Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century
 
Revolutionary
Socialism in the
21st Century
Photo credit: Jack Witek Photography

2024 cultural highlights: music

rs21 members

As the year draws to a close, rs21 members review their musical highlights of 2024.

Supernormal DIY festival by Jack W (General Branch)

My cultural highlight of the year comes from being lucky enough to attend Supernormal, a prefigurative DIY festival with a cult-like following where you will run into various communists you’ve met at London’ Pelican House alongside an array of friends from far-flung corners you didn’t realise you had yet, as well as the usual CAMRA-card carrying, Quietus reading Morris dance obsessives (love you). But I want to mention one item in the programme in particular. 

Walking back up the wooded hill into the low sun of the main field, I crossed paths with a glowing MOONFACE, the arresting creation of Meg Hodgson, who was performing inside the cavernous triangular Vortex stage that day. Meg is a queer, non-binary improv clown, and physicist-in-training. At this year’s festival, they were skulking around the site in full moon drag, briefcase in hand and wearing a suit befitting a mid-20th century titan of industry, and exhorting people to see their show in a croaky Yoda-meets-sentient-ancient-moon-rock voice. Which is to say, I immediately fell in love with this terrifying vision, simultaneously angelic and demonic, and was irrevocably locked in for whatever would follow.

MOONFACE was made in collaboration with UCL’s Professor Ilan Kelman, and is partly a satire of contemporary industrialists like Elon Musk. ‘MOONFACE uses clowning to explore colonial, capitalist mining practices and how the models created on Earth are being used to inform the future of interplanetary travel.’

To put it more plainly, over the show’s forty-five  minutes, Meg uses hilarious, playful, sexy and emotionally compelling audience participation to situate their character, an anthropomorphisation of the Moon, as a sexually promiscuous personification for how what we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves, to each other. Meg also abruptly switches character, delivering scientific facts about interplanetary expansion, to an eerily embodied recital of a survivor’s account of the Aberfan mining disaster in Wales, to a fizzing almost-impersonation of Grimes, Musk’s ex-wife currently fighting him in court. Whilst not a direct satire, it is an identifiable archetype of the manic-cosmic-pixie-dream-girl meets Stepford Wives suburbanite that Elon projected onto an abusive marriage he reigned over in his quest to reverse (elite) population decline. The play speaks about the degradation of bodily autonomy and capitalist alienation under extractivist logics, whether at the celestial or corporeal scale.

The ending somehow managed to make Meg’s ingenious, almost-naked interaction with a roll of tinfoil make me cry, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the performance for weeks after, with all its leftfield DIY-ness. Go see Meg’s shows! 

For everyone else, shoutout to The Boy and the Heron from Studio Ghibli. It too, has a celestial narrative anchor and a non-linear progression, an industrialist patriarch, and the English dub features Robert Pattinson’s similarly demonic and utterly captivating voice work for the title’s Grey Heron. ‘You can build your own tower. A kingdom that is free from malice. Create a world of bounty, peace, and beauty’’, the film recommends. A good sentiment to take into the new year. 

Nala Sinephro’s Endlessness by Jonny J (East London)

Endlessness is the second album by Belgian jazz musician Nala Sinephro. The follow-up to her terrific 2021 debut Space 1.8, Endlessness is a fascinating record that encapsulates much of the genre-bending excitement of contemporary ambient jazz. The album is built around one continuous arpeggio that repeats throughout, though you will at points strain to realise that given the sheer range of sounds and atmospheres evoked by Sinephro and her collaborators. This construction around a repeated pattern makes the album at times feel spiritually reminiscent of another recent psychedelic jazz odyssey, the sublime Promises by Floating Points and the late Pharoah Sanders. But while that album saw Sanders’ singular saxophone playing meld and clash with electronic and orchestral sounds, here the jazz combo remains at the heart of the sound, pulsating throughout as a range of modular synths and strings add contrast and crescendo. By turns relaxed and dramatic, Sinephro’s ability to run the gamut of moods without ever sounding forced is remarkable. A truly wonderful album that could easily find a place as the soundtrack to a wide range of experiences.

Two live shows – Arooj Aftab and Meshell Ndegeocello by Neil R (North London)

The best live music I heard this year came in a short period at the end of October and at the beginning of November. Hearing the sublime Pakistani singer Arooj Aftab in a packed dark Roundhouse London was a moment of such intensity. Her voice, so beautiful and powerful and her band creating such a wonderful canvas of sounds as ghazal, jazz, and soul – all interacting in a wonderful sparse minimal way. Check out her latest album ‘Night Reign’.

