Undiscovered artists from 2012
In my opinion the music industry is like a sausage factory in that it produces at a level of mass production. One can say that the industry has become somewhat shackled in its own chains of stiff beats and restricted melodies. For example the refrains of some of the most popular songs are submissively in tune with people’s passivity. The radical edge of the sex pistols in the 1960s was an age where radicalism in music was reflected through the music of an era that were oppressed, the summer time blues that injected our streets with life, like a wave of consciousness echoing through the streets. An unchained melody, that was eclectic enough to capture the hearts of a generation of angry and oppressed youth. It seemed that the hunter within the people was being lured to rebel against it’s own nature. Futuristic guitar sounds that were echoing the words ‘let’s do this, let’s rebel against our being’. Jimi Hendrix was one of the world’s most profoundly misunderstood characters of an era, where black civil rights were being pushed to the point of no return through reforms, but the black panthers were a sign of the altruism and the seed of revolution within an oppressed generation of angry, oppressed people, who fought fascism. It was evident that Jimi Hendrix had a powerful rhetoric embedded within his lyrics that made it seem that something was calling out to the youth, like a summertime dream capturing the minds of disillusioned workers at a repressive period in history. Purple haze is a wonderful example of this rhetoric. I often wonder, what would be like if Jimi Hendrix was undiscovered. Woodstock was something extraordinary something which was like a storm, a tempestuous time in the hearts of people, which was undermining the tyranny of the elite. This was an example of how mass, and I mean pure mass, a gathering of peace and love among the ranks of our class, can come together to create something literally out of the blues. Now we come to an end of that era and we see that music has become more dogmatic, in that it no longer echoes any of militancy of the youth. Pop stars like Cheryl Cole who is extremely manufactured, in a packaged casing, and sold like a commodity to the youth to listen to. If Bob Marley was alive he’d be turning in his grave. The truth is music has sold out from the roots of depression. How can music keep us adrift, when in reality all it does is temporarily vacate the space between our ears? So what then in the space of 3-5 minutes do we capture from the music that we listen to. I think it’s a sense of false security. We need radicalism in place of pop stars that we’ve already seen strip naked, for the commercial satisfaction of sensationalist newspapers like the sun, to say that this scandal made so and so famous overnight. So if Bob Marley was alive he’d been singing songs of redemption, songs that echoed something of a lyric that meant to be exactly what it meant with no perversion or innuendos, something to make us react, not distract, and say ‘shit you know what music is powerful man’. So how come we’ve become somewhat passive as to whom we choose to inject and pumps us with 3 minutes of a manifestation of the industries fetishism, like a bombardment of bespoke tailor made concoctions. The song Stephen Biko is a powerful song because it has no pretence, except for a deep voice that echoes the repression of the apartheid and he makes no pretence about the lyric ‘The man is dead’, for this truly echoes something within us that makes us rethink. Peter Gabriel 1986, reminds us of something doesn’t it, it does me anyway. 1984, the book by George Orwell the creative writer, that he was, thought this cleverly planned out big brother state, where everything is co-opted and everyone is indoctrinated, pure fascism in other words. Steven Biko was eliminated, but in this powerful song he is brought back to life, by the wave of masses who chant ‘Ho, ho, ho, ho’, a long ho at the end like a Mapuche tribe incantation. So it tells us together we are strong, we are a titan, unity is strength. And it seems music brings us together. When words fail music speaks. And that brings me on to the recent revolutionary music that I have encountered, through rigorous searching of these broken factions, that do not exist except through loopholes where people, have to look hard enough to escape the torture of broken records, and tune in to the underground world of radicalism. Ed Greens is a white rapper, his lyrics are powerful and militant, sometimes overwound, and to direct but mostly it tells that he has some talent not to be commercially packaged but take on the underground world of the channel u styled self-confessed broke labels that make better music than the top artists on the download charts. So 2012 brings beats, rhymes and revolution. Just a suggestion the top music from him I would suggest are, EMPDY X ED GREENS-MORE THAN AN ORGAN, ED GREENS-HOLES, ED-GREENS- COME UP. Eat your greenz is my suggestion, but more than that search your soul to find what exactly music means to you as a person.