 Hello and welcome to Downstream. If politics is downstream from culture, then consider this show a sewage treatment plant. And tonight, we are going to talk in love in this club, euphoria, wisdom in the rave, and whether the left needs to rediscover a sense of fun. And I'm very pleased to be joined by the always lit Jeremy Gilbert, Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London, and the Chief Psychonaut at Navarra Media's very own ACFM, which makes this the most ambitious crossover event since we got James Butler to come on Tisgy Sour. So, Gem, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. So, this show really is kind of a rip-off or a continuation, whatever way you want to look at it, of some hot BBC Radio 4 content. What happened was that a couple of weeks ago, Jeremy made an appearance on Radio 4's Moral Maze to talk about the morality of clubbing, which was about as surreal as having a discussion about raving with Melanie Phillips is probably going to be. So, I really recommend going back and listening to that show after you watch this one, of course, just to get a glimpse of how weird and remote the prestige British broadcasting environment can really be. Because here we all are talking about something which most people do at some point in their lives with the kind of alien distance, which is usually reserved for analysing, you know, a kind of microscope sample of bacterial ooze. So, I heard Melanie Phillips describe dancing as a bacchanalian orgy and later on, and I'm not sure if this bit got edited out or not, one of the panellists compared the relationship between crowd and DJ to Hitler and his followers. So, all in all, some pretty weird stuff. I was on the show as well, but because of the setup, I didn't actually get to talk to Jim directly, but I did want to explore some of what came up and much more besides, because I think that there are questions, interesting questions, sticky questions about euphoria, about hedonism, about excess, about fun, and the rave that the left should address in as light and playful, but serious away as it can manage. So, Jim, maybe to kick us off, what's so good about bacchanalian orgies? I mean, I would want to say there are good ones and bad ones, right? I mean, it was sort of a point I tried to make on the show that I'm not, I wouldn't want to, I'm all for on the one hand, like defending the bacchanalian orgy as a potentially progressive and liberating practice, but I don't think you can really do that without some sense of discrimination without the idea that there are good parties and bad parties. So, I mean, at their best, as Giles Fraser said on the show at one point, the rave, the party, is an expression of what Nietzsche called the Dionysian aspect of human existence, which is, I mean, he was making a distinction between different kinds of philosophy, really, a different kind of worldview. And the Dionysian is that which celebrates sort of the messy, the carnal, the physical, the, you know, the non-rational. And all of those are really important aspects of human experience. I mean, all of those are things that we can't really get away from and that we can't, not that we shouldn't have to get away from. And I think one of the things that's really crucial in contemporary culture and contemporary society is, you know, we're really heavily encouraged by our existence in a precarious labour market, a competitive property market, a kind of highly competitive education system, which is increasingly instrumentalised, and all the other ideological paraphernalia of neoliberal culture. We're generally encouraged to experience the presence of other people, really just the existence of other people as like a problem. And if it really works, then the Bacchanali and Orgi, or just the party, really, it enables us to experience the pleasure, the presence and the existence of other people in a completely non-instrumental way as just as something which is good, which is empowering, which is enlivening. And to experience sort of getting out of your head as a sort of thing, which is potentially enlivening. And this is something we talk about quite often on ACSM, the idea that, you know, getting out of your head can be seen as just a kind of negative thing. It's about losing control, it's about not having, you know, a kind of loss of agency. But it can also mean getting out, not getting out of your head can mean getting out of your head, not just getting out of your head, getting out of your head into some other kind of mental and emotional and physical space where you're sharing an experience with other people, which is bigger than you, which is more than you, which is not just confined by the limits of the kind of little prison, which is your atomised personality in a highly privatised culture. And I think that's always what, that's what those kind of things have always been used for, you know, that's what, you know, festival, dance, music, trance, really, as far as we know, like going right back into human prehistory, I've always been used for that purpose, they're a way of sort of groups bonding with each other and they're a way of accessing some aspect of experience, which is more than simply, you know, that which is bounded by your immediate individual rational brains for processing information and making preference choices based on, you know, the, its desire to maximise its, you know, its immediate self-interest. So that's what's good about it. It's not to say it can't be bad, not to say it can't go wrong. And like, I mean, the point about, you know, the point about fascism is well taken. I've been at raves in my life, I thought were really bad, and I thought the music was rubbish. And I thought, yeah, this is something, there's something a bit flash about this really, like everybody's just sort of, you know, jumping up and down to this jackhammer beat, and there's no real kind of sideways movement to the dancing, there's no real sort of messiness, there's no real sort of eroticism, or if there is, it's all channeled into this weird, you know, sort of linear experience. And so I think it can't, you know, it can go bad, but it's really sort of crucial. I mean, it's a crucial element of any kind of left thought, I think, to recognise that when you get people together in large numbers, they're not necessarily