Sonic warfare

What's happened to Burial’s new album? Since the Mercury-nominated Untrue came out in 2007, only a limited amount of new material has sporadically appeared, most of which has been amazing. My favourite is Untitled Track II, which was played on BBC 1Xtra in 2009.

Burial surfaced in 2006 and maintained a Banksy-style anonymity until he decided that this was detracting from the music and outed himself as South Londoner Will Bevan, alumni of the Elliot School in Putney, also attended by Hot Chip, Four Tet and the XX. Usually lumped in with the dubstep scene,  Burial’s esoteric beats are mesmerisingly haunting and elegiac, setting him apart in a scene which has become increasingly homogeneous.
 
He talks beautifully about his music and the 'dark' aspect of it. In an interview with The Guardian he says:

"When I'm awake all night, sometimes I see the people and the city waking up around me. I feel a little bit moody at them for stepping into my night-time. What I want is that feeling when you're in the rain, or a storm. It's a shiver at the edge of your mind, an atmosphere of hearing a sad, distant sound, but it seems closer - like it's just for you. Like hearing rain or a whale-song, a cry in the dark, the far cry."

It's difficult to put into words what 'dark' means in terms of dub-influenced electronica, but it usually features a predominance of minor or chromatic keys and resonant, sub-low bass, creating an atmosphere of dread and foreboding.

I’ve always been interested in dark music, which probably started when I first heard the Dr Who theme tune! I remember being into drum and bass about ten years ago and reading somewhere that drum and bass nights in London were banning DJs from playing dark drum and bass because it was causing people to start fighting! I remember being fascinated that music could still have such a chemical and primal effect on people, albeit in a negative way.

I’d love to explore this theme further. Kode9 (AKA Steve Goodman) runs the Hyperdub record label and is the man who discovered Burial. Without trying to make sweeping generalisations, I’m willing to bet he’s the only producer in dubstep to have a PhD in Philosophy. He lectures on sonic culture at the University of East London and he’s published a book called Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. I want this book!

It explores ways in which sound and music have been used to control and affect people. The description on Amazon talks about “the cosmic vibrations left behind by the big bang” and “the politics of frequency”. Intriguing stuff!

Most people are aware of the guards in Gauntanamo Bay subjecting detainees to Metallica at full volume for hours on end to induce them into confessing. The BBC also reported in 2006 that a mobile sonic device was being used in Grimsby to deter teenagers from lingering around shops in target areas by emitting an ultra-high frequency blast (around 19–20 kHz) that teenagers or people under approximately 20 are susceptible to and find uncomfortable.

Sonic weapons are officially classified as Non-Lethal Weapons and are an area of research for the military. In The Men Who Stare at Goats, a 2004 book about paranormal and psychological techniques used in the military, author Jon Ronson cites a leaked US military report titled "Non-Lethal Weapons: Terms and References" in which 21 acoustic weapons are listed, in various stages of development. Infrasound is described as "Very low-frequency sound which can travel long distances and easily penetrate most buildings and vehicles... biophysical effects are projected to be: nausea, loss of bowels, disorientation, vomiting, potential internal organ damage or death may occur".

Pretty frightening stuff, but even more intriguing is a technique called the Psycho-Correction Device, which "involves influencing subjects visually or aurally with embedded subliminal messages". Ronson cites an account from a English Guantanamo Bay detainee called Jamal Al-Harith who described being played at normal volume a Fleetwood Mac CD which may or may not have contained subliminal messages.

Not having read the book, I can't vouch for it's credibility or veracity – maybe the story about Fleetwood Mac is just Rumours...

Back to the future

Recently I was listening to Mark Ronson's single Bang Bang Bang on YouTube and guess what? I actually quite like it! It features Q-Tip and MNDR and displays some nice retro-futurist vibes, which I've been thinking about a lot lately. It also bizarrely appropriates the lyrics of traditional French nursery rhyme Allouette – a song about plucking the feathers from a Skylark!


The song and video evoke a kind of 60s/70s futuristic feel, with the effect that it manages to seem retro and strangely foward-thinking at the same time.

This also struck me about Julian Casablancas' solo album Phrazes for the Young (even the title, actually taken from an Oscar Wilde title, gives off this vibe with the use of the z!). It's all spacey analogue synths and and the artwork is all planets and trippy 80s lazers.

