The thing about the above photo from the U.S. campaign trail is that Biden no longer looks anything like Biden. Can someone explain this to me? Is it Photoshop? Some intern on overtime at Madame Tussaud’s? Or has the inevitable already occurred and he’s morphed into an octogenarian lizard lord with a perma-tan?
Whichever, he can hardly string a sentence together and is not fit for office, let alone, another term, no matter what fantasy the Democrats continue to cultivate. The experienced middle-class white man was always going to be the safer bet over his female side-kick though (I’m reminded of Angela Raynor as the Lady in Red which was plastered all over the front pages the other day).
Then there’s Kamala Harris who, let’s face it, isn’t all that far off Biden in that listening to her for more than a few minutes inculcates a generous portion of blancmange in between your ears: What did she say?
It is truly baffling that in a nation with a mass populace of 333.29 million people, the best universities in the world and the highest amount of tech geniuses, we can be left with the prospect of either Biden or Trump, again. It’s actually absurd, the more you think about it. Trump did not materialise out of nowhere, though. He is a mirror of American society—a gross reality check that tends to go unacknowledged.
Moving on, a friend recently put it to me on listening to my track “Dream Catcher” (E) (which I’m currently screening in various formats, including KISMIF in Porto, in July), how I accounted for the ‘blackness’ in my music. It’s not an easy question to answer. I suspect it has seeped in via osmosis. I also advocate oral cultures, being a songwriter who doesn’t write anything down. More to the point, as we are - all of us - cracked vessels, I suspect it correspondingly seeps out. And when it comes to the Blues, the one man band singing about ‘love gone wrong’ on a busted guitar before getting back to the grind was always singing about someone else, or some place else—for the Blues is nothing if not a nomadic form.
We are polyphonic creatures. It is never only us that comes out of us. Black music comes from pain and trauma, and the necessity of that. Field Hollers and Work Songs which came about during slavery and the civil war (1600-1900) harnessed collective muscle-memory, giving rhythm to labour, and labour to rhythm. They were not only a practice of, but a demand for freedom. Perhaps, when we sing, all the music we have ever heard is running through us all at once, and whatever noise we make is us + that. We sing from experience and we need experience to sing. That may account for her question.
But what is running through us when we sing? The Dutch philosopher and lens grinder, Baruch Spinoza1 would have said spirit, some would say culture. An alternative take, commonly cited by contemporary artists, is that we are an antenna for the music. In my recent APR, I said: “I am not in control of it, and I wouldn’t want to be.” Such a focus on ‘receptivity’ over ‘creativity’ would account for that all too common sensation often cited in the literature on listening back to recordings, which tends to be one of surprise: Where did that come from? Was that even me?
Brian Eno, describes this impulse, in characteristically unpretentious terms:
All I’m ever trying to do is to make something magic. Something that makes me think Fuck, isn’t life amazing. That’s all I want. (British Council Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2018: 00:49:18).2
It’s gone nine. The vertical blinds are blowing. I should shut the door. The delete key is doing that thing where it keeps going long after you’ve let go. I’m flicking between this and Emerson’s “Experience” (1842)3.
He calls upon us to live life as an experiment. “What help from thought? Life is not dialectics” (ibid.).
There are now lights on the grass via the extended walkway. The munroes are still just about visible, mid-frame. The non-stop drilling from the shipyard, which I pointed my condenser mic at, thinking I’d turn it into a drum beat, has ceased.
All things swim and glitter (ibid.).4
Professor Cornel R. West recently delivered his 2024 Gifford Lectures5 at the University of Edinburgh. This phenomenal series, entitled: ‘A Jazz soaked Philosophy for out Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane’ is sensational and the best thing you are ever likely to see going on in lecture hall.
The fact that someone like him even exists in academia today is in itself a fate. In a not so deranged world, he could also become POTUS.
If unfamiliar, West is a not only a staggering intellect and a deeply spiritual thinker but also a charismatic musician/spoken word artist who is able to hold an audience spellbound over hours, without losing momentum.
