The day the music died?

29 June, 2015 (21:29) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

While the debate about the horrific violence engendered across the world by the religio-political divide between the right-wing Christian west and the Islamic middle East centred on poor English people sunning themselves on a Tunisian beach, more serious newspapers turned their focus upon Glastonbury.

Now, if you want to hear people yelling ‘vagina’ loudly yet incoherently, devoid of melody, context, meaning, insight or worth, accompanied by Anglo-Saxon obscenities chosen apparently at random, then I could direct you to the court of the Dark Lord, Brother Fiddle, El Dread, Laura and your correspondent at evensong on a Tuesday. Furthermore, listening to swear words hurled endlessly into the Cornish night would cost you nothing.

But, in these end days, a muddy field in Somerset was full of Radio 4 listeners and Z list celebrities who had apparently paid several hundred pounds to see something called Kanye West and its wife, who has built her entire silent career upon having an arse that looks, and probably sounds, exactly like Eric Pickles. Only fatter. And more ridiculous.

This West took to the Glastonbury stage and pointlessly mumbled four-letter-words into the evening air, apparently under the delusion that this meant something other than a patronising white music industry seizing upon anybody remotely black and photogenic as representing the street, no matter what drivelling gibberish they vomit into the ether masquerading as music.

Giants like BB King, Stevie Wonder, Quincy Jones, Charlie Parker, James Brown, Sam Cooke and a thousand others spoke and speak from the heart with passion about their lives and won a trillion hearts to the cause of civil rights with their soul and their musical genius. Kanye West is married to a reality TV star with an arse the size of Belgium, and shouts ‘fuck’ at random intervals to a computerised backbeat.

What’s even worse is the sense of entitlement: his ‘music’ and lyrics are so primitive the whole deal reminds me of a toddler proudly displaying the contents of its nappy, yet West and his accompanying arse exude a massive sense of swaggering entitlement. Actually they should both be on their knees thanking the fates that have granted them so much for so little.

Mouthing scarcely credible drool such as ‘I’m really looking forward to Kanye’ were dullards like…. Well, put it this way: on Saturday, editing a Sunday newspaper, I perused the press agency wire feeds for photographs from Glastonbury. Among them was one of a large queue snaking, refugee-camp-like, through a campsite. The caption said the queue represented festival-goers queuing for the showers and loos. Whilst, in refugee camps in Syria, children queued for water, in Glastonbury, affluent white middle-class campers queued in a muddy field for the right to shit in a bucket so they could ‘listen’ to Kanye Fucking West.

Glastonbury. How far, how stratospherically far, does something have to travel before its creators actually shrivel up with shame and guilt and throw in the fucking towel?

I’m told Glastonbury was founded on hippy ideals of peace and love for all. And now? In 2015? Z list celebs in Hunter wellies, blanket BBC coverage declaring how simply marvellous it all is while broadcasting tuneless navel-gazing ten-year-olds and Kanye. Fucking. West.

Meanwhile, talking of how stratospherically far something has to travel before its creators shrivel with shame, we saw the spectacle of disabled people – people in wheelchairs, blind people, people with all manner of difficulty – trying to storm the House of Commons to prevent the party voted for by just 24% of the British population removing their state help and condemning them to lives of hardship and, as has been shown at too many inquests for a decent man’s conscience, even death.

Yes, death. Removing help from disabled people can do this.

Brian McArdle collapsed and died in the street from a heart attack the day after an Atos assessment judged him fit for work and stripped him of his disability benefits. Atos stripped benefits from Elenore Tatton, even though she had a brain tumour. She appealed, but died in a hospice before the appeal could be heard. Karen Sherlock needed kidney dialysis but was judged fit to work by Atos. As a grieving friend put it, she ‘died in fear because the system failed her, because cruel men refused to listen and powerful men refused to act’. (Case histories from Owen Jones’ superb The Establishment, Penguin £8.99).

Just three tragedies would make a normal human being act. But figures from 2011 alone show 1,100 deaths of sick and disabled people within eight weeks of having their benefits sanctioned. More than 36,000 people had their disability benefits taken away in one calendar year. What then do they do? Become professional gymnasts? As if the Government or its privatised monopoly Atos could give a shit.

What sort of filth can live with that? Step forward the lying liar’s lying liar, Iain Duncan Smith and his rich Tory chums

If you or I were in a position in which our decisions had forced people in wheelchairs to try to storm our meeting room in protest at what we had done, we would curl up with shame and mortification.

The lying liar Iain Duncan Smith and his Eton chums will, of course, do no such thing because a), they have no awareness of the hardship suffered by people who need help; b) they couldn’t give two fucks about it anyway and c), they’re far more interested in delivering on their pre-election promises to the rich corporations, bankers, tax dodgers, hedge fund managers, privatised health firms, media moguls, non-doms and frackers who bought that win for them.

They’ve just sold RBS to their rich chums for £7 billion – seven billion pounds, read it – less than the taxpayer was made to pay for it yet they are pursuing cripples to their graves.

Truly the lying liar Iain Duncan Smith and his Tory chums are the uttermost scum of the Earth. Imagine the verdict of history on your life being that you deprived disabled people – society’s most vulnerable people – of the means to rent, heat, food and drink. That you drove them to death. Imagine that being chiselled on your headstone. For that is what will appear on theirs’.

Until it’s eroded away under the sheer weight of urine pissed upon their graves by decent human beings, of course.

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