Mixing literature, art, politics, philosophy & music

doublethink

Myself and some friends have embarked on a project, a band that tries to mix these things (and more). The reason I have posted something about it here in literature is that we are probably more driven by books than by music, and besides, I'm sick of talking to people who just want a sequel to the Beatles. Basically, we are still looking for a likeminded guitarist, or a likeminded keyboard player. So if you know anyone that might be at all interested, could you please mention it to them? Or if you are interested yourself, even better. Any help would be much appreciated, thanks. Mark



Just out of interest, here is a monster post I put up to scare away 99.99% of the people who read it in the music section of this place. Keep in mind that it is written for the general guitar-playing public...

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"I am the singer/guitarist in a band, and we have been interested in taking on another guitarist for some time now. We recently decided that if a likeminded keyboard player came our way we would gladly take him/her onboard also.

First things first, I should say that what we want to do as a band is not for everyone. Most people do just want to sing songs, get pissed, and become rich and famous. It can be quite difficult to explain in less than a couple of hours what I and the rest of the band want to do with this band.

We would like to think that our lyrics are an obsolutely essential part of who we are, both as people and as a band. We try to merge so many things that it can be very overwhelming to try and explain what we are looking to do. We would like to mix poetry with music, pashion with expression, words/thoughts with people's lives. I want to put some art back into artistry, and meaning back into music. We don't expect to change the world with one flawless embracing motion, all we really hope for is to reach some people to who will adopt what we create, and graft it into their lives. Whether 60 people, or 60 million people feel that way about us, I don't think it would make that much of a difference to whether we viewed the band as a success or not. Either way, we'll just keep slugging away at it.

Our main interests as friends and as a band generally float around things like philosophy, politics, sociology, art, anthropology, film, literature... etc. This, I have to say is quite important, because it works into our personalities, our lives, our lyrics and hopefully our music.

We are not ogre's, but we have tried one degree of compromise after another and it hastn't worked out in the past. We can't really afford to take on anyone who wants very different things from the band, or someone that isn't up to similar musical proficiency. Basically it's the same deal as practically any other band, we would need you to have similar interests, want to make similar music, and be able to hold your own weight musically.

Influences: I hate to sound like such a stereotypical indieboy, but I have to say that similar influences would probably go a long way, especially in the early stages. It just works much better if the people trying to play together know the same songs. At least a few of them.

Our main influences in music: would be The Manic Street Preachers, The Cure (quite recently), The Smiths, Joy Division... etc. We all obviously have our own personal tastes as well, but these are ones we all share (off the top of my head). Oh, and The Clash. We don't tend to play much by them, but we all like them and have been listening to them for some time. We used to play a lot of Smashing Pumpkins, not so much anymore, but they still linger in memory and style I suppose. Although we tend to have a slight disaffection for the oxford boys now, we have also all been fans of radiohead at some point too.

Our main influences in books etc: Everything from Orwell to Wittgenstein, Nietzsche to Camus&Sartre, Chuck Palahniuk to Luke Rhineheart, Derrida to Guy DeBord, Miller to Marx. ****, the list goes on and on. It's like being asked to describe the day you were born.

Art: We have covered a whole wall of the shed (soundproofed place where we jam) with politicised collages, some of it is quite hilarious. I might be able to get pictures if anyone shows particular interest. We like taking other peoples pictures and words and twisting them into some sort of expresive message. In terms of artists that have influenced us... phew... em, Francis Bacon, I was fairly into Cezanne in school. Dabbled with dali too. Oh, and we often take the piss out of the Dadaists, but thats only because we are jealous. Destructive art can be really interesting too.

Based: We all live in Naas, Co. Kildare, but we all go to college in Dublin city centre, so we spend most of our time in town. As long as you would be prepared to travel a little bit, living in Dublin shouldn't pose too much of a problem. We wouldn't expect anyone to travel down all the time anyway, we could sort something out in town.

Oh, by the way, I'm 19 going on 20 soon, Hil is 19, and calv is 21. We have been playing together for a few years now. Especially myself and Calv, the last 4 years give or take. Someone roughly the same age would be good, but we are not super picky. As long as your not going to be settling down with a ford focus, or stuck in secondary school it shouldn't pose a problem. So basically that means someone between 18-25, preferably anyway.

