War...huh!

A good edition of BBC Radio 4's Start the Week this morning; argumentative and heavyweight, which is as it should be. I was interested most of all to hear that James Kent has made, in conjunction with five musicians in various "war zones" around the world, a War Oratorio of five pieces of music which are going to tell us, basically, all about how terrible war is.

I find it odd that people are still making things like this, when it seems that everything that can possibly be said on the subject of "the horror of war" has been said: We get it already, war is a bad thing, and despite his apparently novel means - telling us war is bad through music - I don't really see what Kent is adding to the contributions of Wilfred Owen, Joseph Heller, or, more pertinently maybe, Edwin Starr. In fact, the more that anti-war "art" is created, the more I feel that it becomes less about genuine pacifism and more about being hand-wringingly sensitive and compassionate and, dare I say it, holier-than-thou. There's little more satisfying than showing just how morally superior a person you are than pointing out how much you like to see wrongs righted and pain eased - and look, I've even written a piece of music to prove it!

Moreover, it has to be said that the apparent purpose of such art - making people think (really think) on some new, deeper level about how terrible the whole thing is, and thereby bringing about peace - is self-evidently false. We are awash with anti-war sentiment - barely a day goes by without some form of sanctimonious demonstration against Tony Blair or George Bush, or a new film/play/book/oratorio coming out and reinforcing our understanding of how War Is Hell - and yet wars go on being fought with depressing regularity, just as they have since time immemorial. In fact, one of the most, if not the most, important themes of world history is the very obvious truth that human beings really do rather relish the opportunity of killing each other in organized ways. This is not only evident from a cursory glance at a history book, but also from the studies of anthropologists, who have estimated that at any given time 68% of hunter-gatherer groups are actually at war, 20% have been at war between five and twenty five years in the past, and all others have been at war at some time before that (Divale, W. T., 1972); and that "conflict, rape, revenge, jealousy, dominance, and male coalitional violence are human universals" (Keeley, L. H., 1996).

The question, to my mind, should not then be "how can we reinforce how terrible war is?" but rather "why is it that we seem to enjoy warfare so much?" That is the one that needs to be answered if we are serious about eradicating warfare; and yet it is one that artists seem keen to avoid.

Noisms

So. Introductions.

Nah. Let's talk about Everything But The Girl instead, for no other reason than they're playing on my ipod as I write this, and that listening to them is a weirdly evocative experience for me; press a button and there I am, back in 1996, fifteen years old, spotty, greasy and walking to school in the rain with Walking Wounded on my personal stereo, thinking how poignant and melancholy and wonderful it was.

And the thing is, unlike most of the Britrock music I liked back then and thought was good (Geneva, anyone? Mansun? Spaced?), EBTG really were. They really were poignant and melancholy and wonderful. They were trip-hop but with better tunes, pop but with better lyrics, electronic but with impeccable taste. Everything they did exuded emotion and grace.

Better still, half of them was Tracey Thorn, a woman with a voice all at once smoky, sweet and soothing, capable of lifting the most mediocre song or lyric to something pure and beautiful and yearning: in her hands, Rod Stewart's hoary old I Don't Want to Talk About it becomes the dreamy, heartbroken plea that it should be; the one softly sung word "mirrorball" becomes a metaphor for nostalgia and regret.

The oddest thing to me at fifteen (and which is still rather odd to me now to, although I should know better) is that despite the utter sexiness of her voice, she is in fact one of the least sexy women in pop. The sound that I found, and find, so sultry and alluring, comes from a woman who, if I passed in the street, I wouldn't give a second glance. That isn't so unusual in itself - I know that looks have nothing to do with talent - but it tells me something interesting about myself, in a kind of roundabout way; I love EBTG for their music and lyrics and the way they seem to really mean something, and I suspect that it's precisely because I don't find Tracey Thorn at all attractive. Whereas with most other female artists I usually think about how much I'd like to get them into bed when I listen to them, and probably don't take them very seriously as a consequence, with her I think about what really matters - the music. It's the same with all the other female musicians who I've ever genuinely liked - Beth Orton, Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell - and I suspect that if they were better looking I never would really have gotten to like their music very much in the first place. I just would have put them in the box of 'women who are quite fit', and missed out on some of my favourite songs.

Which makes me think. Almost all of the female musical artists who have really been critical successes - asides from the ones I've mentioned, Chrissy Hynde and Billie Holliday spring to mind - have been so in spite of the way they look. I'm sure the success is due only to talent as much as it is to the fact that men will take a woman more seriously if they don't want to sleep with her.