Why Bob Dylan Shouldn’t Have Won the Nobel Prize for Literature

Let me preface this by saying that I’m a huge Bob Dylan fan. I’ve been into his music since my mid-teens. He’s the reason why I write songs. In fact, I’d be willing to say that I’m a bigger Dylan fan than you, reader, whoever you might be. I could write a book on the guy – in fact, someday I’d quite like to. I know my Dylanology, is what I’m trying to say.

            He didn’t deserve that Nobel Prize, though.

            Don’t get me wrong – he’s arguably the greatest songwriter of the last hundred years, at least in the English language, and an astounding singer as well. What he isn’t, though, is an author – that is, he doesn’t write books. Apart from his autobiography and the speed-addled ramblings collected in Tarantula, Bob Dylan’s contribution to the world of literature consists of a single poem, “Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie,” written in the sixties. While that is a good poem, it’s not Nobel Prize-worthy, and even if it were, they don’t give out Nobel Prizes based on single poems (or at least, I hope they don’t). Bob Dylan is a songwriter - his work is to combine words and music, and then to perform them. You don’t read a song. You hear it. I would have hoped that was obvious enough not to need saying, but apparently the Nobel Committee weren’t aware. Maybe they suffer from some unique form of synaesthesia that causes them to interpret sounds as written words (in which case, that sounds both awesome and very inconvenient) but I doubt it; more likely, they were trying to prove that they were down with the kids by honouring a seventy-five-year-old folksinger who hasn’t made a great album since 1997. Sort of like how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tried to prove they cared about slavery and the historical oppression of black people by honouring Twelve Years A Slave, the most sanitized portrait of slavery since Gone With The Wind. But let’s not get sidetracked into talking (again) about how fucking dreadful that film was. My point is that the Nobel Committee, in all likelihood, don’t give a shit about Dylan or his body of work. I’d be willing to bet they’ve heard, at most, maybe half a dozen of his songs, and they probably didn’t like them. I have nothing against a good publicity stunt, but this is a Nobel Prize for Literature – it’s not some meaningless bauble that anybody can win, like a Nobel Peace Prize. This matters.

Wait a minute. Be very, very quiet. Be so silent you’re barely breathing, and you’ll hear it, a whisper on the wind, rising like a belch from the unwashed mouths of a million pretentious undergraduates, the eternal battlecry of the musical pseud:

He’s not a lyricist! He’s a poet!

Sorry, but no. No, he isn’t. That’s not my opinion, by the way – it’s an objective fact. Bob Dylan writes songs, not poems.

            Again, you’d think that would be obvious, but it isn’t. Not to the army of “journalists” and hipsters who rush out to brand every half-decent songwriter a poet, and study their lyrics in complete isolation from their music or their performance. These people are to music what pigeons are to statues. It’s as if they can’t bring themselves to admit that songs have any artistic merit. Music, of course, is one thing; they’ll ooh and aah over the brilliance of Bach and Stravinsky all you want, and of course they’ll be able to quote poetry all day long. The worth of words in isolation, and music in isolation, is inarguable to them. But, to them, that’s it; that’s the limit of their artistic consciousness. So when they hear a song, they’ll judge the lyrics by the standards of poetry (a medium in which the words stand alone) and the music by the standards of classical music (a medium in which the sound stands alone), with no awareness of the fact that the two require each other. In a song, the lyrics rely on the music and vice versa. While there are songwriters whose lyrics can be read as poetry (Joni Mitchell, Bill Callahan) and even some whose music could function as instrumentals (Frank Zappa, Scott Walker), most do not fit into that category. If you actually try to read Bob Dylan’s lyrics as poetry, they fail miserably, and the same goes for his music when taken without his voice and lyrics. The magic – the thing that makes him a genius – is what happens when you put the two together. That’s how a song works, and that’s what the Nobel Committee will never understand.

            Murakami wouldn’t have deserved to win either.

