of cases. The very novelty of the undertaking was a source of attraction – with its creation of a whole new set of situations – the feeling of escape from the routine of everyday life, the breaking down of the barrier between private lives and the world of work, the transformation of the workplace into a place of residence, fulfilment of the desire for action, of the need to ‘do something’ at a time when everyone felt that important changes were coming. All these elements played a part in the spread of the occupations and helped to account for participants’ universal enthusiasm and cheerfulness.

And here’s an account of the end of a sit-in in Flint, Michigan in 1937:

As the exhilaration of our first union victory wore off, the gang was occupied with thoughts of leaving the silent factory… One found himself wondering what home life would be like again. Nothing that happened before the strike began seemed to register in the mind any more. It is as if time itself started with this strike. What will it be like to go home and to come back tomorrow with motors running and the long-silenced machines roaring again? But that is for the future… Now the door is opening.

Open with Tony Wilson. Close with factory. Exit stage left.

Ok, seeing as we’re posting quotes about punk this one from “Rip It Up and Start Again” needs flagging up and reflecting on:

“Devo had been hippies, of a sort. Gerald V. Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, the group’s conceptual core, were among the anti-war students protesting at Kent State University, Ohio, on 4 May 1970 when the National Guard opened fire. Two of the four slain students – Alison Krauss and Jeffrey Miller – were friends of Casale. ‘They were just really smart liberal kids, eighteen and nineteen, doing what we all did back then,’ he says. ‘They weren’t crazy sociopaths.’ He recalls the dazed, slow-motion sensation when the guns started firing, ‘like being in a car accident’; the blood streaming down the sidewalk; the eerie sound of moaning from the crowd, ‘like a kennel of hurt puppies’. At first, even the National Guard was frozen, freaked out. Then they marched us off campus and the university was shut down for three months.’ That date in May 1970 is one of several contenders for ‘the day the sixties died’. ‘For me, it was the turning point,’ says Casale bitterly. Suddenly I saw it all clearly: all these kids with their idealism, it was very naive.’ Participants in SDS – Students for a Democratic Society – like Casale reached a crossroads. ‘After Kent, it seemed like you could either join a guerrilla group like The Weather Underground, actually try assassinating some of these evil people, the way they’d murdered anybody in the sixties who’d tried to make a difference. Or you could just make some kind of whacked-out creative Dada art response. Which is what Devo did.’”

Of course this is great for several reasons. Firstly, as we’ve argued before punk’s a continuation of hippie. In fact it was both a reaction to hippie’s failed revolution and its renewal.

Secondly, it helps us to reflect on the relation between excess and exception by bringing up Kent State again. We have to remember that Dada was a reaction to the horrors of WW1. Is the resort to Dada a retreat into art caused by the closure of the space for politics or is it best to see it as a sidestepping of a problematic that had become saturated by the states excessive violence. Punk as well as Dada ultimately reopened the space for politics, at least for a time.

A word of warning, you can’t keep that space open for ever you know.

I’ve been reading Please Kill Me, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s ‘oral history of punk’. This quote from Legs, one of Punk magazine’s founders back in 1975 expresses perfectly several ideas dear to our hearts, to do with the critique of identity politics, the majority/minority/minoritarian distinction and the importance of openness.

Gay liberation had really exploded. Homosexual culture had really taken over — Donna Summer, disco, it was so boring. Suddenly in New York, it was cool to be gay, but it just seemed to be about suburbanites who sucked cock and went to discos. I mean, come on, ‘Disco, Disco Duck’? I don’t think so.

So we said, ‘No, being gay doesn’t make you cool. Being cool makes you cool, whether you’re gay or straight.’ People didn’t like that too much. So they called us homophobic. And of course, being the obnoxious people we were, we said, ‘Fuck you, you faggots.’

Mass movements are always so un-hip. That’s what was great about punk. It was an antimovement, because there was knowledge there from the very beginning that with mass appeal comes all those tedious folks who need to be told what to think. Hip can never be a mass movement. And culturally, the gay liberation movement and all the rest of the movements were the beginning of political correctness, which was just fascism to us. Real fascism. More rules.

But as far as us being homophobic, that was ludicrous, because everyone we hung out with was gay. No one had a problem with that, you know, fine, fuck whoever you want. I mean Arturo would regale me with these great sex stories. I’d be going, ‘Wow, what happened then?’

What was great about the scene was that people’s curiosity seemed stronger than their fear. The time was rife with genuine exploration, but not in a trendy mass-movement way. And was always fascinated by how anyone made it through the day, what they really did when the lights were out, to keep their sanity, or lose it.

1974 was a moment that cried out for rupture and polarisation. The possibilities of the movements of 1960’s had already began to close up, solidifying into a new orthodoxy just as stifling as the dreary post-war world 1960’s veterans thought they were leaving behind. Social movements aren’t distinct entities but selections from a continuous dynamic. They are like waves in a continually changing substance. Human subjectivities, that were fluid in times of great motion can suddenly solidify into clag unable to struggle free of itself. It’s at times like this that new ruptures can take hold, a moment of hard stratification to break free of the clag and light out into new territory.

