Tag: music

Carnival, Claudia Jones, and the Machinery of the Surveillance State:

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A tradition that began as an act of defiance is now being absorbed by authority. Sixty years after the initial Notting Hill Carnival, which burst onto the streets of West London in rebellion, the event takes place under conditions the founders could never have imagined. This year, close to two million people participated, while 7,000 police officers, drones, and facial-recognition cameras monitored the crowds. A security operation costing up to £20 million surrounded the area. Over 330 individuals were banned from attending before the event started, and by the end of the first day, police had made 169 arrests. The difference between Carnival’s origins and its current state is not just stark; it is a matter of history. Carnival was born from a riot; today, it is managed as if it could be another riot.

To understand what has been done to Carnival, one must return to the figure who helped bring it into being: Claudia Jones. Her life, politics, and purpose illuminate precisely what is being erased and why.

Claudia Jones: A Revolutionary Life Against Empire

Claudia Jones wasn’t a “community organiser” in the modern, sanitised sense. She was a communist, a Black internationalist, and a leading anti-imperialist thinker of the mid-20th century. Born in Trinidad and raised in Harlem, she was radicalised by the racism of the Depression era. Jones joined the Communist Party USA and became a prominent writer on issues of race, gender, and class. Her 1949 essay “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman” is still a key text in Black Marxist feminism.

Her political activism led to state repression, with the U.S. repeatedly detaining, imprisoning, and finally deporting her in 1955 amid McCarthyism. Britain only permitted her entry because Trinidad was still a colony; she arrived in London as a political exile. There, Jones found a Black community facing problems eerily similar to those in her homeland: racist policing, housing discrimination, low wages, and rising violence from far-right street gangs. She founded the West Indian Gazette, Britain’s first major Black newspaper, not just as a cultural platform but as a means for political activism. It became a space for agitation, organisation, and awareness-raising.

In response to the 1958 Notting Hill race riots and the 1959 murder of Kelso Cochrane, Jones opted for action rather than appeals to authority. She organised an indoor Caribbean carnival at St Pancras Town Hall in January 1959 to directly address racist violence. The event celebrated Caribbean culture and made a political statement: Black people had the right to occupy public space, be seen, express joy, and remain unafraid. The roots of carnival in Caribbean masquerade traditions—created by enslaved and colonised people to mock the planter class highlighted its political significance. Carnival was never just entertainment; it was a cultural act through which the oppressed found a voice in a context where theirs was otherwise suppressed. Today, this history is hidden beneath barricades, drones, and biometric checkpoints.

The outdoor street Carnival that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s was influenced by the same challenges Jones faced: police harassment, racial violence, and the British state’s refusal to recognise Black Britons in public life fully. Carnival served as a form of resistance, asserting existence against erasure, collective identity against isolation, and joy against repression. It was never meant to be ‘managed’ but to be visible. In its early years, Carnival often confronted police, who viewed it as a threat instead of a cultural celebration. The way police respond to Carnival has always reflected the government’s attitude toward Black communities. What has evolved is not the suspicion itself but the mechanisms behind it.

The increase in policing at Carnival is a systemic issue, not just occasional. Arrests have steadily risen each year—209 in 2022, 308 in 2023, 355 in 2024, and 528 last year. The Met publicly celebrates the success of live facial recognition, which identified 98 individuals in 2023 and resulted in 61 arrests. This year’s operation was the largest so far. The stated reasons are always the same: ensuring public safety, addressing knife crime, sexual assault, and preventing a minority from ruining it for everyone. However, this framing is deeply connected to a historical pattern of viewing Black communities as suspicious. Carnival is uniquely labelled as a security threat among Britain’s major cultural events. The policing tactics resemble counter-insurgency measures more than crowd control.

Even senior police officials acknowledge the double standards involved. Former detective chief inspector Mike Neville has described Carnival as the country’s worst example of a two-tier policing system. The London Assembly’s Police and Crime Committee warns that repeatedly diverting officers to police Carnival disrupts neighbourhood policing throughout the capital. The operation expands each year, funded by millions from City Hall. Each year, politicians and media repeat the same pattern: celebrating “vibrant multiculturalism” while using surveillance and coercion tools against the communities being celebrated. Carnival is lauded as a symbol of diversity but also policed as a potential source of unrest.

Commodification Wears a Friendlier Face

If policing serves to neutralise Carnival’s radical roots, then commodification symbolises capitalism’s role. Each year, media coverage reduces Carnival to an economic event focusing on tourism income, transportation issues, and hospitality profits. The “Carnival Economics” project highlights how this reduction neglects the community-based infrastructures—steel bands, mas camps, cultural centres like the Yaa Centre that support Carnival year-round. This form of erasure is subtler; it doesn’t involve drones or facial recognition but instead redefines Carnival as merely a “cultural asset,” a tourist draw, or a contributor to GDP. The political messages the defiance, the assertion of presence, the Caribbean working-class history are erased. Carnival becomes a brand, and its creators fade into the background.

Securitisation and commodification are not opposing forces but are interconnected. They jointly symbolise how a working-class, anti-racist cultural legacy is absorbed into the administrative and economic systems of a state and market that did not originate it and are keen to neutralise its significance. Carnival emerged from Claudia Jones’s revolutionary activism, Caribbean anti-colonial traditions, and Black Britons’ refusal to be invisible. It served as a declaration of presence in defiance of a hostile system.

Today, that tradition has adapted to absorb dissent. It encloses Carnival with police, drones, and biometric tech. It markets Carnival as a tourist destination. It advocates multiculturalism while viewing Black presence as a security threat.

The steel bands continue to play. The crowds keep arriving. Yet, the political significance has been stripped away. An event created because Black Britons faced attacks for claiming public space now relies on thousands of officers and biometric systems to control who can occupy that space. This is not true stewardship. It’s the gradual replacement of a community’s self-organised resistance with the machinery of the very state it once challenged.

Carnival Pays Lip Service to the Memory of Grenfell

Every year, during Notting Hill Carnival, a moment is set aside to remember Grenfell. Green hearts decorate banners and sound systems, a silence is observed, and tributes spread among the crowd. Those who participate do so genuinely. However, on an institutional and political level, Carnival now only superficially acknowledges Grenfell. The act of remembrance has been stylized, losing its deeper significance, and has been absorbed into the official story that has ultimately neutralized the spirit of Carnival.

Grenfell was more than an isolated tragedy; it was the unavoidable outcome of a political system that considers working-class, racialised communities expendable. Policies such as deregulation, outsourcing, cost-cutting, disrespect for tenants, and the dismissal of warnings set the stage for the disaster. The government’s response, characterised by delays, confusion, and a lengthy inquiry that has yet to deliver justice, mirrored this same underlying attitude. Ultimately, Grenfell symbolises a form of social murder.

Carnival’s official remembrance is mainly symbolic, providing a platform to acknowledge grief without addressing responsibility. The green heart signifies acceptable mourning, enabling recognition of loss while avoiding the acknowledgment of the systemic issues behind it. The political statement of Grenfell that the system endangers residents at home and surveils them in public is intentionally left out. Carnival can grieve, but it cannot openly assign blame or accuse.

This is the pattern of managed memory. The entity that uses drones and facial recognition to police Carnival also oversees the unresolved aftermath of Grenfell. It allows commemoration because, when stripped of politics, it is harmless. However, what it cannot accept is the link between the two: that the same communities whose cultural practices are seen as security threats were the ones left to burn in a tower with flammable cladding.

Carnival recalls Grenfell. However, unless remembrance turns into blame—unless sorrow shifts into activism, the memory will stay a tradition rather than a true confrontation. The green heart may continue to beat, as long as it does not reflect on the systems that enabled Grenfell and now encircle Carnival.

The Bands Played On

This year, as the procession arrived at Ladbroke Grove fire station, firefighters in uniform paid their respects to Grenfell. They formed a solemn line, heads bowed and saluting the memory of the 72 victims of the tower fire wrapped in flammable cladding. It was a sincere display of dignity by workers who witnessed the tragedy firsthand, carried bodies from smoke-filled stairwells, and continue to live with the trauma. Meanwhile, around them, the bands played on.

This isn’t disrespect from Carnival’s participants but reflects the choreography imposed on Carnival itself: remembrance is allowed only if it doesn’t disrupt the spectacle. The music keeps playing because Carnival has been redesigned to absorb grief without making it political. Firefighters pause; the crowd pauses; the sound systems lower the volume briefly, then the rhythm continues, as if grief were just another programmed beat in the entertainment. Grenfell turns into a ritual rather than a true reckoning.

The firefighters’ tribute highlights a contradiction. While those who risked their lives see Grenfell as a social murder caused by deregulation, outsourcing, tenants’ contempt, and a political economy that disposes of working-class lives, Carnival’s official memorial remains only symbolic. Green hearts, brief silences, and respectful nods are permitted because they avoid naming the responsible parties.