The Trouble With Corbyn

Let me start off this article by saying this: I like Jeremy Corbyn. He has solid policies, he’s providing a genuine opposition to the Conservative Party (something no Labour leader has done since the wilderness years before Blair) and, best of all, he’s resolutely refused to engage in the kind of childish name-calling and groin-kick politics that dominate the British political landscape. In a world where MPs in the House of Commons behave with less dignity than a class of five-year-olds, and it has become standard practice to accuse your opponents of being everything from Nazis to Islamofascists to Stalinists due to minor policy differences, Corbyn is a mature, dignified man, quietly presenting the public with fact-based arguments and policies that actually stand up to scrutiny. I’m confident that he will win even the sham of a leadership election that the right wing of the Labour party will allow him to have. I even have a little hope that he might manage to win a general election if it doesn’t happen in the next year or two. But there’s something about Corbyn that makes me less than optimistic on that last score. The politeness and maturity that I – and many others – admire is the very thing that puts Corbyn at a disadvantage. The thing is, it’s difficult to sway people with well-thought-out arguments and logic if they’re not already on vaguely the same side as you. When it comes to bringing people over to your side, brash, emotive arguments and easily-quotable soundbites are much more effective – that’s why the Daily Mail is so much more popular than, say, the Telegraph, despite the fact that they have roughly the same political positions. Corbyn is trying to move us as a nation away from the politics of personality, when politics has always been about personality.

I don't say this often, but maybe we should take a leaf out of Nigel Farage’s book. I mean, look at him: he’s a scrotum-faced, politically incoherent failed abortion of a man with a personality somewhere between the Fat Controller and that weird uncle that’s always one drink away from ranting about the Jews. More importantly, he’s terrible at propaganda. He pretends to be a stereotypical “man of the people” while wearing suits that cost more than I make in a month and having the kind of ridiculously posh voice that you don’t hear anymore outside of newsreel footage from World War Two. Despite the fact that his main political gimmick was being photographed in pubs, he never quite got the hang of looking like he belonged in one. The act of drinking seemed completely alien to him – that’s how bad he was at acting. Maybe he was just used to having his drinks fed to him by gilded castrati. And yet, despite the fact that no one with half a brain could possibly be taken in by him – people were. Smart people. People who actually gave a shit about politics were convinced by the Tommy Wiseau of politicians. Why? Simple: he was loud, confident, unconcerned with good manners or gentlemanly conduct, and he presented himself as an alternative. The fact that he was more of the same, only worse, made no difference – he brought in the protest vote, and now he sits in a parliament he never wanted us to be involved with, collecting a nice big salary. What we need is a left-wing (or, in Corbyn’s case, centre-left) Farage – someone who realises that politics is a fight, not a boxing match, and that if you don't hit below the belt every now and then you’ve got precious little chance of winning. What we need is someone who’s loud, unapologetic, and willing to fuck shit up even at the risk of their career or their success at the polls. Corbyn has to be a firebrand, a Fidel, a John MacLean, PT Barnum with a red flag – someone who can bring over the protest vote with ballyhoo, then keep them on-side with substance. At the moment he’s all steak, no sizzle, which is every bit as bad as the opposite extreme.

Having said that, if you use Corbyn’s alleged “unelectability” as a reason not to vote for him, you’re a fucking idiot, and I hope a seagull shits in your hair. 

He Never Died review

He Never Died is a recent[1] film starring Henry Rollins as an immortal, Jack, who discovers he has a daughter. I’m gonna try to say as little as possible about the plot, because I think it’ll be much more enjoyable for you if you don't know what’s coming. What I will say, though, is that it involves mobsters, cannibalism, and a surprising amount of bingo. What it also involves is a standout performance from Rollins. Jack is pretty similar to Rollins – or at least, to the image of himself that he presents – but even accounting for that, Rollins manages to give a nuanced, engaging portrayal of what could in the wrong hands have been a pretty one-dimensional character. I’ve never seen Rollins act before, apart from his non-speaking role in Heat, and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. His reaction shots – often a challenge for actors – are hilarious, and his deadpan delivery brings out the comedy in the film, a necessary counterweight to the horror elements of He Never Died. I’m hesitant to describe this as a horror film. Though it deals with a lot of subject matter normally found in horror (gore, the supernatural, possibly the Devil) the overall intent of the film seems not to be to scare the audience, but rather to draw them into Jack’s world. It’s more like a kind of noir character piece, but without the faux-Raymond Chandler shtick that defines too many contemporary attempts at noir.

