Smith in his disco homage phase. Both songs associated with The Infotainment Scam album, their highest charting album ever reaching a Top Ten 9th position, most embarrassingly obvious title and ugliest album cover (give me the scribbled montages or horror grotesque comics, any day), and equally obvious old guard post-punk Smith staking out a respected niche position in the EDM rave music takeover of 1990s British pop music. The music on TIS, however, is considerably punchier and offers more edgy rock contrast to Smith's deadpan than these live takes. But they'll do and I like the way this live version of The Fall leans into Disco's monotonously simple bass heavy melodic groovelines and still manages to give them their own stamp of post-punk rumble like old pros. I'd like to think Bryan Ferry would give this his nod. The lead track is a cover of the 1979 Sister Sledge disco masterpiece, "Lost in Music," Smith adding, cynically, ominously, chanted, "the roads of access lead to the palace of excess." His "I feel so alive" isn't entirely convincing either but his shrieks of "hideaway, hideaway, hideaway" are the only time we're sure he's being moved by the music. The B-side, and the actual single of the pair, "Why Are People Grudgeful?" merges reggae great Joe Gibb's "People Grudgeful" and some Lee 'Scratch' Perry. A sort of reggae world music post-punk lament for an illusions-free peaceful coexistence, as fanciful as that sounds today. Or difficult to swallow coming from such a crank as Smith. Post-punk noir disco.
TGIDFHow does it feel to be on your own? Sifting through the rubble, bringing up the dead, reassembling history from below.
The Fall's Mancunian Post-Punk Prole Art Beat Therapy
North country and western England prole art dance music 1983. From album, Perverted by Language, on a short list of my favorite Fall albums for sure, and an even shorter list of truly great post-punk albums. And it's not just Mark E. Smith, in your face, clever, obtuse, cryptic, provoking suspicions, homophobic "Sodmized by presumption," antifa "In a German history book," or antisemitic "a Jew on a motorbike," but the band, who he apparently rarely speaks to, so under him or behind him or in whatever hierarchical relationship to him, actually, rock out with him in rivetingly tight post-punk shambolic intensity. Classic Fall.
"Who Makes The Nazis" (1982), post-punk legend Smith tells you: White-O's [flag waving white supremacists], All the Os, Intellectual half-wits, balding smug faggots [great, more potential homophobia and lumping all us bald guys w Nazis], long horn breeds, smiling Buffalos [atavists?], rapists in mirage Spa Motels, real Irish know [underground violence?], Joe, Benny's cob-web eyes, bad bias TV, BBC, George Orwell [note to self: read that James Burnham book], Burmese Days [colonialism], Black burnt flesh, and Crack unit species [militarists? decade before the Crack epidemic]." And a word from anti-fascist (and, again, likely homophobic) Bobby: "If you're out of love, just give them real soap. Hates not your enemy, love's your enemy." Let me guess: "Bush warriors" have menaced Smith/Benny and they're suffering untreated PTSD? And you still can't argue it isn't a little Hitler like for Smith to fire a musician for eating a salad, as he allegedly once did. Nonetheless, poet laureate of anti-fascist soccer hooligans.
PRT.
Our mistake was to think we live in a better country than we do
"Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do. Our mistake was to see the joy, the extraordinary balance between idealism and pragmatism, the energy, the generosity, the coalition-building of the Kamala Harris campaign and think that it must triumph over the politics of lies and resentment. Our mistake was to think that racism and misogyny were not as bad as they are, whether it applied to who was willing to vote for a supremely qualified Black woman or who was willing to vote for an adjudicated rapist and convicted criminal who admires Hitler.
We knew what the problems were, and we wanted to fix them. The principal problems that got us to this bleakest moment in American history are intertwined. They are the crisis of masculinity, the failure of the mainstream news media and the rise of Silicon Valley, and in a way they are all the same problem.
The media might be the simplest to describe. A democracy requires an informed citizenry, and the US media over the past eight years in particular created an increasingly misinformed citizenry.