going to behave that way. And then they're not, it's not necessarily kind of bad. I want to get into the hips a bit later and about that kind of sideways movement, that sensuality that you're talking about, because for me, the mark of, am I going to have fun at this party is, can I conceivably slut drop to the song that's playing? And I can slut drop to lots of songs, but I have to be able to do it and not feel like an idiot. But maybe just to get into the history of it a bit, because obviously there is prehistory of music, dance and collective experience. But when we're talking about club culture, dance culture, we're talking about something else a bit. And I was wondering if you could sort of sketch out the historical development of what we now call club culture, dance culture. Well, this is something I'm trying to do in a lot of detail on the podcast I'm dealing with Tim Lawrence, actually called Love Saves the Day. So this will only be a real sort of thumbnail sketch. But I mean, where you trace that history really depends on which historian you ask. So some people will just say, you know, the history of social dance is just continuous. It goes back into sort of prehistory and into medieval times. And then sort of, you know, you can look at the popularity of dancers, for example, in the early to mid 20th century. What we think of is contemporary club culture, I would say sort of begins when you are you have people dancing to records. And you have a real kind of detachment of social dancing from, you know, basically heterosexual courtship rituals. So as far as I know, as far as we kind of, you know, as far as I'm able to tell, I mean, what's going on when people go out dancing a weekend in the mid 20th century is that it's usually, you're usually dancing to live music, and it's usually couple dancing. And, and it's very much about, you know, people, you know, it's kind of ritualized enhancement of the way in which people form relationships prior ideally to getting married in that cultural moment. And so what happens, and I think you can definitely set, you can talk about gradual processes, you can talk about the sort of the evolution of jazz, you can talk about rhythm and blues as kind of promoting more kind of sensual kinds of dance. But I think there is some kind of turning point around to 1970. And there's several things happening. I mean, one is people dancing to records, which sort of, you know, it's sort of in some ways it has potentially limiting fact is a potentially limiting factor from some people's point of view, because you don't have a kind of live relationship with actual performing musicians. But from another point of view, it actually it frees up the kind of range of music that can be heard in a club space, because you can get records from all over the world. And people do you from quite early on in the 70s, start doing that in some places. And you also get partly for various reasons, you get a sort of practice of dancing where people are going out dancing, and they might sort of dance in a sort of sexy way with somebody they want to, you know, either because they want either because they want to, you know, have a relationship with them all because it's just fun to do that in and of itself. But you also get people more dancing just in a sort of crowd in a group, sort of everybody dancing with everybody. And this happens in various various kind of sites around the same time. I mean, the thing that I know most about and I'm most preoccupied with is sort of the emergence of disco in New York in the early 70s. But you could also point to Northern Soul in Britain, for example, as being quite similar in some ways. It's about, you know, the dancing, you know, dancing becomes a sort of end in itself, and it becomes a sort of purpose of the experience. And then that's all happening in the 70s. And then there's obviously a big wave of interest to kind of the late 80s, sort of early 90s, which I mean, we could get into, but I think, I mean, I would say I'm of the generation who sort of thought we had discovered like going out dancing and going out dancing in this very kind of liberated way at the kind of end of the 80s, early 90s. And it turned out, you know, the more we kind of I think, I think something that happened to a whole cohort, actually, of kind of music fans of DJs, sort of researchers that I was part of is that over the course of the 90s, we sort of gradually realized that actually, we hadn't invented it. The only people who were going out dancing for the first time in the late 80s were sort of post-punk sort of indie boys really, like everyone else had already been doing it, like they'd been doing it all through the 80s with kind of warehouse parties and jazz funk and all this kind of and the kind of rare groove scene and all kinds of scenes. So it wasn't really as huge a shift in many ways as people would like to think, but it was a shift to some extent in the emergence of rave and the emergence of sort of ecstasy fuel club culture sort of out of rave. It did sort of shift it moved clubbing from being something that was a soap that apart from a few years when disco was trendy in the 70s was something that was really associated with quite niche subcultures. By the end of the 90s, it had become I think the sort of dominant leisure activity for a lot of young people. It had become a kind of default thing to do with a weekend, like to go out and have these still often this really quite intense experience of kind of music and drugs and sound and lighting. And so that and I'd say by the end of the 90s, you've got a situation where it's become a sort of default thing for people to do it a weekend. And I think probably the subsequent history is pretty familiar to most people watching. I suppose one of the interesting things to talk about is that live record distinction and the places where it starts to blur and break down a bit. One obvious place in which it breaks down is when you start bringing in emceeing. So rather than DJing being something which is kind of almost passive or curated, suddenly you've got someone like emceeing over the record and then that turns into jungle, it turns into dance hall, it turns into garage, it turns into grime, it turns into drill. And so thinking about how I mean, my experience of the dance is one which has