Not with a spyglass, but with a wild guess

In search of an art without fascism, or at least so much of it

Keele Life Top 10, July 2025, part 1

The format is borrowed from and in tribute to Greil Marcus’s long-and-still-running “Real Life Rock Top 10.” The title is because I currently live on Keele Street in Toronto. Part 2 forthcoming in the next couple of days

1. Rattled by the Windrush: Cymande & the Cimarons, on record, on film

There’s no denying the glut of subpar music documentaries lately, but even “mid” efforts can still perform heroic labours. Witness these two 2025 albums, Renascence by Cymande and Harder Than the Rock by the Cimarons, which might not exist if each of these neglected 1970s UK bands had not gone to the docs for treatment.

Both bands have incredible stories. Cymande came together in 1971 with a synthesis of funk, reggae, soul, and jazz fusion that could only have come out of Brixton at that time. Before long they became the first British band to co-headline at the Apollo, and toured U.S. arenas supporting Al Green. Soon after they disbanded in 1974, their sound became bigger than ever in discos and hip-hop, with their tracks spun at the Gallery and at early Bronx block parties, then sampled on songs by De La Soul, the Fugees, and many more.

The Cimarons formed in a community centre in Harlesden in 1967, as Britain’s first and for many years most prominent homegrown reggae band. They were a world-touring live act who doubled as a UK roots equivalent of the Wrecking Crew, backing all comers live and in studios (from Bob Marley to Ken Boothe to Paul McCartney). They also appeared on Rock Against Racism stages with the likes of the Clash in the late 1970s, before flaming out after an early 1980s attempt at pop crossover.

Each represented the immigrant aspirations and frustrations of the Windrush generation and its heirs, in the headwinds of that era’s white-nationalist backlash. (Not so unlike our own.) They sounded their liberation politics in song, both furiously and joyously, with superb musicianship. But they were marginalized by the UK music industry and mainstream media, who either rejected Black music wholesale or tended to regard domestic variants as inherently inferior to the U.S. and Jamaican “originals.” (Canadians know that syndrome.)

They might have done better if they’d relocated: Cymande were an instant hit in the U.S. and the Cimarons were beloved in Spain, France, Japan, and especially Ireland, where many people in the 1970s felt a trans-Atlantic, post-colonial kinship with Caribbean struggles (much as they do with Palestine today). But each was too strongly rooted in their communities to leave.

Unfortunately, neither last year’s Getting It Back: The Story of Cymande nor 2022’s Harder Than the Rock: The Cimarons Story are truly great movies, precisely because of that UK neglect—there was not enough visual material from the groups’ primes for the filmmakers to work with, so they ended up documenting their reunions more than the original stories.

The Cymande movie does better at explicating the elements of the sound, having at hand the likes of Nicky Siano, DJ Kool Herc, Prince Paul, and even Jim James of My Morning Jacket to enthuse about the impacts of tracks like “Bra” and “Dove” across the decades. The overlong Cimarons doc is too reliant on the aging players themselves, who are endearing but (with spliffs burning throughout) not quite so focused.

Nevertheless both films completely succeed at restoring their subjects to their respective musical canons. And between the two they map significant patterns in diasporic cultural history; the Cimarons doc, particularly, made me want to watch Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock again.

The new Cimarons album marks their first in more than 40 years, while Cymande’s record follows up A Simple Act of Faith, their first reunion project, from 2016. While not masterpieces, both albums still serve to vouchsafe the groups’ legacies, sounding alive and full if not as transcendent as in their storied pasts.

I’m especially moved, in my heart and in my hips, by funky Renascence opener “Chasing an Empty Dream,” ostensibly an elder’s expression of concern about youth in a materialistic culture, but one that between the lines agonizes over the band’s own story: “Sometimes I wonder if it’s all been in vain ... the sacrifices that were made … when you’re chasin’ an empty dream.”

… Or does it explode?