I like this retro-futurist schtick, but I can't help thinking, are these artists (both known for their previous retro-laden work) duping people into thinking that they're making a progression, while simply aping forward-thinking notions of yet another past era?

It's like when, a few years ago, indie bands started ditching their guitars for synthesisers as a reaction to retro guitar music which relied too heavily on the past.

This in itself is pretty meaningless, because no-one's trying to pretend there's anything modern about synthesisers – they've been commercially available since the 60s (Wikipedia claims the synthesiser was actually invented in 1876!) and anyway, the synths they started using were all analogue.

And what does futuristic actually mean now? Does it have connotations separate from it's actual meaning? To me it evokes, among other things, minimalism and a pre-occupation with space travel. In the 50s and 60s I guess space travel was the be-all-and-end-all in terms of the future, but now it seems that people are more concerned with our own planet and how to conserve it! Minimalism seems pretty retro now, too.

And is it just me, or do computers in sci-fi films still seem to operate in DOS?!

Now that the possibilities for the future seem so limitless, maybe the term futuristic itself is a retro concept?

In a nice bit of synchronicity, last week I found a copy of cult 1986 Disney film Flight of the Navigator (in, of all places, a cottage in Cornwall) and the theme tune is eerily similar to Bang Bang Bang! This was one of the defining films of my childhood, but I haven't seen it or thought about it for about 15 years.


The plot bears repeating for it's sheer ludicrousness (the film also features an early performance from Sarah Jessica Parker as a NASA intern!).

Twelve-year-old David is kidnapped by an alien spacecraft which is conducting experiments on different life-forms. Determining that humans only use 10% of their brains (err, hang on a minute...) it fills the other 90% of David's brain with maps. The fruits of this experiment are never revealed. For whatever reason, eight years pass before David is taken back to earth, not having aged (The spaceship believed that humans may not be able to withstand time travel, which is why he wasn't dropped off back at the time he was picked up). His family, who thought he was dead, are delighted and confused to see him, but it is all a bit exhausting for them and after a while his dad and brother go back to bed.

However the spaceship then crashes and is impounded by NASA, who are also studying David to find out why he hasn't aged since his disappearance. David gets aboard the Trimaxian Drone Ship (Max) who reveals that he lost his space maps in the crash and needs to download them from David's brain to get back to his planet, Phaelon. Despite claiming not to know what human emotions or humour are, Max does a good line in camp sardonicism. He downloads the maps and the two fly about pointlessly for a while, with David navigating, before deciding to take David home to Florida. Despite being able to travel through time and space, they consult a standard road map to get there.

Then David decides that actually he wants to go back in time to the point where he was kidnapped and Max agrees to take him, which makes you think, what on earth was the whole point?

I guess I thought this film was pretty futuristic when I was younger, but it seems so dated now. At one point a still frame is used to depict a crowd as a shadow flies over them.

Flight of the Navigator fans – Disney are currently planning a remake!

Anyway, in a nice subversion of retro-futurism (future-retroism?), art project ALT/1977 imagines how modern technological gadgets would have been marketed in the 1970s. My favourite is a re-imagining of the iPod, called the Pocket HiFi, with the strapline "Like a party in your pocket. But not in a weird way"!


There is also the LapTron 64 computer ("Apple II? Seriously?"), the MobileVoxx ("Stop missing calls. Start interrupting movies") and the Microcade 3000 handheld games console ("A child's toy that can literally guide nuclear warheads. Whoops!").

Alt/1977 artist Alex Varanese says: "The irony is I’d gladly trade in my immac­u­lately designed 21st cen­tury gad­gets for these hideously clunky, faux-wood-panelled pieces of über-kitsch. Sorry, Apple."

Is this kosher?

The other week I went to see the "truly terrifying" Ghost Stories at the Duke of York's Theatre on St Martin's Lane (for free London theatre tickets go here if you're under 26!). The play features Nicolas Burns from Nathan Barley and is not that scary!

Anyway, at one point a joke was told to highlight people's differing perceptions of situations to help explain the concept of PAREIDOLIA, the psychological phenomenon where vague/random stimuli are perceived as being significant.