When people are more concerned that a trans girl might play on a softball team than that the climate crisis might profoundly devastate the biosphere and much of life on it, human and otherwise, for the next 10,000 years, the media has failed. When people worry about crime when it is low, an economy when it is thriving and immigrants when they do much of the hard work that sustains that economy and commit fewer crimes than the native-born, the media has failed."
More post-mortem on the election. Solnit's books, Wanderlust (2000), a sort of literary walking tour, and A Paradise Built In Hell (2009), about people coming together in crisis and "elite panic," are two of my favorite books all time. She's a boss.
Billionaires and Bigots Overwhelm Democracy with Disinformation
"But my own conclusion is that both of those things [post-pandemic inflation and sexism/racism] were amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now.
In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Grump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Grump’s former staff that he is unfit for office, and even that his chief of staff General John Kelly considers him a fascist and noted that he admires German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
As actor Walter Masterson posted: “I tried to educate people about tariffs, I tried to explain that undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes and are the foundation of this country. I explained Project 2025, I interviewed to show that they supported it. I can not compete against the propaganda machines of Twitter, Fox News, [Joe Rogan Experience], and NY Post. These spaces will continue to create reality unless we create a more effective way of reaching people.”
Letters from an American Historian
And I'd even have to add the example of the liberal prestige press, NY Times/WaPo and NPR, regularly reporting consumer frustrations with inflation, higher prices, horse race style, with very little if any basic context. For instance, that the whole world experienced inflation generated by supply-chain disruptions after the pandemic. Or that no other developed nation brought down the inflation as fast or as well as Biden and the US economy. Or successfully avoided a recession that most expected as inevitable after the Fed's spike in interest rates. Or even reports that much, nearly half, of the inflation was actually caused by corporate price gouging. They cultivated the opinion, instead, that Biden was to blame for the inflation and rising housing costs, and as if Trump's economics could bring back the prices of 2017. This is disinformation too.
Indeed, by contrast and as a matter of fact, nearly every credible economist tells us Grump's own plans for 20% tariffs on foreign imports and the forced deportation of immigrant labor in the tens of millions would be crazy inflationary.
At this point, the mainstream and right-wing media are propaganda arms for "free market" corporate rule. Their disinformation might make Billionaires freer but it makes workers less free, little more than wage slaves. And, sadly, these oligarchic market arrangements are usually impervious to reform until they mess up so bad they crash the economy like in 2008.
Let the post-mortem begin, Ryan Grim and Krystal Ball @ Drop Site:
"But the real problems for the Democrats go much deeper and require a dramatic course correction of a sort that, I suspect, Democrats are unlikely to embark upon. The bottom line is this: Democrats are still trying to run a neoliberal campaign in a post-neoliberal era. In other words, 2016 Bernie was right."
I agree and disagree with this take. I agree with the general political-economic history and agree with the contention that Bernie's populist left movement was smothered and slandered by the DNC and the media oligarchy in 2016 and 2020. But Biden, after winning the nomination in 2020, took a surprising turn, without a lot of fanfare he embraced the progressive wing of the party in a way HRC and Obama never did. He actually was the first POTUS to champion a "post-neoliberal era," condemned supply-side economics' central conceit, "Trickle-down theory," supported labor like no POTUS before him, and activated antitrust and industrial policy against the worst predations of corporate rule. I was afraid, actually, Harris would cave on these populist economic policies to Billionaire donor class pressures but, to her credit, she didn't. But as a consequence 8 out of 10 of the largest mega donors gave to Grump's republicans to the tune of over two billion dollars; and the richest guy in the world took over Grump's ground game in the last three months of the election and dumped hundreds of millions of dollars more into his campaign. Basically, foremost, doing all this political spending to stop Bidenomics from ushering in a "post-neoliberal era." Neoliberal Dems counseled that Harris should compromise with Wall Street, fire Lina Khan, or put some crypto creep in the cabinet, but I no more think that would have appeased the Tech Bros than militarizing the border, with a bipartisan plan, would have appeased the bigots. Maybe Bernie, white man, could have reached more of the bigots with his message of economic populism than Harris, but he would have faced the same denigrating hazing and obfuscation by the Billionaires and major media oligarchy. Instead of trying a full-frontal assault on the corporate order, like Bernie, a losing David and Goliath contest if there ever was one, Harris and Biden were trying to coax the corporate order into a "post-neoliberal era," a green new deal, as it were, a pragmatic alternative to Trump's violent fascism and chaotic lawlessness. What this election exposes more than anything else, in this regard, economics, political economy, is the ongoing intransigence of corporate rule and, with the crucial help of the mainstream media oligarchy, a popular electorate that has no better understanding of this dichotomy, or any understanding of who really supports their economic interests, than that the prices of groceries and housing were cheaper when Trump was in the Whitehouse.
