Checkpoint 303 Beats Drum for Resistance

Checkpoint 303 composes activist breakbeats and middle-eastern electronica to promote peace, human rights and justice in the middle-east.

Their music is available for free download at http://www.checkpoint303.com or Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/checkpoint303.

Here's a piece the band recently wrote for Common Ground News Service (CGNews) available at: www.commongroundnews.org

Tear down the wall and dance!
06 March 2008

EAST JERUSALEM and LYON, FRANCE — We had nearly finished getting our gear off the stage when someone from the audience came up to congratulate us on our show. After telling us how much he enjoyed the music and video projection, he added, with a slightly troubled look on his face: “…but I have a problem. Isn’t it somehow wrong to dance to music that deals with the Palestinian cause?” He explained that while he found himself dancing to some of the more up-beat songs, he could not help asking himself whether it was okay to dance to the message our music embodies.

We were pleased to hear about his ‘dilemma’. This is precisely what our band, Checkpoint 303, is all about. Instead of telling the audience what to think about the issue of Palestine, which would be a ridiculously naïve attitude, we try to trigger a reflective process in our listeners.

This same question is put to us every now and again. Obviously there’s no universal answer. Every individual has to discover what they consider to be right, that’s the point; it’s ultimately all about the process of figuring it out. But for those who feel guilty grooving to the sound of a serious humanitarian issue, we have one consolation: silly I-love-you-baby lyrics need not be the unique criterion for danceable music.

This said, Checkpoint 303 is not a dance music band. The songs we consider successful are ones that involve the listener in the artistic process, songs in which the listener participates in creating the statement, as opposed to passively consuming a message. This can only be achieved by avoiding music with a ready-to-go, prêt-à-porter, take-away message.


How can this be achieved from a practical point of view? By contrast to other forms of musical activism, we do not rely on lyrics to convey our message. Checkpoint 303’s music is primarily based on field we record throughout the Middle East, and Palestine in particular—covering a large spectrum of predominantly urban sounds: people talking in the old city of Jerusalem, a traffic jam in Ramallah, excerpts of a local Bethlehem radio station, the sound of an identity control at an Israeli checkpoint, the chanting of a demonstration in the west bank, etc. We then transform the audio material into loops, onto which we add electronic beats, riffs and melodies played on oud (oriental lute), keyboard or guitar.


When our ‘sound catchers’, SC Yosh or Cheikh Julio, are on the street with their recording gear, they are not looking for a specific sound to convey a pre-defined impression or statement. The essence of our music is to capture, fragment, and reconstruct the soundtrack of daily life in the occupied Palestinian territories. Yet we don’t restrict our music to only portraying the suffering and hardship of life under occupation. The media is doing a fantastically wrong and biased job of exclusively depicting the negative aspects of life in this tormented region of the world. By contrast, our music includes rhythms of “normal” life, the supposedly insignificant things that never make headlines, but help make possible the very idea of “hope” in Palestine.


Many Palestinian families heroically try, against all odds, to get along with their lives, educate their children, and dream of a better future—one worth living for. There are positive stories to report from Palestine. Our attempt to make music based on objective field recordings in the Middle East is in itself a challenging intellectual exercise. But, at the end of the day, that is precisely what yields the necessary degree of realism and humanity that is the backbone of our music.
Our aim, then, is to blend the aesthetics of electronic music composition with the social, economical, and humanitarian dimensions of reality in Palestine in a way that actively involves the listener in shaping the message. But does this make our work political? Although it may be perceived as such, our creative intentions are not political per se. They are driven by fundamental humanitarian values. It seems to us that the universality of human rights should in theory be both the common ground and the starting point to achieve peace. Additionally, when it comes to the question of whether our art is politically correct or not, the answer is simple: we do not care as long as it is humanly correct. We are artists, not politicians; this allows us the luxury of being able to tell the truth from a humanitarian point of view with no fear of electoral consequences!

Electronic music and audiovisual experimentation are the tools Checkpoint 303 uses to react to both the virtual and physical walls the occupation has created. These walls are also being hacked by the flourishing Palestinian hip-hop and trip-hop scene (e.g. DAM, Ramallah Underground, G-Town, Arapeyat, etc.) but also international artists such as the British graffiti artist Banksy or the American indie songwriter and political activist David Rovics to name but a few.

