#this late stage capitalistic hell hole we live in

[ecle-c-tic]

I fucking hate seeing the news on my nonsense website

[sinceileftyoublog]

Gang of Four Box Set Review: 77-81

(Matador)

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Gang of Four cared about “injustice, oppression, and having a good time,” as stated in the book that’s a part of their essential new box set Gang of Four: 77-81. The set, which includes remasters of their first two albums, the GOAT-worthy Entertainment! and its underrated follow-up Solid Gold, a singles LP, and a double LP of a never-released-often-bootlegged 1980 show at the American Indian Center in San Francisco, is only possible now that the post-punk greats have gotten out of their shitty record deal with Warner. We should be so lucky: While any time’s a great time for Gang of Four, their anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-sexist jams fit the post-2020 environment of COVID-induced rejections of late stage capitalism and racial reckoning of the ever-strong Black Lives Matter movement. On a simpler note, the death of founding member Andy Gill last year (which occurred during the process of putting together this set), a Run The Jewels sample, and a similar box set treatment from good friends/tour- and bill-mates Pylon (the last of which details the same legendary story of Gang of Four’s first U.S. show featured on 77-81) have all caused renewed interest in the band. Perhaps Steve Albini puts it best: “They were engaging because they were equally committed to two principles: one, capitalism is a toxin that poisons all human interaction, and two, it’s your turn to get a round of drinks.”

When Gang of Four started, they were perhaps geopolitically aware and involved, but I’m not sure how much it shone through at the very beginning. (Indeed, they picked their name not really knowing anything about its namesake.) What was always consistent about them were their class politics: In Thatcher’s UK, where the poor got poorer while heaps of trash both literal (garbage) and figurative (Nazis) freely roamed the streets, Gang of Four stood for economic equality. They decried advertising culture on “I Found That Essence Rare” and American capitalism on the satirical “Cheeseburger”. “A Hole In The Wallet” and “It’s Her Factory” stood in favor of the wages for housework campaign and against gender-based economic oppression. “To Hell With Poverty” and “Capital (It Fails Us Now)” were perhaps their funniest expressions of radicalism, re-appropriating siren-like guitars into a disco stomp on the former, telling the story of a newborn reaching for a credit card on the latter. (“Oh no! I left it in my other suit!” they exclaim in a bout of absurdism.)

Better yet, Gang of Four offered an example to follow for other all-white, all-male bands at the time and now, that intersectionality and the class struggle go hand-in-hand. The anti-patriarchy scratchy stomp of “He’d Send In The Army” closes Solid Gold but anchors the live disc in terms of emotional intensity. The book details the band’s participation in Rock Against Racism and Rock Against Sexism concerts, where Black bands and bands with female band members were given the headlining slot over the more popular Gang of Four, who believed that music was not only inherently sociopolitical but alternate to nationalism. And almost as much as the tour-mates and musical peers quoted in 77-81′s book talk about Gang of Four’s originality, they talk about their generosity as a form of community building, going out of their way to share instruments, the stage, and even food with them.

Of course, Gang of Four’s music itself continues to be unrivaled, and band members from the likes of Mission of Burma, Pylon, and New Order wax poetic about Gang of Four’s precision, the controlled spastic interplay between Gill’s guitars and Hugo Burnham’s drums. They weren’t minimal, per se, but they were lean, every element in every song essential. They were the type of band that could put perhaps their best-known song, “Damaged Goods”, fourth in a long set and maintain its and the crowd’s energy throughout. (If bands often close a live set with a comedown, the fact that they closed this show with the blisteringly poppy “Glass” made me realize Gang of Four don’t have any songs that could be described as a “comedown.”) The opening guitar growls of “Love Like Anthrax” are amped up live, as are the nerves of “Guns Before Butter” and the  canter of “At Home He’s A Tourist”. I got to see the somewhat maligned final lineup of Gang of Four in 2015, and listening to Live At American Indian Center 1980 confirms for me what I always thought: that Gang of Four were one of the best live bands to ever do it.

I haven’t seen the physical release of 77-81, which further features a cassette of unreleased outtakes, rarities, and demos from Entertainment! and Solid Gold, but the opportunity for Matador to present the band’s recorded music and the first official publication of their lyrics and contextualize it with live recordings, photos, commentary from their peers, and analysis makes it the indispensable reissue of the year so far. It makes it possible to imagine what it was like to be at that first US show, where Pylon had to play two sets because Gang of Four was hours late due to a van breakdown, eventually showing up hours late to absolutely burn the place down for 15 minutes, inspiring generations of bands and radicals for decades to come.

[vileart]

Naturalism or Symbolism

Another question is left: what kind of play would drive the reader mad in the late nineteenth century? At the time of its writing, there remained a tradition of literary plays - written for reading rather than performing - but both naturalism and symbolism were coming to maturity. The mention of a song in Act I suggests a connection with the bourgeois melodramas popular on the London stage during the nineteenth century, but it seems unlikely that a script so powerful would conform to a conservative - and dramaturgically uneven - genre. Whether the content alone was enough to provoke hysteria is a moot point: with only fragments available, the script's reconstruction is speculative at best.