His compassionate, learned, and free-wheeling, even preacher-like, style is steeped in oral culture. One doesn’t so much watch him, as witness him. The attention he commands is palpable, even via a tiny screen. Everyone in the audience knows that they are a part of something they will not forget.
Roaming luminously through Plato, to Shakespeare, to Montaigne, to Vico, to Nietzsche, to Emerson on where we find ourselves, to Woolf, to his compatriot, the late bell hooks, who bonded in their mutual aim to expose class and racial injustice—both being that rare breed of academic unashamed to put love at the centre of their discourse.
He is the converse of death by PowerPoint.
What are we seeing with West, though? Is it a lecture series, a performance, an oral testimony, or a form of prophecy? (Prophecy and accuracy being different registers, as he points out.)
He boomerangs through the catastrophic, the existential, and the pedagogical via an entirely idiosyncratic and peripatetic exploration of free jazz, blues/swing, and improvisation—anchored to Coltrane. Neither is he uncritical of current ideologies, trends, and bandwagons. In the Q&A, for example, he takes some umbrage with EDI6, in that “decolonising the curriculum” also depends upon who is doing the decolonising. This resonates with Varoufakis who reminds us in his thesis Technofeudalism (2023)7 that with algorithmic culture it comes back not so much to what they know about us, but who knows what, for this is where the power lies.
In his default inclusivity, West contrasts sharply with our own soon-to-be-gone-off-to-Barbados-to-pen-his-memoirs-and-revamp-himself-on-the-U.S.-lecture-circuit, rain-soaked PM, who appears to be totally out of touch with Gen Z in his bizarre pledge (which didn’t even exist two days ago) to bring back mandatory national service. Yes, you heard me right. But even ex-army Adm Adam West says this is “bonkers” and he should know.
This not the 1950s. You can’t get a generation who do not believe in the country they live in because they are smart enough to see that it is jovially screwing them over in the game of downward mobility in which they will be moving back home any time soon (if they ever left in the first place) to do a minimum of community service let alone rifle practice when they would rather be on Snapchat.
The only rationale I can think of is that he has been advised such a move may bring baby boomers increasingly bothered about ‘the boats’ back into the fold. It certainly wouldn’t wash with my seventeen year old niece.
In his claim to be a real person, Rishi remains resolutely out of sync with the electorate despite having admitted, not so long back, that he had known a ‘few working-class types back in the days’, even if he couldn’t remember their names. But he now seems to be on a Kamikaze mission, taking his MPs and their projected salaries down with him.
Starmer, though, in what now seems a done deal, I fear, will only continue to bore the electorate unless CHANGE, the one-word slogan purportedly pounced upon by the party at the very last minute because people “really get it”, really does materialise.
Call me a pessimist but I am under no illusion that Starmer, or a centrist Labour, will do anything to improve my lot in real terms. For us SINKs, as opposed to DINKWADs, rent controls, #thecostoflivingcrisis, food inflation (coupled with mass profits), lack of ‘affordable’ housing, student debt accruing interest at 7.8%, precarious contracts8, and the fact that a job I did back in 2008 was recently advertised at only 2K more than it was back then, are all the more ammunition to look yourself in the mirror, hairbrush in hand, and ask, Joe Strummer style: Should I stay or should I go?
On a more upbeat note, the highlight of the Gifford Lectures 2024, at the end of lecture six - ‘A Love Supreme (A Way Through)’ brought on a prolonged warmth over an intellectual epiphany (although there are plenty of those). (This being the point of Emerson’s essay.) The standing ovation had me wondering if West was going to do an encore. Instead, he began chanting: “A love supreme, a love supreme…”, and laughing, bringing the audience with him.
Such all-encompassing moments of transcendence, the yearning for which is hard-wired in us, routinely get born out though collective rituals, such as sport, stadium gigs, and so on. Yet, here is Brian Eno relaying the primary musical experience of his life as that of being sung to by a Gospel congregation whilst living in California, despite being a committed atheist.
