Rioting within the Box

Last week’s arts highlights pushed the boundaries, but kept us within our comfort zone, observes Cla

The Music Man: Tony Blair in song and dance…again

How many Tony Blair-inspired musical theatre productions must be staged before the former PM has his own sub-genre? On 23 October the newest installation of these wildly popular performances comes to life as Blair on Broadway, a “satirical, musical retrospective of the Blair decade,” which runs until 10 November at Islington’s Hen & Chickens Theatre.

This new musical from the young novelist Iain Hollingshead and BBC World Service journalist Timothy Muller would ooze originality and wit – that is, if our memories were short enough to forget this summer’s 2007 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which saw the head-to-head performances of both Tony Blair – the Musical and Tony! The Blair Musical.

But Blair isn’t the only world leader inspiring dances and duets – in September 2006 a collaboration between the English National Opera and the Asian Dub Foundation produced the shocking Gaddafi: A Living Myth about the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Related:
The BBC’s coverage of Tony Blair – the Musical
See The Guardian’s review of Gaddafi

Of interest:
“Tony Blair: Rock Star” – the 2006 documentary of Blair’s attempts at rock stardom while a university student at Oxford
“Rock and Rule,” The Telegraph, 8 Jan 06
“Tony Blair absolutely modelled himself on Mick Jagger,” The Guardian, 6 Jan 06

Fusion and Segregation: This week’s buzz about the problems facing contemporary music

The New Yorker says indie’s too white, and Amit Chaudhuri says “fusion” is too cliché.

Rock and roll was borne of edgy synthesis and a volatile fusion of African downbeat, African-American jazz and funk, and the crooning lyrics of Elvis Presley and Paul McCartney, says Sasha Frere-Jones, in this week’s New Yorker. So where has the risk, fusion, and “musical miscegenation” gone? Frere-Jones’ article (“Paler Shade of White“) laments the absence of those “uneasy, and sometimes inappropriate, borrowings and imitations” that “gave popular music a heat and an intensity that can’t be duplicated today.”

Meanwhile, as Frere-Jones mourns the lack of experimental fusion in the too-polite ironic indie music of today’s rock scene, Chaudhuri presents a critique of fusion in this week’s New Statesman. Chaudhuri argues that modern “fusion music” rarely does little more than combining cliché, static versions of its elements – “even though there might be a long-standing quarrel between fusion and the canonical traditions, there is no quarrel within fusion,” he says.

But perhaps these arguments are not so different. Frere-Jones sees a musical landscape of segregation and risk-adverse rockers, and Chaudhuri surveys a scene where “fusion” is nothing more than the intertwining of stereotypical static clichés.

Both arguments raise the question: Has society become too polite for musical innovation?

Read Sasha Frere-Jones with “Paler Shade of White” in this week’s New Yorker,
And Amit Chaudhuri with “Into the mix” in New Statesman
And check out: Amit Chaudhuri, This is Not Fusion

Africa’s Legendary Big Name Big Bands

England is receiving a new infusion of Afro-cuban rhythms and Zulu a capella – memories of the vibrant 1970s Senegalese art scene and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Ladysmith Black Mambazo is currently on tour in the UK (until the 21st of November) and Orchestra Baobab released their newest album, Made in Dakar this past Monday, 15 October.

Heralded by The Guardian as “a talisman West African band,” The Times calls Orchestra Baobab’s new album “a masterful slice of mellow Afro-Cuban mambo.” Formed in 1970 and disbanded in 1987, the band re-emerged in 2002 with its Specialist in all Styles album, after over a decade of silence. Orchestra Baobab plays in London at the Jazz Café on November 19.

Meanwhile, Ladysmith Black Mambazo – made famous by appearances on Paul Simon’s 1986 Graceland album and UK adverts for Heinz baked beans, 7-UP and IBM computers – played at London’s Royal Festival Hall this week, on next to stops in Cardiff and Bristol. The legendary all-male South African a capella group sings isicathamiya, a type of music borne of the mines of apartheid South Africa. Their 2006 album, Long Walk to Freedom – which shares its title with Nelson Mandela’s Autobiography – collects new recordings of thirteen classic songs. Their UK tour began October 12th in Crawley and will end November 21st in Derby.

Related:

The Guardian reviews Orchestra Baobab’s Made in Dakar.

The New York Times reviews Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s Long Walk to Freedom

Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s road manager writes in the New Statesman in 2000

In other African Music News:

The New Statesman’s Rachel Aspden profiles the Bedouin Jerry Can Band with her piece “Desert Sounds.” The Bedouin Jerry Can Band performed in London this week (October 16th) at the Barbican.

