Monthly Archives: November 2024

Political vibes

Posted by Ryan Mark Elliott Music on

A lot of people are woefully misinformed when it comes to politics.

And one of the fundamental mistakes that has been made in the USA, is thinking a celebrity who promises easy solutions to what are actually very complex problems can fix everything and quick.

It’s going to be chaos.

If Trump goes ahead with the tariffs he is threatening, he is categorically going to make the vast majority of people who voted for him poorer. Not that any of them were thinking about trade when they cast their votes.

Everywhere the threat of right wing populism is rearing it’s ugly head and I would be lying if I said I was not concerned about this trend. Because the people who promise to fix everything and weaponise your anger and outrage are all self serving narcissists.

What has Nigel Farage actually done for the U.K. over the last decade or so? Nevermind what he has done for his constituents since becoming mp? I’ll credit the fella for what he is good at, which is wrecking things, then blaming immigrants and then posing for a crocodile smile at a pub with an ale in his hand.

He captures a particular zeitgeist though, one of which is some skewed idea of particular British values all iced up with another skewed idea of British nostalgia and people get behind him, not because of policy…but vibes.

Heck, he rattled the conservatives with UKIP so much you could argue he has played a huge hand in them opting to go down a loony populist rabbit hole themselves.

Anyone remember when we all used to laugh off the BNP back in 2010? Those guys would be mainstream now.

I’d love to know what a reform supporter thinks they are voting for when it comes to the economy, our public services like education or health, or foreign policy, or whether they have an actual immigration policy beyond ‘taking back control’. Another populist term used ad infinitum to which I am not sure of it’s particular meaning.

What are these people signing the general election petition (that is if they are people and note bots) expecting to get? It’s not how democracy works for a start and what would their alternatives be? Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage? Give me a break.

Labour have had a rocky time of it in their first hundred plus days in office. Whoever their advisors are need to get on top of the narrative.

The freebies were a stupidity that the right wing press were happy to use as leverage to target them. No matter how not as bad as it was comparably to Tory cronyism, set the standards from the get go! A large swathe of the population is disenfranchised and unhappy. They don’t want to see politicians going to see Arsenal and Taylor Swift for free whilst wearing designer clothes. Pay for them like everybody else!

Then there’s Labours budget and policy. As controversial as it may be, I am behind the changes in place but God almighty the narrative once again is terrible.

Freezing pensioners! The truth of the matter is that winter fuel payments were being made to wealthy people, a lot of which who have willingly said they do not need it. Do I think the threshold for those payments are too low? Yes, but you can’t get into the nuance because everyone is too busy feeling the outrage of the first two words of this paragraph.

Protect our farmers! Once again, I am not sure how aware people are that this is ultimately going to affect a tiny minority of farmers, given how big the threshold is. I’ve read 500 farmers from one source. This new inheritance tax policy is for people who own land worth above three million pounds. The tax amount is 20% which is half of any normal inheritance tax percentage at that moment and it can be paid interest free over ten years! It is also to discourage people such as Jeremy Clarkson and James Dyson buying up land to avoid such a task. Clarkson himself admitted that and got snookered when interviewed by Victoria Derbyshire at the BBC. Now as someone who has taught in impoverished areas where children are in poverty, this seems pretty reasonable to me, but no…Labour want to destroy farmers and they are communists and they are going to tax you to oblivion!

Farmers are struggling for a variety of reasons (legacy of that old chestnut ‘Brexit’ once again included) and it needs addressing but this policy is the least of most farmers concerns.

Guess who also owns over £3 million pounds worth of land too…Nigel Farage, but he’s just like us wanting to take back control of our beloved country.

Labour in one way are playing their cards right, by doing the difficult stuff first, but the image could certainly be better so the sooner they address that, the better. Because the press and opposition and the public will be waiting to pounce anytime a mistake is made or gaff occurs. This is all without even mentioning the frankly ridiculous two tier policing narrative that that self proclaimed messiah and tech bro overlord Elon Musk is obsessively ‘X’ing about. He is all levels of wrong on his take on the U.K. but there will be those that take his word for it, and it’s dangerous.

Who cares about facts when you have feelings? All those feelings that your newsfeed on social media want you to feel so you can spend more time on there weighing in with your misinformed outrage.

I am grateful any time I can have a grown up conversation about this stuff where people do a bit more reading beyond merely a headline.

No one is perfect, but I do believe Starmer is a PM who is capable of acting in good faith, and I believe he is trying to get public services back in order after well over a decade of them being decimated.

And I will say it…we totally take our public services for granted.

Starmer and Reeves are aware that to fix these problems will require a great deal of time and difficult political tugs of war but whilst someone such as myself who is admittedly curious about politics will buy into it, the majority of the public won’t care one iota, and if they don’t see the benefits, they will be swayed towards the populists, because…political vibes.

Labour has to walk that fine tightrope of managing policy and the overall narrative well, or they’ll fall into the same trap as the Democrats, and find themselves in the jaws of the populist crocodiles in the river below.

Club Closures

Posted by Ryan Mark Elliott Music on

The rate to which club closures are happening in the U.K. is rising exponentially. One of the more recent victim of this was The Moon in Cardiff, which is a venue I’ve played multiple times with my bands and enjoyed developing my craft as a performing musician there.

As far as I can see, there are two main problems that are resulting in the club closures, both of which are killer blows.