Animal Materials In some performances, dealings with the dead world have been quite direct: performers manipulate the body, bones, or skin of an animal. The actual skull of a horse has long figured in European and Caribbean ritual performance; attached to a pole, and draped with cloth for skin, the skull becomes a horsehead creature which, Violet Alford says, "inspir[es] both fear and awe." The pelvic bones of mammals were used as masks for Mojiganga processions in Mexico, and for Tlingit ceremonies on the Northwest Coast of North America. The live flesh of the face is pressed against the bone, the eyes of the performer gaze out through the large holes on either side of the coccyx. In France and the British Isles there has long been a Christmastime childrens' tradition of hunting and killing a tiny bird, the Cutty Wren, and then decorating the little corpse with bits of fancy cloth, for procession through the village. In the eighteenth century an English observer wrote of Ireland :

[The Cutty Wren] is still hunted and killed by peasants on Christmas Day, and on the following St. Stephen's Day he is carried about hung by the leg in the centre of two hoops crossing each other at right angles, and a procession made in every village, of men, women, and children, singing an Irish catch, importing him to be the king of all birds. Such a catch (or tune) extolling the extravagance of the diminutive corpse, might go like this: Our king is well dressed In silks of the best In ribbons so rare No king can compare. In all these performances, the play with animal corpses and animal bones makes an implicit or explicit connection with the dead world. Human Remains The remains of dead humans also fulfill functions for the living. This is a vast topic: the freshly flayed skin of a human sacrifice was worn in ritual performance by Aztec priests, the corpse at an Irish wake was proverbially pulled out of its coffin and made to dance one last, loud reel. In medieval Europe traffic and trade with the bones of saints (or the purported bones of saints) amounted to a pre-capitalist economy of dead matter. Patrick Geary writes that the bones of saints, placed within reliquaries in churches throughout Europe, at a time when central authority had all but ceased to exist, provided "protection, identity, and economic sustenance." Apart from these practical functions, Geary says, relics also provided the point of contact between mundane existence and the divine world. They were part of the sacred, the numinous; but incarnate in this world, as had been Christ, without losing their place in the other. (22) This "point of contact" with the other world points to the function of these objects both as a boundary between life and death, and as a gateway for play on either side of that boundary, play with the power and presence of once-live bodies, now dead. I think, in this respect, of the political funeral of AIDS activist Mark Lowe Fischer in New York City on the eve of the presidential election of 1992. Three hundred members of ACT-UP carried his body in an open, plain pine casket from Judson Church in Greenwich Village, up Sixth Avenue, in the rain, to President George Bush's campaign headquarters on Forty-Third Street. There, another object--a thirty-foot banner listing ACT-UP's plan for ending the AIDS crisis--was laid upon Fischer's casket as his friends testified about the politics of his death. "It was his wish," Michael Cunningham said of Fischer, "that we deliver his body to the doorstep of the man who murdered him." At play here was the power of the body without life, the body just recently gone over the border, but still acting up, still "incarnate in this world without losing [its] place in the other." "We have covered his body," another speaker said, "with a list of demands Mark himself helped make ... for simple inexpensive measures that have gone unheeded" (8). The power of Fischer's body joined with and was made manifest by his comrades in ACT-UP who moved it up Sixth Avenue for its performance on Forty-Third Street. It is an exclusive power of the dead to signify to the living from the other side: dead bird, animal skull, saint's relic, or the body of a "hero," as Mark Fischer was called (8). The connection of relics to the dead world (whether that is a world of saints, or simply the world of dead matter) is their source of power, but practically speaking, this power can only be accessed by the simulation of life through the return of motion to the relic, through dance, procession, or in combination with other objects (like the ACT-UP banner on Fischer's coffin). The return of the once-living to social, political, or spiritual functionality is momentary, but it plays across the border of death; we can bring back the body to the live world for some specific purpose. The "point of contact" between live and dead worlds surfaces as a powerful link in performance. Materials of the Dead World "One should start with the materials," Oskar Schlemmer wrote about Bauhaus Theater dances, "learn to feel the differences in texture among such materials as glass, metal, wood, and so on, and one should let these perceptions sink in until they are part of one." The choice of materials is important in object performance because some substances: plants, wood, leather and bone, have a closer relationship to the dead world than others: metal, stone, glass, and plastic, whose connection to the border of life and death is more distant. The near-life condition of harvested grain can account for its anthropomorphic appearances in English folk songs like John Barleycorn, but also for its agency in Christian tradition, as the Host in the Catholic mass, where the baked wafer does not represent, but is the body, the relic of Christ. Wood, another substance close to the live/dead border, is a traditional material of masks, puppets, fetish objects, drums and other musical instruments. Alfred Jarry, the turn-of-the-century French symbolist playwright, was fascinated by the ritual heritage of puppets, and in a sequel to his Ubu Roi had the puppet character Guignol explain the mystic roots of his carved wooden head: In the time of the ancient gods, Before the age of iron, Before the ages of gold, of flesh and of horn, Heads were made of wood. In these wooden boxes wisdom was kept, And the seven sages, the seven sages of Greece were seven wooden-headed men, Seven men, Made from thousand-year-old oaks Who issued oracles in the forest groves of Dodona. The roots of those old trees Groped towards the center of life Like fingers fingering treasures, Through infinite space and the night of time Creeping towards knowledge, embracing the universe. The other-worldly significance of a wooden puppet head attaches itself to other levels of meaning in performance which can all offer reference and access to the dead world. Consider the death symbolism of the hand-puppet figure of Pulcinella in southern Italy. "Pulcinella," Antonio Pasqualino says, "is death because in the guarattelle [hand-puppet] shows he kills everybody he meets and plays with their corpses." Pulcinella's white costume and black mask, Pasqualino says, "are the colors of death," and the "bird-like" aspects of Pulcinella's character, represent the "relationship that exists, in ancient religions and in folklore, between birds and the world of the dead." While wood, plant materials, leather and bone maintain their proximity to the time when the object was actually live, objects made of metal, plastic and glass lack that close organic connection, and must exert themselves more to regain life in performance, through the explosions of the internal combustion engine, the pulses of electricity, or the power of pneumatic pressure. But what they can achieve is in some ways more startling: the life-like movement of computer-controlled robots in the Disneyworld "Hall of Presidents" or in the Jurassic Park dinosaurs, or, perhaps most unsettling, the approximation of a human brain in AT&T's chess-playing computer. Peter Minshall, a Trinidad designer who builds giant carnival figures often employing sophisticated high-tech materials developed for aeronautic design, says of his creations, "It's a whole incredible kinetic form... it is not mechanical, it is alive." But the simulation of life by mechanical means also brings with it a strong identification with death fitting to materials with little proximity to recent life. This is explicitly registered in the destructive and self-destructive performing machines of Mark Pauline's Survival Research Laboratories, but also in the vast area of post-World-War-Two machine aesthetics of Southern California custom culture: the death's-head symbolism of the Hell's Angels, or the life/death imagery in the work of the famed car customizers like Robert Williams and Von Dutch. Playing with the dead world is, ultimately, a spiritual act; spiritual in a different way than performance centered on the body can be. When we see life put into it or returned to the animated object--however briefly--by human hands, we see, in a way, an encapsulation of our own trajectory of existence: from inanimate matter, through life, back to inanimate matter. Our play with puppets, masks, images, machines, relics and other objects is always a serious matter, a play with transcendence, a play with the basic forces of life and death. .

