In the late eighties, I was quite taken with Mark Stewart — intellectually and in principle, at least; his music seemed to resist any emotional connection. Now it seems like his ranting was a little wide of the mark. I'm not saying that everything that's happened in politics and society since then has been rosy. AIDS obviously did for a lot of people, and some communities were devastated by it. But it's slipped off our radars now, as though it were under control. Nothing dates like anxieties about things that, we now know with hindsight, didn't happen. (Well, actually one thing does: complacency about things that you thought you'd overcome, when you hadn't — so this blog post is going to look pretty stupid when, say, there's a nuclear war.)
So Stewart samples Satie, Sakamato and Summmer (Gymnopedie No. 1, Forbidden Colours and I Feel Love respectively), but reframes them all within that quite tiring eighties agit-prop resistance beat, that you can't dance to — you can only stamp.
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