Keyboards: After listening to a lot of The Cure lately, the rest of the band have had a bit of a turnaround on the idea of having a full-time keyboard player in the band. If you want an idea of the kind of keyboard sound and style we are looking for, I would suggest listening to all of "Disintegration" (Cure album), "Going Nowhere" (Cure song off "The Cure", the self-titled album), "Goodnight and Farewell" (Pumpkins song off Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness). They would be just a few examples that we all think would be a lovely sound for the kind of music we would like to make as a four or five piece.

Guitar: Well most of the songwriting is done by myself and Calv. Calv plays the drums, and is also in my opinion (not in his) a very good guitarist. He's about as good as me on the guitar, and I have been playing for almost 7 years now. Everyone in the band has written lyrics at some point or another. The usual writing dynamic would be one of us writes something, pass it round, it usually goes through a few re-writes while we play around with guitar riffs alongside. Sometimes together, sometimes alone. Basically, you would probably want to be able and willing to write songs with me (or Calv in guitar terms). It seems to be where a lot of our work is done. I would be able/willing to bring a guitar into college with me and jam wherever in town (relatively often) if someone interested in joining did live in Dublin. Thats how I would imagine getting around the distance between Dublin and Naas.

Wow. I didn't realise we had so many criteria. We have learned to be more picky and blunt due to some bad experiences. I think that's more than enough for now anyway.

I hope I didn't put anyone off. The things I said here are not neccessarily iron clad, if you are interested at all at least give me a shout. Again, we're not ogres.

Thanks for your time

Mark: Undoinghistory@hotmail.com "

pork99

If I lived in Naas I might be so bored I'd try reading Derrida too.

Can any of you make any sense of him?

".. No one who has something original or important to say will willingly run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief."

Peter Medawar

Redleslie2

pork99 wrote:

If I lived in Naas I might be so bored I'd try reading Derrida too.

Can any of you make any sense of him?

Derrida had a huge influence on Scritti Politti's music. Link. That's how I first came across his work.

pork99

Redleslie2 wrote:

Derrida had a huge influence on Scritti Politti's music.

I don't remember them on Top of the Pops. And my childhood memories of TOTP go back to the mid 70s - the era of Jimmy Saville reclining on the stage in a bright yellow jacket and a pair of almost illegally short shorts.

btw interesting link

However when I read stuff like

According to Green, pop's assertion of rhythm, its interruption of language, its sexuality, the way in which it presents identity and dissolves identity, and the means with which it does so, converges with many postmodern philosophical concerns. 'It is possible to think about music as something that undoes. In as much as it is not semantic, does not have that bedrock of meaning, other than having other ways of circumscribing it, it is a deconstructive mood' (Green in: Toop, 1988, my italics). 'When I met Derrida he said that what I was doing was part of the same project of undoing and unsettling that he's engaged in. He's written that what sets the musician apart is the possibility of meaninglessness. That unsettling has always been my experience of pop, from the earliest moments - pop is about the abuse of language' (Green in: Reynolds, 1988).

It almost makes sense then it doesn't - vaugeness and obfuscation instead of clarity and explanation. And any sense I get out of it is the banal observation that music is non-verbal communication. Well I already knew that.

Then again Post Modernism never mind pop is about "the abuse of language"

http://www.puc.edu/Faculty/James_Van_Hise/postmodernism-disrobed.pdf

Redleslie2

pork99 wrote:

I don't remember them on Top of the Pops. And my childhood memories of TOTP go back to the mid 70s - the era of Jimmy Saville reclining on the stage in a bright yellow jacket and a pair of almost illegally short shorts.

I distinctly remember them doing The Word Girl on Totp, also remember seeing them in Smash Hits (my sister's) and the NME (my brother's) from time to time. Thank you for dredging up that disturbing image of Saville from my youth just when I thought such things had been banished from my consciousness for good.

I'm not disagreeing with you really, I'm a bit neutral on Derrida, but I'd be interested to see if the threadstarter has anything to say about him. Incidentally I think Guy Debord is way overrated, Raoul Vaneigem is far more accessible.

doublethink

I wrote a huge response the other night at about 4 in the morning, and in the process pressed backspace quickly to delete a word, and the browser skipped back to the last page and erased the whole thing. I was too pissed off to respond. I can't spend the time online now forming the response, but I will soon. Basically I'll get back to you in the next day or two. (sorry about the ****ness of the current reply) :rolleyes:

Mark

Tusky

Sounds a bit artys fartsy to me.

