#anyway fuck enoch powell fuck eric clapton and fuck fascists in general

[lookninjas]

So I actually have a story about how the cover art for this last issue of FUCKIT came to be. 

For those who follow me and don’t blog the FUCKIT: the zine tag (thank you for that, by the way), you’ll probably remember that when I was recruiting for submissions, the image I was using was this guy:

Super fun, right?  Definitely suits the theme of “countering a culture.”  Hideously relevant, what with all the drag bans and everything.  I’d put a lot of time into it (the tackiest art is always the hardest), and I’d enjoyed the time I put into it and I was very attached to it and that was the direction for the issue, I was sure.

I also made that decision back in, like, October.  By February, shit had changed. 

Some of that’s just February, to be fair.  Winter is rough, and the end is the roughest part.  Melancholy is a natural element of the season.  Some of it was Terry Hall dying back in December, which got me back into a lot of music I hadn’t really listened to for a long time, which got me thinking about different things (as music always does).  All the bits and pieces of ideas I’d been rolling over to find subject matter for the zine didn’t really compel me anymore.  None of the ideas that did appeal to me really matched up with smirking John Waters on the Cross.  But letting go of the concept seemed short-sighted, and potentially self-indulgent.  What if people had been writing to the theme I’d presented, with the imagery I’d given them, and then I changed it last second?

Then I read @ximen​‘s piece for the zine.

I know no one’s had a chance to read it yet apart from me (although that’s obviously going to change for several of you in the next couple of weeks, depending on shipping times, and also you can get the zine here), but to give some kind of context:  One of the running themes of the piece is Eric Clapton’s not-nearly-as-infamous-as-it-ought-to-be, deeply racist rant at a concert in 1976.  If you’re not interested in reading it -- well, don’t blame you.  It’s unforgivably bad, and his attempts to walk it back have been not terribly great, actually.  However.  Something genuinely good came out of Clapton’s bullshit, and that was Rock Against Racism, a group of musicians and activists who put on show after show after show in the UK and the USA to fight back against the rising tide of racism, facism, and nationalism.  Over the course of five years, RAR worked to unite ordinary people to fight against groups like the National Front, and inspired people to get involved by founding their own RAR groups, hosting their own RAR concerts and festivals...

And starting bands, of course, like a little group from Coventry that started off as the Coventry Automatics, and eventually became the Specials. 

(pictured:  Terry Hall and Neville Staple of the Specials at a RAR concert in Leeds)

I’ve always been a big fan of provocation.  I love it.  I think people need to be rattled up a bit sometimes.  But I’ve also always been a big fan of earnest, sincere, dirty-handed work, in the power of ordinary people in sufficient numbers to make a real difference, and that’s what RAR represents to me.  That’s what the Specials represent to me, and that’s what Terry Hall represented to me. 

They didn’t free the world from racism, and that’s okay.  “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it,” and all.  But they saw the way the culture was moving, and they worked to counter it.  And, you know, Enoch Powell never got anywhere despite having Clapton on his side, so you can’t say they did nothing, either.

So I changed the cover of the zine, to give tribute to them, and to give Clapton the finger one more time.

The theme for next month’s zine is currently the Specials-inspired, “We Sell Hope.”  What that’s going to look like, coming out in a Pride month that sees the LGBTQ+ community under attack in hundreds of ways, I can’t possibly imagine.  I might bring John on the Cross back.  I might do something else.  Hopefully, I’ll be working on some voter registration stuff at that point, although we’ll see how it goes.  However it goes, hopefully we’ll see you there.

Remember:  Make art, help people.

#FUCKIT: the zine #long post #thought some of you might like a look into how the sausage is made #anyway fuck enoch powell fuck eric clapton and fuck fascists in general #looked all around the world we gotta take care of each other