UPLIFT & UPHEAVAL A-PRAISED

UPLIFT & UPHEAVAL A-PRAISED

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

by

Cynthia Rose

It’s beginning to smell a bit like spring— yet what’s flowing fastest seems to be bile, and what’s flowering tallest, hype. This can be fun; I enjoy seeing ZTT record boss Paul Morley pop up on telly to detail the censorships his video endeavors have encountered...And to claim he’d really like to make vids for some “unkempt 15-year-old in the North who hates the world.”

But usually, the incessant media circus is neither fun nor pretty. The average pop “pundit” is encouraged to aspire, not inspire; to sell oneself—rather than any artist—for the price of a few punky Dorothy Parkerisms. (Having just polished off Dottie’s biog, I must say this seems karmically dodgy!)

And, if you really love to love music, the result can be intense frustration. Like last week, when X rolled into town and beat their brains out to deliver a “brilliant, shining and nasty” set at the lowly Marquee. Why was the street outside clogged with fans tugging at Exene’s Cherry-coke-colored locks and waving album sleeves, while inside the ticket-holding biggos scanned each other to the near exclusion of the band. One Voice of Youth I grabbed to ask how he liked the concert sighed and replied, “I’m afraid it’s rather a thumbs-down.”

You can take the position my escorts took. (“These aren’t people,” exclaimed one, “These are papers on two legs!”). And you might—as I momentarily did—wish to blind the whole lot of self-regarding stiffs with Billy Zoom’s 1956 Silver Gretsch. But then he already DID that; it’s getting the press to admit it that’s tough!

Next day the Guardian dubbed Zoom’s fretboard expertise unquestionable but "unsettüng." It doesn't takc much to unset-tle media-men anywhere, of course: don't rock the boat and we'll a¡I keep cruising seems the dominant motto.

And of course this works detrimentally as In A r -f does t° °ur benefit. Take Once ZlFt,me’ the T^king Heads film Chaninn Hour,Previewed last night. I say “Talkin^-o ?-fdsl1 m ?ause that’s how it’s billed; fnv r? 1 ^'nS is an hour-plus ego trip fnn-*TaVld ByrneBVrne put up part of the no ln^’ n®S°tiated the edits and in toto apFn£rS 3S the on/y focal P°int of the band t , ers a^e merely shown looking reverently towards him for cues).

The truly offensive thing about the film, owever, is its relentless cutting from DB onstage, DB offstage and DB at home to a constant montage/barrage of “religious ecstasy” clips. Black gospel choirs and sects (would they do this if Al Green appeared in the congregation?), white Southern folk worshipping, TV evangelists, material hucksters, Mexican Catholics, whirling dervishes, Masia tribemen—the works. A bizarre mixture of Mondo Cane and the sort of commerical ad art for which the Heads trained at Rhode Island School of Design, this little movie thinks nothing of cutting from massed Japanese drummers to Manhattan break-dancers to twirling Sufis. Of course the message (implicit also under fascism, one has to note) is that we’re all actually just the same. Don’t democracies exist to respect the obvious differences one is going to find among people? Apparently not according to Byrne, whose voice-over states: “Some of my ideas about music in other cultures might be wrong but I don’t think it matters.. .1 think it’s a good thing.”

Byrne doesn’t seem to realize that (unlike Springsteen, Little Richard or A1 Green) his ministry is exactly on a level with that of the white TV hucksters whose evangelism he so easily ridicules. One urbane black colleague I bumped into at the screening felt even more strongly than I. Recently, he’d actually been in with the heads of the channel for a chat about its “race programming slots”— and that had been a shock too. “He seemed suprised when I said there was no ‘black community’ as such,” said my friend. “Eventually it came down to ‘well, what do you people want from TV then? I mean, you’re black so you do black things and TV covers them’—Like it was some end in itself!”

This tells you also a lot about why we get the “youth programming” we do, with pop an assumed absolute in the formula. It’s the same in the “youth division”: “You’re young so of course you want music, unemployment and glue-sniffing.” Actually, as my friend told TV’s High Sheriff: “If you can speak in terms of a ‘black community,’ they want two things from TV. One is not to be depicted as freaks and relegated to special programs. The other is good TV!”

That very same day, the conquering Thompson Twins hit town, employing a brace of extra synthesizers for their two sellout dates at Hammersmith Odeon. And conga-player/vocalist Joe Leeway is telling the Daily Mirror that, although he’s black, he was brought up in Britain so: “I think white.” Joe and his glossy cohorts (whose act did showcase split-second stage choreography par excellence) represent one side of a slowly widening chasm between the commercial and the “serious.” And on the latter, an increasing number of acts have been citing gospel as a major influence just lately. Carmel, Paul Weller (sighted at the Mighty Clouds Of Joy show some while back)—-even Brian Eno.

