Steam Down or How Things Begin E-Book

Emma Warren

• Herausgeber: Rough Trade Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Steam Down or How Things Begin is a celebration of an influential weekly jam in Deptford, which author Emma Warren uses to explain the universal ways things are when new culture is being generated. She should know—she's been there when new music has evolved on multiple occasions. It also draws a line between the young London jazz musicians making waves internationally and the reggae soundsystems that operated further down Deptford High Street in the 1980s. It extends that line to the site of Deptford Docks, ten minutes walk down the same street, where ships left for the Caribbean hundreds of years ago.

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface

Beginnings

Middle

Forward!

Bibliography

References

Acknowledgements

Preface

I’m writing this in my kitchen but I’m writing it from hundreds of dancefloors across time and space. What would you see from my window if you were here with me? You’d see a slim road banked by 1960s townhouses in a part of south east London where urban and suburban fold into each other. You’d also see speaker stacks in dark basements and barely-illuminated exit signs, heavy black curtains that separate the bar from the wooden dancefloor and fat cables snaking out of makeshift stages. You’d see a gathering of people who have come to commune.

I’ve been there where new music was generated and where a cultural shift occurred. I’ve done it enough times to have developed a long view on how these moments are in the early days, when the magic is in full flow and before it has been appropriated or enclosed by marketing professionals. The music is always incredible, but it’s not the main thing. In the end it’s just output. The real ingenuity is in people coming together to do a thing and in the process becoming more themselves.

There’s useful information in that long view. Some is obvious: that nothing is new and that everything is built upon what went before; that hype comes in waves. Less obvious are the interchangeable ways in which these cultural uprisings pan out, regardless of when or where they happen. I’ve tried to bring these steps into the light.

The words you’re reading, then, are intended as a guide to the universal qualities of cultural beginnings and a document of one particularly joyful and excellent moment in time. They draw a line between the weekly Steam Down event in Deptford, south London, where young musicians improvise a soulful and energetic jam into existence every Wednesday and the dub reggae clashes that happened underneath baroque eighteenth century church, St Paul’s two minutes down the high street, four decades earlier. They extend the line to include Deptford Docks, where ships left for the Caribbean hundreds of years ago. They draw a circle around these nearby places and invite us all in, holding us in a song that describes where we’ve been and suggests where we could go.

It is human to gather to dance and sing. We’ve been doing it since the beginning of our time. We need to reflect our lives into art and culture so that we can imagine better or different futures, and we need this more than ever. I don’t need to list the challenges we face in the coming decades, but it seems obvious that we’ll need to tap into the forces of togetherness to ride the troubles coming our way.