You're already dead: reading the sacred text of a Crass pamphlet and finding myself a blasphemer
You're already dead but you're reading this blog? Strange. Anyway, today I picked up this little Crass booklet from Housmans bookshop in London, won over, I must admit, by the dinky little A6 format and pleasing design (the fetching tan-brown colour providing a nice contrast to the famous Crass logo and stencil lettering). Put out by the Bristol-based anarchist zine and pamphlet group Active Distribution, it's evidently a reprint of a pamphlet that Crass gave out at their gigs in 1984, their swansong year.
So what's in it? The answer to that is: a 26-page diatribe interspersed with black-and-white illustrations. The diatribe, I must admit, didn't overly impress me. As I've said on this blog numerous times (eg here, here, here and here), I'm a longtime admirer of Crass's work but the political rant in this pamphlet seemed repetitive and crude (maybe that was the point?). Here's a sample:
"The wealthy have been stealing our lives for centuries, they've stolen our lives, and our homes, our bodies and our minds, but when one of us so much as nicks a loaf of bread because we haven't eaten for a day, they DARE to call it a CRIME. IT IS THEY WHO ARE REAL CRIMINALS. They profit by our labour, profit by our passivity, profit by our suffering, profit, profit, profit. They expect us to work in their filthy factories and their garish shops, to go hundreds of feet beneath the ground to mine their wealth, to die of cancer working in their nuclear plant, you dig their holes, build their homes, lick their arse. FOR WHAT? For a fucking pittance."
In fact, taken in small doses such as his extract, it's not too bad. It's a basic political polemic, I guess. But 20-odd more or less unvarying pages of this is wearying and a turn-off even for me, a Crass semi-fan who's sympathetic to their political stance. The topics here are labour exploitation, political and military repression, global capitalism as an exploitative system, consumerism, nuclear weapons, war, Thatcher, Reagan, UK subservience to the USA, and the importance of self-liberation ("YOU ONLY HAVE ONE LIFE, IT IS PRECIOUS AND UNIQUE, LEARN TO LIVE IT"). The problem is that while they're all important issues this pamphlet is bashing you over the head with them in an opinionated tirade that isn't even trying to discuss this stuff calmly or with any depth or detail. It's a surface-level rant that sort of works in those terms, but only in those terms and I think the effect is to leave you slightly exhausted and none the wiser - you simply learn that this is Crass's basical political position (their brand of anarchism) and that's about it. None of this is helped by the decision to pepper the text with CAPS, mimicking the typographical shoutiness of a tabloid newspaper. Ditto the typos (there are quite a few) and the lack of attention to punctuation. Fine, by all means bash out a political pamphlet and - even better - given them out at gigs (that's a genuinely interesting thing to do), but shouldn't you show that you care about these matters by actually presenting it all properly? Or am I being too pedantic, too university-educated about it? Er, maybe - anarchy and freedom (in all textual matters) is what they want ...
Anyway, to move on slightly from all this totally unfair Crass-bashing, there were a couple of things in You're Already Dead which I found interesting. One was a section in the middle where the reader is urged to take direct political action, yet to do it in a thought-out way: "Whatever we decide to do, and wherever we decide to do it, we MUST think first and act second". In an age of Just Stop Oil and Animal Rising this is now pretty standard, but in 1984 Crass's call for "acts of subversion and sabotage" was inspiring and radical (they cite Greenham Common and ALF activists as two exemplars of useful direct political intervention). The other interesting-ish bit in the pamphlet was, inevitably, Crass's take on punk rock and the music industry. According to You're Already Dead, Crass were once approached by a music biz executive from a major record company who offered the band a deal saying he could "market revolution". Predictably enough, Crass were apoplectic at this (though why did they ever even agree to meet this guy in his "sleazy office in Mayfair" - was it Crass just pretending to go along with it as a sort of anarcho-joke?). Thrown in near the beginning of You're Already Dead, straight after the pamphlet announces that punk has "become part of the grand social circus. Dance music for dickheads", the point seems to be that the rank commercialisation of music - along with everything else - is just one more reason why the band were calling a halt to their onstage activities in 1984, the Orwellian year of their long-foretold demise. In 1984, Crass released the single You're Already Dead, which I must admit I hadn't even heard before writing this blog (now I've listened to it several times to get me in the appropriate Crass mood). I don't rate it really. By their standards, it's mediocre. I can dig the line "Fuck American power. Fuck Russian power. Fuck British power", but the overall song, while exhibiting one or two touches of Crass's undeniable talent for interesting arrangements, just doesn't have that much power or real interest-value. And, weirdly enough, when Big A Little A was re-released last year for (gulp) Record Store Day, Crass are said to have insisted that it be pressed not with its original flipside (the amazing Nagasaki Nightmare) but with You're Already Dead because of the latter's more "pertinent" quality in today's political climate. Blimey Crass, ditching one of your greatest songs for this lukewarm plodder? Do you have to bring politics into everything ...?
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