Linton Kwesi Johnson Bass Culture Rar UPDATED

In this context, RAR seemed like a game changer. While the punk rock movement built up a body of followers that probably numbered over a million in Britain alone, the RAR membership never exceeded eight thousand. Indeed, the majority of members were in some way involved in the cultural avant-garde of the time--artists, film-makers, musicians, filmmakers, academics, writers, etc. RAR's most important contribution was that it pointed to a potential third way, one that was to become increasingly important as the movement developed. As far as we are aware, RAR never published anything for mass consumption. Instead, it functioned more like a coterie of like-minded radicals that met regularly, and through which the members made their collective ideas public. However, RAR did not have an equivalent to the pop press, a media organ through which its ideas and positions could be carefully shaped. Rather, RAR was an informal intellectual network that existed through the physical gatherings. Members would exchange ideas and experiences in the RAR coffee-house in London's Cromwell Road at the height of the punk era. However, the network didn't stop there. When the time came, it was decided that RAR would make a return and become a more than just a peripheral fringe movement. Its members' ideas were published in PRAKAS (1981), the RAR journal. In this publication, RAR laid out its vision of the future of the Left and of radical politics. In its opening editorial, the editors wrote:

Today, all three movements are part of the fabric of contemporary British society. Their roots are entwined, but in terms of the Left, each is a unique force. Punk rock expressed in a medium that is popular is a political force. The punk attitude is to throw off the shackles of fear, the constraints of political correctness, and behave as if the rules don't apply. The punk attitude is that of an individual who is free to do what he wants, free to act in ways that are not sanctioned by the dominant culture...

The radical Left's failure to come to terms with the Black Power movement, which was not merely limited to Britain, became evident in RAR's second album The Sound of the Crowd, released in the summer of 1977.

Since the advent of punk and the emergence of a more eclectic counter-culture, this has been done, to a certain extent. However, the punk movement never made much effort to change the ideological outlook that it challenged.

In this context, RAR became a significant document in the cultural politics of punk, not simply because it developed the sound of reggae and R'n'B into a punk aesthetic, but because it also helped to make explicit the related social stratification that undergirded punk's early development. This stratification revolved around the lines of race and class, blurring the often arcane boundaries that divided one from the other. When he wrote that line from his memoir, Widgery was thinking about the experiences of the punk audience during the 1983-1984 tour. 827ec27edc