Strangled: Identity, Status, Structure and The Stranglers - Softcover

Knight, Phil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1782797971 ISBN 13: 9781782797975

Verlag: Zer0 Books, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

The Stranglers occupy a paradoxical position within the history of popular music. Although major artists within the punk and new-wave movements, their contribution to those genres has been effectively quarantined by subsequent critical and historical analyses. They are somehow "outside" the realm of what responsible accounts of the period consider to be worthy of chronicling. Why is this so? Certainly The Stranglers' seedy and intimidating demeanor, and well-deserved reputation for misogyny and violence, offer a superficial explanation for their cultural excommunication. However, this landmark work suggests that the unsettling aura that permeated the group and their music had much more profound origins; ones that continue to have disturbing implications even today. The Stranglers, it argues, continue to be marginalised because, whether by accident or design, they brought to the fore the underlying issues of identity, status and structure that must by necessity be hidden from society's conscious awareness. For this, they would not be forgiven.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Phil Knight is a professional engineer who may well have built and installed the escalator you are standing on as you read this from your tablet. He lives in Cambridgeshire, UK.

Phil Knight is a professional engineer who may well have built and installed the escalator you are standing on as you read this from your tablet. He lives in Cambridgeshire, UK.

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Strangled

Identity, Status, Structure and the Strangers

By Phil Knight

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2014 Phil Knight
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78279-797-5

Contents

Introduction, 
Part I – Just Like Nothing On Earth, 
Part II – I Feel Like A Wog, 

CHAPTER 1

Part I

Just Like Nothing On Earth

"Groups tend to reinforce their members' beliefs and expectations, and when this involves the paranormal, the effects can be insidious. If paranormal manifestations persist and grow, the usual rules of what is possible, reliable, etc. no longer apply. The trickster constellation strengthens. One consequence is the blurring of distinctions between subjective and objective, between imagination and reality. The problems are not limited to groups of 'marginals'. I have watched as medical doctors, high ranking military officers, university professors, and other normal, respectable people were overtaken by preposterous occult beliefs. The full force of this perhaps cannot be appreciated unless one experiences it first hand."

– George Hansen, "The Trickster And The Paranormal"

"I believed that if we thought about a UFO strongly enough, maybe we could evoke it."

– Hugh Cornwell, "The Stranglers: Song By Song"

* * *

On June 2 1973, the crypto-zoologist Frederick "Ted" Holiday partook in a strange ritual on the waters of Loch Ness. Holiday had long been interested in the folklore surrounding the monster that was alleged to reside in the depths of the Loch, and which had been increasingly sighted by both locals and tourists in the recent decades. His initial theory was that this "monster", far from being the reptilian creature of popular imagination, was an overgrown form of tullimonstrum gregarium, a species of prehistoric slug, but he had, during the late 1960s, become increasingly perplexed by the animal's apparent camera-shyness.

As outlined in books such as The Dragon And The Disc, he slowly became convinced that the Loch Ness Monster, along with other denizens of what he called "the phantom menagerie" such as the Yeti, the mystery big cats of the English home counties, and extra-terrestrials, were not real creatures, but what he called "thoughtforms" – manifestations of the human collective unconscious that have a tendency to form when certain highly charged locations are visited by particularly sensitive individuals. Holiday, who claimed to have seen the monster on several occasions, regarded these manifestations as being irretrievably evil, the product of the more grotesque aspect of whatever unknown power organises the universe.

Holiday enlisted a Presbyterian priest by the name of Donald Omand to accompany him out onto the water to exorcise the loch. Although the exorcism passed off without apparent incident, within a few days Holiday and his accomplices were to encounter a bewildering array of bizarre phenomena, including mysterious flashing lights and sudden tornados that would shake the walls of their homes before abating in seconds. Holiday himself would come across one of the notorious "men in black" while attempting to investigate an alleged UFO landing site nearby. It was to be a fateful meeting – he would suffer a heart attack at exactly the same spot a year later.

Holiday was to die of a second heart attack in 1979, still firmly convinced that he had been the victim of the malign synchronicity of what he had termed, in his last book, The Goblin Universe. But what was the true nature of this strange, paranormal power that he thought he had identified? And who were going to be its next victims?

* * *

The events surrounding the recording of The Stranglers' fifth album, the conceptual The Gospel According To The Men In Black form one of the most extraordinary sagas in the history of popular music, and yet it is one that is little-known and rarely examined. It is a story that involves paradox, paranoia and the paranormal, and how these combined to derail the career of a band who, at the time, were considered to have the potential to be the most successful of their era. It is also a story of addiction, imprisonment, chronic misfortune, bizarre coincidences, and death. In order to gain some semblance of understanding of what happened, we will need to travel along some of the most neglected byways of Western thought and meet the most grotesque character in global folklore – The Trickster. Our primary guide will be the American author and parapsychologist George Hansen, who has done much to highlight how this unsavoury character, long thought to have disappeared as a primitive superstition, still operates in the margins of modern consciousness.

The Trickster archetype, whose very milieu is the marginal, the liminal, the disordered and the taboo, reveals much about the nature of The Stranglers, and particularly their singer and guitarist Hugh Cornwell. Unlike peers such as Paul Weller, Joe Strummer, John Lydon and Elvis Costello, Cornwell is something of a neglected figure nowadays, rarely spoken of in the same hagiographic terms. This is strange, as The Stranglers' frontman was once considered one of the most dangerous individuals in popular culture, being the only notable member of the punk scene that the British authorities considered worthy of imprisoning.

A similar taboo seems to surround The Stranglers themselves, who have been assiduously written out of the history of the punk and new wave movements. Thick historical volumes of the era barely reference them, except in the most curtly dismissive way. In 2013, a four-hour BBC television documentary on British punk didn't even once mention them by name. This extreme marginalisation is usually explained "rationally" by the band's misogyny, violence, and tendency to make influential enemies, but, in an exhausted contemporary culture that compulsively seeks to reassess and rehabilitate even the most derided music of the past, it seems reasonable to suspect something deeper amiss.

Indeed, there is something unclean about The Stranglers. Even now, to think about them conjures a certain ominous dread. Whereas the Sex Pistols and The Clash can be assimilated into healthy retrospectives of British pop, in which punk represents a mere burst of cultural vibrancy, there is something about The Stranglers that leaves the guardians of British popular culture feeling queasy. This pervasive aura of dread offers a clue both as to why they are so difficult to assimilate into accepted cultural narratives, and why they themselves became lured by the destructive chimera of the UFO phenomenon. Both of these tendencies suggest that the group were immersed in the phenomena of anti-structure, which is the natural domain of The Trickster.

The concept of anti-structure as its name suggests is intimately bound up in ideas of social structure. Its discoverer, the anthropologist Victor Turner, recognised that all social structures are created by the role-differentiation that an organised society requires. These variegated roles give definition and continuity to the lives of all the individuals within that society, and, most importantly, also denote the status relationships between those individuals. Structure by its very nature introduces hierarchy into human relations and thus some element of alienation and domination. By definition, status is structure, and a change in one will lead to a change in the other.

Within any society, the structure is pervasive but invisible, and Hansen perceptively likens it to a "spirit", in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Zer0 Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1782797971
• ISBN 13: 9781782797975
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 180
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar