“I really wanna be a good christian / but I got rage in my system” - Dizzee Rascal

Here’s aggressive music for our aggressive times. The song is just about violence - “everyday on the road mans moving cold” - the violence is out there, that’s the way it is.

This image of crime-ridden, unsafe environment is precisely the image used today by right-wing politicians employing politics of fear, introducing authoritarian policies in the name of security. But the real question is, how safe and non-violent can a society be when inequality grows, poor people get screwed over and when all aspects of life are commodified?

Frantz Fanon wrote decades ago some thoughtful stuff about violence in the context of colonized Africa. Could some of these thoughts be applied in the context of our cities today? (In fact, the Italian radical thinker Paolo Virno has written about this, and if you read Finnish you could check out this text here).

“The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people. This is the period when the niggers beat each other up (…) When the native is confronted with the colonial order of things, he finds he is in a state of permanent tension. (…) This hostile world, ponderous and aggressive because it fends off the colonized masses with all the harshness it is capable of, represents not merely a hell from which the swiftest flight possible is desirable, but also a paradise close at hand which is guarded by terrible watchdogs.”
(Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of The Earth)

Newham Generals - Violence (ft. Dizzee Rascal and G-Man) (mp3)

(Newham Generals’ album Generally Speaking is out now, on Dizzee Rascal’s Dirtee Stank label. They’re pioneers of grime - ex-members of the legendary Nasty Crew - but this is their first album actually. They’ve done numerous pirate radio sets though.)