~Teen Witch~

There is every chance I actually visited this website back in the day.

One reason I'm such a curmudgeon about hand-tooling my own website is that using my daily 30 minutes of internet to learn about witchcraft from websites like these is perhaps the dearest part of paganism in my memory; it feels integral to living a pagan life, to be reading and considering and stumbling across sites like these.

Afro Celts, Englishness and the 2010s

Something something something about...

world music exists in this like, liberal post-racial fantasy mindset, in which native american panpipes, drum machine, dolphin noises and bhangra rhythm come together to express our essential human unity. This is very nice, and often sounds fantastic, but politically it's also quite ick because it keeps out of sight the historic/ongoing power imbalances between the people and artforms involved. Enigma's fantastic Return to Innocence is the ideal example of both the genre, and also its issues: it samples an Amis chant ("Elders' Drinking Song") performed by Difang and Igay Duana, who received no credit or payment for their work. World music typically flattens all materials into a kind of 'universal and interchangeable substance' which like. we're not there yet.

anyway, Afro Celt Sound System sounds so 90s. They fuse traditional African and Irish rhythms and songs with contemporary chillout-room electro producers. I'm lurched right back to new age knick knack songs which had those CD displays where you could press to listen to each before you bought, all whalesong and singing bowls. & while you can always critique cultural productions regardless of their creators, Afro Celt Sound System was at least comprised of musicians from both Afro and Celt descent having a jam together.

Anyway, the next generation of that band was The Imagined Village - British folk with a twist. It's still world music. You can't sense dolphin vibrations, but it's there politically - the concept of just slapping some dhol onto Steeleye Span and making nice liberals feel a sense of vague wellbeing that folk is now inclusive and represents our modern, diverse nation

It just feels so very sign-of-the-times? On ACFM's folk music episode, Jeremy Gilbert discusses when the Irish became white in the 1990s. He discusses this shift from the Irish being percieved as a terrorist/thuggish/underclass/joke demographic in England who really would be disproportionately overpoliced, to Irish Pub Chains becoming a welcoming family institution and like the rise of Enya, Riverdance and Ireland winning Eurovision six times in a row and stuff. & he hypothesises it's a particular kind of racist shift where, suddenly, celtic vibes were ~the last bastion of true whiteness~, a sort of purity and fresh-faced-girl-on-a-hill preserved-from-ancient-days. Racial boundaries are always shifting about in this way.

And so, like, when I hear Afro Celt Sound System {which i confess, I'm not really enjoying. It emits a wallpaperesque euphoria that puts me in the mind to buy a printer for my HP programmable calculator, or maybe feel unnameable disappointment in the festival chillout tent after spending £4.20 on an organic lemonade in a plastic cup. In contrast, rediscovering both Enya and Enigma have been mindblowing to me, being soused in lush maximalist textures and their greedy feelgood sonic pleasure} - I feel like it's part of that particular 90s moment. Celts are IN, chillout is IN, worldbeat is IN, and like, it's the fashionable ethnicities.

& the Imagined Village reminds me of Alex Niven's bit in New Model Island about when 'England' came back into the national discourse - how in the 90s one would most commonly talk about Britain, but in the 00s and 10s suddenly the distinctiveness of England was back on the brain. Hence 'Let England Shake', English Eerie, a lot of that folk horror revival I've been enjoying so much, and like. Mumford & Sons. Brexit. My husband suggested The Last Kingdom - all about the heptarchy - and even Niven's own book, which is threaded through with a desire for Northumbrian independence. The resurfacing of a distinctively English nationalism, be it evil or twee.

& a lot of this moment is necessarily more tense! The Blair government was very racist but nevertheless, the optimism WAS there initially. In my lifetime, opportunities for people from poor backgrounds in the arts have shrunk; the War on Terror ramped up racist surveillence and xenophobic hostility; attacks on benefit claimaints targeted migrants most explicitly and cruelly; and so in these 00s and 10s resurfacing of Englishness, it doesn't sound like Ganesha murals in the comedown tent, it forefronts a sense of something contested, troubled, desperate and dangerous. The politics of these pieces vary widely, but all have this sense of foreboding.

(It's not clear to me that either a forboding sense of crisis or a euphoric optimism are better or worse ways to relate to multiculturalism; it's just art reflecting a particular mood; the art itself will always lack power to do meaningful change)

There's an interesting essay here, I think, about how like...because these two bands are more-or-less the same people across three decades...the underlying politics of world music remains the same across both bands {a plastering over the problems of racial tension and history} and how the music is constructed too {by slamming together consciously disparate elements, and overtly aware of why this is optimistically political about racial unity}. And at the same time, they sound so OF their moment. ACSS is so 90s you could put it on a skateboard. IV namecheck England explicitly. ACSS is for dancing to the stupid enthusiasm of bouncy Irish fiddle and IV is for songs about rape, workplace violence and deporting war refugees.

in their choices, of these two structurally identical genre works by the same people that feel so different - you can feel time pass.