The issue isn’t the bands performing; they’re merely a symptom. Carnival has become a commercialised event, stripped of its political roots Claudia Jones’s resistance, fighting racist violence, and highlighting Black working-class communities—now seen as mere historical background. Grenfell is recognized, but only as a sad event, not as a critique of the same system that now encircles Carnival with drones and facial recognition technology.

The firefighters attempted to show respect. They genuinely tried. However, the surrounding machinery made their tribute merely symbolic, not confrontational. The music restarted because Carnival can mourn, but it cannot accuse. Until accusations can disrupt the rhythm, Grenfell will stay a tolerated memory for the state—as long as the bands keep playing.

Jones recognized that culture is inherently contentious. It is a site of ongoing conflict. Carnival was never intended merely as a celebration of diversity; it was a political statement affirming that Black working-class life in Britain would not be marginalized, erased, or intimidated. The issue is not that Carnival has always been subject to policing—that was part of its history—but that this policing has become normalized, integrated into the frameworks of “public safety,” “crowd management,” and “economic impact.” This shift has obscured Carnival’s radical roots, which institutions once challenged it.

Podcast Episode: Alabama Shakes and the Crisis of the American Dream

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Pip: A Trumpet of Sedition opens with Alabama Shakes — and the question of whether a rock band's reunion can carry the weight of a collapsing ideology. freerein61 is doing something the music press mostly isn't: treating the return of a band as a symptom of something larger.

Mara: This episode covers what that reunion means against the backdrop of American political and cultural crisis — the gap between the dream and the reality, and what serious art can and can't do about it. Let's start with Alabama Shakes and what the American Dream has to do with any of this.

Alabama Shakes and the Crisis of the American Dream

Mara: The post opens with a critique of how the music press has handled the band's return — and then pivots to what a serious assessment actually requires: looking at the conditions of 2026 itself, not just the band's catalogue.

Pip: The post names those conditions directly. The setup is that the "American Dream," invoked in the band's lead single, is not just a lyrical choice — and here's the line: "Its title rejects the myth of national health and upward mobility, making it anything but a neutral artistic gesture in 2026."

Mara: So the single's title is doing political work whether the band announces it or not. The gap between what the American Dream promises and what most people actually experience is the frame through which the whole reunion gets read.

Pip: And the post is careful not to reduce that to a personal statement from Brittany Howard. The argument is structural — artists are being pulled into political conflict through the objective pressures of social life, not through Twitter feuds or stage denunciations.

Mara: That's where the cultural critic David Walsh comes in. The post quotes his observation that growing resistance to authoritarianism "is beginning to find many important expressions, including among classical and popular musicians, actors, writers and even professional athletes." Alabama Shakes fits that current without needing to headline it.

Pip: The post also makes the case that Brittany Howard's identity is itself historically loaded — a Black, queer woman from Alabama, working in soul, blues, and gospel traditions that grew directly out of histories of oppression. That's not identity politics as the post frames it; it's a material fact about what those musical forms carry.

Mara: And then the post turns to the album's emotional structure. The movement in the forthcoming record between exhaustion and wonder, despair and longing, gets read as more than an aesthetic palette — it reflects, the post argues, a society where millions sense something is deeply wrong but can't yet articulate a coherent alternative.

Pip: The music industry context lands here too. Island Records, Universal Music Group, the streaming economy — the post is clear that the reunion exists inside a system organized around risk reduction and the monetization of nostalgia. Genuine artistic intent and commercial pressure aren't separate questions.

Mara: The central question the post leaves open is whether the album will offer what it calls clarity or consolation — whether it cuts through the ideological fog or remains, however beautifully, a portrait of distress. The post calls the early signs encouraging but says the answer waits for the full release.

Pip: Which is the honest answer. Whether the work can point beyond the limits of the present — that's not something a preview can settle.

Mara: And that tension between what art can sense and what it can yet articulate runs through everything else on the site right now.

Pip: The question underneath all of this is whether cultural expression can do more than mirror a crisis — whether it can help name what's causing it.

Mara: That's the work freerein61 is doing here: holding the music and the moment together and asking what each one reveals about the other.

Alabama Shakes and the Crisis of the American Dream

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Alabama Shakes’ return after nearly a decade has prompted the mainstream press to respond with its usual blend of breathless anticipation and superficial speculation. Much of the coverage falls back on familiar clichés about “nostalgia,” “reunion energy,” and the band “returning to what they do best.” Repeated across the music press, these phrases say less about Alabama Shakes than about the intellectual limits of contemporary cultural criticism.

A serious assessment must begin with the conditions surrounding this reunion. In 2026, the United States is marked by deep inequality, political instability, and cultural confusion. The “American Dream,” invoked in the band’s lead single, is not simply a poetic image but a historically specific ideology whose failure is now widely recognised. The gap between the promise of upward mobility and the reality of widespread insecurity forms the backdrop to nearly all serious art today, and Alabama Shakes’ return is no exception.

Alabama Shakes, the “American Dream,” and the Cultural Opposition to Authoritarianism

The lack of any direct clash between Alabama Shakes and the current fascists in the White House — no stage denunciation, no Truth Social outburst, no headline-making confrontation — is telling. It does not suggest political neutrality, but points to a deeper feature of the present: artists are being pulled into political conflict less through personal disputes than through the objective pressures of social life. The band’s 2025–26 return comes at a moment when cultural expression can no longer be separated from the political regime. That is the context in which their new work must be understood.

Alabama Shakes fell silent in 2018, during the second year of Trump’s first term. Their 2025–26 return comes under markedly different conditions. The administration’s authoritarian course — attacks on democratic rights, incitement against political opponents, and the concentration of executive power — has created a climate in which artists, writers, and performers increasingly feel compelled to respond.

As cultural critic David Walsh noted earlier this year, this growing resistance “is beginning to find many important expressions, including among classical and popular musicians, actors, writers and even professional athletes.” Bruce Springsteen, Philip Glass, Renée Fleming, and Lucinda Williams have already taken public stands, while Trump’s rhetoric toward dissenting artists has become increasingly hostile. Alabama Shakes has not been directly involved in these confrontations, but its silence should not be confused with political absence.

The Political Weight of the Band’s Existence

The band’s significance does not depend on overt political statements. Brittany Howard — a Black, queer woman from Alabama — leads a group grounded in Black Southern musical traditions: soul, blues, gospel, and R&B. These forms grew out of histories of oppression and resistance and remain inseparable from the struggles of working-class and oppressed people in the Deep South. As a critically acclaimed, Black-led rock band from Alabama, Alabama Shakes carries political weight in a period of reactionary nationalism and racial incitement. This is not identity politics, but historical fact: American popular music, at its most authentic, has long expressed the experience of those subjected to exploitation and injustice. To work seriously within that tradition is itself a challenge to the ideological foundations of authoritarianism. The single “American Dream” sharpens this point. Its title rejects the myth of national health and upward mobility, making it anything but a neutral artistic gesture in 2026.

The Limits and Contradictions of Artistic Opposition

The limits of artistic resistance must also be acknowledged. The WSWS has repeatedly observed that, although more artists are prepared to speak out, political confusion remains the dominant tendency. Many recognise that something is deeply wrong, but lack a coherent framework for understanding its causes or how it might be overcome.

This contradiction is evident in the emotional structure of I Must Be Dreaming. Its movement between exhaustion and wonder — between despair and the search for beauty — is more than an aesthetic choice. It expresses the condition of artists who oppose authoritarianism but remain confined by the ideology of the existing social order. They reject the symptoms without yet grasping the underlying disease. This is not a criticism of Alabama Shakes, but a description of the artistic milieu’s broader political limitations.

The Real Question

The central issue is not whether Alabama Shakes will directly “take on Trump.” The more important question is whether their music can contribute, even indirectly, to a broader cultural shift in which the working class becomes conscious of its own power. Will I Must Be Dreaming remain a beautifully realised portrait of distress, capturing individuals trying to make sense of a collapsing social order? Or will it achieve something rarer: a clarity that cuts through the ideological fog and points, however tentatively, beyond the limits of the present?

The band’s history shows a capacity for seriousness, honesty, and artistic courage, though whether this will develop into more than emotional testimony remains uncertain. Their re-emergence is not simply an effort to recapture earlier success. Brittany Howard’s solo albums — Jaime (2019) and What Now (2024) — revealed a restless search for new forms, rhythms, and emotional registers. Far from side projects, they were necessary explorations that sharpened her artistic vocabulary and broadened the expressive range of her voice. The band’s decision to reunite after this development suggests not a retreat into the familiar, but a renewed effort to confront the contradictions of the present.

