This is Gangstagrass, a band that combines bluegrass and hip-hop. I came to mock, because bluegrass is the music of yokels with bad teeth, but it’s really quite wonderful. The combination works both musically and thematically: both genres of music come from people at the very bottom of the heap, from the poorest working class white and black people respectively.
There’s something similar going on in the music of former House of Pain member Everlast, although in his case the working class genre he went for was blues rather than bluegrass. This is pretty old but I love it.
I’ll come back to the subject in more depth some time later, but this reminds me that one of the things I’m not proud of is a kind of class snobbery I have about country music: it brings so many negative connotations, and I have no doubt that as a result I’ve missed out on some wonderful musical experiences in the same way people who dismiss pop music have missed the magic of, say, Robyn or Carly Rae Jepsen.
I’m trying very hard to burst out of my self-imposed cultural bubble and experience things I’d normally dismiss out of hand: one of my most recent bookings is to see Scottish Ballet doing The Crucible, combining two art forms I haven’t experienced: ballet and theatre. So don’t be too surprised if you see me down the front of the Grand Old Opry some time soon.
It’s not perfect. Private schools are exempt. But if you aren’t LGBT and didn’t go to school in the era of Section 28, it’s hard to express just how incredibly big a deal this is.
The Daily Record, Scotland’s favourite newspaper. This nonsense, which is bad enough, was over Section 28 repeal in 2000: things were even more toxic in the 1980s.
When I went to school, 70% of people thought LGBT people were abominations. The Government, aided and abetted by the tabloids, deliberately fostered anti-gay prejudice of the “they are coming for your children” variety. I’ve written more about that era here.
Section 28 made it illegal for local authorities – who ran state schools – to “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” By “promote”, the legislation meant “describe”. LGBT kids didn’t get proper sex and relationship education and many in-school support groups shut down fearing prosecution.
And now, we have our government vowing to protect LGBT kids and putting measures in place to do just that.
Tie Campaign co-founder Jordan Daly said: “After three years of campaigning, we are delighted that LGBT-inclusive education will now become a reality in all of Scotland’s state schools.
“This means that all young people will learn about the LGBT community; their contributions to our society, the history of our equal rights movements, and the impact of homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic prejudice and bullying.
“The implementation of LGBT-inclusive education across all state schools is a world first, and in a time of global uncertainty, this sends a strong and clear message to LGBT young people that they are valued here in Scotland.
This will save lives. I love this country so much sometimes.
INT: A MEETING ROOM - DAY
A small group of people sit on plastic chairs. Some are young; some are very old. One of them coughs and stands.
CARRIE (visibly nervous):Â
Hi everyone. My name's Carrie and I... I...
YOUNG WOMAN:
It's okay, Carrie. You can do this. Be strong!
CARRIE (sobbing):
My name's Carrie and I have a... a... a ukulele.
I like ukuleles. They’re fun little things, like baby guitars. Because they use a different tuning to guitars they’re cool songwriting tools – stripped of your usual reference points you can’t just play the same old stuff – and in the hands of someone like Peter Buck they help make some really gorgeous music such as a lot of R.E.M.’s Automatic For The People (although Losing My Religion was played on mandolin, which is similar but tuned differently).
But people really hate them. Otherwise nice, normal, well-adjusted people go a funny red colour when you talk about ukulele music; others visibly blanch at the suggestion you might play one anywhere near them?
Why?
I think there are several reasons. First up, there are hipsters. People being quirky in a really performative way are intensely irritating, and sadly playing a ukulele is an easy way to be quirky in a really performative way. It’s the John Lewis Xmas ad made flesh, your favourite indie song played by some wanker on a tiny ten-quid instrument.
Secondly: Tories. Mumford and Sons probably have entire mansions full of ukuleles.
Thirdly: it’s a bit naff. That’s something manufacturers have actually exploited: there have been ukuleles shaped as Gibson Les Pauls and as Flying V guitars by firms that were clearly taking the piss.