                The supporting cast are pretty solid too. Jordan Todosey and Kate Greenhouse, playing Jack’s daughter Andrea and love interest Cara respectively, manage to convey a lot of character through very few lines. That’s something that’s worth remarking on, actually – there are very few words per minute in this film. In a world where far too many films feel the need to cram big, unwieldy lumps of dialogue (much of it pointless) into every scene, it’s refreshing to see that writer-director Jason Krawczyk knows when to let his characters be silent.

Having said that, there are still some things wrong. This isn’t Krawczyk’s first feature film, but it sometimes feels like it is. The first forty minutes is about ten minutes too long. The story briefly gets lost, and while I don’t want to spoil anything, there’s something Jack does that doesn’t seem to fit with his character. Also, while Rollins is a good actor, he still flounders a little in the film’s finale – there are a few lines that he delivers as if he’s reading them for the first time. Overall, something just seems to be missing, and I can’t quite tell what. The plot is fascinating, the characters are well-written, the camerawork is excellent, and yet I still found my attention drifting at moments when my eyes should have been glued to the screen. There’s just something about the whole thing that makes it feel like less than the sum of its parts.

                All in all, I’d recommend seeing He Never Died if you’ve got 99 minutes to spare. It’s on Netflix, and it’s certainly superior to most horror films out there at the moment.

Rating: 6/10

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[1] Released 17 March this year

International Working Women's Day - Part Five

To begin the fifth part of my International Working Women's Day series, I need to tell you a little about the Stonewall uprising.

The Stonewall Inn was a queer pub in the Greenwich Village area of Manhattan, back in the sixties. As you'd expect, the police regularly raided the bar. They would subject the patrons to sexual harassment and assault, as they did in most queer bars at the time. On the night of the 28th of June 1969, though, they came to the wrong pub.

It's often said that noone knows who struck the first blow, but that's inaccurate - we know who struck the first blow, and the second, the third, and the hundredth. The police did. What we don't know is who was the first to fight back. The way I heard it was that Marsha Johnson was the second one to bottle a police officer, and it's her that I'll be focusing on today.

Johnson was no stranger to police brutality. As a black, transgender, homeless woman she was regularly on the receiving end of violence from queerbashers, civilian and police both. Many others who fought at Stonewall had similar experiences - the uprising was led by the queer street youth, who were primarily transgender and black or latino. As the police began loading people into a waiting van, the patrons of the bar began throwing coins at the officers. That they threw coins was especially important - many of these were people who may not have eaten that day, who had practically nothing, but they took the change in their pockets and used it as a weapon to fight for their brothers, sisters and non-binary siblings. That is what solidarity means.

The coins were followed by bottles, and soon the rioters had rushed the van and liberated the prisoners, while the police resorted to locking themselves in the pub. Detective Inspector Pine, one of the men who was involved in the raid, said, "I had been in combat situations, but there was never any time I felt more scared than then." (1)

He had reason to be scared - the rioters were nowhere near finished. There was an attempt made to set fire the the Stonewall Inn and burn the police inside - when that failed, the rioters ripped a parking meter out of the ground and used it as a battering ram.

When riot police arrived to back up their colleagues, the Stonewall rioters took them on, too, and held their own. Altogether, the uprising continued in spontanaeous protests and disturbances for five days.

Marsha Johnson fought in the Stonewall uprising, but that wasn't her only, or even her most important, achievement. Soon after Stonewall, in the face of condemnation from mainstream gay organisations like the Mattachine Society, Johnson and several other radical queers form the Gay Liberation Front. They consciously named themselves after the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, and they linked the struggle for queer rights to socialism. They raised money for striking workers, and organised in solidarity with the Black Panther Party, leading Huey Newton to publicly declare his support for queer rights. Soon, the GLF had sister organisations on three continents, including one lead by Peter Tatchell.