Producer Shawn Everett’s return underscores this development. Sound & Colour (2015) stood out among major-label releases of its era for resisting the flattened sound of commercial rock production. Everett preserved the band’s volatility — its sudden turns from quiet reflection to explosive force — without smoothing it into algorithmic uniformity. His involvement suggests a continued effort to push against the sonic limits of the streaming economy.

The Political Dimension: Mood as Symptom of Social Crisis

Reviewers have described “American Dream” as “political,” but usually in the loosest sense. Much contemporary music criticism treats politics as mood — a haze of “chaos,” “division,” or “uncertainty” — rather than as the outcome of concrete social forces. This is more than a methodological flaw; it reveals the ideological disorientation of a cultural layer that senses crisis but lacks the tools to explain it.

The album’s apparent movement between exhaustion and wonder, despair and longing, is more than an emotional palette. It reflects a society in which millions sense that something is deeply wrong but cannot yet articulate a coherent alternative. Artists, like workers, confront a system that promises opportunity while producing insecurity. In this context, the “American Dream” becomes both an object of desire and a symbol of betrayal.

Alabama Shakes are not presenting a political programme, nor should they be expected to. Their work instead captures, with unusual clarity, the emotional and ideological tensions of a society in crisis. The band’s return also reflects a music industry transformed over the past decade. Island Records, a subsidiary of Universal Music Group, operates in a system where streaming has devalued recorded music as a commodity, leaving albums to function chiefly as vehicles for touring, sync licensing, and catalogue valuation. With its critical reputation and cross-generational appeal, Alabama Shakes represents a substantial financial asset.

This does not diminish the artistic impulse behind the reunion. It does, however, place the band’s work within an industry increasingly organised around risk reduction and the monetisation of nostalgia. The tension between genuine artistic intent and commercial pressure is not unique to Alabama Shakes; it is a structural feature of cultural production under contemporary capitalism.

The Central Question: Clarity or Consolation

The question no preview can answer is whether the forthcoming album will simply combine the band’s earlier strengths — raw soul urgency and genre-crossing ambition — or reach for something harder: a clarity equal to the present moment. Can Alabama Shakes cut through the cultural fog of contemporary American life? Can they express, even indirectly, the contradictions of a society where hope endures after the collapse of the ideology that once sustained it? The early signs are encouraging, but the answer will only become clear when the full work is released.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Sources: Music, Statements, and Industry Materials

  • Alabama Shakes. Sound & Colour. ATO Records, 2015.
  • Alabama Shakes. I Must Be Dreaming (forthcoming). Island Records / Universal Music Group, 2026.
  • Howard, Brittany. Jaime. ATO Records, 2019.
  • Howard, Brittany. What Now. Island Records, 2024.
  • Island Records / Universal Music Group. Corporate filings, annual reports, and investor communications (2015–2025).
  • RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). “2024 Year‑End Music Industry Revenue Report.”
  • IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry). Global Music Report (2020–2025).
  • Spotify Technology S.A. “Loud & Clear: Streaming Revenue Transparency Reports” (2021–2025).

WSWS Cultural and Political Analysis

  • Walsh, David. “Artists Speak Out Against Authoritarianism and Attacks on Democratic Rights.” World Socialist Web Site, January 2026.
  • Walsh, David. “The Crisis of American Democracy and the Role of Culture.” WSWS, 2025.
  • Walsh, David. “The Political and Cultural Significance of Bruce Springsteen’s Opposition.” WSWS, 2024.
  • D’Angelo, Tom. “The Music Industry in the Age of Streaming: Profit, Precarity, and the Working Artist.” WSWS, 2023.
  • Greene, Joanne Laurier. “The Social Crisis and Contemporary American Art.” WSWS, 2022.
  • North, David. The Crisis of American Democracy: Essays on Politics, Culture, and Class. Mehring Books, 2021.

Historical and Theoretical Works on Culture, Class, and Music

  • Adorno, Theodor W. Essays on Music. University of California Press, 2002.
  • Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Schocken Books, 1968.
  • Lipsitz, George. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
  • Guralnick, Peter. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom. Back Bay Books, 1999.
  • Ward, Brian. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations. University of California Press, 1998.
  • Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
  • Hobsbawm, Eric. Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion, and Jazz. Verso, 1998.
  • Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka). Blues People: Negro Music in White America. William Morrow, 1963.

Studies of the American South, Race, and Cultural Production

  • Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. Harper & Row, 1988.
  • Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Oxford University Press, 1955.
  • Sugrue, Thomas J. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. Random House, 2008.
  • Romine, Scott. The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction. LSU Press, 2008.

Music Industry Economics and Cultural Labour

  • Hesmondhalgh, David. The Cultural Industries. Sage, 2019.
  • Negus, Keith. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. Routledge, 1999.
  • Meier, Leslie M. Popular Music as Promotion: Music and Branding in the Digital Age. Polity, 2016.
  • Marshall, Lee. “The Rise of Catalogue Valuation in the Streaming Era.” Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2023.
  • Baym, Nancy. Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection. NYU Press, 2018.

Political Context and Authoritarianism

  • Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. Crown, 2018.
  • Ziblatt, Daniel, et al. “Democratic Backsliding in the 21st Century.” Journal of Democracy, 2024.
  • American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Reports on civil liberties and executive power (2020–2025).
  • Human Rights Watch. World Report (2024–2026).

Press Coverage and Interviews

  • Rolling Stone. Coverage of Alabama Shakes (2012–2024).
  • Pitchfork. Reviews of Sound & Colour, Jaime, and What Now.
  • New York Times. Interviews with Brittany Howard (2019, 2024).
  • NPR Music. “Brittany Howard on Artistic Growth and Political Climate.” (2024).
  • Billboard. “UMG Strategy in the Streaming Economy.” (2023–2025).

Archival and Reference Sources

  • Library of Congress. American Folklife Centre archives on Southern musical traditions.
  • Smithsonian Folkways. Collections on blues, gospel, and R&B.
  • Oxford Music Online. Entries on soul, Southern rock, and contemporary American music.

Podcast Episode: Review Matthew Worley’s No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 197

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Pip: "God save the Queen, the fascist regime" — not a bad place to start for a site called A Trumpet of Sedition.

Mara: freerein61 has a review up of Matthew Worley's No Future, a major academic history of punk and British political culture, and it covers a lot of ground — the music, the fanzines, the movements, and where the whole thing fell short.

Pip: Let's start with what the book actually does and where the review pushes back.

—

No Future: Punk, Politics, and the Limits of Cultural Studies

Mara: Matthew Worley's No Future sets out to be a comprehensive academic history of British punk from 1976 to 1984 — covering the initial explosion, the split into post-punk, Oi!, anarcho-punk, the Two-Tone ska revival, and the Rock Against Racism movement. The review's central question is whether that framework is enough to explain what punk actually was.

Pip: The review grants Worley real credit before it sharpens its knife. His archival work on fanzine culture gets particular attention — tracing publications from Aberdeen to Bristol, from the first issue of Sniffin' Glue through the anarchist zines of the early 1980s, dismantling the London-centric myth that dominates most punk historiography.

Mara: And on Crass specifically, the review notes Worley quotes their sleeve notes from Christ The Album directly: "War is confirmation of the imposed reality in which we exist." That's treated as a genuinely significant political statement, not just lyric sheet decoration.

Pip: Which makes it more pointed when the review argues Worley's whole framework can't answer the question that matters — why did all that social energy not produce a revolutionary movement?

Mara: The diagnosis is precise. Cultural Studies, shaped by Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Centre, reads youth subcultures as symbolic resistance expressed through style and aesthetics. The review argues this approach consistently sidesteps the connection between those movements and actual class struggle.

Pip: So you get endless nuance about safety pins and mohawks, and not much about the Labour Party bureaucracy quietly absorbing the anger.

Mara: That's the upshot. The review is equally critical of Rock Against Racism and the SWP, arguing they reduced complex working-class grievances to a single-issue moral campaign, and of anarcho-punk's individualist withdrawal — Crass included — as a politics that cannot confront a capitalist state with police and courts behind it.

Pip: The book's own title becomes the sharpest point. The review reads "no future" not as punk's final word but as evidence of a missing revolutionary leadership — the energy was real, the organisations weren't equal to it.

Mara: And the closing argument is direct: the conditions that produced punk — unemployment, imperialist wars, parties offering nothing — haven't been resolved. The question the Sex Pistols posed in 1977 is still open.

—

Pip: So Worley did the archival work, and the review says: read it, then go further.

Mara: The raw material is there — the fanzines, the bands, the movements. The framework to explain why it didn't become something more is still the argument worth having.

