The subversive gorilla

[imomus]

Today's topic is gorillas. First of all, my latest piece for the New York Times is about a 23 year-old French artist called Stephan Goldrajch, who makes woolly masks capable of transforming your face into a colourful gorilla face.



As I explain in the piece, Goldrajch (who calls himself a "eudemonist", a person dedicated to pleasure) likes fairy tales, and has written a few of his own, including the Tale of Bryone, the beautiful and rich daughter of a king who ultimately slits her throat for venturing too far outside his castle walls. Do not under any circumstances miss the fabulous and bizarre Bryone Song, which sounds like something from my Analog Baroque period (or perhaps the songs of Rroland).

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Here's the other gorilla thing: an English translation which has just gone up on YouTube of Georges Brassens' song The Gorilla. Listening to this song -- in which a hanging judge is raped by a gorilla -- you can't help thinking that an enormous mistake has been made by historians of popular song. Rebellion has been equated, since the 1950s (when this song was released, making Brassens a star) with pelvic thrusts and songs about "rocking around the clock". In fact, rebellion is much more reliably to be found in this deceptively-gentle song about a gorilla. It still packs a huge subversive punch, and there are countries all over the world -- including, perhaps, our own -- where you still couldn't sing this gorilla song on TV, though you could shake your pelvis and rock until the cows come home.

Finally, my various record labels have asked me to point out to you that the Joemus album is available as a digital download. Here it is direct from Cherry Red in the UK and via eMusic in the US.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

The authorities pay much more attention to organised dissent, and they're quite right to.

In which case, you're simply giving the authorities the power to frame the debate.

The power of prudery

[(Anonymous)]

The problems with "being rebellious is so acceptable it's more rebellious to not be rebellious" are numerous.

1. At a high level, "ignore what people think and do what you want even if they call you crazy" hasn't lost local potency. Nowadays the battle in the West is with "seen it all before" rather than moral prudery. This pushes people into obscure corners. Most of which have too many paradoxes (good for art, bad for energetic change).
2. A laissez-faire "find your own space and make mistakes" attitude is still needed in many places around the world. Some societies are virtually open prisons. Not sitting there like an unchallenging row of cabbages is still a useful thing to suggest.
3. It's based on a retrograde debate. No-one in the West takes drugs to change society, some take them for anti-social pleasure. Rock too, a neutral thing. Punk got tired explaining that revolution was machinic - but that was the reason to do it, not the reason to stop.
4. It all goes through one's personal filter. Only certain people notice, say, swear words in songs. I have a friend who cries "Punk used the f-word years ago! It's not fresh, big or clever. Or challenging. In fact, it's fucking boring." Meanwhile I didn't even notice it.

Re: The power of prudery

[robincarmody.livejournal.com]

Some good points (although the last bit of your first point does bring on shudder-inducing memories of NME 1987, Paolo Hewitt et al: "energetic change" is a *very* Red Wedge / Style Council phrase, and I think the result of the '87 election still has a residual effect to discredit such rhetoric).

But I think you're exaggerating what people like me (and to a greater and, I think, sometimes overt extent, Momus) say about rock culture. We're not (well, I'm not) advocating a return to Reithianism, or to the immensely class-stratified norms of pre-rock Britain (we may sometimes say that rock was counter-revolutionary to the extent that it conned people into believing that class divisions had narrowed much more than they actually had, but that doesn't mean we support what there was before it - Momus certainly seems to hate that old Britain). We're merely saying that the *mainstream* of rock has become part of the orthodoxy (Coldplay/Cameron). There are still movements within rock that aren't fooled by the new elite (i.e. Cameron) and indeed despise them, and I respect them even if the music isn't to my own personal taste.

Swear words in songs only irritate me if the singer/band *thinks* they're anti-establishment because they've used them. If they seem to consider themselves part of the New Norms, without any pretensions to be anything else, I'm completely un-arsed as well. So the latterday Rotten/Lydon is a far greater irritant to me than any unapologetic stadium rock band.

Re: The power of prudery

[(Anonymous)]

Hmm, but it's almost too coincidental for me that the same things that leftist commentators like Momus condemn for being not-as-radical-as-we-need (noise/swagger/swearing/drugs) are the same things conservative critics used to condemn as too radical. No-one says "Oh he's wearing flip flops. I keep telling him, they're not going to change the world. But he doesn't listen." Revolution is more than power's homoerotic dream of blue collar rough trade.

Re: The power of prudery

[imomus.livejournal.com]

We could call this the "radicalism treadmill" or something. Since radicalism is reactive, it necessarily becomes reactionary. Since it's revolutionary, it becomes circular.

I should add here, for the record, that this is an old theme of mine. I proposed three articles to the NME in 1986 about elderly male singers "more thrilling and dangerous than a thousand Jesus and Mary Chains": Jacques Brel, Jake Thackray and Serge Gainsbourg. The Brel and Gainsbourg ones got written, and I phoned Thackray to set up an interview. He suggested Fuller's Tap, which was a pub in a brewery somewhere off the M4. Since I didn't have a car, it took me hours to find the place, and by the time I did, he was gone.

Re: The power of prudery

[robincarmody.livejournal.com]

Indeed, but what is and isn't radical changes from era to era. Specifically, what was radical in a Britain whose single biggest problem was its lusting after its own dying empire (and resenting the influence of a certain foreign power) can easily cease to be so when one of the biggest problems (if not the biggest) is lusting after the influence of that very foreign power and seeing Britain as an honorary extention of it.