Political Songs for after election day: Part 1

PETER Guy over at Liverpool's brilliant Get Into This blog asked to me to put together a Top 10 political songs for the momentous British General election day. But as anyone who has ever tried put together Top 10s, it’s virtually impossible, so here’s 10 of my favourites but please post yours below the fold.

A Change is Gonna Come – Sam Cooke: A beautiful hymn for change in Segregation era USA by a man who possessed the voice of his generation. Inspired after his arrest for trying to book into a whites only motel in Louisiana, Cooke set about his masterpiece in1963, the year of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.

The final verse ‘There have been times that I thought I couldn't last for long/but now I think I'm able to carry on/It's been a long time coming, but I know a change is gonna come’ is one of the great refrains of the civil rights-era and the combination of Cooke’s wonderful voice and atmospheric production could make stone cry. Otis and Aretha versions are also worth a listen.

Alternative Ulster – Stiff Little Fingers: It may have been a cut price version of The Clash and lambasted by many in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, but Alternative Ulster has strangely stood the test of time.

Belting final verse too: ‘Take a look where you're livin'/ You got the Army on the street/ And the RUC dog of repression/ Is barking at your feet/ Is this the kind of place you wanna live?

Is this were you wanna be?/ Is this the only life we're gonna have?/ What we need is/ An Alternative Ulster’ Like all great political songs, it’s a call for change.

Eton Rifles – The Jam: Weller’s somewhat naïve call for class war by taking on the officer classes of the British establishment wrongly endorsed by Cameron a couple of years ago. Weller’s always been an uppity outsider: ‘All that rugby puts hairs on your chest,’ ‘What chance have you got against a tie and a crest?’ kinda lay bare his intent. His best political lyric is however on ‘Down in the Tube Station’ ‘They smelt of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs/ And too many right wing meetings’ That’s the 1970s right there and tragically parts of Essex and the North today.

It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back – Public Enemy:  And album, I know, but it is a complete political history class in urban black America at the end of the 20^th Century. Focussing on drugs, violence, government neglect, segregation, black consciousness and militant Islam, it’s hard to separate any one song. Perhaps ‘Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos’ or ‘Night of the Living Baseheads’ illustrate the primal anger and power that made Chuck D the greatest songwriter of his generation. And always remember: freedom is a road seldom followed by the multitude.

Waiting for the Great Leap Forward – Billy Bragg: It was a toss-up between Housemartins-era Paul Heaton and the big nosed bard of Barking, for who wrote the best lefty lyrics in the 80s. But, Bill it had to be, especially given he’s still harassing the BNP whenever he can. 

A lyric that is brilliant from start to finish, but the opening verse has a beauty we don’t often ascribe to Billy: ‘It may have been Camelot for Jack and Jacqueline/ But on the Che Guevara highway filling up with gasoline/ Fidel Castro's brother spies a rich lady who's crying/ Over luxury's disappointment/ So he walks over and he's trying/ To sympathise with her but he thinks that he should warn her/ That the third world is just around the corner’.

Best thing is, he’s still rocking this and updating it at every available opportunity. Check out this performance on Craig Ferguson’s Stateside Talk Show.

What are your favourite 'bits' or 'segments' of songs?

THERE are great albums, great songs and great opening lyrics (‘Bless my cotton socks, I’m in the news’ The Teardrop Explodes), but what are the great ‘bits’ of songs?
By that I mean, what are the wee parts of songs you love?
The grunts, the oohs, the two note guitar solos and the spoken intros which make you want to join in.
The saxophone solos, the count ins, improvised skatting or unusual pronunciations of words you cherish and make you reach up to the headphones and press them that bit closer to the ear drum.

My starter for 10 (in no particular order and to be added to)

“Have you forgotten, that once we were brought here, we were robbed of our name, robbed of our language, we lost our religion, our culture, our gods... and many of us by the way we act, we even lost our minds...”
Farrakhan sample at the start of Night of the Living Baseheads by Public Enemy. Hip hop’s finest moment quickly followed by the almost as brilliant sample ‘We goin’ to get on down now’ soon after. Pure Bomb Squad alchemy. Perfect in every way, just as the album It Takes Million... is. I honestly believe this is pop music’s highest moment. Period.

