States of the Disorderly...

Last month I was privileged to be able to interview Blues legend Buddy Guy. Here is the article:

Buddy Guy was a mere toddler when he first heard the sound of sweet gospel, drifting through the windows of a rural church, deep in the Louisiana Delta.

Music, from the very beginning, was the sound of hope.

The son of a sharecropper, Guy never had much money, but fell in love with the blues in the early 40s, when his dad first installed electricity in the house and the swampy rhythms of Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters poured from the phonograph.

Famously, the young boy carved a makeshift guitar from a few bits of wood, flyscreen and his mother’s hairpins, and amidst the muggy plantations he sat for hours, dreaming of a different world, which his music would emancipate.

50 years on, George “Buddy” Guy is a quintessential Chicago electric blues legend and undoubtedly one of the most revered living guitarists.

Truly of another era, Guy carries the weight of a history and sound which set the course for modern rock n’ roll, inspiring a platoon of devotees as varied as Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix.

Before heading to Australia for his current tour, Buddy was rugged up inside his Chicago home, sheltered from the snow, cooking some good old-fashioned Creole food. Modern day Chicago is a futuristic playground compared to the gritty streets that defined the city when Guy first arrived in 1957, clutching a satchel of southern fried chicken and a busking hat.

“We’re all very religious and I believe God put us here for a reason, not a season,” laughed Guy in his crackling southern accent.

“The guitar was just something natural that came to me, to fall in love with, but none of us ever dreamed this music could take us to all kinda places, all nationalities, to the world. These guys, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, would just be playing with a hat on stage, hoping for enough dimes to get a quart of beer, then you’d pay all night.”

Chi-town blues, as it is commonly referred to, was the sound of liberation for Black America, imbued with the cultural and racial symbolism of a changing nation. Yet, ideologically speaking, the themes of blues music were mild compared to the hip-hop lyrics that dominate Black music today. Guy’s daughter, Shawnna, is an MTV glamour girl, famous for her brashy up-front lyricism and work with the rapper Ludacris.

“My daughter Shawnna, she say to me, ‘Dad, we’re playing your music, what we’re doing is just like what you did back then,’” said Guy.

“I didn’t ever used listen to what these Black kids were saying in this hip-hop but when I did I realised they were saying things that Black kids weren’t even allowed to walk past the studio and whisper back in my day.

“But that’s what music is doing these days, and as long as you makin’ people happy, you doing something good. Music is like the automobile. When it come out it have no radio or heater, damn you gotta crank it up to get it started, but now you press a button it cranks up before you even get in it.”

Of course, it’s hard for Guy to conceptualise the impact of his music. Put it this way, Jimi Hendrix would never have lifted a guitar above his head for those mammoth solos if he hadn’t seen Guy do it first. Equally, as Stevie Ray Vaughan famously quipped: “Without Buddy Guy, there would be no Stevie Ray Vaughan”.

At 71 years of age, time waits for no man, but Guy is safe in the knowledge of one thing at least: the blues is alive and well.

“At my age you just gotta sit back and say wow,” said Guy.

“You wake up, you go to bed, you wake up, you do you’re thing, but then one day you’re a senior citizen, and you the maker of ‘old Black music’.

“The future’s bright, but there ain’t never going to be another Muddy Waters, another B.B. King. They’re the ones, they made the blues, so who gonna fill those shoes? Well ain’t nobody gonna fill those shoes, but the blues’ll still be playing long after we old men long gone.”

Article Published in The West Australian.

Posted by Glenn Savage at 10:49 PM | Permalink

Last month I had the following article published in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (please see abstract below):

This paper investigates the influence of popular/corporate culture texts and discourses on the subjectivities and everyday social experiences of young people, and the extent to which such influences are critically analysed in the English classroom. I present two levels of synthesised information using data analysis born of a mixed-methods postgraduate research project with a group of 15- and 16-year-old high school students in Perth, Australia. First, I argue that popular culture texts position young people to assume subjectivities that are heavily informed by the ideologies and discourses of popular/corporate culture. Moreover, I argue that young people’s social currency is often defined by the extent to which individuals demonstrate an alliance to such ideologies and discourses, and that individuals who deviate from popular norms experience subjugation and exclusion within peer and social settings. Second, I deal pedagogically with subject English and areas of it that hold relevance in terms of the integration and analysis of ‘the popular’. I argue that many students feel their teachers are ‘out of touch’ with the everyday realities of young people and their popular culture influences, and that there is a lack of commitment by teachers to critically analyse popular culture texts in the classroom. The paper concludes by arguing that such failures risk producing students whose everyday experiences are silenced and who are denied the critical learning spaces necessary to deconstruct the ways they are positioned to adopt certain subjectivities. Moreover, critical and progressive pedagogical praxis need to be further deployed by educators in order to effectively analyse the relationship between youth subjectivities and popular/corporate culture discourses.

Posted by Glenn Savage at 02:11 PM | Permalink

I guess this posting is a case of 'better late than never'...

I interviewed the Klaxons in their hotel lobby late last year, in Perth, just before a live show at Capitol Nightclub (see interview/review below). Before the rest of the band arrived, I sat with Simon Taylor-Davis for around an hour, chatting about the band's crazy year. My initial intention was to transcribe the whole interview word for word; which I may get around to doing when I get two seconds spare. Sitting with Simon reminded me of an interview I once heard with Damon Albarn, in Blur's early days. The two bands have many common threads, two decades apart. Anyway, for now, here is the interview/review:

If not for the Klaxons, 2007 would have been very different, and a lot less neon.