DadaKopf

Derrida's project is, I think, an attempt to explain Hegel's conundrum of how the worlds of ideas and phenomena interact. Normally we assume ideas are separate from reality, but Hegel all those hundreds of years ago argued that 'reality' is the mediation between the two - it's missing the point entirely to believe we can access the objective world, because the objective is eternally bound in the subjective. Hegel goes beyond the beyond. Derrida is but one attempt to explain this.

Because Derrida rightly sees language as a system which words constantly refer to things that are no longer present, its 'true' meaning is lost into the slipstream of time and so we're only left with fragments and traces. This is an inherently political project because it undermines anyone's claim to Truth - truth is never a valueless utterance, it's the attempt by a person to control others' thoughts for particular objectives. Thus, 'facts of the matter', and 'persistent features of human life', of 'common sense' are just interpretations infused with political intent.

While we need a certain amount of faith in our models of the world, we have to remember they're only models and are subject to change. Otherwise, it's slavery.

Redleslie: I don't think Debord is overrated, Vangiem is great, but there was way more to the SI than those two. Asger Jorn and Constant were highly influential members of the group, too. In a sense, they attempted to operationalise what Derrida and others like him attempted, they tried to actualise Hegel's conundrum, albeit within a radically revised Marxist framework. I mean, to say that Debord is overrated and Vangiem is "accessible" is to miss the point entirely. They tried to open up people's imaginations which had been petrified by advanced capitalism - they were concerned with absolute freedom. They were concerned with the political value of art. How, then, can one provoke people into living if they're "accessible" and scientistically systematic? Moreover, to pin the SI on two characters is to disgrace what they were attempting - they worked hard to create a movement with no centre, no one architect. It was intended to be a revolving whirlighig of ideas from all sources - it was intended to be a movement that mimicked and transcended the fragmented structure of late capitalism itself. The SI hoped to strike capitalism's own natural resonance frequency and smash it to bits. I always conceive of the SI as never pin-downable to a handful of individuals.

Doublethink, you guys sound ambitious, but I'm afraid I don't dig your musical influences! I play the guitar and would love to get into this sort of stuff, but I'm busy with college and you guys live in Naas. Eugh.

cilamc

Ooh lovely! Political pop! Well I'll have fun reading back over all those lenghthy earlier posts in a mo but first I'll nod towards some great bands who were into politics ans philosophy...

Scritti Politti - According to a piece in Smash Hits "The Word Girl" is about the use of the word girl (surprise!) in pop songs. Semiotics in Smash Hits! How times change, eh? Wonderful track, great album "Cupid and Psyche 85" and a great band. I recommend their first album "Songs To Remember" from 82 which has "Asylums In Jerusalem", "Faithless" (where the Rollo and co. got the name from), "Jacques Derrida" and best of all "The Sweetest Girl" - one of the most lovely lilting pop records of its day. "Anhomie and Bonhomie" from 99 is an excellent album, by the way! Green features on Kylie's current album on the track "Someday"!

McCarthy - Socialist agit-popsters who were on the C86 NME compilation. You can get a great complilation of theirs called "The Very Best Of" - I got my copy from Tower in Wicklow St a couple of years ago. "We Are All Bourgeois Now" is a fab little tune, another great one is "Use A Bank I'd Rather Die". They split in 1990 but evolved into Stereolab who carried on mining this political stream of continental pop. Excellent stuff. But that's another, brilliant, story.

Billy Bragg - gets up people's noses, but I love his mixture of confessional love songs and angsty lefty rebel-rousing numbers. Great place to start is the "Must I Paint You A Picture?" compilation from last year.

Crass - they were a bunch of feminist, vegetarian commune dwelling hippy-punks. They were very confrontational, they've a great album in "Penis Envy" from 1981 if you're into really angry post-punk. "How Does It Feel To Be The Mother Of A Thousand Dead" was covered recently by Ronan Keating! (Not really...)

The Pop Group - from Bristol and founders of the whole Wild Bunch scene which spawned Mark Stewart and the Maffia, Rip Rig and Panic, Nellee Hooper, Soul II Soul, Massive Attack, Portishead, Tricky etc., They were really political and situationist international followers too. Best known for "We Are All Prostitutes", but look out for "Y" or "For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder" albums in second hand shops of Dublin!