been kind of racialized in some ways. And I remember like going to uni and then starting to go like clubbing with white people and it was different. They expected their DJs to be quiet. And I was like, why is this guy not talking? So I guess maybe I just wanted to ask you about the different ways in which the DJ is imagined and what the kind of archetype of the DJ is in different settings. Because for me, the DJ is noisy, the DJ is also an emcee. And then I went out with my friends to X, Y, Y, and I was like, it's a skinny white dude in a white t-shirt. Yeah, well, that's true. I mean, that is a difference. I think the difference is really to do with how much particular scenes owe to Caribbean tradition and sort of reggae. Because that's where that is the sort of origin point, if you like, of of toasting, chatting, emceeing, rapping. It's, you know, that's, I mean, at least according to the sort of official history, that's, I mean, hip hop, even hip hop. So it really only gets going when Jamaican DJs are bringing those some of those kind of techniques to New York. I mean, they're not I mean, usually it's not the same person has to be said the emcee isn't the DJ usually the emcee isn't the selector, there is a specific role. And I'm not sure how different the role of the sort of the selector of the DJ is in all those different contexts. Well, it's interactive, right? It's interactive. So you I mean, the thing is, the DJ is always interactive. I mean, the DJ is always responding to the crowd. And I think in those contexts where emceeing isn't really highly valued, I mean, it's seen as a sort of interruption, actually. It's experienced by people as an interruption of that relationship between the DJ and the crowd, rather than as a sort of facilitation. So I think in some contexts that you're talking about, it facilitates the emcee. I mean, the role of the emcee is to kind of hype up the crowd and also to help to facilitate the sort of feedback between the crowd and the DJ. But then in other contexts, like the ones you're describing, that seems like that people experience that as like an interruption. They don't want to load words that kind of interrupting interrupting the kind of meditative or ecstatic flow. And I don't think one is better than the other, but yeah, it is quite different. Yeah. One of the things that's interesting to me is the way in which you talk about vibe almost. And I mean, a thousand academics are about to like launch arrows at me, but I use the word vibe completely interchangeably with like affect because I think it kind of means the same thing. But to think about differences in vibe, and they can be really subtle. They can be really subtle. So a kind of euphoric experience of like, I'm in a crowd and we're all doing the same thing. So that I didn't experience that a bit later. And I started going to nights which had, you know, dance music techno, I was used to something else, which was that emcee being a mediator of you experience with him what he's rapping in some way. And so you're kind of enmeshed in this kind of more narrative experience. And so I kind of was wondering if you could talk us through different kinds of vibes a bit with that great seriousness, which I know academics to talk about playful things. Well, I think yeah, I mean, I understand what you're talking about. And then to some extent, you know, vibe, I mean, you know, vibe is quite a good synonym for our faith. It's as good a synonym for our faith as any. And I think, I think it is, I mean, it's just true what you're saying, but in different contexts, you know, people are trying to create a different kind of vibe. There's a different, what I would call sometimes a different affective regime of a different set of a different set of, you know, experiences which are supposed to be sort of good, or which the, or which what, you know, the assemblage of elements in that place is trying to cultivate. And yeah, I mean, I think there are really, I mean, I think the difference you've described is one of them is that whether it's based to have a sort of whether you want a kind of a sort of verbal element or a sort of vocal element, I mean, that's that's quite a significant difference. And it's not just a difference between, that's not just a difference between sort of MC based scenes and another scene. It's also a difference between, say, scenes where people are playing a lot of sort of gospel influence stuff like house or, you know, sort of gospel house or sort of disco where vocals are really important. And the kind of anthemic quality of the disco of the vocal is the thing that manages that really helps to unify the crowd and sort of give the experience some kind of content. And then scenes where the vibe that they're trying to cultivate is more sort of is more sort of meditative in some way, I think, which is quite a lot. I mean, there's quite a lot of sort of side charts, a lot of sort of minimal techno is really trying to do that. I mean, I think a really interesting, I mean, the most extreme contrast to what to all the things you've been describing that I've ever experienced is at Bergen in Berlin. And Bergen is like, I remember thinking when when we were here, having all these debates last year about whether you could do social distancing in a club, I remember thinking, well, Bergen could just stay open because that's just how everybody dances there anyway. Like my experience of it, at least the time I went was everybody is in their own space. Like, and they're sort of, they usually are about a meter, not quite two meters, I would say about a meter and a half from each other. And everybody just sort of, and there's very little sort of verbal interaction. There's definitely no sort of winding or grinding of any kind. But again, in some context, it means important to say that is that is important for people. It's important for a lot of people that they should be in a space where they're not expected to perform sexually or perform, perform sexuality. And that is the whole thing that's liberating for them. So that is really important. But yeah, there are really big differences. And you know, I mean, personally, I found by going just really boring, like it was just, I just felt like I could have just, I felt like I was at a sign disco or something. Because I understand that there's