Back home, Alana Newhouse of Tablet Magazine, the voice of conservative American Zionism, published an article titled “Zionism For Everyone” in which she concocts an apology for Jewish supremacy that is barely distinguishable from SS Obergruppenführer Richard Walther Darré’s A New Nobility of Blood & Soil (which I have read so you don’t have to). Am I surprised? No, I am not.

It’s not even worth going into the details of Newhouse’s argument since it is so disingenuous, though I will say that I think comparing zionists to Nazis is usually a lazy polemical manoeuvre that obscures more than it reveals. We should read and understand the monstrous arguments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to better refute them and ensure their exclusion from political and cultural considerations, not use them as abbreviations for “bad”.

In this case, I make the comparison because the arguments of Newhouse and Darré share the same origin in völkisch nineteenth century notions of “peoples”, of ethnic identities and nations, and mystical ties to the lands they claim to have inhabited since antiquity, even if this continuity exists only in the imagination of its authors.

Apologies for ethnonationalism rest on the axiom that a group of people who consider themselves as such—by virtue of language, religion, ethnicity and race—are a people entitled to self-determination, which in the modern struggle between nation states means civil, political and military control over a specific land area. Ethnic nationalists contend that the people belong to the place, and vice versa.

You can probably see immediately how this not only animates Zionism but also implicates the best-intentioned arguments in defence of Palestinians and their right to the land occupied by Israel. Setting that implication aside for the moment to focus not on ideas but rather the concrete and bloody reality of putting these ideas into practice, the tautological problem arises: which people are the people?

Many people consider themselves to be Americans (or English, or Scots, or Germans, or Chinese, or Russians, or Sudanese, or Kurds, etc.), while some would argue that not all of them actually are. Likewise, some factions deny being part of the group at all—they see themselves as a different body altogether and their unwilling incorporation into the group as oppression. So right off the bat, there is contention.

The ideologues of Americanism, both liberal and conservative, would have you believe that these United States are plagued by “domestic terrorists” promulgating un-American attitudes, that, to all intents and purposes, appear peaceable and decidedly American to you and me. According to President Donald Trump’s national security directive “NSPM-7”, as reported by Ken Klippenstein, these include:

• anti-Americanism,

• anti-capitalism,

• anti-Christianity,

• support for the overthrow of the U.S. Government,

• extremism on migration,

• extremism on race,

• extremism on gender,

• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,

• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and

• hostility towards those who hold traditional views on morality.

By this definition, most of the people I know are “domestic terrorists”.

The state intervenes, as it always does, to decide who is American and who (or what) is not. But who is the state? In a democratic republic, it is “the people”—but which people? We’ve arrived at the absurd Escher staircase of nationalism.

The question, as ever, comes down to this: who are we, and who gets to decide?

Read that again: who are we, and who gets to decide? Ask yourself this question in every different sense. Who are we as “a people”, as a nation, as political subjects, as our so-called democracy’s demos? Who gets to decide?

Who are we as people? What makes us who we are as individuals, as friends and family members, as neighbours and members of a community, as workers and co-workers, as economic subjects? Who gets to decide?

The answer to the first part of each question is beautifully, terribly open-ended and there are many good answers. I don’t claim to know which is best. The answer to the second part of each question, however, is always the same: it sure as hell ain’t us.

But then—who are we in moral terms? Do “traditional views on morality” include the formula that might equals right? What do we become when we become strangers to each other, competitors to be feared or reviled? What do we become when we stand by and watch as the retainers of our “sovereignty” mete out unfathomable horrors on people already sheltering in rubble, including children? What do we become when we cheer on or even participate in the criminal slaughter of these human beings who have done nothing to earn our enmity? Who gets to decide?

We do, and we must. It is a moral imperative of the most traditional variety.

April 29^th will mark 127 years since the birth of Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, probably the United States’ foremost composer of the twentieth century. His greatest compositions were crafted to fit on one side of a 78rpm shellac disc, whole worlds spanning a mere three or so minutes. Duke Ellington’s uniquely American brilliance is embodied in his ability to find very good musicians, keep them in his band for decades, learning to write parts that sound as though they flowed naturally and spontaneously from the musicians themselves, elevating them to something great—a universal artistic wholeness in American vernacular. Ellington’s mastery lay in his being a hub around which many spokes turned the wheel—elegant motions where no one part was independent of the others. Let’s hope, for the prospect of actual democracy, that this is a transferable skill.

I’ve dedicated a previous episode of Red White Blues to the Duke’s longest and most ambitious piece of music: Black, Brown and Beige: A Tone Parallel to the History of the American Negro (1943) and written about his conception of “the promise of democracy”.

We’re a long way from believing that the US represents some kind of grand democratic experiment. I suspect that “Make America Great Again” galvanises the disaffected middle class precisely because it’s so unbelievable—there are no stakes in a debate about the present if no one truly believes we’re going anywhere. In the absence of an imaginable future, you just leave it to the big mouth that spews hatred at the people you already hate, a gaping maw where some kind of shared future should be. But if anything about “America” could be called great, or even American, it would be something like the music of Duke Ellington. There’s no going back, but at least we know what we’re capable of.

These are difficult questions that, if they’re answerable at all, can only be worked out in the struggle to overcome the nation, to see ourselves not as a people but as people, struggling together to make a life, wherever we are. Our starting point must be not on who belongs, but on who gets to decide.

The United States and Israel have a lot in common. Both countries came into being through settler-colonial exterminism. Both countries require a bloated class of inveterate national mythologisers, since neither developed organically and their national identities (such as they are) need constant explaining, defending and updating. Both of these national identities are bound up with race—with whiteness specifically—in a way that countries like Scotland don’t need to be, since Scotland as a nation predates the invention of “race” as a social category.

That’s not to say that Scotland isn’t fraught with questions of race and identity, or that Scottish nationalism can’t be racist (it is deeply incoherent in the most generous estimation); but having an identity in the first place, Scotland can in principle grow and change in a way that isn’t permanently defensive. It’s easier to find a niche in a place where the people who arrived before you don’t have something to prove. My own neighbourhood, Govanhill, is a case in point.

It doesn’t require a post-grad in political science to point out that, if you need to resort to the “Blood and Soil” argument, you’re probably already in an insecure position. Think of it another way: this is my flat because I live here. If someone drives me out by force because their family lived here years and years ago, I might not be able to get it back, it might be theirs forever after, and they can come up with any number of elaborate excuses why the flat belonged to them, how I can just move in with a neighbour in the next post code and why overwhelming violence was justified—but that doesn’t make it true. Nobody disputes this who isn’t part of the cult of national mythology.

In the US, the bitterest irony is that the national myth tends to exclude the very people who endowed the country with what we might call its virtues. The slogan “Make America Great Again” is actually a handy tool for interrogating that exclusion.

Start with “Make”. Who made the country? It wasn’t the founding fathers. Who continues to make it, to keep the lights on? It isn’t the founding fathers’ modern equivalent.

What is “America”? It is a continent, two continents in fact, not a country. What makes the United States “American”? Its newness, its self-invention. Some of the country’s self-inventors came unwillingly, but they eventually fought their way to a claim on some part of it as their home, for better or worse. No one gave it to them; America was won and lost and won again. Maybe lost again, and won again, and again and again.

The American empire is a threat to humanity and most other life on earth. It must be destroyed. But I wouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater—some things really are great about the country. There’s a wealth of art and culture, of cinema, music, food, patterns of speech, ideas and technologies sown in the substrate of American class struggle, of Black, Brown, Asian and Jewish resistance to white supremacy, growing in the cracks between cycles of capital accumulation.

The US is not and never was a white country. An outsized portion of our culture comes from minorities within American society, and almost everything good in American culture is a product of the working class creating supplements to a punishing life of labour that make life liveable. National chauvinism is an absurd dead end, but so is shame for the country of one’s birth. A country is not an individual with a personality and a rap sheet.

Idolators of the American myth may peddle a national identity in the garb of the Great Man of History, but like the trope itself, diverse multitudes are obscured in the margins. Neither the good nor the bad of the United States are reflections of you personally. On the contrary, you personally are the product of an immense struggle overflowing the centuries and transcending national boundaries.

I reject the fundamental premise of Zionism: that Jews can’t really be Americans or Scots or Europeans, that their ethnic identity precludes the possibility of “integration” into these societies, necessitating a rogue apartheid state to “protect” them. Every one of these societies already is, at least in part, Jewish. Every culture is a multi-culture—and much the better for it.

You can listen to this episode of Red White Blues here.

East St. Louis Toodle-Oo [Columbia session], 1927

Black and Tan Fantasy [Victor session], 1928

Black Beauty [Okeh session], 1928

The Mooche [Victor session], 1928

Mood Indigo [Brunswick session], 1931

Caravan [Master session], 1937

Cotton Tail, 1940

Ko-Ko [Live radio transcription], 1940

Take the “A” Train, 1940

Perdido [from Ellington Uptown], 1953

Diminuendo in Blue (Live at Newport Jazz Festival), 1956

Fleurette Africaine (African Flower), 1963

In A Sentimental Mood [with John Coltrane], 1963

When I was 19, I crossed the Atlantic with $250, a suitcase light on clothes and heavy on books, and a busted up Washburn acoustic guitar discarded by a friend (I discovered it in their broom closet, upside down, with only two strings, both green from age). The rent on my bedsit was £35 a week—this was 1998—so I had to find work.

The first job I landed was landscaping in suburban Surrey. We planted ornamental trees, trimmed hedges and scraped moss from between the brick roof tiles on top of the big house. To get up there, we had to use one ladder up from the ground, one ladder hanging off the peak of the roof and braced on the gutter, sit facing up on the ladder step and use a stiff bristled brush with an extra long handle to loosen the moss. This was December, the temperature was freezing and the drizzle soaked my jeans, turning them stiff with ice. A cloud of brick dust formed around us. My eye became swollen and painful. Grit floated in the air and landed on my cornea. At the hospital, an NHS doctor swiped it off with a surgical cotton bud and sent me off.

Next I landed a job as a kitchen porter six miles away where the only bus home stopped running 15 minutes after my shift. The chef didn’t like me and would give me awful chores to do at the end of the night, like scouring the black hob until it was silver again. The hob being deeper than my arms were long, scouring the back burners meant burning my middle to reach it. I scoured for 40 minutes before the sous chef told me that the boss was just fucking with me, it would never be silver. I had to hitchhike home near midnight, which in Surrey is no small feat.

Last, they took me on at a telesales office selling carpet cleaning services. We sat by a phone with a big yellow phone book, instant coffee and cigarettes, offering elderly people “free” consultations “in their area”. If they said yes, the salesman would drive to the house and give them the spiel. I went with him once and we bunked off, driving to Clapham where he bought a small bag of crack and rolled it into a joint, which he smoked in the car while I squirmed in the passenger seat.

Having no real skills or ways to make money and being totally unable to hold down these jobs, things got tricky. At one point, all I was eating was a couple slices of toast and green beans in a can. My cheekbones stuck out and people thought I was sick. Desperation drove me to the train station where I sat at the entrance and played all the songs I knew, all fifteen or twenty of them and some more than once, with my hat on the ground in front of me. To my surprise, the hat filled up. I made £36 in about an hour. Eventually, busking became my job.

Is a busker a professional musician? They make money doing it, sometimes they even make a living. I did for a while. Twenty-five years ago, when making money was easier than it is now, I could make enough to last me a week by singing on the street Friday and Saturday nights, 11pm to 4am. People pouring out of the pubs on their way to the clubs would crowd around in the dozens and sing at the top of their lungs: SWEEEEET CAROLIIIINE DAH DAH DAH SO GOOD SO GOOD. Or in a pub, or at a wedding. From my experience, most musicians make money like this or some other way more similar to this than, say, Taylor Swift. You learn to read a crowd, how to keep them interested, how to let them do most of the work so you don’t blow your voice out. You learn to spot trouble and to pick up banknotes as soon as they hit the coin pile. You learn to see hustlers coming and to protect yourself and your audience from them. One guy pretended to have learning difficulties, dropping a twenty in my case—then fainting. When people from the crowd would help him up, he’d reach for his twenty and grab a handful of coins at the same time. I grabbed him once and threatened him and he yelled I’M A NUTTER I’M A NUTTER. What part of the economy do these transactions occupy, unmediated as they are by the market proper? What kind of jobs are these that require as much training as a doctor—buskers and hustlers—where there are no qualifications or regulatory standards? Is busking begging? Are beggars workers too?

In a society where labor power is purchased and sold, working time becomes sharply and antagonistically divided from nonworking time, and the worker places an extraordinary value upon this “free” time, while on-the-job time is regarded as lost or wasted. Work ceases to be a natural function and becomes an extorted activity, and the antagonism to it expresses itself in a drive for the shortening of hours on the one side, and the popularity of labor-saving devices for the home, which the market hastens to supply, on the other. But the atrophy of community and the sharp division from the natural environment leaves a void when it comes to the “free” hours. Thus the filling of the time away from the job also becomes dependent upon the market, which develops to an enormous degree those passive amusements, entertainments, and spectacles that suit the restricted circumstances of the city and are offered as substitutes for life itself. Since they become the means of filling all the hours of “free” time, they flow profusely from corporate institutions which have transformed every means of entertainment and “sport” into a production process for the enlargement of capital. By their very profusion, they cannot help but tend to a standard of mediocrity and vulgarity which debases popular taste, a result which is further guaranteed by the fact that the mass-market has a powerful lowest-common-denominator effect because of the search for maximum profit. So enterprising is capital that even where the effort is made by one or another section of the population to find a way to nature, sport, or art through personal activity and amateur or “underground” innovation, these activities are rapidly incorporated into the market so far as is possible.

- Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974)

Before the mass production of recorded and broadcast music as an affordable consumer good, musicians either went through formal training in the academy or informal training in unofficial apprenticeships with more experienced practitioners of an instrument or vernacular style. This method of producing music workers persisted for decades into the age of music as a consumer good produced at mass scale.

The academy offered training in music theory and composition, arrangement, orchestration, and performance for the concert hall. A musician or composer was primed for the highly specialised field of art music in all its entanglements with the wider economy, which were often limited to consumption by a small group of people with a respectively specialised taste or fluency in art music. This didn’t make the music necessarily better; it simply added a barrier to its legibility for the general public (ie. the working class). You can argue over the chicken or the egg coming first, but either way, specialisation and signifiers of class position were mutually constitutive and reinforced one another.

Before American vernacular musics like jazz, ragtime, blues, folk or old time became art music, the only way to study them was to actually play them with other people or listen to recordings and learn from there. Again, informal apprenticeship predominated decades into the advent of records and radio because the nature of vernacular music is that it speaks in slang—and to use slang you’ve got to speak to somebody, more specifically somebody who understands the lingo (unless you don’t actually want to be understood, but we’ll come back to that another day). The result isn’t all that different from the music emerging in the rarified heights of the academy: it came down to legibility. You had to understand something about hearing (even just intuitively) before you could understand what you were hearing.

The practitioners of both art music and vernacular music were not professionals in the strict sense: that is, their fields were not professions so much as services—rendered, in art music for the aristocrat and the bourgeois, and in vernacular music for smallish groups characterised by ethnicity, affinity, locality, or a mix of the three. Musics largely emerged from the classes they were meant to service, neither of which were professional classes as we understand them today. Both the production and consumption of these types of music signalled something about those classes, the type of knowledge one garnered as part of the class and the valence of intra-class identity. But neither music forms were productive, in the limited sense that they played little or no part in the accumulation of capital. One party has money to pay a musician for the experience of hearing their music; the other party has music to exchange for money (or whatever is on offer). It’s a closed circuit. Each party can repeat the transaction, sure, but the transactions themselves don’t lead to further transactions, to returns on investment, to the enlargement of the original outlay, which is the formula of capital accumulation.

This came later, when music was objectified as a recording or broadcast and alienated from the performer and the performance. Capital, in this arrangement, interjected itself as the middleman between the musician and the purchaser of a record or radio. For the capitalist, a commodity can be anything as far as they’re concerned, as long as there is sufficient profit on their investment. Music as a profession emerged as a consequence of capital seizing the means of production and distribution, placing themselves as a barrier between the producer and the consumer, making both parties reliant on the capitalist for any exchange to occur. Harry Braverman’s point about the debased quality of cultural commodities in the quote above might be debatable, but there is no doubt that the intercession of the market fundamentally changed the way, the reason and the type of music that was made by transforming music into a commodity and its producers into hired labour.

If you want to make money from music (busking notwithstanding), you’ve got to market yourself. Every musician comes up against this reality: being a professional means being a salesperson, enmeshed in a circuit of value production—from digital platforms to physical venues to public liability insurance to the hours getting started in the first instance, usually funded by working some shitty job—that benefits you least of all. To sell, first you’ve got to buy. You’re immediately compelled to become a petit-bourgeois, a small business owner competing with huge corporate rivals who wield monopsony purchasing power that translates into a market monopoly. “Being your own boss” in this instance means purchasing your own labour power and squeezing your “hired labour” to get the most surplus value you can muster.

I don’t know how to do that and I never have. Some of the best musicians I’ve ever met were terminally incapable of meeting the demands of professionalisation. Of all the jobs I’ve done, the highest paying music gigs were by far the worst, the hardest work, the most embarrassing—a real departure from the trend in non-music jobs where the less I got paid, the harder I was expected to work. The most successful musicians I’ve known have been some of the most superficial, the most mediocre, the downright corniest—but they were damn good at selling themselves. And not to audiences but to the people who actually “matter” in the music business: managers, labels, promoters, etc. Music relied on an “attention economy” long before social media or its vapid terminology wormed its way into our working lives. Music, as always, foreshadowed the world to come.

I put together this month’s episode thinking about those musicians engaging with American vernacular musics like jazz or blues and how almost all of them had non-traditional routes into their “careers”. Many were buskers; some we have very little knowledge of (like Bayless Rose and his record “Frisco Blues”), since Black music recordings in the 1920s were largely the result of labels scrambling to find artists to make records in keeping with increasing demand. This meant that urban labels sent recording engineers to the rural parts of the US, putting advertisements in local newspapers with an open call to audition, with those deemed saleable given the opportunity to record a couple of songs. Some of the resulting records captured musicians who subsequently made a living performing and recording; others remained in relative obscurity.

Some of my favourite records in this episode are from buskers: Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas’s “Run Mollie Run” is as close as you’re going to get to hearing nineteenth century dance music played by a musician from the nineteenth century. Henry Thomas was basically a hobo who rode boxcars from place to place, playing on the street or in bars for tips. “My Baby Ooo” by One String Sam is not as old as it sounds (1956) but the guy is playing a homemade diddly bow, a single-stringed fretless instrument he played with an empty glass jar as a slide. This is one of his only two recordings; he made his living busking on the streets of Memphis. The Reverend Gary Davis became a legend in New York for his tutelage of folk-revivalist fingerstyle guitarists like Dave Van Ronk (himself Bob Dylan’s mentor) and his fixture as a Harlem busker. He’s playing his own unique arrangement of Scott Joplin’s quintessential ragtime masterpiece, “Maple Leaf Rag”.

Other recordings, like the jug bands and “blowers”, range from modernist masters like Coleman Hawkins in a studio-only band working under the title Mound City Blue Blowers to the Depression-era covers band The Washboard Rhythm Kings, where the musicians are cutting these sides purely as a kind of side hustle. Like Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Sevens, these bands didn’t exist outside of the studio. Recording was just another gig, another small paycheque to keep them going until the next one. We don’t call it “the gig economy” for nothing.

It was precisely the lack of a music profession that allowed the regional vernacular culture of working class Americans to be captured and preserved. One of the records I’ve chosen, Lucille Bogan’s “Shave ‘Em Dry” (definitely NSFW) was likely recorded for private consumption, since no label would ever release a song sung by a sex worker about the intimate particulars of sex work (her frequent profanities and eruptions of laugher suggest that Bogan didn’t intend it for a wide audience either). Similarly, Geeshie Wiley’s “Skinny Leg Blues” takes the blues genre’s raunchy innuendo on a sharp and sudden turn when she sings “I’m gonna cut your throat, baby / And look down in your face”. This isn’t even “popular music” in the sense that folk music is a kind of “popular music”.