Along with her close freind and fellow Stonewall veteran Sylvia Rivera, Johnson founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) in 1970 as a caucus of the GLF. STAR took in homeless queer youth, giving them a place to stay and a surrogate family, led by the Queen Mother herself, Marsha Johnson. Johnson and Rivera often did sex work in order to pay rent and bills, and to keep their young charges from having to do the same.

Later, in the 1980s, Johnson became a part of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power. At a time when the US government was content to let gay people die from AIDS, ACT UP organised demonstrations to bring attention to the AIDS crisis, and to push for government action to deal with it. They had many successes, and their actions have been credited with helping push the government into passing reforms that made AIDS and HIV medication easier to access.

In 1992, Marsha P Johnson's body was found floating in the Hudson River.

There is some debate over whether she was murdered or committed suicide, but it comes down to the same thing in the end. Regardless, Johnson's life was one worth celebrating: she was by all accounts a colourful, vivacious woman who brought great joy to those who knew her, and she was one hell of an activist, which is why I'm writing about her here.

1. http://www.socialistalternative.org/stonewall-riots-1969/

International Working Women's Day - Part Four

Hello again - I was travelling most of Friday and working yesterday, so I didn't get a chance to post the fourth part of my International Working Women's Day series. Anyway, here it is.

Leila Khaled has been a hero of mine ever since I saw her speak at an SWP event in London in 2012. She had to give her lecture via Skype from Oman, because due to her activities as a member of the PFLP she had been denied entry to the UK.

The PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) is a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary group fighting for an independent, socialist Palestinian state. Leila Khaled is a founding member of the group, which grew out of the Pan-Arab Nationalist Movement, and she has participated in numerous actions, including being part of the Black September hijackings in 1970.

By 1970, twenty-six-year-old Khaled was no stranger to hijackings - the previous year she had become the first women ever to hijack an aeroplane. That plane had been TWA Flight 840, flying from Rome to Athens, with - so the PFLP leadership thought - Yahtzik Rahman, Israeli ambassador to the United States, on board. Unfortunately, they were mistaken. Khaled had the pilot fly over Haifa, her birthplace, before landing in Damascus - she wanted to see the place where she was born, a place she hadn't been to since she and her family were forced from their country in 1948. The passengers were allowed to disembark (unharmed, I should add) and once they were out of harm's way Khaled and her fellow hijackers blew up the nose section of the plane.

After the hijacking, a picture of Leila Khaled wearing a kaffiyeh and holding an AK-47 was widely publicised. A cross between Audrey Hepburn and Che Guevara, Khaled's image became iconic - this posed a problem for her. If she was to carry out further hijackings, she couldn't afford to be recognised.

For Khaled, the answer was simple: if her face made her a less effective revolutionary, then she would change her face. And that's just what she did - between her first hijacking and Black September, Leila Khaled had six operations on her nose and chin to alter her appearance. Clearly, the operations worked.

Unfortunately, the hijacking was a failure. Israeli air marshals captured Khaled and killed her comrade, Nicaraguan-American Patrick Arguello. She was later released as part of a prisoner exchange with the PFLP.

At the lecture she gave in 2012, Khaled proved that the years have done nothing to dull her intellect, or her commitment to the struggle. She brilliantly broke down the events that were then occurring in Syria, and spoke of the need for Syria - and all Arab countries - to be free from both Western imperialism and their own home-grown tyrants. She also warned of the risk of "further Islamification" (her words) of the Middle East, a warning that, with the rise of ISIS, proved to be accurate.

Leila Khaled was, and remains, an iconic example of someone who has dedicated her life to a noble cause.

International Working Women's Day - Part Three

In my previous post, I wrote about Mary Barbour, and how socialism is a necessary part of feminism - in this post, I'll be looking at the flipside of that. Just as most women are working-class(1), about half of working class people are women; in other words, feminism is a necessary part of socialism just as socialism is a necessary part of feminism. Of course, male socialists all too often forget (or deliberately ignore) this, and this is what gave rise to the formation of the Mujeres Libres.