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This article is part of a special series on Art and Conflict, which surveys the work of art in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and examines the political dimensions of art in general.

Copyright permission is granted for publication.

Checkpoint 303 collaborates with film-makers, musicians, and visual artists from around the globe. Its free tunes from occupied territories are an act of resistance and a celebration of hope.

Checkpoint 303 was invited by Massive Attack to be a support band for three shows in the UK in 2007 and in France in 2008. We are also very much into performing in alternative venues and spaces where the aesthetics and meaning of sound/noise and its link to social activism can be reconsidered and explored...

Over the last two years, the band has performed electronic and live sets in several countries (USA, Australia, Canada, France, Palestine, Tunisia, Belgium, Spain, Sweden, Japan, etc.) spreading the word for peace and human rights through a blend of twisted electronica, downtempo, break-beats, oriental riffs and field recordings...

Video Writing

Writers, take note -- here's some kick-ass art:



Watch him make his point in 2:20. Notice the quick-cuts which simulate a too-slow-internet-connection effect. Observe his hip-hop presentation -- poetic, with a beat.

Observe, too, how the 2:20 is a complete story, as it is divided into scenes by: 1) a change in camera angle; and 2) Jay Smooth's change in body angle (turning to presumably work on his computer).

All the result of good and thoughtful writing. Genius!

See more at illdoctrine.com.

Drag Your Boomer Parents Into the 21st Century

Tired of listening to the same pathetic, decades-old music options from your Boomer -- or Gen Xer -- parents? Technology has several answers for you!

The article offers several possibilities, but I recommend Pandora.com. It's so easy even your parents can figure it out!

The Artistic Pirate

Anyone who has taken one of Prof. Harold Jaffe's classes is familiar with his motto: Find a seam. Plant a mine. Slip away. Repeated on his website, the motto exemplifies his commitment to the artist's role as society's Trickster-Hero. Why Trickster-Hero? Because the old images of the artist as Warrior-Hero, like Hemingway, or Romantic-Hero, like Marilyn, can be too easily faked or too readily co-opted. The Trickster-Hero can evade such capitalist traps -- for a while, at least.

The Trickster-Hero is the topic of Matt Mason's The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism. Mason's "pirates" -- graffiti artists, music and film samplers, information appropriators -- don't resemble Robin Hood or Captain Jack Sparrow. They are artists: their "thievery" consists of excluding those who would exploit that art for money. Hence, they "reinvent" capitalism.

Why do artists now live like "pirates"? Because they want to decide how their art is used. They have seen artists treated as product, overworked, used up and killed off by agents, companies and corporations created to maximize profits from that art. They have seen idealism being rebranded to sell erectile dysfunction remedies. They have seen "rebels" who became rich for being rebellious work to stifle that same instinct in their audience.

"We live in a world where things we used to pay for, such as music, movies, and newspapers, are now available for free. But things we used to reproduce for free, such as seeds and pigs, have to be paid for. This is a world where we need to understand the finer points of the pirate mentality...."

Mason's book contains useful how-tos for aspiring pirate-artists, plus bonus real-life examples of famous pirate raids on corporate culture, including describing how Madonna was punked. Yes, that Madonna, once celebrated for her ability to market rebellion, is now poster girl for a failed Warner Bros. pirate-squashing. When she f-bombed a downloading site, workers retaliated:

"Frustrated by a globalized music industry force-feeding them plastic pop music, hackers, remixers, and activists began to mobilize within hours against Madonna.... Days after the decoy files were released, new versions of Madonna's a capella outburst started springing up.... Madonna's official site was hacked and every track from her new album, the real tracks, were pinned to the home page free for anyone to download. Across the top of the page, the remixer posted a response to Madonna, the music industry, and everyone else threatening to stand in free culture's way: THIS IS WHAT THE FUCK I THINK I'M DOING."

Way to go, pirates!

Drive In Saturday, 4.26.2008

Bill Withers/"Use Me"

Gang of Four/"Armalite Rifle"

John Foxx/"Miles Away"

Discharge/"Does This System Work?"

