A long time ago I had intended to write an article about
Russell Brand for this blog. This would have been about 2013/14 between the
Jeremy Paxman interview and the 2015 General Election. We were at that stage
more than half a decade into the crisis and while things hadn’t quite descended
into the infernal quagmire we find ourselves in now they were certainly gearing
up. During that time Russell emerged as a voice of a type of politics that is
as old as power structures themselves, that has been around in something
approximating its current form since modernity began and has always been there,
though rarely articulated in the mainstream of political or social discourse.
Also, the specifics of they way in which it blew up and other people reacted to
it said something very interesting about the culture around politics and the
media in general at this juncture in our history. As ever and to my own personal annoyance, in spite
of the fact that I felt I had some unique insights to contribute to the
conversation I never got around to laying those thoughts down in a coherent
manner, which is inconveniencing me right now as there seems to be something
similar happening right now in Ireland with two other public figures and I
don’t have that previous work to refer back to.
So, failing that and without getting into the whole Russell
Brand thing at length I’ll now sum up the salient points of this essay that
never was, or as I see them the three features of what I’d call The Russell
Brand Moment:
1) Revolutionary or even quite a lot of the time left-reformist politics are
ruthlessly no-platformed by the gatekeepers of the mainstream media out of the
general political discourse. On this occasion an individual circumvents the
gatekeepers by already having access to a platform due to their celebrity
status built in a long career elsewhere in the media as an entertainer.
2) This was assisted by a use of social media platforms as a
way of bypassing said gatekeepers and reaching a wide audience in a way
impossible just a decade ago and unthinkable in any other generation.
3) That said, there are limitations that we must understand,
no point getting over enthusiastic. The individual at the centre of this is
usually part of the movement and reasonably well informed, but about to the
level of the average cadre, which is understandable, they already have a
full-time occupation, i.e. whatever propelled them to their celebrity status in
the first place and may hold contradictory positions; they may slip up on
particular issues when called to voice opinions outside of their immediate span
of knowledge. Added to that their no more free of any unreconstructed societal
attitudes than the rest of us. It would be churlish of us to expect otherwise.
The 3rd point I had actually observed at the time and was
bourn out by the trajectory the whole Brand thing took over the course of 2015.
Essentially Brand fell at the first hurdle making the rookie error of seeing a
modest shift leftwards on the part of the Labour Party as a new dawn in UK politics and
backing David Milliband in the 2015 general election. In doing so he shot what
credibility he had and retired temporarily from public life and the one man war
against the media and political establishment he’d been on since the Paxman
interview. He’s been back since but that
moment has tangibly passed. I’m sure he’s kicking himself now that the actual
labour left has made a breakthrough, but maybe we’ll look back and see the
Brand moment as a precursor to the ascension of Corbynism.
So with that in mind I’d like to talk about what’s going on
with a public figure in Ireland; Blindboy Boatclub of The Rubberbandits.
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| The Rubberbandits |
The Rubberbandits are two friends who grew up together in Limerick that go by the aliases of Blindboy Boatclub and Mr
Chrome. They were early stars of Irish social media, making their name
initially on Bebo and Myspace with a series of humorous prank phone calls. In
2007 they started making comedic hip hop and gigging a live show. In their
music videos and while performing they both always wear a plastic shopping bag
with eye and mouth holes cut out while their DJs dressed up as disgraced former
government minister Willie O’Dea. Their first video Horse Outside went viral
and took them from 'internet famous' to genuine notoriety. The humour of these
songs has a certain off-the-wall sillyness and broadness to it, but like some
of our best (O’Brien, Milligan etc.) it is belied by a fierce wit and
satirical eye, the targets of which have ranged from the hyper-sexual machismo
in hip-hop to ill informed armchair republicanism to hipsters.
By the beginning of this decade the Bandits were hot shit and
have only gone from strength to strength, scoring TV work for RTÉ, The BBC,
ITV, Channel 4. They had one of their songs featured in the new Trainspotting
film and have played gigs and festival appearances up and down the island and
internationally. Through all this they have managed a degree of relative
anonymity for two people in the entertainment industry who are household names
in a modern country. Their names are out there and can be accessed with a
cursory Google but there’s only a single picture of Chrome’s face sans-plastic
bag and none of Blindboy. Seriously, you can find a picture of
what Burial looks like IRL easier.
More recently, Blindboy has authored and published a book of
short stories, The Gospel According to Blindboy in October 2017 and started doing
a
podcast which was initially to promote the book but has taken on a life of
its own, topping the iTunes podcast chart since its first episode continuing to
do so through to the time of writing.
