Cranked Up Really High - Stewart Home

CRANKED UP REALLY HIGH –
STEWART HOME

The advantage in re-reading Stewart Home's Cranked Up Really High almost 25 years after it first being published is that all the songs that he writes about are now available on YouTube. Whereas before, when Home wrote for example about a song entitled King Of Punk by former yippie David Peel and declared it to be one of the greatest New York punk songs of the seventies, you just had to take his word for it – or take his words with a pinch of salt. Now, however, at a click you can give it a listen and decide for yourself whether Home is correct, and on this occasion I'm happy to report that he's right and it is indeed a very good song.

He does, however, sometimes get it wrong especially when he's talking about things other than specific songs. In his postscript, for example, he declares that Cranked Up Really High is the best theoretical account of the punk rock phenomenon to date and the only work on punk rock that is worth reading. Well, it's not a bad book at all but then so too is Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus which makes for a bit of a problem because Home seems to have written his book essentially as a riposte to Marcus, particularly regarding Marcus's linking of punk and the Sex Pistols with Situationism.

Rather than linking the Pistols to the Situationists or even to the Velvet Underground, Home makes instead a very good case of linking them more to the 1970s London hippy Underground/Notting Hill scene clustered around such bands as the Deviants, the Pink Fairies, the Edgar Broughton Band, and Hawkwind. Viv Albertine of The Slits made the same connection in her memoir Clothes Music Boys when she described the Sex Pistols on her first encounter with them as being 'loud and raucous but not bad musicians. I'd seen bands that had this anarchic quality before: the Pink Fairies, the Pretty Things, the Edgar Broughton Band...'

Before he joined the Pistols wasn't Johnny Rotten once an old Hawkwind fan himself? Didn't Lemmy even once try and teach Sid Vicious how to play bass? And then there were the record labels. Stiff Records famously released New Rose by The Damned but at the same time they also released Between The Lines by the Pink Faries. Chiswick Records released singles by punk bands such as Radio Stars and Radiators From Space but they also released the débuts from Motorhead and the 101'ers. So yes, Home’s argument is a convincing one.

Cranked Up Really High is essentially a discourse on genres within the punk rock realm with Home plotting a path between various forms of the medium. From the Fugs and the MC5 in America to the Notting Hill scene in London, to the Pistols and '77 punk to American punk to British Oi! To white power rock of the Skrewdriver kind to Riot Grrrl to Vegan Reich. A lot of it is waffle, of course, and comes across at times as being merely a way for Home to wax lyrical about some of his favourite records. Not that this is a bad thing, however, because the strength of the book lies in the way that bands not normally discussed or even ever mentioned are written about: John The Postman, the Depressions, early Adam And The Antz, Crisis, Condemned 84, Close Shave, and even somewhat controversially, Skrewdriver, to name but a few.

Along the way many valid points are made such as when Home says that punk began as music and punks themselves began as music fans and performers, which is kind of obvious but something that's often overlooked. There's a few clangers in there as well though the amusing thing is that it's unclear if they're intentional or not. For example, at one point he writes 'some readers may feel that I come across as suspiciously anti-Bergsonian, holding to the position that time is not real, that all events are merely the unfolding of a reality already existent in the world'. He's making a joke here, right?

At other times straight out of the blue he lurches into Richard Allen territory which comes at odds with the general tenor of the book, for example when he mentions a fight at a Crisis gig and writes 'the chick booted the bastard in the bollocks, severely crippling the cunt'. Is this Home in his 'demolish serious culture' mode with him intentionally trying to sabotage the 'seriousness' of his discourse, or is it just the auto mode that he falls into as soon as he begins writing about violence? Who knows?

For all this, Cranked Up Really High is a good book though I wouldn't go so far as to say it's the only work on punk rock that is worth reading. That honour, in my opinion, still belongs to England's Dreaming by Jon Savage though of course the crown is still open for the stealing...

John Serpico

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea - Yukio Mishima

THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA -

YUKIO MISHIMA

It was all going well up until the part where the children kill a cat and cut its insides open with a pair of scissors. I thought this was meant to be – according to the blurb from the Sunday Telegraph on the back cover – 'a work of exquisite balance and beauty' not a James Herbert novel. I'd earlier forgiven the description of the naked sailor as maybe a Japanese art thing rather than something that should go into Private Eye when it read 'ripping up through the thick hair below the belly, the lustrous temple tower soared triumphantly erect'. Eat your heart out Barbara Cartland. But I persevered...

I must admit, I'm always a bit wary of Japanese literature because I never really trust the translation. If you take the translation at face value then it can work really well and produce some magical if not sometimes twisted language as is the case I always thought with Haruki Murakami or even with song lyrics where the Japanese singer sings in English as translated by themselves – Japanese hardcore punk rock is brilliant for this.

Good novels, however, often tend to have a subtext and a whole other world swirling around under the actual words and if the translation is wrong then that other world is distorted and clouded. At one point, for example, Mishima writes 'with streamers waving and strains of 'Auld Lang Syne' and I immediately wondered is that how he wrote it or the way it's been translated? Is there a Japanese equivalent of 'Auld Lang Syne'?