The joke went something like this:

A Frenchman, a Scotsman and a Jew are all in the desert. The Frenchman says, "I'm so tired and thirsty, I must have wine!". The Scotsman says, "I'm so tired and thirsty, I must have Scotch!" and the Jew says, "I'm so tired and thirsty, I must have diabetes!"

Now, in my subsequent retelling of this joke, I was met with a range of reactions.

One friend of Jewish heritage said in an email, "Yeah that's really funny because we're all neurotic and have big noses".

It's difficult to accurately gauge tone from emails, but I read this as world-weary sarcasm, along the lines of "How hilarious, yet another propagation of a crass generalisation about Jewish people". Now, I fully sympathise with this interpretation, but I think that it misses the point of the joke!

Firstly, I want to start by talking about the JEWISH/NEUROSIS stereotype. I know around ten people who would describe themselves as being of Jewish heritage and I wouldn't describe any of them as having the defining characteristic of neurosis. So where does my understanding of this come from?


Almost exclusively from Curb Your Enthusiasm, and the films of Woody Allen.

In this funny interview, Larry David and Ricky Gervais talk about neurosis being one of the hallmarks of Jewish comedy. This is illustrated by a scene from Annie Hall, where Woody Allen's character Alvy Singer says "Don't you see the rest of the country looks on New York like we're left-wing communist Jewish homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes and I live here!"


Note that the people I've mentioned are American and, more specifically, from New York City (although Curb Your Enthusiasm is set in LA). I'm sure there are plenty of other examples of this theme, but I'm talking expressly about my own experiences. What I'm trying to say is that I associate the JEWISH/NEUROSIS stereotype specifically with New York Jewish comedians, and as such it is a WEAK stereotype in my mind.

In other words, the propagation of this generalisation is NOT enough to make me laugh, yet I still find this joke really funny. Why?

Because I'm laughing at the absurdity which arises when a base-level joke such as the ENGLISHMAN/IRISHMAN/SCOTSMAN one tries to deal with the relatively complex concept of neurosis.

This joke is usually used in England to portray Irish people as being stupid (a generalisation that PWEI does not reflect!). Interestingly this format of joke is used all around the world – Wikipedia cites combinations such as Dutchman/German/Belgian and Swede/Dane/Norwegian.

When this is replaced by the more subtle idea of portraying Jewish people as neurotic, the joke's limitations are exposed, and it's funny!

Also, I love the contrast brought to mind between STUPIDITY and NEUROSIS. Calling someone a neurotic is really not that much of an insult!

I'm aware that it's not particularly funny to analyse a joke in this way – for more on this, see this article by Charlie Brooker, but I wanted to stand up for this one, because it's just the kind of subtle subversion that makes me laugh.

But even if the premise of the joke isn't racist, that doesn't necessarily mean the joke isn't offensive. You could say that the subversion of humour doesn't excuse the propogation of a crass stereotype, however mild. What do you think? Let's generate debate and maybe we can achieve CULTURAL UNITY...



IN OTHER NEWS, SPOTTED: A youth on St John's Road, SW11, teaming Barbour countrywear with sports-casual tracksuit bottoms. He has GONE BEYOND. Sadly target evaded capture on camera. Send your CULTURECLASH photos to popwilleatitself@live.com!

Fancy that!

CORRECTION: Last week I worried that making fun of Jack Wills would leave me open to charges of INVERSE CULTURAL SNOBBERY. I've since realised that I was merely guilty of INVERSE SNOBBERY.

INVERSE CULTURAL SNOBBERY amounts to a Desert Island Deal viewer being mockingly disparaging about Daniel Defoe's SEMINAL NOVEL.

Today while strolling along the Haymarket in the West End, I came across the tourist gift shop Fancy That of London. (Note the SENTRY OF THE QUEEN'S GUARD to the left – he plays a key role in this tale!)



Fancy That sells the typical array of Union Jack-emblazoned TOURIST TAT,



and (obviously) Marilyn Monroe clocks.



But what really piqued my interest was a group of Asian tourists who were having their photo taken with the aforementioned sentry.



Now, the sharper PWEI readers will have already noted that THIS ISN'T A REAL GRENADIER GUARD! It's a man wearing a costume.