a whole scene, there's a whole kind of, you know, there's a whole world of people, you know, for whom that is what it's supposed to be about. And that to some extent, you know, dance scenes are more, you know, where people are kind of, you know, playing lots of hands in the air anthems and listening to a lot of vocals are kind of cheesy and kind of banal and not really not and can't generate the kind of sort of personal intensity that they're looking for. So yeah, it definitely is the case. And it does I mean, it does raise a really interesting question that you're pointing to it does raise an interesting question as to whether you ever want to make some sort of political critical discrimination between what it is that different kinds of scenes are actually trying to create like what it is they're trying to cultivate. So there was a really interesting moment in I would say in the sort of especially the sort of second half of the 90s into the early 2000s when in Britain, the sort of British club scene was going to cutting edge of it is producing these incredibly kind of innovative, so formally innovative music. So drum and bass coming out of jungle, UK garage, UK garage is always the most fascinating example for me because UK garage, I remember I remember being I remember reading some blogger in the early 2000s who had read stuff that I and other people other other academics had written about what we liked about disco or rave or dance culture and he said on he said, theoretically, like UK garage is the perfect music, like it means it's sensual, it's erotic, it's but it's not it's never really cheese never too cheesy. It's never it's also it's sort of formally innovative. But the actual scene around UK garage was just horrible. I mean, the scene was these clubs where you weren't allowed to wear trainers, you weren't allowed to wear jeans, they wouldn't let women in if they weren't dressed sexy enough. And what you were supposed to do is order champagne at the bar and take a cane of that was the kind of it was the kind of high moment of early Blair right aspirationalism. And it was and it was a kind of a mostly black iteration of this completely depoliticized, you know, politically, if it what if it has any politics, it was a reactionary politics, basically. It's interesting you say that because when I was working with Wiley, this is obviously before the horrible Twitter rant. But one of the things that he said is that garage was always quite American to us. And so then for the people who then kind of started that grime scene, it's part of it a rebuke to what they perceived as the Americanism of garage of like, you want the champs, you want the cars, you know, you want no trainers in the club, whereas we're doing something different, and it is much more English, it's trackies, it's trainers, it's taking elements from even like football chanting and a bit of like laddiness. But that was what he considered in the rebuke to garage in a way. Yeah, that's right. Well, it wasn't. I mean, it was a sort of fantasized American. I mean, I think, you know, I mean, grime was in was a reaction against that. And it was also a reaction against the fact that we're really, I mean, I was sort of teaching, you know, I was already teaching undergraduates in the second half of the 90s. And it was the it was quite disturbing, you know, especially for that it was only a quite a short period. It was quite disturbing to me, but it was also disturbing. I mean, people like Paul Gilroy have written about this that, well, that really the sort of the whole the MTV base had for a few years over the imagination of a lot of kind of young black people was really kind of hypnotic hold. I mean, that was the kind of that became the sort of horizon of aspiration. And then grime did represent a sort of reaction against that because partly it was a sort of rejection of the perpetual aspiration to create sort of commercially successful British hip hop. I mean, that's the I mean, initially, grime was really proud of being something distinctive, being not hip hop. It's something it's our own thing. It's MC based, but it's but it's based on it's based on raga tasting. It's not trying to sound like, you know, you know, Bronx or LAMC rappers. So yeah, it was and it was a real sort of it was a real sort of reaction. But also, I mean, grime is also an interesting example of a scene where I mean, you'll you'll wait. I mean, what I was going to say about garage was that was that people there was this real kind of interesting split between people who were just listening to this stuff at home or on the radio sort of great sort of advocates of it, like Simon Reynolds and people who were actually involved in kind of going out clubbing regularly who mostly didn't want to go near it. And grime again, as you say, grime is very sort of interesting because grime is, you know, grime is this very kind of complicated, especially that early grime moment. It's very sort of complicated phenomenon because on the one hand, it's reacting in these quite positive and innovative ways against, you know, against the exactly the things we've been talking about. But also, it's not really connected to any kind of political critique of those things. It doesn't really any and often, you know, the scene around grime again, it was often, you know, it was violent. It was kind of quite internally sort of destructive, not always, but it was like a lot a lot of the time. So and I think that sort of aesthetic. I mean, for me, the thing that really the real kind of limit of point of this for me was actually dubstep. It was dubstep was dubstep was the kind of an old offend lots of people now saying this but dubstep I thought mostly created this amazing scene, creating a very, very specific vibe. But but it wasn't a good vibe to me to me. I used to I always thought this is a bad vibe. This is a vibe that somehow it borrows the kind of aesthetic of dread and menace mostly from dub and reggae, but it depoliticizes it. Like it's not you're not you're not cultivating a sense of dread because you're building up revolution, you know, you're building up revolutionary pressure, you're just aestheticizing the experience of being aviated in the city. Like that's a good thing in and of itself. And so for me, I thought that was really problematic. It was