On 20 August 2011 14:26, Tim Allen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Re the riots, re poetry, re bloody good new music - anyone here come across The King Blues yet? Their latest and third album, Punk and Poetry, is brilliant. Anyone who knows me closely will know that I have never been a fan of rap (and not only because of the ugly logic of inverted capitalist sentiments that gave rise to gang culture) but the mix of ska, punky pop, and politically up-front street poetry from this London band is refreshing and very contagious.

In all the discussion following the riots one thing that has been missing is any acknowledgment that this strikingly political event is something that has erupted within an absence of any political structuring of ideas, except in the vaguest and most erratic terms. The long defeated left of this country have no organisational or ideological foot in the underclass camp - recent generations of the young of the poor and underprivileged have grown up in a political/philosophical vacuum because even the people who speak up for them, out of liberal conscience etc, are mostly servants or agents of the system itself. Those lucky enough to have the combination of intelligence and motivation to think outside of their immediate cultural surroundings have to scrap around for any hints of a notion of a wider political signification of their situation that they can possibly hook onto. They do this mostly as individuals, and so as individuals get lost.

But some of those individuals do manage to make it in their music, and hence to relate. Hearing the lyrics to these King Blues songs it makes me wonder if there is in fact a much higher political awareness among some of the disaffected young than i previously thought. It doesn't always take much to politicize people and the past year with its student protests, arab spring and talk about cuts by the rich chinless wonders could be enough - it just needed some catalyst, which it got.

I am not an apologist for the riots, or for thugs (whether wearing hoods or helmets), but riots are always symptomatic. Is the harshness of the crack down going to crush this hot spirit of opposition because most of those caught up in it have little or no political conception of what they've been involved in, or will it actually contribute to spreading a form of politicization? Interesting times....

Cheers

Tim A.