The Mujeres Libres, or "free women", were a group of anarcha-feminist women who formed in anarchist areas during the Spanish Civil War. While anarchism proposes the liberation of all people, the men in the CNT-FAI (the organised anarcho-syndicalist movement in Spain at the time) had been raised in an extremely patriarchal society, and they acted like it. This problem was compounded by the fact that the CNT focused mainly on factory workers, while many of the working women worked from home and were not unionised(2). Women were laughed at in meetings, paid less money than men for doing the same job, and their needs were generally ignored by men who thought that class and the state were the sole systems of oppression in their society. The Mujeres Libres disagreed; they were no more willing to be subservient to a husband than to be subservient to a boss.

During the attempted revolution in Spain, women were present in every area of activity, and the Mujeres  Libres reflected that. In addition to brigades of female soldiers, they had numerous labour divisions, each representing workers in a different sector of the economy - transport, public services, nursing, clothing, and so on. By July 1937, their members numbered around twenty thousand(3).

As today, many anarchists opposed the formation of separate groups for women. Creating women-only organisations was seen as "divisive", and contrary to the anarchist idea of freedom for all, regardless of gender. This argument will be familiar to anyone who is passingly acquainted with modern activism and, in 1937 as now, it functioned as a silencing tactic; the meetings that were nominally "for everyone" were in fact meeting for men, which women were grudgingly allowed to attend. The women needed a separate organisation because they, and they alone, could be trusted to fight for women's liberation.

So what can we learn from the Mujeres Libres? First, that the struggle against oppression must be led by the oppressed themselves. The primary victims of patriarchy are women and non-binary people; the men of the CNT-FAI were not affected by the oppression of the Spanish women, and their upbringing had taught them to disregard women's complaints. For these reasons, they could not be trusted to do what was in the interests of the women. The Mujeres Libres were women who had personal experience of being on the wrong side of the patriarchal hierarchy, so they had the motivation to do something about it.

The second lesson we can learn from them is that addressing the concerns of a particular group (in this case women) is not divisive, or detrimental to a comprehensive liberatory struggle. The women of the Mujeres Libres worked, fought, and died alongside their male comrades, and contributed just as much to the struggle against capitalism and the state. The really divisive thing - the thing that is actually detrimental to the struggle as a whole - is to focus on class to the exclusion of all else. If your organisation doesn't oppose racism, it is exclusionary towards ethnic minorities; if it does not oppose patriarchy, it is exclusive to women and non-binary people, and so on. If we want to build a truly, radically free society, we need to oppose all forms of oppression, ,regardless of whether they affect us personally. As the Industrial Workers of the World put it, an injury to one is an injury to all.

(1) when I say "working class" in this context, I'm including all those whose class interests align with those of the working class - so, this includes rural workers and peasants, and the wage-earning portion of the middle class.

(2)  https://libcom.org/history/separate-equal-mujeres-libres-anarchist-strategy-womens-emancipation

(3) Ibid

International Working Women's Day - Part Two

Welcome to part two of my seven-part series on awesome women from history. This time, I'll be focusing on Mary Barbour.

In 1915, thirty-year-old Mary Barbour was living in Govan, Glasgow. The men were mostly away at war, and the landlords of the area - thinking that the women would be unable to resist - had raised rents to extortionate levels. They had already met with some resistance - along with Mary Laird and Helen Crawfurd, Mary Barbour had founded the Glasgow Women's Housing Association to fight for the right to decent housing and affordable rents. There were many protests over rents in previous years - trade unions had been putting their weight behind the struggle for housing justice since 1910 - but it was in 1915, the second year of the First World War, that things came to a head. Barbour organised a rent strike. The tenants refused en masse to pay the rents the landlords asked of them, often driving off rent collectors with violence, and quickly found widespread support. The police, of course, attempted to evict the strikers, but the women from the housing association - collectively known as Mrs Barbour's Army - were more than willing to defend themselves and their fellow workers. The rent strikers were supported by mass demonstrations, and soon more strikes broke out across Glasgow and the surrounding area - by October of 1915, an estimated fifteen thousand people were refusing to pay rent. By November, a further five thousand had joined them, and trade unions were threatening to down tools if their demands were not met. On the 17th of November, all legal proceedings against the strikers were halted, and in December the Rents and Mortgage Interest Restriction Act was passed, reducing rents to their pre-war levels.

