ERRATA. (Actually I think 'erratum' is grammatically correct, when you've made just the one fuck-up, but it looks odd). Below I make reference to the Streets album selling a mere 13 thousand copies in America (should have been a bit more sceptical, given the source was a Streetsphobic friend rubbing his hands with schadenfreude), well it turns out that Original Pirate Material has done a respectable 47 thousand and is still selling steadily (about 3000 a week) over three months after its release. Given the fact that it must be getting almost-zero radio play and video-rotation, given also the parlous state of the record industry thanks to file-sharing/CD-burning, and given the fact that many hipsters would have got it on import in the 8 month gap between its release in the UK and its finally coming out domestically, this is a pretty decent result. Certainly on a par with earlier successes d'estime like Size/Reprazent's New Forms, and who knows it may "catch on" like other sleepers (c.f. The Strokes). Not that I'm bothered either way: it's not the kind of record that is diminished by its failure to be popular in any given territory. But it would certainly be a nice bonus.

Don't have time to fully explore the 'critical reception of OPM in the USA' as promised, it would take a whole macro-essay. But I should at least take a moment to modify my comment about 'most Americans not fully getting it', I was really talking about the reviews I've read. And I don't mean not getting it in the sense of not being informed, like you have to do some kind of course in UK culture before you can enjoy/engage with the record. I'm talking more of the approach, which here seems to typically ignore OPM's positive attributes and worry away at its "negative" ones. Even the most favorable reviews here seem to pose the record as a problem, something to be measured against hip hop. The most extreme example being the Christgau review of course which reads like one long list of defects and ways in which it doesn't cut the mustard, such that the A minus grade comes as a complete surprise (you're expecting C-Plus). But even Sasha Frere-Jones, whose favorite album of the year is Original Pirate Material, comes over as fretful in his original Voice review, grappling with the knotty problem of its un-Americanness. Elsewhere you get the gives-compliment-with-one-hand, takes-away-with-another move: Kelefa Sanneh in The New York Times declared that surprise surprise, the best hip hop record of the year is by a white Briton but only a few sentences away opined that Skinner isn’t really a rapper at all. In Britain, the reviews don't bother with all this categorizing and compare-and-contrast with the real-American-deal nonsense, they just get straight down to what would seem the most salient thing about the album: its exceptional capacity to entertain and amuse. (And move and touch and, if you want, resonate) A good example (haven't got the url to hand but I'm sure you can work out how to get to Freakytrigger) are Tom Ewing's comments on various Streets tracks in his DOWNLOAD THIS/2002 Best. Year. Ever. epic cataloguing his favorite tuens of the year. You read the comments and you think "the guy gets it". There's no difficulty, nothing to worry about or at. Original Pirate Material has a context. for sure. but it transcends its context. It is there to be enjoyed as a stand-alone entity: a blessing, a fortune. Basically, the record is a licence to gush, and I suppose what has disappointed moi about the critical reception here is the dearth of real gushing. What use is a rave review if it doesn't actually RAVE?

Happy hardcore thrives in the US of A. A piece by the magnificently monikered Andrew John Ignatius Vontz.

Rock Critics 4 Peace. Is what the sign I held said. Attached to the sign's handle was one end of an extremely long banner, made by some friends, which intended to declare ‘Violence Begets Violence’ (phrasing a tad Old Testament, but a valid point) but unfortunately stopped short at ‘Violence Begets Vi’. One could only hope the more rockhistorically-aware in the crowd took this as a reference to Vi Subversa (fortysomething-even-in-1979 frontperson of anarchopunx Poison Girls) and thus a celebration of the grand continuity of refusenik culture.

Shamefully, the big march eight days ago is one of the very few demonstrations I've ever participated in. Never been much of a joiner, I suppose. The only semi-excuse I can muster is that for some of my generation, the ascension of Thatcher was such a surprise, such a hope-dashing trauma, that, especially if it occurred at a formative period in one's youth when politics tend to lean towards the unfeasible (at the time I would have been oscillating between Situationism and Communism--an easy stance when you're sixteen and don't own anything), it opened up a massive chasm between ideals and politics-as-the-realm-of-the-possible. And in that chasm something close to resignation developed. Brief encounters with organized politics, whether it was anarchists (all-talk except for the really-just-up-for-a-ruck macho streetfighter types) or canvassing for Labour, merely encouraged the drift towards fatalism and quiescence. Not exactly resistance-is-futile, but biding one's time until the culture shifts again. For many of us in the Eighties, I suspect, the energy we might have in a more promising decade devoted to activism was instead channelled into music and its surrounding discourse; that was where our "battles" were fought. (Whether that was a massive diversion/waste of energy is something I'm trying to work out with this post-punk book).

At a certain point, though, regardless of whether demonstrations achieve their aims or not (and this one, as impressive as it was globally, appears to have made not a blind bit of difference to the USA and UK's headlong rush towards the geopolitical precipice), on an individual level there comes a point at which a certain better-out-than-in logic takes over. Keep on swalllowing your own anger/disgust/indignation/dismay and it turns poisonous. It was inspiring to see the creativity, humour, and high spirits of the marchers. And it was revelatory to witness--as visceral, glandular experience rather than second-hand, intellectualized concept---the police's heavy-handed and unprovoked crowd-dispersal tactics. As the cordon of mounted police started to advance down a packed 3rd Avenue--not quite a charge but more than a canter--I felt like the peasant in Monty Python & The Holy Grail: "Ah! Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Come and see the violence inherent in the system!”