The Republican Whitewashing of American History
"WTF? Our National Archives are removing displays and information about MLK, Native Americans, the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement, unions, birth control, and the American internment of Japanese during WWII because it may upset Republican legislators. When US Archivist Colleen Shogan was grilled by the Senate during her confirmation, neofascist Josh Hawley called her a Democratic “extremist” and warned her that he and other Republicans “would be watching closely for signs that she was pulling the independent agency to the left.” Looks like this effort to “work the refs” is succeeding. Most recently, a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. was replaced by a picture of Richard Nixon meeting Elvis Presley, pictures of the camps where we interred Japanese-ancestry US citizens were taken down, references to the coal industry causing environmental hazards were removed, and Shogan “also ordered the removal of labor-union pioneer Dolores Huerta and Minnie Spotted-Wolf, the first Native American woman to join the Marine Corps, from the photo booth, according to current and former employees and agency documents.” They even removed a picture of Republican President Jerry Ford’s wife Betty because she was wearing an Equal Rights Amendment button, and in the display of “patents that changed the world” the birth control pill was replaced with the bump stock that turns semi-automatic weapons into functionally fully-automatic machine guns. This “obeying fascists in advance” is beyond the pale, and hopefully now that it’s getting some publicity Shogan will reconsider bowing to the GOP’s white supremacist base."
Original story in Current Affairs
As a retired school teacher I can comfortably admit now I definitely taught the CRT version of US history while teaching high school social studies and english classes for nearly a quarter century, as I gathered did most my colleagues in blue bubble Seattle. And probably would have been banned or hounded in many parts of the country today for doing so. But not everybody even in my blue city approved of teaching the conflicts. Some wanted a more celebratory, rah rah, version of US history taught, with less emphasis on the conflicts and discrimination and more emphasis on our national glory, etc. It was a divide, again, even in a blue city, with people that still did not get that America's development because of its democratic opportunities and diversity were in fact its greatest achievement. I know bigots don't want to hear any of this. And I know to some this just sounds like more Kumbaya multiculturalism but, yes, along with our imperialist arrogance, and our militarism, our multicultural democratic opportunities, however flawed and shorted, are a defining distinguishing feature of our national identity around the world. It's our soft superpower. Erasing that history will not make us stronger but weaker. And it is, again, on the ballot in this election.
"The forces of control" "The forces of control" "The forces of control"
They are closing down
Communications
They're taking control
Of our situations....
"Headache for Michelle," Au Pairs (1981): I think I thought of the Au Pairs at the time as Johnny-come-latelies, last year's news, or by the time I had caught up with Playing With a Different Sex, anyway. But they actually went back to 1978 and had a way with the post-punk song that shoulda coulda produced in a better world several sharp Top 40 singles; It's Obvious, America, We're So Cool, and this moody, caustic, finely etched post-punk record, for just a few striking instances. Vocalist Lesley Woods was their signature, and a savage critic of contemporary sexual politics. And not bad with the pop hooks. You wouldn't go terribly astray to think of the Au Pairs as a distaff counterpart to the Gang of Four, or as they were. Both inspired by the art school side of the class of '77 punk protest. Both into funk but it comes out more nervous and herky-jerky and clinical when they do it. Both sound like they read hip academic literature on sexual politics, and they chatter a lot in songs about demystifying patriarchy and capitalism. And although the Au Pairs were from Birmingham, they actually did play together often live with Leed's Gang of Four during post-punk's original heyday. And what a double-bill that would have made. The Au Pairs music has aged well and stands as an exemplary model of early 1980s post-punk agitprop feminist dub funk. Shouldn't be missed.