A guest posting by Fraser Pettigrew
Righting the world’s wrongs with the help of a good tune is in many ways fundamental to the very idea of rock music. Whether expressing the iniquities of racism in America’s South in its blues roots, or recruiting youth to anti-war or anti-oppression campaigns in the 60s, 70s and 80s, politically motivated rock has always harnessed the appeal of good-time party music to further a social cause. Even in its more aggressive forms during the punk era, the principle was well observed that if I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.
Not all political music has embraced the Maoist subterfuge of popular form to effect radical change however. The likes of Crass, for example, never troubled the charts in their unrelenting dedication to anarchism and hardcore punk. The last time I encountered an artist with serious social issues was back in 2016 and it certainly wasn’t an occasion of the singalongaJerryDammers Free Nelson Mandela variety.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor is a Canadian collective, one of the few acts in the broadly defined genre of rock music that live and work according to political principles. They have consistently expressed their anti-capitalist and anti-globalist message since first coming together in Montreal in 1994. Considering that their music is almost wholly instrumental, the messaging is most explicit in the titles of pieces or in the packaging in which it is made available.
I should point out early on that I’m not familiar with a great deal of their music. I only possess one LP, 2002’s Yanqui U.X.O. So you couldn’t describe me as a fan exactly. But still, who can fail to be intrigued by a band whose origins lie in a home-made 30-copy cassette album entitled “All Lights Fucked On The Hairy Amp Drooling”?
The music on Yanqui U.X.O. is fairly representative of their style, I believe, consisting of four 20-minute instrumentals that stretch minimal musical content from quiet beginnings to furious crescendos and back again, using multiple guitars, basses, drums and classical string, wind and brass instruments. The title of the album combines the Spanish rendering of ‘Yankee’ and the initialism for ‘unexploded ordnance’, some of which is seen falling out of a bomber on the front cover. A graphic on the sleeve depicts the complex interconnection of the music business with the military-industrial complex.
How can such simple, lyric-less music be political in the absence of commentary, packaging or programme notes? It wasn’t a question that occurred to me when I snapped up a couple of tickets to see them live at the 2016 Edinburgh Festival. All I knew was that it was a rare opportunity to see a cult band with a bit of a reputation and I liked Yanqui U.X.O. enough to think that the live show would be musically stimulating at the least. In that I was not wrong, though not in the sense that I probably expected.
The venue for the show was The Playhouse, a theatre I hadn’t been in for over three decades at least, but well remembered as the scene of milestone gigs in my youth by The Jam, Elvis Costello and Misty in Roots. A mixed bag of punters milled around in the foyer and bar, much as they had in the 70s and 80s. Unlike those days there was no support band to endure or ignore and we were ushered to our seats by a bell as you would be at the opera house.
Onto a barely illuminated stage ambled the musicians, three or four at first, and as expected the music began quietly, modulating in stately fashion between a couple of chords, gradually solidifying with the addition of more players as the piece progressed, three or four guitars, two bass players, a drummer, or was it two? A cellist… It was so dark it was hard to see.
By this gloom, our attention was diverted away from the band to the large screen above the stage, onto which was projected a sequence of mystifying and seemingly incoherent grainy black and white film clips, looping repeatedly, compelling you to study them for meaning. At first the camera seemed to pan across what looked like a studio model of a skyscraper city, looping back and panning again, and again. Shapes, possibly buildings, no people. Then later the scene changed to a telephoto shot of some figures in a bleak modernist plaza, bleached by sunlight, the repetitive loop isolating one man’s curious gestures into a zoochotic stereotype, like the despairing sway of a long-captive animal. Another figure stood with his back to the gesturing man. Were they arguing? Was this some sort of surveillance video? Was some violence about to ensue?
As we watched, the music had imperceptibly grown, bar by bar, swollen and intensified until at its height it was pummelling the audience with almost unbelievable sonic force. It was undoubtedly the loudest music I have ever heard, hardly varying from the same few chords, half-tones apart, aural assault in a minor key, sustained over a lengthy plateau rather than a peak until slowly it subsided and faded away back to silence. There was applause and some cheering, as much in relief as in appreciation.
What had just happened? I felt as if we’d been caught in the middle of a typhoon, unable to escape, able only to grit our teeth and wait for it to pass. And then it started again, different chords, different disquieting film, another crescendo, another battering of intense noise, so loud and unrelenting that it felt like a physical weight on my chest, stifling my breath, threatening to squeeze the very life out of my heart and lungs. Four or five separate pieces ebbed and flowed over the hour, repeating the punishment, until finally we were released, spilling out of the exits like hostages after a siege.
The combined effect of such noise and the disturbingly repetitious monochrome film loops was one of profound alienation, an indefinable sense of existential dread. We shuffled out into the summer evening, slowly readjusting to a world where human interaction and communication spoke of friendship and connection, and Edinburgh’s elegant cityscape brought pleasure and a vibrant sense of place, a host of feelings that had been forcibly denied and beaten out of us for the duration of the concert.
It was a truly staggering experience, unlike any other cultural event I have ever witnessed. Instead of enthusing and inspiring the audience with upbeat anthems of hope and defiance, GY!BE had brutalised us with a dystopian vision and weaponised music by extreme and sustained volume. If there was a political message to be gleaned from the performance it was that there is something very wrong with the world and THIS IS WHAT IT FEELS LIKE! It is not enough to know that there is fear and suffering, it is necessary through this stupendous confrontation to experience it and sense it within yourself.
I felt stunned, shattered, almost literally. The use of sound as a weapon may still be experimental in military circles, but on this evidence GY!BE have perfected it.
The strange thing is, however, that on record the music has a quite different effect. It would be difficult in any case to replicate the concert experience in your suburban home without bringing the police round and incurring a noise abatement charge. But even played loud in your living room it’s impossible to escape the fact that the music is often beautiful, expansive, epic, grandiose, sublime even, conveying an aching poignancy like a Mahler or Bruckner adagio. Perhaps that too is part of the concept. Be seduced by the uplifting beauty of this art, buy the record, follow the band, come to the concert. Then, when the lights go down and the doors are shut, all will be revealed. A chilling realisation will creep over you. You will discover that this is not just music, you can’t dance, and this IS the revolution.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 