Trigger warnings required on white churnalists protecting po' coloured folk

Dear lord …! A working-class BAME woman of colour, I am evidently a child in need of white commentators protecting me with "trigger warnings" on book covers in case my delicate sensibilities are offended by sexist, homophobic, racist content.

"Look, here I am, the good fairy, here to protect you while, incidentally, shutting you up." See how this works? I don't need "protection" from the arts: I need it from purported leftists who use us as career fodder.

Perhaps the New Statesman's own Tipper Gore should revive the Parents Music Resource Center (making me Frank Zappa versus the Mothers of Prevention) which campaigned to slap warning stickers on music that scared them.

Are we to cut a swathe through the culture and label film, music and print with "read with caution" stickers … or "may contain nuts"? Do I lack the resilience and analytical powers to read Sax Rohmer's yellow peril archetype Fu Manchu, or the critical faculties to watch DW Griffiths' Birth of A Nation without fainting in the aisle?

"Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?" Are we now "no-platforming" Mark Twain?

Am I allowed to make up my own mind or should the cultural commissars do it for me?

Who are the literature police who will decide what warnings go where? Oh, let me guess.

As the world grows nastier, the more some culture pundits attempt to infantilise us, to Disneyfy the culture that reflects our world. We must all be treated like trauma victims in a therapy group. However, art allows exploration not only beyond our own experience but of the experience of others: the world beyond our own personal space. It's an effective and empowering way of equipping us to deal with the real horrors to come.

This is the value of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Charles Shaar Murray says, "My parents stopped monitoring my reading by the time I was 14. After that, they assumed that I was sufficiently mature to deal with anything I was likely to find on the page — or, for that matter, on the screen. Hell, my late sainted mother even walked me into Polanski's Cul De Sac before I was legally of age for X films."

It's a rule of politics to think long and hard before taking on powers which you would not wish to see being used by your opponents. Here's a nice litttle dystopia for you. Imagine UKIP in government … or, more credibly, in charge of your local council library and plastering their stickers over everything.

Trigger warnings on literature will ultimately be like Asbos, a badge of honour for writers with integrity. It's a stupid idea only the worst half-wit click-bait controversialists would promote. Philistine commentators willing to wreck the culture for a few career points should be let nowhere near it.

In the words of Phil Polley, "Suggest a sticker applied to forehead of all newborns 'Warning: Life - May Not include Trigger Warnings'"

Laurie Penny responds

CRAP LYRICS: What do Siouxie Sioux and Rod Stewart share with Bernard Manning?

Charles Shaar Murray just read me a brilliant demolition of "Hong Kong Garden" by Siouxie Sioux and the Banshees and "Every Picture Tells A Story" by Rod Stewart from journalist and former NME writer Johnny "Cigarettes" Sharp who has written a most excellent book, Crap Lyrics (pub Portico).

Punk rock never had any truck with petty social rules or niceties. Yet when Siouxie sang, Slanted eyes meet a new sunrise, a race of bodies small in size, she seemed to be expressing a knowledge and empathy with immigrant peoples that had more in common with pre-punk figures such as, say, Bernard Manning. Chicken chow mein and chop suey, they rhymed questionably with Hong Kong Garden takeaway, displaying all the searing wit of the bloke who goes into a Chinese restaurant and asks for 'flied lice'. But let's not be too hasty in our condemnation. After all, Miss Sioux has since claimed that the song was 'kind of a tribute' to immigrant communities who were harassed by skinheads in the late 80's.

It's certainly an interesting way of showing respect for other cultures, especially coming from a band who once wore swastikas on stage. I'm sure they meant well, though. Anyway, I'm off down the Notting Hill Carnival dressed in an afro wig and boot polish — it's my tribute to the afro-caribbean community. I'm hoping for a warm reception.

I can't stand Rod Stewart so I was lucky enough to miss out on this lyrical masterpiece, "Every Picture Tells A Story".

Once the Beatles had taken the word by storm, the globe became a playground for tight-trousered troubadours eager to export some culture (usually a culture of sexually transmitted bacteria) to their foreign cousins. But like latter-day Marco Polos, they did at least report back on theier experiences, to educate us in the customs and peoples they met there. As Rod Stewart put it in this postcard from the edge:
On the Peking ferry I was feeling merry, sailing on my way back here.
I fell in love with a slit-eyed lady, By the light of an eastern moon,
Shanghai Lil never used the pill, she claimed it just ain't natural
... and so I did the decent thing, and put a condom on my Deng Xiao Ping.

