BEN WATSON

Everything points to S. A. today!

Having completed tomorrow’s Late Lunch, I was casting around for tracks for Friday’s The OTL Show … I played Yamaha strings to Garth’s blik’nsnaar, then pulled an LP from the shelf. Not quite totally at random, it was from the “world” section (my LP collection is basically Anglo-American, with forays into German and Russian Free Jazz, the Caribbean and Mediterranean, plus Japanese stuff, avant-classical from all over the globe, plus ethnological documents from everywhere) … It was Veit Erlmann’s Iscathamiya LP of Zulu worker-choir music! Held in the shrinkwrap was a reply to an (obviously) anguished letter I’d written to the record company in 1988 asking for the rest of the sleevenotes (a fascinating essay on the back of the LP by Erlmann was continued “on inner bag” it said, but mine was a plain inner sleeve), saying they couldn’t find it. I really liked Erlmann’s realistic appraisal of notions of ethnic “purity”/racial essence in music. Never mind, I just found this: core.ac.uk. I see Erlmann’s written a book decrying copyright law in recorded music as an oppressive capitalist strategem, looks good too.

Cheers

OTL

ammas

On 2023/06/07 15:37, Ben Watson wrote:

Interesting how academic sociology marches in step worldwide …

The article Veit Erlmann wrote for Witwatersrand University’s History Workshop in 1987 on working-class choirs ends with a quote by Ernesto Laclau, so … fully in line with the EuroCom “Gramscian” idea of class alliance as the only way forward (“hegemony”). His article is very informative and detailed about the choirs – clear about their being both expressions of protest and a means of demonstrating aptness for employment – but the focus on culture (always impure/mixed/”contradictory”) blocks the formation of an independent working-class politics – and excludes any critical avantgarde à la Shepp/Bailey/Erasmus.

In 1979, I tried to get funding for a PhD on the function of music in the struggle between the avantgarde and the mass culture industry. I never secured the funding to do it (so did my research into Zappa on unemployment benefits), even though some music departments were interested (including Wilfred Mellors in York and David Osmund-Smith at Sussex). My combination of SWP activism (ANL, Right To Work, Rock Against Racism) and Adorno went down like a lead balloon at the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies. Stuart Hall looked at me like shit on the end of stick for saying George Duke’s records after being exposed to a mass audience by Zappa were compromised by commercialism. Compromise was their watchword! They rejected my application.

I’m (slowly) reading the Revolutionary History volume on the Balkans. Again and again, an emphasis on “culture” is used by reformists like Karl Kautsky to justify illusions in colonialism – and finally to justify World War I (probably the most barbaric event so far in world history!). I see the “cultural turn” in academic Marxism – which gave me high hopes for a job in the 80s (never fulfilled) – as a similar kind of compromise. These people love to analyse “working-class culture”, but always from a point of scholarly superiority, they don’t try and make anything happen in the forms themselves.

Description is the enemy of creativity.

This is the reason Sezgin is so keen to reveal the Leninism of the 1920s avantgarde. True art and true politics go together – sociologies of “working-class culture” as something separate from the analyst always end up in the reformist, pro-war camp. We must hold on to this as the war in Ukraine hots up.

It’s fun talking to you, Aryan & co. Raises ghosts!

Cheers

OTL

ammas