60: The singer, the potter and my terrible body

Hello. Welcome to Border Crossing issue #60.

I hope you’re doing well and having a good summer. A very sunshine-y welcome. Also a big hello if you’re a new reader, thank you for signing up. It’s lovely you’ve joined us, snacks are over by the barbecue, make yourself at home.

[this email contains zero B*ris J*hns*n]

This time I’ve written a swirl of thoughts about my love (or not) of music and how it relates to my distaste (or not) for my physical body.

By the way, this was ages ago now, but many congratulations to Simon Atkinson, whose Fantasy Premier League team ‘Escape For Victory’ defended their crown, winning our Border Crossing League for the second year running, scoring 2,344 points. Jamie Stuart’s ‘Douche Tank’ came a strong second on 2,286 and Kenny Graham’s ‘Game Of Throw Ins’ came third on 2,270. Good game everyone. Next season incoming fast.

Let’s roll…

gems

1

Rhiannon Giddens’ radio series Black Roots on BBC Radio 4 / BBC Sounds is a terrific reclaiming of the history of American folk/roots music, to overturn the myth that it’s a white music form.

2

I’m a fan of the colourising artist Marina Amaral, her Twitter feed is excellent. Here’s a major interactive photo piece she worked on last month for the UNHCR, colouring vintage photographs of refugees, to breathe freshness into them.

3

Jyoti Yadav’s extraordinary story for Indian site The Print about how a horrific crime and injustice fifty years ago in Maharashtra set in motion profound changes to Indian law and culture. Trigger warning for sexual violence — also The Print has lots of popup ads but it’s worth it.

4

Joy Press writes for Vanity Fair on the problems at Netflix — and Hollywood’s schadenfreude about it.

5

Anand Mathal writes in Coconut Bangkok about the ‘primitive technology’ viral YouTubers.

potato gem

A Dutch study finds that potato proteins are as effective as dairy-based proteins.

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The singer, the potter and my terrible body

In the immortal words of Socrates, ‘welcome to your life, there’s no turning back.’ Oh, except it wasn’t Socrates, it was Tears For Fears.
— Lee Mack (on the BBC’s Freeze the Fear with Wim Hof)

It’s only falling back in, made me realise I’d ever fallen out.

The New York-based Pakistani singer and composer Arooj Aftab is headed toward world superstar status. Her music blends neo-sufi, jazz and neoclassical composition. Even if that doesn’t sound like your bag, check her out. There are some very, very good live sessions on YouTube. She’s the first Pakistani ever to win a Grammy award and her third album Vulture Prince was just re-released, after she signed to Verve late last year. I’ve caught Aftab live twice in the past month: first at Primavera Sound in Barcelona, then a headline show at St George’s Church in Brighton.

Before anyone heard of her in the west, still a kid, she was this early progenitor of a burgeoning Pakistani Internet-based indie music scene, sharing teenage compositions online at a time when almost nobody there was doing that. Aftab then moved to the USA to study at Berklee, before landing in New York to work as an editor and score films, while she dived into the jazz scene. She’s already edited an Emmy winning 2017 documentary called Armed With Faith, so I guess that means she’s halfway to an EGOT before she’s forty.

I don’t write often here about the two behemoth topics that slosh fervently around the caverns of my brain the whole time, that is music and politics. They pop up sometimes but overall I steer clear for Border Crossing. My relationship with other people’s music has been very complicated, in a way I haven’t felt able to address until recently. And of course my exhausted relationship with party politics (like yours probably too) is so toxic and stupid at this point, it’s not worth putting into words. Primal screaming into the void doesn’t make a great essay.

I’m just realising now that I’ve been in such a bad place with music for the past decade, it felt like abandonment, without ever coalescing into a conscious thought, or finding a language for it. So even when I’ve enjoyed and appreciated music, become a ‘fan’ of an artist, it hasn’t been helpful or deeply internalised, merely a kind of cerebral appreciation. For years. It has felt like skating on top of it, rather than swimming in it. Even as I steadfastly refused to fall into the trap of bitterly claiming ‘music was better when I was young’, still it slipped away.

So now the thing is — I’m telling you about Arooj Aftab because, though it wasn’t even my outright favourite set of the festival, I think her performance at Primavera Sound was a straw that broke the camel’s back (so to speak) of me clocking that I’d truly fallen back in love with the notion of music, in an overwhelming way. In turn, I began to realise how far I’d fallen out of love with it, before.