really problematic because from an objective point of view, I was very interested in it. I was impressed by it. I knew it was formally innovative music, the way they were using sounds and club spaces to cultivate a very specific vibe was was really, you know, was really sort of impressive on its own terms, but it wasn't progressive in any sense for me. I mean, it was basically sort of reactionary, as far as I could see. It was reacting against a bunch of stuff, but it wasn't really giving any people a sort of sense of hope and aspiration. So I guess for me, the question is then what would it mean for it to be politicized in your view? Because I guess like dubstep is happening just when I start going clubbing, right? Sneaking out. Obviously, Marm, if you're watching this, I was over the age of 18 when all of this happened. And there was never any psychoactive substances. But that for me was like one of my first like club experiences. And so it was often like on the one hand, the parties I was going up to were like very grime, rap and MC driven. And then it was like club experiences were kind of like dubstep-y. And I suppose for me at that age, that experience of what you identified as the dread and the menace felt thrilling and real in a way, captured a sense of place. And so I guess in a way I can't imagine what it would have looked like or sounded like or felt like for it to have been more politicized. So genuinely, it's an open question of like well, it's not necessarily the case that it could have done. I mean, it could have done at that moment. So I'll say two things in relation to that. I mean, one is, I think generally, and this doesn't just apply to club culture or dance culture, this applies to all sorts of cultural forms, actually, that you can't expect them to sort of generate a kind of complete politics of their own, like a lot of the time that they're not going to become that they have a sort of potential. I mean, precisely what culture does a lot of the time is in fact to generate vibe. But then if that vibe, if you want that vibe to become something more than just vibe, which is actually informing a kind of relevant, an actual sort of identifiable political project, then there has to be a political project somewhere out there for it to connect to. And the big problem actually, I mean, when I've written about sort of academic stuff about this, my argument is always that well, the big problem for that whole sequence of highly innovative British sort of dance music from jungle onwards, what Simon Reynolds called the hardcore continuum is that there wasn't, there wasn't a kind of active left for it to connect with. Like they emerged in the wake of a really a series of historic defeats for the left and including sort of black radicalism in Britain. So there wasn't anything there for them to connect with. And if there had been, then it might have connected. I mean, dubstep specifically, I would tend to say is not, you know, dubstep for me, if you're talking about dubstep, dubstep specifically has to be understood as part of that sequence. And, you know, my relationship to it was obviously conditioned by the fact, you know, I'm a lot older and I'd been through, I was there for the early days of jungle and the kind of excitement, the kind of drum and bass and even UK garage. And it seemed to be, it didn't really have that sense of, you know, for me, it didn't have that sense of radical novelty in the same way that it seemed to be sort of distilling elements out of those things rather than really adding anything. But ultimately, the answer to your question, well, what would it be? Well, there's two things at an aesthetic level, it would, it has to have some sense of hope. Okay, so I'm going to say, and this is something lots of people always want to disagree with me about, don't at me on Twitter, because I'm just not replying the arguments on this. All I can say is, yes, I've thought about this, I've been thinking about this for decades. And I know all the reasons why people think that music is really dark, and that it's really angry, is really sort of angry, has this kind of radical potential. I would say, I would just say, I like a lot of that music, I admire it, and I see why it's necessary for people. But if you want to look at historical examples of where kind of music scenes have connected up productively with some kind of wider political struggles, it's only ever with music that carries some sense of hope in it. It's never with music that it's just a scepticizing the experience of alienation. There's just sort of making a sort of making a sort of virtue of necessity by just creating a sort of accentuating the darkness and the anger of your vibe. And I would like to believe differently, you know, I was sort of, you know, I was sort of not by my parents, but by my cultural parents, the people writing in the music press of the 80s, you know, I was raised a postpunk, like most kind of what white guys my age were. So I would love to believe it, but the historical evidence is really weak. So I would say my answer to you would be on a purely aesthetic level, it has to have some sense of hope. The music has to have some sense of hopefulness about it, some level of some kind of optimism. Which for example, even the most, I mean, you can argue that like especially the early really innovative grime like does, like even though it's really kind of angry, for me, there's something about the sheer kind of, the sheer weirdness of those early, like why the indizzy records, which make it just feel like anything is possible. Like if you can make this record, like you could do anything, anything could happen after, after, you know, that first dizzy album, you think, well, the lyrics are really scarily kind of dark, you know, they're really about the narrating and experience of kind of, you know, borderline kind of mental illness in. But there's something about the music is so sort of sonically variable and so kind of energetic that you just feel like this could go there's a real sense of sort of possibility implied in it. But of course, I would say for that then to have then developed into something else, you can imagine a different history in which that kind of really experimental dimension of that early grime then develops into some music we haven't heard yet, you