X/"White Girl"

PUNK ROCK 2008/JAY REATARD

When Memphis Tennessee's Jay Reatard punched a drunken fan in the face a couple nights ago in Canada and then canceled the show only three songs in my initial reaction was:

"What a fucking hypocrite"

Jay Reatard's complaints were that the show was overcapacity, there wasn't any security staff, the crowd was spilling beer on  his equipment, and kids kept climbing on stage, messing up his performance.

How un-punk.

In Punk's beginning this type of phenomena wasn't just tolerated but encouraged.  The ethos behind the movement dictated that the barrier between performer and audience be smashed, all the rules of conventional performance be broken, and that anarchy prevailed.

Yet Reatard's reaction is totally punk:  heartfelt, spontaneous, and without consideration for established social norms.

Obviously the didacticism of the punk/un-punk debate is philosophically bankrupt, just as any argument that swings between the yes/no poles of a term that is essentially nebulous.

What's interesting here is the Reatard's desire to perform uninterrupted by the social qualities attributed to his genre, his territoriality over his place on stage, and his rage at being silenced by some dumb, drunk Canadian stage diver.

The music being good and the documentation of this whole event (thanks to the fact that every kid in the Western hemisphere owns a digital camera/cell phone) is really going to get his punk rock career moving.

Neu!

Here's some live footage of Neu!, making it happen. This is, I'm guessing, somewhat rare.

Neu! was very influential, as has been well documented. On their first two records you can hear much of what came later, in terms of underground music.

This footage, to me, is indicative of a sort of penultimate glam--fun, texturally interesting, uptempo, experimental and emotionally precise rock music.

Neu! also had the sense, at this juncture, of never not being current. Seeing them here, they might be representative on one of the more transparently compelling aspects of postmodern culture.

Transmission

I bought a copy of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures a few months ago to replace my lost LP (the UK first issue vinyl with textured jacket). Mine is the US release, but I assume it's a first issue because it reads "Factum 1" on the matrix, the matrix being the blank section of a vinyl record, between the record's grooves (the songs) and the label. At any rate, while I was squinting at the matrix of my new LP to determine its authenticity, I found a statement scrawled into the vinyl, in the matix: "I'm looking for a guide."

It's appropriate, given their oeuvre--Factory Records; Post-Punk; their bleak prospects culturally, politically, economically. How difficult it was to get anywhere, meaningfully.

Do we look to a guide; should we, given the status quo?

The impulse tells us something about ourselves, our condition.

Joy Division, performing the song "Transmission" from their LP Unknown Pleasures:

Drive In Saturday, 4.5.2008

Pulp/"This is Hardcore"

The Fall/"Totally Wired"

Motorhead/"Iron Fist"

Mick Jagger and Ry Cooder/"Memo from Turner"

Dusty Springfield/"Son of a Preacher Man"

Plasmatics and Tom Snyder

The hardcore punk movement in the 80s reached one of its cultural high points when Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics were on TV. It was a grand scandal, and so popular they were back on TV for sweeps week. With her spreading shaving cream all over her chest, being angry and rebellious, with mohawks to rival the best in Trafalgar Square, with her blowing up a car on stage--TV couldn't resist and neither could I. From my post-adolescent-male-point-of-view it was a theatre of pain and suffering, with boobs! What's not to like? At least that's how it was back in the day. These days I appreciate the best of punk for its raw accomplishments in tweeking the hegemony from within its own capitalist system, infecting even as it's held to the margins of the radio dial and cultural landscape.

There's one aspect of punk (such as hardcore punk music like the Plasmatics, FEAR, Germs, Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys) that is as alive for me now as it was when I was first discovering it in the late seventies and into the eighties, and that is the humor, the ironic deadpan hilarity of this work. In this clip we can hear the band opening with a count "One, Two, Fuck You." It's not the kind of humor you'll read in the New Yorker, but it's funny anyway. I like to think about how Kafka's K would react, sitting in the audience at a Plasmatics show, feigning disgust and disinterest but mesmerized by the sexualized rebellion against the system. Either he would forget himself and dance upon his chair, get some shaving cream on his hands, or he would cower in guilty shame for having liked it. Either way, he would not leave the theatre. He certainly would not be as comfortable as that badass Tom Snyder, who had lots of great punks on his show.

