A warm revolution

Ripping it up

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Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash

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Introduction

This piece is an edited version of an essay I published on the Unpsychology Substack last year. If you’d like to read the original longer piece you can find it HERE.

The piece was prompted by my friend and fellow Unpsychology Magazine editor,

Lesley Maclean

, writing on a Warm Data community forum¹. She posted this trailer video for the film Rip It Up And Start Again² and wrote this:

"I loved watching this both because this was the music I listened to as I grew into adulthood, but listening to these musicians talking about what they were doing really evokes the symmathesy³ happening within and around that time.”

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Mark Stewart RIP

One of the talking heads in the film is Mark Stewart, of The Pop Group (and loads of other bands). He died in 2023, so there is a poignancy here. His legacy continued with this video, Cast No Shadow, which was produced alongside the Rip it Up project.

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1 Rip it up

It occurred to me, as I watched the trailer for Rip It Up and Start Again, that music movements – these organic, orgasmic explosions of culture – are places where ‘change’ really does take place. I wasn’t sure at the time that Post-Punk was really my scene (of course, there wasn’t a scene, but many scenes) but seeing those bands and hearing the artists talking made me realise how much their influence seeped into my consciousness.

Revolution starts with intention, spontaneity and ‘ripping it up’; then, all too often, it gets rigidified into rules and tribes. Almost by definition, a cultural revolution only lasts as long as the people involved continue to stick two fingers up at… well, everyone else. Once they become part of a scene, or a movement, or the culture, it’s time to pass on to the next generation – or withdraw to the shadows to keep a small flame burning.

Back in the day - the days when I was growing up as a teenager – pre- rather than post-punk, my revolution came from Ziggy (David, not Steve) and Mott (the Hoople), the cool, rockier end of Glam, which fucked with gender norms in quaint ways that could really only shock the 1970s denizens of Middle England.

It wasn’t a real revolution of course, and I wasn’t a real revolutionary. Despite my leftist leanings, revolution seemed scary and a little ‘uncivilised’. At university, I remember having a debate/argument with a very articulate member of the Socialist Society (or some such group I had joined). I was taking a pragmatic democratic-left stance, and he, a revolutionary marxist, was so scornful of my naïveté and my lame mainstream positions.

At a gig, I felt like a revolutionary, even if only for the evening, and the best bands always had a sense of transgression about them.

Then punk came, and this did seem like a revolution, but it was over before it was even a thing – morphing swiftly into post-punk and new wave which, in turn, grew quickly into a vast, diverse scene. It was hard to get a handle on what bands were cool or authentic and who were the pragmatists, hanging on the coat tails of the 'revolution' in order to make it.

There were other movements brewing across the pond of course. By the time ‘rock’ was fading into MOR and AOR and endless, earnest solos, soul and disco had long been messing with our feet. And as this music came to Europe – in the UK, spawning the Northern Soul scene in the North, more glittery Disco in the South – there was a multi-tentacled revolution growing worldwide.

It became Electronica, House, Rave, Techno, Drum and Bass, Hip Hop, Garage and Grime. These merged with each other (and with post-punk, new wave and grunge). As these waves washed into the mainstream, they were all ruthlessly commercialised (as music from the margins always is). However, a few kept their edge. The seeds and roots of new transgressions, perhaps.

Later in my life, House was part of a personal revolution – a revelation – and I can hear the transgression and punk sensibility, in it even today* - just listen to something like Mike Dunn’s If I Can’t Get Down⁴ to get a sense of it…

House can still be revolutionary in the ways that Glam and Disco could sometimes be. Born from the US Gay/Black experience, and then organically growing in many directions from a myriad of seeds and roots, today it still carries a LGBTQA+ inclusiveness that enables people - identifying as queer, gay, straight, trans or non-binary - to move together: still 4-4 on the dance floor.

These are personal and collective revolutions. They may not change anything directly or systemically, but they can sometimes offer a space in which the ‘system’ can be understood or navigated.

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*As a counterpoint to Rip It Up…, I’d highly recommend the Glitterbox documentary, Where Love Lives: A Story of Dancefloor Culture & Expression about one element of the still-thriving House Party scene around the world, and some the fabulous people who inhabit it! Billy Porter’s piece near the end is deeply moving. The YouTube version is below and the full film is also currently on Amazon Prime HERE.

