Things I watched, read and listened to this week #6
A Book Review
This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika and the Third Reich
The roll call of musicians that have flirted with or celebrated Nazi iconography and doctrine is staggering. In This Ain’t Rock and Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika and the Third Reich, Daniel Rachel provides a chronological list of offenders, leaving hardly any major player from the back pages of music history unscathed. Even the incredible work carried out by Rock Against Racism doesn't escape criticism having for many years failed to look in the direction of antisemitism. This was at a time when rock music was doing major business selling antisemitism as something that might have artistic merit or an appealing aesthetic.
Here are just a few examples of when pop music got into bed with the cult of Hitler.
In the 1960s, John Lennon goose-stepped around the stages of Germany with his right arm raised. In the 1970s, Sid Vicious wandered around the Jewish districts of Paris wearing a Malcolm McLaren-designed T-shirt emblazoned with a swastika, rubbing cakes into the faces of Jewish people. In that same decade, a band emerged from Manchester called Warsaw, named after the Polish city that was first occupied by the Nazis. Later they would change their name to Joy Division, named with reference to the brothels in concentration camps where Jewish women were forced into sexual slavery and routinely raped up to 20 times a day while their families were murdered outside. After the lead singer’s death, they landed upon a third name — New Order, a further salute to a Nazi concept. Spandau was a prison in Berlin. When prisoners were hanged and then shot, their bodies would move as if they were ‘dancing’. This was known as the Spandau Ballet. Each of the books 368 pages reads like this.
In a sprawling and grim take on the last 60 years of popular music, Daniel Rachel presents facts but little personal opinion. You are invited to draw your own conclusions. But to close this book and go and destroy your record collection would be a misguided take. John Lennon wasn’t a Nazi; he was one of many young men trying to wind their parents up. The members of Spandau Ballet are of course just crooners with synths and many others just followed trends put in place by fashion designers and record label owners. But there are many people, largely from the 1974 onwards (the year that footage emerged of the genocide committed against the Jewish people) who were well aware of what they were doing and who hold, to this day, far-right views and Nazi sympathies — step forward Kanye West and Roger Waters.
Does it all mean that we can’t enjoy the music of our some of idols anymore? That’s down to the individual, of course. But you won’t be finding me in my Joy Division T-shirt any time soon.
I bought this from rough trade. If you attend Guitar Social classes or events I would happily lend you my copy.
Series one of Beef was the best thing to appear on TV in a long, long time. If you didn’t see it, it’s two people that have a minor altercation in a car park and then go to war with each other. It is funny. It is exciting. It is written to perfection and features career-defining performances while commenting on the state of our world. It won ALL the awards.
Series two is about love and ambition set against a slightly administrative story of embezzlement. Where Beef series one had fights and chases, and a closing episode that was truly spectacular, this is a much more domestic affair. There are moments where we see splashes of what made Beef one so remarkable — the fight scene in episode eight shows the touches of genius that made the first outing such a treat — but where its predecessor showed imagination and creativity when telling a story about revenge, the revenge scenes here are all a little tame. We have gone from people throwing away their entire lives just to prove a point, to people doing unhygienic and gross things with each other’s drinks. Like kids might do.
If you haven’t seen the original Beef, I would see that instead of this. And if you have seen the original Beef, then should you find yourself on a long journey with nothing to do, then this will do.
Beef is available on Netflix now
A Song Review
Janet Jackson meets Prince
You know the drums at the start of Prince’s Doves Cry? That distinctly 1980s approach to recording drums? Well, not since Doves Cry has that sound sounded so good. And what about when Phil Collins does his party trick in In the Air Tonight? That “Duf-Duf, Duf-Duf, Du Dum, Do Dum Dum” bit — well, not since Cadbury used it to sell chocolate has it been put to such great effect. So it might be the beats, it might be the Janet Jackson-style vocals, it might be because it’s spring and this brand of pop just sounds better in the sun, but I have listened to this about 90 times in the last three days. My Spotify end-of-year wrap is officially skewed.
No Na are an Indonesian girl group with members from Bali, Lombok and Jakarta. They signed to 88rising last year, the American label that represents Asian and Asian American artists.I think they are going to be huge.
Hit play, air drums at the ready.
You can listen to this song on Spotify right now
A film review
A triptych exploring the complexities of the ties that bind us together
A brother and sister visit their father somewhere in the cold wilds of America. He lives alone, played by Tom Waits. The daughter is distant, wary, unsure of him. In conversations between the siblings, the son downplays the level of financial support he is giving their father. Later, when she notices him wearing a Rolex, her suspicions sharpen. After a stilted but not entirely hopeless visit, the children leave, and more is revealed about the father and the way he conducts his life.
Then we move to Dublin, where two daughters visit their cold-hearted mother who does a fine job at imitating what love might look like. It’s all cutlery scraping on porcelain and loud ticking clocks while a meal is performed out of obligation rather than warmth, and the diners take it in turn to provide an update on how life is transpiring, because, well, that’s what you’re meant to do. You can feel the absence of love as a looming fourth character as they wait silently for the Uber to arrive.
Finally, in Paris, a brother and sister spend time in the flat of their dead father, talking through memories and the past.
All three acts circle variations of the same conversations, told in different emotional registers. It will raise questions for you, here’s one that came to my mind: would you rather have a parent who is dead but loved you, or one who is alive but doesn’t care? I’ll probably hold back on that one in my next game of would you rather.
I loved the first act and I wish the whole film had been with those three characters.
The Dublin section was physically uncomfortable to watch — if a film’s success is to be measured against the response it elicits, then five stars all round. The mother is monstrous in that quietly affluent way, where cruelty is enabled not by lack but by emotional distance and the wrought iron locked gates in the pathway that should lead to a mother’s heart.
The Paris section is where I struggled. The siblings’ performance of a version of cool never quite feels real — leather jackets, discussions about micro dosing, heavy vocal fry, driving through Paris in an old car. If you asked AI to write a scene featuring two cool people in Paris, it might have come up with this.
By the time the film enters its third round of conversational patterns, I was done, and I’m ashamed to say, mostly because I found them so irritating. Others clearly didn’t, so perhaps that’s just me. I do tend to get a bee in my bonnet over things nobody else seems to care about and these two leather-clad alleged hipsters were the keepers of the hive.
I watched this at The Curzon, Soho