When you join a gospel choir what you do, and the pleasure of what you do is that you surrender. You stop trying to be in control. Now we live in a culture that has got where it is by being able to control nature… (The University of Edinburgh, 2017: 01:34:22).
He also cautions us that this is the same impulse which leads to fascism.
I recently gave a talk at a symposium. I was going to present my video essay The Path of Totality, based upon my rather excessive online excursion into the recent Great North American Eclipse which coincided with receiving the custom Blackout Baby EP from the cutters. Symbolically, the record resembled the eclipse, (it was black and round!). And my ideas tend to come visually. But the resulting video essay exceeded the conference format in duration, so the convener asked if I would be happy to show only a part of it, to leave time for the Q&A. Eh? He wanted me to cut up this dark Romantic piece on totality?! No way!
A Love Supreme9 is considered Coltrane’s masterpiece. It is also a statement of his spiritual recovery.
He had one of the best jobs in jazz, touring with the Miles Davis band. Yet, substance-fuelled, his playing swung from the jaggedly brilliant, to the demonstrably numb. Davis understandably fired him. Coltrane’s band mate, the pianist, Mccoy Tyner4 (Westervelt, 2012), sums up this time as one of risk and spontaneous rapture:
I couldn't wait to go to work at night. It was just such a wonderful experience. I mean, I didn't know what we were going to do. We couldn't really explain why things came together.
The chant10 came out of Coltrane’s solo in the opening part “Acknowledgements” (the others were “Resolution”, “Pursuance” and “Psalm”), through variations upon a simple four note motif, which he repeats 36 times.
When West reimagines this for a 21st century audience in an auditorium, then, he single-handedly abolishes bloodless managerialism and encroaching neoliberalism, ushering in an uncommon, communal joy. This is no easy fate. Neither is getting people from the U.K. to sing impromptu. He brings home our business as temporal creatures, our historical consciousness stamped upon us thorough a rich legacy of European philosophical discourse, whilst acknowledging indigenous plurality, and, of course, Marx—in that we continue to shape the world but not under conditions of our choice.
Segueing to Aretha Franklin, West mentions “Amazing Grace”11 recorded on the album of the same name at L.A. Missionary Baptist Church in 1972, so I looked it up on YouTube. You can hear the ‘room sounds’ and the anticipation of the congregation, with their clapping, gasping, and whooping—hanging on her every note. With her unfathomable voice she seeks out every dark corner and crevice and drags it into the light. Aretha’s father, C. L. Franklin, an American Baptist Minister, is also in the room. He gives a speech just over half way in, saying that she, [Aretha] “never really left the church”. The crowd erupt.
These old recordings are so rich and resonant compared to the generative AI crap we will soon be drowning in. Yet I doubt cloning and voice recognition software will ever be able to soar, or break. One imagines Aretha, sat there, her back a little stooped. Her vocal running long and deep like a canyon river.
I was busking along the river the other night, with a flute and amp, when a French girl passed by. I knew she was French immediately as she had that casual beauty that only French women have. I then saw her again the next day, exercising, and she asked if that was me singing the other night. I said, yes said, and she said that, along with the sun, it had “enlivened” her evening.
When asked what the ‘takeaways’ of what we do are, they are not always obvious, or even quantifiable. When in Venice, for example, undertaking the Space Junk Broadcast Tour in October 2022, I was given several photographs of me, taken from different vantage points on the same occasion when I was wearing my blue wig, by a night receptionist at the hotel I was staying at, and an air host on a stopover who worked for BA.
I was also given a handwritten thank you note from a South African girl who was deeply homesick, who said I was her angel, and approached many times by those curious as to what I was doing. I was told that my spontaneity invited others into their own.
When singing with my amp across The Grand Canal (footage I have not posted online), a gondola passed by with a full load of tourists. They all began to wave at me, as did the gondolier, smiling, and I waved back. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.
None of these events could have been anticipated.