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2. Nostalgia sucks

Some personal context. As a counsellor and psychotherapist, I’ve been around the ‘personal growth’ and ‘integral’ scenes for far too long. I have always been on the lookout for new ways of helping and understanding, but I was always more a fellow traveller, and I never bought the bright, shiny fantasies embedded in the New Age.

However, it could seem a progressive place to be at a time when the political and cultural Left in the West seemed to be in terminal decline! New Age, humanistic and holistic worlds were often inclusive and open-minded. If not revolutionary, they sometimes questioned social, cultural and economic structural norms - and leaned towards ecological and other-than-human ‘voices’, as well as paying attention to the Earth, and what humans have been doing to it.

However, one of my hesitations and constant niggles about the integral, holistic places I sometimes found myself, was that the art could seem a bit obvious and literal, and the music could often, and definitely still can be, a little bit shit.

Plinky-plonk, diurnal beats for the meditation vibes; earnest jazzers and living-off-the-land folkies; appropriated ‘world music’, played by white people in dreadlocks and harem pants. And the art: brightly coloured over-literalised spiritual and transcendent pieces drawn from themes taken from Hinduism or indigenous cultures. If this seems subjective and judgemental, then I confess to prejudice in this regard! However there’s certainly been a tendency in these spaces to look for ‘traditional’, ‘indigenous’, ‘natural’ vibes – and this is mirrored in other aspects of culture and lifestyle too.

What sometimes seems to be missing is an appreciation and celebration of the genuine transgression, transformation and anarchic joy that are found in the waves of here-and-now underground musical movements. This music might jar and challenge – hurting your ears and shattering your sensibilities. It might sometimes be massively awful, but is NEVER just a little bit shit.

Maybe, these holistic and integral folks are a bit too evolved for all that blood and thunder? Or maybe they have succumbed to the understandable human tendency to stay with what we know. If we were brought up in the sixties, then what people sometimes call ‘my era’ might still be the music of the sixties – much of which was genuinely part of a cultural revolution at the time. Or the seventies, eighties and so on. Or we might kid ourselves that jazz, punk, Northern Soul, reggae or traditional folk are still where the edge lies…

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3. Everything moves on…

I guess we all move on. I am an old leftie, but I’m no longer stuck in the days of Red Wedge, the Anti-Nazi League and the old-skool disco and dance music that messed so wonderfully with my head and feet back then. They’re all still in there, of course (I went to see Billy Bragg on his 40th anniversary tour, for god’s sake!) but I’m always looking out for what is bubbling under, because that’s where the warm stuff always is…

And, lest we forget, these are ‘bubbling’ days of global warming, the climate emergency, wars, colonialism, genocide and governments and corporations unable or unwilling to move beyond our civilisation's straight-line reliance on carbon to keep the system running.

Is there an equivalent punk/post-punk that will respond to this artistically? Or will we be locked in an endless loop of looking back, either to an imagined golden age or historical dystopia, as we advance into the hot-mess of a warming future, to a soundtrack of power ballads, appropriated dub beats and earnest singer-songwriters?

In Rip It Up, founder-member of The Pop Group, Mark Stewart (who died in 2023) says, with characteristic grumpiness:

“I’m loathe to talk about the past, but because you’re making this bloody film, I’d like to put a few things straight, of this, what I call, historical revisionism”.

He wants to warn us off nostalgia. He says it right. Nostalgia sucks. We all do it from time to time, but when it sticks, we get stuck. And music gets stuck more than most things in our neo-liberal, commercially compulsive culture.

In truth, there were no golden ages - culturally, musically, ecologically, politically. There is history, of course, and we should honour that, and our ancestors – the transgressors and revolutionaries who came before us. Yet perhaps the only thing we can ever say about the times we grew up in – our so-called ‘formative years’ – is that these particular experiences and expressions are part of the person we became. They are part of our ’self’; not in any predictable or deterministic way, but certainly in a sense that is deeply relational and collective. It’s this personal ecology of sound and noise that this publication is all about.

This is not ‘development’ or ‘growth’ or ‘adulting’, but is an ongoing, lifelong process of revealing and catalysing, of bringing together elements in relationship and creativity that will, before long, spring apart again.