Capitol, resplendent in a hyper-colour sea of the young and glamorous, was testament to the band’s newfound celestial fame; proving the dance-meets-indie ‘nu-rave’ scene is now firmly a subculture and quasi-religion.

Glo-sticks aplenty, eyes glazed in fervour and mouths ajar, a carnal atmosphere greeted the scene’s demi-gods when they finally emerged through a miasma of sparkling lights. The stage was set for one of those special nights. Hours earlier, Klaxons’ guitarist, Simon Taylor-Davis, cradled a fresh cup of English Breakfast tea, ensconced in the quiet comfort of his hotel lobby.

In beautiful juxtaposition to the madness to ensue, Taylor-Davis was keen to chat about a year which has seen his band’s debut album, Myths of the Near Future, eclipse all expectations, win a 2007 Mercury award and forge a fashion-music beast inconceivable when they jokingly quipped in 2006, “we’re a ‘nu-rave’ band”.

“Not long ago, in London, there was a sense of urgency, the brink of losing control, and we became the ‘catalysts for carnage’,” laughed Taylor-Davis.

“We had friends bring glo-sticks to gigs, it all became a party, a joke, and suddenly we were poster children for our own revolution. Now on high streets everywhere, you can buy your complete ‘nu-rave outfit’.”

But was it all a beautiful plan?

“Of course it was!” chimed bassist Jamie Reynolds, bursting into the room with keyboardist James Righton, fresh from radio promo and cradling piles of free CDs.

“From day one it was about ideas. We couldn’t play instruments, but we started writing about fantastical nonsense, stole ideas from nineties dance music and played with weird concepts about the apocalypse.”

“In the end, we became a cut n’ paste pastiche pop band, with a collage of sound that we took to the mainstream,” said Taylor-Davis.

“Pity is, now we haven’t written a single song for 18 months!” said Righton, “and we need to sit down and make a new one. The next record is honestly going to be so much better. We’re really ready to start pouring ideas.”

In the meantime, however, life continues as a roller coaster of debauchery and endless sell-out tours. Carnage, of course, the operative word.

Later that night, the Klaxons literally assaulted Capitol with a wall of stripped-back, rough and raw sonority, paying homage to their post-punk influences.

Decidedly heavier than on record, Atlantis to Interzone, Totem on the Timeline and Golden Skans were affectingly delivered to a writhing pit of pheromones, serotonin and sweat.

By the time Two Receivers reached its crescendo, Capitol, the most painfully ill-conceived venue in history, was a messy feast for the zealous, and the Righton vs. Reynolds trademark vocal duo resonated beautifully.

“F**k New York and London, Perth is my new favourite place!” screamed Reynolds, before launching into their debut single, Gravity’s Rainbow.

Instrument swapping aplenty, guitar pedal mastery and vocal gymnastics all seemed effortless. Perth’s rapacious audience simply sapped the sonic energy.

Unfortunately, by the time Isle of Her and It’s Not Over Yet graced fans, the band was almost out of songs. It’s easy to forget the Klaxons are indeed a very young band with merely a handful of tunes to their name.

Returning for a raucous version of The Four Horsemen of 2012, there was no doubt the Klaxons are indeed the scribes of our musical future.

Later on, caked in post-gig sweat, amongst a landscape of beers bottles and grimy discarded glo-sticks, Simon Taylor-Davis had an epiphany: “You know what? I’m ready for the future! Bring on 2008, let’s rinse these ideas out and serve ‘em up.”

Article Published in The West Australian.

Posted by Glenn Savage at 10:46 PM | Permalink

Late last year, an arduous process of research and writing culminated when my Masters thesis was submitted.

My thesis, studied at Murdoch University (Australia), specifically investigated the influence of popular culture texts on the subjectivities of young people and argued that critical pedagogical practices need to be further deployed by English teachers to interrogate popular culture texts in the classroom. My data analysis synthesised information born of a quantitative survey and in-depth interviews with secondary English students.

Although the thesis will predominately interest researchers in the fields of education and cultural studies, I believe it also offers something unique in terms of the autoethnographic-styled narratives which punctuate its structure throughout. In many ways, the four narratives are more enlightening than the data itself, in terms of explicating the personal process of 're-birthing' which I endured as a result of delving into the theories therein. Academic work is too often stripped of individuality in the seemingly futile process of attempting an 'objective account'; and these narratives certainly 'fly in the face' of traditional edicts.

The thesis was examined by Jane Kenway (Monash) and Michael Kehler (Western Ontario) and published early 2007, but now the time feels right to put it up on this site. You can download the abstract, the entire thesis, or the individual narratives (see below, all in PDF form).

Alternatively, the full thesis is also available via this link, as a part of the Murdoch University Digital Theses Project.

A distillation of my research will be published in an article in Discourse - Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, in March 2008. I will post the abstract closer to the date of publication.

Regards,

Glenn

Abstract

Full Text

Narrative #1 - The Whirling Vortex

Narrative #2 - Anarchy in the UK [and Perth, Western Australia]

Narrative #3 - The dislocated teacher

Narrative #4 - 2006: A reconceptualizing self...

Posted by Glenn Savage at 12:04 AM | Permalink