Fourthly, and this is mainly a UK thing, George Formby. You’ve got to love a country that’s still annoyed about a popular entertainer from the 1940s. And he’s got a bad rap because the world of popular entertainment was a lot more innocent back then. Give me enough gin and I’ll argue that Formby was the Sex Pistols of his era: not only was his one-man act about as DIY as you can get, but his banjo ukulele-powered The Window Cleaner was banned for its horrific smut.
There’s no doubt that in the wrong hands, the ukulele can be a terrible thing. I deeply traumatised some friends the other day by sending them a YouTube clip of a man doing a very bad cover of Morrissey’s Suedehead on a ukulele.
But in the right hands, they’re great. I wrote a song on one the other day, and while that particular song is now an extremely vicious-sounding guitar stomper, the original demo of ukulele and acoustic guitar was really warm and lovely.
Never mind me, though. I’m rubbish. Check out this guy playing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.
His name is Jake Shimabukuro. Isn’t he great?
And here’s Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder.
The ukulele has a fascinating history. It’s the descendant of an instrument called the machete and travelled to the US from Portugal via the Hawaiian Royal Family. It caused a craze in 1920s America, where it felt like an exotic novelty, and became associated with that most sleazy of all genres, jazz. Things were going just great until the Wall Street crash.
While the US lost interest, UK performers embraced the same banjo ukulele that George Formby would make famous, and after WWII the arrival of mass market manufacturing led to a second US ukulele craze, this time with plastic instruments sold to kids. The figurehead of the second ukulele boom was Tiny Tim, and that’s where it all went wrong.
Here’s what I mean.
With George Formby on one side of The Atlantic and Tiny Tim on the other, the ukulele’s cool was irreparably dented. And it’s been that way ever since, with the good efforts of bands such as The Magnetic Fields drowned out by the finger-in-one-ear bullshit of Mumford and Sons and their many terrible imitators.
Here’s The Magnetic Fields with This Little Ukulele:
I think it’s a real shame that the ukulele has fallen out of favour. It’s a brilliantly cheap way to make music (it costs a fraction of what you’d pay for a guitar), it’s a doddle to learn, it’s brilliant for kids and it’s capable of genuine magic.
It’s 2018 and a publicity-seeking entrepreneur embarks on a high-profile court case.
“If it’s okay for black men to marry white women, then it should be OK for me to marry my pet pig,” he chuckles. Newspapers and radio make it their light-hearted story of the week.
No? Let’s try this one.
It’s 2018 and a publicity-seeking entrepreneur embarks on a high-profile court case.
“If it’s okay for lesbian women to marry, then it should be OK for me to marry my dog,” he sniggers. Newspapers and radio make it their light-hearted story of the week.
No?
It’s 2018 and a publicity-seeking entrepreneur embarks on a high-profile court case.
“If it’s okay for disabled people to get special parking spaces, then it should be OK for me to identify as disabled,” he snorts. Newspapers and radio make it their light-hearted story of the week.
Still not with me?
It’s 2018 and a publicity-seeking entrepreneur embarks on a high-profile court case.
“If it’s okay for trans people to change their legal genders, then it should be OK for me to change my legal date of birth,” he snorts. Newspapers and radio make it their light-hearted story of the week.
That one happened.
The guy’s intent doesn’t matter; it’s irrelevant whether he genuinely feels hard done by or if he’s using this to promote something. There is no substantive difference between the coverage of this story and repeating the “I identify as an attack helicopter” abuse trans people get on social media. It reinforces the trope that trans people are tricksters or mentally ill, that legal gender is something people change on a whim.
Last month, the extremely dodgy anti-trans group Fair Play For Women dropped a five-figure sum on a full page advert in the Metro claiming that reforms to the Gender Recognition Act would threaten women’s safety. It was cynical. It was designed to whip up hatred. And it was absolute bullshit.
Some of us complained to the Advertising Standards Agency, which regulates print advertising. They’ve just sent me their verdict.