I asked British writer Steve Turner, whose longtime interest in gospel has taken him across most of America, if he thought this any symptom of possible spiritual regeneration. “I think the interest is probably pretty superficial,” he told me. “I think a lot of it is English audiences just being drawn to something black and passionate. Certainly when a white artist wants to sing about religion, they’re much more censorious.”

Stiff Records already tried to follow the UK success of the Clark Sisters’ “You Brought The Sunshine” with a homegrown EP by Islington’s Inspiration Choir Of The Pentacostal First-Born Church of the Living God, coming up with an extremely secular but not particularly chart-prone product. And Radio One quickly hustled up a gospel show. (“They’re putting choirs on that just because they’re black!” commented a West Indian friend of mine. “It’s ridiculous, because the music is bad; I mean, we’ve got great gospel choirs. But we’ve got great Welsh choirs too.”) One pirate station puts out a good gospel hour at nine on Sundays, but it’s hard to locate on the dial.

On the side of welding feeling to commitment, however, there can be few British rivals to Linton Kwesi Johnson, who’s just issued a fourth LP (if you count 1980’s LKH In Dub). Titled Making History, it lives up to that slogan in every respect: a beautiful and lovingly crafted work of fierce, polemical pride. On the sleeve there’s no pic of Johnson (or Joe Dallesandro or Michael Caine, in contrast to the latest fad)—only his black poet’s hand clasping a textbook with the album’s name across it.

Had Johnson not pulled back from recording-star status for three years, after 1980’s Bass Culture, one doubts his new work could have achieved these levels of power and cultural celebration. The time off, he says, was taken “to clarify where my work should go”—but much of it was spent performing live up and down the length of the U.K. (LKJ also took the stage in Europe and at 1982’s Carifest, where he met Jamaican dub poet Mikey Smith.) Johnson has served as co-ordinator for an International Poetry Reading for Black and Third World writers (producing an LP of same) and he sponsored Smith’s UK debut, recording with Dennis Bovell the late artist’s only LP, Mi Cyaan Believe It.

There’s been much more: radio work on a history of Jamaican music in 10 parts; a role in the London appearance of Louise Bennett, the “mother of dialect poetry”; and, always, his political activism. (A member of the Race Today Collective and Black Youth Movement as well as a founder of Creation for Liberation, LKJ the family man also belongs to the Alliance of Black Parents.)

Three years of performance in this political climate—sometimes a capella, sometimes to backing tapes, and often with the nine-piece Dennis Bovell Band, who backed him on record—have produced the unique strengths of this current work. All of Side 2 on the LP is obituary—for the murdered Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, for Johnson’s own father, and finally for the 13 young people who died in the scandalous New Cross firebombing. But these things are uplifted by both the music and—primarily—by the wondrous way Johnson uses words. No one else could have made anything else like this; and it will soon be out in the U.S. on Mango Records. LKJ’s books of poetry are also available: write Race Today, c/o 165 Railton Rd., London SE24 for information.

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LETTER FROM BRITAIN

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The majority of the music media has largely passed over Making History in order to bestow the pose of Poet Laureate on Stephen Morrissey, songwriter/leader of those charming men the Smiths. As ordinary as their name implies, the Smiths would sound pleasant enough with their Byrds-ish licks and folkie lilt—if it only they weren’t overlaid with Morrissey’s relentless monotone of a vocal. An aggressively selfpublicizing “celibate” (and seemingly a nonstop narcissist), Stephen M’s versifying seems just what you’d expect from someone who prattles on about how he faced up to his traumas of teen-dom: by dosing down with pills and retreating into sleep!

You can add to the legacies of hibernation a coy reticence about sexuality which would make Michael Jackson’s lyrics look like the print-out from a lie detector. “Hand in glove,” goes one of the Morrissey classics linked (by him) to Jean Genet, “the sun shines out of our behinds/no it’s not like any other love/this one’s different—because it’s us.” More telling is a selection of titles which includes the likes of “Still Ill,” “What Difference Does It Make,” and “I Don’t Owe You Anything!” As one pal put it: “Look! Right here in Line One of the LP he says, ‘it’s time the tale were told’ and then he never fuckin’ tells you what the tale is!”

The poetry of music has never been and will never be a black and white question. But, for me, now, it’s still Kwesi after all these years—by a very long distance. ^