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukio Mishima is about meaning but what that meaning might be is open to translation. It's many stories within one with each of these stories themselves being multi-layered. To go by the title of the book, the main story is in regard to the sailor although he is just one of the characters and not necessarily the main one, there also being the mother and the son.

It is also about the sea, about glory, about children, pride, destiny, love, life, death and allegory. The film it was made into in 1976 starring Sarah Miles and Kris Kristofferson is weirdly good but at the same time strangely awful. After finishing reading it, the book lingers in the mind because of it being such a conundrum. Is there a relationship here between Yukio Mishima and Ayn Rand, I wonder? Is The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea Yukio Mishima's suicide note written thirteen years before he famously committed hara kiri?

I think it might be.

John Serpico

Riot. Strike. Riot - Joshua Clover

RIOT. STRIKE. RIOT – JOSHUA CLOVER

A riot is not an end unto itself but a means to an end, and what that end might be is the question that needs to be considered. Whether this has always been the case is something for historians to answer but certainly it is how things are today. According to Joshua Clover in his book Riot. Strike. Riot in the past the strike was the method by which workers would have their demands met, and this is very true. The world, however, has changed and nowadays what a strike can achieve has been reduced due to the way economics has been re-arranged. That's not to say the strike is absolutely ineffective or redundant as a tool of action, it's just that the demands a strike can call for have been contained and bracketed.

Clover's book is a complicated dissertation using the language of academia to posit ideas on how we might move toward what is essentially a revolutionary horizon. On reading it, if you don't have the will or that compulsion to move toward that horizon then you're probably going to fall after the first chapter because it's pretty hard going. At times it seems even a little strange to apply such intellectualism to a subject such as riots but then – why not? Are we meant to be intimidated by intellectualism? Are we meant to be intimidated by a riot and see it only as something to be condemned?

Whilst cutting a picaresque swathe through the jungle of words there are some really good points to be found, not only all of Clover's alone but many he has drawn from other sources to embolden his own. Regarding the police, for example, he quotes Guy Debord: 'What is a policeman? He is the commodity's active servant, the man fully subsumed by the commodity, by whose efforts a given product of human labour remains a commodity with the magical property of being paid for. Looting instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes its ultimate logic: the army, the police and the other specialised forces possessed of the State's monopoly on armed violence.'

The conclusion being that the police now stand in the place of the economy, the violence of the commodity made flesh.

Expounding upon this, the strike is applicable to the production phase of capital and the riot is applicable to the consuming and purchasing phase. Looting is still a form of purchasing except the payment is zero. During any so-called 'food riot' of old, the seizing of food by the mob was market regulation, much as exporting food in the midst of dearth is market regulation. Rather than the price being set by those who would profit and rather the market holding sovereignty, it is instead the mob who set the price and who command sovereignty, this same reversal being exemplified during the Gordon Riots of 1780 where the breached wall of Newgate Prison was signed 'His Majesty, King Mob'.

Given that the market was meant to provide full employment and a kind of equality for all, it should by now be abundantly clear that it does no such thing. The ranks of the excluded are swelling and the State can no longer purchase the social peace. It is all stick and no carrots, as Clover puts it. For the lumpenproletariat to strike is not an option and nor has it ever been which is why it is from them that any insurrection will find its urban spearhead.

Being surplus to requirement all that can be done is to hold the lumpenproletariat in check as effectively and as cheaply as possible so as not to impede upon the functioning of the market, the tool for this being the constant threat and constant use of State violence. It's no accident that the prison population is dominated by the workless poor.

'The riot,' writes Clover 'is the other of incarceration. That is to say, it is a consequence of and response to inexorable and intensifying regimes of exclusion, superfluidity, lack of access to goods and State surveillance and violence, along with the State's inability to apportion resources toward the social peace.'

Whilst public services are withered away under the guise of austerity measures or those that might generate a profit sold off and privatised, the services and institutions that money is always found for is the police and prisons. Again, it's no accident.

Of examples of the revolutionary horizon to be moved toward, Clover cites the Paris Commune of 1871 as an example along with the more recent Occupy movement though he's actually very critical of Occupy and pulls it up on some of its (many) failings. Ultimately, there is no blueprint of how to get to where we need to go and even no blueprint of where exactly that is. One thing for sure, however, is that the way things are now and the way things are going is not sustainable and simply cannot continue. Unless, that is, we want to turn the world (or even just the UK?) into a vast sub-North Korean super-state in which self interest is the guiding star, where laissez faire capitalism has free reign and profit is the be all and end all. Where nature and the environment is incidental and just something else to be exploited, where we are ruled over for the benefit of an elite 1% and the other 99% can go hang, or go beg, or go starve, or as writer Whittaker Chambers once put it: 'To a gas chamber – go!'.

The self-serving elite along with all those who benefit from the crumbs from their table must be brought to heel, and this task must fall to those who have no or very little investment in the way things are. The dispossessed. The lumpenproletariat. The excluded. The mob. Call them what you like but the important thing is not to fear them and not to fear a riot unless of course you are part of that 1% or a lickspittle of theirs. Then yes, be afraid because the end game is here. We are in it. Riots are inevitable and the mob is coming. His Majesty, King Mob is coming.

John Serpico