This snowflake’s an avalanche.
A love letter to the lyrics of Joy as an Act of Resistance by IDLES.
Blighty wants his country back
Fifty-inch screen in his cul-de-sac
Wombic charm of the Union Jack
As he cries at the price of a bacon bap
Islam didn’t eat your hamster
Change isn’t a crime
So won’t you take my hand, sir
And sing with me in time
G-R-E-A-T
“Islam didn’t eat your hamster”.
Try explaining the weight and brilliance of that line to eight and six year old boys. My young sons love this song and yell along as the lyrics demand, but they needed to understand what this shouty man is singing, and as the youngest asked, “why?”
Never mind trying to explain who Freddie Starr was, how do I explain The Sun? How do I put this wicked slap in the face of a lyric into a context their curious minds can compute? They’ve never read a newspaper, so how do I explain how decades of reckless tabloid bigotry have stoked the darkest and meanest parts of my countrymen’s hearts?
How do I explain what their country has become? How do I ask for their forgiveness that people I had thought of as ‘good people’ have been permitted by their government to hate their neighbours and retreat into the infantile, ‘wombic charm of the Union Jack?’
Things are supposed to only get better aren’t they? Isn’t that what Tony promised? How have we allowed ourselves to sink back into an austere torpor where stoking nationalism, racism, fascism and every other apocalypticism either gets you elected or a warm seat on a talk radio show?
That curious exchange from the back of the car on the school run made me so very sad. It also made me angry. Not a raging violent anger, just a grey, futile anger. I’m so tired of the weight of the helpless anger that these divided times have brought, and I’m angry that my innocent sons will come of age in an angry, helpless and pointlessly nasty society.
Nasty times demand nasty music, and nasty times are an incendiary fuel for great angry music. IDLES are such a radical band, not just because they’ve created the perfect Brexit soundtrack, but because they know that angry music tastes so much better when seasoned with a big pinch of rambunctious joy and a dollop of caustic wit.
I sing at fascists ’til my head comes off
I am Dennis Skinner’s molotov
I’m lefty, I’m soft
I’m minimum wage job
I am a mongrel dog.
I’m scum.
This snowflake’s an avalanche.
Forty-odd years since punk first rose up against the bleak and desperate days of strikes, racism, power-cuts and the collapse of British manufacturing, the filth and fury is rising again. Once again it’s frenetic, aggressive, foul-mouthed and very, very loud but this time the leaders of the pack are clearer-headed and their pens are sharper. Damn, how we need them now.
IDLES might sound and look like bovver-booted nihilists yawping their way down the pot-holed pavements of Pound shop Britain, raging against a callous elite and tabloid-fuelled ignorance, but that’s a deliberate camouflage. IDLES are the political heirs to The Clash but their music is propelled with the affable lunacy of The Damned. Yes these are brutal Brexit songs, but they’re far more Yoda than yob.
‘Fear leads to panic, panic leads to pain, pain leads to anger, anger leads to hate.’
I’m frightened and furious at how impotent we all seem to be to halt the swirling slide into the toilet bowl, and I’ve lobbied and petitioned and marched and Tweeted all to no apparent avail, so what’s left? Maybe joy might be a the medicine we need. Maybe dancing and cheering and pogoing and singing along might just ease us away from the darkside and turn us back to the light. Even if it’s just for a while, it might be just enough.
Joy As An Act Of Resistance is one of those albums that’s the exactly the right thing for the times, and its title is exactly what it says it is. Like their live shows, the album might appear to be a violent and hedonistic riot, but it’s funny and bouncy and rambunctious and actually full of joy. The lyrics are snarled and spat and jeered, but the words of these songs unambiguously preach unity and tolerance.
“My blood brother is an immigrant — a beautiful immigrant.
My blood brother is Malala. A Polish butcher, he’s Mo Farah.
He’s made of bones, he’s made of blood, he’s made of flesh, he’s made of love, he’s made of you, he’s made of me. Unity!”
IDLES’ politics are are fuelled by the divisions of class. Class that should have no place in a ‘civilised’ democracy, or meritocracy or whatever ‘ocracy’ we’re supposed to be living in. These are songs to soundtrack Cold War Steve. Like Johnny Rotten at his best there’s far more wit than spit, demanding that you see Johnson, Farage, Mogg & Co for the jokes that they are.
“A heathen from Eton, On a bag of Michael Keaton…
You look like a walking thyroid. You’re not a man, you’re a gland. You’re one big neck with sausage hands.
You are a Topshop tyrant. Even your haircut’s violent.”
IDLES are inciting us to lawful civil disobedience. Screw the rules and laugh in the faces of the jesters in power because they have no real control if we surge together as a positive force. Bounce and scream and dance and pogo together — Poles and Cockneys, Somalis and Scousers side by side — just to show that we will not lie down and take it. But we will take it better together.
One of the best gigs I’ve ever seen was The Stooges at Glastonbury in 2007. Twenty minutes into their set they launched into Real Cool Time and Iggy instigated a joyous and immense stage invasion. He demanded that the audience ‘get up here — I can’t stand this bullshit anymore — get up — take over’. And take over they did en-masse. The soggy muddy hordes swallowed up the Stooges who not only kept playing, but launched into No Fun like they were launching a missile strike. I don’t care if it was pre-planned or entirely spontaneous, it was the most visceral and thrilling fuck-you of a scene. The original godfather of punk was reminding us that even at sixty, joyful misbehaviour can be an act of resistance. For ten minutes total anarchy sounded and felt like the most exuberant and positive high.
IDLES’ shows and their music is cut through with that reckless spirit too. They are the Stooges we need now. There’s definitely a little venom driving what they do, but they never seem to lose sight of the fact that righteous anger, applied with wit and brutish charm, is a far more powerful unifier than hateful rage.
IDLES know you don’t need them to name your enemy, you know them well enough — each to their own — and they know they don’t need to tell you what to do about it. They’re just here to remind us to “Never fight a man with a perm.”
“Let’s hug it out. Unity.”
Footnote:
I’ve been lucky enough to see some seen life-changing, life-affirming performances from legends and unsigned acts but the Stooges at Glastonbury in 2007 would be very hard to top whatever the criteria. Turn it up and enjoy.
If you liked this, you might also like the love letter to the lyrics of Search And Destroy by The Stooges.