Of course, many Black American musicians of the early twentieth century weren’t rural amateurs or even folk musicians. The composer James Reese Europe treated jazz and ragtime as an art music, insisting that it be played by a full-scale orchestra (though not of the symphonic variety). His recordings are some of the earliest jazz records in existence, though his music is usually labeled as ragtime. Even I’ve been guilty of overlooking Europe: in the second episode of Red White Blues, I described The Original Dixieland Jass Band’s 1917 recording of “Livery Stable Blues” as “the first jazz record”, which isn’t strictly true if you count recordings like “Memphis Blues” and others he cut with his 369th Infantry “Hell Fighters” Band, made during the First World War. Likewise, James P. Johnson was a composer and pianist who straddled the world of rent parties, musical theatre and publishing. While he’s best known for being the pre-eminent master of Harlem stride piano, he composed operas and popular songs played by other artists. He was as close to a professional as any of the featured artists in this episode.

The opening track is a modern recording of Erik Satie’s music for the ballet Parade from 1917. This piece is, in some ways, an outlier, since it is high art music, part of the Dada movement, a ballet, from France, etc. But if you listen, you’ll hear that part of Satie’s Dada approach, meant to antagonise elite tastes and spur on revolutionary challenges to class power, was to incorporate music not considered appropriate for the concert hall: there are frequent strains of jazz, ragtime and popular song throughout the fifteen minute duration of Parade.

Erik Satie is now considered a great composer, but in his own time he made a living playing piano in barrooms of suburban Paris, where his function was to entertain. Even his compositions, appreciated as they were by a progressive-minded minority of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were rejected by the kingmakers of French music who commissioned (and paid for) music works. A large number of Satie’s works went unpublished, discovered among his possessions only after his death. Parade marked a high point in Satie’s career, when he was able to collaborate with Jean Cocteau, who devised the one-act scenario of the ballet; Pablo Picasso, who constructed the set, painted the curtain backdrop and created the elaborate and profoundly impractical painted cardboard costumes worn by the dancers; and Serge Diaghilev, leader of the Ballet Russe, who danced the ballet. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term “surrealism” describing Parade in the show’s playbill.

Parade takes place on a busy Paris street, in front of a theatre. A ragtag troupe of performers take to the street to promote the show, in increasingly desperate attempts to draw in a crowd. There are ocean liner foghorns, clicking telegram keys, a typewriter, police sirens and even gunshots incorporated into the music. Parade culminates with the troupe making an extraordinary and frankly insane spectacle, with a huge crowd looking on. The spectacle comes to a close and the crowd disperses, believing they have actually seen the show, much to the chagrin of the performers, who did it all for nothing.

Without laying it on too thick, I think you should be able to pick up on the allegory. If not, have a look at what musicians are up to these days when they’re not making records or playing in a room full of people.

Satie: “Parade: Ballet Réaliste” [1917], Orchestre Symphonique et Lyrique de Nancy

“Memphis Blues”, James Reese Europe / Jim Europe’s 369th U.S. Infantry “Hell Fighters” Band

“Carolina Shout”, James P. Johnson

“Boodle-Am Shake”, Dixieland Jug Blowers

“Run, Mollie, Run”, Henry Thomas

“Hello Lola”, Mound City Blue Blowers

“St Louis Blues”, The Washboard Rhythm Kings

“Frisco Blues”, Bayless Rose

“Cocaine Habit Blues”, Memphis Jug Band, Hattie Hart

“Skinny Leg Blues”, Geeshie Wiley

“Shave ‘Em Dry (II)”, Lucille Bogan

“Don’t Tear My Clothes”, Washboard Sam

“My Baby Ooo”, One String Sam

“Memphis Shakedown”, Carolina Chocolate Drops

“Maple Leaf Rag”, Rev. Gary Davis

I pledge allegiance to the flag, the white flag ... When they say “black” or “Negro”, it means you’re not an American. ... I pledge allegiance to your flag—not that I have to, but just for the hell of it I pledge allegiance ... With no stripes, no stars... It is a prestige badge worn by a profitable, profitable minority ... I pledge allegiance to see that someday they will look to their own promises to the victims that they call citizens ... Not just the black ghettoes, but the white ghettoes, and the Japanese ghettoes, the Chinese ghettoes, all the ghettoes in the world. Oh, I pledge allegiance alright; I could pledge a whole lot of allegiance!

Mingus puts it into words really well. But his music says a lot more without explaining anything. The songs I chose for February’s episode, all forms of sacred music or protest in the shape of prayer, say it too. Black American sacred music from the twentieth century is inherently “protest” music—professions of faith in anything are assertions of dignity, since one is professing to have made a free choice in the face of brute force that would have you bend to its will.

I’m not a believer but you’d be a fool to think that faith is simply fake or simply deluded or simply stupid. Religious institutions may be as venal and corrupt as any other institutions, but listen to the tenor of actually-existing resistance: it is faith in something. Then look at all the New Atheists and how many ended up beating the drums of war from the cloisters of their syndicated columns and airport paperbacks. Don’t trust anyone, believer or otherwise, who poo-poos “grand narratives” or calls you stupid for seeing the world differently—they’d sooner blow it up than share it.

People throw around that old Marx quote about “the opium of the masses” but Marx himself pointed out in the same chapter how opium dulled pain that would otherwise be fatal. Who could undergo invasive surgery without pain relief? Music is also a pain reliever and all the songs I’ve chosen are expressions of faith, whether literal or figurative: James Baldwin’s “Precious Lord”; “I’ll Be Rested (When the Roll Is Called)”; Mingus’s “Prayer For Passive Resistance”; Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln’s screeching “Prayer / Protest / Peace”, etc. Jazz in the middle of the last century meshed with the Civil Rights Movement, that potent handshake between communities of faith and communities of principle. But jazz music didn’t make statements the way spokespeople of the Civil Rights Movement did; rather, the music embodied the feeling of being and doing what many Americans in the twentieth century were and did.

A record is not a person, but it’s as close as we can get to a conversation with what’s gone, a real kind of talking between worlds.

Under capitalism, the market is universal as the mediator between people. That mediation takes place through objects—commodities—so that relations between people become relations between things. This changes the way and the reason that things are made, since a commodity is an object produced for sale on the market at a profit. Its use to the end consumer is secondary, sometimes non-existent. The manner in which our world is produced and reproduced through the division of labour, its efficacy for creating surplus, takes precedence over the thing being produced. The world itself becomes a by-product of the accumulation of capital.

Division of labour means that workers in all fields are deskilled, separated into a chain of production where they perform ever-smaller, ever-simpler tasks requiring less and less knowledge of the overall process of production—with the exception of specialists and managers, a thin stratum set slightly apart from the rest of the class of labourers. This secures capital’s control over the method and speed of the work, but it also creates dependency in the working class as a whole, since we can’t simply turn away from capital and reproduce our everyday existence independently. Goods that were once made by the people who needed them, using skills passed down over generations, become the endpoint of a process that involves dozens, hundreds, sometimes even thousands of total strangers linked only by some abstraction called “the economy”.

This dependency doesn’t necessarily change the use value of an object.

Commodification removed music as an ordinary, everyday thing that people did for themselves or had done for them by someone within their own community—minstrels, troubadours and other semi-professionals. Before the objectification of music in the the record or broadcast, there would have to be both a personal and communal component to the experience of listening, one in which participation—dancing, singing along, beating a tambourine—was the norm. Unlike European art music, in which an audience passively consumed the work of a composer who may not be present or even still alive, and where the orchestra was the highly specialised delivery system between composition and audience, there was no such hierarchy in folk music or even popular music until the industry found its niche in the wider field of mass communications.

Within jazz, division of labour transformed these musicians into specialists, a higher stratum of worker than your uncle who sings at the wedding reception or a wandering minstrel playing for farm labourers in a ramshackle marquee for tips and drinks. But the music remained a distillation of lived experience, including those lives of past musicians who enriched the genre’s emotional vocabulary, in the shapely form of a shared cultural expression in spiritual garb. Jazz in the middle of the twentieth century still had the power and valence of hard-won moral authority. It also retained much of the character of the blues, gospel, folk music and marching bands from which it developed. So while advanced technique and vernacular idiom set jazz apart from popular music forms, requiring extensive training for the practitioners and a knowledge of how to listen on the part of the audience, the meaning being communicated was legible to those for whom it was meant.

Being a countercultural form, jazz may not have been a widely shared experience but it was (and is) a repository of a certain collective understanding, a dialect of the common language, tongues imbued with a kind of religious kinship. It gestures towards something bigger than this, here, now.

The Civil Rights Movement could not have happened as it did without mass communications, especially the tactic of passive resistance, which took for granted that newspapers and televisions would capture the violent spectacle of ordinary people getting their heads caved in for reasonably asserting their rights as citizens of the United States (and elsewhere). The tactic hinged on the power of its effect on witnesses. People would vote differently or write to their congressmen if only they knew. Of course, the movement was made up of more than just religious groups and peaceful protesters singing “We Shall Not Be Moved” en masse, though the legend peddled by mass media elides or sanitizes the more militant factions of Black American resistance to racism.

Today, there is more to witness than anyone in the twentieth century could have dreamed. If anything, you can’t get away from it. Yet it’s this very act of witnessing that stirs in us that familiar feeling of impotent rage, of powerlessness, of withering separation. Passive resistance dies in the dark, but it also dies of over-exposure. The power of a movement, its ability to endure and advance, rests on the most delicate filaments: social bonds unmediated by the market, by the state, by a culture hammered into shape according to the dictates of capital. Those filaments have been thoroughly shredded and no movement worth its salt can emerge in a society where we’re unbound from each other. So I don’t need to believe in god to know that something is missing, a void that civil-social bonds like religion used to fill.

Music makes life a little more pleasant, without any reason or explanation or deeper purpose. Music can also make life a little easier because when you add rhythm to a task or put on headphones while you allow a boss to suck your soul for a wage or you distract yourself from something physically painful with a song you know intimately, you’re using a well-honed, time-proven tool. Music helps makes sense of the world, and boy, do we ever need it to make sense. And music gives life a sense of meaning—someone across space, across time can externalise the most complex storm of thoughts and emotions, the same chaos living inside you, showing you that it didn’t kill them, at least not in time to stop them making something beautiful. So you know there are more of us out there who see it this way, you hear the call in a language you thought only you could speak.

Can music fill the void? No, definitely not. But for me, at least, it gives voice to this longing for something bigger than me. I live in hope that someone else can hear it too.

Listen to the episode here.

“Precious Lord”, James Baldwin, David Linx & Pierre Van Dormael
“Tulinesangala”, Nakisenyi Women’s Group & Béla Fleck
“I’ll Be Rested (When the Roll Is Called)”, Blind Roosevelt Graves & Brother
“Prayer For Passive Resistance” [Live at Antibes, 1960], Charles Mingus
“Triptych: Prayer / Protest / Peace”, Max Roach & Abbey Lincoln
“Adhan & Allah-O-Akbar”, Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim) & Johnny Dyani
“Come Sunday”, Eric Dolphy
“When I Lay My Burden Down” [Live at Portland, 1975], Elizabeth Cotten
“We Shall Walk Through the Streets of the City (Dirge)”, Ernest “Doc” Paulin
Interspersed with sound collage by Yours Truly

On the other hand, the joy of broadcasting a radio show at all is consolidating and enriching my understanding of and feeling for the music I’m playing.

When I sat down to plan the first episode of the year back in January, I had recently become the owner of a shiny new lack of employment, thanks in large part to illness of the psychological variety, two years of a brain and soul destroying job that I can only characterise as the anvil that broke the camel’s back, to say nothing of parenthood, financial strain, having my bag with my computer in it stolen from ten feet behind me in Queens Park while I took a photo of my son, the ghosts of old problems, anger, allergies, undying ambitions—every goddamn thing. The kind of brain I have is what people describe as “autistic”, meaning that I’ll see patterns in places that many other people won’t. But on this occasion, the occasion of planning the episode, all the songs I had in mind appeared as a jumble. Eventually I ran out of time. The only pattern I could see was behavioural: I was fucking up. Again.

But I listened. I listened to the same playlists over and over again, using particular recordings in a specific sequence to calm my nerves, to make sense of things in a limited simulation of reality, a ground zero where I knew, if I took stock of where I stood, I would remember that things in my life are bad but not that bad. Bad things pass, as do the good things. Once I started getting sick of a playlist it was usually because I was getting better; I didn’t need it anymore (for the time being).

Of course, this vignette is only intelligible in terms of trends in streaming and cloud technology and it’s why I hate the algorithm so much: a mechanical salesman making educated guesses about what you want based on a dataset comprised of your previous behaviour mathematically modelled, offering the same old “new”, utterly missing the point that the thrill of having the world’s music at your fingertips lies in actively courting what you don’t already know—active being the operative word—whether that means discovering recordings you’ve never heard before or finding something new in records you’ve heard a million times.

Someone hits record then someone else plays a note: it begins, it ends one or two or so many beats later. The bars form a measure, measure upon measure, then the song is over. You hit play and the song begins and ends. Maybe you do that once every ten years; maybe once a day for three decades. Either way, by listening to music over time we come to hear ourselves passing through phases of experience, moment upon moment, a series of firsts, memories rising and unfurling leitmotifs, call and recall, the form becoming content. To listen is to actively participate in being alive, as subjecting the world’s noise to your own perception is to bring a semblance of meaning into the world.

For the March episode, I asked my friend Conor—my wonderful pal with whom I garden, talk about music and politics and the USA and who also writes about the concrete world often obscured by the abstract—to take over the show and play music from the Outer Jazz canon that I was unlikely to know. I listened and some of it wasn’t easy. When life’s got you by the balls, the kneejerk reaction is to retreat to your well-worn sound bath, to turn the noise down.

Maybe this is why I can’t watch the snuff films that pass as “social media” anymore: video may be more objective than something like music, but only in a limited way. You have to account for the fact that worm-brained scrollers like us bring our own meaning to videos of thugs in uniform murdering people in the street. Video messianically redeems the sense we deliver to it, making gibberish of otherwise plain documentary evidence. A picture is not always worth a thousand words. The roiling stream of “content” becomes a wilderness of mirrors.

Opening your ears to unfamiliar music, to music that offers no comfort, you meet the music halfway. You’re not being served; you can’t command the music, “do this for me”; you’re collaborating. It’s good for you, especially if you want to learn something, or feel something, or open yourself to the unknown.

Sometimes I think taste is a curse: it would be better to enjoy everything you hear, to at least gain some knowledge of another person’s hearing, so that sound itself becomes an unmitigated delight. Short of this musical utopianism, I try to find something noteworthy in every music I hear, even if it isn’t enjoyment. Sneering is just a failure of due diligence. We expect this of ourselves and others when the subject is not music—you can’t simply refuse to engage with all things foreign, nor should you. And you yourself are the foreigner to most of the world’s inhabitants.

The music that we do know well can present a challenge to others (especially if you’re into jazz). How would you go about sharing an artist’s work with someone who didn’t know it? If the task before you was to reduce the work of several decades to an hour-long episode, including your own reasons for thinking it’s worth hearing, could you do it? April’s episode celebrated the work of Billie Holiday, my favourite singer. As a primer of her music, it doesn’t succeed—I’ve left too much out, songs and biography, and I am not the person best fitted to singing her praises. But if I can get someone to turn their ear to an hour of Billie Holiday, it won’t have totally failed either.

By the merry month of May, I had become a working musician again after a decade of doing other things. The anvil had fallen, the camel’s back was broken—but mine remained intact. This time, however, I went back to my original love: folk music. Our lives fit into a wider totality like the cells of a single body. If that body is ravaged by sickness, is it possible for us to be well? I suspect not, but you have to try. This is what music is good for; it’s a reprieve from the fever dream of our decaying way of life. Folk music, being rooted in the lifeways of people in a specific place and time, reminds me that our own way of life is structured around disposability: of objects, of people, even of whole social orders. But the struggle to live well gives meaning to the cycles of both life and culture—beyond the business cycle.

My wife described the birth of our son and the contractions that brought him into it as resembling a train speeding through tunnels. Each contraction came with harsh, stabbing light, overwhelming brightness that seared through her core like a train bursting through fiery daylight. Then the contractions would subside and the train would pass into the dark mildness of a tunnel, where the lights ahead and behind were visible but distant. There was no pain in the dark intervals. Light, dark, light, dark; pain, relief, pain, relief. So it goes. Eventually the train stops and there before you is new life. One cycle ends, another begins.

As metaphors go, I think this one expresses the relationship of jazz to folk music aptly: new musical forms arise from the throes of another, expansion and contraction in the crucible of historical times and places. Time and place are mutually constitutive: to travel deeply into music is to travel in space and time; to listen deeply is to hear strains of places that existed then but not now. Jazz shouts the twentieth century but also whispers the nineteenth. If you can learn to understand the regional dialect of a music (and remember that place is also time), you may be able to discern the shape of a cycle—and as one cycle emerges from another, you might get lucky and catch a glimpse of the future.

The artist Tehching Hsieh created a piece of work called One Year Performance 1980-1981 or the Time Clock Piece, in which he took a single frame photo of himself at a time clock every hour on the hour for 365 consecutive days. Right at the beginning, he shaved his head so when you watch a reel of all the frames put together, the man’s hair seems to magically grow while his outfit and the background stay the same (excepting the time clock spinning cartoonishly).

I really love this artwork because it captures something intrinsic to all great and lasting works of art: the art stays the same while the world changes, so even the unchanging undergoes a transformation. Culture means something to people and meaning is not static, it is dynamic. A work of art or a song or a photograph or a even a doodle will mean different things to you the longer you live with it. And with Time Clock Piece we’re only getting the document—the work of art was the sleepless, clockwork year Hsieh sacrificed to it. I see the subject of Time Clock Piece to be not just time but art and its inseparability from life itself.

Between June and October, I traced my varied attempts at coming to grips with my own bias towards music I already know. I listened to more New Thing (a.k.a. “free jazz”), 1920s jug bands, improvisational music loosely related to jazz or not at all, and music that I didn’t necessarily understand. It’s one thing to reflect on music you’ve been listening to for years. But even Stonehenge was new at some point.

Events get the same treatment in the name of history. Gaza, for example, might one day be a prominent scar but right now it’s an open wound. Scars tell stories but stories presume an ending, while flowing blood and rubble in the making offer no such shapely closure. Even so, people make music in spite of all the noise, the lack of a sympathetic audience, or rogue states to silence them. To listen does not necessarily grant you access to a music’s emotional or cultural source. There is a music project called Gaza Birds Singing, sharing videos of music teachers in a tent in Gaza, giving children music lessons and leading group singalongs. They sing and play and smile like angels so you’d never know they were living through hell.

And that’s because it means something, and that’s why it means something.

When D’Angelo died in October, I put together November’s episode in tribute to his beautiful music. It’s easier to eulogise one musician’s passing than bearing witness to death on a mass scale. In celebrating D’Angelo’s musical life, it seemed fitting to close the episode with his own tribute to the life of Prince, the greatest pop star who ever lived (in my unprofessional opinion). If music can be more than escape or dreaming that the world is other than it really is, maybe it’s a proving ground for allowing ourselves to feel all that loss and still pay some kind of tribute. Maybe eventually it will do more—get us on our feet, rising to the challenge, which in our time is prising the helm from the hands of lunatics.

It’s a cold January so far. The frozen rooftops absorb the weak and scattered sunlight. At the end of the year, I closed back in on myself, retreating into the languid comfort of superficially gentle music preparing me for the deep freeze. But a still surface of ice hides all kinds of rumblings and a multitude of sins. When spring comes and the ice melts, hidden things float to the surface. The soil bursts, flowers rise to greet the living and the dead. You can hear it, if you listen. Or you can sing yourself to while away the time.