  The elevation of an object from the status of prop to active agent provokes anxiety, because it appears that focus on the object will reduce focus on the human body. This anxiety is in fact justified, because performing object theater de-centers the actor and places her or him in relationship not to another actor or to the audience, but to a representative of the lifeless world. But the lifeless object speaks profoundly when manipulated by its performer. And the profundity of the object, because it is part of the dead world, reaches different, deeper levels of signification than live actors can. In response to Kleist's and Craig's claims for the performing object, the late Polish director Tadeusz Kantor wrote "I do not share the belief that the MANNEQUIN (or WAX FIGURE) could replace the LIVE ACTOR, as Kleist and Craig wanted." But Kantor misunderstands the significance of Kleist and Craig's theories. If we look at the whole body of their works, we see that Craig (whose unfulfilled lifelong ambition was always to produce wonderful versions of Shakespeare plays with actors) and Kleist (whose fascinating dramatic works were all written for actors), did not want to "replace" the actor with an object so much as accept the presence of the object onstage, as Kantor himself did in his theater work. In other words, in performing object theater the actor remains essential; the simultaneous presence of both actor and object is central to the theater of objects. The purpose of object theater is not to replace the actor with an object (which is of course impossible, because a human needs to operate that object), but to juxtapose and join human and object together onstage. Oskar Schlemmer understood this in 1922. Looking forward to his Bauhaus theater work, which would be obsessed with the performance function of objects, Schlemmer still wrote "I would place the human figure at the center of my investigations ... man and his relationship to the world about him." The dynamic relationship of human and object (the world about her) is in fact the central aspect of performing object theater. This relationship is also the relationship between the living world and the dead world. Playing with the Dead World Puppet theater, and other theater focused on material objects, has a different relationship with death than actors' theater does. 

-- Gareth K Vile Performance Editor 07898789126 The Skinny | The Drill Hall | 30-38 Dalmeny Street | EH6 8RG | 0131 467 4630 This e-mail and its attachments are private and confidential and are intended for the above named recipient(s) only.  If you have received this message in error, please notify us and remove it from your system. The contents or opinions contained in this e-mail are those of the sender and do not  represent those of Radge Media Limited or The Skinny unless otherwise specifically stated. Any content submitted to editors via email is subject to normal terms and conditions for Skinny content unless otherwise specifically stated. Advertising sales confirmed in emails to Skinny sales staff are subject to normal terms and conditions for contracted advertisements in The Skinny. Radge Media Limited is a limited company registered in Scotland. Registered number: 310052. Registered office: The Drill Hall, 30-38 Dalmeny Street, Edinburgh EH6 8RG from the vileblog http://ift.tt/2qUR1X2