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In the year of Sandinista! (it came out late in December), Adrian Sherwood is twenty years old in London, with his new creation On-U Sound, many friends who play music, and a clear idea of the future.
It is a particular interpretation of no future because it involves activism: the future is here, it is this.
The New Age Steppers are a collective of punk friends who enjoy playing Jamaican music. Among them are people from the Slits and the Pop Group (this shows how little nihilism is involved).
Sherwood is the guy who organizes and orchestrates the jams, reworks them, and abstracts them; he isolates the components and interrogates them one by one, bending them to his will through the mixer. He reassembles them, staining them with his suggestions.
We feel the masochistic pleasure of being conquered, the sadistic pleasure of dissecting the conqueror.
He derives a concept of dub that, like a marble, rolls in the groove of a future he has just begun to trace: that he will continue to trace for forty years, and for who knows how many more.
It's a matter of charisma, technical skill, taste.
It is the most obvious answer, and the closest to the truth, to what can us white people give to this music? An updated discontent, a new sense of rudimentality, but with fashionable polish for the parties of the new decade. In practice, just trouble.
The coexistence of Ari Up's soprano talent, which in Sherwood's hands becomes a siren and a violin, and Mark Stewart's visionary anti-capitalism (on this topic, read a beautiful piece by Mark Fisher here), polarized by steady basses in the foreground and passing echoes in the background, is both the culmination and the turning point of English punk at the beginning of the '80s.
The vanishing point, in both the perspective and escapism sense, the rest of the urban guerrilla, the punk who escapes from the job of doing punk and from canonization, but not from his responsibilities; and in his off time, he continues to reason, to stay in the world.
[already on malemale.eu for the general public]
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