MY PILLOW IS THE THRESHOLD

is a song off the Silver Jews new LP "Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea". It won't be released till August 2008 but thanks to illegal file sharing I've procured a copy. If the internet police are reading this: I promise to buy the vinyl the week it's released.

This song seems to be in defense of the sleepy intellectual who the rest of the world sees as a lazy parasite yet who might just be some sort of sage dragging important ideas from the other side into reality. I especially dig the "throw my thoughts like tomahawks" and "what looks like sleep is really hot pursuit" lines.


I take decaf coffee
Two sugars and one cream
I don’t see the use in staying up just to watch tv

I unplug all the neon
Turn the ringer off the phone
Throw my thoughts like tomahawks
Into this world which I disown

Because the pillow that I dream on
is the threshold of a kingdom
is the threshold of a world where I’m with you

it’s a dark and snowy secret
and it has to do with heaven
and what looks like sleep is really hot pursuit

I hold your picture in my mind
It makes me warm when I am cold
Gets me up and it makes me walk
It makes me question what I’m told

Somewhere in a foggy atlas
Lookout mountain lookout sea
First life takes time then time takes life
Now the next moves up to me

Because the pillow that I dream on
Leads to some fantastic glory
It’s the threshold of a world I can’t ignore

Like time unspooled from heaven
did you find me sleeping in your doorway
now I’m here for good
I won’t leave you anymore


David Berman is an American poet, cartoonist, and singer-songwriter best known for his work with indie-rock band the Silver Jews.

Here's a short video clip by artist Jeremy Blake, a recent suicide plagued by an obsession that Scientologists were out to destroy his career, with Berman reading poetry over it.

It's called Sodium Fox

SILENCE/JANDEK/SONTAG

The Houston, Texas musician Jandek has self-released one or more albums of discordant howling freak folk songs every year since 1978 without granting any interviews to the public.



It wasn't until 2004 that he performed live, unannounced at an obscure folk festival in Scotland. Attendant music geek jaws hit the floor as the recognition slowly set in that the gaunt nearly albino man in black playing on stage matched the likeness of the figure that would sometimes appear on Jandek album covers. The organizers of the festival never claimed to have had any dealings with anyone called Jandek, only "a representative of Corwood Industries" the record label whose sole artist is Jandek and is presumably run single handedly by the individual behind the music.

Below, Susan Sontag has some intelligent things to say on the subject:

"Rimbaud has gone to Abyssinia to make his fortune in the slave trade. Wittgenstein, after a period as a village school-teacher, has chosen menial work as a hospital orderly. Duchamp has turned to chess. Accompanying these exemplary renunciations of a vocation, each man has declared that he regards his previous achievements in poetry, philosophy, or art as trifling, of no importance. 
But the choice of permanent silence doesn't negate their work. On the contrary, it imparts retroactively an added power and authority to what was broken off—disavowal of the work becoming a new source of its validity, a certificate of unchallengeable seriousness. That seriousness consists in not regarding art (or philosophy practiced as an art form: Wittgenstein) as something whose seriousness lasts forever, an 'end,' a permanent vehicle for spiritual ambition. The truly serious attitude is one that regards art as a 'means' to something that can perhaps be achieved only by abandoning art; judged more impatiently, art is a false way or (the word of the Dada artist Jacques Vaché) a stupidity. 
Though no longer a confession, art is more than ever a deliverance, an exercise in asceticism. Through it, the artist becomes purified—of himself and, eventually, of his art. The artist (if not art itself) is still engaged in a progress toward 'the good.' But whereas formerly the artist's good was mastery of and fulfillment in his art, now the highest good for the artist is to reach the point where those goals of excellence become insignificant to him, emotionally and ethically, and he is more satisfied by being silent than by finding a voice in art. Silence in this sense, as termination, proposes a mood of ultimacy antithetical to the mood informing the self-conscious artist's traditional serious use of silence (beautifully described by Valéry and Rilke): as a zone of meditation, preparation for spiritual ripening, an ordeal that ends in gaining the right to speak.
So far as he is serious, the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has with an audience. Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that ambivalence about making contact with the audience which is a leading motif of modern art, with its tireless commitment to the 'new' and/or the 'esoteric.' Silence is the artist's ultimate other-worldly gesture: by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, consumer, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work." — Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will, The Aesthetics of Silence 

Outside...was nothing

Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn circa 1984

"Punk," because it indicated such a wide variety of modes of expression, was always an unstable signifier. Certainly, to my mind, it was always easier to explain what punk was not; "that's not punk" being one of the operative clauses of the period.