Arooj Aftab has a singing voice that can shift your soul’s position within its frame. It’s sort of hard to believe it’s happening. This isn’t a particularly useful comparison but Aftab’s singing reminds me of my favourite English voice of all time, that of the folk singer June Tabor. Her gift of sliding down low with gravitas, yet no loss of clarity or precision. Then soaring. Dry humour offsets the seriousness of a bewilderingly warm, intense tone (and ‘weighty content’). A bottle of red wine onstage. A big, important difference though, is most of the lyrics not being English, I can’t understand what she’s singing about. And that doesn’t remotely matter, in fact it’s a positive: this is a pure enrapturing with sound.

Aftab is a fine band leader. Her scatterling group includes incendiary Scottish harpist Maeve Gilchrist, Greek double-bass virtuoso Petros Klampanis and the bewitching New York violinist Darian Donovan Thomas, all of whom are serious journeying artists in their own right, who slay without diffusing focus. Together, this was one of the greatest small ensembles of musicians I’ve seen.

I’m almost relieved that there is a duff track on her otherwise pin-drop perfect double album. That she can make a mistake is fabulous. She performs that song very differently live, rectifying an error of arrangement, and it’s wonderful.

Have you tried switching it off and on again?

More generally, I don’t know which direction this change in me came from. Is the music of the artists I’ve fallen for these past few months so uniquely wondrous that it switched me back on, simply by its own power? Or was I already going through a process that allowed those artists in, through a kind of glitch in my defence shield? Does it matter? Why even search for meaning, just roll with the benefits.

Well. Another thing that’s occurring over roughly the same timescale is (the beginning at least of) a wholesale reconciliation with my physical body. Back in 2019, also in Barcelona, we saw Lizzo during her breakthough pre-Covid European tour, still on small-to-medium stages. Her big girl self-empowerment message, wrapped in its explicit filthy-hot language and breathless R&B pop tore me to shreds. I’m far away from Lizzo’s core demographic but it was a self-actualising hammer blow. I remember being fully immersed in the show, blown away and at the same time moved to tears by her reclaiming of her power, by the rebuttal of body fascism and embracing of self-adoration. I mean, she can fucking sing until any generation gap and cultural language differences didn’t matter at all, they’re broken down. Effortlessly, Lizzo speaks to me too, a mid-forties white beardy guy from the UK, perhaps as powerfully as she speaks to young women of colour who she’s directly engaged with.

Two years later (this bit is incongruous but bear with…) during lockdown as our TV habits took a sharp shift towards the light and escapist, we watched every series of The Great Pottery Throw Down. Chief judge Keith Brymer Jones is a big hairy bloke, a highly skilled expert, yet very sensitive. He’s become famous for crying when people reveal themselves through their pottery, which is bloody lovely. His sensitivity has attained actual value — it’s literally a stamp of quality, a proud moment for contestants to make his eyes water. In the earlier series’, when Brymer Jones sat at his potter’s wheel to demonstrate the challenges he’d set the contestants, he would wear just work dungarees, with his big hairy shoulders bared. This wasn’t an affectation, and it wasn’t commented upon within the show. It’s just what he wore to make his pottery. A high status character utilising his incredible craft skill and sharing his expertise. The physicality aspect wasn’t mentioned.

It was a tiny thing, yet this hugely impacted me in a way that’s hard to express; to a point where even trying to articulate its power, for a long time afterwards, has made me cry. This big, high status (in context) guy, both fully at peace with showing raw emotion over art — brimful of compassion — and, at the same time, a firm acceptance of a particular kind of naked chunk of (masculine) body onscreen, hewn in a way that you almost never see on telly, unless it is an object of derision, or knowingly fetishised. This wasn’t Sexy Beast. Later, for whatever reason, Brymer Jones has stayed covered up for his demos, which is a bit sad — but the good work had been done for me. Also, Pottery Throw Down has became an increasingly intersectional, quietly radical programme. It is a beautiful show in many more ways than Keith’s beautiful shoulders.

In the small (queer-friendly, horror film loving) Catalan town of Sitges, between the two festival weekends, we swim in the Mediterranean in the morning. I’m by far the least stressed I’ve ever been about going half-naked into the open. I’m not over it. I still habitually loathe this shape, almost — not quite — enough to be able to start to “fix” it, whatever that means. My addiction (and it is an addiction) to food is still basically unhealthy, triggered by boredom, or moments of harm to self-esteem, or stress, or creative frustration. But I can see liberation, just over there, right there, in the heat haze.