OK, so I kind of made up that last line. But don't dismiss old Rod for any lack of chivalry, or indeed romance. He goes on to inform us how she won his heart, then refers to her once more as the 'slit-eyed lady'. How she must have loved that pet name. Sadly, history history does not record whether she affectionately dubbed him 'parrot face' in return"

Johnny's sharp book is full of equally funny take-downs, throwing like a top martial artist, actually not having to do much except have an eagle eye and present what's already there. The Beastie Boys telling us, Girls! To do the dishes! Girls! To clean up my room. Girls! To do the laundry!; Rod Stewart again, promising to make love to you Like fifteen men when he gets "Lost In You" (hmm); Prince coming over some poor woman's wedding gown in "Head" (double hmm); Prince once more coming where he shouldn't in "Come" (triple hmm). Who's this Liz Phair who wants to fuck you like a dog (presumably after sniffing your bum for the longest time) and threatens to make you like it in "Flower"? And Prince yet again, this time coming in his "Sister" like some sort of dribble-monster run riot.

Thank heavens song-writing giants like Bob Dylan and David Bowie set a better example. Oh, wait ...!

Buy this book!!!

Charles Shaar Murray: The Hellhound Sample book launch and birthday party

"You don't need to go to the crossroads to make a deal with the devil. The crossroads will come to you."

So says award-winning author and journalist Charles Shaar Murray of his first ever novel, The Hellhound Sample. Off we trooped to the Archway Road crossroads in north London on Wednesday for his combined book launch and 60th birthday celebration at the trendy Boogaloo, haunt of many a cult muso and rock-chick supermodel in north London.

The Hellhound Sample, is published by Headpress in July. It's a handsome beast with a fab photo-mosaic cover of our favourite icons from Bessie Smith to Marlon Brando, the book being a supernatural epic taking in three generations of black American musicians. Charles draws on his extensive knowledge from a 40-year career as "the rock journalist's rock journalist" and biographer of blues legend John Lee Hooker, to weave a vivid tale of the blues. Whatever happened to those who followed in Robert Johnson's footsteps down at the crossroads?

It's a potent mix of secrets, nightmares and lies, spanning decades and continents. James "Blue" Moon has one last chance to escape the hellhound on his trail ... if the cancer doesn't get him first.

Deborah Grabien, creator of the successful JP Kinkaid stories, says:

Charles Shaar Murray has given us a phenomenal story ... It achieves something rare in fiction: it makes you feel and it makes you wonder.

Charles read an extract from the book (see video above) and was then interviewed by another legend of the counter-culture, John Sinclair. John was a major figure in the American underground of the 1960s and 70s. He managed the proto-punk Detroit rabble-rousers MC5 band, supported the Black Panthers and formed the White Panther party in solidarity, and was then arrested by a narc who'd bummed a couple of joints off him and sentenced to 10 years in prison. This sparked a wave of protest from the left, with John Lennon recording the song, "John Sinclair" on his album, "Some Time In New York City".

The author said that, while it's not exactly a roman a clef, there were elements of several well-known music figures in the characters. F'rinstance, "Blue" Moon's house is based on John Lee Hooker's gaff where Charles stayed while talking to the great man for his biography, Boogie Man. And Mick Hudson's music company office in Soho Square was modelled on Paul McCartney's. There. You were told here first.

The evening ended with a set by Charles's band, Crosstown Lightnin' (a video of which I'll be posting later), and a fab encore where the band was joined onstage by Gary Lammin, Peter Conway and John who recited some of his poetry to a medley of Bo Diddley.

It was a fine way to spend an evening and I had the headache the next day to prove it.

Pix and video by Anna Chen.

Charles Shaar Murray writes.

More pix at Headpress.

Tiger Mom or total cow? Amy Chua punts her book

Look. Let's get this straight. Amy Chua is nuts. In China her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, is called U.S. Mom because her maternal oddities are regarded as symptomatic of a western spiritual and psychic malaise. That her neuroses are being marketed as typical of the Chinese people as a whole (as if we are a monolithic society) is a sign of how little we are understood over here.

A grown woman goes into battle with a three-year old when she shows signs of having a will of her own? You threaten to chuck her out into the freezing winter's night because she had fun bashing the keys of the piano with her tiny splayed fists instead of picking out the pinched three notes to which you have reduced her world? Get some therapy, lady.

While I haven't yet read the book, I've heard the radio serialisation, watched the TV interviews and read the numerous articles as the Amy Chua roadshow juggernauts another stereotype down our collective craw: the machine-like drone incapable of deep love; function and service being all.