know, some new kind of double some really kind of some very kind of, you know, something that would have gone more in the direction of the UK funky was trying to go in, except it would be a bit more sonically experimental. That all could have happened. But for that to happen, I suspect we didn't need different social and historical conditions. We just had to not be in like the worst time in one of arguably the worst period in history, or at least in my lifetime sort of politically, the early 2000s. What you said about that first dizzy album and that early grime of, you know, Wiley and dizzy for me, the ingredient there isn't necessarily hope, but it's fun, cheekiness and a bit of mischief. So you kind of get this sense of a kid who is just like, you know, being parked in front of Nickelodeon and has all of those cultural reference points and is bringing it in through lyrics, which are also really dark and really challenging. And for me, it was that combination was this kind of like, you know, cheeky youthful energy, which I think is one of the reasons why POW then became like the anthem of like 2010, 2011, right? It was kind of like resurrecting this tune, you know, this beat forward rhythm. And it's because I think it's obviously incredibly angry and incredibly violent, but it's mischievous and it's cheeky. And then when I go, well, who is doing that now? Well, I would say maybe, you know, it's not Dave and it's not Stormzy, but it is J-Hus, you know, he's making this album where it's about somebody who is on the edge of losing their mind. He conjures, Kojo Karam writes about this very well, you know, this kind of alter ego of Juju J to like embody all that darkness and all that chaos. But I guess I go, how do you, how do you weave hope into that without undermining in some way the authenticity of the artist who's making it? If they're not feeling the hope, then how do you bring it in? You know, I'm not saying, I've got no interest in saying what individual artists should do. I mean, that's not, I don't see that's my sort of job. I mean, I'm not, I mean, individual artists can only really do what they do, I think. So I, but I think all I can say is historically, if you want to look at, if you want to, for a mute, yeah, there are music scenes, you know, like soul, for example, historically, that have connected, have made sort of connections with broader currents of political change. And they've always, one of the things they've always had in common is this sort of, you know, in a sense of optimism. I mean, that might not be what grime is for. I mean, grime might be something else. It might be just carrying out a different function. And that's not to say it's bad. I think it's probably to say we shouldn't be complacent. I mean, I do think that I do think there's a certain complacency about some people wanting to say like grime is brilliant because it's now. And that's all we should really say about it. I also, I think that what you're describing is a really powerful music, but it is also expressive of the fact that, you know, working class, especially like non graduate, non university based like black youth in Britain today are still not in a great place, you know, they're not in a pre revolutionary place that some people I think would like to think they are. They're not, they're mostly very demoralized. They're not very politicized and and I and that suggests to us something that we all know, there's something that completely outside the world of culture and music, you know, there's a lot of work to be done in kind of rebuilding that and rebuilding that sense of hope. So my point is not that artists should deliver hope for people at all. Actually, that's not my point. My point is that I think there's a limit to how far we should just say, look how cool this is about music, which is expressing a sense of hopelessness. Actually, I think we could admire it and we can love it, but I think we should also say that we should be a bit, we should be kind of concerned about the fact that we're living in a world where like the only music that sounds that's quite innovative is also really dark and hopeless. And I also think this about sort of hip hop in the States, I think on the one hand, I think, you know, and it's, you know, just saying like X, X, X, Tentacion was cool because it's what young people are listening to now isn't isn't really responsible so to criticism like it's fascinating and it's powerful, it's kind of fantastic art, but also if that's where kind of young people are at or at least large numbers of young people, then we should be worried about that the same way we're worried about lots of other things. I think the difficulty is saying that without like condemning the art or condemning the music. And I think it is really important also not to do that because in the end, I mean, and I'd say this about the experience of rave and its kind of legacies in Britain, like really why did British rave not turn into the soundtrack to a kind of a real kind of revolutionary counterculture like we as we would have liked to have happened and as some of people thought would happen. Well, it basically wasn't the fault of Ray, it was the fault of the left to be honest, it was because the labour movement and the leadership of the labour movement at that time in the mid 90s wanted nothing to do with any form of countercultural activity, any kind of alternative culture. And even when people involved in rave culture did really try to build connections with the labour movement and the left that they were rebuffed or ignored for the most part. There is a disapproving vein within the left which would treat all of this discussion as froth. Do you know what I mean? It's frivolous, it's hedonistic, who cares what's going on in the club, get down to your CLP, that kind of thing. And so I guess I wanted to ask you, is that bit of the left which says not only is this useless but it's actively alienating to the real decent working class, are they right? Is this a fundamentally boring country and what you've got to do is connect with them in boring ways? Well, no, they're not right, but also they're not pointing to something that's totally wrong. I mean, they're not, they are, I think, so I think you have to sort of take seriously a lot of their observations and their claims, you have to