If these guys had walked the mile's distance down Piccadilly and across Green Park to Buckingham Palace, they could have taken a picture of the real thing! (and also burnt 75 calories, according to walkit.com)

This got me thinking, why are people so willing to accept FAKE CULTURE?

These tourists were either too lazy to seek out real culture, preferring to stick to the tourist traps of the west end, or they live in a world where they believe (or choose to believe) that, while not guarding the official royal residences of our sovereign, sentries like to hang out outside gift shops posing for photos with tourists.

Either way, it seems they are refusing to engage with British culture as it stands today.

Now, I too have been guilty of this in the past. Anyone who has backpacked around south-east Asia (or read Alex Garland's 1996 novel The Beach) may be familiar with THE BANANA PANCAKE PHENOMENON.

I am referring to the cafes, hotels and restaurants along the well-trodden tourist routes of Thailand, India, Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia that serve banana pancakes for breakfast in an attempt to cater for western tastes.

Despite being meant to be native to Western countries, these pancakes actually seem exotic to tourists – in this way they are part of a distinct culture of their own – TRAVELLER CULTURE.

These tourist routes have even been re-named The Banana Pancake Trail, in what Wikipedia refers to as an "affectionate nickname" but which to me sounds slightly derogatory!

When I was teaching in Darjeeling, in West Bengal, India, I used to kick back in a place called Joey's Pub. Here's a bad picture of Joey behind the bar (no I don't think that's his real name):



Despite having upholstered wooden stools and benches, Guinness posters on the walls and serving bangers and mash, Joey's Pub failed to re-create the atmosphere of a TRADITIONAL ENGLISH BOOZER, while remaining clearly distinct from other Indian bars.

This distinction seems to come at the point where TOURIST meets SMALL-TIME ENTERPRISING BUSINESSMAN. But what's interesting is that, just as we are attempting to sell Eastern tourists their own pre-conceived ideas about England, they are attempting to sell us exactly the same! I think that says more about us than it does about them.

Where am I going with this? I like banana pancakes – they're DELICIOUS. And Eastern interpretations of Western culture are fascinating in themselves. But flying half way around the world just to experience BEING A TRAVELLER seems kind of absurd.

I am aware that this topic has probably already been done to death – Alex Garland's novel itself was written as a criticism of backpackers who view south-east Asia as a cultural themepark – I'm just trying to relate it to my own experiences.

Maybe I'm being unfair to the tourists who visit London's tacky gift shops. I am aware from experience how it can sometimes be difficult to make the distinction between REAL CULTURE and FAKE CULTURE. And anyway, maybe Fancy That of London is more representative of modern capitalist London than Buckingham Palace is.

Anyway, lest anyone accuse PWEI of NOT FULLY ENGAGING, here are some photos from my recent travels to, respectively, Bristol (note the sinister pigs' heads in the background),



and Rochester, Kent.

It's hip 2 B square!

Pop Will Eat Itself likes to span the entire spectrum of pop cultural phenomena, and the murky world of FASHION is no exception.

If you’ve been in any of the UK’s major cultural hubs in the past three years, you may have seen one of these:


It’s a Barbour Beaufort waxed jacket, traditionally favoured by the Royal Family and anyone who owns a country estate (currently retailing at RRP £189.95).

But you would have probably seen it worn as below, or teamed with a MOUSTACHE and tasseled loafers.




However, while recently strolling through the not particularly hip North Kent town of Gillingham (population 100,000), I passed a group of WORKING-CLASS URBAN YOUTHS rocking replicas of the black Barbour Chelsea quilted jacket. This jacket has also been favoured by City bankers (left) and CREATIVELY-MOBILE URBANITES for some years now.

I am all in favour of this kind of cultural cross-pollinisation, I’m just surprised at how quickly this trend has filtered down from the cutting edge. At Topman.com there is now even a Country and Heritage section in its jackets department, where you can buy "uber cool" Barbour knock-offs!

Now, I am down with the Barbour jacket entering the mainstream. It is functional, understated, and taps into a RICH VEIN OF ENGLISH HERITAGE. It is also durable and long lasting, counteracting the DISPOSABLE/PRIMARK culture.

So how do you explain the rise of these TRADITIONAL AMERICAN BOATING SHOES (AKA Topsiders)?