Moreover, since circa 1990, which marked the period in which punk was appropriated into the official culture as a style stripped of its radical cultural/political implications, "punk" on this level, has ceased to have any intrinsic meaning beyond its historical connotations.

So that, given the above, I'd rather focus on whatever it was that punk meant/means to me as an individual. At this point, it would be customary to demonstrate my credentials on the topic: a long, annotated list of shows attended and records purchased; a demonstrable, detailed insider's knowledge of the key players and major events; an easy familiarity with the appropriate slang and jargon (easy answer: there really isn't any); and a strong, succinct opinion, one way or the other, on Lipstick Traces and the use of "London Calling" in a Jaguar commercial. Here I'm half-mocking the insularity of the punks, as well as the ease with which this sort of "street cred" can be faked (all of which was well-spoofed by The Tubes [of all people] in "I was a punk before you were a punk"). But this phenomena, I'm guessing, is characteristic of any underground, marginalized cultural movement. There was a very real sense in that being a punk was all one had, and so this identification was valued seriously and intensely by those that shared in it.

Which leads to a consideration of punk as an exclusive (but not, of course, in the sense of catering to the wealthy) social grouping. The nature of this exclusivity might certainly be seen, anthropologically, as universally determinant, to varying degrees, in any social grouping. It is interesting to note that Western societies, at least according to their official cant, now privilege inclusiveness and diversity as being among their celebrated "values." But what is proffered in reality is access to a diffuse, transparent, invasive, superficial and banal cultural milieu that at essence can only muster the anonymous consumer as its primary site of subjective identification. This is your reward for blending in with the melting pot: you get to buy stuff at the mall and be infotained. So there is a very real sense in which the socially exclusive nature of punk can be seen as an oppositional strategy in relationship to the bland material enticements and specious ideology of the official culture.

That said, based on my own experiences with the San Diego hardcore punk scene during the 1980's, I can offer the observation that I've never been involved with a more diverse group of people. Not only was the scene itself factionalized; politics, attitudes, aesthetics and behaviors were varied literally beyond belief. Often the only thing anyone seemed to have in common was their shared code of identification.

Paradoxically, the uniqueness and fragility of punk as social identity was reinforced by prevailing market forces. Many among the first wave of punk bands in New York and England in the mid-to late 1970's were signed to major record labels in attempt to cash in on the latest "teenaged" music trend. The majority of these bands had relatively small sales and this, combined with their radical form and content (and the band's own irreverent, indeed venomous attitudes towards the labels themselves), led to them being dropped by the majors. The host of younger bands forming in the wake of the first wave were subsequently ignored by the major American labels. So that, for any punk band forming after this period, there was the very real knowledge that prospects for commercial success (or even a living wage) were slim at best. At that point, any band identifying itself as punk did so out of enthusiasm and commitment (and a strong dose of foolhardiness). What arose in reaction agains these restrictions was the formation of an underground network of independent record labels and promotional tools, often formed and managed by the groups themselves, operating at barely self-sustaining profit levels.

At that point, to be a punk was to be commercially marginalized and culturally untouchable. This led to a very precise and concrete awareness that the identification as a punk was reinforced by real world conditions: it was not simply another prefabricated lifestyle to be donned and then discarded in a leisure class search for self identity. It was instead an existential choice fraught with some personal peril and invested with tremendous meaning generated by the participants themselves. It was, in a word, freedom.

Subjectively, how it all felt, was this: when you became and shared in being a punk, this identity permitted the play of your desires, your politics, your aesthetics and provided a means of locating as a unique individual with in a dynamic, distinct social group. It was a spontaneous, intuitive group exercise in the creation of meaning. And outside of that...was nothing.

So to see the whole thing co-opted in the early 1990's, sold out for a song on the strung out byways of yet another Lollapalooza tour, well, that was pretty fucking hard.


A recent exchange with Trumanwater reminded me of this post I wrote for Michael Filas' punk studies page, which I am recycling here in the general spirit of inquiry into the nature of catagorical distinctions per se.