Oh that's my Top 5 for now, there are loads more. You'd like Paul Morley maybe, ex-NME journalist, founder of ZTT, member of Art of Noise - he's really into the SI and he has written some really great books, "Ask: The Chatter of Pop", "Nothing" and "Words and Music".

Oh the best of luck with your band doublethink!! Like your ideas a lot and your influences, would love to help out but I'm too old (26) and live in Spain at the moment. Would love to hear how it all goes along for you guys though! Fave Cure albums for me are "17 Seconds", "Pornography" and "Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me" btw. Oh and have you heard of Zlavoj Zizek? He's a good writer, a "post-structuralist" but writes on pop culture, films, pop and so on.

Jacques Derrida's "Writing and Difference" changed my life, really...

pork99

I think this, from theonion.com, kind of says it all

Redleslie2

DadaKopf wrote:

Redleslie: I don't think Debord is overrated, Vangiem is great, but there was way more to the SI than those two.

Well in fairness they're the only 2 of the SI I've read and it's been about 3 years since I've looked at Debord's stuff so maybe a reappraisal is in order.

DadaKopf

You ever seen this?: www.infopool.org.uk

http://www.infopool.org.uk/situpool.htm

doublethink

cilamc wrote:

Ooh lovely! Political pop! Well I'll have fun reading back over all those lenghthy earlier posts in a mo but first I'll nod towards some great bands who were into politics ans philosophy...

Scritti Politti - According to a piece in Smash Hits "The Word Girl" is about the use of the word girl (surprise!) in pop songs. Semiotics in Smash Hits! How times change, eh? Wonderful track, great album "Cupid and Psyche 85" and a great band. I recommend their first album "Songs To Remember" from 82 which has "Asylums In Jerusalem", "Faithless" (where the Rollo and co. got the name from), "Jacques Derrida" and best of all "The Sweetest Girl" - one of the most lovely lilting pop records of its day. "Anhomie and Bonhomie" from 99 is an excellent album, by the way! Green features on Kylie's current album on the track "Someday"!

McCarthy - Socialist agit-popsters who were on the C86 NME compilation. You can get a great complilation of theirs called "The Very Best Of" - I got my copy from Tower in Wicklow St a couple of years ago. "We Are All Bourgeois Now" is a fab little tune, another great one is "Use A Bank I'd Rather Die". They split in 1990 but evolved into Stereolab who carried on mining this political stream of continental pop. Excellent stuff. But that's another, brilliant, story.

Billy Bragg - gets up people's noses, but I love his mixture of confessional love songs and angsty lefty rebel-rousing numbers. Great place to start is the "Must I Paint You A Picture?" compilation from last year.

Crass - they were a bunch of feminist, vegetarian commune dwelling hippy-punks. They were very confrontational, they've a great album in "Penis Envy" from 1981 if you're into really angry post-punk. "How Does It Feel To Be The Mother Of A Thousand Dead" was covered recently by Ronan Keating! (Not really...)

The Pop Group - from Bristol and founders of the whole Wild Bunch scene which spawned Mark Stewart and the Maffia, Rip Rig and Panic, Nellee Hooper, Soul II Soul, Massive Attack, Portishead, Tricky etc., They were really political and situationist international followers too. Best known for "We Are All Prostitutes", but look out for "Y" or "For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder" albums in second hand shops of Dublin!

Oh that's my Top 5 for now, there are loads more. You'd like Paul Morley maybe, ex-NME journalist, founder of ZTT, member of Art of Noise - he's really into the SI and he has written some really great books, "Ask: The Chatter of Pop", "Nothing" and "Words and Music".

Oh the best of luck with your band doublethink!! Like your ideas a lot and your influences, would love to help out but I'm too old (26) and live in Spain at the moment. Would love to hear how it all goes along for you guys though! Fave Cure albums for me are "17 Seconds", "Pornography" and "Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me" btw. Oh and have you heard of Zlavoj Zizek? He's a good writer, a "post-structuralist" but writes on pop culture, films, pop and so on.

Jacques Derrida's "Writing and Difference" changed my life, really...

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Thanks for the info on the music/philosophy crossovers. I don't know if it's because of you mentioning them and us remembering them subconsciously, or just coincidence, but we have started listening to a few of the bands you mentioned there. I got some scritti pollitti, thought it was pretty cheesy, but hey, I guess thats what you get when you give a postmodernist studio time

Cal got quite into McCarthy. I never knew stereolab were any relation, I might give them a look too.