Similarly, on the more recent album launch on the Camino, my carrying the amp led to many conversations and new ‘followers’. It became a talking point on the route that there was this a female musician doing these ‘pop-up’ dances with an amp on the beach.
Other pilgrims stopped and took photos or video, then later in the alburgues they wanted to know my story, and why I was doing this.
I have many faults, but when I get an idea, I ride with it, and I’m pretty much unstoppable at that point.
Culture helps us cohere. Most of the routine situations we face daily call upon us to be in control of proceedings. This absurd stunt, piece of performance/endurance art, and act of resistance to my album sinking without a trace on DSPs, was, though, a combination of two things I like to do—walk, and make art.
On The Eye of the Storm - The Political Odyssey of Yanis Varoufakis (2024), in a three-way conversation with Varoufakis and the host, Eno highlights the value of identifying the “things we like to do” and doing them. This might seem obvious, he says, but it is easier to know what you do not like, than what you do.
In our reputation (reaction?) economy, the word ‘like’ has assumed a ubiquitous currency in a world bursting with heart emojis12. Yet, if we think about what we like doing, these things are our internal compass, even our “lodestars” (Eye of the Storm Podcast, 2024: 00:36:23) and we need to do them. Unleashed creativity only bites back.For Eno, ‘active surrender’, is a most unvalued proposition in art which resonates with my PhD audio statement: Vehicles for Abandon.
He explains:
I always think surrender is the most underrated human activity. Surrender is what we do when we have sex, when we take drugs, when we engage in art, when we engage in religion. Those are all activities where we deliberately let go of some of our agency, some of our need, our obsession with control and say I’m going to let myself be controlled, I’m going to let something take me over. I’m going to become not me but part of something else.
Eye of the Storm Podcast, 2024: 00:52:30-00:53:05
Varoufakis then brings up love “with the fall”13 as a complimentary type of surrender which is thwarted in the algorithmic dating ‘market’. I previously wrote on this in ‘Cold Intimacies: Love and capitalism’ drawing upon Eva Illouz’s critique of emotional capitalism, the work of British photographer, Jane Hilton, and feminist performance art.
Qualifying the subtitle to this post, at the Andrew Carnegie Lecture Series - Brian Eno, which also took place at The University of Edinburgh, in 2017, Eno asserts that “…all art is automatically political”.14 It is bound up in our methods and how we go about realising our vision. Being a musician who does not play any instruments it is rather through technology that Eno has extended himself into the world, sonically.
If we make work in a different way to others then that alone is a political statement. We can make music, for example, that collapses dominant discourses of popular song, and reveals more of who we are in the process. “All of the art we do is not only whatever it is, it is also a set of messages about how things can be made, and who we think we are when we’re doing it” (Eno, cited in The University of Edinburgh, 2017: 01:23:03-01:23:40).
I wanted to leave you with this video of Silent Photography in Death Valley by Graincheck. She uses ASMR to augment natural sounds and generate atmosphere. I was drawn into her embodied and meditative process. She seems to be creating space, and silence. Although she does speak in ushered tones when promoting the sponsored Nomad bag, the most repetitive sound is that of her camera shutter. Twisting her body to get the right shot, and setting up her gear in the middle of an empty road, it’s as if she’s won the lotto. Alone in the valley, doing her thing.
*This is a special note to say thank you to my new Founding Member, Nige Cook. Thank you Nige, your support is very much appreciated.
Next up
The Glad Cafe, Glasgow, electric guitar improvisation & vocalisation with GIOdymanics. Weds 29 May, 7:30 pm - close.
In Bento’s Sketchbook (2011, London: Pantheon) the late John Berger asks: ‘How does the impulse to draw something begin?’. He then endeavours to answer this by homing in on Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza’s God is nature itself, via an investigation into drawing, politics and storytelling.
