music

Guest Post: ‘A Beautiful Way to be Crazy’ by Genevieve Carver, with poem ‘Champagne, Cocaine and Sausages’

Welcome to Week-Whatever in the big brother/sister PP lockdown showcase. Today we have something quite different, a little bit musical, a little bit performative, and more than a little bit rebalancing the gender imbalance in the music industry. The videos of her band The Unsung are a great watch. This all comes from Genevieve Carver’s Verve Poetry Press book, ‘A Beautiful Way to be Crazy’, which you can buy here. Oh, and download sales from the band’s music will go to ‘Refuge‘ the domestic violence charity. So without further ado, here’s Genevieve:

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credit: Alexandra Wallace*

“I’m a poet, but music has always formed the backbone of what I do. Song lyrics are always creeping into my poems, and in the past I’ve written about people whose death was caused by music, and the relationship between music and mental health. I perform in a gig theatre ensemble along with three multi-instrumentalist musicians (Ruth Nicholson, Brian Bestall and Tim Knowles) called The Unsung, and our latest show, A Beautiful Way to be Crazy, explores female experiences in the music industry. My debut poetry collection of the same name was published by Verve Poetry Press in February 2020.

Women make up just 30% of the music industry as a whole, and as little as 2% in certain, usually more tech-heavy roles. I decided to talk to some of that 30%, and gather together some of their experiences. I interviewed almost 50 people, including cis-gendered, trans, non-binary and intersex individuals. I spoke to singers, instrumentalists, sound engineers, producers and events promoters, covering genres from classical to folk, electronica, rock, pop and jazz. I interviewed performers in a sex workers’ opera, 4O2A2439 internationally touring DJs and members of an all-female band of adults with learning difficulties. My aim wasn’t to get famous names but to talk to women who lived and breathed music in their everyday life, either professionally or at an amateur level.

The show I ended up making, combines the themes I pulled out from these interviews with my own personal experiences. It weaves together music from my incredibly versatile band with original spoken word, readings from my genuine teenage diary entries from 1999 (aged 13) and audio clips from the interviews.

Two tracks from the show are currently available to watch in full:

Human Being – a pop song:

Little Green – a Joni-Mitchell inspired lullaby:

You can download our music from https://genevievecarvertheunsung.bandcamp.com, and all money from download sales is being donated directly to Refuge domestic violence charity.

The book that has been published by Verve includes the whole sequence of poems from the live show, as well as other poems from my performance repertoire covering themes including hangovers, roundabouts, existential dread and why I don’t do yoga.”

https://www.genevievecarver.com/; @theunsungpoetry

Champagne, Cocaine & Sausages

“I want champagne, cocaine and sausages” – Nina Simone.

I am Nina Simone’s anger
I am Etta James’s veins
I am Ani DiFranco’s middle finger
I am your little sister’s bedroom door.

I am the ripple in the pond
I am the rip in your jeans
I am wild and unwashed and broken
I am not taking it lying down.

I am shit at lots of things
I am difficult
I am wrong
I am tied in knots I’m free
I am simply trying to be me
I am frightened
I am flawed
but I am here
and I’m not going anywhere.

I am Kate Bush’s treble
I am Jacqueline du Pres’ tremble
I am Polly Harvey’s pedals
I am Kathleen Hanna’s rebel.

I am Clara Schuman’s manuscript
I am Stevie Nicks’s sleeves
I am Alanis Morisette’s misunderstanding of irony
I am Bjork’s clenched fist.

I’m just a girl
I wear my hair in curls
I wear my dungarees
down to my sexy knees
I am sugar and spice and all things
deep and lost and painful and real
I am fighting to be heard
and not only seen
I am a woman, phenomenally.

I am Tori Amos’s cornflakes
I am Sinead O’Connor’s skull
I am Taylor Swift’s reputation
I am Madonna’s youth.

I want champagne, cocaine and sausages
I want it all and I want it now
I want what I cannot have
I am hungry
I am greedy
I will bite off more than I can
vomit back into the void
it’s a new dawn
it’s a new day
it’s a new life
and I’m feeling ready for it.