The university had one of the highest paid vice chancellors in the country. Her salary was near double that of the Prime Minister. This despite the fact that it was one of the smallest universities in the country, in the bottom half in terms of rankings, with no special claim to institutional leadership. It was, however, a very good place to study art and criticism, and to find yourself in the company of fellow weirdos. That is to say, it was ripe for gentrification. The vice chancellor was the living embodiment of that gentrification.

I wrote a poem about her. I took the piss out of her for earning so much money while doing so little for the institution of higher learning, to say nothing of the town the university occupied. I compared the forces that landed her in the top job to those of the psychotic pigs Jesus chased off a cliff. I asked her why gentle Jesus chased the pigs off the cliff. I created a collage with her official portrait and the letters “F” and “U” over her eyes, the initials of the university, then used this for a cover. I printed 50 copies of the poem and handed them out to people I thought would find them funny, including my woefully underpaid and overworked tutors. My tutors loved it. Then I got an email from the uni’s head of communications, requesting in sombre tones to meet and discuss a particular, albeit unnamed, matter.

Mr Comms had thinning hair; he was gangly and paunchy at the same time; he wore an ill-fitting suit and pointy shoes, both common to the 2010s. Mr Comms used to work in British media and it showed in his demeanour as well as his clothes. He may be heading those sorts of well-remunerating communications befitting the genocidal class as we speak; I wouldn’t doubt it. We met in the canteen and he pulled a copy of my poem out of the inside pocket of his ill-fitting blazer. He slid it across the table to me like contraband, speaking sotto voce:

Have you seen this?

Yes, I wrote it.

You wrote this? And you’re admitting it?

Yes.

This is hate mail.

Please tell me what you find objectionable in the poem.

What, you want me to go through it line by line?

I’m a student of literature. That’s what we do.

He asked me about the pigs. I explained. He threatened me with expulsion on the grounds of “gross misconduct”.

Now, I’ve spent enough time banging heads with figures of authority to know when it’s worth it and when it isn’t. But I have a fatal intolerance for taking editorial notes from mercenary hacks in ill-fitting suits. My wife once (half-)joked that you could tell how a person fucks by the way they dress. I wasn’t about to get fucked by a normie in winklepickers.

And that is how Spaghetti For Brains came into being: a pamphlet press, cheap A5 pamphlets printed and stapled, the text carefully typewritten and photocopied by yours truly, the collage done with discarded ephemera and a Pritt stick.

The last SFB pamphlet came out in 2020, just as lockdown was announced. It wouldn’t be possible to sell copies for the foreseeable future, so I thought I would start a podcast and simply read the writing aloud. At the same time, the campaign to nominate Bernie Sanders as the Democratic candidate for President was just beginning. People here in Glasgow kept asking me about it—and there was a lot to tell. So I started the Spaghetti For Brains newsletter, this newsletter.

My old friend Norm joined me on the podcast. He was active in the Bernie campaign and we talked shit, told jokes and wondered/disagreed/cackled aloud about politics. We kept it up weekly (mostly) until my life was suddenly pulled apart in a vortex of eviction, depression, pregnancy and death. The podcast fizzled out. Norm and I still have ideas for episodes and sometimes we can find the time to record. Maybe one day we’ll do some more.

In the intervening half decade, I’ve changed as the world has—not always for the better, neither the world nor myself. No one, I think, can claim to have kept pace. If you widen the scope to include “the left”, I would argue that even fewer of us have. Ethno-nationalism, fascism, craven liberal democracy, democracy of form with no content—ghosts of the nineteenth century disguised as ghosts of the twentieth—haunt us with renewed menace, with the vigour of the undead, on a trajectory from nowhere left to go perhaps as far as the end of the world. The menace is real. Some ghosts really can hurt you. Without a vision of freedom to animate the opposition, and the bedraggled filaments of civil society to embody that vision, we find ourselves prone before the oncoming train, tied to the tracks, an old cartoon, a tired meme. Some on the left seriously contend that there is hope in the unserious possibility of the track running out before we’re run over; that the train will derail, crash, disintegrate, disappear. Then, somehow, we’ll find ourselves unbound and upright, ready to—what? Rebuild the train in our own image? Lay new tracks to somewhere else? What?

And yet…

I refuse to despair. And I’ve never been surer of my commitment to our self-emancipation from the delirium of class society. There’s simply too much at stake to wallow in cynicism. And there’s no cynicism like the satiating despair of a person who once subsisted on an abundance of hope.

That said, even the name “Spaghetti For Brains” is characteristic of an irony born of that despair so redolent of the previous decade. I’m not feeling ironic anymore—not in the scant minutes I get to myself, sitting down to write; not in the wee hours spent staring into the distant gloaming horizon of further vortices pulling my life apart; not when my fate collides with yours because we happen to occupy opposing currents in the tornado; nor when we’re so outpaced and outflanked by our enemies that they become practically invisible, despite sucking up all the representational oxygen in the room.

Down here in my mousehole, writing is fighting. And I think I should be fighting in my own name.

So I’m retiring the Spaghetti For Brains imprint. What this means in practice is that this newsletter will still appear in your inbox at the irregular and embarrassingly infrequent rate that it always has, but it will bear my name, as will the website. (My name is Ben Kritikos, by the way.) I’ll still be writing about music, the social history of records, recording, workers in music producing music as a commodity—a story whose central character is not any particular style or individual musician, but the US empire itself. It’s the story of what an American is (or a Scot or a Brit) and the ever-contentious question of who gets to decide. The only change will be the byline.

If you’d like attend, you can book a ticket here. Tickets are £15 but I’m offering a free place for anyone who needs it, so don’t be shy and do get in touch.

After the listening event I hosted at the shop for Govanhill International Festival, where we listened to Charles Mingus’s The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady followed by an open discussion, I was encouraged by people’s engagement with the question of what it means to be from somewhere, the porosity of nationality and attendees’ ability give full attention to a challenging piece of art for 39 uninterrupted minutes.

That said, Scotland has a unique peculiarity. Many people here who would consider themselves on “the left” seem to believe some fantastical things about Scotland’s political and economic orientation. The beleaguered drive for national self-determination in the perennial campaigns for independence give those on the “Yes” side what I would consider a false impression that Scotland is much more “progressive” than it really is. In other words, it’s better than England here, sure—but that’s an extremely low bar. Being slightly north of hell does not put you in the same hemisphere as heaven.

The listening event gave me a lot to think about in terms of telling the story of American power and who we mean when we say “American”; of fighting MAGA on new terms freed from the constraints of liberalism, since it is precisely this liberalism that I found constraining some of the attendees’ thinking about what freedom and democracy actually mean. It’ll be a big job putting across an argument without first challenging some fundamental assumptions about the world we live in.

This is exactly what we can undertake together at the writing group. I believe that the power of storytelling, in whatever cultural form it takes, is a vital weapon in the struggle against the increasingly naked aggression of capital, from Gaza to Glasgow and around the globe. Marxism can help make this chaotic world legible. It can’t tell the whole story for us, of course, because the power of a story comes from the humanity of the person telling it. As a storyteller, you reveal something about yourself and this revelation illuminates the world around you, letting others see it in a new light, granting us renewed vision, the power to imagine the world (or some corner of it) more deeply or totally differently.

The MAGA story is powerful because it simplifies what is actually extraordinarily complicated, obscuring more of the world than it reveals. Liberalism in all its impotence, having now ceded the world to its fascist heirs, has hitherto only quibbled about the moral of that story—the point, as Marx wrote 180 years ago, is to change it.

Dear Sal,

Merry Christmas, my lovely boy. I love you very much. For Christmas this year, I got you a present that you won’t even know exists for a long time. It’s this little letter and a few songs thrown in. I’m hoping that it ages well, that it takes on something it doesn’t have right now but should have by the time you can read it. It’s a gamble, but gifts are like that. You never really know how it will land.

Well, I also got you a balance bike, which I know you’re going to love.

That song we just heard was Thelonious Monk’s quartet playing his rendition of the children’s song “That Old Man” (or “This Old Man”, as I grew up calling it). Back in October, I dedicated a whole show to Monk’s music in honour of his birthday. I mentioned then that he was, as well as being a revered jazz modernist, the father of two children. Thelonious Monk’s reputation in the press was that of a kooky, mysterious, sometimes impenetrable personality—he was both valorised and denigrated with this exotic portrayal. But not many consumers of the media portrayal knew or cared that he was a father who, unusually for the time, did most of the day-to-day parenting while his wife worked.

There’s a lot you can say about this: about race, about mid-twentieth century gender politics, about jazz musicians and the way they were depicted in the media; but I think that, being a dad myself, I can safely say that people don’t expect much from fathers and the subject of fatherhood is often one that only comes up when you’re talking about someone making a hash of it—or not doing it at all.

This is, in part, the fault of dads themselves: many... make a hash of it or don’t do it at all. But many others simply won’t talk about their experience of fatherhood, as though the subject isn’t interesting or is somehow self-explanatory. I don’t believe either of these things about being father. In fact, I have an awful lot to say about it because I disagree with so much of what I have heard said about it and I really want you to know how much I’ve learned from being your dada.

At the time that I started writing this, you were nineteen months old. (You’re now two and a bit.) We’re raising you, your mother and I, with basically no help: no childcare, no family nearby, precarious housing and employment, and a civil infrastructure that reminds us daily that children, as well as people with disabilities and elderly people, are simply not important. Some people take the opposite view, as though raising children was magical and the only activity an adult needs in their life (maybe the sleep deprivation has addled their brains) and that a parent’s job is to shield their child from pain or struggle of any kind. Both extremes, it seems to me, don’t consider the fact that, though they might be small and not have full command of language yet, children are people.

The most striking thing about you, of course, is your loving personality. You’re so caring and accepting, so affectionate, so hungry for touch and play. You also need to know things—you want to know what’s happening when we sit on the toilet, where the pee goes, what’s inside our belly buttons (I really hate that you need to know this), what it feels like to touch the inside of our mouths, what my knees taste like. So in this time out of time, it’s reasonable to assume that, at the point this letter reaches you, you’ll want to know some other things that I might not be around to show or tell you. I hope that I am—for Christ’s sake, the idea that I won’t be there is torture to me—but just in case, I’m putting this down for you. Because I know what it’s like when a father isn’t there to share a certain kind of information that you might find useful, maybe even necessary.

To begin with, you’re half American. You’ll obviously already know this in an ordinary sort of way, but I want you to know what that actually means. On my radio show, we listen to jazz records because I think that jazz captures, better than any other music, the process of people in the United States becoming Americans: how the idea of who an American is expanded to include people who a short time before did not get included and how this expansion took a huge amount of fighting and resisting and refusing to accept the boundary of “American” and “not American”. I hope that I’ve been able to show that this process is not necessarily the conscious or deliberate result of concerted action by specific individuals, but something that happens across a shifting population, who are themselves intertwined with huge social and economic forces impossible to see when you’re standing in them. These lines between belonging and not belonging, of being from somewhere and not being from somewhere, are often arbitrary or horribly exclusive, even violent—the state or someone wielding power might have one idea, while the actual people who make up the population intuitively understand something else entirely.

You and I are a great example. I’m American—emotionally, culturally, legally—I hold an American passport and it’s where I was born and raised. But I haven’t lived there for decades. So the law says that you, my son who was born here in Glasgow, are not American. I haven’t even been able to get you a passport because I would have had to have lived in the US for two of the last five years, which I haven’t. But frankly—fuck that. Your dad is American, your grandparents are American, your great-grandparents—you might not have a passport, and you might not speak with an American accent, but you’re half American. Your name is Salvatore, for God’s sake. When I watch baseball on the tv, you shout “GO YANKEES”. The US State Department can kiss my ass.

But you’re also Scottish—you’re very much from Govanhill, despite not having a drop of Scottish blood. Your entire life consists of walking a circuit from the Community Gardens, Queens Park and the Hidden Gardens. You come to Nan’s and queue with me while I’m waiting for a roll. Sgt. Bob knows you. So do the very nice people from Women on Wheels who run the balance bike sessions. You’ve spent hours watching and chatting with the guys operating the diggers, cranes and the steamroller laying new payment on Queens Drive. You know what asphalt is because of them. You go to Locavore and steal clementines. When we’re in the playground at Govanhill Park, the other children playing next to you, who don’t all speak the same language as each other let alone as you, play with you like you’re one of them. Because you are.

Some people would disagree, but I would disagree with them. We live here—proof positive. Some people would say that belonging is about working hard or contributing something economically, some nonsense like that. The jelly-blooded evangelists of “tolerance”, the political dinner ladies stirring the melting pot. But Govanhill is great because the people who live here are not an amorphous mass of integrated suburbanites sharing a single civic identity that looks like an advertisement for an app. We’re all here doing our own thing, in between scratching out a living, wresting a bellyful from those who so munificently tolerate us.

Govanhill isn’t unique in this respect, nor are you. People have always moved to places and made them theirs, as they themselves came to belong to the place. But the hardscrabble existence of economic migrants goes one of two ways, in my experience: they come to the US or to Scotland (or wherever) and raise their kids as Americans or Scots, or they keep their kids close in a community of other people from the same country. Either way, their kids grow up different from them and the place becomes different as it absorbs them. Govanhill is so densely packed that you can see myriad examples of both kinds of parenting walking down two or three blocks. So, you’re going to be Scottish, but Scotland will also be a little bit you.

But what can I give you of the United States, of your heritage? It’s a tricky question because of American culture’s absolute dominance here and its role in holding together the geopolitical order of capital. It’s easy to scoff at the very idea of “American culture” when you’re intoning it to people whose own culture is comprised of the Simpsons and McDonalds, where British children call Father Christmas Santa Claus just like children in rural Ohio, where “America” is not so much a place as a brand concept. Maybe you’d be better off if I gave you less of the United States rather than more.

When you were tiny, Sal, I found myself singing old American folk songs to you. I didn’t quite know why then, but I do now. It’s because there’s something in there, something I know about, that you can’t get from the merchandise that passes for American culture. And it’s not something cryptically American—this folk music is certainly of a place and a time, but it’s lasted as long as it has because it applies across places and across times. And that’s something that the best American culture is good at: capturing a small kernel of the most ordinary human experience and elevating it to the status of a story.

I’m always talking about jazz because jazz tells the story of a very specific idea of the United States—but ideas, like art forms, grow out of the real, concrete, living world, not just out of people’s brains. So telling the story of jazz is a way of telling the story of how the country got the way it did and came to think of itself the way it did because jazz was the first truly American art form.

But folk music is different—first of all, a lot of these songs aren’t just old, old tunes handed down from person to person across the US in a natural way. The reason I can play them for you in recorded format is because some specific musicians and archivists (like Pete Seeger for example) set out to create a recognisably American popular culture that would bring people in the country together and foster a sense of solidarity. It was a deliberate attempt to project an image of the country to itself in a way that pushed back against powerful people doing the same thing for their own selfish ends.

I’m going to play you some records now. The first is Pete Seeger singing “John Henry”, an old folk song that’s been sung with different verses, a different plot, a different melody, a different rhythm—but I like this one the best. Pete Seeger was really famous by the time this was recorded in 1980, so everyone who came to listen also came to sing along. In the folk tradition, the song is structured in a way that makes it easy for the singer to get people to sing along, which Pete Seeger explains at the beginning. It tells the story of a father who works at a job where the bosses are trying to replace human workers with machines. It ends with the dad dying and the son understanding who his dad was and why he did what he did.

It sounds tragic when I put it like that, and it is tragic that the character of the song has to die; it’s a tragedy in the sense that good people are destroyed by forces to which they are morally superior. But the song resolves with the singer telling us that John Henry is still around despite being dead. The problem of bosses trying to replace us with machines is also still around, so it’s a helpful reminder that people can outlive the bad things other people do to them, even when they seem to be dead—and that there are ways of living that are worse than dying.

I really wanted to show you this song because it gets to the heart of something important—you are who are because of your subjectivity, the world behind your eyes that no one knows but you. No one else is like you exactly. You’re Sal, a person seeing the world through your own eyes and everything you see and feel and experience will be filtered in a unique way through that set of conditions that make you you. But you’re also incomplete—you need other people. All of your needs are outside of yourself: food, shelter, the tools to obtain these things, help using those tools, language to map out the world and people to speak it with, love, sympathy, understanding—these things are basically like limbs or organs but on the outside of your body and they’re all bound up with other people. And so you are, in a very real way, who you are to other people.

The problem here is that those external limbs and organs you need to survive and to be happy and to be Sal are subject to this crazy thing called ownership—they are this weird, distorted thing called property. That means that some asshole you’ve never met and will never meet has decided that he owns them and that since you need them to survive, you’ve got to work for this asshole to get money to pay for these things. And because the whole of society is structured like this, everybody is in the same boat: we’ve all got to become this one way to do the job of getting the money to buy the limbs and organs that even though they’re part of our body are not attached because we need them to survive.

And another problem is that this way you’ve got to be in order to do the job to get the money to buy the limbs and organs from this asshole who shouldn’t have them in first place—it’s antithetical to your nature. Even though you are who you are to other people, the thing that makes people great is that they’re all different—too much of the same thing means you’re made up of all the same stuff, like soup made entirely from water. And what’s worse is—it hurts. It hurts a lot to force yourself to be this thing that you’re not.

So John Henry said to his captain, “A man ain’t nothin’ but a man, but before I’d let your steam drill beat me down, I’d die with a hammer in my hand” because it’s better to die fighting than it is to be crushed to death in the act of contorting yourself into the shape that some asshole and his machines insist you should be.

You might not quite realise how much this fight has shaped everyday life for you and every person you know, because people themselves don’t see it that way—we’re all too busy trying to keep those limbs and organs attached. It takes up all of your mental bandwidth. But believe me, kiddo, it’s the defining impulse of our society. Take it from your old dad.

And there have always been people who fought rather than submit—fought for this thing called democracy. Being half American and the other half Scottish, you’re bound to hear this word being bandied about, especially in the mouths of the people who have nothing but contempt for it. When they say it, they mean it in the narrowest sense—ticking a box every four years or so. That’s not democracy. There being a vote in a building in London that you’re not even allowed into isn’t democracy. Even if there is democracy in there, that’s not democracy in the true sense. It’s only democracy if it’s everywhere that people are: the home, the workplace, the public spaces, the schools and institutions.

If you’re unlucky enough to work a job, which I’m fairly sure you will, you’ll immediately be faced with the lack of democracy that I’m talking about: the boss tells you what to do and who to be and you do it and be it or they take away your ability to survive in the world. It’s a dictatorship, though most people don’t really call it that. But don’t worry, Sal—you’re in good company. People have been fighting for a democratic society for as long as there has been a society.

That’s what the next two songs are about: first, Billy Bragg and Dick Gaughan singing “The Red Flag”. Now, this song normally gets sung to the tune of “O Tannenbaum”, a German Christmas carol—a slow, depressing dirge—but the guy who wrote the lyric set it to a fife and drum melody called “The White Cockade” that the drummers and pipers of the Continental Army played on the battlefields of the American Revolution. The author of the song, James Connell, wanted to rouse people who heard it to fight energetically for a world where no one person was subject to the power of another—what I’m talking about when I use the word “democracy.” Though Connell probably rolls in his grave when Kier Starmer sings it at the beginning of the Labour Party conference every year.

But you and I both know what this song means—you’ve bounced on my shoulders ecstatically so many times while we danced and sang this one together. It’s about the world that I want for you.

After that, we’re going to hear “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” by Harry McClintock, who performed under the name Haywire Mac, the singing hobo. A hobo was a person who hated work so much that he’d rather walk across the United States looking for a handout or sneak onto big freight trains. Hobos would go to great lengths to not work, which nowadays is the kind of thing that people despise. You’re supposed to want to work, which is just stupid. Don’t get me wrong, if you love what you do then you will want to work—I love doing this show and I spend a lot of hours at it (mostly while you’re sleeping). And if I could make a living doing this, I would work even harder at it because I wouldn’t have to waste a lot of time and energy tending the machines and destroying myself for the benefit of some asshole.

