Digital Resistance 2

See my previous post, Digital Resistance.

Digital resistance is a political act. It challenges the powers-that-be and re-appropriates powers that belong to us. It returns to us the 'choice' that politicians talk so much about, even as everything they do is set to remove it from us and control it.

However, the tactical use of media and the arts to express resistance is not usually a conscious act by people who want to be politically active in the traditional sense. Heck, politics is boring and irrelevant to most people. Or so they think.

It amazes me sometimes when people say 'I'm not interested in politics'. They're often very willing to have a good old moan about tax rates or the banking crisis, how crap schools are in their area or about how there are never police around when you need them. They don't seem to have made the connection, that these issues and more are all about who we give power to and what degree of power we give them. That's politics. I fully understand why many people don't care about political parties and the grey, self-serving power hungry scum who inhabit them - but to say one has no interest in politics is illogical and stupid. We all care about what happens to us and who's controlling our lives.

It applies in less obvious ways too. Who is deciding what we listen to, read, watch or play? Who sets the boundaries of the choices we have? Even in the realms of music and art, these things are political. There are power brokers with vested interests in things being a certain way, who have the resources to manipulate and direct a somnambulent general public into being mere 'consumers'. I hate that term.

Our little record label, Broken Drum Records, and its new offshoot BDR Dancefloor, were formed without any great pre-existing ideological impetus. We just wanted to make music. The tactical use of media to affect social change is like that; most protagonists are not taking the traditional role of political activists and aren't either supporting a political party or playing the inherently reactive role of the counter-cultural rejectionist. However, the moment we choose to step outside the boundaries created by unbridled capitalism or the traditional media industries, we're in the realms of digital resistance and we're creating tactical media.

I came across this definition of 'tactical media', which I quite like.

The term 'tactical media' refers to a critical usage and theorization of media practices that draw on all forms of old and new, both lucid and sophisticated media, for achieving a variety of specific noncommercial goals and pushing all kinds of potentially subversive political issues.
(N5M, 1993)

I'm not sure about the 'non-commercial' part - we have no aversion to earning money - but we definitely have specific as well as superbly vague goals and our aim is to be subversive.

We started Broken Drum Records back in the days of the Cassette Culture. This was pre-internet, so not exactly 'digital' but it was resistance. People around the world made music that the industry would have rejected, using a medium that was accessible to everyone, unlike vinyl, and distributed that music in a manner not controlled by the mainstream music industry. It had its own print media, with some excellent fanzines (eg Gajoob) being another good example of cultural resistance. There were radio shows around the world that would play home-produced cassettes. We were very excited to be part of something, to be able to make music when we'd have had no chance of doing anything within the mainstream music industry. We were able to do whatever we liked. It doesn't sound particularly subversive - it's not like we were exposing state secrets or planning a terrorist campaign - but it was subverting the dinosaur music industry by the radical, beautiful technique of simply ignoring it and doing what we wanted to do.

As time went on, I developed a personal political message within my music. I had, over a long period of time, become utterly bored with rock music and had started to discover different genres from around the world. African, Arabian, South Asian, North African musical forms were full of sounds and rhythms that reinvigorated my jaded musical tastebuds. Sometime in the mid 90s I first heard Transglobal Undergound and Natacha Atlas, Loop Guru and Bill Laswell. They brought these musical forms into a glorious collision with Western electronica and created something that grabbed my attention as nothing had for some time. I knew that this was the music I'd been waiting for. My personal political agenda since then has been to introduce this new way of looking at music to my friends and the world around me. The mainstream music business is happy enough to sell 'world music' but even by giving it that marketing label, it has consigned a thousand musical genres to a place where they can be collectively ignored in favour of predictable, tedious guitar rock that the unimaginative moguls of the record industry can understand and control.

In the 90s, just as here in the UK the Asian Undergound was the very cutting edge of creativity, the industry came up with Britpop, the most retro, pointless, uncreative marketing scam in years. The music industry hasn't changed since. It churns out guitar bands by the dozen, mostly rehashing ideas that those of us born in the 60s and achieving adulthood during punk, have heard a thousand times before. Packaged, hygienic rebellion for the masses. Yawn. The few remaining record shops marginalise the musical forms I love to the 'specialist music' bins. Nothing changes.