At Primavera Sound in 2022, I score eight artists 9/10 or higher, including: Arooj Aftab, Mogwai with their short notice 3am set, Big Thief (who I’ll try to write about soon, for another email) Caroline Polachek, Brighton’s shouty krautrock band Squid, Megan Thee Stallion demolishing a sweltering nightclub in town, late additions to the main stage Hurray For The Riff Raff and Australian prog maniacs King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, who played five sets over two weekends and didn’t repeat a song. Another eleven acts get 8/10+ in my notebook. One artist scores a perfect 10/10, which is Lorde. I’m having the time of my life, baring flesh, yet fretting to myself about why I’m scoring everything so high.

I can’t remember if I told you already but earlier this year we bought a good new record player, which I wired up in the living room to old hifi speakers, giving us decent analogue sound and access to vinyl for the first time in more than fifteen years. It’s the first turntable I’ve owned: I was in the CD generation, both as a punter and with my own music. None of my own albums were released on vinyl. There are a few 12” copies of The 253 floating around from 2001 but they never even had a real sleeve. Rifa has a terrific nineties indie collection, which I admired when I met her, yet only now we’re playing them again. Can’t dance too hard or the stylus skips. Earlier in Spring I discovered The Cure’s hallucinogenic 1989 album Disintegration. Written as a reaction against stardom, it still became a breakthrough in ‘levelling them up’ (sorry) making them reluctantly even famouser. I’ve never been a full-on Cure fan, enjoyed the singles and what not — but no devotion, so I suspect this is the first time I’ve ever sat down and listened to a Cure album all the way through. What a blast.

Discovering such an obvious, hackneyed joy as playing records (lol) goes hand-in-hand with a newly vivid absence that I’ve not put my finger on before. For the first time, I yearn for a copy of each of those old T-T albums on record, to play loud through the old speakers (probably just once or twice) and listen, and look at the sleeve. I’m serious enough about that to be hatching actual plans to achieve it. Meanwhile, in the months since we set up the turntable, despite believing I’m being very choosy about what to buy, still I’ve spent more money on music than in fifteen years.

“Be careful!” says my radio station manager friend Iain, rightly.

It’s interesting that the artists who propel me to challenge body distaste don’t look like me, and none are really aiming to speak to men like me. We’re often the negative protagonists in their lyrical scenarios, because we’ve been the world’s worst douchebags for a thousand years. It’s a lot to make up for. And even amongst all the positive stuff out there taking on men’s mental wellbeing, there’s almost nothing that could be described as ‘empowering self-love of the physical body’. But if we are able to work on ourselves to be open and intersectional enough (and ‘step back out of the way’ enough, and ‘acknowledge past flaws’ enough) to learn to embrace new creative languages and cultural hegemonies, this is one incredible plain benefit: that we get to share in powerful teaching and hard-earned wisdom. What the idiots call ‘woke’, not realising that their own byword ‘freedom’ is its own psychological hobbling. Where people like me can go on that journey, obviously we can access sublime liberation for ourselves too.

I now believe it’s been over a decade since I ‘fell out of love’ with music, without noticing it happening. It long pre-dates giving up the touring career. As a punter, I think it was caused by: the rise of podcasting, storytelling and other audio forms, disappointment in the ongoing careers (and in some cases ideological decisions) of some of my lynchpin artists, the technology-driven changes in the sound of live guitar bands, popular music becoming a visual, production-led artform…

As an artist, I think it was caused by: the rise of punter photography shared online, the rise of the importance of videos and YouTube, my own lack of crossover success (not having any hits!), the injection into music-making of unattainable expensive ‘support systems’ such as in-ear monitoring and video making…

Intrinsic webbed connections to self-loathing. Now, quiet, ongoing ecstasy: a changing relationship with music and a changing relationship with a physical body. I’m swallowed. It’s in all this stuff. In Arooj Aftab’s slow-motion Sufi mellisma. In Megan Thee Stallion’s ferocious rapping and the dominating wiggle of her bum. In Big Thief’s emotionally apocalyptic songwriting and rare, assuredly untidy sonic interplay. In Lorde’s stoned, sardonic storytelling of a pop journey. In Lizzo and Self Esteem’s unwavering self-love rhetoric. In them a liberation unfelt for the longest time.

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get in touch

email: chris@christt.com
Insta: @cjthorpetracey @thebordercrossing @folkhampton
Twitter: @christt | @folkhampton

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Look after yourself and your people.

All my love and all good things, as always.

Christopher
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