Language is the enemy: Scritti Politti's politics

Listening to songs like "Is and Ought the Western World", whose lyrics oscillated line by line between the prosaic details of everyday oppression and the abstract contours of deep political structure, it was clear that Scritti had moved as far beyond Gang of Four's schematic case studies as that band had advanced upon Tom Robinson's tell-it-like-it-is protest songs.

Scritti Politti - Is and Ought the Western World 1978

In the chorus of "Messthetics" Green declares 'We know what we're doing', by which he meant that the music was fractured on purpose. But in a larger sense Scritti managed to convince many people that they did - or at least were thinking more rigorously about the crucial quandaries than anybody else.

Scritti Politti - Messthetics 1979

Prominent among the ideas whizzing about was Gramsci's concept of 'hegemony' - a catch-all term that covers the official ideology of state, Church and other institutions, along with the more diffuse and subliminal 'commonsense' assumptions that hold together a social system. In Scritti's brittle ditty of the same name Green personifies Hegemony as 'the foulest creature that set upon a race'. He sounds racked, as if he's desperately struggling to free himself from Hegemony's mental tentacles: 'How do you do this?/How can you do it to me?' At the chorus, the group derisively recite the sort of platitudes that seem pre-political in their 'obviousness' but actually work as hegemony's glue: 'an honest day's pay for an honest day's work'; 'you can't change human nature'; 'some are born to lead and others born to follow'. At song's end, Scritti mocks the clichés that preserve rock's own stasis quo: 'rock 'n' roll is here to stay' 'but can you dance to it?'; 'walk it like you talk it'.

Scritti Politti - Hegemony 1979

On the sleeve of the group's third release, the Peel Sessions EP, a page from the imaginary book Scritto's Republic proposes the idea of language as a sort of conductive fluid for power - permeating our consciouness and constructing 'reality'. 

In "P.A.s' - the last track on 4 A Sides - Green sings about Italy in 1920 and Germany in 1933 as moments when 'the language shuts down'. In his most honeyed, airy tones, he ponders the mystery of popular support for totalitarianism - 'How/Did they all decide?...What was irrational/Is national!' - then imagines mass unemployment making the same thing happen in eighties Britain.

Scritti Politti - P.A.s 1979

In these conditions, despair is always just a heartbeat away. The fraught energy of 4 A Sides' "Bibbly-O'Tek" fades with the bleak aside, 'Which reminds me, there's no escape', before rallying itself for the struggle.

Scritti Politti - Bibbly-O'Tek 1979

Throughout 4 A Sides, the sheer joy and fervour of music-making itself triumphs: "Doubt Beat" sounds resolute, with Tom Morley's driving drums and Nial Jinks' wriggly, melodic, funk bass conjuring what Gramsci called 'optimism of the will' sufficient to counter the lyrics' 'pessimism of the intellect'.

Scritti Politti - Doubt Beat 1979

'There must be harder than this', Green pleads in "Scritlocks Door", meaning harder than the flabby thinking and 'ill-sorted' ideas of rock culture.

Scritti Politti - Scritlocks Door 1979

Scritti Politti - Skank Bloc Bologna

I step into the room and immediately stumble against a typewriter lurking on the dingy brown carpet. A small tower of books perches precariously on top of the machine. Next to it lies a half-drunk mug of coffee, its thick meniscus greeny-grey with mould. Jutting stacks of pamphlets, broadsheets, and academic paperbacks sprawl across every available surface - TV, mantelpiece, even the top of the gas fire - while the bookshelves look close to collapsing. On the wall above the fireplace, poking through an overlapping foliage of gig flyers and activist leaflets, there's a seven-inch single and a framed Hammer & Sickle, with a used teabag dangling irreverently off the latter's blade.

I never visited Scritti Politti's squat, located in a nondescript side street in Camden, north London. But I feel like I did. As a sixteen-year-old, I stared endlessly at the black-and-white photo of Scritti's living room on the front of their 4 A Sides EP. 

In Scritti's debut single, "Skank Bloc Bologna", there's a brief, sardonic allusion to The Clash's idea of themselves as 'The Magnificent Seven'. (Scritti's leader Green had read an NME interview in which the band compared themselves to the posse of vigilante heroes). 'They said they felt like...a bunch of outlaws that would come into town to put everything to rights', Green told one fanzine. The song's last verse, he explained, punctured this 'silly over-romanticized notion' of the rock group as 'macho gunslingers, the Robin Hoods of today'.

The 'skank' is easy to place: the loping, white-reggae groove of the bass and drums, which Green overlays with plangent rhythm guitar closer to folk-rock than punk. The 'bloc' is a buried allusion to Gramsci (one of Scritti's favourite neo-Marxist theorists) and his concept of the 'historic bloc': an alliance of oppressed classes uniting to overturn the existing order and overhaul the dominant 'common-sense' worldview of what's natural, ordained, possible - revolution as the creation of a new reality. The 'Bologna' of the title is another story: in early 1977 Bologna's Communist mayor lost control of the city to a riotous coalition of 'autonomists' and counter-culture radicals. Self-organized and carnivalesque, il Movimento - as it was nicknamed - aimed not to seize power but to smash it altogether, leaving everybody and nobody in charge. But Mayor Zangheri denounced the rioters as bohemian nihilists and enemies of the proletariat, and after several weeks called in armoured cars to crush the rebellion.
The title 'Skank Bloc Bologna' seems to imagine the Scritti squat as the germ of a future Movimento Inglesi. Yet the tone of the song is desolate. The verses zoom in on a girl adrift: the hapless, hopeless product of bad education and stifled imagination, she's got no sense that change is even possible. Green sounds like he's fighting his own despair - in sleepy London town, revolution seems a long way off. But even if the girl doesn't know it, 'Something in Italy/Is keeping us all alive'. And closer to home there's 'the magnificent six' (the number in the Scritti collective at that point), with their schemes and dreams: 'They're working on a notion and they're working on a hope/A Euro vision and a skanking scope'.

The melody's off-kilter beauty and the plaintive melancholy of Green's singing (indebted to the 'English soul' of Robert Wyatt), along with the intrigue of the lyrics and that cryptic title, captured the imagination.

Scritti Politti - Skank Bloc Bologna 1978

On the photocopied sleeve, Scritti went one better than The Desperate Bicycles in the demystification stakes, itemizing the complete costs of recording, mastering, pressing, printing the labels and so on, along with contact numbers for companies who provided these services.