As a working-class woman, Mary Barbour understood that it is meaningless to talk of women's liberation without also talking of the end of capitalism. The majority of women in the world belong to what could broadly be called the global working class, and have to deal with the double whammy of capitalism and patriarchy - both of those are systems of unjust hierarchy, and both need to be abolished. A feminism  that does not address the intersection of gender and class is a feminism that ignores the interests of most of the world's women - a female prime minister doesn't mean shit if she enacts policies that further the oppression of marginalised women.

Mary Barbour understood intersectionality, not as an abstract idea, but as an everyday experience. She was a woman, so she experienced misogyny; she was working-class, so she knew what it was like to get the shitty end of the capitalist stick. Barbour would have none of the insistence that marginalised people settle for fighting single-issue campaigns, because she knew that people do not live single-issue lives. She helped organise the rent strikes, and was a dedicated anti-war activist, but she also started Glasgow's first family planning centre, to help women take control of their lives and their bodies. Mary Barbour has been commemorated in songs, poems, and plays, and I'm happy to add this (very small) celebration of her life to the historical record.

International Working Women's Day - Part One

I thought it would be a great idea to do a post each day in the week leading up to International Working Women's Day, each post celebrating an iconic woman who I thought the world should know more about. Unfortunately, I had that idea just now, so it's too late. Instead, I'm going to do a post every day for a week, starting today, on International Working Women's Day itself. This first post is on Harriet Tubman.

Harriet Tubman said, on the subject of her escape from slavery, "There was one of two things I was entitled to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other." She got her liberty, probably in part because even the Grim Reaper didn't want to fuck with her. Born into slavery in 1822, Tubman made her escape in 1849, but her own freedom wasn't enough - her family were still slaves. Working with the Underground Railroad - a secret network of free black people and white allies - Tubman made several trips back to the South to help her family escape. Though every rescue put her in mortal danger, Tubman reportedly grew more confident with every family member she led to freedom, and quickly became one of the Underground Railroad's most famous heroes. Over eleven years, in thirteen expeditions, Tubman is estimated to have helped around seventy slaves escape, leading no less a figure than Frederick Douglass to say, in a letter to Tubman:

       The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of          your heroism. Excepting John Brown—of sacred memory—I know of no one who has willingly               encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have.

John Brown, of course, was the white abolitionist who attempted to lead a slave rebellion to create a free state for escaped slaves. Harriet Tubman, being the badass that she was, helped Brown recruit escaped slaves for his army. Tubman was not present at Brown's ill-fated raid on the town of Harper's Ferry - some say she was sick with a fever, others that she was on a rescue mission in the South at the time. Whatever the reason, Tubman's absence saved her life - had she been there, she would almost certainly have been killed as Brown himself was. 

When the American Civil War broke out, Tubman came to Port Royal to serve as a nurse, but managed to find enough free time to become the first woman to lead an armed assault in the civil war. Basically, her life was a combination of Glory and Django Unchained. 

Later in life, she got involved in the women's suffrage movement, travelling around the US to make speeches in favour of women's emancipation. This post is getting a little long, so I'll end it here. Tomorrow, I'll be writing about Mary Barbour. 

Top 5 Couples in Literature

It’s that time of year again – happy valentines ladies, gentlemen and others. I figured I’d write a list of my top five romantic couples in literature because I like lists and also romance. Here we go.