take seriously the idea that well, if you just, if you only, if you, if you create the impression that what it means to be on the left is purely for your cultural affiliation only to be a sort of cutting edge, a sort of avant-garde, a sort of urban, you know, avant-garde or popular avant-garde, if that's the impression that you create, then you do risk alienating people. On the other hand, I also think the sort of just being really complacent about sort of cultural conservatism on the left is also, is also sort of a problem. So I think it's, there isn't any kind of easy answer to how, to resolve all those questions. I think my, I would also say that one thing I would say is that some of that, some of that kind of anti-culturalism, which is a phrase I've just invented, does, it does, it partly it's a reaction against something that was fairly typical certainly of my generation. It was typical of a lot of academic work, and it was typical of some wider thinking actually, on the left or not, or in the wider culture, which was that somehow cultural practice, cultural activity could really substitute for political work, for kind of formal political work, that it would kind of lead it or it'd inspire it, and it could substitute for it. And my own, and this doesn't make me popular. I mean, a lot of the time when people want me to talk about rave, like a lot of people, they want me to say, yeah, like rave is just as radical as like, you know, being active in the labour party or something, which has never really been my position. It's always been my position. Well, so can you imagine if those are the only two elements of the human experience that you could imagine? Like either at the rave, or you're, you know, outside an NEC meeting, wondering like if the meeting is there for us, can you fucking imagine? Well, that's a really good point, actually. I think you've hit on the crucial thing, because for me, I mean, from my kind of the conceptual and historical perspective, if you want a really healthy kind of political left, then or any kind of movement really, you need a range, you need a whole ecology of institutions and practices, and you need intermediary institutions to some extent, which kind of sit in between the zone of sort of pure culture and the zone of, you know, formal politics. And that is something, and part of the problem, I mean, certainly a problem in the 90s and 2000s, there was none of that. We didn't really have any of that. And I think it's one reason, it's funny, because I was talking to somebody, I was talking to somebody in the States about this just last week, actually, a guy who had been really involved in, been really involved in rave culture in California, like all his life and club culture, but also he's kind of in, you know, he's a supporter of things like DSA, Democratic Socialist in America. And he, and he, we were sort of comparing the experience of people being really frustrated there, by the lack of any real connection, potential connection, it's seen between those things. And here, where, at least in some kind of zones, there has been a fair amount of interchange between some of those things. And in, you know, in the UK, I think the real, the thing that's really, you know, it's quite small scale, it's quite localized, but what's done quite a lot of work to create some of that sort of bridging is the wheel transform. So the wheel transform has done, has been really successful, I think, in its, you know, with the resources it's had in its quite limited way, sort of, you know, at least facilitating conversations, points of conversion, points of relay between kind of radical culture and, you know, and radical politics. And so I think that, and I think it's, I think what you really need is sort of institutions and you need places where people can have these sort of conversations and you need, you know, programs like this one and you need, and you need, you know, you need podcasts now and you need kind of a broad range of ways of those things happening. And that's how you end up getting, that's how you end up getting sort of, you know, you only end, I mean, historically, one of the things that sort of, you know, I think there's things that typifies a certain attitude of, on the left is the assumption that, you know, the only kind of music, for example, that is politically valuable is some that is, is music that has the didactic explicit content that is just has its, you know, wears its political slogans, you know, on its sleeves and makes them very explicit. And I think that's clearly not true. That's clearly wrong. And I think it's the case that you only get the, you get these really sort of vibrant relationships between musical innovation and cultural innovation and sort of political, you know, political progress and forces political progress when there are enough kind of, there's enough for kind of intermediate zone. There's enough of a sort of ecology of institutions and practices, which is, but of course, those things don't happen by themselves. I think it's weird thinking about this, you know, I mean, if you think about historical moments, I would say when, for example, you know, there have been, there seems to have been really productive relationships between things going on in music, things going on in politics. I mean, in Britain, in some ways, you know, the high moment is the early 80s. Yeah, you've got the specials having number one single singles, specials is, you know, in some ways, quite contrived musical project, but it's got an, on the one, it does have a very explicit anti racist politics and anti that's right politics. On the other hand, it is quite innovative, you know, it's reviving this scar music from 15 years earlier, but it's mixing them, mixing it with punk and postpunk is genuinely kind of novel, it's really interesting. But you get that as the culmination, really, a sort of 20 years of people doing all kinds of different political activism of people organising music festivals, of reggae being understood as a sort of political form, like even though a lot of it's, even though it isn't often explicitly, often it isn't explicitly political in its lyrics. And also, it's also informed by the fact that, you know, people are talking about theory, you know, it's also informed by the fact that people in the music press are