(NB: Cymande plays Toronto on July 29 at the Concert Hall)

2. Outrageous & cultural fasci-tropism

Keeping it anglophilic: I stayed up the whole of one night last weekend devouring Outrageous, the new six-part Britbox/UKTV series about the antics of the Mitford sisters in the early-to-mid 1930s. For those not acquainted, these were six sisters of fading-aristocracy extraction (cousins of Winston Churchill, not incidentally) whose company included effervescent comic novelist Nancy, “red sheep” lefty activist and journalist Jessica, British Union of Fascists consort Diana (Mosley), and literal Hitler groupie Unity. (Who was, btw, conceived in Swastika, Ontario.)

The show was absorbing for its excellent acting and direction but irritating for its urge to Downton Abbey the story of these brilliant but undereducated women’s ideological passions down to their related romantic pursuits. Fair in the case of flaky Unity, maybe, but much more complex with Diana. And highly annoying vis-à-vis Jessica, Spanish Civil War volunteer and later author of The American Way of Death. Her lifelong political commitments were not simply about her crush on her teen Bolshevik second cousin and future first husband, as implied here. Cause and effect went much more the other way around. (He died fighting the Nazis in 1941, and she later married U.S. labour and civil rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft.)

Still, the fictionalization and even the soap-opera-ization do help restore this much-gossiped-over tale to a more immersive, immediate experience. You get why the sisters would be in search of one alternative or another to capitalism, which was in the process of destroying their centuries-long patrimony. Fascism no doubt felt closer to the feudal-class patriarchy they were raised under. But both it and Communism proffered responses to the guilt (and boredom) they felt due to their family’s disconnection from the suffering of ordinary Britons in the Depression, even as their own family fortune drained away.

There’s more emphasis here than in many past treatments on the threat the Mosley blackshirt movement posed to the Jewish and/or queer people in their own social milieu, which finally forces viewpoint character Nancy to make a moral choice. (The full consequences of which await in the second season I hope is coming.)

The matter of how to deal with loved ones who’ve undergone disturbing radicalizations feels very contemporary of course. But so is the insidious attraction of such conversions, the cultural gravity pulling the likes of Diana to what Heidegger characterized (forgive my crude paraphrase) as the voice of Being that spoke the loudest to its moment.

We’re seeing that now culturally in ways I wouldn’t have dreamed of during the first Trump administration. As the will to resist has worn down, the craving for success is driving many to jump aboard the apparently fastest, winningest train. Even if it’s a death train.

(Btw, this week I also decided finally to give up completely on Twitter.)

3. The ‘anti-woke literary scene’ … and back to the Mitford-Mosleys

Witness Rolling Stone’s recent profile (July 6, 2025) of the “anti-woke literary scene” in Los Angeles. This is a West Coast cousin/sequel to the so-called Dimes Square art-sleaze scene in NYC, which “vibe shifted” gradually from “dirtbag left” to neo-reactionary.

I sympathize with some of the antipathy expressed in the feature to the excessive “millennial moralizing” around art in the past decade-plus (in which I also sometimes participated). But their posturing about daring political incorrectness mostly seems no fresher than any bog-standard “what’s wrong with being sexy?” protestations among Art Dudes who want to dress up their clichéd fantasies as acts of liberation or at least of “assertive gusto.” A tendency that shows its whole ass when it leads some of them to embrace Trump as an avatar of that libidinal freedom.

As Outrageous reminded me, the original Fascist movements also had their artsy sympathizers, with the likes of the Futurists and to some degree the Vorticists—though of course anything avant-gardeish became “degenerate” anathema as the totalitarians attained true power. But those antecedents were at such higher levels of sophistication, that this L.A. crowd represents less “the second time as farce” than the dozenth time, as farts.

Maybe one of these writers really will find an original way to portray what it’s like to experience tremors in your formerly assured dominance without merely longing to dominate again. Who knows? But under any such temptation to throw your lot in with cruelty in the name of your own emancipation, it’s worth stopping to wonder how you’ll be regarded by the future, or at least by your own children and grandchildren.

The writer Nicholas Mosley, son of Oswald and stepson of Diana, found their legacy horrifying, and devoted himself to the question of what a truly non-fascist literature would mean. (He also wrote directly about his family, some, which is all his Wikipedia entry seems to care about.) In books like the Catastrophe Practice series, which culminates in one of my favourite novels ever, Hopeful Monsters (1990), that meant purging all pretensions of objectivity, topsy-turvying his characters’ perspectives, and recasting all statements as half-questions and certitudes as symptoms.