Review Matthew Worley’s No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984 (Cambridge University Press, 2017),

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

“The legacy of The Clash continues to shape what has been best in popular music. It was The Clash’s pushing back of the boundaries, for example, that made possible (and helped shape) the ska revival of the late 1970s/early 1980s, one of the highest spots of political songwriting in recent British musical history.” Paul Bond

“Punk rock should mean freedom, liking and accepting anything that you like. Playing whatever you want. As sloppy as you want. As long as it’s good and it has passion.” — Kurt Cobain.

“God save the Queen/The fascist regime/They made you a moron”.

Sex Pistols

Matthew Worley’s ‘No Future’ offers a comprehensive academic history of the connection between punk rock and political culture in Britain from 1976 to 1984. It covers the initial punk explosion, its subsequent split into post-punk, Oi!, anarcho-punk (Crass), the Two-Tone ska revival, and the Rock Against Racism/Anti-Nazi League movements. This work is a thorough and well-researched cultural history, yet it has notable analytical limitations that readers should be aware of.

Worley situates punk within a clear social and historical framework: the collapse of Britain’s postwar Keynesian consensus, high youth unemployment, issues within the Labour Party and trade unions, and the rise of Thatcherism. He emphasises that punk is not merely fashion or nihilism but is deeply rooted in genuine social anger. The book’s broad coverage, including bands like the Sex Pistols, Crass, Sham 69, and the Specials, illustrates that punk was a multifaceted cultural phenomenon in which class struggles, political beliefs, and generational discontent interacted in various ways.

Worley’s earlier academic work is highly valuable, offering substantial examples of historical research. His Cold War article rightfully cites Discharge’s ‘Realities of War’ (1980) as a significant turning point, both musically and politically, as it was the first sustained punk effort to directly address working-class anger towards the war machine and nuclear threats. His detailed and balanced depiction of Crass highlights that the band was more than just a musical group; it served as the centre of a genuine communication network that included fanzines, pamphlets, independent records, benefit concerts, and connections to CND, squatting movements, and animal rights groups. He quotes their sleeve notes from ‘Christ The Album’ (1982), stating: “War is confirmation of the imposed reality in which we exist.” This stands as a notable political statement.

The ” One Nation Under the Bomb article is even more valuable as raw material. Worley has done hard archival work that nobody else has done, tracing hundreds of fanzines from Aberdeen to Bristol, from the first issue of Sniffin’ Glue (1976) to the anarchist ‘zines of the early 1980s. His account of the breadth and geographic spread of punk fanzine culture reaching into Sunderland, Bradford, Telford, and Northampton gives the lie to the London-centric picture that dominates most punk historiography. He shows that punk fanzine culture was a genuinely national, working-class youth phenomenon, not a metropolitan art-school project.

He depicts British punk through the themes of nuclear anxiety and Cold War politics. This perspective highlights key aspects of the anti-nuclear movement and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which indeed influenced punk culture, especially within the “Oi!” and anarcho-punk scenes linked to bands like Crass. This was particularly evident in the early 1980s when Thatcher’s deployment of cruise missiles at Greenham Common coincided with a surge in the peace movement. However, this approach risks emphasising an ideological or culturally political view at the expense of the underlying class dynamics.[1]

Worley’s focus on the British punk fanzine is historically genuine in one important respect: fanzines represented something qualitatively different from the commercial music press. In the pages of Sniffin’ Glue, Ripped & Torn, Kill Your Pet Puppy, Maximum Rock’n’roll, or the anarcho-punk publications that clustered around Crass Toxic Grafity, Enigma, Punk Lives, there was a raw, unmediated attempt by working-class and lower-middle-class youth to make sense of their world in their own voice. The do-it-yourself ethic (“Here is a chord. Here is another. Here is a third. Now form a band”) was not merely aesthetic posturing. It was a direct rejection of the cultural gatekeeping of capitalist media.

However, it is essential to examine punk fanzines honestly rather than celebrate them uncritically. They covered a broad spectrum, from almost solely music-oriented to explicitly political, and included publications that primarily served as channels for anarchist propaganda. The political fanzines linked to the early 1980s anarcho-punk scene, those linked to Crass, Flux of Pink Indians, and Discharge, are where Worley’s Cold War and anti-nuclear themes are most clearly expressed. Publications like Scum or zines related to Poison Girls combined an anti-nuclear stance with feminist separatism, veganism, pacifism, and anti-statism, creating an eclectic yet recognisable ideological package.[2]

He also correctly identifies the political heterogeneity of the scene. The SWP’s Red Rebel and RAR’s Temporary Hoarding sit alongside the far-right NF’s Punk Front and the anarcho-punk Toxic Graffiti as competing attempts to harness punk’s social energy. And he notes, honestly, that punk’s “abiding impulse was to ‘do it yourself’, not conform to the diktats and doctrines of self-appointed ideologues”, which is why all these attempts brought “only scant reward.”

No Future’s main weakness is that Worley lacks a theory of class. Despite its ambitions, No Future is largely constrained by the academic framework Worley employs. Cultural studies, strongly influenced by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (including Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, etc.), is not aligned with Marxism. Worley views youth subcultures as symbols of “resistance”, resistance shown through style, music, identity, and subversive aesthetics. Worley consistently overlooks the crucial question posed: what is the connection between these movements and the class struggle?

Cultural Studies emerged as an alternative to the class struggle, acting as a safeguard against revolutionary class politics. Paul Bond’s article on Stuart Hall examines the origins of Cultural Studies. His insightful obituary of Hall emphasises that it was intentionally developed as a critique of revolutionary Marxism, particularly its modern form, Trotskyism. Its rise in Birmingham in the 1960s is linked to the political upheaval following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the ensuing defections from the British Communist Party. During this time, the key question was whether disillusioned individuals would embrace Trotskyism and authentic Marxism or seek a new intellectual framework that opposed capitalism in theory but not in practice.[3]

Analysing punk through ‘subculture theory’ reveals endless nuances about symbols like safety pins and mohawks. However, it doesn’t address the key question: why did punk’s social energy, rooted in working-class alienation and anger, fail to ignite a revolutionary political movement? The answer isn’t in the music or subculture itself. Instead, it lies in the political context of Britain’s working class during that period: the dominance of the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy over the labour movement, the pseudo-left groups like the Communist Party, International Socialists/SWP, and the Militant tendency, which diverted social anger into dead-end political avenues, and the lack of a mass Trotskyist party capable of offering genuine revolutionary leadership.

Rock Against Racism and the SWP

Worley discusses Rock Against Racism (RAR) and the Anti-Nazi League (ANL), movements mainly organised by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the late 1970s, focusing on the punk and reggae scenes. He views these efforts mostly positively as effective youth mobilisation against the National Front. However, I am somewhat more critical. The SWP exploited RAR/ANL to enhance its organisational presence while often placing political awareness secondary to anti-fascist unity. In practice, this meant aligning with the Labour Party and trade union leadership, simplifying the complex social issues faced by working-class youth to a single-issue moral campaign against the NF. This approach neglected to foster independent working-class political opposition to both Thatcherism and the Labour/union establishment that enabled it. The SWP’s “anti-fascism’ strategy created a pressure group rather than a revolutionary movement.

Anarcho-Punk and Its Limits

The anarchist element in punk, notably Crass, along with Conflict, Flux of Pink Indians, and others, sought to connect music more seriously with radical politics. Worley discusses this thoroughly. However, anarchism’s main weakness is also its biggest flaw: its rejection of political parties, programs, and the pursuit of state power ultimately makes punk politics ineffective. Crass’s politics focused on individualist, countercultural withdrawal from bourgeois society rather than strategies for the working class to gain power.  Ideas such as “Do It Yourself,” autonomous communities, pacifism, and lifestyle politics, although sincerely held, cannot overpower a capitalist state with police, courts, and armies. Worley is too sympathetic to these tendencies. He views the limitations of the anarcho-punk scene as interesting complexities, rather than as the result of a petty-bourgeois political outlook that cannot provide the working class with a way forward.

The Title’s Irony: Its Value and Limits

The book’s title, inspired by the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen,” reflects a harsh truth: the nihilism and despair among working-class youth in late 1970s Britain, who believed they had no future within the current system. However, the historical lesson reveals that a future did exist, the prospect of socialist revolution. It was the lack of revolutionary leadership that led many to see “no future” as the only honest response. Different groups, such as the SWP, the Labour left, and the anarchists, in their own ways, helped ensure that this genuine social anger was absorbed, dissipated, and ultimately conquered.

No Future is worth reading as a detailed empirical account of a culturally rich and politically charged period. But to understand why the energy of that moment did not lead to a revolutionary transformation, you need Marxism, not cultural studies. The crisis that produced punk has never been resolved; it has only deepened. The “no future” of 1977 is the social reality confronting young workers across the entire capitalist world today.

