i feel so bruck up today…

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Prince Buster – “Wreck a Pum Pum” (compilation 2000, tracks late 60s). Ska and rocksteady isn’t something I know very much about (not that that has ever stopped me before, mind). This is a pretty cool compilation of Prince Buster’s party tunes courtesy of Hackney Libraries – so lots of shagging basically. The title track and its female vocal counterpart must go down well in a party situation but I ain’t to keen on hearing that Buster’s “dick is in a terrible state” at 8 o’clock on a Monday morning, even if this is over a great ska version of “the little drummer boy”.

The two tracks which stood out for me were “She Was a Rough Rider”, a touch more subtle, but still just as, uh, engorged… and “Pharoah’s House Crash” which is impassioned and topical: “The firemen strike, the watermen strike… every day you take bucket to the well, one day the bottom must fall out”, i.e. can’t take no more: resistance style….

war dementia!

So Blair doesn’t give a stuff what we think about the war: “history will be my judge”, he bleats. Well that’s just great, cheers. Whilst scrabbling around for a positive side to this pretty terrifying turn of events, I came up with:

a) Clearly Tony is feeling the push – and this just makes him look completely barking mad.

b) Everyone who whined on at me for not voting at the last general election (“But we’ve got to get the tories out! It will be YOUR fault if they get in again!” blah blah blah) has gone Pretty Fucking Quiet these days.

I’ve had a few discussions with people over the last few months about the motivation behind the war – like, is it all about oil/the economy/distracting people from trouble at home, etc. And generally we’ve agreed that it isn’t “all about” one particular thing, but I reckon people have underestimated (or as Bush would say “misunderestimated”) Tony’s desire to be a PLAYA. He wants to play the big boy’s games and he reckons that this war will get him on the team, and down in history.

(Incidentally, we had a rambling drunken conversation the other week about how “bling” Saddam is with all those palaces and uniforms, and how you could fit Bush and Blair into that gangsta equation. Blair is obviously a “playa hater”, but we had some trouble with Bush. It was one of those nights).

Anyway. The (ma)lingering liberal in me poses the question: how do you reason with someone like that? And the answer comes back: “you what?”. Blair just isn’t playing the rational discussion game these days. Why would that be? What will happen next? Well, how about we all try using the phrase “history will be my judge” when we are in the middle of heated discussions over the next few weeks, and see how it helps?

I’ve just realised I’m not wearing a belt

Waking up is always a bit unpredictable because me daughter runs tings in our house, and that usually means any time between 6:00am and half past seven. So this morning she throws a spanner in the works by waking up at about quarter past eight. Bit of a rush to leave the house, but I still manage to haul out the walkman and today’s selection is:

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Warrior King – “Virtuous Woman” (2002). Which came out to rave reviews last year, but only reached Hackney libraries recently. It is wicked modern roots – and is more focussed on songs and tunes than the frenzied ranting of yr Sizzlas or Capletons. In fact there are some brilliant tracks on here, like the opening “Power to Chant” which is meaty sound system stuff, and the singles “Education” (on the Storm riddim, which I also have a wicked Buju/Gregory combination on) and “Never Go Where Pagans Go”, both of which are absolute top heavyweight selections in their own right.

It’s pretty positive stuff lyrically (no calling “fire” on everything that moves here) although my personal philosophy obviously differs quite a bit – being a habitual goer of places where pagans go and all that.

Some serious clangers on “Africa Must Be Free”, which moves on from the call to a return to Africa to saying that Europeans should basically stay in Europe and that Palestine is “for the jews”. Ulp.

There are a few weaker tracks which didn’t appeal to me that much on first listen, including a so-so cover of “What’s Going On”. Certainly well worth a loan from the library though – the heights are a must and Warrior King is one I will continue to check.

War Fever part 4

On Waterloo bridge the other night. Another guy walking along, ranting to himself: “Well, if you’re gonna attack a country…”.

Things revving up at work – unexpected people coming in with “Stop The War Badges”, other people who are in the territorial army getting called up to go to the gulf. Somebody stuck a poster up in the kitchen about the march, somebody else tore it down…

Everything is Permuted

Paul Cecil now has a great looking site which covers Temple Press and related publishing and also some interesting stuff on the Process Philosophy of Alfred North, which to be honest I had never heard of.

However, this is pretty good stuff: “Process emphasizes the space between two points. It’s neither the start that’s important, nor the end; but the travelling between. ” Worthy of further investigation…

PE

Continuing the hip hop theme, we now go back… way back to the classics: Public Enemy – “Yo! Bum Rush The Show” (1987?). Pretty intense for first thing in the morning, but some definite classics in there. I normally overlook this in favour of “Millions” or “Fear”, but it’s great.

bitches, weed and mercedes

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On the walkman this morning: Master P – “MP Da Last Don” (1998). An impulse buy in a charity shop at the weekend. Double CD of low-down dirty hip hop for a fiver. Sorta southern G-Funk business, excellent production. The whole rough beats vs smooth strings and synths dynamic. I’m no expert on this stuff, though.

