“I don’t want to live under the clock; I don’t want to climb to the top…”
Tag Archives: anti-capitalism
so, happy in cape town?
ORIGINAL (threw up in my mouth a little):
DETOURNEMENT (all that is basically changed is the soundtrack):
We want to thank you for flying with us
We know you coulda stayed home, just cried and cussed
May all your guns go off if it’s time to bust
May all they tanks have time to rust
They got the armies turning bullets into gold
They got the hookers turning tricks in the cold
And every time the police kicks in the door
An angel gas brake dips in the O
And even if a d-boy flips him a O
It ain’t enough to buy shit anymore
Sleep in the doorway, piss on the floor
Look in the sky, wait for missiles to show
It’s finna blow cause
They got the TV, we got the truth
They own the judges and we got the proof
We got hella people, they got helicopters
They got the bombs and we got the, we got the
Don’t talk about it
It won’t show
Be about it
It’s ’bout to blow
I just spit the dope lines, I don’t snort ’em
Tell the boss to call police to escort him
You don’t write all them lies, you just quote ’em
Get offline, plug in to this modem
No, you can’t out-vote ’em
The rules is still golden
Only jewels we holding is if we guarding our scrotum
If you press your ear to the turf that is stolen
You can hear the sound of limitations exploding
Please sir, may we have another portion?
We’re children of the beast that dodged the abortion
Neck placed firm ‘tween the floor and the Florsheim
We’ll shut your shit down, don’t call it extortion
Caution — we’re coming for your head
So call the Feds and get files to shred
Every textbook read said bring you the bread
But guess what we got you instead?
Let’s keep it banging like a shotgun
We in a war before we fought one
Now if you’re tired of working so they can play
A common enemy, we got one
Now keep it banging like a shotgun
We in a war before we fought one
Now if you’re tired of working from day to day
A common enemy, we got one
harun farocki – inextinguishable fire (1969)
“(1) A major corporation is like a construction set. It can be used to put together the whole world. (2) Because of the growing division of labour, many people no longer recognize the role they play in producing mass destruction. (3) That which is manufactured in the end is the product of the workers, students, and engineers.”
“When we show you pictures of napalm victims, you’ll shut your eyes. You’ll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you’ll close them to the memory. And then you’ll close your eyes to the facts.” These words are spoken at the beginning of an agitprop film that can be viewed as a unique and remarkable development. Farocki refrains from making any sort of emotional appeal. His point of departure is the following: “When napalm is burning, it is too late to extinguish it. You have to fight napalm where it is produced: in the factories.”
Harun Farocki, rest in peace.
to change life
tricky – hell is round the corner (1995)
From one of the most arresting albums of the twentieth century, Maxinquaye (Island Records, 1995). I bought this CD in my final year of high school, and spent hours and hours in its company over the next few years, lying prone, alone, on the floor, curtains drawn, drowning. The album’s fractured claustrophobia felt so exactly right for the time, particularly in South Africa… its heart of darkness festering quietly while the rainbow nationalist rhetoric raged outside.
“It was the most bizarre record I’ve ever worked on,” says Mark Saunders about Maxinquaye, the 1995 Tricky album that, with the exception of the previously released singles ‘Aftermath’ and ‘Ponderosa’, he co-produced with the artist, in addition to taking care of the engineering, programming and mixing. “It was a complete un-learning experience and it was also a total re-learning experience. Think of how to make a record, then forget everything you’ve learned and start completely backwards and upside down. I could write a book about Tricky. He’s such a great character.”
Read more about the highly unorthodox way in which Maxinquaye was made, HERE.
flash mob flamenco
Flamenco flash mob staged by anti-capitalist group flo6x8 inside a bank in Sevilla, Spain, to express anger and frustration at the economic crisis. Flamenco began as an art form centred around protest and social awareness. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, flamenco songs were largely about poverty, suffering and the hardships of everyday life.
Read more HERE about how flash mobs are reconnecting flamenco to its roots, or watch a 25 minute BBC documentary on the phenomenon.
(Thanks to Lizza Littlewort for posting the featured link on Facebook this morning.)
noise and capitalism
“This book, Noise and Capitalism, is a tool for understanding the situation we are living through, the way our practices and our subjectivities are determined by capitalism. It explores contemporary alienation in order to discover whether the practices of improvisation and noise contain or can produce emancipatory moments and how these practices point towards social relations which can extend these moments.
If the conditions in which we produce our music affects our playing then let’s try to feel through them, understand them as much as possible and, then, change these conditions.
If our senses are appropriated by capitalism and put to work in an ‘attention economy’, let’s, then, reappropriate our senses, our capacity to feel, our receptive powers; let’s start the war at the membrane! Alienated language is noise, but noise contains possibilities that may, who knows, be more affective than discursive, more enigmatic than dogmatic.
Noise and improvisation are practices of risk, a ‘going fragile’. Yet these risks imply a social responsibility that could take us beyond ‘phoney freedom’ and into unities of differing.
We find ourselves poised between vicariously florid academic criticism, overspecialised niche markets and basements full of anti-intellectual escapists. There is, after all, ‘a Franco, Churchill, Roosevelt, inside all of us…’ yet this book is written neither by chiefs nor generals.
Here non-appointed practitioners, who are not yet disinterested, autotheorise ways of thinking through the contemporary conditions for making difficult music and opening up to the wilfully perverse satisfactions of the auricular drives.”
Sound interesting? HERE, DOWNLOAD NOISE AND CAPITALISM FREE.
Edited by Mattin Iles and Anthony Iles
Contributions from Ray Brassier, Emma Hedditch, Matthew Hyland, Anthony Iles, Sara Kaaman, Mattin, Nina Power, Edwin Prévost, Bruce Russell, Matthieu Saladin, Howard Slater, Csaba Toth, Ben Watson.
More details from the publishers, Arteleku Audiolab (Kritika series), Donostia-San Sebastián (Gipuzkoa)
Publication date: September 2009
fleurmach 