This trend was, if not started by, then surely brought to prominence by this band, who, despite attending Ivy League institution Columbia University and wearing cotton Oxford shirts, claim they are not real WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), but are merely “satirising the look” of upper middle class preps.

Commentators in America have suggested that Vampire Weekend offer some kind of MATERIALISTIC ESCAPISM in the midst of global financial crisis. So maybe this is what’s going on with the rise in heritage/upper class clothing?

But the sporting of Barbour jackets in East London PRE-DATES the collapse of Northern Rock! (source: my own eyes). This begs the inevitable question: Did East-London hipsters predict Britain’s financial crisis?*

Also, is it LESS or MORE ironic to wear the attire of a traditional upper-class Conservative now that these guys are actually in power?



The appropriation of this type of clothing into youth-led fashion is nothing new. Working-class FOOTBALL CASUALS were rocking the Beaufort on the terraces in the 1980s, during which time the country was also in the midst of FINANCIAL RECESSION, bringing us culturally full-cycle!

But the kids wearing Barbours today are more likely to be trust-fund kids than working class kids, and they have probably PILFERED their Barbours from their grandparents! I even know a girl who rocks a Barbour-style jacket that was a compulsory part of her school uniform at public boarding school! There is a DELICIOUS IRONY here if anyone can be bothered to explore it.

Now, PWEI does not espouse CULTURAL SNOBBERY, and that includes INVERSE CULTURAL SNOBBERY. But all of this coincides with a truly frightening rise to prominence of this:



There is no irony to be found here – this shop is for GENUINE SLOANES.

You might say, “Who cares why people are wearing this stuff, maybe it’s purely about aesthetics?"

That may be true, but if PWEI can’t apply pseudo-academic analysis to trivial matters, then what's the point?

*No

Headlines

The recent news story about alleged Russian spy Anna Chapman caught my eye in particular for the continuous use of the phrase REDHEAD SPY in newspaper headlines, including this one, which is illustrated by a picture of a woman who is clearly a BRUNETTE.

This highlighted the REDUCTIVE NATURE and SEXISM of the press – this theme has been covered in depth by an article in the London Evening Standard, which I can now no longer locate!

Here is the beige-jacketed spy in action in Times Square – probably during a covert mission or something.



Anyway, this got me thinking about the general ABSURDITY of press headlines, which by their nature must be reductive, but also eye-catching.

A few years ago I saw a headline in the Manchester Evening News exclaiming MAN FOUND ALIVE IN STOCKPORT, which is an example of SEMANTIC AMBIGUITY.

This ramps up the SOCIAL DEPRIVATION and URBAN DECAY of the former industrial town, while also playing on its PAROCHIAL rivalry with Manchester.

Is this a clumsy accident, or the deliberate work of a wry-eyed Mancunian subeditor? Sadly, my experience of the Manchester Evening News would lead me to believe the former.

However, some headlines are clearly intentionally ambiguous, like this one from The South London Press that I heard about: ELEPHANT RATS INVADE ICELAND.

Apparently, the article was about rodent infestation at an Elephant and Castle branch of the popular frozen food store...

Interestingly there is a technical term for semantically/syntactically ambiguous headlines – CRASH BLOSSOMS – which originates from a headline which is not actually funny. The ultimate Crash Blossom is the mythical World War I headline EIGHTH ARMY PUSH BOTTLES UP GERMAN REAR – there is a whole website dedicated to ambiguous headlines here.

Speaking of parochialism reminds me of a story my uncle told me that when the RMS (ROYAL MAIL SHIP) Titanic sank in 1912, the headline in Glasgow was GLASGOW MAN DIES AT SEA.

Some tentative googling tells me that, not only is this story probably apocryphal, it is also not exclusive to Glasgow, with citations coming from various parts of Scotland and England.

The helpful Newsletter of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research says that various permutations of this headline are often cited as examples of EXTREME PAROCHIALISM, though none has ever been verified.

The most extreme, ascribed to The Press and Journal of Aberdeen is TITANIC SINKS: LOCAL MAN LOSES POCKET WATCH.