5. Jaime and Circe Lannister – A Song of Ice and Fire by George RR Martin

The ruthless, incestuous, infanticidal Lannister twins may seem like an odd choice to begin the list, but there’s something truly touching about their devotion to each other. It’s a mark of GRRM’s skill as an author that he manages to humanise even the most repellent characters, including his main villains. Everything Jaime does, he does for Circe – in his interactions with other people he’s practically sociopathic, but when it comes to her, though he never lets his guard down completely, we see him show genuine tenderness. Circe is decidedly less romantic, but she is clearly devoted to her brother (wow, that’s a creepy sentence to type). Admittedly, the whole twincest thing is gross as fuck, but when you look past that, the love that these two have found in a harsh and unforgiving world is touching.

4. Celie and Shug – The Colour Purple by Alice Walker

Celie’s relationship with her husband’s lover Shug Avery is one of my favourite literary romances, in large part because of the way that Celie’s character develops throughout their storyline. Walker’s decision to focus on the oppression of queer black women at the hands of black men was groundbreaking for its time (so much so that the film adaptation glosses over Shug and Celie’s relationship completely), but even ignoring that, Walker’s ability to make her characters feel like real people, and grow like real people, makes it impossible not to be drawn in by these two.

3. Rod and Carl – Cleansed, by Sarah Kane

“I love you, now. I’m with you, now. I’ll do my best, moment to moment, not to betray you. That’s all. Don't ask me to lie to you.”

If that’s not the most heartfelt and honest declaration of love you’ve ever read, I need to know what you’ve been reading. A play set in a concentration camp may seem like an odd place to find a moving romance, but despite all the torture and death Sarah Kane’s third play (like all her work) is fundamentally about love. There’s the love of the illiterate boy Robin for Grace; the love Grace has for her deceased brother; even Kane’s Mengele, the sadistic guard Tinker, loves the Woman who appears to him in a coin-operated booth (it’s a very odd play). The couple that really touched me, though, were Carl and Todd, who Tinker tortures in order to find out the limits of love. Sometimes, the most beautiful stories bloom out of the ugliest of circumstances.

2. Lyra and Will – His Dark Materials trilogy, by Phillip Pullman

It had to be in there, somewhere. The books of the His Dark Materials trilogy were among the defining novels of my childhood, and with good reason. Beneath all the philosophy and grand inter-universe conflict, there’s a heartbreaking love story between the two young protagonists, who are eventually forced to part, as neither could survive in the other’s world. It’s been more than a decade since I read these books, but Lyra’s words to Will have stayed with me to this day:

“After we die we’ll find each other, an atom of me and an atom of you, and we’ll cling together so tightly that nothing and no one will ever tear us apart.”

The Amber Spyglass, the final part of the trilogy, remains the only book to have ever made me cry.

1. Jess and Ruth – Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

Stone Butch Blues is an astonishing book – a lyrical, relatable and often brutal story of a young person coming to terms with their sexuality and gender, starting in pre-Stonewall New Jersey and ending in the AIDS era. Feinberg based much of the book on hir own life, and it shows. Stone Butch Blues has the immediacy of first-hand experience. Reading Feinberg’s most well-known book, you get the feeling that sie really lived the experiences sie was writing about, and that sense of personal reality is part of what makes the relationship between Jess (the semi-autobiographical protagonist) and Ruth so involving – they feel like real people, people you might know. Another reason Stone Butch Blues is at number one is that Jess goes through so much shit over the course of the book that there’s a genuine sense of relief once they meet Ruth, and finally start to have some good luck. It’s a conflict/reward dynamic that never feels forced, which is something a lot of writers struggle to achieve. At the end of the day, the thing that makes Jess and Ruth’s story so touching is Feinberg’s skill as a writer – hir mastery of plot, prose and characterisation come together to build up a moving portrayal of two people finding solace in a world full of hardship and violence. That’s why Stone Butch Blues is at the top of my list.

Sick Health - Fat White Family Review

Fat White Family
Songs for Our Mothers

If there's one thing wrong with pop music today (and there is) it's that it suffers from a suffocating feeling of good health. Even in ostensibly rough and unwashed genres like metal and hip-hop, everything seems far too clean. It's like record companies, radio stations and musicians themselves are afraid of letting their music show any sign that the world is anything other than a non-stop party, that there are any problems that can't be solved by the time the chorus finishes. Caring is out of fashion; polish is king.