Worley’s work is genuinely valuable as a historical record of what working-class youth actually thought, felt, and produced in Britain in this period. The sheer empirical richness of his research is impressive, and the raw material he uncovers is politically important. Discharge’s “Realities of War,” the network of fanzines stretching from Aberdeen to Bristol, the Crass collective’s fusion of music, politics, and communal living, these things deserve to be remembered and taken seriously.

To determine whether punk was a revolution, we need to look beyond Worley’s framework. Punk was not a revolution; rather, it was the cultural expression of a working-class generation overlooked by existing political organisations. The reason it didn’t become a revolution isn’t mainly due to punk itself, but to the movement’s failure to build a mass party capable of channelling that frustration politically. This remains an unfulfilled task. The factors that fueled punk mass unemployment, imperialist wars, a ruling class dismissive of workers, and political parties offering no alternatives—are still present, even more acutely today. The question “no future?” still awaits an answer.

Notes

Obituary: Joe Strummer of The Clash, dead at 50-Paul Bond- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/01/stru-j13.html

[1] One Nation Under the Bomb: The Cold War and British Punk to 1984- Journal for the Study of Radicalism, FALL 2011, Vol. 5, No. 2

[2] Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines, 1976-84: ‘While the world was dying, did you wonder why?” History Workshop Journal, No. 79 (2015), pp. 76-10

[3] Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political career dedicated to opposing Marxism- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/05/hall-m05.html

Paul Weller: Dancing Through the Fire: The Authorised Oral History: Dan Jennings (Author), Paul Weller (Contributor) 11 Sept. 2025 Constable Publishers

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I’m always looking for something. Not in an unhappy way. I like to try different things. I don’t want to be morbid, but I’m not getting any younger.

Paul Weller

“Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

Walt Whitman

I get labelled as just being about one thing, but there are lots of layers to what I do.

Paul Weller

Dancing Through the Fire is the authorised oral history of one of the world’s most important musical figures: Paul Weller has almost Dylanesque managed to reinvent himself from the stunning rise of The Jam to the stylish reinvention of The Style Council. Since disbanding the Council, he has had a spectacular decades-long solo career. Weller, alongside Lennon and McCartney, remains among only a handful of artists who have topped the UK album charts in five consecutive decades. This excellent oral history by award-winning broadcaster and journalist Dan Jennings features over 200 hours of interviews with Weller’s family, bandmates, collaborators, and industry figures.

A study of Paul Weller’s career (from the Jam and Style Council to his solo work) and Dan Jennings’ use of the oral history genre will provide the reader with a rich entry point of how popular music reflects class formations, political currents and the shifting role of intellectuals and artists under capitalism.

The Modfather and Working-Class icon Paul Weller’s post‑punk and Britpop-era work reinforces a British working‑class identity, nostalgia, and dissent. Weller’s politics and music were grounded in the post‑war British political economy of deindustrialisation, youth unemployment, Thatcherism, and the music industry’s structural shifts toward commodification, consolidation, and global markets.

Understanding Weller through disciplined oral history equips readers to recognise how culture both expresses and can obscure class interests. Today’s struggles — precarious labour, austerity, environmental crisis — require cultural work that mobilises artistic forms for political education and organisation. A critical study reveals how artists may ally with bourgeois institutions (such as parliamentary politics and corporate sponsorship and how autonomous working‑class cultural forms can be revived.

One of the most important songs from Weller’s punk days was A Town Called Malice. Released in 1982 by the Jam (written by Paul Weller, recorded with Style Council musicians), the song emerges in the wake of late-1970s deindustrialisation, rising unemployment and the political consolidation of Thatcherism. These processes transformed the British working class—through mass redundancies, the decline of long-term industrial employment, and the expansion of precarious, service-sector labour—altering both objective class positions and political subjectivity.  

The pun names the locality (town) as a social relation: not merely a site of decline but a product of hostile economic restructuring. “Malice” anthropomorphises the systemic violence of capital’s restructuring—plant closures, wage cuts, rising rents—making structural brutality feel like an intentional social agent. The title functions ideologically: it mobilises resentment but frames it as a local pathology rather than an expression of class conflict.

The song captures the accelerated proletarianisation of entire layers: young people forced into wage dependency or precarious work, losing access to transitional education and apprenticeship pathways. The affective register—disorientation, fatalism, yearning—reflects a class composition with fractured organisation and weakened industrial solidarity. The lyrics’ focus on private emotional response rather than collective remedy points to the present limits of working-class political organisation under Thatcherism.

The song’s upbeat Motown-derived groove and horn lines give it a buoyant, danceable surface while the lyrics narrate decline. This contradiction of form and content is dialectically significant: an uplifting groove can broaden appeal (embedding class grievances in popular culture) but can also aestheticise suffering, sedating political urgency. The adoption of black popular forms—soul and Motown references—connects British working-class musical practice to international proletarian cultural traditions. Yet, here it is largely cosmetic rather than explicitly solidaristic.

Jenning’s book runs to well over 700 pages, but it is well worth the read. As you can see from the picture, I bumped into Weller recently. Had a brief but memorable conversation. He was kind and polite. I look forward to his next piece of work. Jennings’s book is a masterpiece and reflects Weller’s genius.

Bob Dylan Outside the Law: The Poetics of John Wesley Harding by Robert Reginio – 27 Sept. 2025 Palgrave Macmillan

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 “Words are always filled with historical meanings, and that makes language a shifting medium through which we see the world. The songs on John Wesley Harding have shifting meanings, too. They’re so layered in terms of intertextual references that the words are less about objectivity and more about being enmeshed in history. When we’re in this language, we don’t own it or use it to signify. We’re just borrowing this system of significance for our time on earth.”

Robert Reginio 

“To live outside the law, you must be honest.”

 “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” Bob Dylan

“There must be some way out of here / Said the Joker to the thief / There’s too much confusion / I can’t get any relief”.

“All Along the Watchtower

I pity the poor immigrant/who wishes he would’ve stayed home’

Who uses all his power to do evil,/But in the end is always left so alone

I Pity the Poor Immigrant

“No martyr is among you now / Whom you can call your own / So go on your way accordingly / And know you’re not alone”.

I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine”

Bob Dylan Outside the Law: The Poetics of John Wesley Harding by Robert Reginio argues that the 1967 album is a sophisticated, critical response to the social turmoil of the 1960s in America rather than a retreat by Dylan to his folk roots. It shows that John Wesley Harding is not merely a record but a pedagogical tool that, if studied properly and with clarity, can reveal how art, politics, and class formation interact with the kind of political organisation the working-class needs.

Reginio’s book, according to Dr Barry Faulk (Florida State University), is a “pathbreaking study” and a “necessary corrective” to existing scholarship.”: Reginio opposes the common assumption that John Wesley Harding was a simple, acoustic retreat because of his 1966 motorcycle accident. Instead, he argues the songs use “archaic tonality” to mask a complex, biting commentary on American politics and the myth of the “Summer of Love”.

A word of caution is needed, as the reader should know that Reginio takes a “Post Structuralist Approach” to Dylan, drawing on theories by figures such as Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva. Both are similar in their philosophical outlooks, with Jacques Derrida advancing “deconstruction, to explain that there is nothing outside the text, he elevated language and textual play above an independent, objective social reality. This move dissolves stable reference, undermines the possibility of objective truth and relativises the relation between thought and material conditions. As for Julia Kristeva, drawing on psychoanalysis and semiotics, emphasizes the semiotic and the subject’s internal, linguistic drives. While opposing the philosophical outlook of both Derrida and Kristeva

By 1967, Dylan had broken with the role assigned to him by the folk-liberal milieu. As David Walsh notes in his long appraisal of Dylan’s trajectory, the artist “rejected the role that had been prepared for him by the ‘left’ folk music world” and moved across social and cultural circles rather than forging a consistent political line. John Wesley Harding should be read in the wake of that rupture: it follows the electric period and his motorcycle accident, and it arrives amid the radicalisation and disillusionment of the late 1960s. The record’s pared-down sound and biblical/shadow-play imagery mark both withdrawal and renewed moral interrogation.

John Wesley Harding is one of my favourite Bob Dylan albums and is one of the most important records for anyone studying culture and politics from the 1960s. It marks a decisive stylistic and ethical shift from the electric confrontations of 1965–66 and the explicit protest songs of 1962–64 to a leaner, quieter, quasi-biblical mode. To understand its significance for Marxist study, we must situate the album within Dylan’s trajectory and the wider political context.

After the electrified breakthrough and the controversial Newport performance in 1965, and following his 1966 motorcycle crash, Dylan’s public persona retreated while his songwriting changed. Critics and historians have noted that his move away from the role of “people’s troubadour” combined personal, musical and commercial factors, producing work that was inward-looking and allegorical rather than the direct indictment of power of earlier songs. Musically, John Wesley Harding strips arrangements to the essentials; lyrically, it draws on folk, country, and biblical imagery, producing ambiguous parables rather than straightforward protest.