With regards to the complaint you made, also along with several other complainants, we understand that you are concerned that the ad misleadingly implied that women will be at risk as a result of the Gender Recognition Act consultation. After assessing the ad in light of this concern, we think it may have broken the Advertising Rules on misleadingness and we have taken steps the address this.
Unfortunately the verdict is irrelevant and the steps – telling the group not to make such claims again – are pointless. The advertisement ran, the government consultation is now closed. Trans people were silenced; unfortunately the bigots weren’t.
When is “random person has an opinion” news? When it’s a “concerned parent”. This is from yesterday’s Scottish Daily Mail.
The text describes how a “father-of-two” criticised the First Minister. “Edinburgh parent Richard Lucas…”
Now, Mr Lucas is indeed a parent. But he also has another role. He’s the head of the ultra-right wing Scottish Family Party. He left UKIP to create the party in order to “fill the void” left by the abandonment of “Judeo-Christian-inspired values of traditional Western civilisation”.
Their (or more likely, his: we’re not talking a mass movement here. The party has fewer than 2,000 Facebook followers) policies include getting gay people counselling to stop them being gay, to stop golf clubs being forced to admit women and to battle the evils of “feminist orthodoxy” and human rights. The party hates trans people and gay people and feminists and immigrants and women’s reproductive freedom and all the other right wing hate figures and argues that right-wing bigots should be legally allowed to beat their children and discriminate against anyone they disapprove of.
In other words, he’s a fruitcake who should be fired into the sun, the kind of arsehole who finds a home writing columns for the Glasgow Herald.
Or if you prefer pictures:
None of that, as you can see, made it into the Mail article. He’s just a reasonable parent with no particular axe to grind.
This is despicable journalism, and there’s a lot of it around. All too often people who run pressure groups are allowed to present themselves as ordinary people, and the journalists either don’t bother to find out who they are – which is shoddy journalism – or they know and keep it from their readers, in which case they’re no longer journalists but propagandists.
It happens on radio too, phone-ins populated by ordinary people who forget to mention that they’re councillors or candidates or head of fundraising for political parties or pressure groups. And you get it on shows such as Question Time, where representatives from “think tanks”, aka pressure groups with shadowy funding, advance the agendas of their paymasters.
This simply isn’t good enough. It’s poisoning the well of genuine debate and in many cases it’s giving bigots a platform they would be denied if their true affiliations were made clear.
Time for our next caller. Adolf is a painter from Braunau Am Inn, and he’s got some interesting views on the subject of immigration.
On the verses she trips across syllables like skipping stones and chews vowels like gum — an affectation that’s spawned no end of affectionate memes. On the pre-chorus, she switches to the sloshed gutters of her low register, Auto-Tune bubbling off the vocal like a Poliça record. On the chorus — a big one — she belts loud, but it’s not the immaculate belt of a Whitney Houston, but one with exertion and rasp, strain and push (in the spinto sense, pushing away air). Where traditional divas’ voices sound like centers of gravity, Sia sounds like she’s fighting against gravity itself. She’s singing about it, too; the chorus doesn’t end with a big high note, but an almost-mumbled oath: “holding on for dear life.”
This is Glasgow’s city of the dead, the Necropolis. It’s also a brilliant place to watch fireworks, which is what the people in the photo were doing last night. I love this shot, it looks more like I’ve stumbled upon some kind of ritual.
I’ve written many times about the “detransition myth”, the oft-repeated and thoroughly debunked claim that most trans kids who go through medical transition then change their minds. The short version: anti-trans groups tell you that 80% of trans kids detransition; the actual numbers show that 80% of gender non-conforming kids aren’t trans. Those kids aren’t given any medical treatment whatsoever.
It doesn’t stop the bullshit, unfortunately. The weekend papers were full of it once again this week, prioritising scaremongering nonsense from anonymous “concerned parents” over actual facts.
Wouldn’t it be great if the newspapers had some real numbers to work with?
Over the weekend, the various medical experts that comprise the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) had a conference. This is important, because it’s the WPATH guidelines that (eventually) inform the healthcare trans people are given. They’re a serious bunch.