One of the cultural myths of our age is that through ‘personal development’ we improve ourselves. This is a fallacy. For all we know, the women and men who were at the heart of the punk and post-punk revolutions (and many others) back in their day, have not ‘improved’ themselves. They might actually have messed themselves up. Never meet your heroes, we are told, and I think this is wise – especially heroes from our past. They might not have grown at all. They might have been arseholes back then, and might be bigger arseholes now. That doesn’t take away what they achieved, but the baton of relevance is always handed on – and it takes great self awareness and grace to recognise this and to step back or move aside.

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4. In the City

Punk, House, Post-Punk, Jazz, Soul, Hip Hop, Folk - all the major 20th century musical movements and their social, cultural, political and artistic reference points – have some things in common. They come, not from integral, holistic plinky-plonky dreams of wilderness and nature, but emerge from human labour and struggle – often in urban settings (‘in the City’). These urban and suburban movements (Detroit, Chicago, Berlin, Liverpool, Manchester and way, way beyond) stand for the expression of something chaotic, anarchic, liberating and communitarian hidden deep within the human spirit.

It’s ironic that, for all the eco-talk of ‘rewilding’, it is often in these transgressive, urban cultural spaces – framed most clearly by ‘popular’ music – that we are truly in touch with the ‘wild’ parts of being human. In some ways, ‘back to nature’ pseudo-rebels can be deeply reactionary and tame, stuck in nostalgia – often turning their back on the realities and complexities of our times, perhaps not wishing to face up to the personal and collective trauma that they – we all – hold.

I don’t want to set up a false polarity here, nor to make music into some over-serious analogy for life and philosophy. People like what they like – and there are transgressive and ‘punk’ strands in all musical genres – including metal, country and traditional folk. And, of course, music can be soothing and transcendent, calming, predictable, uplifting and spiritual too, and this is entirely OK.

However, the often self-conscious New Age practices of transformation – that are slickly turned into monetised products by ever-adaptive capitalist systems – offer nothing more than can be experienced (often more deeply and viscerally) on a dance floor or at a gig - or even in our bedrooms.

As has probably been said many times before, what lies behind punk (and post-punk, House and the rest of these ‘revolutions’) is an attitude – embedded in the present moment – that emerges when people come together at a particular unpredictable confluence of circumstances, without – as a number of the post-punk pioneers say in the film – a ‘rulebook’.

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5. Revolutions carry a warning

I was reminded of this while reading China Miéville’s exhilarating history of the Russian October Revolution of 1917.⁵ All through those extraordinary few months, there was such a flurry of social, cultural and political activity and change. The action ebbed and flowed through the city of St Petersburg, and beyond, at breathtaking speed. Everything was up for grabs, there were no rules – or rather the rules (even those agreed upon the night before!) were always up for changing.

It reminded me a bit of the Rip It Up musical revolution and the ways streams of thought and culture can converge, then rush downstream with great speed and intensity, with a sense that anything is possible – right here, right now.

However, we know what happened to the actual Russian Revolution as that swollen bloody river moved downstream. And this reminds us that in any ‘movement’, the transition to ‘organisation’ might be the most dangerous phase, in which the complexity, creativity, chaos, transgression and relational joy is either welcomed as bringing something new and essential for the human (and other-than-human) condition; or rejected, ‘othered’, twisted or pushed back into the shadows, as the potential for ‘change’ is lost.

On the positive side – and sticking with warm musical revolutions now – there will always be a new wave of true rebels and artists ready to rip it up and start again. I salute them, and look forward to listening to their noise; at first screwing my face up at the brash, unfamiliarity of it and then, later, getting it; sensing that there is once again a tear in the fabric through which the gods of noise can be heard.

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Notes and references

1. Warm Data is a practice and way of seeing the world that emerges from the work of Nora Bateson. Nora’s new book Combining is available now from https://www.combining.life.

2. Rip It Up And Start Again is a planned film by Nikolaos Katranis and Russell Craig Richardson about the global Post Punk scene of 1978 to 1984. The extended trailer can be found HERE.

3. Symmathesy is a word coined by Nora Bateson: “this notion of mutual learning taking place in-between contexts”. Find out more in her Substack article HERE on Unpsychology Voices.

4. Mike Dunn’s If I Can’t Get Down is from his 2020 album, My House From All Angles.

5. October: The Story of the Russian Revolution by China Miéville, published by Verso Books, 2018