It makes his prose willfully awkward, keeping the reader philosophically and often amusingly off-guard. His characters are always interrogating why they act and speak as they do, and whether they are accountable for these half-involuntary choices. As Mosley wrote in one of his late books:

You can learn from your mistakes, but you do not choose mistakes because this would not be learning. You learn to choose, or perhaps that you are in league with choice, by recognizing its existence. It is like a relationship with a loved one.

A loved one, that is, who might also turn out to be a charming, murderous traitor.

4. RIP Fanny Howe

Another deeply anti-fascist writer, the poet Fanny Howe, died this week at age 84. Neither a conventional New England self-portraitist nor as radical an experimentalist as her sister Susan, Howe is perhaps best described as a writer for whom the stakes of life and language are at risk in each successive line. Here’s a lusciously mortal example from 2019’s Of Life and Love, called “Clouds.”

There's a softening
To the bricks outside
And the thousand-mile storm
Is leaving where it's coming from:
From the long-ago to my abode.

I'll sit at the window
Where it's safe to say no.
I won't go out, I won't work
For a living, I'll study the clouds
Becoming snow.

Not with a spyglass
But with a wild guess
And only three words: "You never know."
Now I see others like me
Thinning into the least thing
And drifting out like the frost of dust.

Downstairs, cries of lust.
Up here, a requiem mass
And light to lead the clouds home
To the past. All of us, poor at last.

(PS: Here is a choral setting of the poem, by the Cambodian-American composer Bosba Panh; and here a video of Howe herself reading it, though she leaves off the last part.)

5. Poor at last: The musician as worker and/or ‘middle class’

Cadence Weapon, aka Rollie Pemberton

A recent post of Michael Barclay’s directed me to this piece in The Walrus by Luc Rinaldi on “The Death of the Middle-Class Musician,” which does a commendable job of surveying the economic state of the non-star music maker in 2025. It begins with the testimony of Rollie Pemberton, aka 2021 Polaris Prize winner Cadence Weapon, who has written eloquently and often on the question himself.

But like Michael, though not on quite the same grounds, I find the historical perspective here thin, as I often do in discussions of the streaming economy. It’s hard to say what form or level of compensation for musicians ever has been standard, except to say that “ripped off” is probably the norm. The harder question is what kind of workable system would be more fair, without pointlessly wishing various technological advances and listener benefits out of existence, for example. (Though as the recent ‘Velvet Sundown’ hoax reminds us, AI slop remains well worth fighting, within, er, reason.)

One of the sharpest recent interventions in that discussion can be found in “Worker’s Song,” by writer and musician Franz Nicolay in The Baffler, which tries to suss out what we can learn from the ample 20th-century successes of professional musicians’ unions. (From some reporting I’ve done but never turned into a complete project myself, it seems quite accurate.) It’s a piece to read, re-read, and, spirit willing, act upon.

But ultimately that question can’t be separated from the larger ones that have haunted most of this list. The issues around the current musical means of production/distribution parallel all the usual factors that erode sustainable jobs and worker solidarity (viz the “gig economy”), bringing precariousness to almost every kind of work in the 2020s.

To have a thriving middle class of musicians, I suspect you mainly just need a thriving middle class, and a symbiosis will form. For all their atrocities and hypocrisies, most western nations from the 1940s to the 1990s—under pressure from their populations to reign in the brutalities of capitalism, accommodate unionization, and redistribute the most excessive wealth—did make exceptional strides in extending middle-class status to more and more people.

And that’s most of that mythologized era of viable musical professionalism people wax nostalgic over now. It’s a whole concept of progress long under assault by the rich and the right wing that’s now been driven to near-collapse, with the rhetoric of faux-populists everywhere providing cover for the killing blow.

Their true face is plain in the “big, beautiful” assault of a budget bill the Trumpist Republican Congress just passed.

Adversity can breed creativity, yes, but when it comes to the prosperity of the arts and that of the ordinary person in any halfway decent society, mostly, as Neil Young likes to say, it’s all one song. Or as Cymande put it in “The Message”:

Together ’fore we go,
Forever, like it was before.