One presentation analysed detransition rates in the Nottingham gender clinic, a very large provider of trans-related assessment, counselling and healthcare. Of the 303 trans kids studied, how many do you think detransitioned?
It should be easy. If there’s an 80% detransition rate, you’d expect to see 242 people detransitioning.
The actual number?
One.
From the study:
Only one person of the 303 reviewed made a detransition (0.33%). They later transitioned again.
There were two other detransitioners, but they withdrew before ever attending the clinic. But even if you take them into account, the real world detransition rate was 0.99%.
The “why” is as interesting as the “how many”. Detransition wasn’t because the patients realised they weren’t trans. The patients said they couldn’t continue because their families were unsupportive: things were just too difficult.
Unlike the newspapers, I’m going to point out the flaws in the numbers I’m using to make my point. It was a study over one year, it’s just one gender clinic, and over time you’d expect more people to revert to their original gender presentation because as I’m the first to admit, this shit is hard. Forums are full of stories of people who came out and attempted transition only to retreat because their lives were so spectacularly shit due to lack of familial acceptance and the prejudice of others. Eventually they re-transition, but it’s often many years later.
I would expect the actual numbers over a longer period to be higher than 0.99%.
However, the numbers do correlate with others: the numbers from private trans health providers, many of whom can’t name a single case of permanent detransition; the surgical regret rate of 2% among gender confirmation surgery patients (that’s the kind of regret rate many surgeons can only dream of. It’s much higher among, say, cosmetic surgery providers); the many studies that show trans kids with supportive families living happier lives and the ones with unsupportive families living miserable ones.
One of the reasons detransition rates are so low is because we already have a cruel but effective way of weeding out people who aren’t serious or who aren’t strong enough to cope. It’s called the NHS. The system is so overloaded and waiting lists are so long that the supposed “fast tracking” you read about in the papers is a process that can take two or three years just to get to an initial assessment, with another couple of years of assessments.
We haven’t quite reached this stage, thank God. In the US, Nazis like these yahoos in Georgia are still a fringe group. Neo-Nazis are much more subtle, and much more dangerous.
White supremacists and other far-right extremists have killed far more people since Sept. 11, 2001, than any other category of domestic extremist.
And yet as the NYT details, it’s been almost entirely ignored by law enforcement.
Data compiled by the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database shows that the number of terror-related incidents has more than tripled in the United States since 2013, and the number of those killed has quadrupled. In 2017, there were 65 incidents totaling 95 deaths. In a recent analysis of the data by the news site Quartz, roughly 60 percent of those incidents were driven by racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, antigovernment or other right-wing ideologies. Left-wing ideologies, like radical environmentalism, were responsible for 11 attacks. Muslim extremists committed just seven attacks.
Meanwhile the US President vilifies muslims and describes white supremacists as “good people”. But this isn’t just a problem with the current administration. As the NYT notes, it goes back decades and its anti-semitism goes back further still. It’s just that a toxic mix of right-wing politics, shockingly negligent journalism and institutional incompetence has created the perfect storm for it to flourish. Some 22 million Americans currently believe that neo-Nazi or white supremacist views are perfectly acceptable. And there are multiple credible reports of white supremacist groups deliberately targeting law enforcement jobs, moving what’s already a largely conservative workforce much further to the right.
As I’ve written many times before, social media has played a significant role in normalising and spreading neo-Nazi propaganda. The NYT again:
alt-right memes, while dripping in irony, were also, in essence, hate speech, part of a propaganda war arguably intended to spread terror just as much as any ISIS execution video.
The so-called debates we see, the platforming of the likes of Steve Bannon or various alt-right “shitlord” trolls, are playing into their hands. They’re amplifiers, enabling extremists to reach enormous audiences. What liberal media types (yes, people like me) seem unable to understand is that they’re being played. The alt-right aren’t interested in debate. For them, there really is no such thing as bad publicity.
We’re living in very frightening times, I think, and things are going to get worse before they get better.