But sometimes you can actually avoid being destroyed, usually by sacrificing a certain degree of comfort or by banding together with others and fighting back. This song was an anthem for those kinds of people. It was the marching song for a group called the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, who did a pretty good job of fighting the dictatorship of work. They lost in the end, but they did a lot to claw back some of those limbs and organs. So, as old Haywire Mac says, “Rejoice and be glad.”

As I’m writing this, you’re asleep in the buggy at my side. It took me hours to get you to nap, walking up and down Victoria Road trying to avoid the blazing winter sun shining in your eyes, making sure you’re not too cold, comforting you when you cry for your mom, for a toy digger, for a thing you can’t articulate and that I can’t figure out…

You know, Sal, I sometimes look at you sleeping there and feel the tremendous responsibility I have to you as my son. I know you very well and I know your needs, but this feeling of responsibility also reminds me that I was failed—and having been failed, I don’t really know what success looks like. Before you were even born, when I heard you were going to be a boy, I had a little moment of terror: a searing shaft of ruthless light shone on a darkly hidden fear that the long line of bad or absent fathers, in which I’m the latest, was somehow biologically determined.

The next record I’m going to play is an old Greek song in the rebetika style: “In the Cool Morning”. It’s one of the genre’s most famous players, Vassilis Tsitsanis, singing about being a mangas—a playboy who flouts social conventions and smokes hash all day. Rebetika is the Greek equivalent of the blues or jazz because it’s the only truly Greek music form, though the people who originally played it were ethnic Greeks from other countries and the character of the music is as Middle Eastern as it is European. Like the US’s relationship to African American culture, the Greeks had a hard time accepting this “foreign”-sounding music—until, of course, it went from a folk music to a popular music to the much-lauded national art music of the country.

Your Papou, my biological father, was born in a tiny village on an island in Greece. His father wasn’t a good parent to him, wasn’t even really around that much from what I’ve been told. I wouldn’t necessarily describe either of these men as manges, but the image of the carefree man who keeps himself unencumbered by responsibilities is a potent one that spans cultures, music genres, even centuries. The man who’s free from responsibilities, or who fulfils them effortlessly, is more of an archetypal, aspirational figure than a real-life one and you can see it drawing men away from their families like a siren call. Following that call, these men end up drowning in their own selfishness because I certainly have never met a single one who was happy or free, though I’ve seen enough of them old and lonely.

To be totally honest, it’s not difficult to understand the impulse to bolt when the going gets tough, because the going really is tough for a parent: the seemingly endless nights of interrupted or non-existent sleep when the baby cries and cries like a trapped animal; walking around the same square mile at a snail’s pace all day looking for something to do or waiting for the kid to nap; scrambling frantically to keep a toddler from walking into moving traffic or eating bleach or trying to ride a Staffy or throwing themselves into the duck pond; standing shamefaced on the pavement stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the staring passersby when that toddler has a fifteen minute tantrum because you so cruelly prevented them from committing these many and varied suicides.

None of this is your fault of course, and I would never leave you because of it. And it makes you realise that all these guys through the years who’ve thought of themselves as really manly men were obviously just not able to endure it. Sure, it’s probably easier to go with the social flow and slip on the invisibility cloak of gender that absolves you of parental responsibility so you can sit around smoking hash and playing the bouzouki—not everyone is cut out to be a dad.

But before you go thinking that all dads are deadbeats or that I’m trying to claim I’m some kind of hero for braving boredom, anxiety and embarrassment, let me assure you that plenty of men have been good dads. The next two songs, “Coorie Doon” by the Glaswegian Matt McGinn, and “Prayer of a Miner’s Child” by the Appalachian banjo player Dock Boggs, express to me the real tenderness at the heart of being strong. Even the old-fashioned kind of dad wasn’t just some brutal troglodyte who brought home nothing but money to pay the bills and an iron discipline. Men get a bad rap that’s only partially deserved. Lots of men, like any person who has to contort themselves into the shape of a working machine, were only able to endure it because they sat there crouched in the dark, in the dust, in the damp, dreaming about their little ones at home sleeping soundly. Even the most pitiful son of a bitch can get through whatever the world throws at him if he knows that someone loves him and that he’s got someone to love.

Your mom and I talk sometimes about the things we want for you, as well as the things we fear for you, and it isn’t anything specific. When you were tiny, we used to listen to the song “My Blue Heaven” and it sounded almost haunted to us—the quaint idyll that Gene Austin’s recording paints a picture of seems kind of corny, yeah, but also just so... familiar. Once you were able to distinguish between night and day, between yourself and the world, it took hours of breastfeeding to get you to sleep every night. I would write in my journal in the next room while your mother patiently waited for your body to relax and release from hers. I’d reflect while I listened to this song on what I could give you, poor as I am, and what I really wanted for you. After months of thinking about it, a couple of years at this point, I think the most important thing I can try to instil in you is the ability to know and love other people unreservedly.

Love for others has given humans the ability to face firing squads, to ascend the gallows without hesitation, to give up long lives to a cause not in a fit of passion but patiently and enduringly, to sacrifice comfort and reward and recognition—because they felt love and knew in their hearts that they were loved. The willingness to know others deeply and to be known is a prerequisite for self-understanding and it’s the foundation of love between people. It’s also terrifying. It requires a huge degree of vulnerability; it is, without exaggeration, revolutionary in its potential, and without this love, nothing of worth is possible or even desirable. But it hurts sometimes and it’s embarrassing and it’s also impossible to be this vulnerable while also maintaining the illusion that you’re something special, even especially pitiable. So the measure of our success as parents will be the extent to which you can love and allow yourself to be loved.

You’ve taught me this, Sal. We stumbled into parenthood without knowing what it would be like, hoping to build “a little nest that’s nestled where the roses bloom,” just like so many other people—but it was too hard. So we ended up meeting other parents with kids of a similar age walking around Govanhill aimlessly, haunting the parks and preventing their toddlers from drowning in a duck pond. After a while, the parents from other places—the ones crowded together in little flats, with no family around, no childcare, not enough money—all recognised each other and slowly came together as a kind of unit.

This is your group of friends, kiddo. This is your working family, who you see every day and who look after you and you look after. Govanhill gave us that—the setting for creating family out of nothing, for filling in the gaps where civil society should be. And you gave us the impulse—you pushed us outside, out into the world, into the arms of other people, where we would have to learn to love others for the sake of our very survival. It’s probably the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

The Christmas myth, the nativity and all that, seems like a good and relevant one to me. Mary and Joseph were escaping the terror of King Herod, who declared that all newborns be killed to prevent the birth of a prophesied Messiah. I’m sure that at least one of their modern-day counterparts in Gaza is giving birth right now, maybe not in a manger, maybe with no kings coming to offer gifts. One day I expect you’ll ask me about this time we’re living through, to account for myself in the face of something so awful, but what can I tell you? We only do what we can do. I have no idea, no frame of reference for understanding how a person endures that. But I suspect when they see their little baby for the first time, they’ll see something more than just a child. They’ll see the promise of a future, a whole cosmology of life triumphing over death, life itself and all the love in the world.

Merry Christmas, Sal. I love you.

This record is not only a beautiful work of art but is the composer’s desperate cry to his audience that racism was destroying the United States and making the world hell for people who weren’t white.

At the event, we’ll be listening to the record in its entirety. After, I’ll give a short presentation to give the record some historical context. But what I’m actually interested in is recovering the fiery Cold War conversation that this record butted its way into: the question of what an American is—and who gets to answer that question. It’s just as timely and up in the air today, in Scotland as much as the US, as it ever was. That’s why we’ll be having an open discussion, digging into these questions and seeing what we can come up with. I know it’s not possible to tackle such huge subjects by talking about a jazz record in a library, but I believe that we need to start somewhere and The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady speaks to the crisis of the present moment powerfully and urgently.

As I write, Donald Trump, in one of the first acts of his second administration, is attempting to strike down birthright citizenship, a right enshrined in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution—in other words, he is trying through presidential fiat to redefine what an American is. If he’s successful, it could mean treating undocumented Americans as a foreign invading army who can be dealt with militarily. Now, I’ve talked a lot about this, both in print and on the radio show, and I’ve talked about it in connection with The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. You can read my essay “The Passive Voice” (or listen the radio show episode where I read it alongside playing the record) to see what I think.

But I want to know what you think. That’s why I’m hosting this event. You might not think that you know enough to have an opinion, but you definitely do. You’re a person living in a country—maybe your country, maybe not—and what else is a country but a place where a bunch of people live? Why shouldn’t your opinion on citizenship be considered? You’ve sure had enough practice getting your hands on it and I’m sure it didn’t always come easy. Whether it was getting a passport or visa, accessing benefits or entitlements, being able to see a doctor or find a place to live or beat back the fear that you wouldn’t have enough money the next month for essentials, this is the stuff of everyday life wherever it is that life is made.

Where does freedom or democracy fit in?

Words and concepts like “freedom” and “democracy” are so overused and abused by people wielding them as weapons of economic power that they sound almost meaningless. I want to know what you think they mean, or what they could mean. We can’t fight back against something we don’t even understand, but neither can we rely on the experts to make us understand it—because, as I say, who knows better than you what it means to be a regular person?

Tickets are free but you’ll need to book. You can find details of the event here and you can book tickets here. I look forward to seeing you there.

The idea for the show is that by telling the story of jazz records as objects, tracing the development of both jazz music and also the infrastructure of American consumerism, you could tell the story of how the United States came to a position of global dominance. This is in no small part because the two things—jazz and consumerism—developed at the same time.

Our reliance on petroleum, in the form of fuel oil and plastic specifically, transformed the world and transformed us. We are all the product of a concrete world of automobility and the oil-fuelled mechanised production of plastic consumer goods. Our ideas about citizenship, about nationhood, about culture and counterculture, about the past, the present and the future all arise from a material reality constructed almost entirely from oil.

Vinyl records were among the first of these plastic consumer goods, and jazz was, at the time that records went from being made of shellac to being made of oil-based plastic, America’s popular music. Before this, jazz had been an African American vernacular music, a kind of folk music; and after jazz’s stint in the mainstream, it became an art music with modernist ambitions. The lineage of jazz moving from a folk music to a popular music to an art music moves in parallel to the lineage of the modern American consumer-citizen coming into being. In this way, we can “see the world in a piece of plastic”, to use the words of Kyle Devine.

American capitalism in the twentieth century promised prosperity. Now, in the twenty-first, we’re choking on microplastics, endangering our own species as well as most others through anthropogenic climate change, and living through an endless series of socioeconomic crises without a sufficient explanation from the people who claim to be experts on the subject. Our culture does little to comfort or educate us, let alone to foster solidarity. Our technology creates as many problems as it solves. Our work, if we’re “lucky” enough to have it, is frequently gruelling, mostly boring and oftentimes meaningless—we work longer and harder for lower wages and fewer benefits. Even people from comfortable backgrounds struggle to feed, clothe and house themselves or even to remain in once place, while everyone else faces the prospect of adding to the record spike in deaths of despair. Instead of getting easier, life gets harder, more lonely, more angry—and more difficult to change.

The “American way of life”, now spread across multiple parts of the globe at the expense of almost all the others, has sold itself as freedom; yet here we are, discovering that this kind of “freedom” equals murder, misery, ecological catastrophe and a powerlessness to do anything about it.

Jazz is often described as “the only true American art form” and I think that this is true—in a sense. The story of these jazz records, the cultural and infrastructural landscape that enabled them to come into being and the extremely talented people who laboured to keep the music alive, also offers (in my opinion) a vision of real freedom, imagined by many of the people who were blocked from taking part in the American way of life. It’s easy to scoff at the very idea of “American culture” when you’re intoning it to people whose own culture is comprised of the Simpsons and McDonalds, where “America” is not so much a place as a brand concept. But jazz represented, at its best, both a resistance to this debased form of American civic identity and also, as an activity bound up with both commerce and culture, a key to understanding how that normative American consumer-citizen came into being.

I’m not saying that jazz records hold any answers to the problems we’re facing, but looking at how the records were made, the physical world that gave rise to them and the societies that inhabited it, we can trace the path that got us here, to better understand it—and, crucially, to change it.

Below is a list of all the scripted episodes to date, in reverse chronological order, with a link to SoundCloud and a short description. For a full list of episodes including track listings, you can visit our Instagram.

• Episode 21: An open letter to my son, for Christmas.

• Episode 20: “A Plastic Shadow”: V-Discs, Vinyl and the Second World War

  [taken from the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/V-discs1-991943-1944]

  On this episode, we look at the history of V-Discs and the rise of vinyl.
  
  In August of 1942, the American Federation of Musicians declared a strike: an all-out ban on members going into the studio and recording music. The strike was called to force the big three record companies to increase the royalty rate on recorded music paid to musicians, which had become a substantial part of music workers’ business in an American culture structured around the production of consumer goods. The strike would last for two years, in which time no commercial records were made.
  
  But the US military and the big labels joined forces to create V-Discs (or Victory Discs)—non-commercial records for the enjoyment of the American soldiers and staff stationed abroad. Records up to this point were made of a rationed material sorely needed in the production of armaments: shellac. With the US having an abundance of oil, the petroleum-based vinyl record came to prominence and it’s been that way ever since.
  
  Oil-based plastic didn’t just shape music manufacture in its own image, though—it shaped American consumerism, which undergirds the world as we know it through mass production and mass communication, the end result of which is masses. It’s us.

• Episode 14: Bebop, the Nuclear Age and the American Century

  In this episode, we explore the creation of an American “mainstream”, forged by empire-minded plutocrats like Henry Luce (of TIME, LIFE and Fortune magazines) in the fire of nuclear energy, with sound collage capturing the ways that military and civil technology was presented to the public as the conquest of the American way of life over other countries and even nature itself. We listen to records featuring leading modernists in their first roles as sidemen, wartime bootleg recordings and V-Discs—the only records being made during a two-year strike that brought the record industry to its knees between 1941-1942—as well as the earliest Bebop records that seemed to appear, in revolutionary fashion, fully formed from nowhere in the mid-1940s. We close out with a track that captures the counterrevolutionary current to Bebop.

• Episode 10: Black, Brown and Beige

  On this episode we listen to Duke Ellington’s sprawling jazz suite Black, Brown and Beige, recorded only once in its entirety and never played in full after 1943 when this record was made. Ellington uses this “tone parallel” to tell the story of Black Americans becoming Americans, but listening to this record 81 years on, it throws up all kinds of questions about the United States itself—about the nation, “the people”, and who a place belongs to, and why.
  

• Episode 8: Magnetic Tape and the Citizen as Consumer

  On this episode, we interview the sound archivist and host of @radio_buena_vida’s Member Ship Card Conor Walker. Conor brings us through the history of magnetic tape and its impact on both sound recording, the record industry as well as music listening habits that helped shape the American citizen-as-consumer.

• Episodes 6 & 7: The Swing Era

  On this two-part episode, we hear records from the 1930s that paved the way for what we now call 'the Swing Era’. These records set themes that American culture would be forced to struggle with by the end of the decade, and that would come to define the era: issues like race, class and the tension between art and popular culture.

  And this era, the Swing Era, was a product of oil, a product of the car, the highway, the suburbs and the teenagers who lived there. From the mid-thirties until the end of the war, it would become what Gunther Schuller describes as ‘that remarkable period in American musical history when jazz was synonymous with America’s popular music’. It would also be the only time that this was true. The age of oil would eat its own children.

• Episode 4: The Passive Voice

  On this episode, we hear Charles Mingus’s 1963 masterpiece The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, and Ben reads The Passive Voice: notes from 2020 reflecting on the George Floyd uprising.

• Episode 3: Jazz: The Original “World Music”

  Jazz is a uniquely American music, but like the United States and its patchwork of different nationalities, jazz is the product of a number of influences from outside of the United States. This also lent itself to influence the music of other countries. In this episode, we explore the ways that jazz used, and was used by, the music of cultures outside the United States, as well as how jazz represented a kind of “open source” radical cultural expression at home and abroad.

• Episode 2: New Orleans and the Birth of Jazz

  New Orleans is considered the birthplace of jazz, but where did jazz’s origin myth as “America’s Music” come from and what can it tell us about the United States’ ideas about itself?

• Episode 1: “America’s Music”: an Introduction

  We kick off the show and introduce the themes we’ll be exploring, as well as spinning some records just for fun.

On January 23^rd, 1943, Duke Ellington and His Orchestra took to the stage at Carnegie Hall, dressed in black tie and tails. Sonny Greer, the orchestra’s drummer, raised his sticks and burst out a drum roll, building up to the whole band striking up in unison, following Ellington’s signal, to loudly intone the ‘Star Spangled Banner’.

While the concert was notionally a charity event to raise money for Russian War Relief (since the Soviet Union was, at that time, an ally of the United States), the idea had really been born in the mind of Ellington’s management. The program for the evening would be a kind of ‘Best Of’ the Duke’s two decades’ worth of music, a catalogue that by 1943 had attained legendary status internationally among jazz fans, critics and musicologists alike. Together with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington was not only a prominent figurehead of American music but to many he was an ambassador of Black America itself.

The centrepiece of the program, however, was a brand-new piece of music titled Black, Brown and Beige: A Tone Parallel to the History of the American Negro. Quite a mouthful. And that’s because it was an ambitious attempt, by an ambitious composer, to present the history of Black people in America—from their arrival in bondage having been stolen from Africa, to their struggle as slaves in the South and their acceptance of Christianity; their role in the Civil War and the aftermath of a divided Republic; their cultural development as a new kind of American; and on to the part they played in fighting the US’s wars abroad, all the way up to the culturally vibrant Harlem of the present day (of 1943).

This programmatic “tone parallel” took the form of three movements, much like a symphony, with each representing successive stages of Africans becoming Americans—hence the title Black, Brown and Beige. Ellington is using his orchestra to tell a story. You might be thinking that’s a lot of story to fit into 49 minutes of music, and you’d be right. You might also find it a little uncomfortable that, as each stage succeeds the last and Black people become more integrated into the fold of American citizenship, that they become lighter… But we’ll come back to that.

The show was recorded on a glass master disc that didn’t see the light of day for another 35 years. This is largely because Black, Brown and Beige was savagely reviewed by critics from both the jazz and classical worlds. The latter found the piece lacking in coherence, a jumble of different ideas patched together without a unifying shape or form. Some classical heads also resented the intrusion of jazz—this merely commercial music—into the selective company of their rarefied artistry. From the other side, jazz critics thought Ellington was kind of selling out, abandoning the fiery spirit of jazz to court the pretentious, thin-blooded world of so-called art music.

Ellington seems to have taken the backlash to heart. He never performed the whole piece again and, despite making future forays into the western art music tradition, never again undertook a composition of this scale or complexity.

But in the intervening decades, critics have re-appraised Black, Brown and Beige, finding that its flaws, while not negligible, don’t detract from its overall expressive power or its success as a piece of composed, long-form jazz music conceived for a concert hall setting. The whole concert was finally released on a three LP set in 1977, with the critic and champion of Ellington’s music Leonard Feather writing a long essay for the liner notes. In that essay, he makes the case that in Black, Brown and Beige Ellington had achieved ‘the elevation of jazz to an orchestral art form’.

Black, Brown and Beige takes up two sides of an LP, and we’re going to hear my copy of it today. Duke introduces each section with an explainer, taking us through three stages of history in the development of African American citizenship, each lighter and brighter than the last. From the BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM opening the slavery-era work song and spiritual song of ‘Black’, which occupies the whole first side; to the vernacular blues of ‘Brown’, and its fife and drum music recalling African Americans’ participation in military campaigns that expanded the American empire; and finally, as Duke puts it in his introduction to ‘Beige’, the final section depicting contemporary Harlem:

many don’t have enough to eat or a place to sleep but work hard and see that their children are in school. The Negro is rich in education. And it develops until we find ourselves today struggling for solidarity. But just as we’re about to get our teeth into it, our country’s at war and in trouble again, and, as before, we of course find the black, brown and beige right in there for the red, white and blue.