One of the mechanisms used in these moments is a dip into the past to pull out some new antecedents but is all this still possible within the ever re-devoured remains of pop culture? In fact we need to rework that for it to even begin to make sense. Seeing as pop will eat itself as a means of things staying the same, as a means of homestatic reproduction, can it eat itself unhealthy? Are there any antecedents that when eaten will make pop feel a little queasy? That might break pop out of its self-referential reproduction and reconnect with wider social movement.

Fucked if I know, but perhaps we can detect signs in the latest incarnation of the “side of the bed” T-shirt –Thou shalt always kill The song by Dan Le Sac Vs. Scroobius Pip currently getting airplay and column inches and scraping into the top 40.

Here’s the lyrics, print your own shirt:

Thou shalt not steal if there is direct victim.
Thou shalt not worship pop idols or follow lost prophets.
Thou shalt not take the names of Johnny Cash, Joe Strummer, Johnny Hartman, Desmond Decker, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix or Syd Barret in vain.
Thou shalt not think that any male over the age of 30 that plays with a child that is not their own is a peadophile… Some people are just nice.?
Thou shalt not read NME.
Thall shalt not stop liking a band just because they’ve become popular.
Thou shalt not question Stephen Fry.
Thou shalt not judge a book by it’s cover.
Thou shalt not judge Lethal Weapon by Danny Glover.
Thall shalt not buy Coca-Cola products.
Thou shalt not buy Nestle products.
Thou shalt not go into the woods with your boyfriend’s best friend, take drugs and cheat on him.
Thou shalt not fall in love so easily.
Thou shalt not use poetry, art or music to get into girls’ pants. Use it to get into their heads.
Thou shalt not watch Hollyoakes.
Thou shalt not attend an open mic and leave as soon as you’re done just because you’ve finished your shitty little poem or song you self-righteous prick.
Thou shalt not return to the same club or bar week in, week out just ’cause you once saw a girl there that you fancied but you’re never gonna fucking talk to.
Thou shalt not put musicians and recording artists on ridiculous pedestals no matter how great they are or were.
?The Beatles – Were just a band.?Led Zepplin – Just a band.
The Beach Boys – Just a band.
The Sex Pistols – Just a band.
The Clash – Just a band.
Crass – Just a band.?Minor Threat – Just a band.
The Cure – Just a band.
The Smiths – Just a band.?Nirvana – Just a band.
The Pixies – Just a band.?Oasis – Just a band.
Radiohead – Just a band.?Bloc Party – Just a band.
The Arctic Monkeys – Just a band.
The next big thing – JUST A BAND.

Thou shalt give equal worth to tragedies that occur in non-English speaking countries as to those that occur in English speaking countries.
Thou shalt remember that guns, bitches and bling were never part of the four elements and never will be.?
Thou shalt not make repetitive generic music

Thou shalt not make repetitive generic music

Thou shalt not make repetitive generic music

Thou shalt not make repetitive generic music

Thou shalt not pimp my ride.
Thou shalt not scream if you wanna go faster.
Thou shalt not move to the sound of the wickedness.
Thou shalt not make some noise for Detroit.
When I say “Hey” thou shalt not say “Ho”.
When I say “Hip” thou shalt not say “Hop”.
When I say “he say, she say, we say, make some noise” – kill me.
Thou shalt not quote me happy.
Thou shalt not shake it like a polaroid picture.
Thou shalt not wish your girlfriend was a freak like me.
Thou shalt spell the word “Pheonix” P-H-E-O-N-I-X not P-H-O-E-N-I-X, regardless of what the Oxford English Dictionary tells you.
Thou shalt not express your shock at the fact that Sharon got off with Bradley at the club last night by saying “Is it”.
Thou shalt think for yourselves.
And
Thou shalt always kill.

Of course some of these are not objectively, revolutionary more in the nature of directional demands but it was the mention of Crass as ‘just a band’ that peeked my interest. Clips of the songs video on youtube have kids asking “who are Crass?” “who are Minor Threat?” on the coments.

I suppose the Crass brand is ripe for re-discovery as an authentic outside to commodification (pay no more than £3.50) but it’s only when you check out the facial hair on the video that you discover what’s really radical about Scroobius Pip.

If there is hope it lies with the beards.

I didn’t see the show but I’m interested that no one disavowed their past. Even the most boring and reactionary ex-punks (cough Lydon cough) still seem to recognise that their moment was something special, where their activities multiplied possibilities. I’m wondering how many of the people who subverted the media line on the summit (surprising journalists by not acting their age) have an affectionate, unnoticed, political/cultural biography of their own.

What the Italian Autonomia movement realised was that what seemed peripheral experiences and struggles at the time were actually moving to the centre. So that when we watch Lefties the most anachronistic thing is their faith in the labour movement. It’s the only thing out of time. Just like when you watch the Sex pistol’s film ‘Filth and the fury’ the punks are from our historical period and the conservative councillors aren’t. Which leads me to something else missing from the program. Without that large squatting scene you don’t get punk.

Like Brian say’s the true value of moments like the seventies squatting scene and other such cracks in capital’s edifice is that they provide space for experimenting with the future and that’s a much more productive way to think of revolution. When you look at it like that their revolution really did change the world. The problem is that capital keeps presenting itself as the ultimate limit to those experiments and that’s where the tension lies; between how to live a life and the very real and actually existing need for fundamental systemic change.