JAMMED UP, JELLY TIGHT

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

JAMMED UP, JELLY TIGHT

by

Penny Valentine

Struggle after struggle

Year after year

The atmosphere’s a fine blend of ice.

I'm almost stone cold dead

In a town called malice.

—“Town Called Malice,” the Jam.

The keen political eye that punk brought to pop, even when it sounded its most nihilistic or anarchistic, has not been the main ingredient on the agenda for a while now.

Dance and nostalgia; arch technostrut and pop ballads, individualism and lyrics to effect a pose, not affect a generation...this was beginning to sound de rigueur for the 80’s.

This month the Jam came up with “Town Called Malice” which, apart from a clever play on words, reflects an urban despair all the worse for its evocation of the current climate of political impotence; the grinding down of active dissent; the cruelty of a politics which relies, across Europe arid America, on millions of unemployed to frighten the rest of the community into submission.

Paul Weller is outraged. His is not a lament, but a fury. It is only the third single this year to contain overtly political sentiment. Like the others, it does not even rely on traditional melodic lines to help it along. In many ways it is a sparse tune, particularly given Weller’s normal reliance on melodic structure. Equally, it has had no trouble finding its success.

Not since the Specials’ “Ghost Town” has a record so well captured an urban mood and sent out its own warning: “Better stop dreaming of the quiet life/’Cause it’s the one we’ll never know/ And quit running for that runaway bus/’Cause those rosy days are few.”

The year started with Fun Boy Three. Nodding assent to Lieber & Stoller and “Little Egypt” for their slow grinding music, came their direct comment on Thatcher’s Britain and the right’s ascendence in “The Lunatics/Have Taken Over The Asylum.”

“Take away my right to choose/Take away my point of view/Take away my dignity/Take these things from me...”

In the weeks that the single was at the top of the charts Lynval Goulding, one of the Fun Boy Three’s two black singers, had his throat badly slashed in a racist attack.

The FNT’s sentiments were bred, suitably (given “Ghost Town”), in the Specials’ line-up. Ironic in that during their lifespan as a group the Specials were deliberately intent on side-stepping any vocal commitment to taking a stand. Doubly ironic when you consider that the second most pertinent political single of the year has 1 been “The Boiler” by Rhoda—the Special AKA. Produced and partially put together by the Specials’ Jerry Dammers, “The Bolier” is a documentary, a piece of pop realism. Although the form Rhoda takes to pronounce a flat post-punk near-monologue “vocal” has its own tradition in the more maudlin, reactionary aspects of popular music (“Deck Of Cards,” etc.), the record was the first piece of personal politics/agitprop since Tom Robinson. Not only that but it revolved round a graphic description of a subject high on the agenda of British feminist politics—rape.

Although it was enormously successful (because it was?) the results are problematic. It brings the issue into the arena of contemporary culture, to an audience that might never have considered the subject in any depth. Yet the risk of voyeurism is ever present. Rhoda .is the rape victim. By the end of the record she is,, as she has been all along in her own eyes, a victim.

No such risks are attached to most of the songs on The Gift, the Jam’s new album, from which “Town Like Malice” springs.

Much criticism has been mounted at Weller’s apparent refusal to commit himself to organized political action, or indeed, to be specific about the terms of oppression. So the ironic thing about “Gift” is that it emerges not just at a time when Weller and Co. have made two surprising and unannounced appearances for “political” causes—CND’s rally late last year and Rock Against Racism’s re-emergence as an organizing force at the Right To Work march in early March—but in a time of general political doldrums. So “Gift,” an indecisive, incomplete, somewhat directionless collection musically and a set which reflects Weller’s own' confusion between a salvation that lies with love and individualism or collective action, somewhat accidently reflects exactly the political climate at the moment.

The Grind has set in; there is a shortage of optimism. This week the government announced (we would have laughed if we had the energy) a re-introduction of that 40’s institution the Home Guard, small private “armies” of local inhabitants who would protect military installations in the event of invasion; plus a form of army training and unofficial national service to keep the unemployed youth off the streets. Soon government “hand-outs” to the unemployed will be liable for tax.

Electronic music begins to sound like its own dance of death. As a friend said only the other day, it is the beginning of the computer musician. Just as workers will be replaced by robots, so even music will not need The Musician. Apocalyptic visions abound, the will to action suffused in some strange lethargy. The depression of a nation. Paul Weller brings in the horn section: “I was hoping we’d make real progress/But it seems we lost the power/ Any tiny step of advancement/Is like a raindrop /falling into the ocean/We’re running on the spot—always have, always will?”

On the other hand: “Think of the future and make it grow/Why don’t you move together/And make your heart feel better.”

Weller is at least still looking for a way to move his feet; elsewhere is proof positive that the art school dance does indeed go on forever, that nostalgia is exactly what it used to be. More of which next month.