Ellington here is using what the scholar John Howland has called the Africa to Dixie to Harlem narrative. Long-time listeners of Red White Blues might recall that we explored this in the second episode (which, incidentally, you can hear on our SoundCloud). You might also remember from that episode that Ellington was a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, the movement of Black artists and thinkers in the 1920s who aimed to highlight the unique and central contribution that African Americans made to American culture writ large. You can see that Black, Brown and Beige is the culmination of Ellington’s thinking in this respect.

In Black, Brown and Beige, we’re presented with a historical intervention as much as a piece of art. From the concert opening with the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ to the ‘struggle for solidarity’, Ellington embraces the idea of America fulfilling its great promise of democracy and human liberty, some sanitised version of Manifest Destiny in which Black Americans are central to the nation’s self-becoming. This music is programmatic in the deepest sense.

The program of Ellington’s “tone parallel” is presenting the history of Black America, one that wasn’t as well-known then as it is today, and using it to project an image of a future Black American: a fully integrated, urbane and thoroughly bourgeois American person. He’s taking a stagist view of integration, one in which Black people are becoming modern; and in their modernity, they’re becoming, in the uncomfortable words of the scholar Phil Ford, “worthy of freedom”.

While I don’t have the experience or authority to criticise Ellington on the question of African American civic development, it’s easy to see the underlying conception of freedom, “worthiness” and American civic identity at play here, a conception that I think hasn’t actually changed much since 1943. In fact, I don’t even think that it’s particularly American, let alone African American. Ideas about the nation, about “the people” and which people a piece of earth belongs to, and why—variations on these ideas were used to justify Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union (not even chief among their uses), which the concert premiering Black, Brown and Beige was ostensibly raising money to help the victims of.

The idea that a geographical place and its civil infrastructure can belong to some people who occupy it and not others, that you can earn it like a holiday or a factory or a medal of honour, is a thoroughly bourgeois notion bound up with the assumptions of capitalist property relations instrumental to ruling class power. Integration based on the assumption that oppressed people should struggle to become more like their oppressors, through hard work and gritty determination, could only be desirable as an alternative to the outright exterminism of the Nazi variety. There’s no shortage of examples of this model of civic identity being used to justify exclusion, even genocide, as often as development or integration—and it’s the very shape of whiteness. And that lends itself readily to criticism because everyone is worthy of freedom.

But I don’t want to give you the impression that this is anything other than a musical masterpiece, or that the Duke’s story of Black Americans becoming Americans is somehow historically inaccurate. The kernel of emotional truth in Black, Brown and Beige rests upon the fact that American history is largely the story of people producing a wealth never before imagined and sharing in almost none of it.

Like Duke, I don’t see this history as a tragedy, but rather as a commandment: make it different. Make it new. Become equal—not to the master, but to the task of doing away with him.

There’s a picture in Claudia Rankine’s 2014 book of poems Citizen, right at the end of a poem titled “February 26, 2012 / In Memory of Trayvon Martin”. It’s a doctored version of a famous—or I should say infamous—picture, in which a large crowd of people, clearly from early in the last century, stand around a tree. There’s an almost festive atmosphere, like they’re at a village fête or a fairground attraction. The people are all white, and in the branches of the high old tree, there’s an empty space where the image has been doctored. The original, undoctored image inspired Abel Meeropol to write the song “Strange Fruit”: it’s the picture of a lynching.

It doesn’t really matter which lynching, because the picture is depicting the act and the fact of lynching as much as the specific event here—though of course, it was real people being murdered in an act of racist violence in 1930: Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, two young men with families and friends, personal lives, belongings, habits and jobs. And it’s not the voyeuristic gaze of the camera that’s obscuring and depersonalising the victims; it’s the racist violence itself that does this.

That’s what makes the picture, doctored by photographer John Lucas, so potent,: he’s removed the image of the people being lynched; he’s removed the object of horror—horrifying because it’s so dehumanising, this hateful act of turning people into inanimate objects. Instead, all we can see is a crowd of white people, a big tree, and a big black emptiness where the bodies in the original photograph should be.

This simple act of photoshopping completely reorients our relationship as spectators to the image, since we’re no longer seeing the lynching, but rather the people who’re there to witness it. Watching along with them, we’re in this terrible, uncomfortable and pointedly challenging position of being among them. And if you’re white, you’re suddenly acutely aware of your own whiteness, an awareness that it’s taken this unbelievably awful and clever bit of imagery to bring into focus. Which, I would hazard a guess, is part of the point.

To me, this sudden reorientation, this forceful imagery that makes you see not only the horror of lynching but the socio-cultural construction of race that precipitated it and where you yourself fit in this construction, is the meaning and the potency at the heart of Billie Holiday’s 1939 recording of “Strange Fruit”. But before we get to 1939 and the recording of “Strange Fruit”, there was the tumultuous decade of the 1930s bringing a new idea of America into being.

I just wanted to take this opportunity to let you know that you can now support Spaghetti For Brains by becoming a patron.

Become a patron

If you’ve been reading the long-form cultural histories that I publish in this newsletter, or you’ve been listening to Norm and I pour our jaded hearts out on the podcast, or you’ve been tuning in to Red White Blues to hear about the petroleum-soaked history of American citizenship as told through jazz records, you’ve been there for the finished product. But it takes a hell of a lot of work to get these things finished.

Head over to our patron page or go to www.spaghettiforbrains.com and click on the tab ‘Become a patron’. You can also make a one-off donation if you want to support us but can’t make a regular contribution.

While this newsletter, the podcast and Red White Blues will always be free, any contribution you can make helps us to keep this thing going.

On previous episodes of Red White Blues, we’ve listened to jazz records and I’ve talked about the history surrounding them, trying to illustrate the material world that gave rise to the music as much as the music itself. My intention here has been to try to show that our idea of the United States is highly contingent and relatively new—and also very much constructed from the United States’ own idea about itself. In other words, there is an obscured reality beneath the surface.

And this matters a lot, even if you’re not American, because, in a sense, we’re all American now: its technology is our technology, its food is our food, its politics are our politics, its wars are our wars. We live in the shadow of its global dominance, and even the idea of what it means to be a citizen of somewhere has been thoroughly bound up with American ideas of liberal democracy.

This is absolutely true of Europe since the Second World War: the Marshall Plan, in which the US funded the rebuilding of the post-war ruins, meant that countries receiving American largesse were rebuilt to bind them economically to a US-dominated global economic order. So the worldview of a person whose relationship to the state is based on this post-war American-style capitalist liberal democracy—let’s call them the American citizen-subject—is not confined to the geographical region of the United States.

You may notice too that I’m talking a lot about African Americans, and this isn’t just because jazz is a uniquely Black music. I appreciate that this may be sensitive in light of the unresolved history of racism in the West and the peak in interest since the movement for Black Lives since 2014. But I think that the best way to get beyond the surface of this citizen-subject is to see how it was formed; and in the US, as well as here in the UK, it was formed in large part by constructing a kind of default white non-identity, which was simply the obverse of a racialised—almost always Black—other. Jazz is a uniquely American music because it’s a unique expression of this contradictory otherness, even when white people play it.

So the subject matter here isn’t jazz records or even music, but a double helix made up of these citizen-subjects—both the producers and the consumers. Jazz records functioned as commodities on an emerging consumer market, but they’ve also left traces of the line between belonging and not-belonging, and the centuries-long process of incorporating the other into the fold of American citizenship. So there’s no way to tell this story without talking about Black Americans because American culture, in this sense, very much is Black American culture. And to quote the scholar Kyle Devine, ‘Seeing the world in a piece of plastic … poses special challenges. Its readymade convenience masks a variety of other realities’; in other words, ‘sound reproduction is social reproduction’.

On the latest episode, the first of two parts, we hear records from the early 1930s that paved the way for what we now call 'the Swing Era’. These records set themes that American culture would be forced to struggle with by the end of the decade, and that would come to define the era: issues like race, class and the tension between art and popular culture.

And this era, the Swing Era, was a product of oil, a product of the car, the highway, the suburbs and the teenagers who lived there. From the mid-thirties until the end of the war, it would become what Gunther Schuller describes as ‘that remarkable period in American musical history when jazz was synonymous with America’s popular music’. It would also be the only time that this was true. The age of oil would eat its own children.

You can listen to this and all previous episodes here.

The piece I read was pulled together from notes made in 2020 during the George Floyd uprising, reflecting on the history of American citizenship and its relationship to slavery. The causes of racist state violence and Black American resistance to it have a material basis of course, but our understanding of them is mediated by a dense web of assumptions and ideological sleight of hand—like a police report written in the passive voice. The disconnect between the material and the ideological is the subject of these notes.

You can listen to ‘The Passive Voice’ here. The piece also featured in a recent episode of my radio show Red White Blues: an Anthology of America’s Music, where I play the whole of Charles Mingus’s record The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. We’re up to episode five now and there’s a lot more in the pipeline about jazz, oil and the making of American power. If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so here. I’ve also started an Instagram where I’ll post the show notes and other fragments of research from the project.

1.

Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction

May 25, 2020 (MINNEAPOLIS) On Monday evening, shortly after 8:00 pm, officers from the Minneapolis Police Department responded to the 3700 block of Chicago Avenue South on a report of a forgery in progress. Officers were advised that the suspect was sitting on top of a blue car and appeared to be under the influence.

Two officers arrived and located the suspect, a male believed to be in his 40s, in his car. He was ordered to step from his car. After he got out, he physically resisted officers. Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress. Officers called for an ambulance. He was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center by ambulance where he died a short time later.

At no time were weapons of any type used by anyone involved in this incident.

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension has been called in to investigate this incident at the request of the Minneapolis Police Department.

No officers were injured during the incident.

Body worn cameras were on and activated during this incident.

Glasgow, 24 May 2020. I click on a news headline about police brutality in Minneapolis: <FBI INVESTIGATES DEATH OF BLACK MAN AFTER FOOTAGE SHOWS OFFICER KNEELING ON HIS NECK>. ‘In the footage the man, later identified as George Floyd, 46, can be heard to shout “I cannot breathe” and “Don’t kill me!” He then becomes motionless, eyes closed, face-first on the road.’

A couple of days later, unrest spread across fourteen cities after police in military-grade armour violently responded to what began as peaceful protests. Now, on 3 June, that unrest has spread across the US to 140 cities. Watching from the other side of an ocean, my eyes and brain and stomach glued to Twitter, I remember the feeling of living there—the feeling of standing on a mass grave, the feeling of standing on a powder keg, the feeling of barely concealed violence. And I definitely don’t feel better than what I left behind. On the contrary, I sort of walked off the job.

While the media’s hot takes alternate between blaming out of state white anarchists, to the shit-for-brains assertion of Russian meddling, most of us know what’s going on. Like the civil rights movment of the last century, as well as the reaction to it, the call is coming from inside the house. And reciting this unfolding history in the passive voice won’t change that.

In Blues People: Negro Music in White America, Amiri Baraka’s 1963 study of African-American music and citizenship, he uses the blues and jazz to chart what he calls ‘the path from slave to “citizen”’ to discover something about ‘the nature of American culture’. He points out that this path was narrow and there was no turning back, knowing, as African Americans did, what America was capable of. The scare quotes draw attention to how that path to citizenship disappeared under the feet of the people walking it. He says:

What is so often forgotten in any discussion of the Negro’s “place” in American society is the fact that it was only as a slave that he really had one. The post-slave society had no place for the black American.

Published the same year that the jazz composer Charles Mingus released his masterpiece The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, Baraka later cites Mingus’s work as an example of how Black American art music ‘is always radical in the context of formal American culture.’

Amiri Baraka’s focus on jazz is significant. In 1963 when Blues People was published, the CIA was waging a cultural Cold War against the Soviet Union, sending Black American jazz musicians to non-aligned and Eastern Bloc countries to show how cultured and not-racist the US was. They also made the fatuous claim that jazz, with its interplay of extremely skilled soloists, was an analogue to American liberal democracy.

But American liberal democracy, like any form of imperialism, was built on exploitation and fantasy. The illusion that most of the world toils freely and voluntarily to produce wealth for a tiny fraction of capitalists can only be sustained if we don’t acknowledge the plain fact of what our eyes and ears and bodies tell us. We have to believe in something bigger, something obscuring what’s right there on the surface, unseen because it’s unsought, something so destructive of sight that nothing true is visible until it cuts through our flesh or burns us awake. In other words, we dream until we choke. The passive voice becomes a weapon. Jazz does not equal democracy—at least not American democracy. The band stops mid-song in a violent crash of cymbals.

2.        

The production of recorded music as a commodity produces in its turn a whole language of consumer tastes, with each record a unit of its vocabulary. No one expects to be understood if they’re speaking with words that no one understands, so jazz embodied a tension between popular music and art music, because even the people playing the most dissonant skronk meant for those in the know had to sell enough records to the the squares to eat and pay rent.

And American jazz records are haunted by the ghosts of the people who made them—not just the musicians but the engineers, the lacquer cutters, the metalworkers producing the raw materials of the instruments and microphones, the construction workers who built the studios and venues, and of course the far-flung producers of petroleum, on which the entire political economy of the post-war United States revolved.

I’m looking for a copy of Charles Mingus’s masterpiece The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, recorded and released as an LP in 1963. Flipping through Discogs, I find a first US stereo pressing in perfect condition—for £206.04. I would never spend that much money on a record even if I could afford it. I keep looking and find a UK Mono pressing from 1964 in Near-Mint condition for £80—a day’s wages.

The thing with vinyl (so the thinking goes) is that the closer you get to the original pressing, the better the sound will be. So collectors generate a fetish for “pure analog”, a supposedly faithful reproduction of what it was like to be in the room when the sound was recorded—hence the notion of “fidelity”. It’s ridiculous because all recorded sound is mediated, which is why we call it “media”; and of course so is the way we hear.

Part of this fetish includes the weight of the vinyl itself, with the gold standard being 180 grams. There’s a kernel of truth in this, but no vinyl can make bad music sound good. In the early sixties, when Mingus recorded Black Saint, audio technology had developed to a high standard of analog recording, with related advances in LPs and sound systems. Music industry executives were in the business of selling not music but records. In a competitive market, they advertised the superior quality of a record’s manufacture. By “adding value” to the medium of long-playing polyvinyl chloride discs, record companies increased their profit.

Then in October 1973 the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries led by Saudi Arabia introduced an oil embargo. They halted sales of crude oil to Western countries supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War. While this itself didn’t actually affect the price of oil very much, it allowed the US State Department and the big oil monopolies (known as the Seven Sisters) to manufacture a quote-unquote “energy crisis” that sent the price of a barrel soaring by 400%. The shock sent petroleum-reliant economies like the US and the UK into recession. Petrol stations jacked up their prices dramatically, introducing caps on how much you could buy at the pump. Consumer spending plummetted, while inflation skyrocketed and wages stagnated. (Sound familiar?) And seeing as everything is made of plastic, and plastic is made from oil, suddenly the overheads on producing vinyl records spiked in line with the price of crude. Everything from the magnetic tape used to record music to the shrink-wrapped record you picked up at the shop was petroleum-based, and the high cost of these materials ate into profits.

As a result, from 1974 vinyl got thinner to keep the cost down to something like an affordable retail price. Scrolling down the column of releases of The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady on Discogs, I can afford the ones pressed after 1973 with the cheapest editions being for the most part from this past decade. But even within these newer editions the price fluctuates according to their rarity and the validity of their claim to be <pressed using the original master tapes>.

3.

Two legal principles underpin the framework of contemporary Western citizenship. The first is jus sanguinis or “the right of blood”. This principle is used to establish nationality based on family relation to other members of that nationality. A timely example is British people applying for Irish citizenship post-Brexit based on their relationship to parents or grandparents who came here from Ireland. The second principle is jus soli or “the right of soil”, which establishes nationality based on birth in that country. Most European countries legally define citizenship through some blend of these two principles. In the United States a person born in the country, regardless of the status of their parents, is automatically granted US citizenship—more or less.

Historically, each arrival at Ellis Island represented a break with Europe, with the past, a self-blazed fork in the road where these Europeans became Americans—and became white. Very few Americans peer backwards through the lens of time without the aid of an accommodating culture ringing off the acceptable bounds of national storytelling, or a narrow tracing of genetic heritage. Pride in our supposed greatness as a country is implied through countless variations of the same coming-of-age story in which our national maturity follows the progress of a grand idea—of Democracy—seemingly guided by some hidden hand. We feel a part of something bigger, but not too big to see in its entirety. God’s will is mysterious, but not inscrutable. We’re invited to sit at the table. The lotus is delicious.

In April 1964, Malcolm X delivered a speech known today as ‘The Ballot or the Bullet’. He skewers the origin myth that draws equivalence between descendants of European immigration and the enormity of chattel slavery. Addressing a Black audience in supra-national terms, he calls into question the “right of soil” underpinning American citizenship. He says:

I am one who doesn’t believe in deluding myself. I’m not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what’s on that plate. … Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American. Why, if birth made you American, you wouldn’t need any legislation; you wouldn’t need any amendments to the Constitution; you wouldn’t be faced with civil-rights filibustering in Washington, D.C., right now. They don’t have to pass civil-rights legislation to make a Polack an American.

So what is it that makes Americans? Michael Sawyer in Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X, says that ‘democracy, by its nature, requires that there be those outside of its logic in order to establish the separation between citizen and non-citizen’. In the UK as well as the US, as in any empire, it’s not our victims who live in the shadows but rather we who live in the shadow of what we’ve done to them. We’re citizens inasmuch as we can stake some small claim in the idea of the nation. That can mean actually possessing something beyond an idea, or kidding yourself that you do. Citizenship in this respect is a gloss over property relations.

4.

The citizen is the corollary of the slave.

It’s no coincidence that the notion of citizenship, of an individual’s legal status in relation to the state, came into being at the same time and in the same place as institutionalised, codified slavery. The conception of citizenship has never included everybody; on the contrary, it was built around the exclusion of the very people who laboured to make civic life possible.

Western civilisation, as the Right like to remind us, began in the polis of classical Athens. Democracy demanded the political participation of the Demos, that fraction of the city-state’s male population who owned property. Slavery and the servitude of women freed these men from the base concerns of the material world. Rights, privileges, and even one’s place in the cosmology were determined by economic status: to be human was to be in possession of property; all others were property.

The Romans adopted and extended the Athenian conception of citizenship. For much of Rome’s bloody historical development the civitas as a “public entity” in reality operated to disenfranchise all but landowning nobility. Then in 212 AD the Emperor Caracalla issued an edict granting all free inhabitants of the wide-ranging empire Roman citizenship. Historians don’t quite know why, but it’s a fairly safe bet that generosity had nothing to do with it. And while Rome boasted an extremely elaborate hierarchy of citizenship, apportioning limited rights to all but property-owning full Roman citizens, there was only ever one kind of slave.

Slaves built the pyramids at Giza, the Parthenon overlooking Athens, and the monumental ruins of Roman architecture. All the wonders of the classical world come courtesy of a nameless, numberless human surplus. The United States, too, was built, founded, forged, farmed, milled and minted with the blood of forced labour. The president, the ultimate citizen, currently sits in a White House easily recognised by its neo-classical columns and porticos, signing stimulus bills to print money that tells a three-word lie about unity in the language of antiquity.

Slavery and genocide leave a gaping hole in American history, because the life of the past is only recognisable, as are any lives, when they count, when we can recognise them as real and relate to them. It’s nearly impossible to intuit how slavery underpins our own self-understanding as citizens, because it’s impossible by definition to identify with dark matter. And dark matter accounts for most of what we are.

5.

When people ask me why I live over here, they’re really asking me why I would leave the golden pastures of the United States. I don’t believe in the America you see in the movies, the same way a person from the UK doesn’t live in Downton Abbey. I don’t buy the narrative about America because I know it too well. An insurrection sparked in Minnesota is not just history in the making, it’s part of the slow revelation of a history unpacked. And I take it with me wherever I go. Like the subject of all great American drama, the glittering façade is just that. People want to believe, maybe even need to believe, that there is a place where they could be happy, where they could walk tall and live in dignity, if only they could just get there...