The ‘1,2,3,4’ preceding the final verse of Springsteen’s Born to Run, usually accompanied by a delirious punch of the fist followed by a deep tinge of regret that you are bladdered at 1am in your Merseyside front room and not in a bar on the Jersey Shore circa 1978.

Strummer's lupine 'Ow Ow Ow Ow' in London Calling by The Clash

'Fuckin' long, ain't it' Magnificent Seven by The Clash

The ropey saxophone solo in This Old Heart of Mine by the Isley Brothers

Everything in either the four minute or near nine minute versions of Movin' On Up by Curtis Mayfield, especially the bongos

The opening John Byrne-penned riff to - and the very final G chord of - There She Goes by The La’s

All the horns on the later segments of Otis Redding’s Try a Little Tenderness

‘Let’s hear it now for Otis Redding’ and all the subsequent ‘fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa’s’ on Arthur Conley’s Sweet Soul Music

How Weller’s voice raises up on the word society in the line before the chorus in the Jam’s Going Underground. ‘And I want nothing of what soc-IERTY wants, I’m goin...’

The ‘Put Yer Fur boots on’ exclamation by Van Morrison on the intro of the Bang Sessions version of Madame George

The guitar lick on The Needle and Damage Done by Neil Young

The opening to Where the Streets Have No Name by U2

The opening riff to Streets of Your Town by the Go-Betweens

the 'la la la' bit of Waterloo Sunset by the Kinks

My favourite song lyrics: Part 1 (of many)

What are your favourite song lyrics?
This is the opening salvo from me:

The greatest lyric of all time (and utterly postmodern for those interested in such things)
"Tramps like us,
And we like tramps"
Charlemagne in Sweat Pants
The Hold Steady


"They were married in June
She was gone before the leaves were even turning
She said "Well, I knew he was a fool, but I
somehow thought my welfare concerned him"
Unhappy Song
Lloyd Cole

"They smelt of pubs
And Wormwood Scrubs
And too many right-wing meetings"
Down in the Tube Station
The Jam

"A freshly fallen, silent shroud of snow"
I am a Rock
Simon & Garfunkel

"There's a crowd says I'm alright
Say they like my turn of phrase
Take me round to their parties
Like some dressed up monkey in a cage.
And I play my accordion
Oh! but when the wine seeps through the facade
It's nothing but the same old story
Nothing but the same old story"
Nothing but the Same Old Story
Paul Brady


"From the time I could walk he’d take me with him
To a bar called the Green Frog Café
Where old men with beer guts and dominoes
Lied about their lives as they played
I was a kid and they all called me sidekick
Like Desperados waiting for a train"
Desperados Waiting for a Train
Guy Clark

"88 you wait the S-One's will
Put the left in effect and I still will
Rock the hard jams, treat it like a seminar
Teach the bourgeois, and rock the boulevard
Some say I'm negative
But they're not positive
But what I got to give
The media says this
Red black and green
Know what I mean
Yo, don't believe the hype"
Don’t Believe the Hype
Public Enemy

"Everything dies baby, that’s a fact
Maybe everything that dies someday comes back"
Atlantic City
Bruce Springsteen


"We just sit in this hazy bubble with our quarters
Discussing how beautiful Gail Porter is"
The Irony of It All
The Streets

'Je Suis Authentik': It's French rap, la

I have written this for Pete Guy's great Liverpool music blog http://peterguy.merseyblogs.co.uk/
Some great writing up there every week. Please bookmark it.

Around 1995/ 1996 French hip hop went very slightly overground. On the back of the soundtrack to Mathieu Kassovitz’s award winning movie La Haine, Anglophone audiences were introduced to IAM, Raggasonic, Assassin and became reacquainted with the wordy poetry of MC Solaar.

And then, as quickly as the film and music came, it went away again until 2005 when, among others, the now French President Nicolas Sarkozy partially laid the blame for the riots in the Paris suburbs at the feet of a new generation of rappers.

French hip hop is amazing, a real barometer of what is going on in the ‘immigrant’ communities of ‘les banlieues’ and exists as the kind of urban history project commercial US hip hop has failed to be for many years.

Older bands, like the once peerless Supreme NTM (‘nic ta mere – f*** your mother), mix the hard driving beats of Public Enemy and the Bomb Squad, while La Rumeur are a kind of multi-media, academic activist group, mixing albums, newsletters and philosophy with a social justice agenda. (Two of them have MA’s in modern culture, and none of the four seem to be particular fans of les police).