Fat White Family care. Fat White Family are not polished. Fat White Family are the perfect antidote to the enforced civility of modern pop (aren't we all a bit tired of being civil?). For one thing, they're not afraid of sounding fucked up - from the simmering menace of "Whitest Boy on the Beach" to the unsettlingly direct confrontation with fascism of "Duce" and "Goodbye Goebbels," to the general queasy sound of the album as a whole, this is a band that seem to take pleasure in making you feel like you've just found a cockroach in your curry. And songs like Tinfoil Deathstar, which deals with both heroin addiction and the death of austerity victim David Clapson, show that Fat White Family are willing to be seen to give a shit. What's more, they actually appear to have some kind of political viewpoint. In a world where the closest thing to political commitment displayed by most musicians is a quick set at a benefit gig for whatever cause is in the news, Fat White Family actually seem to do shit. Their first major bit of press came when they organised a street party to celebrate the death of Margaret Thatcher; they've participated in anti-gentrification actions, and raised thousands of pounds for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign; they've used the word "socialism" and, what's more, they actually seem to know what it means.

But more important than any of that is the music itself. All the intelligence and worthy actions in the world mean nothing if you can't play. Fortunately, they can. Songs for Our Mothers is a solid album; chaotic, multifaceted and creepy as fuck. The whole thing has a kind of off-kilter vibe to it, like that moment when you first realise you've drunk too much, and you're about to be sick. It's jarring - in contrast to the barely-controlled mayhem of their live shows, the album foregoes aggression and focuses on atmosphere. The rhythms stagger and lurch, the vocals are just a little too quiet to hear properly, but loud enough for you to catch a few key phrases. The music itself varies from Autobahn-era Kraftwerk on "Whitest Boy on the Beach" to country on album closer "Goodbye Goebbels," a love song from Hitler to his right-hand man that actually manages to be quite touching. It's almost as if the band set out to write as many different kinds of songs as possible, only without the self-indulgence that that implies - these songs have clearly been slaved over. I really do wish, though, that the vocals were mixed a bit higher - what few lyrics I can make out are great, and I really wish I could hear the rest of them.

Rating: 8/10

Review - Bowie

David Bowie
Blackstar

Something happened on the day he died
- David Bowie, "Blackstar"

Faced with death - whether from old age or a potentially fatal illness - most musicians withdraw a little and make stripped-down, solemn records where they play the acoustic guitar and sing about the transience of life. Johnny Cash did it with his American series, Leonard Cohen's been doing it for about twenty years, and one might have expected the recently deceased David Bowie to do something similar. But if there's one thing you could say with certainty about Bowie, it's that he never did what the world expected. More than anyone else, except perhaps his friend and contemporary Lou Reed, David Bowie made a point of never making the same record twice, always moving forward, creating the trend rather than trying to fit in with it, and he continued that approach on his final album, Blackstar.

It's taken me a long time to write this review, because Blackstar is the kind of album you have to listen to more than once to really appreciate it. This isn't the Bowie of "Starman" and "Rebel Rebel". Instead, the songs on Blackstar are closer to the more experimental Station to Station. The music is a collection of sounds, more about feeling than melody, while the lyrics are dense, obscure, impressionistic. Even on "Dollar Days", the album's most direct song, the lyrics are more allusive than descriptive. But even though Station to Station and Bowie's previous album The Next Day offer good starting points for a description of the sounds to be found on Blackstar, the fact remains that this represents new ground for Bowie. Unlike any of Bowie's previous works, Blackstar has the feeling of a jazz album - the way the sounds fit together is reminiscent of Bitches Brew more than anything else - while the lyrics show more of the influence of Bowie's hero Scott Walker. Sadly, we'll never know what Bowie would have gone on to do had he lived, but Blackstar gives the impression of an artist about to embark on a new phase in his career.

What Blackstar proves above all else is that, even approaching seventy and fighting a losing battle with cancer, David Bowie was at the height of his powers as an artist, and the body of work he left us with is something few artists can compete with.

Rating: 10/10