But despite the white teeth and inscrutable optimism—or perhaps because of them—my America is a sad place, and that’s maybe the most damning thing you can say about it. My America has been walking around on broken legs for decades, broke down on broken crutches. My America’s number one export is a narrative about itself that is as popular at home as it is abroad. My America is drunk on powerlessness: the ruling class chatter compulsively about diversity to hide the fact that they’ve got a knee on someone’s neck. My America has a problem with its own neck that means it can’t look backwards. My America’s view is parallax like looking out of the window on a train travelling at speed where the objects in close range seem to race past while objects in the middle distance shift slowly across a horizon that appears not to move at all. My America thought Louis Armstrong smiled because he liked them. The pursuit of happiness is making everybody miserable in my America. My America would do better to open its eyes and ears and nose and smell the gangrene before it sets in. My America is in the grip of a seizure. Be careful around my America because I’m pretty sure it’s contagious. My America is a wall cavity full of hidden bodies. Most of them are alive—at least the ones we need to worry about. The body is a devalued currency in my America. Flood waters wash them up like coins churned from the bottom of a wishing well. My America has got its head in the sand and claims it can see the stars. My America looks up at the night sky and sees a single moon shining. But the moon doesn’t shine. Waxing and waning, it reflects the light of a massive fire. And there’s only so long you can sleep, dreaming of golden pastures, before the house burns down.

No, I haven’t dropped off the earth. I just had a baby, which is nearly the same thing.

Well, he’s eating actual food now and sleeping at a (more or less) predictable bedtime, which means I have tiny little morsels of about fifteen minutes here and there to plot and scheme.

I’m starting a radio show next week. It’s called Red White Blues: an Anthology of America’s Music. I’m going to spin jazz records from the 1910s to today. I’ll also talk a little between songs about how the life of the blues (jazz being the blues in fullest form) tells a forgotten story of the battle to decide what America—and an American—would be. Rather than being Great, I think it was great that we were just another country.

Tune in to Radio Buena Vida on Thursday, 6 April at 1pm (GMT), where I’ll be broadcasting live from Radio Buena Vida in my very own beloved Govanhill. You can even drop in for a coffee and say hi if you’re in the neighbourhood. Follow the link—lots of great shows on RVB worth checking out.

When this was published back in August, I didn’t know that there would be a wave of labour militancy not seen since the 1980s. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak recently warned that people would find it ‘very difficult’ to use the NHS this winter. Now that NHS nurses are on strike alongside workers across industries, I figured this took on an added dimension and deserved another turn. -Ben

1. Socialism and the NHS

There is a sleight of hand in almost every public conversation about the NHS. Like the old “buy one, get one free” marketing strategy, it’s anachronistic because you’ve obviously “bought one” before you got the other one “free.” Similarly, the NHS is not “free at the point of service,” despite politicians’ unending incantations that it will remain so every time a government on either side of the aisle is accused of trying to privatise it.

Citizens, permanent residents and those with right to remain in the UK pay to use the NHS through taxation and National Insurance contributions. Others living here on temporary visas are obliged to pay hefty fees of as much as £3,120, often on top of their taxes, to gain access to the service.1 There are prescriptions, procedures and services for which the NHS requires payment regardless of your nationality or visa status. So “free” is a misnomer on its face.

Still, the NHS is a marvel, the greatest legacy of the twentieth century’s working-class victories in the UK. By the end of the Second World War, many Britons believed that a new world would be rebuilt from the ashes of the old. Under a newly elected Labour government, health minister Aneurin Bevin ushered in the National Health Service Act 1946, sparking a huge public endeavour that relied on what we now call ‘the post-war consensus.’ After the unprecedented destruction wrought on three of the planet’s five continents during the war, Britain’s workers demanded nothing less than a transformation of civic and social life.

The construction of a National Health Service from whole cloth answered that demand. A project of its scale and scope was made possible by the widespread belief that if society could mobilise for ‘total war’ then it could be mobilised for a superior peace than had ever been achieved before—it was a vision of total peace. You could call this kind of ambitious, far-reaching civic engineering ‘socialism.’

But it wasn’t beliefs, desires or political ambitions that brought the NHS into being. The massive cost of the war effort, human and financial, and the urgent need for workers to rebuild the country’s ruins, provided the working class with added economic and political leverage. Trade union density grew from a little under six million before the war to nine million in 1946 as men returning from the military re-joined the workforce.2 An organised working class were not only better positioned to make demands but to act decisively if these demands weren’t met.

This leverage got results. A quick look at the history of strikes in the UK shows a gap in the post-war period all the way up to the mid-1960s—not because a disorganised labour movement was crushed by the property-owning class but precisely the opposite.3 The Labour Party won a landslide victory at the 1945 election, ousting the hated Tories and their “national hero” Winston Churchill. The ballot precluded the need for the bullet as political parties campaigned on popular policies that they would genuinely have to deliver on.

Old threats to capital from before the war, subsumed in the united front against fascism, soon reappeared. The Soviet Union emerged as a key power on the world stage, despite losing over twenty million lives to the fighting. Having liberated Germany and most of the concentration camps as they swept the Eastern front, communist allies couldn’t be so easily characterised as enemies (though this wouldn’t last long in the Anglosphere). Quintin Hogg, later a Tory MP, warned in 1943 that ‘we must give them reform or they will give us revolution.’4 Britain’s ruling class—including Labour Party leadership—rightly perceived that communism’s call for radical social transformation would prove a threat to their own legitimacy if the men and women who sacrificed so much for victory were not rewarded handsomely.

Perhaps some had to hold their noses, but social democrats, liberals and conservatives alike broadly supported the creation of a welfare state and a National Health Service, a mixed economy that included nationalisation of key industries, a policy of full employment and a more central role for trade unions in policy making. It was time to put away the stick and hand out carrots as fast as possible.

So there never was a time when the British public hasn’t paid in full for the NHS. It’s the standalone instance when we got what we paid for.

From its inception, the service has been at once a kind of beacon for socialism but also a bulwark against further working class demands for a comprehensive shake up of property relations in Britain. Since the 1970s, the beneficiaries of this property relationship have chipped away at the other working-class gains of the post-war consensus through a radical restructuring of the economy often called ‘neoliberalism,’ providing us with a glimpse of what’s in store for the NHS.

But as the neoliberal dogma of free market fundamentalism proved untenable in light of the coronavirus pandemic, the British state took a much more interventionist approach to managing the economy. And now those interventions for the public good are being rolled back at the same time that inflation and the twin crises of housing and the cost of living begin to bite. Unlike in the post-war period, those of us who sacrificed are expected to sacrifice some more.

Capital never lets a good crisis go to waste—neither should we.

The NHS is the last vestige of a demand for ambitious—you might even say revolutionary—social restructuring to benefit regular people; a glimpse of what total peace might have looked like had a wider revolutionary project succeeded. Can its successes or its failures provide a model for socialism today? Or does its slow starvation carry a message that public health is bestowed upon us from above—that the future is already written and that we are certainly not the victors?

Subscribe now

2. The NHS and Civic Identity

It’s fair to say that people generally get used to what they’ve got. Capitalism has a way of naturalising the social relationships that dominate our lives. If you’ve always lived in a country where healthcare takes a huge bite out of your paycheque—or where you simply can’t have it because you can’t afford it—this becomes the normal state of affairs. After all, you’re just one person who needs to eat, find shelter, and scrape together the means of returning to work again tomorrow.

Likewise, if you live in Britain you’ve always had the NHS; it’s hard to imagine life without it. You were probably brought into the world by an NHS midwife, nurse or doctor. Even if you’ve barely ever used it, you know someone who has.

You’ve also probably heard horror stories from the US of people dying from totally preventable diseases because they couldn’t pay for treatment. You may have heard that a third of crowdfunders exist (and mostly fail)5 to pay for such treatment or to avoid “medical bankruptcy”—some phrase!6 You might have thought to yourself, ‘what a shame,’ relieved at the foreignness of such a scenario.

Or perhaps the NHS has badly let you down—maybe you’re one of the many people on these outrageously long waiting lists that pepper the headlines. You might be one of the millions of Black or minority ethnic people in Britain on the sharp end of health inequalities outlined in a recent report by the NHS Race and Health Observatory.7 Maybe you’re a transgender person struggling against outdated gender recognition procedures; or a woman who suspects she’s got endometriosis and has struggled for years to get a doctor to take you seriously instead of blandly telling you to ‘get pregnant or have an IUD fitted.’ Maybe you think the NHS shouldn’t be free because there isn’t a “magic money tree.”

In any case, for good or bad, the NHS helps form the contours of your civic identity.

Most people in this country don’t have the time or the wherewithal to stop and consider life before (or in the absence of) public healthcare. Why would they? So much discussion about the NHS begins with blind spots and unexamined assumptions, good feelings littered with gaps in knowledge that are easily exploited by an owner class (and their representatives in Parliament and the media) whose interests are diametrically opposed to the very idea of a “free” health service. Capital sees all nationalised public utilities as untapped revenue streams, profits just crying out to be realised.

And they’re not wrong, if we use the American system as the standard for-profit healthcare model.

3. For-profit Healthcare is Class War

The American healthcare industry is worth around $4.5 billion and, as one of the fastest growing industries in the world, its value is projected to increase by around 50% by 2028.8 A Brookings Institution report describes how the healthcare sector employs one tenth of American workers and accounts for a quarter of government spending. Americans spend more than any other country in the world on healthcare—more than twice as much as people in Britain. Even by US standards, Americans now spend 290% more on healthcare than they did in 1960 (adjusted for inflation).9

Despite—or more likely because of—the industry’s profitability, health outcomes in the US rank the lowest among high-income nations. A study conducted by the Commonwealth Fund shows that the US has the highest rate of women dying in childbirth in the developed world, with the vast majority of these deaths being preventable. Infant mortality, a key marker of a country’s health, is also among the highest in the US compared to other wealthy countries—and disproportionately so for Americans who aren’t white.10

Covid has exacerbated the already existing American healthcare crisis: the CDC reported last year that US life expectancy dropped by a whopping 1.8 years, mostly due to coronavirus deaths—the largest one-year drop since the Second World War.11 In the decade before coronavirus hit, American life expectancy was trending down in part because of an opioid epidemic orchestrated by Purdue Pharma and its owners the Sackler family.12 The Sacklers harvested $10 billion in profits from their highly addictive and often lethal drug OxyContin.13

While people with access to the higher end of healthcare in the US report among the best health outcomes in the world, they are an absolute minority. As the Brookings report points out, a mere 5% of the American population accounts for half of all healthcare spending. Commonwealth Fund president David Blumenthal stated it bluntly to CNN: ‘In no other country does income inequality so profoundly limit access to care as it does [in the US]’.14

The immiseration facing workers in the US is evident in the number of people who are either underinsured, have only limited access to state programs like Medicare or Medicaid, or have no healthcare coverage at all. An NCBI report relates how ‘[a]round 45 million Americans under the age of 65 lack health insurance cover, and far more US citizens than UK citizens report that the cost of healthcare is a barrier to access.’ This same report showed that the NHS delivered the most equitable healthcare of all the countries studied, with the proviso that waiting times for treatment were usually longer.15

This parlous state of healthcare helps capital discipline American workers. Employers and policy makers leverage access to insurance cover, treatments and medications to keep wages low while also limiting the power of workers to organise and fight back. The Brookings report notes that employer-funded health insurance can represent as much as 26% of a worker’s pay packet and is ‘one of the largest categories of consumer spending’.16 You’re less likely to quit your job, or form a union, or go on strike if the threat of losing access to healthcare dangles over your head like the sword of Damocles.

The economically coercive relationship between workers and those who provide them with healthcare—or withhold it from them—perfectly reflects the underlying class antagonisms in American society. Bernie Sanders weaponised these antagonisms in both his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. He frequently cited the ridiculous discrepancy between the price of insulin in the US, where it can cost as much as $1,400 a phial, compared with neighbouring Canada, where the price averages at one tenth of that.17 The for-profit American healthcare system was in some ways an easy target because the profits are so huge and the unfairness of the system so glaring.

But despite the enduring popularity of flagship policies like Medicare For All, which still ranks high in voter polls, Sanders’s campaigns failed in the face of ruling class reaction.18 Whether his target audience were put off by the idea of “socialism” as liberal and conservative media outlets insist, or because they simply didn’t believe that Bernie could seriously overcome the excesses of American capitalism—or because of outside interference in the democratic process—the Bernie Sanders campaign could win nothing but the argument.19

With Jeremy Corbyn’s efforts on this side of the Atlantic collapsing for much the same reasons as the Sanders campaign, we’re reminded that being right is never rewarded with an endowment of power because power is won, never endowed. And it isn’t won with superior arguments.

Subscribe now

4. European Healthcare Models

While European countries with comparable populations and economies to the UK almost all have some version of universal healthcare, they’re often comprised of for-profit service providers, with a larger proportion of people paying for health insurance, either privately or combined with state subsidies.

European healthcare services tend (with notable exceptions like Portugal and the Scandinavian nations) towards what Americans call single-payer or multi-payer systems, where most healthcare costs are guaranteed for all those but the wealthiest, while leaving open a market for private health insurance.

In Germany, for example, their multi-payer system operates by making health insurance mandatory, with people on lower incomes, retirees and others eligible for publicly funded coverage. This theoretically remains a form of universal healthcare—though in practice that’s not always the case, especially for people with complicated migration status. It also leaves many workers reliant on employers for health insurance, echoing the American model.

France’s healthcare system is primarily publicly funded, with government spending on healthcare similar to that of the UK. Their system works as a form of social security covering the bulk of expenses, with the additional requirement to purchase a top-up ‘mutual’ health insurance. Most people in work earning an average salary will pay for their visits to the doctor or other medical treatments and will be reimbursed either in part or entirely, depending on the treatment and their personal circumstances.

Germany and France have broadly similar health outcomes to the UK and there are relative merits to the European model compared to ours, mostly around choosing your doctor or varieties of treatment for the same illness. But their systems commodify healthcare and are not as straightforward, nor as cost-effective, as a fully nationalised health service. Germany and France spend more on healthcare per person than the UK—£4,432 and £3,737 respectively, compared with Britain’s £2,913.20

5. Sick People in High Places

The UK demonstrated a contradictory public health and executive response to coronavirus compared to other countries under discussion. Key differences were reflected in the outcome of the initial vaccine rollout.

Now—overall vaccine uptake since the early stages of the pandemic has varied wildly within the UK and other countries, with the symbolic value of being vaccinated fuelled by a tenacious antivax sentiment and a virtue-signalling reaction to it, both more attuned to political culture than to health.

That said, when the vaccine was first introduced and lacked a coherent cultural-political valence, its rollout demonstrated countries’ varying abilities to rapidly acquire, distribute and deliver vaccine shots to people who needed them. So let’s leave the cultural and political questions around the vaccine aside.

The NHS had great success getting shots into arms despite the devastating underfunding of the past several years. Harkening back to the ‘total war’ of the thirties and forties, the government appealed to a nostalgic wartime sense of our civic identity, using the NHS to obscure the class divisions brought to the fore by the pandemic. In fact, while the government publicly took credit for the UK Covid-19 Vaccines Delivery Plan, it was left to NHS workers to plan and enact the rollout, as reported in The London Economic last year.21

Thanks to the service’s centralised structure and its administrative capacity to plan orders of medicines on a national scale, at relatively lower costs than private healthcare bodies (a feature of the service’s greater buying power outwith the pandemic), Britain easily acquired the vaccines the country needed. It also used its network of localised trusts to ensure that the vaccine was distributed equitably across the UK, in many instances with logistical support from the Ministry of Defence.

The vast majority of the 1,500 vaccination sites established at the outset of the pandemic were NHS-affiliated spaces such as hospitals or pharmacies; some were places of religious worship, with a small fraction of commercial premises. The people administering the shots were either NHS nurses and doctors or volunteers organised under their guidance.

Many of those on the frontline of the vaccine rollout performed this organisational feat without sufficient PPE—due to the government’s failure to secure adequate equipment on time. We now know that the contracts the government awarded to private companies for PPE through their ‘VIP lane’ has lost the taxpayer £8.7 billion in wasted or unusable equipment.22

To add insult to injury, during the initial rollout almost none of the frontline workers and volunteers administering shots were themselves eligible to be vaccinated—ministers’ pin badges and performative tears notwithstanding.23

Despite governmental malfeasance, NHS workers’ organisation and personal sacrifice led to over forty-three million doses of the vaccine being administered in the first six months of its rollout—an astonishing accomplishment for which workers deserve more than clapping.24

But Boris Johnson’s band of bunglers squandered the early success, allowing the virus to spread almost uncontrolled through their evident (though unspoken) policy of herd immunity.25 Ministers encouraged people to visit restaurants just as the curve started to flatten, with their ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme leading to a predictable spike in infections, hospitalisations and deaths.26

The UK currently suffers one of the highest proportional death rates among rich countries, with over 160,000 covid deaths reported27—though the Financial Times has pointed out that these numbers are likely underestimates because deaths in excess of the annual average are far higher.28

The catastrophic US response speaks for itself.

While European countries struggled to contain the virus in the early months due to the EU fumbling their plans and negotiations around vaccine supply and production,29 most advanced economies on the Continent have managed to outperform the UK in terms of deaths per hundred thousand: Germany currently stands at around 144; France around 203; the UK 240.30

There’s only so much the NHS can do.

European capital may not be able to make the same emotional appeal to people’s civic nostalgia for a post-war institution like the NHS, but they don’t need to. German and French workers have not faced the same level of immiseration from covid that UK workers have, mostly down to their comparatively generous social security protections (including up to 100% paid sick leave) and the rules around eligibility being eased further and for longer than here in the UK.

Subscribe now

6. Socialism in Sick Times

Every generation is an heir to its past. It wasn’t an impersonal liberal-democratic order that endowed us with a National Health Service—working class people feeling their power at a unique moment in history demanded and won it. But if we lose the NHS, so too will those who come after us.

In the UK today, there is a democratic deficit that reduces public participation in decision making to an occasional box-ticking exercise. No one voted capitalism into existence and it isn’t possible to vote it out. This democratic deficit needs to be addressed at the workplace, the hospital, the care home—wherever we find the encroaching threshold of capital’s dominance over us.

In the light of the Tories’ manifest arrogance and corruption—the illegal parties during lockdown, the fat contracts handed out to friends and campaign donors, etc.—people can clearly see the class dynamic at play.31 NHS workers are uniquely positioned to build class consciousness and worker power by seizing on the public’s goodwill to take industrial action against privatisation.

One of the primary assumptions of the ruling ideology is that introducing market forces into public institutions produces efficiencies; that reshaping public bodies into private businesses competing on a market leads to better outcomes. The dictum, implied or stated outright, is that greed is good. As we’ve seen with the American healthcare system, which is the market model at its purest, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Nevertheless, market forces are being thrust upon the NHS as never before with the government’s Health and Care Bill. The bill, which recently received Royal Assent, will rip apart the centralised structure that’s characterised the NHS since 1948, replacing it with 42 Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) comprised of existing public health bodies like GP surgeries and trusts—but with the crucial addition of private enterprises. The Health and Care Bill will also give the Health Minister unprecedented power to intervene in the service at every level—enabling him or her to deskill and defund the role of nurses and other frontline workers while bloating the ranks of highly-paid business administrators, as reported in the Morning Star.32

These ‘reforms’ could be the end of the NHS as we know it. According to doctors, unions and groups like Keep Our NHS Public, it will enmesh the service with the very same vampiric American corporations that have decimated US healthcare and the workers who rely on it. These parasites will suck the lifeblood out of our NHS while sly politicians point to the record sums being pumped into the service—only to be bled out by shareholders.33

It’s unlikely that the antihuman market forces threatening to devour the NHS will produce a healthcare system like in Germany or France. It’s more likely that our service is gutted to the point of being there in spirit but as a shell of its former self, an inferior option for those who can’t afford expensive—but highly profitable—private health insurance. We simply cannot sit by and watch the NHS swirl around the plughole of for-profit healthcare.

