Agit-disco [Hardcover]

Agit Disco is a multimedia project devised and co-ordinated by artist, writer and countercultural activist Stefan Szczelkun. Ostensibly the Agit Disco book is a series of annotated playlists of protest and revolutionary music chosen by 22 of Szczelkun's friends and associates. However, if used in combination with the web, some curiosity and a pair of headphones, then it becomes a user's manual for the history of radical pop music.

Szczelkun has been a critical agent in collective and collaborative cultural production for over 40 years. His subversive career began with the Artslab movement of the late sixties and runs through the Scratch Orchestra and autonomous living projects in the seventies, the Brixton Artists Collective, the Mail Art network and Small Press in the eighties and the Exploding Cinema collective and contemporary D.I.Y. media. The Agit Disco project is an integral strand of this collectivism and it had a long germination, as Stefan notes :

'The earliest time I thought about an Agit Disco was in conversation with Bruce Haggart of the Street farmers and Clifford Harper the legendary anarchist artist.....must have been C. 1973.'

The first deployment of the concept appears in the book as Thomas Zagrosek's Agit Disco 1 which was played as a DJ set at the project launch party in 2008. The project developed, with each new contributor, to become a series of shared CD's, a website, a blog, a Youtube channel and now a book. The diversity of the media corresponds with the variety of contributors and approaches. Amongst the cultural activists, artists, bloggers and Djs is the disability rights activist Micheline Mason, the Situ-ironist Stewart Home, the blogger and former anarcho punk Neil Transpontine, the feminist and gay activist Louise Carolin and a selection from the parents and teachers of a Scottish primary school with an autonomous art studio. Some selections are predictable and general, others specialised or obscure. The poet Luca Paci plays songs from the Italian Social Centre movement, Tom Vague's selection is themed around the counterculture of Notting Hill Gate, photographer Sian Addicott contributes a Welsh playlist and critic Tom Jennings compiles a sampler of radical US hip hop. The approach of each contributor also varies, some lists are like agit-prop desert island disks, others are biographical narratives. John Eden's list is a short history of early British reggae, Simon Ford presents an almost abstract slideshow of his album covers and artist Tracey Moberley uses her tracks to compose the narrative of a working class woman's life. Some contributors eulogise, some theorise, some just give you the playlist. The great pleasure of the text is to follow the detailed annotations, seek out the audio online and follow the tracks wherever they may lead.

Amongst the gems are the proto rap of Dave Bartholomew - Monkey Speaks His Mind (1957) from Johnny Spencer's Agit Disco 2. Bartholomew wrote hits for Elvis, Fats Domino and Chuck Berry, but in his own voice he delivers a devastating indictment of human cruelty. Tribal Jam (1990) by X CLAN on Stewart Home's Agit Disco 6 invokes the lucid power of the first wave of conscious hip hop in the early nineties.
Ay Carmela - Viva la Quinta Brigada is an Anti-Fascist anthem from the Spanish civil war that will make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.

As Szczelkun himself acknowledges, the Agit Disco project is riddled with contradictions ; it is a nexus of questions. The most critical of which is : What makes a song radical ? In his introduction Anthony Iles inquires :

There is a tendency towards music that wears its political content safely in its lyrics. But what of instrumental music ? Is music with no lyrical content never political ? What of the milieus around musical production ? Could we leave Jazz (largely instrumental) out of any discussion of politicisation and music ? Techno and Jungle ? And if we can talk of a politics that does not claim to represent its aims or political demands - then can't music also build a politics out of its very material, form and delivery ?

From these questions others bloom. If instrumental music can be political then what are the formal qualities of politically radical music ? Captain Beefheart believed the regular ryhthm of mainstream pop was the heartbeat of war and conformity. Is experimental syncopation an essentially radical form ? And what about protest songs ? If the only criteria for a protest song is political activism then what about right wing activism ?
It's not impossible to imagine a playlist of fascist toe tappers from Screwdriver, Marko Perkovic, Simon Bikindi, Bound for Glory and other creeps. But actually the devil does not have the best tunes, most overtly reactionary music is vapid, derivative and far from groovy. Moreover, whilst the case for a radical interpretation of Jazz, Techno, Jungle, Gabba or Math Rock is totally plausible, the argument for an effective right wing instrumental pop music seems negligible. Maybe it is possible to harness the utopian joy of popular music for reactionary ends but it goes against the grain of the culture. True popular music is the music of the people, and carries the carnival desire for social equality, freedom and justice. Perhaps the crucial question for activists is how to gauge the effect of radical music ? How effective is a protest song that only reaches a discrete clique of devotees ? How can you subvert the mainstream without becoming appropriated by the capitalist spectacle of phoney dissent ? These are questions that Szczelkun raises and suggests we solve :

`...overall the Agit disco project is about asking the question of how we can better use our heritage of political music. Can it be made more potent through a process of mixing, recontextualisation, concentration and discourse ? How is it remembered ? Perhaps the outcome of a million different homemade selection albums in circulation might be the aim rather than some stone dead canonic discography.'

But the days of circulating albums has passed, we are now in the time of lists. As a paper book Agit Disco is both postmodern and an anachronism. Perhaps in twenty years some teenage rebel browsing deep in a second hand bookshop will come across a tattered copy and find revelations within the yellowing pages. In twenty years all books may be second hand. As the accelerating media convergence drives us to the inevitable unified device, so the act of reading becomes increasingly sequestered from the infinite hypertext of the web. Comparable online playlisting using Spotify, ShareMyPlaylists.com or Last.fm is automated and immediate. A key function of Facebook and Youtube has become the exchange of countless playlists. Last.fm not only generates playlists, it has an algorithm to assemble and connect compatible playlisters into lists of listmakers. Of course the longest list is the web itself, constantly sorted and amended, so that now the hazardous quest through bedsit collections, record stores, bootfairs and charity shops is replaced by the anodyne websurf. Whilst once the radical underground nurtured a stash of arcane and forbidden culture, now everything seems equivalent and available simultaneously. One of the negative effects of this has been to further authorise and empower the professional curators. In the chaos of undifferentiated stuff, the curator assumes the taste and authority to legitimise the canon. The Agit Disco project has the affection, fluidity and potential to subvert the professional canon. Divorced from the web the book is fascinating paradox. There are many obvious omissions from the playlists, but it is not a process of definition, it is a shared contribution. As a reader you cannot resist the invitation to the game.