I have some Massive attack stuff, but I never picked up on any overtly political references. I might not have heard it because I wasn't expecting it. Perhaps they are worth a second look. Portishead were on my long list of things to do. The sort of list you never actually do.

In terms of underground stuff, one thing does spring to mind. Firstly I'd like to say that I don't think the manics ever really get the credit they deserve for the range and depth of references they make in and out of their music. (that wasn't my point though) Their lyricist/bassist and general bigmouth is Nicky Wire/Jones, and he has been hugely inspired by his brother Patrick Jones. He is a poet, and I saw a colaborative music attempt called big noise. I'm not sure who was doing the music, I know James Dean Bradfield (Manics singer/guitarist) was involved. In it Patrick Jones was basically reciting poetry/lyrics over music, and I have to say, it was really impressive. The track was called Guerilla Tapestry...

Lyrics
The Guerilla Tapestry [Patrick Jones Featuring James Dean Bradfield] [Printer Friendly]

Author: Patrick Jones
We are not deceived by your words
We see through your promises
We sanctify your lies
We are the disaffected
The isolated wounds of subtle napalm
Shopping doesn't make us happy
Commercials cull our sensitivity
Freedom is nothing without responsibility
But in the rain drenched tarpaulins of the market traders
Lays the epitomy of belief
Clinging to our pennies on entrance or exit
A memory or dream
This hole in my throat
This gap in the ink
This place without meaning
This stuttering eloquence of screaming
Save, save us all
Allow desolations
Find a path
Be unafraid to act
Hold life
Stand, stand oak tall
Even the smallest body makes a shadow
In the hanging out of washing
The protest of discipline
Tiny hands scraping solitudes
Clinging to moments
Creating miracles from everyday routines
In the dignity or ironing
In the anxiety of mortgages
The the the sentence of being
But still still still the being
We are butterflies trapped in the frost
Victory is acknowledging the fact that we
We have not yet lost
So caress me with your alienation
Alienate me with your caress
Create me with your credit
And pour me power through direct debit
Feed me freedom from selling shares
And paint me a symbol and tell me I'm free
We are
We are the guerilla tapestry
In the silence of insurance payments
Council tax benefits
Industrial tribunals
The penny pinchers
The super savers
The lottery watchers
We are the incoherent throats searching for sound
The peaceful protestor
The single mother
The social worker at the homeless shelter
We are the happy shoppers
The credit cravers
The sales offers
The poundstretchers
The breaking fabric of modernity
Stitched only by our solitude
We are the temporary fragments of a capitalist master plan
Unemployment statistics
Family credit beggars
No-collar coolies
Part time slaves
Sucking severances
Praying for meaning
Not this lipless screaming
And in these motives that purify
In these acts that dignify
In this tiny gesture of defiance
Is an articulation of a point
A vision versed in lament
This hate
This hate is born from love
We are the undying
The breath of chlorophyll over the concrete
The soul against the gold
We are loneliness burned iron fists fuelled by injustice
We are the denied yet unified
We are the tapestry
The crackling cracks of modernity
Dislocated desperations stitched together
By the disparate verses of out skin
I write therefore we exist
We exist therefore I write
And from this page this scream this no
From the supermarket to the dole
From the youth centre to the old people's home
Is the sound of the silence
Of the sound of the alone to the alone
The sound of the ability to resist
And in this ink there is the blood of a thousand miners
And in this ink the eyes of five hundred dockers
The struggle of my father
The sensitivity of my mother
And the hand of my baby
And in this prison cell there is the sky sunlight
And in these words the power they tried to deny us
The stab of a killer
The tourniquet of a nurse
And in this ink is one
Is many
Is you and I
And in this voice
The milk of a mother
Against against against
Their chains that smother
Mother to man to woman to child
The guerilla tapestry spread nationwide
And in the division there is a unity
And in this incision there is a sanctity
And in this pale silent page
Bisters a cacophony enraged
With the burn of generations
Following the bullet of emancipation
We are we are the threads
We are we are the severance
We are we are the stitches
We are we are a no in search of a yes
We are we are the breaking
We are we are the making
The blind beginning to see
We are we are we are the guerilla tapestry

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The music is quite good

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Well if you move somewhere closer than Spain gimme a shout, as we never found anyone we thought would work out.