It's been a while. Almost a year, in fact.
Diskjammy #7 was uploaded from my laptop [then stationed on a desk built from a door in an industrial block in Tottenham, London] on November 11, 2010. On November 10, 52,000 people hit the streets of London for the first of several protests against education and public sector cuts. The movement, such as it was, bloomed and ballooned, gathering momentum and supporters as it went. I was there too, and it felt real and bloody, exciting and frightening: a brave new war. I started reading books about Capitalist Realism and neo-liberalism and queer resistance and thought about building a Trojan horse out of scrap wood; but I was falling in love, too, and working long hours to pay the rent. When I wasn't working I lay in bed with my lover and talked about the future, which was bleak. Like the rest of us I was sharpening my tools, getting ready for something. Nothing was happening, not yet; but everything was changing.
I moved out of Tottenham, left for Berlin, left for New York, kept working; and all the time I was thinking, "I must make a new tape." But every new theme I thought up just seemed silly in the face of what was going on around and inside me, and so I left it, and waited.
I write this from a desk covered with other people's papers in a studio in Shoreditch. I don't live anywhere in particular, but I work here from time to time. As I write, London embarks on its third day of occupation at St Paul's, joining an unprecedented wave of protest across the globe, from Syntagma to Wall Street and everywhere in between.
Inevitably, there's been a lot of talk about "the soundtrack of the revolution" - of punk rock and grime and the Human Microphone. What is clear, however, is that this movement is no singularity, but a wave, a multiplicity - as various as cities and people and as diverse as our lives. "It was true in Syntagma and it is true at St Paul's," writes Paul Mason, "if you ask 50 people why they're here and what they want you will get 50 answers."
Diskjammy has always been something of a research project. I love reading diaries, looking at photos, hearing stories; the breadth of lived experience as it is recorded and transmitted. These protests, in my view - however confused and divided they may appear - are about seizing visibility for human experience as it is lived by "the 99%."
[Pop]songs represent what's left of the oral tradition. They are the stories we trade back and forth; stories of desire and belonging and alienation, an affirmation that others feel as we do. Tthe 99% blog can be seen as a pictorial expression of the oral tradition, featuring people like you and me holding up their handwritten, digitized, righteously hard-luck stories before the gathered virtual crowd - like so many folk and blues and calypso singers - in order to serve the greater good and galvanize others into action. In the same spirit of revolutionary disclosure and radical emotionality, I'd like to ask you to share your .mp3s and .wavs and all your messy lossy-format longing for a better future. Or just a different one.
What are YOU fighting for?
I want your songs of rage, your battle-cries, your protest songs; I want the new young soldier, the voice of a generation; I want the song that speaks of what has made you angry again, even after ten years or twenty; I want the song that wordlessly expresses all you care about. I want the song whose harmonies suggest new models for non-hierarchical self-organization. I want your tracts. I want voice recordings made in your bedroom or on your bike; I want you to identify, and express, what kind of a war we're fighting, and to speak your part in it - in your own words or someone else's, with beats or countermelodies, with silence, with breaks, with speech, with sound.
The mixtape is the quintessential token of exchange in a gift economy wherein love is the common currency (for a person, for an idea, or for the music itself). This seems appropriate enough given that the mechanisms of market capital are breaking down on all sides. "Something has been going on between the left earphone and the right earphone of this generation that represents a profound change in attitude" (Paul Mason, as before). I look forward to hearing it in mine.
[somewhat arbitrary but strictly enforced]
** SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 25/11/11 **
What I'll need from you:
1. One mp3, titled and marked with the artist's name: any genre, any length
2. Optional: An image (.jpg preferred) of something you love.
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Love is the common currency...worth repeating.
ReplyDeleteWhen is the submission deadline?
ReplyDeletea challenge- a welcome one- no holds bard, we'll hear what comes. I am pleased to listen to the previous mixes- how wonderful... AND .... respond ....
ReplyDelete