Through that time Blindboy has used his media presence to
articulate the common sense perspective of his generation, using his platform
to talk about pertinent issues if the day, mostly looking at them through the
lense of mental health, sharing his own experiences to destigmatize something
that’s still heavily taboo in Ireland. An early intervention was in 2006 when
he spoke out against Bebo’s use of profile views, which he considered
psychologically unhealthy to the point where it might lead to someone taking
their own lives and called for the practice to be discontinued. This lead to
his page being shut down without discussion by Bebo in spite of their
popularity (the interview has now been reproduced in the feb 20th podcast
God's Posture where he
speaks about it at length). The evils of social media and potential deleterious
effects on the psyche of the users and unconscionable business practices of the
various platforms is something that we’re now all familiar with and has been
discussed and analyzed to the point of cliché but in 2006 looking at that type
of media through psychological theory was quite novel. He understood social
media as only someone who grew up using it could.
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He’s also used this as a way into the wider issues effecting
Irish society, critiquing capitalism by looking at the socio-economic
conditions which drive metal illness and talking about the psychological
benefits for men of embracing feminism on the Late Late Show where he’s a
frequent guest and expanding on these themes at length in the podcast. More
recently he’s weighed in on the movement to repeal the 8th amendment. In a
recent podcast he interviewed the film and TV star Cillian Murphy, who rarely
gives interviews but had reached out to him to collaborate on some repeal
propaganda, specifically orientated towards young men who the usual political
discourse wouldn’t reach and might otherwise be apathetic on the issue. When
the referendum was won by a substantial margin what most activists in the field
have known for years was accepted, finally, by the establishment, i.e. that the
pro-choice position had (in Gramscian terms) transcended good sense to become
the common sense position. One can’t underestimate the role of pop-cultural
figures in expressing and solidifying cultural turns like this.
Getting back to what I’ve proffered as the three features of
the “Russell Brand moment”, the first two points seem to be fairly self evident
based on what’s been outlined so far. There are differences though, he’s not
been as confrontational or taken on the beast as directly as Brand had been
doing, even now much later it still astounds me that Brand with his YouTube
channel was in a running dialogue with the Murdock media empire and that he
could goad them into responding to him on the nightly Fox news shows.
Also, Blindboy’s personal politics are quite different to Brand who consciously
and overtly identified with the revolutionary tradition and specifically
Anarchism (though a somewhat muddled and idiosyncratic one). Instead Blindboy
talks about his family history in the West Cork IRA in the 1920s though he
doesn’t identify with any contemporary Irish republican organisation. When he
gets down to it he’s decidedly left-reformist, stopping a good way short of
anti-capitalism though decidedly to the left of the Irish Labour Party. Which
seems fair enough to me as it would put him about where most Irish people, and
in particular those around the great social movements of recent history are at
the moment, i.e. conscious and even proud of the republican revolutionary
tradition, to the left of consensus politics on most issues and if not up for a
full overthrow of the state, are certainly disillusioned with it as-is and
yearning for change.
Which brings me to the question of how should organisations of the left ought to relate to
him? Is there a right way to respond to these figures that as they occur in the
culture, especially since with the continuing prevalence of social media and
the disintegration of the institutions that were traditionally the gatekeepers
of the cultural discourse this sort of thing is liable to happen in the future.
Again, I’m sorry that I never managed the Russell Brand post because a lot that
happened on the left in the wake of the Newsnight interview and subsequently is
instructive. You had stuff like the “I Support Russell Brand’s Call for
Revolution” facebook page. I will be generous and assume this was the work of
one Brand fanboy who was an SP member rather than a party social-media
initiative, but it struck me as a bit band-wagon jumpy and opportunist.
Basically it was an SP member using the Brand moment to proselytise for his
specific fraction by creating the page to share Brand content and SP content,
often content specific to his local branch in
Coventry. Now I wouldn’t want to pick on the
guy unduly but I am singling him out as an example of people on the left
getting overly enthusiastic and just being narrowly focused on how to further
their sectional or even personal agenda without looking at the bigger picture,
which ought to be inclusive.
Still, I prefer this approach to the churlishness and negativity that a lot of
leftists and activists responded to Brand with. For those unfamiliar I’ll refer
you to Mark Fisher, one of the few people on the left who at the time had what
I’d call the correct take on Brand:
The next night, it was clear that Brand’s appearance (on newsnight) had
produced a moment of splitting. For some of us, Brand’s forensic take-down of
Paxman was intensely moving, miraculous; I couldn’t remember the last time a
person from a working class background had been given the space to so consummately
destroy a class ‘superior’ using intelligence and reason…. Brand had
outwitted Paxman...