For Spinoza, God is present in the act of drawing, in the single-handed gesture, and therefore in the line, as much as he is in the beauty of a flower, or the blueness of the sea, for example. Lawrence’s modernist novels dealt not only with the contemporaneous sense of social isolation experienced after the industrial revolution, but sexuality, the subconscious, and our sense of what it is to be rooted to the Earth, to experience vitality, or, as he termed it “the blood-self”. His novels and poetry call upon us to embrace spontaneity in order to be fully alive. It then follows that for Lawrence, as with Spinoza, and Berger, God is always looking for a body. Ontology takes precedence over epistemology. We see an example of his inclination in his novel Sons and Lovers (1913), when quoting Paul Morel to Miriam: “It’s not religious to be religious […] I reckon a crow is religious when it sails across the sky. But it only does it because it feels itself carried to where it’s going, not because it thinks it is being eternal.” I, at least, feel this to be true in my body, it feels itself carried.
British Council Bosnia and Herzegovina. (2018) Artist’s Talk By Brian Eno. History Museum of BiH. Sarajevo. 17 July. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAfx1_Bit00>. (Accessed: 22 May 2024).
Emerson, R.W. 1842, Essays-second series, The Floating Press, Auckland, New Zealand.
See 3.
The University of Edinburgh. (2024) Professor Cornel West Lecture Six: A Love Supreme (A Way Through). 20 May. Available at: <https://www.youtu.be/yhehelwF-8Y?si=3kXN-eX0B3I_xxCW>. (Accessed May 21 2024).
Emerson, R.W. 1842, Essays-second series, The Floating Press, Auckland, New Zealand.
There is also a poem with the same title. Emerson called upon us not to over intellectualise life, nor be drawn to utopian thinking. His point being that it is our personal experiences that forge us, not what we read, or absorb of other’s ideas.
Equality, diversity and inclusivity. For more on this, see Sara Ahmed’s critique.
Varoufakis, Y. (2023). Technofeudalism. London: Bodley House.
Labour are pledging to ban zero-hours contracts. April, 2024.
Coltrane, J. (1965) A Love Supreme. U.S.: Impulse! Records
John Coltrane (2018) A Love Supreme Pt. I - Acknowledgement (Take 1/Alternate) 26 July. Available at: <http://www.youtu.be/OS6jiLhzxEE?si=Tk6mBHp4d85iAWXf>. (Accessed: 22 July 2020).
The song “Amazing Grace” and title track was not written by a Black musician but an English slave trader called John Newton (1725–1807) who converted to Christianity and repented of his previous exploits. Even so, Franklin makes this song her own.
For more on the ubiquity of ‘likes’ and heart emojis, and the frenetic pointlessness of it all (!), see Byung-Chul Han’s Saving Beauty (2017) and more recent The Crisis of Narration (2024).
The latter distinguishes storytelling from storyselling, as detailed in my previous post here, upholding narrative as a life force which mitigates contingency and gives our lives meaning.
Han, Byung-Chul (2017) Saving beauty. London: Polity Press.
Han, Byung-Chul (2024) The crisis of narration. London: Polity Press.
Eye Of The Storm Podcast (2024, April 24) Brian Eno and Yanis Varoufakis | THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION TO ASK | Podcast 3. Available at: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cr75x7Ql3Hk [Accessed May 25 2024].
In conversation with Eno (2024) Varoufakis brings up Badiou and Zizek’s point on love as radical contingency or in other words, “love with the fall” as being complimentary to Eno’s “active surrender”. See Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love (2012) on love as zero-risk, and Žižek who regularly revisits Badiou’s theory in his ongoing criticism of the dating market and algorithmic match making services which, he argues, is taking us back to pre-Romantic times. The phrase also appears in my song “Freezer Delight”, track 20 on Space Junk, which is a political statement, of sorts, with frequent reference to class consciousness, whilst being a fantasy set down the freezer aisle of Asda on a Thursday night, to quote: “But what if I want the fall / Would you be so kind / To pick me up off the floor / To make my shoes shine?”
The University of Edinburgh. (2017) Andrew Carnegie Lecture Series - Brian Eno. 19 January. Available at: <https://youtube.com/watch?v=0qATeJcL1XQ>. (Accessed 25 May 2024).