I am the reason the caged bird sings
I am the thorn in the side of the boy
I am the fat lady telling you it’s over
I am spinning
I am floating
I am so close to the edge
I am busting at the seams
I am everything you ever hoped you’d be

so take a piece, just try it
there’s too much here
for you to even make a dent in me.

(*Alexandra Wallace’s photography can be viewed here)

Lean Back as instructed by Fat Joe by Theresa Lola

You know that band? What were they called?
The band that gave you permission;
the band that blew the bloody doors off.
Who stood you upright, against the face
of X & Y cardboard chromosomes, dressed
as show homes on streets lined with every sign
except a U-turn. The band that took you away
like a rapture cult. Yes, that’s the band.

Well, whether it was a band, or – as is the case with our poem today, a song – teenagers have been shaken and taken out of the mundanity of school life, or hanging out on street corners, by music. Often it is a ‘fuck you’ to all that has gone before.

Lucky enough to be fifteen years old in 1977 with forgiving parents, it was punk, reggae, then being from Coventry, Ska (especially the Specials), that blew the bloody bedroom door off for me; the music, the bands, the look, all felt like a revolution. The Clash song ‘1977‘ summed up the mood; ‘No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones, in 1977!!!!!’ – (Elvis in fact died that year, so it was very prescient, as the song was written before his death). It was the camaraderie which, essentially said: no-one likes us, we don’t care.

Most teenagers have that moment, when the music is for only them; it reflects their mood in the face of world issues and adults who they feel don’t understand them. It can often be the first step to independence, which you and your friends own. I see this in Theresa Lola’s wonderful celebration of Fat Joe’s Lean Back, ‘in the unofficial national anthem at school. When the students gather you recite the lyrics to Lean Back, lean your shoulder at a 45-degree angle and watch them gaze at the perfect arch, your tongue burning with no lyric left un-scraped.’ We can see the whole playground making the moves, mouthing the words, coming together. Then the poem takes us to deeper stuff, how the music makes us feel about our identity, our position in society. ‘Till now you carried the name ‘unidentified female body in the yearbook pictures’. You tried scratching out the name, shifted to the busy table at the cafeteria.’ This is what makes great music, and great art more generally; both uniting, whilst at the same time making us feel it so personally. (more…)

Spirit of ’79 by Stanley Notte

cov 2021 In 2021, Coventry will be the UK’s city of culture; the second city, after Hull in 2017. I am sure there is an air of excitement in the city, and the times I have gone back recently, there is certainly talk but as yet little knowledge of what it will entail. Us poets are hopeful of getting a chair at the table, but what will be the shoe-ins? Theatre, with the figurehead being the Belgrade Theatre, will be a hub of the arts, as no doubt will the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum; both in recent times mixing the contemporary with the nostalgic. And I think it is nostalgia, that music will take as its starting point. (more…)

November Review – From Nana’s Luck to The Last Gang in Town?

It’s been a great second month for Proletarian Poetry (I would give you the stats but that’s a bit too geeky. I am however, warming my hands over them now).

I have got to know some great poets who have kindly agreed to have their poems featured on the site. As I’ve said before, in terms of working class lives, this is about the poems not the poets; I secretly believe that all poets have written a working class poem, they just don’t know it yet – it’s a class consciousness problem 🙂 Also as I write this, I am reminded how many of the poets I have seen read this month; all are great performers in their own right and way – you really can’t beat live poetry. For example, on Saturday I was at The Shuffle where two featured poets on PP, Inua Ellams and Karen McCarthy Woolf read alongside, Tom Chivers, Holly Corfield Carr, Gale Burns, and Harry Mann. The theme was the environment and there were a great range of poems on the subject.

This month’s poems have covered a number of themes to do with: family, gender, identity, racism, urban life, work and industry, food, and music (got to have the music). There are mothers, fathers, grandparents, butchers, assembly line workers, brass bands, activists, priests, loan sharks, and (to use the title of Inua Ellams’ poem) Lovers, Liars, Conjurers and Thieves. (more…)