However, that history hasn’t been written yet.

Because the NHS is such a successful model for a nationalised social utility—an imperfect yet clear vision of total peacecentral to any socialist project—capital desires all the more to see it dismantled. This covert attack on the NHS strikes at the heart of our expectation of public healthcare and its role in civic identity. As such, it has the potential to bring the democratic deficit of British property relations sharply into focus. It can illuminate the class struggle as a fight to disentangle health from wealth; to recapture social necessities that already belong to us, ones that we’ve earned.

But as the fate of democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn has shown, good arguments don’t win power. That patient died on the table. It will take NHS workers and the public alike standing up for the service, even if that means entertaining the previously unthinkable possibility of strikes and other forms of industrial action. We don’t have the same leverage that we did when the NHS was founded, but this post-pandemic attack on workers from all sides puts the nature and scope of the struggle in perspective.

In the words of the Greek poet and partisan Odysseus Elytis:

For the sun to turn it takes a Job of work,

It takes a thousand dead sweating at the Wheels,

It takes the living also giving up their blood.

Since I left my childhood home in the great State of New York, I’ve moved house thirty-three times.

That’s a lot, but I’m not special. It’s a common story now: people can’t afford to stay put because rents go up and wages stay the same.

When I moved to Glasgow, I sincerely hoped—beyond both hope and reason—that I’d left my moving days behind me. It’s kind of tough, feeling like the only home you’ve got is the travel-sized piece you took with you. My partner and I eventually found a flat in Shawlands, settled in and made plans the way you would if you fully expected not to move again for the foreseeable future. It was foolish, in retrospect.

After three and a half years in that flat, the landlord sent us an official notice of rent increase: a 21% rise. We pleaded with him, reasoned with him, implored him, even argued. ‘I can’t be expected to stand still while the market moves on,’ he wrote. The anonymous brains at the first-tier tribunal tasked with protecting tenants evidently agreed. Not only did we have to move out, but the landlord also connived to keep our deposit.

Because this all happened in the midst of a housing crisis, it looked for a minute there like we might actually have nowhere to go. It wouldn’t be the first time in my life. But it’s hard to surf couches when you’re already hauling one around.

Lucky for us, some friends were leaving their flat in Govanhill, where we’ve worked and hung out for years, so we took it over. Now, here we are. Maybe thirty-third time’s a charm.

The Scotsman ran an article in 2013 with the headline: ‘Govanhill: Glasgow’s Ellis Island’. Having come to Govanhill myself via the hereditary route of New York’s Ellis Island, the title struck me as a canny dodge of some pretty tricky conversations about both the US and Scotland.

The casual conflation of ‘Ellis Island’ with ‘Govanhill as a historically welcome place in Scotland for migrants’ sounds like so many outdated talking points from the world of almost ten years ago, before Kids In Cages or one-way flights to Rwanda. Historical amnesiacs often forget—or ignore—that, judging the US’s track record on race and class, we should absolutely be aiming higher. And like the parts of New York most fetishised for their “diversity” (shout out to Brooklyn), Govanhill’s reputation could go from neglect to Negronis in a dizzyingly short space of time.

But since we’re talking about a little Lifestyle feature in a right-leaning rag, maybe I’m being too critically demanding. The article was, after all, as much about food as it was about migration. Or is it the other way around? Though nestled in the ‘Food and Drink’ section, the author conjures the gritty realities of racism, crime, poverty and the bloody history of populations in transit.  He seems to be talking obliquely about something else, whatever it is—or perhaps he’s avoiding that something else altogether—by talking instead about the neighbourhood’s rich culinary culture.

‘The story of Govanhill, its people and its long history of immigration is best told by talking to those who prepare and enjoy its food and drink,’ the author says before doing precisely that. And after relating the wide-ranging views of these preparers and enjoyers, the article ends: ‘Govanhill is great for food, no doubt. It’s also a fine place to feed the soul.’

It’s hard to imagine anyone publishing an unreconstructed love letter to an under-served majority-minority neighbourhood like this in late 2022. Why? Not because Govanhill doesn’t deserve it, or that people don’t actually feel this way about the place; but because as rents and house prices skyrocket, so too do the stakes for its residents. The author’s romantic cheeriness signals that he enjoyed visiting Govanhill—which implies that he doesn’t live here. This kind of flâneur journalism, praising the exotic beauty of the city’s larder from arm’s length, reads today like the threat of property developers pricing us out of it.

If you’re going to write about a place, as I am currently trying to do, where over a century of cultural fermentation may well be sterilised by a few dozen landlords in a handful of years, it’s worth remembering that living communities must be the subject, as well as the object, of history. I guess in practice this means understanding how a place feeds itself and allowing your soul to go on a diet.

But the journalist who touted ‘Glasgow’s Ellis Island’ was invoking the zeitgeist. Migration and food both still play an outsized role in the way people view Govanhill, and they’ve certainly influenced the course of its development since the mid-nineteenth century.

Govanhill was founded as a company village for workers at the now long-gone collieries and coal-bearing wagon paths extending from Allison Street all the way to the River Clyde. The coal mines provided fuel for the iron foundries a mile up Cathcart Road at the Govan Iron Works—or ‘Dixon’s Blazes’, as it was known by the workers producing iron and steel, so named for the family who owned the entire area.

Many of the workers who came to Govanhill in the middle of the nineteenth century were Highlanders facing ‘clearance’ in their home towns and villages. Local lairds uprooted and even destroyed rural villages, driving tenant farmers off the land (or ‘clearing’ it) to make way for more profitable sheep grazing. This forced the dispossessed workers to seek new lives in the slums of industrial centres like Glasgow, by then boasting the worst and most overcrowded living conditions in Europe.

Many others were Irish migrants escaping the famine of 1848, when Irish potato crops suffered a blight that could have left enough for the sharecroppers to eat, but not enough to provide the landlords a surplus. The landlords, of course, took what was left of the crop and allowed the sharecroppers to starve, even setting fire to their houses and driving them off the land when they failed to make payment. Ireland’s population dropped from eight million to just over four million (a drop from which it has yet to recover), with millions dying and many emigrating to the United States—or places like Govanhill.

By the late 1870s, the village had grown into a town. In 1891, it was incorporated into the City of Glasgow. The tenements for which the neighbourhood is known were built between this time and the 1910s. These tenements housed an increasing number of skilled and semi-skilled workers from the Highlands, from Ireland, and from the 1920s it received a wave of migrants from Italy and Jews from Eastern Europe. Victoria Road swelled with shops and amusements for those with disposable incomes, often operated by these new arrivals who brought with them espresso, gelato, fried fish and potatoes and other now-familiar fare.

From the 1950s, Glasgow Corporation undertook a policy of slum clearance and urban overspill, razing old tenements to the ground and separating generations-old communities out into isolated housing schemes on the outskirts of the city. There were few jobs, shops or amusements, if any, and transport back to the city was infrequent, expensive and time-consuming. Govanhill managed to avoid this disaster of bureaucratic city planning. Residents later formed a housing association that took administrative control of the social housing in the area and used compulsory purchase orders to seize derelict buildings from rogue landlords.

In the 1960s, Govanhill became home to many Pakistani people arriving in Britain, with Allison Street still serving as a strip of Asian groceries, restaurants and takeaways. Cathcart Road to the east is home to several tailors and clothing outlets catering to the Pakistani community. In the last twenty years, the neighbourhood welcomed migrants from Eastern Europe, including Glasgow’s highest concentration of Romani people. Again, the number of Romanian groceries along Allison Street and the side streets adjacent, as well as the copious shells of sunflower seeds peppering the pavement, stand as a testament to the settlement of this community in Govanhill.

With wages across Britain (and the rest of the West) stagnating since the early 1980s, while the cost of housing, food and energy has risen even above the level of inflation, domestic migration within Britain also changed the demographic composition of Govanhill. Where Glasgow’s West End once housed people on low incomes, students and artists, the gentrification of those neighbourhoods and their rising rents pushed people south to areas like Shawlands, Mount Florida, Cathcart and Govanhill. Edinburgh also witnessed the highest rent increases in Scotland over the last ten years, with average rents peaking well above £1,000 per month long before Glasgow recently crossed that milestone. With rents nationwide shooting up by over 33% in the last decade, people from across Scotland come to the Southside because of its relative affordability, while visitors come to eat and drink.

Glasgow is an attractive prospect for young people in other parts of Britain who can’t afford to stay where they are: cities like London, Bristol and Manchester, where the gap between the rate of pay and the cost of living continues to grow into a yawning chasm. And in Ireland, where rents in cities like Dublin are amongst the highest of anywhere in Europe, young people have viewed Glasgow as a good option for living in a reasonably sized English-speaking city, with opportunities for a decent work-life balance.

But the downward pressure on living standards in the rest of the UK and Ireland are taking their toll on Glasgow too, and especially on already under-served areas like Govanhill. So with this influx of (mostly) young and often downwardly mobile people who can’t afford to buy their own homes or stay in the towns and cities they come from, the businesses that cater to them—cafés, brunch restaurants, bars and groceries—soon followed.

Some people call this process ‘gentrification’, and sometimes they’re correct—though we need to be clear and distinguish between a neighbourhood simply changing (which is inevitable) from a neighbourhood being gentrified (which is not). People move into a neighbourhood from other places, often out of pure necessity, and the neighbourhood accommodates them without displacing anyone. A variety of communities have settled in Govanhill over decades and the area is now home to all of them. The migratory patchwork gives Govanhill its distinctive character.

Gentrification, on the other hand, is the process by which property developers, lettings and estate agents, landlords and investors transform poor and working class neighbourhoods into uniformly bourgeois sites of upmarket businesses and “desirable” properties by displacing the often well-established and close knit groups of people who live there.

You don’t have to destroy a community to make their neighbourhood nicer; indeed, not everything that’s expensive is good. But the agents of gentrification are parasitical: poor and working class neighbourhoods are profitable because they are cheap and can be made expensive. Clearing unwanted people out of these areas earmarked for “development” is a key step in the process: you can’t gentrify a desolated industrial district where no one lives because no one actually wants to live there.

In fact, even not-for-profit public development projects aimed at under-served neighbourhoods can be grist to the gentrifiers’ mill. Take Govanhill Baths on Calder Street for example: the building sat derelict for decades before a dedicated and quite radical local campaign fought and won action from the council. The Govanhill Baths, now under reconstruction and opening to the public soon, will unquestionably benefit the residents of Govanhill—that is, if they can still afford to live here when the baths built for them likely increase the property value in the area.

It would be absurd to describe The Govanhill Baths Community Trust as gentrifiers, as it would be to describe the plucky fight for a public pool in an under-served community as gentrification. But even these laudable community victories can be exploited by landlords and property developers as public subsidies that raise the value of their investment and ultimately cater only to the rich, a kind of fattening for the slaughter.

Govanhill is undoubtedly being subjected to gentrification. The Scottish Government’s announcement of a rent freeze and eviction moratorium up to March 2023 notwithstanding, rents in the area have risen over 15% in a year while evictions spiked. Looking at the longer term, rents in Glasgow have soared by nearly 64% in the last decade. Meanwhile, Scotland’s child poverty rate is at its highest here in the heart of the First Minister’s constituency, at a shocking 69%—nearly three times the national average.

Unaffordable accommodation is a big part of that. The average rent for a two-bed flat in the G42 postcode is now over eight hundred pounds a month: a person splitting this rent with a partner or flatmate would need to be taking home at least £19,200 a year after tax and deductions to keep their rent at a safe quarter of their earnings. That’s more than I earn as a Band 3 NHS worker.

With property prices spiralling, many flats and houses in Govanhill have moved out of owner-occupation to join the buy-to-let profit bonanza, making home ownership impossible for many people who only a few years ago would have been able to buy. Every tenement flat that enters the private rental market puts upward pressure on rents and house prices, as landlords consolidate their grip on already limited housing.

Meanwhile the Scottish Government fails to build more social housing, with existing stock privatised and allocated to the property management corporation The Wheatly Group (through their subsidiary, Glasgow Housing Association). But even this dwindling number of social tenants are now facing rising rents to ensure that Wheatley turns an ever-higher profit. This lack of downward pressure on prices combined with ever more tenants having no option but the private rental sector is pushing up rents on remaining properties to completely unaffordable levels for people in Govanhill.

Since establishment media talks about this infrequently and in limited terms, it’s unsurprising that people will instead blame migrant residents themselves for the poor condition of the neighbourhood, while in the same breath point to new shops in the area as harbingers of gentrification, often attributing the rising cost of housing to these businesses. A certain reactionary strain of anti-gentrification sentiment will also blame the people they think shop and work there—the old “avocado on toast” straw man.

Take Locavore on Victoria Road as an example. With their faux-leftist branding—an upraised fist full of leaves under the words ‘TAKE CHARD’—Locavore is one of many ‘community interest’ operations hocking expensive organic food and a narrative about themselves as an alternative to capitalism, while at the same time…you know, just basically doing capitalism.

Locavore employs mostly young university graduates who in any previous period since the Second World War would have found jobs that didn’t involve sweeping, mopping and stacking shelves. While this cohort is obviously “privileged” compared to the people here facing serious deprivation, that argument totally ignores the true balance of power—and is unsurprisingly broadcast loudest from the last upwardly mobile generation, who are themselves more likely to be landlords.

Blaming young people for gentrification falsely assumes that they’re in these jobs, and even in this city, because they simply chose not to stay where they were. Really though, dramatic changes within the economy over decades have sent millions of people across the country and even across continents in search of a place like Govanhill: somewhere to live, somewhere to work, somewhere to have a social life and a family.

It’s debatable whether a company like Locavore is a symptom or an agent of gentrification. In one respect, they attract (and rely on) consumers who are able (or at least willing) to shell out on premium groceries, and this is unlikely to be Govanhill’s current demographic majority. On the other hand, they’re not a private equity firm with thousands of rental units in their portfolio: they rent like the rest of us. If Locavore does indeed drive up property prices, then eventually they’ll gentrify themselves out of a piece of prime real estate.

Govanhill’s problem is not the number of brunch spots in one square block, but the class cleansing of urban areas happening across wealthy western countries. If you can afford your groceries, you probably don’t care what the yuppies are up to. The Govanhill Baths Community Trust seem to understand the stakes here, opening the People’s Pantry in 2020, where membership is a few pounds a week and gets you a basket of groceries worth the cost of a single Locavore chicken. Of course, the waiting list to join is currently around one year.

But the question of whether shops like Locavore contribute to gentrification (or whether charities like the People’s Pantry can alleviate it) misses the point, I think. It ignores the everyday volatility of life under capitalism for people who are not its subjects but its objects. The market’s shifting winds that set people in motion to and from places like Govanhill also wear away the living standards of long-time residents and recent arrivals alike, which has led to the current upsurge in industrial actions. Workers from the railway, the post office, city council workers including the guys picking up the rubbish, and perhaps soon NHS Scotland are all going on strike to fight for pay that actually meets the cost of living. Hell, even Locavore workers are unionising.

At the same time, tenants unions like Living Rent are campaigning and door-knocking to build tenant power street by street. There’s no doubt that had Living Rent and others not piled pressure on the Scottish Government to take action on tenant protections since 2014, the recent rent freeze and eviction moratorium would have been unthinkable. And it’s no coincidence that at every picket, from the cleansing workers at Polmadie Recycling Centre to the posties at the depot on Victoria Road, you’ll see Living Rent members flying the green banner in solidarity with the strikes. Being crushed by soaring rents is substantially the same problem as being crushed by low pay.

Tenants and workers, old townies and blow-ins, employed in a traditional blue collar industry or flogging organic vegetables—or not employed at all—the thing we have in common is the drive to live well and not alone, balanced against the rising cost of food, fuel and shelter. Some move on, many more arrive. And as we make the place ours, calling dibs in whatever language, dressing our nests and stoking our fires, investors and developers speculate on the very qualities that make this neighbourhood home.

While the SNP and the Scottish Greens make mealy-mouthed promises of rent controls in 2025, landlords prepare by jacking up rents. If the current rent freeze ends in March next year as planned, before these rent controls are due to take effect, the baying dogs of private property will pounce. It’s hard to imagine where there is left to go.

As tenants as much as workers, the only way to even stand still is to fight, together.

Standing at the top of Queens Park looking north into the city, over the grid system of tenements and potholes, cycle lanes and broken street lamps, a distant building reads in bold type: PEOPLE MAKE GLASGOW. It’s a funny one, because the phrase is true in a shallow sense, but what do these platitudes really tell us? People also make satellites and rocket ships and morning rolls and Tennents lager and buildings and books and statues and signposts and iPhones and guitars and medicine and freighters and lorries and laser guided missiles and prosthetic limbs and kalashnikovs and Bentleys and chow mein and super yachts and Amazon fulfilment centres.

People make them alright, but do they get to keep them?

The beautiful thing about strikes and struggle is, you know that everyone involved believes they have a future. Why else would they bother? The moment you see someone shrug and say, ‘ah, what difference does it make,’ you know it’s game over.

Govanhill’s future is unwritten. And it could go either way. The architecture of a gentrified neighbourhood stands eerily as a monument to the place it used to be. Time and place: the more you give of the one, the more you belong to the other. And despite its long history, it’s early days for Govanhill.

Every morning when the sun hits my neighbours’ windows and covers my living room in a buttery glow, where my cat sits warming himself while the kettle starts to whistle, the landlord, the prime minister, the king—all furthest from my mind. My partner is pregnant with our first child and I look at the schoolyard out my back window, the sound of the bell and kids arriving screaming and running, parents at the gate waving goodbye. I wonder about my son: what part of Govanhill he’ll want to keep and what part of him belongs to it, how many Romani words he’ll learn and maybe teach me, this person who I haven’t met yet but whose life is so intertwined with mine.

When the press reports on these announcements, they simultaneously make them sound confusing and inevitable. They are neither. That’s not to say that inflation is easily explainable (it’s not) but when the people who own everything start talking about making sacrifices, you can bet your skyrocketing energy bills that they have no plans to hurl themselves into an active volcano to appease the god of economics. Capital and its media mouthpieces are trying to trick you into believing that it’s either divine intervention or workers’ lack of ‘wage restraint’ driving inflation.

But for the energy companies really driving up the cost of living, it’s a bonanza of war profiteering. The Guardian reported this week that the big five energy companies’ profits are currently booming thanks to the war in Ukraine. This isn’t just happening: the capitalist class has decided to make life hard for us.

I have no profound insight into our plummeting standard of living. I’m just another person trying to cope with, on the one hand, a world that becomes more shitty and stupid and arbitrary every day, and, on the other, the steady barrage of explanations why that fail ever more miserably to convince. It feels futile to add another explanation to that pile.

That said, nobody who works for a living, including me, is going to take all this laying down. The rail workers are on their second strike this year; the postal workers will take to the picket lines after them; and workers at NHS Scotland are voting on a pay offer from the Scottish Government that, in light of skyrocketing inflation, amounts to a pay cut—which, according to the BMA, represents for some NHS workers ‘an astonishing and unjustifiable 30% real decline in take-home pay since 2008/09’. So there’s a strike brewing at the NHS.

The only public figures addressing this reality are the union leaders at the picket lines. And maybe that’s as it should be. I’ve long argued, in this newsletter and on the podcast, that hope in our electoral institutions draws attention away from the struggle on the ground for working class power. Elections can be useful vehicles for expressing that power; but without workers themselves doing the struggling, building that power in the first place, electoral politics is mere catharsis—a distraction from the issue at hand.

If history is anything to go by, even some of the greatest wins of the last century’s working class movement were used as bulwarks against further revolutionary demands. I recently wrote an article for a new magazine called The Guts Of It, in which I argue that the NHS played a crucial role in the post-war settlement between labour and capital, in which workers’ demands were partially met to avoid a total overthrow of capitalism—a very real possibility after decades of growing labour militancy. In my article, ‘Socialism in Sick Times,’ I make the case that the story of the NHS is also the story of the rise and fall and potential rise of socialism in the UK.