The Newsletter also notes that CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED film director Ethan Coen, in the introduction to the published screenplay of Fargo says that Trotsky lived for a time in New York, accounting for this headline which appeared in a local paper in October 1917: BRONX MAN LEADS RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.

I also want to talk about headlines which reduce TRAGIC SITUATIONS into COMIC ABSURDITY.

My friend told me about this headline in a Brighton newspaper: WINDOW CLEANER KILLED BY GIANT NOVELTY PENCIL.

There is something about the FUTILITY of the man's job and the PUERILE TRIVIALITY of the giant pencil which combine to create a truly awe-inspiring piece of tragicomedy.

The same story in the Mirror is even illustrated with this picture! I'm pretty sure this is a standard size pencil.



The story turns out to be about a man with a history of psychosis who committed suicide by stabbing himself repeatedly in the groin with what the Mirror refers to as a JUMBO SOUVENIR PENCIL.

This is clearly a bona fide tragedy, but can the media be blamed for their reporting on this? Maybe they are just reflecting THE ABSURD which pervades every corner of life.

Finally, more food for thought is this recent headline from The Metro: WRESTLING MIDGETS KILLED BY FAKE HOOKERS, which is absolutely not misleading.

Welcome!

Welcome to Pop Will Eat Itself – where I will be discussing POP-CULTURAL PHENOMENA, as well as other general ABSURDITIES OF LIFE.

Last week I turned on the television and was confronted with this:



Now – I don't know exactly what it means to "go all Robinson Crusoe", but according to Channel 4, that is exactly what Deal or No Deal went, in a special edition entitled Desert Island Deal.

At no point is it explained why.

If you didn't see it, there is no way of accurately describing the sheer SURREAL SPECTRE of the events that unfolded, but just to give you an idea:

– Noel Edmonds appears dressed as Robinson Crusoe and adopts a Steptoe-esque Cockney accent. (In Daniel Defoe's SEMINAL NOVEL of 1719, Crusoe sets sail from the YORKSHIRE city of Hull and is based on real-life castaway Alexander Selkirk, from SCOTLAND.)

– He lunges around dangerously, evoking the deleterious mental effects of lack of human contact and the delirium caused by excessive seawater consumption.

– He exclaims: "This is the show where we examine each others chests!", which is a weak attempt at INNUENDO.

Noel introduces the first contestant with customary fanfare: "Carly Fullerton from Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire – a Business Support Administrator!".

With admirable humility, Carly brings us crashing back down to earth, saying: "I can't make it sound any more exciting I'm afraid – that's what I do".

Seconds later it is revealed that Carly is afraid of bananas! I don't think I need to tell you what happens next!

I could go on, but you should really see it for yourself.

Defoe's SEMINAL NOVEL examines the theme of CULTURAL RELATIVISM. Despite his disgust, Crusoe feels unjust in holding the natives morally responsible for cannibalism as this practice is so DEEPLY INGRAINED IN THEIR CULTURE.

Do we apply the same thinking to regular viewers of Edmonds' own inimitable brand of early-evening light entertainment?

How do regular Deal or No Deal viewers view the Desert Island special? With genuine mirth? Detached irony? Or, like me, complete bafflement?

Pop Will Eat Itself does not espouse CULTURAL SNOBBERY.

Is it possible that Noel Edmonds is operating on an ALTOGETHER DIFFERENT PLANE to other human beings?

Two bizarre facts about Noel Ernest Edmonds from Wikipedia:

For many years Edmonds has been a believer in Spiritualism, in particular the concept of Cosmic ordering. He has claimed that he is occasionally visited by two melon-sized "spiritual energy" balls, which appear over his shoulders and which he believes to be the spirits of his dead parents. Edmonds further claims that the orbs only appear on digital photographs.

Edmonds claimed that he had stopped payment on his TV licence in early 2008, in response to the sometimes controversial methods used to enforce collection of the licence. Edmonds declared that it is wrong to "threaten" and "badger" people, in response to the collection authority's common assumption that the non-possession of a licence can mean licence avoidance, as well as the large fines which can be used as enforcement for non-payment. However TV Licensing later claimed that Edmonds actually did possess a valid current TV licence.

How does this general weirdness square with Edmonds' AVUNCULAR APPEAL?

Watch this space for more explorations into popular/ist culture and Noel Edmonds.