Radiohead and Klezmer

Yes, this is a post about Environment for Blog Action Day. You’ll see, I’m getting there.

Following Radiohead’s Pay-What-You-Can move for In Rainbows I’ve been witness to some interesting debates. Many musicians I know have been celebrating. Because Radiohead’s servers have been overloaded, many people have been publicly circulating versions of the album on their sites or via email (notably WhiteRoom).

In response to the proliferation of these alternate access points for In Rainbows, there have been some heated words:

“Radiohead is proposing a new business model that is crudely undercut by people like WhiteRoom who are CHEAP; the band is precipitating a collapse of arts industries; it’s all just poorly thought-out indie publicity; it doesn’t matter at all; it’s ok by me,”

etc.

Meanwhile I’m reading a book called Soil and Soul.

On the cover there’s a quote from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke:

“I’ve finished reading a book called Soil and Soul which was very inspiring … A desire for ecological change with no ego or malignance and no messianic tendencies.”

So reading this eco-political-poetic narrative, I see it lined up against In Rainbows. And I can’t help but think about rainbows, the light and water in them, and the connection between culture and environment.

Soil and Soul describes life in the Hebrides and among other native communities. The way an ecological and social balance that relied on sharing was known, then undermined by imposed systems of exchange:

I now understand that the society I was privileged to be part of in those days was based on an economy of mutuality, reciprocity and exchange. These qualities mattered to us at least as much as cash transactions did. The social thinker Ivan Illich has called such a system ‘the vernacular economy’. This is, he says, like our vernacular, or mother tongue.It is a way of doing and being that is learned, effortlessly, through the culture. Often we do not realise what we have until it goes. However, it would seem to me that if such principles can be communicated afresh, they could be of value to community groups everywhere that are trying to develop what E.F. Schumacher called ‘economics as if people mattered’.

(…)

Whereas the vernacular economy is necessarily mindful of the human and biological processes by which goods and services come into being, the new way- capitalism - reduces human labour and nature’s providence to figures on the London or Tokyo stock exchanges. It hammers whole ways of life into speculative chips, drip feeding a casino economy. Such is the essence of neo-liberal globalisaton: competition subsumes the co-operative relationship. Government is forced out of the economy, but money then takes its place as king and it cares little for community or environment. Plutocracy - government by by the rich - yields inevitably to oligarchy - government by the few. Reverance falls by the wayside, having become an irrelevance. People know that something is wrong. But it’s hard to see what it is, and the world goes on, after a fashion.

It would have been around 1970 that the fishing started to change in the Hebrides.

The author, Alastair Macintosh, goes on to unfold a humanistic, modern mode of putting these chips and pieces of knowledge, practice and community back together.

To me it seems clear that Radiohead’s move is connected to this book, and is about a much bigger push for change then critics are acknowledging. By getting music to people at whatever price they can pay while reducing the demand for the plastics and non-renewable minerals used in CD’s, the band is supporting peaceful initiatives for a more balanced and ecological distribution of wealth. They are helping to enrich the cultural ground for a modern ‘economics in which people matter.’

They are one amoung many open access trajectories and their move is a drop in the bucket, but a noisy and therefore awesome one, in my opinion. One that is helped by musicians and others who are sharing the songs and spreading the word.

Last thing:

Soil and Soul was slipped into my hands by my dear dumpster diving, community building, crocheting, orchestra-composing friend Emily Doolittle. Emily’s birthday is tomorrow, October 16, and she’s celebrating at an open Klezmer Jam in the Mile End here, in Montreal. Come and join us if you’re about and we’ll feed each other with free access to a vernacular… And maybe vegan gluten-free organic birthday cake. Who knows!

Feel free to come with or without instruments. People will be teaching tunes, so don’t worry if you don’t (yet) know any Klezmer music!

Café Arts is at 201 Fairmont West (a couple blocks East of Parc.) The jam is from 7 to 10.