I wrote the article back in February, and at the end of the piece I argued that ‘It will take NHS workers and the public alike standing up for the service, even if that means entertaining the previously unthinkable possibility of strikes and other forms of industrial action.’ I was worried that my conclusion might come off a little extreme. Little did I know that the magazine would finally hit shelves at a moment of widespread labour upheaval with broad public backing.

Since things are about to get a lot worse than they’ve ever been in our lifetimes, having a long-established and much cherished institution like the NHS provides not only a political-economic focal point for struggle, but an emotional one too. The NHS stands as an example of what we can win when we fight; it’s a living embodiment of the kind of world we deserve—a better one than this, for sure. Nobody but the capitalists want to see the NHS fail; and the more they hobble it, the easier it is to see the parasitic social relationship of capitalism at play. It’s hard for the bastards to tear a beloved thing out of our hands and pretend they’re doing us a favour.

The Guts of It launches on the 18th of August. There’s a launch event at Good Press in Glasgow, which you can attend for free, but you’ll need to book here. I’ll be reading ‘Socialism in Sick Times’ at the event. The magazine will be available in two print editions: one printed on fancy paper for sale at £7; the other on newsprint that you can have for free. The online edition will also be free to read.

Like standing still in a riot, it’s often hard to take stock of what’s happening until after the smoke and teargas clear. That’s why history, theory and storytelling are so important. They help us make sense of events that otherwise appear discrete or unrelated. And while you can’t read your way out of a crisis, understanding its causes and its character can you help you decide how to act.

The current explosion of housing costs, as well as the overall cost of living, can feel like a personal failing. The logic of capitalism is the primacy of the individual: everyone competes on the market of human endeavour and endurance, and—so the story goes—only the strong survive. When despite working your ass off you can’t even secure stable and long-term shelter, that most basic human need, it stands to reason that you’re just not strong enough. Nothing quite equals the stress of uncertainty around where you’ll retreat to at the end of a hard day—to eat, to sleep, to feel safe. Who are you if you have nowhere to go? It reinforces the sense that you’re merely an individual, that you’re alone.

The bitterest irony of this logic is that capitalism is, if nothing else, the socialisation of the forces of production. Every time you eat, say, a banana, you’re at the end-stage of a process that includes countless previous stages and countless workers like yourself: workers clearing fields; workers planting banana trees; workers harvesting and packing the fruit; teamsters and sailors and longshoremen shipping the fruit across the planet; supermarket workers selling you the banana; workers feeding and clothing all these other workers, etc. There’s not a single physical object in your life that wasn’t the product of people you’ve never met working together to create the world we live in. You have more in common with these people than you do with your own native-born capitalists, because you also take part in creating the world through your labour. Still, somehow you’re alone and nothing belongs to you but the bare necessities to get up and go back to work—and sometimes not even that.

This book takes a shot at explaining why.

The Housing Monster was written by an anonymous construction worker and posted on prole.info, where you can download the ebook for free (and find a link to print copies as well). Spaghetti For Brains helped record the audiobook version, which is available for free at the Internet Archive.

Here’s the publisher’s description of the book:

The Housing Monster is a scathing essay that takes one seemingly simple, everyday thing—a house—and looks at the social relations that surround it. Moving from intensely personal thoughts and interactions to large-scale political and economic forces, it reads alternately like a worker’s diary, a short story, a psychology of everyday life, a historical account, an introduction to Marxist critique of political economy, and an angry flyer someone would pass you on the street.

Starting with the construction site and the physical building of houses, the book slowly builds and links more and more issues together: from gentrification and city politics to gender roles and identity politics, from subcontracting and speculation to union contracts and negotiation, from individual belief, suffering, and resistance to structural division, necessity, and instability. What starts as a look at housing broadens into a critique of capitalism as a whole.

In the coming weeks, you’ll also be able to listen to the audiobook on Spaghetti For Brains podcast, broken into four parts. Feel free to share it or to use it for your own purposes.

Until then.

Just when things were starting to feel a bit more normal and settled, our landlord notified us that he was jacking up our rent by 21%. My partner and I have been navigating Scotland’s labyrinthine (and deeply flawed) appeals system since.

It couldn’t have come at a more apt time: I’d just started recording the audiobook version of The Housing Monster, written by an anonymous construction worker for the website prole.info. The Housing Monster is an illustrated manifesto that starts with a look at how a house is built and zooms out inch by inch to reveal the social relationships that dominate our lives under capitalism. It parses out how the stuff that we need to live—houses, for example—become distorted, and in turn distort us, when they’re transformed into commodities. In the particular lies the universal: mapping out the housing market, the author reveals the inner workings of the class struggle, the battle between regular people producing and reproducing the world and the capitalist class who own it.

What really struck me about the book when I first read it was how the author ties the personal experience of being a worker in with the larger social forces that act on us, forces that are too big to be seen but condition even the smallest aspects of our lives. Finding my own interests in direct conflict with my landlord’s while I recorded the audiobook, it was easy to see how the subject of class struggle isn’t theoretical or academic but much of the substance of everyday life.

You’ll be able to listen to The Housing Monster in its entirety at prole.info, where you can also download the ebook for free. If you want to pick up a print copy, you can get it at PM Press. We’ll be releasing the audiobook on the Spaghetti For Brains podcast in shorter instalments over the coming months. Keep your eyes peeled.

I’ve also been working on a podcast miniseries about Charles Mingus’s masterpiece The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Released in 1963, it perfectly captures the tumultuous decade in which it was made: fusing the violent racism of the United States and the composer’s mental crisis trying to navigate it as an African-American, a musician/composer, and as a worker. My intention was not just to relate the cultural history of the album itself but also the lineage of jazz that Mingus drew from. Again, within the particular lies the universal—a materialist analysis of the record forces us to confront the bloody history of the country, the reality of recording industry executives’ exploitation of music workers (especially Black music workers), and ultimately the way our listening habits have been shaped through our reliance on petroleum since the twentieth century. With the current spat between musicians and streaming services, there’s a lot to learn from Mingus’s fight to make a living as an artist in America. The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady stands as a testament to his struggle, which remains as relevant today as it was in the 1960s.

I’m hoping to release these episodes in the coming months, with the script published on the Spaghetti For Brains Substack shortly after.

This year I’ll also be publishing new writing on Spaghetti For Brains. In the third and final instalment of the “Orwellian” series, I’ll be looking at the legacy of anticommunism in the United States and Europe and how this shaped Orwell’s own legacy, including the varied—and often contradictory—use of the term “Orwellian”. Orwell himself is largely to blame for the misuses of his signature concept, having acted as an informant for British intelligence in the years following the war. He saw the threat of Soviet espionage in Britain as greater than the threat from his own country’s ruling class.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that he was wrong and that his choice to support the British security state was characteristic of his and other socialists’ insistence on what Michael Parenti has called ‘pure socialism’—that is, the rejection of a revolutionary politics that doesn’t 100% conform to one’s particular notion of what the revolution should be. This refusal to measure a revolution’s success or failure based on a comparison of what it overthrew, the horror that preceded it, mars political debate on the left to this day.

Spaghetti For Brains

Sales Soar at the Everything Store

1 ‘Power-worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. ... This habit of mind leads also to the belief that things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than they ever do in practice. The rise…

Read more

5 years ago · Spaghetti For Brains

Spaghetti For Brains

"Orwellian"

The past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time, I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it’s got no reality, it’s just a set of facts that you’ve learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets …

Read more

5 years ago · Spaghetti For Brains

I’m also working on a longer piece of writing reflecting on my time as an “essential worker” and how the experience of working in a grocery through the height (or depth) of the pandemic left me reevaluating my own politics. Beginning in 2019 when I still harboured illusions about my ability to pursue education and maybe even academia; through the Bernie 2020 campaign, which was the spark for this newletter; then being stuck in a shitty low-paid job at the grocery wondering if I would die of an infectious disease; to being injured at this same job and thinking I might die anyway—I simultaneously lost hope in the old ways of thinking about capitalism and my place in it, while also losing most of my anger and cynicism in favour of the clarity that a budding class consciousness brings.

It’s a work in progress. You’ll hopefully get the opportunity to read it by the summer. But don’t quote me on that.

In the meantime, there’ll be episodes of the podcast where me and Norm try to make sense of the diseased gumbo that is politics, culture and working life. As braver people than me have said, the only way out of this shit is through it, together.

When it rained five days, and the skies turned dark as night 
When it rained five days, and the skies turned dark as night 
Then trouble taking place in the lowlands at night 

I woke up this morning, can’t even get out of my door
I woke up this morning, can’t even get out of my door
That’s enough trouble to make a poor girl wonder where she want to go

Bessie Smith’s ‘Backwater Blues’ tells the story of a woman displaced by a flood. 

That’s the simple, passive interpretation I came to when I first heard it, having been encouraged and conditioned all my life to listen with detachment to songs about tragedies that happen in some other place or some other time. Let’s call it the BandAid or ‘We Are the World’ model of listening, in which there’s an assumption of the audience’s unfamiliarity with the subject matter. ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’—and do you? Like all forms of charity, the logic of capitalist property relations is baked in: there will always be poor people but it’s up to those of us enjoying Christmas On Earth to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty by opening our ears, our hearts and our wallets. It’s not only a way of listening that’s being constructed here; this is how our Western subjectivity is formed.

‘Backwater Blues’, like the blues in general, makes the opposite assumption—it assumes familiarity and a shared subjectivity. It’s what made the blues so effective as a repository for African-American history and collective consciousness, but also as a commodity for white record company executives to build a market on.

It’s probably Smith’s most famous song. She penned it herself shortly before recording it in February 1927 with the Harlem stride pianist James P. Johnson. For decades, musicologists and historians believed ‘Backwater Blues’ to be about the Mississippi River Great Flood of the same year, which to this day remains the most catastrophic natural disaster in American history. The banks of the river burst across seven states, inundating an area nearly the size of Scotland. David Evans, writing in the journal Popular Music in 2007, describes how ‘between 250 and 1,000 people lost their lives, between 600,000 and a million people became refugees, over 162,000 homes were flooded, 41,000 buildings were destroyed, and up to a billion dollars in economic losses were sustained.’1 The majority of victims of this disaster were African-American.

A backwater is another name for a flood plain. Flood plains are not prime real estate. In fact, because everybody knows that rivers flood and flood plains are there to take the hit, you would only put houses on a flood plain if you didn’t give a shit about the people living there. It feels almost tacky to point out that Southern landowners at the beginning of the twentieth century didn’t give a shit about Black people. The concentration of Black residents in these areas led to the massive loss of life and livelihoods described in ‘Backwater Blues’. Like Hurricane Katrina in 2004, you couldn’t call the disaster “natural” without laughing up your sleeve.

It was equally a disaster of racist property relations and it extended beyond the flooded Mississippi and into the relief effort. People displaced by the flood were herded under armed guard, forced to work for rations of food and clothes on pain of prison or even death, with the refugees eventually contracted out to the landowning class under conditions resembling the slavery they had escaped only decades earlier. Evans suggests that this ‘last straw’ contributed to the Great Migration of African-Americans to the industrial North. Black Southerners escaping rural dispossession accounted for a large swath of the growing Black working class—the very record-buying audience of blues recording artists like Bessie Smith.

But Bessie Smith didn’t write ‘Backwater Blues’ about the flooded Mississippi, which we now know, because she recorded it two months before this particular flood happened. Over time the song became associated with it because the horror of that specific event pertained in the case of every other similar event of the time—of which there were many. The underlying property relations that made it so catastrophic weren’t specific to the Mississippi Delta, and audiences who hadn’t necessarily experienced floods were still able to see something of themselves in the implicit theme of race and class dispossession.

Evans’s article makes the case that Bessie Smith found inspiration for ‘Backwater Blues’ on Christmas of 1926 when the Cumberland River flooded during her stay in Nashville. With her show cancelled, she found herself in a boarding house above an undertaker’s, crowded together with people who’d been displaced. Angela Davis, in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998), recounts the words of Smith’s sister-in-law, Maud Smith:

there was a lot of other people there, and they were trying to get her to stay, so they started hollerin’ “Miss Bessie, please sing the ‘Back Water Blues,’ please sing the ‘Back Water Blues.’” Well, Bessie didn’t know anything about any “Back Water Blues,” but after we came back home … [she] came into the kitchen one day, and she had a pencil and paper, and she started singing and writing.2

So ‘Backwater Blues’ isn’t about the Mississippi flooding—but it sure as hell is about a long-suffering but resilient group of people who needed their story to be told in the wake of a disaster that was as much man-made as it was “natural.”

Then they rowed a little boat about five miles ‘cross the pond
Then they rowed a little boat about five miles ‘cross the pond
I packed all my clothes, throwed ‘em in, and they rowed me along 

When it thunders and lightning, and the wind begins to blow 
When it thunders and lightning, and the wind begins to blow 
There’s thousands of people ain’t got no place to go

All songs mean different things to different audiences. You can like it, and you can ‘get’ it, and sometimes one can happen without the other. When Bessie Smith sang ‘Backwater Blues’ into a microphone in a recording studio in New York City, she was telling two stories at the same time. 

One story, the one that white executives at Columbia Records thought they were using to realise a profit, depicted an unfortunate event—what Davis calls a ‘merely private misfortun[e].’ The fact that hundreds of thousands if not millions of African-Americans could relate to this experience offered capital a selling point. Black Americans were an early target market for the record industry and female blues singers provided the product. Davis points out that Mamie Smith’s ‘Crazy Blues’, released in 1920 on Okeh Records, stands as the first ‘race record’ of its kind. ‘Within one month’s time,’ Davis writes, ‘black people had purchased 75,000 copies at a dollar each.’ Bessie Smith’s mastery of the blues also proved profitable with white audiences titillated by her ‘shouting and moaning and praying and suffering’ in a ‘wild, rough, Ethiopian voice’ (to quote a contemporary review by Carl Van Vechten in Vanity Fair). The audience for this first story was the record buying public whose sensibilities, as well as their musical tastes, might lend themselves to active or passive listening—with the tension between the two subsumed in the form of the record as commodity.

The other story began before ‘Backwater Blues’ was written, with the dispossessed people above the undertaker’s pleading with Smith to ‘sing the Back Water Blues’. Whether these people bought Columbia’s records or not, they’d certainly heard Smith sing live—and almost certainly heard nothing ‘Ethiopian’ in it because this story is uniquely American. It was their story and it didn’t start with Bessie Smith. She picked up the thread and carried it farther and wider than anyone had done before—so wide, in fact, that it reached all the way here, to me, now. But songs like ‘Backwater Blues’ must have taken on a specific quality for Smith’s Black audiences; something at once more personal but also bigger than a ‘merely private misfortune.’ Sitting in my little home office in Glasgow, typing this on a laptop, I’ll never know exactly what that is. All I’ve got is the recording—which is something. But there’s something else that’s lost forever: the subject-forming quality of the blues and its demand that this way of looking at the world finds a vehicle for expression, to make sense of what’s happening. That’s something I can ony get a glimpse of, if I put in the effort to find it.

Davis argues that the ‘collective property’ of songs like ‘Backwater Blues’ and their ‘socializing character’ helped ‘carve out a new space in which black working people could gather and experience themselves as a community.’ Having really lived the blues, and being shaped by the same immanent forces that spawned the blues format, ‘blues song represents the collective woes of the community, along with the determination to conquer them,’ Davis writes. The musical style and the real life phenomenon of the the blues were inseparable.

Some music never gets old because we need to believe this about it—that it’s got some affective potential that binds us to others, and to each other, across unwalkable space and unwaitable time. I think if there’s a tie that binds people to begin with, a shared experience of trauma and oppression, music like this can offer a series of neural pathways through which a collective consciousness can flourish. Davis’s argument, in this light, is spot on.

But what about now, when the world is the way it is, and we are the way we are—atomised, alienated, without a political channel to turn discontent into organised resistance, endlessly visible to each other but mediated by companies much more sophisticated in their ability to gauge audiences than Columbia Records ever was? Music that speaks to and even operates as a social consciousness and memory—how has this changed over time? Can music in America and other “developed” capitalist societies still do this? Are there modern-day equivalents? Or has the political economy and its shaping of the way we hear music undermined our ability to have this kind of collective experience?

Then I went and stood upon some high old lonesome hill 
Then I went and stood upon some high old lonesome hill 
Then I looked down on the house where I used to live

Backwater blues done caused me to pack up my things and go 
Backwater blues done caused me to pack up my things and go 
‘Cause my house fell down, and I can’t live there no more 

As the twentieth anniversary approaches of the September 11th, 2001 attacks, it’s easy to see how these collective experiences can be weaponised against the very people they happen to. The families of 9/11 victims and survivors are scathing in their opposition to President Biden’s planned appearance at memorial events. They cite successive administrations’ refusal to release documents alleged to show Saudi Arabia’s complicity in the attacks. The threat of terror provided justification for the USA PATRIOT Act, the opening salvo in a steady war of attrition on Americans’ civil liberties since 2001 (and in reality long before). The so-called War on Terror ended not with a bang but a whimper as the US scrambles to evacuate from Afghanistan—which the Bush administration invaded on the flimsy pretext of ‘getting’ Osama bin Laden and avenging our wounded national pride. The disaster of the Iraq War produced a memory hole bigger than any Orwellian fantasy of totalitarianism, with apparatchiks like David Frum—the man who actually composed the phrase ‘Axis of Evil’—now writing articles lamenting how things could have gone differently. Meanwhile drone warfare has escalated, largely under the aegis of a president who came to power on some vague suggestion of ending our imperialist interventions. Capitalism itself teetered on the brink in 2008, with Western economies yet to fully recover. The Movement for Black Lives forced the issue of police and prison abolition into the mainstream, even summoning insurrectionary energy in the streets; though with no organised channels to direct that energy we’ve seen it dissipate without any substantial change in the way the ruling class defends private property. The twenty-first century has so far seen more extreme weather events than at any other time in living memory, while an obedient corporate media continuously fail to point out how the bloated US Department of Defense is the number one polluter on the planet, favouring instead a focus on drop in the ocean consumerist tinkering—and litigating the question of whether climate change is even happening. We’ve watched, skulking and glassy-eyed, as a virus wipes out the old, the infirm and those who can’t afford to social distance because they’re too busy serving those who can, while the people putatively responsible for public health spend more energy keeping the tills ringing than they do keeping our hearts beating and our lungs breathing air. Our world and our epoch are defined by crises: epistemological, racial, class and gender-based, political and existential.

There’s no music that captures the ‘collective experience’ of any of this, not because music can’t do it but because we’re not experiencing it collectively. Still, Bessie Smith’s ‘Backwater Blues’ can tell us a lot about ourselves here in this moment. It might not provide the answers, but it certainly raises the right questions. The race and class antagonisms embedded like metadata in ‘Backwater Blues’ are the thread of a story to be picked up and carried farther and wider. We can break the transactional habit of listening at a remove by cracking open the shell of music’s commodity form.

Then, something radiates from the past through recordings like this. Sure, you can’t just reach out through fossilised aeons and touch the person or people who made these diamond-like musical artefacts, but like a satellite picking up signals broadcast from miles away you’re in some kind of direct communication with them and the world they came from—which is your world too. And like a satellite, it gets to a point where either you or the music (the metaphor works either way) are too far out in space to stay connected, no gravity holds us together and the line goes dead. The two worlds are lost to each other forever, inevitably, tragically—but how beautiful it is that that hasn’t happened yet!

Now that the “natural” disasters have started happening to us—not to some other who’s far removed enough to deserve our pity—how do we make sense of it? Will we recognise in each other our collective potential as a group, as a people, as a class with our imminent dispossession in common? Or do we have to wait until some kind of flood washes our lives away, until we’re standing upon some high old lonesome hill, looking down to where we used to live?

Mmmm, I can’t move no more
Mmmm, I can’t move no more
There ain’t no place for a poor old girl to go.