Reginio correctly situates the album (1967) within the political convulsions of the 1960s. As James Brewer writes, “Anyone old enough by the summer of 1968 to be conscious of events will remember the upheavals rocking the political landscape. Younger people with a historical awareness will surely have some knowledge of them as well. On March 31, 1968, US President Lyndon B. Johnson, in the face of mounting anti-war sentiment, shocked the country by announcing he would not seek re-election. Only weeks before the release of Music From Big Pink, Robert F. Kennedy, by then a leading candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, was assassinated. Dr Martin Luther King, who had come out strongly against US intervention in Indochina, was in Memphis, Tennessee, in support of the sanitation workers’ strike when he was assassinated in early April. Inner city rebellions exploded in major US cities after King’s murder, as they had the year before, dubbed the “Long Hot Summer of 1967.”[1] 

“All Along the Watchtower”

The album’s sparse arrangements—on these two songs, acoustic guitars, organ, restrained rhythm—force attention onto language and narrative. This austerity is not retreat into solipsism but a formal device that foregrounds moral judgment and parable.

Songs like “All Along the Watchtower” (though released on later singles/performances) and many tracks on the record use legal, outlaw, and prophetic imagery—figures “outside the law,” testimonies, judgments. The album’s title itself evokes the frontier judge and a biblical outlaw archetype, blending American folk law and biblical registry to question authority and culpability.

Dylan deploys ambiguous narrators and compressed, elliptical lines. This resists facile appropriation by liberal managers of culture who wanted a single “voice of a generation.” As Elijah Wald’s account of Dylan’s musical path shows, Dylan was always a musical sponge whose form choices shifted with social circles and aims.[2]

All Along the Watchtower is one of Bob Dylan’s most enigmatic and influential songs. The three-stanza lyric compresses a parable-like scene—watchmen, a joker and a thief, a princess in a tower—into a terse, prophetic tableau. The song’s spare, elliptical language and biblical cadence mark a shift from Dylan’s mid‑60s surrealism and topical songs toward a more aphoristic, mythic idiom. Its meaning has been variously read as an existential fable, a critique of social order, or a poetic expression of historical rupture. The most famous reinterpretation is Jimi Hendrix’s 1968 electric cover, which transformed the song’s sound and popular resonance. Numerous artists have since covered the song.[3]

In I Pity the Poor Immigrant Dylan’s figure of the immigrant—vulnerable, suspect, morally ambivalent—maps onto real processes under capitalism: forced migration, precarious labour, and social exclusion. Such conditions are not isolated misfortunes but structural consequences of capitalist accumulation and imperialism.

One thing worth noting about the album’s title is the figure of John Wesley Harding. As Tony Attwood from the website Untold Dylan writes, “Dylan’s preoccupation with outlaws does intrigue. And especially his tendency to upgrade certified nutcases to well-behaved, humane role models. Jesse James gets a single, friendly name check (in “Outlaw Blues”), and in “Absolutely Sweet Marie”, he plants the paradox that to live outside the law, you must be honest. A first standard-bearer, then, of that motto is John Wesley Harding. The half-beatification of Billy the Kid (1973) may be attributed to Peckinpah or to the angelic aura of the protagonist, Kris Kristofferson, but with “Hurricane” (1975), Dylan rather breaks his neck when he passionately defends a repeatedly convicted murderer and declares him a hero. A low point came with “Joey” (1975), the epic hymn to the immoral Mafia killer Joey Gallo.[4] It should be noted that Hurricane Carter was exonerated and released.

Dylan’s preoccupation with rescuing ruffians from historical obscurity aside for serious readers and students, John Wesley Harding provides a useful case study in the relation of artist to class struggle — Dylan’s shift underscores that cultural figures do not automatically translate artistic dissidence into political leadership. As David Walsh in his article (Does Bob Dylan deserve the Nobel Prize?) Dylan’s career shows the danger of individualistic detachment and the absorption into celebrity culture, which can dilute oppositional potential. There are limits to Dylan’s cultural reformism; the album’s parabolic language can obscure material causes and class relations. This reinforces why Marxist cultural analysis insists on linking aesthetics to social forces and political organisation.

As David Walsh points out, “Bob Dylan was neither the first nor the last American popular artist, or artist of any kind, to imagine he could outwit historical and social processes–which threatened to ‘slow down’ or even block his rise–by avoiding their most vexing questions and problems. What he didn’t realise was that in turning his back on social life and softening his attitude toward the existing order, he was at the same time cutting himself off from the source of artistic inspiration, that he was surrendering forever what was best in him.”

About the Author

Robert Reginio is Professor of English at Alfred University, where he currently serves as the Margaret and Barbara Hagar Professor of the Humanities. He has published widely on Bob Dylan, including essays in The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan’s Live Performances: Play a Song for Me (Routledge, 2023) and Multitudes: Teaching Bob Dylan (Bloomsbury, 2024). He has presented his work on Bob Dylan at several international conferences and symposia and serves on the editorial board of the journal The Dylan Review.

[1] Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band—a documentary film- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/05/25/once-m25.html

[2] An interview with Elijah Wald, author of Dylan Goes Electric!- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/02/13/ojlf-f13.html

[3] americana-uk.com/versions-all-along-the-watchtower

[4]  John Wesley Harding (1967). The argument against.bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/8381

Joy Crookes — Juniper (CD): 2025

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“I get angry at the cost of living rising because I know the struggle to pay for your life fractures relationships.”

Joy Crookes

“First, art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy, feelings, and moods: art is not the expression of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet… Like science, art cognises life”

Aleksandr Voronsky

“The peculiarity of the artist lies only in the fact that he unconsciously separates and notices only the typical, and this typical is not abstract, but concrete. It is an object and exists in the form of images”.

Aleksandr Voronsky

It is unquestionably true that the need for art is not created by economic conditions. But neither is the need for food created by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics.

Leon Trotsky

Joy Crookes (born 1998) is a British singer-songwriter of Bangladeshi and Irish heritage whose work blends soul, R&B, jazz, and chamber pop with sharply observed autobiographical lyrics. She emerged as a distinctive voice in the 2010s-2020s for her warm, expressive vocal delivery and songs that interweave family history, migration, class and intimate relationships. Her debut album, Skin (2021), and earlier EPs and singles established her reputation for crafting songs that make private memory speak to broader social conditions.

Her debut album, Skin, and her follow-up album, Juniper, were written while embedded in the stifling atmosphere of the capitalist cultural economy—the crisis of the music industry and streaming economics shape who survives and what reaches audiences. Crookes frequently weaves social commentary into her music, drawing on her South London upbringing and Bangladeshi and Irish heritage to explore systemic issues. Her debut album, Skin, was particularly noted for its “vibrant politics and beautiful storytelling”, as were all her previous works.

“You seem to forget you came here through a woman, show some… respect.” – was seen as a challenge to patriarchy and male-dominated capitalist political systems, and was written in response to the 2016 US election and the experiences of women in her family. Kingdom”: Written the day after the 2019 UK General Election, it critiqued the re-election of the Conservative party and the resulting “wave of anti-immigration sentiment”. “No such thing as a Kingdom When tomorrow’s done for the children.” – Suggests that the state has failed the future generations.

Joy Crookes’ second album, Juniper (2025), is a richly textured work that blends soul, R&B, jazz, and chamber pop with candid lyrics about family, class, identity, and love. Musically and lyrically, it rewards close, repeated listening: warm string and jazz-influenced arrangements sit beside spare piano ballads and beat-driven songs. At the same time, Crookes’ voice moves between intimacy and soaring intensity. The album is notable for its ability to make personal memories and family stories speak to broader social conditions.

Listeners should pay close attention to the jazz chords, strings and restrained production, which create a humane atmosphere that contrasts with the alienation Crookes describes. “Mathematics” is a beautifully crafted song and my favourite on the album. As a social document shaped by class relations and cultural forms, it works on many levels. Crookes often grounds other songs in family portraits and migration histories.

It would help the listener to transcribe the lyrics and identify concrete images, used by Crookes such as repeated motifs, numbers, calculation, measurement), and who speaks. Her mother appears in several songs, suggesting an extraordinarily close bond between mother and daughter. Her words, arrangement, tempo, and vocal tone reflect her worldview.

Crooke’s music is a confirmation that Art cannot be separated from the social forces that produce it. But she is different and an exception. Most mainstream music globally is banal and controlled by corporate entities that shape what reaches mass audiences and how artists survive the music industry’s exploitation and streaming stratification. Crookes’ Juniper stands apart in that it centres working-class life and minority experience rather than offering mere escapism.

