Rhian E Jones

History, politics, pop culture and the places where they intersect. The shorter www.velvetcoalmine.wordpress.com

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Published November 15 by University of Wales Press

http://www.uwp.co.uk/editions/9781783167883

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My second book, on Weird Welsh Victorian Popular Protest, is out this month. More info here.

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Defacing WWII icons, back in the day

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A response to Saturday’s events at downing street, and the Daily Mail’s article: Anarchist mob plotting a summer of thuggery

The gauntlet has been lain down.

In last week’s election, a small proportion of this country’s population, 24% of eligible voters, declared war on everybody else. We can...

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A request to Manics fans out there

This year I'll be writing a book on Manics album The Holy Bible, along with Larissa Wodtke and Daniel Lukes. My section will focus on the album's social and political context ie Britain in the 90s,...

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I was initially suspicious of Pride. There is a certain brand of British feel-good film – pioneered perhaps by The Full Monty, reaching its peak with Billy Elliot – that, for all its virtuous intentions, portrays the ravages of the 1980s in a style the writer and critic Joe Kennedy describes as: ‘deindustrialisation – a great laugh where we learned a valuable personal lesson.’ In Matthew Warchus’ and Stephen Beresford’s take on the 1984 encounter between Dulais Valley strikers and London-based activist group Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, I feared a portrayal of Wales even more cringeworthy than that of The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain; I feared ‘working-class’ and ‘queer’ being presented as mutually exclusive categories. Thankfully, Pride’s Valleys accents might be occasionally inconsistent but its politics are almost impeccable.

https://www.newwelshreview.com/article.php?id=849

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As a child of the nineteen-eighties, way before online discussions on how to be a fan of problematic things, I remember being starry-eyed about the Soviet Union. I grew up in impeccably Old Labour territory, in which the anti-Stalinist tenets of Neither Washington Nor Moscow But International Socialism had not diminished a certain instinctive admiration for the achievements of 1917. Any yearning for the USSR, though, had less to do with the reality of its final days and more to do with its symbolic opposition to a Conservative regime which was then laying siege to the industry, economy and community of my part of the country. I looked East in the way one might look to the stars in the hope of arbitrary rescue by occupants of interplanetary craft, with expectations about as realistic. My attitude was based on abstract ideals, not on the real lives of those living under conditions I could not fathom and struggling to change them. Nevertheless, in those days the existence of what seemed like an alternative to capitalism meant something which, given the current glaring absence of alternatives, is hard to recover, much less explain.

http://thequietus.com/articles/16244-agata-pyzik-poor-but-sexy-culture-socialism-ostalgie

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PALE is a new arts and culture journal. Each edition will eschew a unifying theme, and instead collate diverse pieces illuminating overlooked, marginal, forgotten, or as-yet-undiscovered issues preoccupying thinkers and artists today, which may not have found a home precisely because they fail to...

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ugh, journalists who say WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT CLASS but then that's all they say

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Socio-economic escape routes, whether through higher education, a professional career, or fame, are less available to the British working class than they were at the time of Oasis, and certainly than they were pre-Thatcher. Individuals who might previously have struggled to escape the dole queue are now enmeshed in the coils of workfare, payday loans, and zero-hours contracts, and access to the channels of political and cultural power increasingly eludes those without independent wealth. Definitely Maybe’s type of radical discontent, with its lyrical theme of wishing to be someone else, somewhere else — the restless working-class tradition that also informed contemporaries like Pulp and the Manic Street Preachers — now lacks any productive outlet. Part of the “climax and catharsis” that Oasis managed to capture was the feeling of Britain throwing off the weight of the 1980s nightmare and moving forward, even if we had nothing more stable or promising before us but the neoliberal chasm into which we now find ourselves cast.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/living-fast-revisiting-oasiss-definitely-maybe

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“We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it.”

- Oscar Wilde

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I believe that a lot of working-class awareness of disadvantage and oppression is already informed by a feminist impulse, even if the women in question wouldn’t necessarily call themselves feminists. The type of feminism visible in the mainstream media has, unsurprisingly, been dominated by women whose race and class allows them greater access to the channels of mass communication, but this does not reflect the variety of women to whom feminism can be relevant.

http://strikemag.org/sisterhood/

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To accept that society functions on a purely meritocratic basis requires the same blend of woolly optimism and wilful blindness that Reaganites invested in “trickle-down economics”. Curiously, champions of meritocracy are usually detractors of socialism, which gets dismissed as “a nice idea, sure, but it simply wouldn’t work in practice, what with human nature being just too venal, greedy and corrupt”. Yet the equally optimistic myth of meritocracy endures, even though in a country governed by an Etonian elite – the cream of society only in the sense that they’re rich, white and bad for your health – it seems as quaint as believing in the tooth fairy.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/13/bbc-chair-merit-top-jobs-talent-gender-bias-connections (via rhianejones)

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It’s become almost impossible, in official political discourse, to even raise the possibility of an alternative to the currently collapsing capitalist consensus and the austerity needed to sustain it. Let's not be mealy-mouthed here: the imposition of austerity is causing rising rates of homelessness, mental illness and (even) suicide, while the financial elite are becoming richer than ever and we are told to begrudge our neighbour their seventy quid a week living allowance [...] The possibility of articulating a left-populist alternative is not just dismissed out of hand, but actively recoiled from with a knee-jerk fear out of all proportion to reality.

http://rhianejones.com/2014/07/17/alex-niven-oasis-rhian-e-jones-interdisciplinary-labour-and-cultural-studies-socialism/

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Admittedly one might struggle to see Ari’s willingness to piss onstage, or the Slits’ on-air discussion of the stains left by menstrual blood, as a straightforwardly revolutionary act. But then again, one might also struggle with the concept that the treatment Albertine records from men throughout her life is either acceptable or inevitable. Like Germaine Greer’s advocacy of tasting one’s own menstrual blood, the Slits’ plain speaking on sex and sexuality, in an age where women were caught between sexploitation and slut-shaming, could be usefully subversive in its shockingness.

http://thequietus.com/articles/15692-viv-albertine-slits-clothes-music-boys-book-review (via rhianejones)

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Admittedly one might struggle to see Ari’s willingness to piss onstage, or the Slits’ on-air discussion of the stains left by menstrual blood, as a straightforwardly revolutionary act. But then again, one might also struggle with the concept that the treatment Albertine records from men throughout her life is either acceptable or inevitable. Like Germaine Greer’s advocacy of tasting one’s own menstrual blood, the Slits’ plain speaking on sex and sexuality, in an age where women were caught between sexploitation and slut-shaming, could be usefully subversive in its shockingness.

http://thequietus.com/articles/15692-viv-albertine-slits-clothes-music-boys-book-review

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We keep being told that feminist close-combat is over, but in a world of street harassment, Slutwalks and #everydaysexism – not to mention tabloid demonisation of single mothers and feckless binge-drinking teenage girls – walking down the street can still be a battle. It helps to learn how not to give a fuck. The Slits learned this too, becoming a bulletproof girl-gang, weaponising femininity and resisting commodification not as a calculated pose but as reflex, instinct, necessity.

From: http://thequietus.com/articles/15553-live-report-faber-social

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