Obviously the lyrics throw up the usual misgivings, but are done pretty artfully and with humour. The best gangsta tracks are always the ones where they talk about the regret of ending up that way, being forced into a corner. (“The ghetto got me crazy, but there’s more to life than bitches, weed and mercedes”).

Got me thinking about how some people (liberals? can I call them that?) expect those on the bottom of the pile to be hyper-conscious and not want materialistic bling bling stuff, but channel their energies into great art or revolutionary politics.

Yeah right. I was at a training course last week and everyone seemed pretty well off, but when it came to doing a talk on your “vision”, people were still banging on about wanting enormous houses and expensive cars.

Plus Master P comes in with some incredibly atonal “huuuuuugh”s on loads of the tracks, which reminds me of U Roy.

war fever 3

And so to the Stop The War march. We’d managed to assemble a handy crew of mates with kids this time – I think a few of us felt that this was better than us all marching separately because people without kids generally want to do different stuff on marches (like nip off to pubs!) and we could keep an eye on each other and all that. It took us about 4 hours to get from Gower Street to Cambridge Circus (normally a 20 minute walk) because of the sheer weight of people. Impressive, but frustrating – it was damn cold and we wanted to keep moving.

Still, there were some nice distractions on the way – someone on Gower Street took the trouble to play music out of their window for us (Paul Simon, admittedly, but still appreciated) plus a rather cute naked man danced around on his windowsill for us, with a banner reading “I love you!” The news was at pains to point out that loads of people were marching for the first time (which presumably is almost mathematically inevitable if it’s the biggest march in the history of the country or whatever), so there was lots of features on painfully middleclass people making banners in their Suffolk conservatories and suchlike. Which is great, of course. The crowd did seem to be the most diverse since the Poll Tax one.

But… you did wonder how far people’s opposition to war would go. My suspicion is that a good few marchers were in favour of war if the UN gave the go ahead, for example. Plus obviously you have yer raggle taggle of misfits who make up broad based coalitions. You know the deal – churches, political parties you wouldn’t normally piss on if they were on fire, that sort of thing. I’m usually quite cynical about the power of marches other than to galvanise people’s feelings and break down the isolation you feel having unpopular views. This is probably because most of the marches I have been on have been 100,000 people tops. You can’t help but feel that 1 or 2 million people makes all the difference and that this will have to have some kind of effect on policy.

And of course once people have marched once and felt good about it, and seen that most people there are not total nutters, they may be inclined to do so again.

So anyway, by the time we got to the Chinatown part of Shaftesbury Avenue, the kids were getting cold and tired (bless them, they did really well!) – so we bailed out. I think I had a vague intention of rejoining the march later, or getting to Hyde Park to see everyone together at the end, but we were all knackered so this didn’t happen.

We went to Burger King instead, heh heh. No doubt there will be some typical anarcho-moralists reading this who are shocked by that, but tough. You try finding somewhere in central london on a cold Saturday afternoon which has room for 3 buggies and food that their passengers will eat.

It was all going really well until I took the little one off to the toilets for a nappy change. I didn’t mind paying 20p to get in, and carrying her through a steel security turnstile, but I was a bit annoyed that after all that there was no changing room. The gents were somewhat inhospitable to say the least. No seats on the toilets in the cubicles (useful for balancing stuff on, or sitting on, or at least stopping the daughter putting her hand down the bowl) and the chrome and concrete fittings were all really depressing. So not one of the best, but at least it was clean. I exited the cubicle with old nappy suitably bagged up, and looked around for a bin.

No bins to be seen but there were a couple of staff in there cleaning up, one of whom was wearing a suit and tie, which I always take to mean a certain amount of helpfulness. Unfortunately for him, the guy gave me a load of blather when I asked where the bin was. He told me that I wasn’t “supposed to bring babies into the men’s toilets”. So obviously a strong commitment to customer service and gender equality there, then.

As I’m sure you can imagine, I questioned him somewhat, uh, “directly” about this. And basically the deal is that if you are a male parent in Burger King, you have to go and get a member of staff to change your baby in the women’s toilets. Now I’m sure Burger King employees have a wide portfolio of skills and backgrounds, and I’m even prepared to believe that some of them are trained by the company in child care, with special attention to nappy changing. But I’m still not convinced that handing over my offspring to a complete stranger to change her nappy is something I would be prepared to do. My conversation with the bloke continued in this vein for a while and we ended up agreeing that the best thing for me to do would be to throw the nappy sack on the floor.