Joy Crookes’ Juniper is more than an accomplished musical second album; it is a resource for developing working-class cultural literacy. Reading songs as documents of lived social relations trains the political imagination—turning private memory into collective understanding and, ultimately, organised action. Her album should be treated as both an artistic and pedagogical text. A socialist analysis of her work will help build a socialist consciousness and a socially equal society based on need, not profit.

Taylor Swift: Culture, Capital, and Critique Paperback – 30 Jun. 2025 by Hannah McCann (Editor), Eloise Faichney (Editor), Rebecca Trelease (Editor), Emma Whatman (Editor), Routledge

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“At the moment, it wouldn’t be going too far to say [Swift] is one of the most powerful people in the world.”

Georgia Carroll

How has Swift achieved such phenomenal success with albums like this? To some extent, her rise can be attributed to the persona she has cultivated, together with the music industry. In the interest of mass appeal, the singer offers something to everyone: a little bit acoustic and country, a little bit electric and urban, a soupçon of sexiness, a pinch of feminism, and a lot of spectacle. At the same time, Swift has taken pains not to offend anyone and to remain relatively “apolitical.” She won’t “corrupt the youth” or inspire critical thinking, which is music to the ears of the industry.

Eric Schreiber

 “If the time becomes slothful and heavy, he [the poet] knows how to arouse it . . . he can make every word he speaks draw blood. Whatever stagnates in the flat of custom or obedience or legislation, he never stagnates. Obedience does not master him; he masters it. …”

Walt Whitman

The essays in this book came about through a so-called Swiftposium held in Melbourne, Australia, before the start of Taylor Swift’s 2024 Eras world tour. The Symposium was the first of its kind. Its remit was an academic examination of the singer-songwriter Taylor Swift.

This, however, was not a regular academic conference. Despite the organisers going out of their way to say it was not a fan convention, it was pretty clear that the speakers and the audience had other ideas.

According to one report, “Fans were also desperate to take part, and on Sunday, hundreds of people—walking advertisements for rhinestones, cowboy boots, and Swift’s signature red lip—flocked into Melbourne’s iconic Capitol Theatre to hear lectures about the megastar. At a sold-out friendship bracelet-making workshop beforehand, 19-year-old Soumil says the event – run by RMIT University – is helping heal the wounds left by the ticketing bloodbath of last year, so much for academic impartiality.”

As this quote demonstrates, the degree of impartiality of these essay contributions leaves a lot to be desired . Swift fanatic Rachel Feder writes “ I was first introduced to Taylor Swift through my students, and then through my relationship with Tiffany, who grew up with the albums. She even has a picture of meeting Swift after a concert when she was 15. She’s an OG Swiftie.

At the Grammys last year, when Swift announced her “Tortured Poets Department” album, Tiffany texted me, saying, “This is your album. This is your era,” because Romanticist tortured poets are my whole thing. I shot off a quick email to my editor that said, “Hey, sorry to email you at night about Taylor Swift, but do we want to do ‘A Swiftie’s Guide to Tortured Poets?’” The team had all these incredible insights on how to make it capacious, like a “Swifties’ Guide to Literature” slash “Literary Guide to Taylor Swift.” Then I brought Tiffany on board, and we wrote it so fast. We had seven weeks to do the first draft, and we got through every album before “Tortured Poets” dropped in April 2024. We experienced that album in real time, writing that chapter in two weeks, which was a nerdy, bookish Swiftie’s dream.”[1]

It does not need an academic to tell you that Swift is big business. With a fan base of over 500 million, she is the highest-earning pop star of all time and is now a billionaire and a member of the American oligarch club. Her billionaire status has largely come off the back of fairly routine and uninteresting songwriting. Swift admits that her favourite songs are the ones where she has to think.[2] If that is the case, then only two albums from her extensive catalogue, Folklore and Evermore, are worth listening to.

One thing is clear from the essays in this book and in general is that Swift is protected and defended by not only a group of fanatical academics, but she is a fully paid-up member of the #MeToo movement who defends her with vigour.

Two such fanatics, Mary Fogarty & Gina Arnold, launched an attack on the songwriter Bob Dylan, writing “Swift may be replacing Dylan feels a bit like reparations. Dylan’s work influenced a generation of singer/songwriters, as well as those who wished to write about music, rather than make it, but unfortunately, he is responsible for, among other things, a swath of material which relegates women to objects and does worse. The women of his songs, as many have noted, are, as Katrina Forrester (2020), put it, ‘Unappealing. They were clawing, childish, neurotic, and demanding, women who wanted too much or took what he didn’t want to give. The feminist invocation of Dylan inhabited the uncomfortable terrain between critique and homage: could they use his words to transcend the relations of a world that he described so well yet also embodied? When Ellen Willis (2012) later revised her classic 1967 essay on Dylan, she wrote that he exemplified the ‘bohemian contempt for women’.[3]

It is hard to know where to start with this venomous essay. My point is that Dylan had far more insight into the nature of relationships between men and women than Swift will ever have. As David Walsh writes “A perusal of Bob Dylan––Lyrics: 1962-2001, at least its first half a dozen years or so, reveals a lively imagination at work, and sometimes deep feeling. Dylan can be witty, satirical, insightful and, as well, genuinely outraged at American society’s injustices. The lyrics are capable of conveying physical and psychic longing, both for “the beloved” and for recognition by society at large.[4]

As for swift her songs the Marxist writer Eric Schreiber claims they are indistinguishable, vapid and self-centred. Instead of poetry, her lyrics resemble teenage journal verse, including the inevitable pretentiousness.

Making a further point, he writes, “Swift is best understood not as an artist but as a creation of the music industry and a reflection of the present state of cultural decline. She was born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1989. Her father is a former stockbroker for Merrill Lynch, and her mother worked as a mutual fund marketing executive. When she was growing up, Swift enjoyed the privileges of America’s financial elite. She spent summers at her family’s vacation home in Stone Harbour, New Jersey, where the median price of a house is $2.5 million.[5]

Her latest album, Life of a Showgirl, continues in the same vein as her previous work. As Alex Petridis writes in his Guardian review of Showgirl, “More startling still is the distinct lack of undeniable hooks and nailed-on melodies. The songs are well turned, but in terms of genuinely memorable moments, Showgirl evinces just one killer chorus (Elizabeth Taylor), some impressively unexpected key changes on Wi$h Li$t and the authentically heart-tugging Ruin the Friendship, which finds Swift returning to her home town for the funeral of a high school boy she regrets not dating. There’s a fantastic chord sequence on Actually Romantic, but, alas, 37 years ago, Frank Black wrote a very similar one for Where Is My Mind? by Pixies, a song you can literally sing along to Actually Romantic. The rest floats in one ear and out the other: not unpleasantly, but you might reasonably expect more given the amassed songwriting firepower behind it, and Swift’s claims of “keeping the bar really high”.[6]

Given what has happened in the world recently, you would have at least expected some form of comment to appear in her new album. Swift is an intelligent girl, but has chosen to stay silent. Again, like previous material, Life of a Showgirl deals with her feelings and past relationships. Her perspective has not matured appreciably since her early days.

Schreiber is correct when he writes, “Swift also arises out of the remarkable and ongoing monopolisation and narrowing at the top of the music industry. Record companies, artist management, broadcasting and concert ticketing and promotion, respectively, have come to be dominated by two or three corporate goliaths each. Of the 2 million artists on Spotify, less than 4 per cent account for over 95 per cent of streams. In 1982, the top 1 per cent of artists took in 26 per cent of total concert revenue; by 2017, the number was 60 per cent. In short, Swift’s great success is a symptom of the decay in popular music over the past several decades. It reflects an official culture unwilling or unable to look at itself critically and honestly.”[7]

Swift it would appear to be trapped in a prison largely of her own making. As Shakespeare writes in Hamlet  ‘This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.’As any great artist male or female this should be their starting point. Bob Dylan was a spokesman to a generation for a time and was true to himself. Swift has had plenty of chances to speak out against the injustices and inequality in the world but so far has chosen to stay silent. This will be the legacy of her work and she will not be able to shake this off.