However, our small contribution to digital resistance moves forward. We have a thriving podcast, playing drum and bass, dubstep, dub, hiphop and more, very often with a non-Western influence.



Many of the artists give their music away free or any payment goes directly to them not to fatcat shareholders of one of the big four labels. Our own globally-flavoured music continues to do well. More and more people are reading this very blog. Many of my friends have broadened their listening habits into realms they wouldn't have imagined fifteen years ago. Several of them have joined the Broken Drum Records team. I don't know what personal agendas some of the crew may have with our musical work - perhaps I'll ask them and write about that next time.

Resistance isn't futile!

Digital Resistance

Secret Archives of the Vatican started making music at the end of the 80s, start of the 90s, and we caught the tail end of an amazing social phenomenon, the cassette trader scene. There's a half decent Wikipedia article about the scene HERE.

We were conscious, even then at the start of the 90s, that we were making a conscious choice to operate outside of the mainstream music industry, where there was little or no possibility for 'success' if you made genre-defying, truly unique music. It meant we'd never make any significant money but we'd be free to do whatever we wanted to with no-one telling us how to present our music or forcing us into 'marketable' styles. We did alright; we had radio play in over 20 countries, we had tracks featured on compilation cassettes issued with various magazines and, above all, we had fun doing it. As far as I'm concerned, we had success. It just wasn't what the record companies would call success. Details of some of our early releases can be found HERE.

There were hugely influential publications (such as Gajoob) that played a part in developing a kind of philosophical basis for this independent artistic activity and we loved it.

Well, the years rolled on, the postal services declined, cassettes died and the internet was born. It took a while but now the advent of broadband and mp3s, FLACs, WAVs etc has made the creation, distribution and acquisition of music more democratic than ever before. No wonder the old dinosaur music industry hates it and constantly tries to undermine any progress. All of this we've written about elsewhere, of course, so let's not get sidetracked.

In the recent past, the political process here in the UK and Ireland, and also in the USA, has been deeply damaged by incompetence, corruption and people finding out the truth through things such as Wikileaks. I've noticed a small but steadily growing murmur of discontent among people I know and I've been intrigued by various suggestions that deliberately and consciously, as far as it is possible for us to do so, we should choose to operate outside of the parameters of behaviour chosen for us by politicians, unrestrained capitalism and old industries.

Some people have started to use the term Digital Resistance. The moment I heard the term, I knew it made sense. It's about using the possibilities of digital distribution of knowledge, subversive art, real news etc to disrupt existing authoritarian power structures. It's about digital intervention in situations of injustice. It's about the possibilities of invading worlds that have been deliberately kept from us by powerful people with vested interests in maintaining antidemocratic and controlling structures intact for their own benefit.

There is no way in most developed Western countries that we can change the world through politics; never in my lifetime have people been so disillusioned with, and contemptuous of, our political leaders. All major parties seem interchangeable and the minority parties are either nutters or fascists. There is no cultural salvation from the political quarter. Violent revolution is an option, I guess, but firstly I don't believe it changes anything (other than very temporarily). As soon as idealists take power, they have to constrain the next generation of idealists in order to protect their own revolution from that of the younger generation. It ends up just as autocratic as what went before. Secondly, I also hate violence - it's not a road I want to go down.

So, how do we negate the rising intensity of authoritarian culture? It is my belief that a digital cultural resistance movement has immense promise; new paradigms of digital intervention are being gestated right now. Through our art, music, alternative news sources, confrontational refusal to comply, and active opting-out from received patterns of social convention, we can effectively prevent The Man from ordering our lives and telling us how to live.

Our little part of all this is mostly in the musical realm. We're trying to be at the forefront of new ways of doing things and we're committed to making a fair amount of the music we create available free of charge (although we don't have a theoretical objection to earning some money for the work we put in). Through our blogs and podcasts we try to tell everyone about good music by other artists and labels. We write in our blogs about the lies and misrepresentations of the mainstream music industry.

We're at an early stage of thinking about the implications of a Digital Resistance movement and we'll be sharing more of our thoughts here as our ideas develop.