La Rumeur’s ridiculously good Best of, ‘Les Inédits’ illustrates the political nature of their work.

They take their message seriously, the website of the brilliant podcast www.yolala.org says, they: “prefer to use the term ‘rap made by sons of immigrants’. Their rationale is that many rappers are not even French citizens and that there is nothing ‘French’ about the musical identity of French rap, kind of like there is no such thing as ‘French kung-fu’. Likewise, some bands like Lunatic prefer to say ‘rap in French’ instead of ‘French rap’, to differentiate language and nationality.”
Now picture Jay Z philosophically dissecting US hip hop in the same manner.

What unites them with a new generation of stars like Disiz la Peste, Kalash L’Afro, Diam and Sniper is the united need to starkly illustrate life in the suburbs among North and West African immigrant communities in Paris, Marseilles, Lyons, Toulouse, Le Havre and beyond.

My favourite, Disiz la Peste’s insanely catchy ‘C’est ça la France’ juxtaposes a vitriolic rap against tourist Paris, the establishment, the National Front and the lives of those in the banlieues with a backing track of traditional French accordion. No description can do the song justice and it is also the only rap song which name checks impenetrable structuralist philosopher Michel Foucault, although I could be corrected.

Disiz (or is it la Peste?), born in Amiens to a Belgian mother and a Senegalese father, is also a vocal figure in the community. After calling for the end of the riots in late 2005 because of the damage they were inflicting on the inhabitants of the banlieues, he added: “First of all France must learn to say sorry – for history, for the colonies because there is no equality of opportunity.”

He has also followed the well trodden path of successful rappers moving into film and TV taking roles under his given name of Serigne M'Baye

Moving a bit more underground, the recent bumper album of collaborations ‘Ecoute la Rue Marianne’ (2007) from Marseilles threw up the incredible partnership of Kalash L’Afro and Le Rat Luciano on the title track.

The album, which came as a reaction to riots across the country, demands that the establishment (Sarkozy is forcefully denounced as ‘raciste’ on several occasions) listen to the music and disenchantment coming from the banlieues. The driving refrain ‘Ecoute la Rue Marianne’ pulses and crackles throughout the track. Al Peco’s ‘Tu Te Trompes’ (You’re Wrong) takes apart the arguments of those who believe Islamic immigration is over running France – hear anything you recognize from Britain, Mr Daily Mail?

But my great pleasure in French hip hop is the detective games you have to play to understand it – translating lyrics through crummy internet translation sites, getting the dictionary out and consulting news websites.

Just like travelling to Belfast in 1989 to buy books about Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey after constantly listening to It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back for about six months, I have found a similar commitment to working out French rap pays equally rich dividends. You have to invest a bit more time and effort in it than with ‘99 Problems (and a bitch ain’t one)’.

Like the London grime scene, the French rap community is amazingly fruitful and new things are appearing like wildfire. As ever youtube, Last.fm and Spotify.com are excellent places to sample the lyrical delights, as is the website of the French hip hop radio station Skyrock FM.

But, it’s still difficult to keep up with, so the aforementioned www.yolala.org is invaluable.

An infrequently appearing podcast (it was once a month for nearly three years) produced by Switzerland-based Parisian native Thomas, it is a veritable treasure trove of songs and interviews (particularly on Kalash L’Afro). Shows on political rap, religion, rap from Quebec have been the stand-outs for me – hell, he even did one on German rap.

Ultimately one thing which really attracts me to French rap is simply the sound – the language and the l’invert back slang of the ghetto are wonderful natural rhythmic companions to hip-hop beats. French DJs are also, I believe, much more imaginative in their sampling and mixing.

Ultimately, many of the artists sound urgent and vital. NTM, effectively disbanded since 2000 (apart from some massive live shows at the Paris Palais des Omnisports a couple of years ago), still sound as fresh as they did when their debut album Authentik was released in 1992. Prodige Namor, Kalash, 113, La Rumeur and Disiz la Peste produce music that sounds dangerous with powerful messages – you just have to work a bit harder to get them.

C’est ça le rap de France mes amis.

Websites to watch
www.yolala.org
www.rap2france.com
www.skyrock.fm