The first is the changing landscape in the culture. Lefsetz argued that we should let them close. This is because there are less bands breaking through and that the focus on developing music is done via solo artists and the internet. Artists will build their profiles there, make the record first and then the shows come later if you so happen to get something that has enough momentum to open up further opportunities.

He further made this argument by saying that alongside the changing medium of artist output is the changing ways in which an audience consumes music, again due to online connections, streaming and the sheer fact that a lot of people aren’t interested in going to clubs to hear original music. People do not want to have their conversation drowned out by a band where there is no guarantee on the quality. Consumer habits have changed and it’s not only online music platforms that clubs are competing with, it’s all media and streaming platforms, and that’s before anyone leaves the door to go to a restaurant let alone a cinema, which so happens to be another industry that is struggling.

Now whilst I agree with Lefsetz’s reasoning, I can’t get behind the whole idea of just letting clubs close, and that’s because I have seen enough people who love being in these grassroots community, supporting music on the ground and the joy it can bring to these people, even if it is the tiniest fraction of the population. Club owners put themselves on the line and risk bankruptcy to keep their spaces alive. When promoters and venues do the work, you can get sold out shows, I’ve been on both sides of it, as a promoter and as a concert goer. I just finished a show in Swansea yesterday where the owner had three consecutive sold out events!

Which leads me to the second problem, which I think is the more fatal one.

The total lack of support for grassroots venues from the powers that be.

When I walked past The Moon after it’s closure. There was the same litter printed twice and stuck on the door that was rather aggressive in its tone about the handover of assets.

Government is to blame. Landlords are to blame as is the occasional idiot resident who decides to move close to a venue and complain about the noise, and then ends up with far too much power.

We are in a perpetual economic crisis, given a tedious never ending slow recovery from 2008, a failed austerity programme that has squeezed our public services to breaking point, the populist stupidity of Brexit, a pandemic and then a subsequent cost of living crisis. All of which has preoccupied governments but when it comes to cutting back, normally arts is the one of the initial targets.

Talk about a myopic vision.

‘You don’t know what you got til it’s gone’.

We will hear the same thing. That there is no money. We are tired of hearing that there is no money. There is the money, but it’s withheld in an ever increasing case of income inequality, but heck Labour cannot even make slight tweaks to taxation of the wealthy without being labelled as communists. How indoctrinated are we all to think that this level of greed should so be so legitimised?

Arts and culture and it’s impact on the beneficial impact it has on communities is totally taken for granted. I teach young people who use music as a means to connect with people and given the correlation between time spent online and the decrease in young people’s mental wellbeing, why aren’t we getting behind the idea that an easy fix would be to support places that can bring people together in person? People were crying to do this again after the lockdowns.

Then there’s the artist development side of things. Sure, solo acts are having a good time of it at the moment, especially those who can harness online tools with flare, but things happen in cycles and it will be before long that people will want bands to be more prominent again. But how are we going to facilitate this when there are no venues available for them to play and develop their craft?

The Beatles spent tens of thousands of hours playing in clubs in Hamburg and people forget that this was a huge part of what allowed the Beatles to become the Beatles.

Many would have no doubt seen the list of grassroots venues that Oasis played in their earlier days and how many of them no longer exist. Given the dynamic pricing kerfuffle, talk about forgetting your roots, but the Gallagher brothers are so far gone that they could not care less, otherwise they would have said something about it by now.

You can at least credit some higher profiles like Johnny Greenwood for being outspoken about this.

If Arts and Culture cannot be given a chance via funding, or tax reliefs it will continue to die. However, if we fall into the trap of playing victim and spending our energy complaining, it will continue to die. So it comes down to finding ways to influence change, which the likes of Music Venue Trust is starting to do, or looking at multidisciplinary spaces and being innovative about what spaces can become a venue.

It’s going to come down to people on the ground with a bit of skillset and innovation to galvanise change.

So what can we do?

Maybe bands can start playing on the high streets. And when people complain about the noise, tell them to get behind reopening our venues!

US Election 2024

Posted by Ryan Mark Elliott Music on

If there’s anything I’ve learnt that is an absolute fundamental in modern politics, it is that you do not win an election by looking down on people who vote for the opposition.

Trump may be a convicted felon and a compulsive liar. But there’s no denying that he is a master at convincing working American people that he is on their side, especially when they believe that the liberal elites have left them behind.

Sure, Trump will probably impose tariffs that will screw them over but it’s not about the truth. It’s about perception. (Think Brexit)

And Trump used the internet and the power of outrage to his advantage.

We have to accept that the politics of identity has played a huge part in this election, sadly more-so than the issues that should matter much more, not least women’s rights.

There needs to be an absolute reckoning for the democrats.

Biden dug his heels in for far too long when his time was up, so they then fast tracked VP Harris, when she had too much baggage, ran a poor campaign in 2020 and lacked the leadership skillset to properly challenge the republicans on issues like the economy or the Israel/Palestine conflict.

They should have been more decisive and ran a nomination where someone with a clean slate and leadership experience could have come through, like Josh Shapiro or Gretchen Whitmer, but they all rallied and shunned anyone who had anything critical to say.

They need to stop thinking they know better. The Democrats were in a fantasyland where they played a losing strategy and gifted the victory to Trump.

As depressing as this all potentially is, I can’t help but read about it with fascination and learn something from it.

Starting with the stark reality that we have not yet figured out a way to properly challenge populism and that centrists should ditch the top down approach and start thinking of ways to do this bottom up.