The moralising left quickly ensured that the story was not
about Brand’s extraordinary breach of the bland conventions of mainstream media
‘debate’, nor about his claim that revolution was going to happen. (This
last claim could only be heard by the cloth-eared petit-bourgeois narcissistic
‘left’ as Brand saying that he wanted to lead the revolution –
something that they responded to with typical resentment: ‘I don’t need a
jumped-up celebrity to lead me‘.) For the moralisers, the
dominant story was to be about Brand’s personal conduct – specifically his
sexism.
Rather than be happy that our politics were suddenly being
articulated in the mainstream he was lit on for past personal indiscretions and
problematic material from his old stand up routines. Now I’m not going to
defend any of that, just saying that when something like that happens that this
was a lot of people’s first response does not speak well of them as individuals
or the movement they inhabit. It felt to me at the time that after decades of
defeat and retreat and so many years in the bunker that a lot of these
activists just didn’t know how to take it when something good happens. There
was also a tangible element of jealousy relating to the whole thing. These h8rs
were people who had spent years or decades in the trenches being patently
ignored by the media. Seeing someone from so far outside their club, who is a
bit of a clown, doing what they could and would have done if only they’d been
given the opportunity. I can only imagine how that smarted.
And I’ll reiterate, its not like he’d done nothing, a lot of the criticism was
legit to some extent. Nobody should be afforded a pass for bad behaviour just
because they’ve done some good work. But, again getting back to Mark Fisher’s
peice:
It is right that Brand, like any of us, should answer for his behaviour and
the language that he uses. But such questioning should take place in an
atmosphere of comradeship and solidarity, and probably not in public in the
first instance – although when Brand was questioned about sexism by Mehdi
Hasan, he displayed exactly the kind of good-humoured humility that was
entirely lacking in the stony faces of those who had judged him. “I don’t think
I’m sexist, But I remember my grandmother, the loveliest person I‘ve ever
known, but she was racist, but I don’t think she knew. I don’t know if I have
some cultural hangover, I know that I have a great love of proletariat linguistics,
like ‘darling’ and ‘bird’, so if women think I’m sexist they’re in a better
position to judge than I am, so I’ll work on that.”
So far though there seems little sign of anyone of any
significance on the left doing that to Blindboy. Partly this is because of how
he’s been handling himself. Also, I’d put that down to the political culture on
the Irish left as not being so hostile, unlike Britain four years ago we’ve not
had a series of defeats, disappointments, organisational schisms and wasted
opportunities to build a culture of begrudgery out of. Far from it. The
backlash might happen, some of the stuff from the Rubber Bandits is pretty off
the wall and if one were so inclined one could go back through his work looking
for stuff you could decontextualise and paint as problematic I dare say you
could nitpick enough out of it to make whatever point you wanted if you were so
inclined.
But then why would you?
Which brings me in a roundabout way to what I propose as the right and sensible
thing to do in this instance and in general: constructive engagement. When the
political discourse gets opened up beyond the usual quarters of the activist
left we should be in there, not just to capitalise on it for our own benefit
but to engage with the people coming to it from that direction with our ideas
and the good sense we’ve acquired through decades of struggle and also to be
open to what we can learn from them.
One thing that I’d also propose is to acknowledge the
immense potential someone like Blindboy has in overcoming something that’s been
a bit of an issue on the left. Again because we’ve been on the defensive for so
long we’ve got to a point where we seem to spend a lot of time concentrating on
telling people what to not do. I think that having a vision of how things could
or should be is also important if we are to get anywhere. It’s particularly good to have this discourse directed towards
men. With the cultural revolutions and progress towards gender equality a lot
of the traditional role of men in society has come to be seen, quite rightly,
as oppressive. The traditional narrative of patriarchy has been torn down but
we should do more to provide something for men in its absence, if for no other
reason than if we don’t somebody else will. Jordan Peterson has made a bit of a
splash doing exactly this. That said, depending on your position in the
movement that might not be prudent or appropriate, so when Blindboy talks on
the podcast about physical exercise, mental exercise and how one relates to the
other, that is what he’s providing. In fact since the early drafts of this
piece when I wrote the last sentence he has basically said this on the podcast
in response to a listeners query about the Jeepster.
It also means to an extent acknowledging that while he does
have a part to play in the struggle he’s not an expert by any means in
organising or experienced in the practical side of the movement. So, when he
does drop the ball, as in his recent comments on the Trump protest or letting
his podcast guest Vincent Browne rabbit on in an ill-informed and inaccurate
manner about the organised left parties in Ireland (including mine), that we at
least have that in mind when we engage him back on these issues.
For now though, I’m just looking forwards to enjoying the
show. It is a part of a national conversation that people my age are having in
public that isn’t going on anywhere else and I’ll be happy to see it continue.
I am interested to see where he takes what he’s doing in the future.
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