About The Wire (not the cop show)

I picked up a copy of The Wire for the first time in several years and, despite it being the 500th edition, it seems somehow diminished, as is often the case on the rare occasions I chance upon a print periodical and yes, I guess I’m part of the problem, aren’t I? An appeal for donations (as distinct from subscriptions) means it feels more like the journal of some Trotskyite splinter group being sold outside Brixton station in 1991 than a magazine covering strange music.

Maybe it’s not a coincidence that it’s more overtly political than I remember. An article by Mark Fisher’s biographer, arguing that hauntology was “concerned with the ways in which certain forms of fugitive music continue to resist recuperation by capitalism”; another in which Theodora Laird explains that “the solitude of my practice is a direct reaction to my experiences of racialised othering”. Moreover there appears to be an assumption that relatively new-fangled semantic orthodoxies need no further explanations. Two separate musicians are referred to as “they”, without the clarification that they (by which I mean the two of them, not either one individually using that pronoun and as I’ve said before the problem is not that non-binary people require a pronoun, it’s that they want one that’s already being used for something else) are (I assume) non-binary and this is their preferred pronoun; and a piece on using sign language to interpret music performances mentions “Deaf” (capital D) audiences, implicitly taking the side of those who refuse to acknowledge hearing loss as a disability. (For more on this see Ahmed Khalifa’s interesting post.)

There were some gems amidst the lectures, though. First, a quotation from the former Swedish PM Tage Erlander: “A politician’s job is to build the dancefloor, so that everyone can dance as they please.” Which is nice, even if I haven’t danced since about the same time I was buying Trotskyite journals in Brixton. And an article about the Chicago trio Bitchin Bajas, who are officially my new favourite band, even if I refuse to dance to them.