Blowing over the top of a bottle of San Pellegrino

Adam Mars-Jones

Plat du Jour by Matthew Herbert
Accidental

Matthew Herbert’s Plat du Jour is an album of dance tracks united by the theme of food. Herbert has made a name for himself as a producer from collaborations with Róisín Murphy and Björk, but Plat du Jour is a different kettle of fish, a personal project that has taken a couple of years to devise and record. As the opening track makes clear – it’s called ‘The Truncated Life of a Modern Industrialised Chicken’ – he is obsessed by the ethics of eating. In its idiosyncratic way this is protest music, but there’s only one actual song on the CD, the perversely catchy ‘Celebrity’ (‘Go Gordon/Go Ramsay/Go Beyoncé/Go Beyoncé. . .’).

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Vol. 27 No. 24 · 15 December 2005 » Adam Mars-Jones » Blowing over the top of a bottle of San Pellegrino (print version)
Pages 26-28 | 4128 words

Letters

From Paul Tickell

Adam Mars-Jones describes himself as ‘someone who hates drum machines’ (LRB, 15 December). This doesn’t augur well for a review much taken up with the writer’s thoughts on ‘protest dance pop’ because inevitably he gives the dance part of this hybrid scant regard – ditto black music, so often synonymous with dance. In his version of the 1960s there’s no Curtis Mayfield or Sly Stone or the myriad of black artists who made musical protests. Of course they’re easily excluded when the definition of protest is ‘rather precarious emulsions of melody and slogan’. This conjures up the bland and tentative, and among others Edwin Starr’s ‘War’ won’t be fitting in there; nor will Jimi Hendrix’s feedback-heavy ‘Star Spangled Banner’ or his later ‘Machine Gun’.

This Band of Gypsies number is more or less a blues, which brings me to the most dispiriting part of the review, what Mars-Jones refers to as ‘the one-size-fits-all dungarees of the twelve-bar blues’. Can this folksy garment do justice to a form in which you’ll find the religious sublime (Blind Willie Johnson), the spooky (Elmore James), and the downright witty (Memphis Minnie). She by the way (the first woman to play electric guitar) was fond of glitzy split skirts and would have been puzzled by Mars-Jones’s demeaning metaphor; as would Robert Johnson in his dandy three-piece suits.

In the 1920s Memphis Minnie recorded her protest-cum-lament about the flooding of the Mississippi Delta ‘When the Levee Breaks’. It was reworked in the early 1970s by Led Zeppelin and has become one of the most sampled tracks in hip hop. But samples are maybe a bit too close to drum machines for Mars-Jones and it’s no surprise that later eras in black music are also absent from his potted history of ‘protest dance pop’. No Grandmaster Flash or Public Enemy or more recently Kanye West who’s made his feelings clear about the US administration’s response to the New Orleans flood.

Paul Tickell
London W9

From Jim Jenkins

Adam Mars-Jones thinks there weren’t many protest songs in the 1980s; but then he also doesn’t like drum machines. Songs isn’t exactly the word, but in warehouses and fields all over Britain there were people dancing to what might qualify as a variety of what he quaintly calls ‘protest dance pop’. It certainly felt like we were protesting against something, or involved in some kind of gentle revolution. But then we were all nutted on E, so maybe we were just kidding ourselves. And the hideous spectacle of 1990s so-called ‘superclubs’, the long hangover of indie guitar music, and the political disappointments of the past decade would seem to suggest that we were.

Jim Jenkins
Cardiff