8 Tracks: Of Political Resistance with Mark Stewart

Music

The current climate is startling, political disarray and callous vicious cycle which seems as if it might never end. Brexit is just one part of a jigsaw puzzle in an utter mess with scattered pieces dotted carelessly across the globe…

Mark Stewart has always been a pivotal figure in the musical underground, born in 1960 he was a founding member of The Pop Group, a pioneering band which helped blur the lines between post punk, industrial rebellion, dub, free jazz and beyond. They were fierce and political, setting the tone for a new wave of British music and underground leaders with a whim to protest and rebel.

Earlier this year Mute reissued one of Mark's most inconic records, "Learning To Cope With Cowardice". Now seem's as fitting as ever to invite him to curate and select music which has the potential to inspire the disenchanted and encourage resistance to the status quo of the political system.

See below:

Buy HERE.

LISTEN

Junior Delgado – Famine

An exhilarating, original edifice of astonishing rage.

Junior Delgado – Famine

An exhilarating, original edifice of astonishing rage.
John Holt – Police In Helicopter

Straight from Jamdown, this song changed forever how an apparently normal dancehall riddim can be flexed into radicalisation. One for the sound boys.
James Brown – Santa Claus, Go Straight To The Ghetto

Like Mr Brown was, back in the day, with his world changing, fascinating and awe inspiring FUNK. Technically savvy, rhythmically conscious, but above all optimistic like Santa himself! We too need a generation of everyday heroes straight from the street.
Malcolm X – No Sell Out

Revolutions in music seldom appear readymade but I suspect that the basis of a new synthesis of the mechanical and the biological may well be found in the codes of Keith LeBlanc’s drum programming here.
Mark Stewart & The Maffia – Liberty City

Designed to cock a snook at every premise which sleeps undisturbed in our current assumptions. ‘From dark skies…’
The Watts Prophets - F*Cked™

This is the most ambitious project and one of the key origins of rap culture, the effort was to establish a collectivist point of departure for the theory of oral communication.
The Last Poets - When The Revolution Comes

Because this rejects the common assumption that human culture was a modified extension of primate behaviour and urges, instead that it was the product of an immense social, sexual and political revolution, initiated by women.
John Trudell – Bombs Over Baghdad

One of the first songs about remote warfare / robot war, one that describes the developments on technology’s most controversial frontier. One of the many Native American activist / singer’s all too timely warnings.