Notes

1.   “The Story of Us” (Taylor’s Version): Taylor Swift and Interconnections of Sociological Theory and the Music Industry- Reema Azzo

2.    Are You Ready for It? Re-Evaluating Taylor Swift- Mary Fogarty & Gina Arnold

3.   Left of #MeToo -Heather Berg -Feminist Studies, 2020, Vol. 46, No. 2 (2020), pp. 259-286

4.   Does Bob Dylan deserve to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature? David Walsh

5.   Ceasing to be the voice of a generation-Paul Bond

6.   Celebrity, Music, and Public Persona: A Case Study of Taylor Swift

7.   Elaina K.M. Junes Minnesota State University, Mankato

8.   Campaign Problems: How  Fans React to Taylor Swift’s

9.    Controversial Political Awakening- Simone Driessen

10.Miss Americana: Taylor Swift as a Battleground for Feminist Discourse

11.Juliet Eklund University of Denver

12.Who Needs to Calm Down? Taylor Swift and Rainbow Capitalism Eric Smiale

13.“Blue Swift”: Popular Culture Meets Politics∗ Orestis Troumpounis† Dimitrios Xefteris  November 2024

[1] www.du.edu/news/du-professor-explores-bookish-brilliance-behind-taylor-swifts-eras

[2] observer.co.uk/contributor/roisin-lanigan

[3] Are You Ready for It? Re-Evaluating Taylor Swift- Mary Fogarty & Gina Arnold

[4] Does Bob Dylan deserve to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature? http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/21/nobe-o21.html

[5] The Tortured Poets Department and the Taylor Swift phenomenon-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/05/21/wzwk-m21.html

[6] Taylor Swift: The Life of a Showgirl review – dull razzle-dazzle from a star who seems frazzled-www.theguardian.com/music/2025/oct/03/taylor-swift-the-life-of-a-showgirl-review

[7] The Tortured Poets Department and the Taylor Swift phenomenon-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/05/21/wzwk-m21.html

Lady Sings the Blues by Billie Holiday (Penguin Modern Classics) Paperback – 29 Nov. 2018

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“I’ve been told that no one sings the word ‘hunger’ like I do. Or the word ‘love’.”

Billie holiday

 “Holiday’s voice, no matter how the Dufty/Holiday interviewing process went, is as real as rain.

David Ritz

The government has failed us; you can’t deny that. Anytime you live in the twentieth century, 1964, and you’re walking around here singing We Shall Overcome, the government has failed us. This is part of what’s wrong with you — you do too much singing. Today, it’s time to stop singing and start swinging. You can’t sing up on freedom, but you can swing up on some freedom. Cassius Clay can sing, but singing didn’t help him become the heavyweight champion of the world; swinging helped him achieve that title.

Malcom X[1]

“If the anger of the exploited ever mounts high enough in the South, it now has its Marseillaise.”

Samuel Grafton[2] On the song Strange Fruit

Lady Sings the Blues is a brutally honest warts-and-all autobiography of Billie Holiday, the legendary jazz singer. Holiday died on July 17, 1959, at the Metropolitan Hospital in East Harlem, New York City, due to complications of chronic drug abuse. Holiday had an unbelievably difficult childhood. Born on April 17, 1915, in Baltimore, Maryland. Her mother, Sadie Fagan, was 13 years old, and her father, Clarence “Pop” Holiday, was just 15. Her birth name was Eleonora, which she later changed to Billie.

Holiday grew up fast, surviving an abusive childhood; her mother did loads of different jobs, including prostitution. She grew up in Baltimore and Harlem brothels. It has been said that she had a limited vocal range but went on to be a unique singer with an “unsettling emotional wallop”. While it is tempting to see Holiday as a victim, that is not how she saw things. Her memoir was written with help from William Dufty, and according to David Ritz, “Holiday’s voice, no matter how the Dufty/Holiday interviewing process went, is as real as rain. She is open about her sexual abuse, her forced imprisonment, her heroin addiction, and in a minimal way, her struggles of being African American before the development of the Civil Rights Movement.

Some facts in the book have been disputed.[3] John Szwed argues in his 2015 study, Holiday, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, that most of the book is accurate; however, Holiday’s co-writer, William Dufty, was allegedly pressured to suppress material due to the threat of legal action. Writing in the New Yorker Richard Brody said “In particular, Szwed traces the stories of two important relationships that are missing from the book—with Charles Laughton, in the nineteen-thirties, and with Tallulah Bankhead, in the late nineteen-forties—and of one relationship that’s sharply diminished in the book, her affair with Orson Welles around the time of Citizen Kane.”[4]

Her untimely death at the age of just 44 ended the career of one of the most important jazz vocalists of the 20th century. While the re-release of her autobiography by Penguin in 2018 went some way in reestablishing her importance. However, the release of the 2015 film by Lee Daniels, The United States vs. Billie Holiday, was a significant misrepresentation of Holiday. According to John Andrews, writing in the World Socialist Website, the film “dishonoured” her work and was a “seriously misguided effort”.

He writes, “The film was populated with historical and entirely fictional characters, blended haphazardly with actual and fabricated historical events, replete with sloppy mistakes and anachronisms too numerous to catalogue. One prominent example from the film: methadone was not used to treat heroin addiction until some years after Holiday died.”[5]

Naturally, Holiday’s autobiography suffers from a substantial fixation on race; this is not surprising given how much racial abuse she suffered, but it is largely divorced from the social struggles of postwar America, as expressed in both the growing civil rights movement and official, state-sponsored anti-communism. Given Holidays’ limited political understanding, she cannot place her life struggle within the broader aesthetic developments of that tumultuous period, not only in jazz, but also in film, literature, and art.

“Strange Fruit”

One of those broader aesthetic developments is Holiday’s relationship with the song Strange Fruit. In her 1956 autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday suggests that she worked on the song together with Abel Meeropol. Holiday’s economy with the truth has circulated for decades, with Holiday even claiming that the song was written for her and that she had a hand in writing it herself. Meeropol always denied this claim. David Margolick and Hilton Als, in their work Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song, said that her account “may set a record for most misinformation per column inch”. Even stranger was Holidays’ response when challenged about the song in her ghost-written book; she said, “I ain’t never read that book.” 

“Strange Fruit” is not an easy song to listen to and requires several listens to appreciate its complexity.  Peter Daniels, in his article “Strange Fruit, believed it was the original protest song. “It is simple, spare, but effective poetry. At a time when political protest was not often expressed in musical form, the song depicted lynching in all of its brutality. The three short verses are all the more potent for their understated and ironic language. The juxtaposition of a beautiful landscape with the scene of lynching, the smell of magnolias with that of burning flesh, the blossoms more typically associated with the Southern climate with the “strange fruit” produced by racial oppression—this imagery conjures up the essence of racist reaction. Racism in America stands indicted and exposed by these lines, with no need at all for a more didactic or agitational message.[6]

Meeropol was a member of the American Communist Party from 1932 to 1947. When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for espionage, he and his wife adopted their two sons; both children took the surname “Meeropol” In 1937, he published “Bitter Fruit” in the New York teachers’ union journal. The song was Meeropol’s response to seeing a photo of a lynching. Like many of his generation, he was radicalised by the Russian Revolution, the threat of fascism, and the Great Depression.

Holiday cannot be faulted for not undertaking a more detailed examination of the issues surrounding “Strange Fruit”. Holiday does not even begin to understand why the poorest section of the white working class would turn their desperation into racist atrocities. The book does not probe the class roots of racism as a means of dividing the working class. Any limited gains made by the black working class were made possible by the militancy of millions of black workers in the industrial struggles of the 1930s.

Also absent from the book is Holiday’s comprehension of the role played by the American Communist Party and its Popular Front politics. The holiday does not mention that socialists and communists were on the front line of the struggle for racial equality.

As Daniels points out, “There was a tremendous contradiction inherent in the work of artists, writers and intellectuals who the CP influenced in the 1930s and ’40s. On the one hand, as part of a leftward-moving working class and intelligentsia, they were attracted by the promise of the Russian Revolution. They articulated, to one degree or another, anger at capitalist exploitation and oppression, as well as hopes for social equality and socialism. Most of this layer, however, identified the Russian Revolution with the regime in the Kremlin. Only a minority agreed with the socialist opposition to Stalinism articulated by Leon Trotsky. Meeropol was one of the majority on the left who aligned with the CP during this period. The creative work of these individuals could not help but be influenced by their blind obedience to the Soviet bureaucracy and its reactionary political stance.[7]

Since the release of the 2018 Penguin version of Lady Sings the Blues, interest in Holiday seems to have waned a little. It is hoped that, with the current protests against the fascist Trump administration, interest in the holiday and the song “Strange Fruit” will begin to take hold. There has already been a limited revival of interest in the music, as evidenced by the many more recent recordings. Her autobiography has significant weaknesses, but it is worth reading, and Holiday, after all, was one of a kind.

[1] library.gayhomeland.org/0008/EN/malcolmx_speech_1964.htm

[2] www.theguardian.com/music/2011/feb/16/protest-songs-billie-holiday-strange-fruit

[3] www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Billie-Holiday-s-bio-Lady-Sings-the-Blues-may-2469428.php

[4] The Art of Billie Holiday’s Life-www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-art-of-billie-holidays-life

[5]Great jazz vocalist dishonoured by The United States vs. Billie Holiday—Can’t we do better? http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/07/06/unit-j06.html

[6] “Strange Fruit”: the story of a song-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/02/frut-f08.html

[7] “Strange Fruit”: the story of a song-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/02/frut-f08.html