Chinese are complex, as all human beings should be. Yes, there's the age-old pressure to 'get on' and do well materially: hardly mysterious in a region of the world where absolute poverty, famine, civil war, the low status of the regularly conquered, and a short life-span was the norm until the latter half of the 20th century. [Note: while there is still poverty, China lifted 400 million out of absolute poverty in the last few decades according to the World Bank.]

Yes, Chinese can be strict as any middle-class white folk who send their offspring to boarding school to be beaten and fagged. As anyone who ever belted their kids. But they are unlikely to start an airline with child-free flights. And the Chinese certainly don't get arsey when kids have noisy fun in restaurants.

While there are indeed student suicides in China driven by failure to gain desired grades, Cambridge had a two per cent suicide rate [Edit: need to confirm this figure]. My mate Denis Wong remembers the tower being sealed off while he was at Birmingham University. Recalling his own mother's soppiness towards all children, Denis points out, 'Chua correlates herself with the Chinese, rather than of a certain class in North America. Much of the pressure by Chinese parents is not Spartan, but concern for their children to succeed, like anyone else might feel.'

But no! We are presented with a media tidal wave of stereotyping the Chinese as loveless robots. Channel 4 News, departing from its usual high standards, has Katie Razzall writing online:

It's a far cry from traditional western methods of parenting and, at some points in the book, Ms Chua appears almost deranged.

Funny how, when CNN went to China to find these 'Tiger Moms', they couldn't. How surprised they must have been to discover that the Tiger Mom is seen in China itself as a specifically US stereotype.

Even Chua's own husband, Jed Rubenfeld, now assures us that they were raising their kids with traditional American values.

Sigh! Someone brings out Mommie Dearest and suddenly we are all Joan Crawford.

When I was a kid, I was spoilt something rotten by the Xinhua journalists and embassy staff, who missed their own children while they were abroad on assignment. Comrade Ma, the Chargé d'affaires, swept the porcelain panda off his desk and into my hands when he noticed I'd been admiring it. My white English mother raised me as a Spock baby, with my father's up-to-a-point approval, but Denis reminds me of the counter-trend to instil discipline, and intensely hothouse, the children of the western middle classes. I escaped that relentless academic pressure and was still consistently in the top three of the class, and joint first in the year for O levels.

Perhaps journalists should get out more. Or get some Chinese friends.

Ozzy Osbourne meets Tony Blair: War Pigs

Ah, the wit and wisdom of Ozzy Osbourne, clown prince of rock 'n' roll but a breath of fresh air among the creepier psychofrantic wing of the liberal media.

While some present Blair as a sincere chap who, f'rinstance, donated his £4 million book advance to the British Legion out of the goodness of his own heart, which I say was the price of buying back his brand taking a clobbering in the nether regions of the advance book sales lists, Ozzy paints a very different picture of his fan.

From Ozzy's hilarious autobiography, I Am Ozzy (Sphere, Little Brown) a small but telling moment when Blair schmoozed while soldiers and civilians died in his war:

I'm not so comfortable with politicians. Meeting them always feels weird and a bit creepy, no matter who it is. For example, I met Tony Blair during The Osbournes period at this thing called the Pride of Britain Awards. He was all right, I suppose; very charming. But I couldn't get over the fact that our young soldiers were dying out in the Middle East and he could still find time to hang out with pop stars.

Then he came over to me and said, "I was in a rock 'n' roll band once, y'know?"

I said, "So I believe, Prime Minister."

"But I could never work out the chords to 'Iron Man'."

I wanted to say, "Fuck me, Tony, that's a staggering piece of information, that is. I mean, you're at war with Afghanistan, people are getting blown up all over the place, so who honestly gives a fuck that you could never work out the chords to 'Iron Man'?"

But they're all the same, so there's no point getting wound up about it.

A quick reminder of those Black Sabbath War Pigs lyrics:

Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerers of death's construction
In the fields the bodies burning
As the war machine keeps turning
Death and hatred to mankind
Poisoning their brainwashed minds
Oh lord yeah!

Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor
Time will tell on their power minds
Making war just for fun
Treating people just like pawns in chess
Wait 'til their judgement day comes
Yeah!

Now in darkness world stops turning
Ashes where the bodies burning
No more war pigs have the power
Hand of God has struck the hour
Day of judgement, God is calling
On their knees the war pigs crawling
Begging mercy for their sins
Satan laughing spreads his wings
Oh lord yeah!