I only discovered Meshell Ndegeocello a few years ago despite the fact she has been producing glorious music for over thirty years. Her London gig in November showcased her new album, ‘No More Water’, a tribute to James Baldwin. Her wonderful singing and stunning bass playing was pushed into the background though by the vocalist Justin Hicks with his deep rich languid tones. This paean to Baldwin in music and words with samplings of his voice added to the mix is truly remarkable.

Three albums – Caribou, Four Tet and Floating Points by Allan S (North London)

Dan Snaith (Caribou), Kieran Hebden (Four Tet), and Sam Shepherd (Floating Points) are doyens of British dance music. Over the past 15-20 years, their productions have reflected and shaped club culture; they can now be said to exist as a recognisable, independent flank within popular music. Their success exempts them from most of the struggle for commercial viability in a competitive industry of hyperactive self-promotion, streaming services and gig grabbing. There aren’t many of whom we could say the same, and all three released new albums this year. 

Historically, with the development of capitalism, commodification and the mass market, Western artists were able to broker individual freedom from the ideological systems of princely courts, churches, and craft guilds. The other side of the bargain, however, was to vye with others for dominance in this field of nominally ‘free’ production and exchange. The market proved to be no less censorious for the majority of artists, granting freedom to only the smallest number of individual figureheads. With commercial success relatively assured, Snaith, Hebden, and Shepard occupy this position to which most modern artists aspire. 

So, neither battling it out over promoters and labels nor flattering the tastes of the contemporary court (public grant funding applications), what are they doing with all this freedom? Broadly, they are hitting something of a mass audience with re-combinations of dance musical forms of the past twenty years. Introducing listeners to unfamiliar sounds that have been swept up and lost in the waxing and waning of trend cycles, they cut back as a video editor might to show easily missed details, useful material.  

Floating Points brings listeners back to a melodically (rather than rhythmically) driven, Progressive House sound that was prevalent in Britain from the early 90’s to 00’s. Caribou, a Canadian very much adopted by the Brits, signs toward a similar place but also adopts a Niche ‘Bassline’ sound, developed in the midlands during the mid-00’s. The albums are front-loaded with these more stylistically expansive and physically exhilarating tracks, while Four Tet makes a more conventional but balanced effort, nodding back to ground already covered in his late-00’s/early-10’s UK Garage permutations with frequent returns to an earlier, comfortable Downtempo fit.

In putting together Long Play records (LP’s) from their established platform, these producers together make a statement of leadership in dance music. What they have offered is a set of recombinatory pop art experiments whose virtues are similar to those offered by party drugs. There’s a formal transgression that is, though not self-sufficiently so, conducive to open-mindedness and abrasive to authoritarian thinking. It’s not at all the only way to gain this temporary closeness to psychic liberation, but the transmission of past thrill into a homogenous present, at scale, might inculcate a wider predilection to taking truth against the grain.  

Pop music by Clara H (South London)

Perhaps, it isn’t very chic or intellectual but one of my cultural highlights was the work of Taylor Swift. I managed to see her twice at Wembley performing The Eras Tour. Once was a product of planning and a year’s waiting. The other, a bit more on a whim. According to my Apple Music Replay, the extended version of her eleventh studio LP ‘The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology’ also featured heavily on rotation.  

Ever since I can remember, pop music has been an everyday joy, a way to find community, both with people on the internet and in the real world. 2024 marked a particularly stand-out year for it. Along with Swift, other old favourites like Kacey Musgraves dropped new material. I love her pop country work so much I travelled to Amsterdam to see her at the historic venue Paradiso on her ‘Deeper Well’ tour. There was also the rise of Chappell Roan, whose comments on the Democrat candidate Vice-President Kamala Harris in the US election made me want to send her a copy of the Communist Manifesto, and the arrival of Charli XCX’s much-memed ‘Brat Summer’. 

Some of it was cringe (like the declaration that Harris embodied the party girl vibe of Brat) but some of it, like the remix of ‘Girl, so confusing’ featuring Lorde really showcased the power of ‘working it out on the remix’. I think I’m not alone that the line, ‘Girl, you walk like a bitch, when I was ten someone said that, and it’s just self-defence until you’re building a weapon,’ was a bit life-changing! Special shout to the Caroline Polachek-backed remix of ‘Everything Is Romantic’ and the ACAB tag on the bus stop sign in East London. 

My heart even warmed to Gracie Abrams, whose ‘nepo baby’ roots can almost be forgiven for delivering the instant classic ‘That’s So True’ from her sophomore album, ‘The Story of Us.’ Pop presents an everyday pleasure, bookmarking my hijinks around town or pepping up shifts writing entertainment news copy. Clearly, it isn’t very highbrow, but it possesses a sacredness in its profanity. 

The first part of the cultural highlights of 2024 can be read here.

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