MULES - CLAPPING FOR CARERS

 

From the off, this debut single by Brighton-based four-piece Mules recalls British post-punk’s halcyon days of socio-political engagement. A litany of false consciousness, exemplified in lines like “Taking Ambien and tweeting is not praxis”/ “Putting filters on selfies is not praxis,” is delivered in a blunt, spoken word style that recalls the Brechtian alienation effect practiced by Gang of Four and Wire. Musically, it owes a little more to the North American post-hardcore of Wipers or Metz; but overall, the angular attack of ‘Clapping for Carers’ puts the listener in touch with a cultural spirit that was truly transatlantic as it captured a nascent discontent with the implementation of neoliberal capitalist ideology. The Gang of Four of ‘At Home He’s a Tourist’ or Fugazi at their most strident come to mind. Perhaps an even more unconscious debt may be owed to ‘Skank Bloc Bologna’-era Scritti Politti. Compare ‘Clapping for Carers’ and the Scritti song ‘Hegemony’: on a surface level, both employ the platitude “A fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay” (or “An honest day’s work/an honest day’s pay” as Mules have it), but the title of the Scritti song signifies an even more historically relevant bond.

Both Scritti’s Green Gartside and Mules’ lead singer Tommy Vincent were/are fascinated with the concept of hegemony. While imprisoned by Mussolini, the Italian communist/neo-Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci developed it in his Prison Notebooks to explain how seemingly ‘common sense’ ideas are disseminated through the media, higher education and religious institutions to ‘manufacture consent’ (a concept the linguist Noam Chomsky, a political thinker who admires Gramsci, would run with in his study of American mass media Manufacturing Consent). To confront this form of social control, Gramsci advocated a counter-hegemonic struggle in which dominant ideas of what is legitimate are exposed as pseudo-truths (at best) that serve the interests of the powerful.

Vincent explains that the song’s title and such lines as “Clapping for carers is not praxis/Classist one-upmanship is not praxis” were inspired by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s bad faith appropriation of a helpless public’s symbolic display of clapping for the underfunded NHS during the pandemic. There’s a bold ambiguity in a line like “It doesn’t matter what you’re doing/as long as you’re doing something” that could be read as self-referential and self-critical. Is the ‘doing something’ of performing a song like ‘Clapping for Carers’ an act of genuine praxis in Vincent’s definition or more ineffective performative action? Raising these kinds of questions about the relationship between musical culture and genuine political engagement is a crucial aspect of this rigorous Marxian stream of post-punk practice. Gang of Four were doing something similar. If that’s what was intended, then it speaks to a common frustration that songs like those by the Leeds punk-funkers or those by counterculture icons such as Bob Dylan before them were only able to inspire a desire for widespread sociopolitical transformation, but not actually bring it about.

“What we need to do if we’re to make a difference,” Vincent argues, “is implement collective action with a view to affecting radical systemic change.” In the absence of more practical and organic social action, it remains necessary for groups like Mules to point out what’s false and what’s missing. Jean-Paul Sartre, another important philosopher of praxis, offered something complementary in the concept of the practico-inert as put forward in his Critique of Dialectical Reason. The speaking and creative subject, for Sartre (as interpreted by Roy Elveton in an essay on Sartre and praxis), is constructed partly in a pre-existing universe of language and culture, but in the speaking moment also exists in a future sphere of others and the practical tasks necessary for their liberation. The individual is historically embodied in the ‘ready-made’ (the ‘common sense’ notions of hegemony); but the possibility remains for an inert identity to be transcended in a unity of the subject and its world.

“A suicide pact is not praxis”, sings Vincent - an argument that despair is not an option. The absurd man of the author of No Exit may well have agreed. Gramsci - who argued for pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will - probably would have too.

'Clapping for Carers' is out now on HalfMeltedBrain Records and available via this Bandcamp link:

https://halfmeltedbrainrecords.bandcamp.com/track/clapping-for-carers?from=fanpub_fnb_trk

And here's a video for the single:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GDFCHOL6-A

BAND PHOTO: (c) Sam Luck

TEXT: (c) copyright by Jon Kromka 2022