Youssou N’Dour’s new album, Rokku Mi Rokka (Give and Take), comes out October 29. The Senegalese artist is famous both for his work with Orchestra Baobab and for his own music, which is at times both innovative and nostalgic, combining Afro-Cuban rhythms, jazzy saxophone and melodic guitar, and Senegal’s rich griot tradition of praise-singing and story-telling. From cosmopolitan Dakar, N’Dour is the king of the jazz, soul, and rock scene in his country’s capital.

Chronicles of Eagleton vs. Amis: What the “feud” has to say about contemporary British literature

The media has run away with itself again with last week’s press coverage of the brewing “academic spat” between Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton and literary giant Martin Amis – best-known for the books Money, London Fields, and The Rachel Papers.

The row began after Eagleton’s foreword in his new edition of Ideology: An Introduction accused Amis of Islamophobia and attacked him for his comments that:

“The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not let them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children…” (quoted in The Guardian)

However, Eagleton’s critique of Amis is not exceptional but rather part of a much larger comment on the contemporary British literary scene, flushed out in part in a June 2007 essay for the Guardian, where he discusses the historical singularity of an era bereft of major socialist or otherwise radical left-liberal writers – no Shelleys, no Bernard Shaws and no Virginia Woolfes. Eagleton says only Harold Pinter remains, though he is at best a “champagne socialist.”

On these charges Eagleton is joined by John Pilger, who wrote in a 2002 New Statesman article that “Martin Amis represents a problem: that some of the most acclaimed and privileged writers in the English language fail to engage with the most urgent issues of our time.”

And by Ziauddin Sardar, who wrote “Welcome to Planet Blitcon” for New Statesman in 2006, commenting that “Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan dominate British literature – and they’re convinced that Islam threatens civilisation as we know it.”

A Selection of the Coverage
“Martin Amis essay ‘like work of BNP thug,” The Telegraph, 5 Oct 2007
“Eagleton vs Amis, a very literary spat,” The Telegraph, 6 Oct 2007
“The ageing punk of lit crit still knows how to spit,” The Sunday Times, 7 Oct 2007
“All Marxists are equally dim, Terry included,” The Sunday Times, 7 Oct 2007
“Amis returns fire in Islam row,” The Guardian, 12 Oct 2007
Terry Eagleton with “Rebuking obnoxious views is not just a personality kink,” The Guardian, 10 Oct 2007
Martin Amis with “I did not advocate harassing Muslims,” Guardian Unlimited, 12 Oct 2007
The Guardian’s 2002 Profile of Terry Eagleton, “The High Priest of lit crit”
Terry Eagleton’s writing in the New Statesman archives

Radiohead’s “Pay-as-you-can” album

Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows (10 Oct 2007) has revitalised the discussion about the internet’s impact on music production and consumption. With the unusual offer to let fans pay as little or as much as they want to download it from their website, 1.2 million copies were downloaded within the first twenty-four hours. But was the move just a promotional tool for concerts and future marketing campaigns? Bryce Edge, Radiohead’s manager says: “If we didn’t believe that when people hear the music they will want to buy the CD [which comes out in December], then we wouldn’t do what we are doing.”

Has the internet changed the way we experience (i.e. consume) music? When artists see more money coming in from concerts than albums, have live performances become more important than recorded music?

“Big Acts Follow Radiohead’s Lead: Let Their Music Go Free,” PC World, 10 Oct 2007

“Madonna ‘to leave record label’” BBC 12 Oct 2007 – the pop star is leaving Warner Music to sign a contract deal with the concert promoter Live Nation (which will “distribute albums, promote tours, sell merchandise and license her name”).

In another nod to the increasing influence of the internet on the music industry, Led Zeppelin announced that their songs would finally be available digitally, as of November 13, 2007. The New York Times says they were “one of the last superstar acts to refrain from selling its music online.”

Meanwhile, Alex Ross writes in this week’s New Yorker that the Internet is “killing the pop CD, but it’s helping classical music.”

Which 87-year old Nobel Prize winner has a myspace page?

Yes, “that epicist of the female experience” Doris Lessing is also a burgeoning internet queen. With a myspace page (smoke/drink = no/yes) and three new post-Nobel-Prize Facebook groups (“The Authoritative Doris Lessing Society,” “Doris Lessing Appreciation Society,” and “Doris Lessing changed my life”), Doris Lessing is plugged in.