There has always been – and still is – an element of transgressive politics to dance music, says the maker of one of this year’s most acclaimed albums
From the beginning, Jack Latham was determined that the politics of his second album as Jam City would not pass people by. A short polemic written by the 26-year-old to announce Dream a Garden begins: “No hope, no future, a constant war raging in the peripheries,” and January’s video for Unhappy was a gothic agitprop collage of HSBC slogans, aspirational adverts, fires on the high street and Latham declaiming – in a denim jacket bearing the slogan “Class War”, no less – his main theme: that capitalism is making us miserable. It is unmissable also in the lyrics to Crisis, a paean to the 2011 riots, where a London of burnt-out cars, “black batons under the stars” and spitting at Foxton’s estate agents signs is juxtaposed with the redemptive power of love, solidarity and resistance.
With surprising speed after its 2011 release, Latham’s debut album Classical Curves began attracting that reverential label, “influential” – even, in its short life, “masterpiece”. Its industrial minimalism and jagged rhythms drew stylistically on underground house and grime, a backdrop on which sat some of the sculpted synths of 80s disco and vogue. Before Classical Curves was even ready for release, let alone spawning an army of bedroom producer imitators, Latham was contemplating his next move: how to bridge the gap between the disastrous politics of the world around him and his music-making (perhaps reflecting his art school background, he refers to this as “my practice”).
by Dan Hancox via Electronic music | The Guardian
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