kind of, for a few years, are kind of it's considered cool to, to cite kind of cultural theorists and to have some kind of intellectual pretension and all that stuff got derided years later. But actually, it was part of a general ecology, which made possible all those sort of exchanges. And I think, so I think it is really, it's just, it's about proliferating the number of sites, number of texts or programs or institutions where interchange can happen and where conversations can happen. And that's what produces the culture, which can, which produces things. But I think it is, it's really, but it is also really important to say that culture ultimately can't be a sort of substitute for political struggle, like it isn't, like rave wasn't, like rave ultimately as a political force got neutralized, captured, sold back to us in a fairly, you know, crappy form base of the time. In just the same way that, you know, I mean, you know, jungle drum and bass, you know, sounds objectively like it should have been the soundtrack to a huge wave of black radicalism. It's not historically normal. You get a black led musical form as radically distinctive and popular as drum and bass was, and it isn't associated with explicit black radicalism. Like if you go back to the 20th century, it's not just me as a sort of critic saying it should have been. It's like it's weird that it wasn't, or why wasn't it? Well, it wasn't because there wasn't because the anti-racist movement had suffered some real organizational defeats. And the left has suffered real organizational defeats. And it was in retreat. And there just wasn't really a left for it to connect to. So I think it is really... I mean, I think sometimes with this, I mean, there can be a truth in misunderstanding something. And one of my real clangors of a misunderstanding was before I was familiar with her work. I saw in a bookshop, Jody Dean, crowd and party. And obviously, I bought it thinking that was like, it was about like rave culture and club culture. And then suddenly I opened it. And it's about like revolutionary discipline and the party form and, you know, channeling class struggle. And I was like, well, maybe there is a truth in my misunderstanding and my misapprehension that when we're talking about crowd and party, we're talking about parties and parties. Well, it's... Yeah, you're right. Well, the use of the term is really interesting, you know, because party, you know, party just means almost any form of collectivity. But it's a collectivity... I mean, the term party in the political sense, or even or in the sense of like a party, a specific group of people, it implies both collectivity and specificity, right? So, I mean, the political party, you know, has the same root as the idea of the parties and the term party. I mean, the part... And when the third term political party first started to be used, it just meant a particular group, like a faction of people who went together to the same coffee houses or the same pubs or restaurants. So, yeah, I mean, there definitely is something there. And there is something... But then there's always the question as to what, you know, well, what can formal politics learn from the kind of energy of the dance floor party and all what does the kind of energy of the... What does the rave and the dance floor party have to learn from formal politics? That's the... I mean, my PhD had a chapter about this, you know, 20 years ago. And my argument then was actually, well, rave... One of the problems with rave was that the movement around it didn't have any sort of... Didn't exactly... Didn't have any discipline. I mean, this isn't just true... This isn't just saying you need discipline to win elections. I mean, I mean, rave wasn't even able to defend itself from commercialization and government repression. You know, it just laid... You know, rave was subject first in the 90s, first to direct political repression and then to very open, like almost explicit attempts to sort of depoliticize it and commercialize it and turn it into a site of capital accumulation and profit making. And it was completely unable to resist it. Why was it unable to resist? It was unable to resist partly because the politics of most of the people involved who might have tried to resist was kind of anarchist politics, explicitly anarchist, and was basically opposed to any notion of political strategy or long range organization or sort of counter hegemony, because all that was considered to be basically Stalinist in its implications. So you couldn't have a sort of strategy. Whereas for example, actually in places like Austria and Germany, there was all... There was a sense that there was a big risk of rave as a cultural form becoming kind of radically depoliticized by these kind of attacks. And they were more successful. You didn't need membership organizations or political parties, but you did need some sense actually of strategy, of strategy and organization and discipline and sort of message discipline and coherence in order to defend the sort of radicalism of that culture from, you know, sort of predatory capitalism. So I think it is true, actually. I think even, you know, I would say my own experience as a promoter and as a party organizer actually is that you do, you do need quite rigorous discipline to have a really good party. You do need to be organized and you need to have a clear idea of what you want and you need to have a clear idea of what people are going to try and take from you or stop you doing because otherwise they will. So what I'm hearing is that as radical praxis, me cornering somebody in the dance with a copy of the prison notebooks is absolutely the thing to do. Obviously, there's so much more that can be said on this. And for those of you who are listening and really are just into what Jeremy is saying, head on over to ACFM where you can hear him joined by Keir Milburn and Nadia Idle talking about all of this and more besides. It's one of the most fun things I think that we do at Navarra Media and also I think one of the most culturally valuable. It takes play with the utmost seriousness and that's why I love listening to it. And if you're not sure about it, just take half and see how you go later. Jeremy, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been a real pleasure. Thanks a lot.