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Miss Black America are one of those bands that have been hyped to the
hills for telling it like it is. They seem to have a lot more rage in
their souls about the world in which we live than most people could muster
up in a whole lifetime.
Written 21st July 2003, the following is a statement by lead singer
Seymour Glass about the state of the world today and how it makes him feel
both as a musician, as well as a human being.
“Here’s a FACT: being in a band is the best job in the World. You get to
clamber into a van with your mates, travel from town to town, meet
hundreds of people you’d never otherwise have met, get drunk, watch other
bands, jump around like a muppet for 40 minutes every night and then GET
PAID FOR IT. Most of the people you meet are lovely. You get knackered,
bruised and cabin-crazy from being cooped up in a car for weeks at a time,
but it’d be exactly the same if you were a travelling boxing instructor,
or an astronaut who hated all the other astronauts, or a man in a barrel,
so Pearl Jam and Radiohead and all those other bands who’ve ever
complained about the straaaain of it all can quit whinging and eat my
shite.
Yeah, so there are wankers in the upper reaches, the industry is
full of slags who want to make a fast buck and leave you for dead and just
don’t understand my music, man and blahdeblahdeblah – but regardless of
all the men-in-suits backwankery (those people have as much control over
you as you allow them to have), actually Being In A Band is fucking great,
and even when you get shat on, as a man with experience in these matters,
I can vouch that it’s still a million times better than working at Pizza
Hut in Uxbridge.
One of the many things I love about it is the fact that you can actually
Do Something Good – I know that sounds a bit glib and 80’s (“It’s all for
the kids, man!”), but it’s true – even if it’s helping to put on one gig
to raise money for a charity, it’s still a fucksight more than a lot of
people ever bother to do and even if you never do anything ever again and
go on to become a disgusting couchbound slob creature that produces 50
times its own weight in excrement, you’ve already kind of cancelled
yourself out – like planting a tree to make yourself carbon neutral, only
not the hippy-dippiest load of old shit I’ve ever heard. Thing is, you can
do as much or as little as you like; and while it’s not always considered
Cool to do anything that isn’t completely useless, rolling a drunk over so
he’s no longer face down in his own sick doesn’t make you Danbert Nobacon.
Know what I mean?
So we’re doing a tour for the ANL (Anti Nazi League)’s Love Music Hate
Racism campaign, because something needs to be done: recent months have
seen the British National Party (BNP), a far-right, highly racist
political party whose Chairman, Nick Griffin, is a self-confessed admirer
of Adolf Hitler’s politics, with links to terrorist group Combat 18 (one
of whose members was responsible for nail bombing a Soho gay bar a couple
of years back) gathering support all over the country – they’ve even begun
to win council seats in areas where racial tensions are high (for more
information on this, visit the Anti Nazi League website ).
While the BNP’s
profile isn’t as prominent as that of the National Front back in the late
‘70s, when it was still considered quite acceptable to stand on a soapbox
in front o! f kids in the marketplace and shout about sending the Nigger
back home (if you don’t believe me, watch the Clash’s “Rude Boy” film),
the fact is that people are falling for them – they’re currently the only
political party who speak in the language of real people, they go door to
door and chat, and people really believe that they care, and vote for
them, whether they know their leader thinks Hitler was a really great
bloke or not.
You might not agree with all the ANL’s views on how to deal
with the BNP and with racism as a whole – I certainly don’t – but the fact
is that we need to let people know what the BNP are really about, and let
the BNP know that they can’t drive a wedge between cultures that have
already, by and large, integrated amazingly well in the last 50 years. And
a travelling party seems like a damn good idea to me.
So once we started making phone calls, the tour was a piece of piss to put
together; almost everyone we asked to be involved in any way said “yes”
without any hesitation, and promoters welcomed us with open arms, often
allowing us to have far more bands on and go on later than they usually
would (with the notable exception of Barfly, who, as company policy,
strictly avoid doing anything for the good of the many – although with
them now firmly established as the McDonalds of Toilet Promoters, it was
hardly a surprise). I found this quite arousing, and once we’d confirmed
all the dates, I went up town and went Danger Wanking in Bury St Edmunds
town centre.
Danger Wanking, in case you were wondering, is where you go
to a public loo with a full-time attendant, start wanking, call really
loudly for help and then try to finish yourself off before someone comes
to unlock the door. Top larks.
Toryboy toilet tuggings aside, Miss Black America are not a political
band. I’ve only ever written one overtly political lyric (Smile, You’re On
Fire!) and that was hardly a Socialist Manifesto – I was just fucked off
at George W. Bush, which hardly makes me a GODDAMN PINKO COMMIE BASTARD,
it just makes me not completely insane. Politics, as far as I can make
out, is saying absolutely anything but the truth. What we do is say what
we think, the way we see it, because we CAN.
I don’t necessarily believe
that just because you CAN do something you SHOULD do it – otherwise, I’d
be all up for genetically engineering carrots to grow up trees, just to
piss the rabbits off – and I don’t subscribe to the notion that being
outspoken makes you a great rock star (otherwise Chumawamba would be
genius, and Jeff Buckley would be rubbish) but if you’re privileged enough
to live in a country where you can express your opinion, I feel you I have
a small degree of duty to do that, especially when faced with a bunch of
people who wouldn’t really like you to have an opinion at all – a prime
example of the BNP’s real workings came when Colin from Cultural Ice Age,
who helped put the tour together, was bundled into the back of a car by
some BNP supporters, right outside his house, and told that if he carried
on working with the ANL they’d come back and give him more than just a
verbal warning. This was 4 weeks ago, in a village near Portsmouth.
If
these people got anywhere near power, how long do you think it’d be before
they came knocking on your door? And don’t think it’s that far out of the
question: while they’re not in Hitler’s league as rabble-rousing,
self-mythologist propagandists go, you have to remember that in 1923,
following a failed coup in Munich, Hitler was a laughing stock, a
political joke; 10 years later, he was Chancellor of Germany under a
senile President who let him do whatever the fuck he wanted, and we all
know just how much he wanted.
The BNP are not the Nazi party; but the ANL
use the term "Nazi" to single out those who hold Hitler’s views and would
like to see them put into practice in any way, shape or form – like Johnny
Rotten said, “If you look like an arsehole and talk like an arsehole,
you’re an arsehole”, and a far-right party by any other name is still a
bunch of jackboot-wearing, weasel-minded bastards.
All these things aside, what supporting Love Music Hate Racism comes down
to really is a simple question: do you think it is acceptable for people
to be abused, hounded, terrorised, demonised, beaten, maimed and killed
just because of their race, their religion, the colour of their skin, what
their parents do or did, their sexuality, upbringing, accent, class, dress
sense, taste in music, political views? If the answer is “yes”, then you
are a Nazi, and it probably is political for you. If the answer is “no”,
then you are a human being, and politics has nothing to do with it”. |
unless otherwise stated.
